Renaissance English History Podcast: A Show About the Tudors

Jane Grey wasn't just a pawn. She was a fierce Protestant intellectual who made a real choice when the crown landed at her feet in 1553. What if she'd said no? We explore what Mary's reign might have looked like without a Protestant figurehead to rally around, whether Wyatt's Rebellion would even have happened, and why the answer has less to do with Jane's courage than you might think.

Sign up for the Anne Boleyn Scavenger Hunt here: https://www.englandcast.com/anneboleynscavenger/

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Someone left a comment asking about Tudor dairymaids, and I went down a rabbit hole I did not expect. The dairymaid looks like a background character in Tudor history. She is absolutely not.

We're covering her daily work, the surprising economic independence the dairy gave women in a world designed to give them none, and why the phrase "as smooth as a milkmaid's skin" is actually encoding centuries of accumulated medical knowledge that eventually gave Edward Jenner the lead for the smallpox vaccine.

She woke up before dawn, milked the cows, made the cheese, sold the butter, saved her money, and changed the world in ways no one thought to write her name next to.

🔎 Join the free Anne Boleyn Scavenger Hunt at englandcast.com. 15 days, 15 clues, ending May 19 on the anniversary of her execution. https://www.englandcast.com/anneboleynscavenger/
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You've probably heard that Tudor people never drank water, that ale was the default drink for everyone including children, because the water would kill you. It's in pretty much every Tudor history book from the last thirty years. And it turns out it's a lot more complicated than that.

In this episode we dig into where the "nobody drank water" story actually comes from, why the sources historians rely on have a serious bias problem, and what a remarkable piece of recent research from Trinity College Dublin found when they actually reconstructed Tudor beer from 16th century records. And then coffee arrives in England around 1650, and everything changes.

Link to the two-sleeps video is here:

https://youtu.be/x1Q4tYhLRvA

TudorFair.com for the mug!
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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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