Renaissance English History Podcast: A Show About the Tudors

Before bridges, before coaches, before passable roads, if you needed to get anywhere in Tudor London you needed him. The Thames waterman was licensed, badged, opinionated, and completely indispensable.

In this episode we spend 24 hours on the river: shooting London Bridge, ferrying Shakespeare's audience to the South Bank, and watching the coaches arrive and take everything away.

Plus: John Taylor, the Water Poet, who was furious about all of it and wrote pamphlets to prove it.
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Before hospitals, painkillers, or germ theory, the Tudor midwife was the most powerful person in the room. Licensed by the Bishop, sworn to secrecy, she outranked duchesses, performed sacraments no other woman was allowed to touch, and knew every secret in the neighborhood.

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Scotland in the 1560s was chaotic even by Tudor standards. In this thought experiment episode, we ask: what if Mary Queen of Scots had fled to France in 1567 instead of marrying Bothwell? We walk through the real history, then imagine how one different decision might have changed the Catholic plots against Elizabeth, the Spanish Armada, and the entire trajectory of the British monarchy. Plus: come join us at TudorCon, October 23-25 in Richmond, Virginia. tudorcon.englandcast.com.

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History says medieval women were powerless. Some of them knew exactly where the power was and went and got it.

In this episode I'm looking at four women who built careers, won lawsuits, and left things behind that still exist today, all inside a legal system that was stacked against them. Katherine Fenkyll ran one of the most active cloth businesses in Tudor London for thirty years, negotiated with guilds and cardinals, and took people to court over bad silk. Rose de Burford chased Edward II for an unpaid debt five times while simultaneously producing embroidered vestments for the Pope. Alice Chester took over her late husband's international shipping operation and donated the first crane to the Port of Bristol. And Joan Bradbury founded a school in Saffron Walden that is still open today.

None of them were rebels. They were just very good at finding the gaps.
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The story of how a respected Elizabethan botanist looked at a tomato, applied perfectly logical medical reasoning, and concluded that English people shouldn't eat one, and why it took two hundred years for anyone to prove him wrong.

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