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Tudor England: A History

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So, yeah, there is a sort of concerted attempt by some of the upper echelons of society to deride Henry VII’s achievements. To deplore his reign and, you know, his style of kingship, which is deeply unfair. Shakespeare in performance From playhouse to film sets, explore four centuries of staging Shakespeare

There is some mild revisionism. Henry VII is rescued from later Tudor propaganda and shown to be a half decent king. Mary I's reputation as the sadistic burner of Protestants is put into the context by the more than double the number killed under Elizabeth after the failed Northern uprising (although of course it is the burnings that did for Mary's reputation, not simply the number). was a crucial year in the story of the House of Tudor. It marked the moment when the crown passed from Queen Mary to her formidable younger sister Elizabeth. It also was the year when the long history of Catholicism in England came to an end. To learn much more about all of this, Violet travelled to Oxford, to meet Dr Lucy Wooding, the author of Tudor England: A History. *** [ About our format ] *** Scene Three: Late 1557, The Works of Sir Thomas More, sometime Lord Chauncellor, wrytten by him in the Englysh tonge are published by the printer William Rastell, who was also More’s nephew. But what did this mean for the ordinary people of England? What was their experience of life like as the monarchs came and went? Wooding explains that many parishes life went on, with continuous readjustments, in a relatively uninterrupted manner. Thankfully, predictably, even Wooding can’t escape the reigns or doesn’t want to – we move steadily from Henry VII, the usurper who founded the dynasty, to his son Henry VIII, to the teen-king Edward VI and his successors Mary I and the great Elizabeth I. But it’s only when you watch how steadily Wooding poles away from personalities and toward larger societal and political forces that you realize just how refreshing such an approach can be when it’s done with this much verve and lightly-worn erudition.For a woman who had real kind of imagination and determination—it’s not easy to get an education. It’s not easy to express yourself through writing—and yet people did. And the few voices that we hear—I mean, they may be just a few voices, but they’re really quite powerful and eloquent voices. WOODING: Well, we have to be a little bit careful there because of course we’re still talking about an age in which literacy is limited. But, I think it goes further down society than some people might assume. J ust before Whitsunday in the summer of 1549, a fight broke out in the playground of a school in Bodmin. When the dust had settled and questions were asked, the authorities discovered that the children had divided into two gangs, or rather ‘two factions, the one whereof they called the old religion, the other the new’. In this, the children revealed themselves to be remarkably acute commentators on wider social developments. Not long after, on 9 June (Whitsunday itself), the government of Edward VI imposed the Book of Common Prayer on every parish church in England. The time-hallowed Latin mass was replaced with an English text. The West Country exploded with what’s known as the Prayer Book Rebellion, one of the greatest popular risings of the 16th century. ‘If there was a single point in time that separated the old world and the new,’ writes Lucy Wooding in her magnificent new survey of Tudor England, this was it.

BOGAEV: So, that’s why the education was focused so much on classic Greek and Roman history and writings. I guess the question is, what kind of Tudor adult did all of this classical education yield, besides William Shakespeare?Now that we are questioning whether in fact there was that much Protestant commitment when she comes to the throne in 1553, we can look at her in a slightly different light and think, “Ah, okay. Well…” I mean, she herself always said that she was ruling over a largely Catholic population with a small vocal minority of Protestant troublemakers.

BOGAEV: Yeah. It sounds as if it was a time of great income disparity, you know, prosperity as well as widespread poverty, or fear of poverty. It sounds very familiar actually, and I know you caution often against making great parallels between modern times and Tudor times. But between immigration and plague and political instability and income inequality, it’s hard not to. Folger Theatre reopens this fall, with the rest of the building to follow in 2024. Learn about the building renovation and start planning your visit.

Felicity Heal, ‘Food gifts, the household and the politics of exchange in early modern England’, P&P 199 (2008), 41–70. BOGAEV: We were just talking about Jane Anger on this show, and that’s who I’m thinking of as you speak. BOGAEV: Right. You say that 95% of the people lived in villages. But then you had London, this amazingly mutating city. It just had tremendous turnover and it depended on immigrants, you write, to keep the city alive. That they needed, I think you said, 4,000 new arrivals each year to sustain population with so many people dying of, what? Plague and overcrowding and poor sanitation?

WITMORE: Lucy Wooding is a Langford fellow and tutor in history at Lincoln College, Oxford University. Her book, Tudor England: A History is out now from Yale University Press. These are the difficult-to-articulate disputes that baffled me as a bright-eyed undergraduate. While a lesser work would lose its way in a forest of difficult and often contradictory scholarship, Wooding is refreshingly clear and balanced. Tudor England is so well-cited that it’s easy to recommend to someone trying to get up to speed with current historical debates, but it’s also far from dry – liberally scattered with grisly tales and memorable digressions into everything from gardening to the theatres. Our learned guide on this journey is Lucy Wooding. Wooding is Langford fellow and Tutor in History at Lincoln College, Oxford. She is an expert on Reformation England, its politics, religion and culture and the author of a study of King Henry VIII. So, the understanding that the fertility of the landscape is a blessing from God, I think this helps imbue the landscape with a lot of religious meaning.You know, we’re looking at a population which is very often hovering on the poverty line. Where a landscape can seem, yes, full of riches and fertile and full of promise. But where probably every five or six years a harvest will fail. And, if a harvest fails two years in succession—or as it did in the 1590s, three years in succession—then you are seeing people who are starving. Come to that, there’s a great deal of debate within Catholicism as well as to, you know, where the sort of center of gravity of Catholic belief and worship should be. Christopher Dyer, A Country Merchant 1495–1520: Trading and farming at the end of the middle ages (Oxford, 2012), 27. I do think one thing that set them apart though, is that even the wealthy in Tudor society quite often had a really powerful sense of social responsibility towards the poor. Something which I think, well, I think perhaps compares favorably with attitudes today.

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