Renaissance English History Podcast: A Show About the Tudors

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Latest Episodes:

Thomas Tusser's Tudor To-Do List for Autumn (Written Entirely in Rhyme) Sep 29, 2026

Show notes

The harvest is in. Now what? In episode 2 of our autumn series, we head out into the Tudor village with the best guide I could possibly have found: Thomas Tusser, a former choirboy and court musician who walked away from court, became a Suffolk farmer, and wrote an entire farming manual in rhyme.

We crash a harvest home celebration spotted near Windsor by a German traveller in 1598, follow the gleaners into the stubble and the pigs into the woods, and find out why "mast fats up swine, mast kills up kine." Then we spend time with the Tudor farmer's wife, who was winnowing corn, making malt, driving the plough, selling geese at market, and keeping the accounts. And there's a 1523 farming manual that tells husbands and wives to show each other their receipts!

This is episode 2 of 4 in our series on how the Tudors got ready for autumn. If you missed Michaelmas, start there. There's a goose in it.

🎟 TudorCon From Home, October 23 to 25. We livestream the main room all weekend, and every talk is recorded with audio and slides so you can listen afterward. Every ticket comes with a digital swag bag worth over $100. Sign up by September 30th to join the Privy Council and get the bonuses, including the Spooky Halloween Walk through London: https://tudorcon.englandcast.com/tudorcon-from-home/

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Why Tudor Tenants Brought Their Landlord a Goose (Michaelmas Explained) Sep 28, 2026

Show notes

September 29th was one of the biggest days of the Tudor year, and most of us have never heard of it. Michaelmas, the feast of St Michael and All Angels, was when rent came due, farm servants' contracts ran out, London chose its Lord Mayor, and the lawyers and students all headed back to town. It was also goose day, and the reason tenants turned up at the landlord's door with a goose under their arm is funnier (and a little sadder) than you'd think. This is episode 1 of a four-part series on how the Tudors got ready for autumn.
In this one:
🪽 Who St Michael was, and why he's weighing souls in English church doom paintings
🌧 The Wenhaston Doom, hidden under whitewash for 300 years until a rainstorm in 1892
🪿 George Gascoigne's poem about tenants buttering up their landlords "for fear their lease fly loose"
🏴‍☠️ Busting the myth that Elizabeth I started the Michaelmas goose after the Armada
📜 Why the British tax year still starts on April 6th, thanks to an old quarter day
🎟 TudorCon From Home, October 23 to 25. We livestream the main room all weekend, and every talk is recorded with audio and slides so you can catch up afterward. Every ticket comes with a digital swag bag worth over $100. Sign up by September 30th to join the Privy Council and get the bonuses, including the Spooky Halloween Walk through London: https://tudorcon.englandcast.com/tudorcon-from-home

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The Peasants' Revolt Was Crushed. So Why Did England Never Tax Like That Again? Sep 25, 2026

Show notes

The rebellion is over in three weeks. Wat Tyler is dead, the charters are revoked, John Ball is executed, and by every measure that historians usually use, the Peasants' Revolt failed completely. Except that the tax that started it was never levied again in the same way for a hundred and thirty two years.

The next general poll tax in England comes in 1513, under Henry VIII, and even then the government moved carefully. For four generations, the memory of 1381 sat in the room every time Parliament talked about taxing ordinary people.

In this final part of the series we go to Smithfield on the 15th of June, 1381, and work out what actually happened between Wat Tyler and the fourteen year old king. Then we follow Richard II to Waltham, where the chronicler Thomas Walsingham puts a speech in his mouth that is quoted in almost every book on the revolt, and which one of the best modern historians of 1381 thinks was made up.

We go through the reprisals in Essex, Hertfordshire and Norfolk, and then we ask the question the whole series has been building toward. They lost. Did they also win? Serfdom in England is not abolished by an act of Parliament. It drains away. And in 1574, Elizabeth I signs a commission to free the last serfs on the crown estates, which tells you both that villeinage had almost disappeared and that it had not quite.

📅 TudorCon From Home, October 23 to 25: join the Privy Council by September 30 for bonus game nights, early community access, the Spooky Halloween Walk through London audio tour, and 25% off with code PRIVYCOUNCIL. 👉 https://tudorcon.englandcast.com/tudorcon-from-home/

FREE WEEKLY NEWSLETTER Tudor and medieval history in your inbox every week, plus the three history stories that caught my eye. https://www.englandcast.com/newsletter-sign-up/

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The Day the Rebels Walked Into the Tower of London | Peasants' Revolt Part 3 Sep 23, 2026

Show notes

In two weeks in June 1381, English peasants drove a Chief Justice out of Essex, took Rochester Castle, walked into Canterbury Cathedral, camped outside London, burned the richest palace in the country, and then walked into the Tower of London and beheaded the Archbishop of Canterbury. And a fourteen-year-old king rode out to meet them and said yes to everything they asked for.

This is Part 3 of my series on the Peasants' Revolt, told day by day, from Brentwood on 30 May to the night of 14 June with the rebels holding London. We cover Wat Tyler, who has no history at all before that month, John Ball's sermon at Blackheath, the manor court rolls they burned everywhere they went, the Flemish weavers murdered in the streets, and Johanna Ferrour, the woman the court records name as a leader of the attack on the Tower.

▶️ Part 1: https://youtu.be/bl5z1blEY-Y | Part 2: https://youtu.be/AT5AWrkIBVE

🔔 Subscribe for Part 4, the aftermath, which is where this story really gets you.

✈️ This episode is sponsored by Context Travel, who run small group and private tours led by scholars and local experts. I took their Hampton Court tour this summer, and my video about it is here: https://youtu.be/V9iXh7Eask4. Book a tour: https://www.contexttravel.com/

📬 My weekly newsletter: https://www.englandcast.com/newsletter-sign-up/

👉 https://tudorcon.englandcast.com/tudorcon-from-home/

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Where Did All the Women Go? The Tax That Started the Peasants' Revolt | Part 2 Sep 22, 2026

Show notes

In 1377, England counted about 1,355,000 adults for a new poll tax. In 1381 it counted again and found about 896,000. There was no great plague, no famine and no invasion. So where did a third of the country go?

They were at home. Village after village sent in tax lists with far more men than women, because families had simply stopped telling the government their daughters, sisters and widowed mothers existed.

In Part 2 of my series on the Peasants' Revolt, I look at the 30 years that pushed England to breaking point. We cover the labour laws that fined workers to lower their bosses' taxes, a law telling ploughmen what they could wear, villagers who paid for copies of the Domesday Book to prove they were free, a ten-year-old king, and a poll tax that charged the poorest family the same per head as the richest. It all ends at Brentwood on 30 May 1381, when the people of Fobbing threw the tax commissioner out of town.

📅 TudorCon From Home, October 23 to 25: join the Privy Council by September 30 for bonus game nights, early community access, the Spooky Halloween Walk through London audio tour, and 25% off with code PRIVYCOUNCIL.
👉 https://tudorcon.englandcast.com/tudorcon-from-home/

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How Rain, Dead Cows and the Black Death Started the Peasants' Revolt Sep 21, 2026

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In June 1381, rebels broke into John of Gaunt's Savoy Palace, the wealthiest house in England. They smashed the gold plate, crushed the jewels with hammers and threw the silver in the Thames. According to one chronicler, when a man was caught stealing, his own side threw him into the fire.So how do ordinary villagers get to that point?

In Part 1 of a four-part series on the Peasants' Revolt, I go back to the beginning. That means the rain of 1315, a famine so bad the king couldn't buy bread, a cattle plague that took the milk away from a whole generation of children, the Black Death, and a government that responded by making it illegal to ask for a raise.

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What the Tudors Did When They Couldn't Control Anything Sep 18, 2026

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Every year in Tudor England, the weather warmed up and people wondered if this would be a plague year. On top of plague there was the sweating sickness, which could kill you between dinner and supper, plus a flu pandemic and years of failed harvests when bread prices tripled. So how did ordinary people live with that constant hum of "something terrible might happen"?

In this episode we go outbreak by outbreak, from the first sweat in 1485 to the plague that greeted James I in 1603, and ask how people coped at every stop. We meet the Brandon boys, two teenage dukes of Suffolk who died of the sweat on the same morning in 1551, and their mother Katherine Willoughby, trying to make sense of it through her new Protestant faith. We look at what people lost when the Reformation took away purgatory, plague saints and prayers for the dead, right while the plague kept coming. And we meet Bartholomew Steer, who planned a rising in the hungry 1590s and had four men show up.

I made this one because so many of us are feeling a low hum of dread about big things we can't control right now. The Tudors don't have all the answers, but they have some surprisingly useful ones, and a bit of plague comedy too.

Also join the Privy Council for TudorCon From Home. Stream TudorCon, October 23 to 25, from your couch for $59, with a Digital Swag Bag worth over $100. Sign up by September 30 to join the Privy Council and get the brand new Spooky Halloween Walk through London immersive audio as a bonus, along with an extra game night, Tudor Zoom backgrounds and your Privy Council badge. Use code PRIVYCOUNCIL to save an additional 25%.

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The Monks Henry VIII Left Behind, Told in 200 Sonnets Sep 16, 2026

Show notes

What happens to your whole world when the king decides your faith is wrong? Richard Smith's new book, Beyond Where Words Can Go, follows two young Benedictine monks, a lord's youngest son and a foundling left on the monastery doorstep, through Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries and all the back and forth of the English Reformation. And it's told entirely in sonnets. Two hundred of them!

Richard is a clinical psychologist in Washington, DC who started writing sonnets for his dog (yes, really), and I loved talking with him about what it felt like to live inside the old faith, where the monks went when their homes were pulled down, and why the sonnet turned out to be the perfect way to tell this story. Our friend Gerry joined us live with some great questions about the manuscripts lost when the monasteries fell.

Find Richard at richardsmithwriting.com and on Instagram @richardsmithwriting.

Get Beyond Where Words Can Go:
Bauhan Publishing: https://bauhanpublishing.com/shop/beyond-where-words/
Bookshop: https://bookshop.org/p/books/beyond-where-words-can-go-a-novel-in-200-sonnets-richard-smith/7f97cae4082d4972
Barnes & Noble: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/beyond-where-words-can-go-richard-smith/1148428273?ean=9780872334007
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Beyond-Where-Words-Can-Go/dp/0872334007/

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They Tried to Demolish Hampton Court. Then the Queen Died. Sep 14, 2026

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Where Were You on 9/11? Walsingham in Paris, 1572 Sep 11, 2026

Show notes

Twenty-five years ago today, I was at my desk in Soho, emailing my friends about Thanksgiving plans, when one of them told me to open Yahoo because something big was happening in New York. For the anniversary, I wanted to tell you where I was that day. Then I want to take you back to another morning that started out completely normal: Paris, August 1572.

The St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre began just days after a royal wedding that was supposed to bring peace. Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth's ambassador, was right in the middle of it. His pregnant wife and his little daughter were in the house, and a teenage Philip Sidney was sheltering with them while refugees came to his door.

We'll also follow the news back to England, including the refugees who landed at Rye, and look at how quickly grief turned into a demand for safety, both in 1572 and in 2001.

Take care of each other this week, and if you want to, tell me in the comments where you were.

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