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Deadly bellringing and fatal bacon: grisly accidental Tudor deaths
00:36:51
Steven Gunn reveals what accidental deaths in Tudor England can reveal about everyday life in the era
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- [00:01]
Stephen Gunn
I herald his beginning.
- [00:03]
Ellie Cawthorn
Marvel Studios the Fantastic Four I herald your end. The biggest event of the summer.
- [00:09]
Thomas Gramelski
IHerald Galactus has arrived.
- [00:15]
Alex von Tunzelman
What is that?
- [00:16]
Ellie Cawthorn
Come on.
- [00:16]
Thomas Gramelski
We will fight this together as a family.
- [00:19]
Stephen Gunn
Johnny.
- [00:19]
Thomas Gramelski
Now.
- [00:21]
Ellie Cawthorn
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- [00:59]
Thomas Gramelski
And.
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Ellie Cawthorn
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- [01:35]
Thomas Gramelski
Welcome to the History Extra podcast. Fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History magazine. From drowning and agricultural mishaps to getting stabbed during a football match, crushed by a pig, scolded by porridge, or suffocated by a fish, there were myriad ways to accidentally die in Tudor England. Professor Stephen Gunn and Dr. Thomas Gramelski have compiled hundreds of these accidental deaths in their new book, An Accidental History of Tudor England. And I spoke to Stephen to find out how looking at the records of deaths can teach us about everyday life in the era. What were some of the ways that people died or came to unfortunate ends in the 16th century?
- [02:25]
Stephen Gunn
Well, we found accidents a very good way to look at the whole of Tudor life, because people have accidents doing all sorts of different things. People have work related accidents, doing lots of different kinds of jobs in agriculture, in industry, and just in domestic work. People have accidents at home and relaxing, playing sport, playing football. People have accidents traveling, whether they're riding horses or walking along, or just trying to cross bridges in the landscape, which could just be a plank of wood. And so every different area of people's lives throws up different kinds of accidents. So it gives us not a complete picture, but a pretty kaleidoscopic picture of the ways that people lived in 16th century England.
- [03:07]
Thomas Gramelski
What was the most common cause of accidental death in Tudor England?
- [03:12]
Stephen Gunn
Well, the most striking one is drowning, because about 40% of all accidental deaths recorded in coroner's inquests in the 16th century are drownings. And there are lots of reasons for that, both to do with how people move around the landscape, but also to do with people's work, which are nice examples of the kinds of big issues that looking at accidental death opens up in thinking about how people lived.
- [03:35]
Thomas Gramelski
Can you give us any more examples?
- [03:36]
Stephen Gunn
Well, two examples would be a classic men's drowning accident is that in June and July, and it's concentrated in June and July, working men get very hot working in the fields, working on building sites and so on. And so at the end of the day, and these accidents concentrate in the late afternoon and early evening, they strip off and jump in the nearest pond or river to get clean. Many of them can't swim. Perhaps some of them have heart attacks because of the shock. Some of them are exhausted from harvest work or other kinds of heavy work. And so lots and lots of people end up drowning in those circumstances. Classic women's drowning accidents. About one in eight accidental deaths of girls over five and women in the 16th century is fetching water, because people are going backwards and forwards to wells and ponds and rivers all day collecting buckets of water. And when the weather's bad and it's slippery or they're ill, they still have to go. And so very large numbers of people are falling into the water. Their underclothing's made of thick linen and their over clothing is made of thick woolen cloth. So they get waterlogged very fast and they find it very hard to get out again once they've fallen in. So those are two very common kinds of drowning accidents that just tell you things about everyday life that you wouldn't realize. And strikingly, they're both things that we haven't really thought about much before, because fetching water is such an obvious thing to do that nobody really writes about it. Nobody writes in their diary, my maidservant's got three buckets of water, water today. Because obviously your maid servants got three buckets of water today because that's what maid servants do all day. So that's the kind of thing that doesn't get written down. And likewise, people have looked at medical books which say, don't, whatever you do, have a bath because it's really bad for you. It lets all the diseases in through the pores in your skin. It's much better to Change your fine linen or silk shirt after you've been playing tennis. Well, obviously those books are written for rich people in the 16th century and poor people don't have the luxury of changing their shirt, so they just take it off and get in the river instead. So those are the kinds of things where this kind of source opens up areas of life that we can't really look at so easily through the kinds of more conventional sources that historians use.
- [05:43]
Thomas Gramelski
At first glance, these deaths can seem quite random, quite esoteric. You know, they're not in war, they're not in the aid of some great political aim. But why are they interesting to look at? What can we learn from looking at these accidental deaths about the ways that people lived?
- [05:59]
Stephen Gunn
I think what's interesting about them is precisely that they don't fit in with the big stories of Tudor history that we're used to. And those big stories are important. There are enormous things going on in 16th century England, the Reformation, major wars with France and Spain, dramatic events in national politics. You only have to look at the reign of Henry VIII to see most of those things going on. And not surprisingly, that's what we've paid a lot of attention to. But actually, what ordinary people did all day matters too, partly just out of the respect that's due to ordinary people in the past, but also matters in terms of understanding what life was like in the past. These coroner's inquests have their limitations. So, for example, you need to keep reminding yourself that if you died in a plague outbreak, nobody would have a coroner's inquest on you because it was completely obvious what you died from. So nobody needed to work out, was it a murder, was it a suicide, was it an accident? Were any follow up legal proceedings needed? No, they weren't. You died of plague and they just needed to get you buried as quickly as possible. And so, in terms of the total number of people dying, this is quite a small proportion. On the other hand, it does tell you what people were doing all day, which not many other sources do. Another kind of source that some historians have been using recently is the depositions, the witness statements that people made in legal cases where, for example, they'll say, well, I know that these people came and stole the hay that we were harvesting, because I was there and I was working from 8 o' clock in the morning till 4 o' clock in the afternoon, and I was working with John Smith and Joan Brown can say what happened as well. So people can use that sort of thing to say, well, here's the Mix of people that were doing this harvesting and this is how long it took, and this is where they were. But accidents, precisely. I suppose, because of their quality of just being very everyday do tell you what people are doing in a way that lots of other sources don't.
- [07:55]
Thomas Gramelski
So it's this rare glimpse really into everyday life. You've written a feature for our team at BBC History Magazine that is essentially a calendar of the accidental deaths in Tudor England. Looking at each month and some of the most regular causes of death, you suggest that each time of year has a different risk associated with it. Can you give us some examples?
- [08:16]
Stephen Gunn
Well, examples would be things related to what work people are doing different times of year, and then also pretty obviously, things related to climate. So you're more likely to get killed in a snowstorm in December or January. And we've got particular snowstorms that are obviously bad in different places in particular years that kill a number of people. In each case, you're going to have difficulties clearing ice, in some cases even breaking ice on ponds so that you can fetch water when things are frozen, which obviously you're not going to have in the summer. Conversely, in the summer, there are accidents caused by people responding to heat. And there are also then jobs that people do at particular times of year. So a nice example would be a lot of people fall off houses and barns, thatching them in the autumn, because you do thatching in the autumn, because you've got lots of straw left over from the harvest. You haven't got lots of big agricultural work to do in the way that you have in the harvest time. And also winter's coming with snow and rain and cold weather, so you want to get a decent roof on your house. So lots of people have thatching accidents in the autumn in a way that they don't at other times of year. And those sorts of patterns of work issues, the most obvious one is the harvest, where you can see the hay harvest first, then the grain harvest and then the fruit harvest in August, September running through into October. So harvesting different crops at different times of year will cause different sorts of accidents with those different crops. But there are other kinds of work that are fairly seasonal. So winter work, a lot of it involves work with timber, because there aren't leaves on the trees, because dormant wood is less likely to split when you're chopping it. So you actually get better timber if you cut the wood in wintertime. And one of the things that we can do is look at contemporary agricultural handbooks. There's a great book by a man called Thomas Tusser, called 500 points of good Husbandry, which tells you, in quite bad poetry, how to work your farm at different times of year.
- [10:12]
Thomas Gramelski
So the picture that you painted so far is fairly agricultural and fairly rural. We've got accidents of people thatching roofs, we've got accidents of people working with timber and on farms. So were accidental deaths more common in rural settings than in urban ones?
- [10:29]
Stephen Gunn
No, they weren't more common in rural settings. But the key thing is that lots of towns weren't very good at handing in their records. So this has bizarre effects, like the fact that it looks to have been extremely dangerous to live in Rutland and extremely safe to live in Hampshire, because Rutland doesn't have any large towns. The small towns that it has, like Oakham, are good at handing in their records, whereas nearly all the big towns don't hand their records in. So Hampshire looks very safe. But that's because we haven't got records for the big places in Hampshire. There are some towns we can look at and others that we can't. Newcastle hands in its records very well, so we know a lot about accidents with the port on the Tyne and accidents, for example, involving civic festivities at Newcastle. So we have plays being put on for part of the church calendar in Newcastle, where they've obviously got special effects with exploding gunpowder, and the exploding gunpowder explodes the gun chambers that it's in and bits of shrapnel start flying around and hit people in the audience. York is good. We've got a lot of material for York again, particularly problems with the rivers. For example, someone who takes her household's cow to the river to water it when it's frozen and the cow falls through the ice, and then she and several other young women are all trying to pull the cow out of the water and all end up falling into the frozen water with the cow. Building in urban contexts is difficult because everything's congested. People are trying to work up ladders when other people are trying to drive carts down the street. And that doesn't mix very well. There are lots of animals around in urban contexts as well. We've got a butcher whose heifer runs away from him and he tries to chase it and then falls over on the tool that he's holding in his hand. Trouble with dogs. We've got guard dogs that break out and go and attack people in places like Southwark. Again, we haven't got the records, except for one year, we haven't got the records for the City of London, but we have for Southwark So lots of urban type accidents from the Greater London area. We have to see through what's happening in Southwark rather than through what's happening inside the City of London itself. So there are obstacles in the way of having a complete picture of what's happening in towns. But we can see quite a lot of what's going on in towns and indeed in quite a lot of cases, the street patterns of the town still survive. So we can pin things down to particular streets, particularly in somewhere like York or Newcastle. We've got a lot of accidents. We can actually watch things happening all the way around the town.
- [12:46]
Thomas Gramelski
And do we have a sense that wealth could buy you immunity from accidental deaths were the poor more vulnerable to them?
- [12:54]
Stephen Gunn
I think different people have different sorts of accidents, so it's quite hard to work out what proportion of people were in different kinds of social roles in the 16th century. But estimates for the number of gentlemen would be somewhere between 1 and 4% of the population, probably rising over the century. And their accidental death rates are not way out of line with that. That's partly because a lot of ordinary people get places by walking, they get places by riding horses and a lot of people fall off horses. So falling off a horse is a classic rich person's accident. Indeed, probably the richest person in all our accidents is a small boy, George Lord Dacre, whose giant vaulting horse, well, giant by his standards because he's an 8 year old boy, falls over on top of him. Also, of course, richer people more like to have guns, so accidents with guns quite often involve richer people. We've got a ra nonchalant young esquire in Kent who tries to shoot a pigeon to feed his hawk out of his bedroom window because he can't be bothered to go downstairs and then catches the firing mechanism of the gun on the window latch and shoots himself through the. Through the shoulder. So there are characteristic rich people's accidents and characteristic poorer people's accidents. One of the things you can do when you've got large enough numbers of people from a particular occupational grouping is to try and work out whether a job is more safe or more dangerous. And the great source to compare things with from this point of view is a set of musters for the militia in Gloucestershire in the very early 17th century, where they list the jobs of about, I think, three quarters of the men involved. So that gives you a sense of the proportions of people doing different kinds of jobs. You can then compare those with the proportions of men of particular occupations having accidents. And it looks as Though the really safe things are the textile industry jobs. We have lots of weavers who have accidental, fatal accidents, but they're all being kicked by horses when they're walking down the road or falling off bridges when they're crossing the river or things like that. Like that. They're not killing themselves weaving. Whereas millers have a lot of accidents in water mills and windmills, because water mills and windmills are powerful and comparatively fast turning machinery. The inner workings in particular are made of wood, and so you have to keep greasing them to keep them working. And you don't want to lose valuable milling time by stopping all the water running and shutting everything down while you stop and grease things, or shutting everything down while the wind's blowing and greasing things. So people are very tempted to try and grease the machinery while it's still working. And their clothes, clothes get caught and their hair gets caught and their fingers get caught and they get dragged in. So that's one problem. But then also, controlling the power supply is very difficult because you're either trying to control fast flowing water, which you can easily fall into. We've got one man who takes a shortcut to close the floodgate, the water gate on his mill stream, by just jumping on top of it, and sooner or later, of course, he slips off and falls into the mill stream. So controlling the water flow is difficult, controlling the wind flow is difficult for a windmill because you have to climb up the windmill to put canvas cloth over the windmill sails in order to make them catch the wind better. But then of course, that means you're climbing up and down in high winds to put these canvas things on the windmill. So milling is really dangerous. And millers have a bad reputation in the 16th century for being a bit crooked, that they will always give you back slightly less flour than they're supposed to give you from the grain that you've given them. But that may be because it's a dangerous job and so they think, well, they ought to be able to make a profit from it. So, again, there are some limitations, but it does look as though a lot of the time we really can work out what the different sorts of risks to people, people at different stages of life and different social levels are.
- [16:31]
Thomas Gramelski
It's a bit like a Final Destination film this. Everywhere you look, there seems to be some horrible way to die.
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- [18:08]
Thomas Gramelski
That struck me reading your book was were there a lot more deadly incidents? How much was that a part of it? Or was it more that minor injuries could more easily be deadly?
- [18:20]
Stephen Gunn
I think it's both of those because the kinds of things that are dangerous, some of them are things that we've managed to make much safer. Now on the other hand, there are lots and lots of these injuries where people, for example, fall over and cut themselves on their knife. And you would think that wouldn't be a fatal injury. And it isn't a fatal injury. Even sometimes the jurors inquest jurors will report, for example, people cutting themselves and nine days later getting a very bad fever or part of their body swelling up. We would think, well that's pretty obvious evidence that they've got infected. But they don't think in those terms. But they say but nothing had happened to them to cause that swelling apart from the accident with the knife 10 days ago. So we still blame the accident with the knife. So they have a slightly different sense of how things fit together. Intriguingly, on two occasions, jurors also use astrological ideas to say, we've got one man who is breaking up a fight between two dogs and he gets his foot cut, a very small cut from the tooth of one of the dogs and the jurors in effect say, well, you wouldn't have thought that would kill him, but the sign of the foot was then raining at that time. In other words, the astrological sign that was in the ascendant was the one that was particularly to do with the health of the foot. And so you would think it's a particularly dangerous time to get injured in your foot. So they're trying to explain things as best they can, but obviously they're facing different medical circumstances, difficult medical understandings from ours and they're all for. Also they're describing difficult practical circumstances from our.
- [19:51]
Thomas Gramelski
Something I wanted to ask you about was interpersonal violence. You mentioned earlier that obviously a lot more people carried weapons, they carried knives around. Is it right that violence between people or brawls could sometimes be defined as accidental if somebody died?
- [20:05]
Stephen Gunn
Yes, certainly jurors are quite clever in using the different categories that they have available. And now of course they might be, and we can't tell which of these it is. They might be clever in the sense that they're very finely working out exactly what happened and applying the principles of the law, or they might be clever in thinking, well, John's all right, isn't he? We don't really want to get John into trouble, so we'll say it was an accident and we can't tell most of the time which of those it was. Although the court of Star Chamber is increasingly active in 16th century in investigating juries that have given verdicts that it thinks might be questionable. So there is a bit of a shadow hanging over people if they really think they're just going to fix things quite blatantly. So there are certain misunderstood disputes in which people are fighting and the verdict is found that the death is accidental. And mostly those seem to be cases where either it's pretty obviously not meant to be a fatal fight. So people wrestling with each other, for example, where it appears to be for fun, even if one of the people doesn't think it's quite so much for fun as the other one does. Or things where in effect they're using accidental death rather than self defense because you can have a self defence verdict where somebody kills somebody in self defence. And interestingly, some of the coroner's inquest reports on things that the jury ends up saying were accidents describe fights between people using some of the terminology and some of the scenarios that jurors also use when they're describing self defence deaths. So that would be things like people going backwards when they're being attacked rather than going forwards, attacking the other person, people getting to a hedge that's so high and thick that they can't get over it, so they just have to fight back. Those sorts of people who are lying on the ground at the point at which their weapon goes into the other person. And we have one very complicated case which takes the jury a long time to decide on, which may be a duel, where the jurors use some of that sort of language. They use some of the language you would use for a murder indictment. When they're talking about how the person who ends up dead attacks the other person, they use some of the language that you would use in a suicide verdict, because they say that the person who ended up dead threw himself onto the other person's weapon, not having the fear of God before his eyes. And then in the end they say, well, the end, the verdict they reach was that it was suicide, but they also say that it happened by misfortune, which is what you'd say in an accident verdict. And then the King's Bench court had been King's Bench, to which these inquests are returned. The clerks there write on it. One writes self defense and then crosses it out. Another one writes, it's an accident and it's the accident one that they leave to stand. So that's about the most jumbled verdict you can have, where they're obviously thinking which of these different legal categories we're going to fit this into. Presumably with the aim that if they think that the duel was the fault of the person who ended up dead, who interestingly also seems to be the person of higher social status, he's a gentleman and he's fighting with a rapier, a proper dueling sword and a dagger, whereas the person who comes out of it alive is a yeoman. So he's slightly lower social status and he has old fashioned broadsword and a buckler, a little shield. So the man with the superior technology ends up dead. And they may seem to think probably it's his fault. These two people have met in the middle of town and apparently exchanged unbearable insults. And then apparently by accident, they meet on the way out of town later that afternoon, buy a major landmark and start fighting. So there are all sorts of things that are some sort of a fight or a conflict, but still end up being found as an accident. And the jurors even sometimes use this rather useful category they have, where you can have a death that's an accident, or you can have a homicide that's an accident. In other words, somebody is active in Killing somebody, but doesn't intend to kill them. So the death itself is an accident. And that's something, for example, they use in football accidents. So if two people just run into each other, that's an accident. If one person tackles another in a particularly brutal way, obviously not intending to kill them, but breaks their leg and they then die subsequently, that's a homicide by misfortune. And in that case, the person who perpetrates the brutal tackle doesn't face a murder trial, but they do have to pay for a pardon.
- [24:22]
Thomas Gramelski
Wow. So Tudor football was a lot more brutal than today.
- [24:25]
Stephen Gunn
Tudor football is very dangerous. Yeah.
- [24:27]
Thomas Gramelski
On the point of carrying weapons, this is intriguing to me. Was there a sense that people throughout society would carry weapons? And I guess we could extend this to dangerous tools. Was society just a lot more lax about people's access to dangerous items?
- [24:42]
Stephen Gunn
There are lots of ways in which people have to carry things that you could use as a weapon. That's the best way to think about it. First of all, everybody needs a knife to carry their food up. People very rarely use forks in the 16th century. Forks are quite exotic. That means everybody's got a knife. And you have lots and lots of accidents with knives, where people just fall over. They fall over crossing stiles and their knife goes into their leg. They fall over running along and their knife goes into their leg. And lots and lots of these knife injuries are either in the thigh or in the belly, which does suggest that the fact that people have got knives hanging on their belts is part of the problem. But then you can't not have a knife or, or you can't have your dinner. So everybody's got to have a knife. Lots of agricultural tools will double up as weapons, particularly what are known as bills. They're sometimes called hedging bills. Military versions of those are what the English use against the Scottish pikes in the Battle of Flodden in 1513. So they're a fairly standard weapon. But they're also the sort of things in agricultural versions that you would use for cutting down low hanging branches off trees if you need some firewood, or if you need some fresh branches for animals. Animals to browse on. So a lot of people will just be going round with a bill, some kind of staff with a sharp blade on the end, and you can use that for fighting. Similarly, quite a lot of men might have a bow and arrow with them because it's useful for hunting. By the end of the century, people are carrying guns quite often for hunting birds, but obviously you could fire a gun at somebody in anger. Or you have lots of accidents with guns, partly because of the way that the firing mechanisms are set up that make them quite unstable. So there are lots of ways in which you can have an accident with something which doubles up as a tool and a weapon. And then there are all kinds of other tools that people can have accidents with. So axes for cutting down trees, saws. People don't have accidents so much with the saws as they do with the saw pits. Because if you're sawing up big logs the way you do it, because it's a two man saw, you have somebody in the pit under the log and somebody above the pit, and the two of you hold one end of the very big saw each and saw it backwards and forwards. But of course, if the log falls into the pit, then there's somebody underneath it, or the pits get full of water and people fall into them. So all kinds of things can go wrong with sores as well.
- [26:56]
Thomas Gramelski
And what were some of the biggest risks to children in particular?
- [26:59]
Stephen Gunn
The ones inside the house are predominantly liquids lying around, so children spill hot liquids over themselves. After all, cooking is very slow in 16th century England, so lots of households will just have a cook pot on the fire a lot of the time. Porridgey brews of various sorts and meat stews of various sorts are fairly standard meals and vegetable stews. So there's all always hot liquid around. And also lots and lots of households are home brewing. So you have vessels full of hot wort and then once you've brewed it into ale, you have vessels of hot ale cooling down. You have hot milk for cheese making around the house. So you get the sense there are lots and lots of vessels of liquid around. Then there's just buckets with water in ready for use later, and children fall into those. The other big danger is animal, partly dogs, although sometimes the problem is children are playing with dogs and then fall over or fall into the fire or whatever. The animals which are more dangerous in terms of direct attacks on children are pigs, because pigs are rooting around for food all over the place, including coming into households. And horribly, pigs will go after babies. And one of the other books in the way in which we use Thomas Tusser to look at agricultural practices, we can also use a book by a man called Leonard Maskell, which is about how to look after animals. And he does say you have to keep an eye on pigs with children, because pig will just come and pull babies out of cradles. And they do quite a lot. So pigs kill as many people as dogs do, and they actually kill more people in direct attacks. But they're nearly all very small children.
- [28:34]
Thomas Gramelski
Something that I learned was unexpectedly deadly is bells in churches. Can you share some story of those?
- [28:42]
Stephen Gunn
Yeah. Bell ringing seems to be increasingly popular in the 16th century, partly because it's actually quite a vigorous sport. So young men have a reputation for going into bell towers and going at it hammer and tongs, ringing the bells for all they're worth. And the problem usually involves the bell ropes. So people get the bell ropes caught around their legs or caught around their arms. They get knocked off balance or in some cases even lifted up in the air and dropped. And church floors, whereas house floors are often just swept earth with rushes on them, church floors are often paved. So you're being dropped from a height onto a paved floor and it does terrible dirt damage to people. And also the bells sometimes break. So you get bits of large metal bells flying around inside the church and hitting people. In one case even coming out of the window of the church and hitting somebody who's in the street below. So there's quite a lot can go wrong with bell ringing.
- [29:35]
Thomas Gramelski
Alongside the horrors of bell ringing, are there any other particularly eye opening or surprising or unusual deaths that you uncovered in your work in the archives?
- [29:46]
Stephen Gunn
Well, there are the quirky ones where you simply can't understand how it happened. We have one elderly and quite frail lady who's sitting by the fire warming herself and she's killed by the bacon that's hanging up in the, in the chimney to smoke falling on top of her. And then when you think about it, they're hanging sides of bacon. So they're hanging basically half pigs in the smoke above the fire to smoke the bacon. And four of them fall on her. So you can imagine that might do you quite a lot of damage. The weird ones are things like there's a man who's asleep on a cart and he rocks, rolls off the cart and on top of him rolls a fish that's on the cart and it suffocates him. And you think, well, why didn't he wake up? Some of my students said he must have been really drunk at the time. Well, it's possible, but the Inquisitor was about 1 in 100 victims. It actually says they were drunk. It doesn't say he was drunk. Partly wonder whether if it's, well fun thing, it could be a big fish, it could be a pike or something like that. They count things like porpoises as fishes. So it could be a porpoise or a dolphin. And also I wonder whether to get. Keep it cool or to keep it damp, whether it might be wrapped up in a wet cloth. And, of course, if something with a wet cloth falls on top of your face, it starts to become more plausible that it might suffocate you. So those are the strange things. And then there are the things where you just think people are seriously unlucky. So we've got a man who is standing in a disused churchyard near the edge of Coventry, where there's a maypole erected. The maypole falls over and it doesn't hit him. And he must have thought, that's good. I was worried that was going to hit me. Doesn't hit him, it hits the city warp behind him, it dislodges a stone which comes off and hits him on the head. And that's seriously unlucky.
- [31:23]
Thomas Gramelski
The final destination resonances are very, very strong. So, after looking at all these horrible incidents, Stephen, after rooting through all of these coroner's inquest, what have you taken away from your study?
- [31:37]
Stephen Gunn
I think the main thing that we've learned is that in some ways, people in the 16th century are different from us because they face different kinds of problems, they maybe have different priorities, but in other ways, they're actually quite like us. So there are all sorts of ways in which they're trying. Trying to do things more safely. Classic example would be something like when they're scything hay, because scythes are very sharp and there's a danger that you're going to hit the person next to you. You don't walk in a line where you're all level with each other, you walk in a line where you're diagonally staggered. But if you keep doing that for four hours on a hot morning, sooner or later somebody falls over or catches up with somebody because they're going a bit faster or makes a mistake. And so people do get hurt in the end, although they're trying to do things safely. Likewise with wells, they try various different ways, making wells safer, notably having some kind of barrel or roller that you can wind up the rope round so that you're not just hanging onto a rope, lowering it down the well, you're actually winding something that then winds it up and down. But there, for example, you then have people who will put their hand on the barrel to look down the well to see what's happening, and then the barrel spins round and they still go head first down the well, or the posts that the barrel's on break and a piece of wood flies off and hits somebody. So all sorts of things can still go wrong, even if they try to be safe. And also like us, they try and take shortcuts through things like the man jumping up and down on the floodgate. But then we all try and do things like that. So whenever I climb on a chair in my office to reach a book down, I think, goodness, this is the kind of thing that I read about people doing in 16th century accidents. But also, of course, they must have done it safely 99 times before somebody does it and it doesn't work. So whatever you try, something can go wrong. And in some respects, therefore, they're quite like us. Which I suppose is what you often find out when you look at people in the past.
- [33:29]
Thomas Gramelski
That was Stephen Gunn speaking to me. Ellie Cawthorn Stephen is a professor of history at the University of Oxford and the co author with Thomas Gramelski, of An Accidental History of Tudor England, From Daily Life to the Sudden Death that's out now. And as I mentioned in our conversation, Stephen has written a feature charting the different ways to die through the Tudor's seasons. You can find that now on our website, historyextra.com thanks for listening. This podcast was produced by Jack Bateman. Mama Papa. This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas and the courage to stand alone. Including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War.
- [34:35]
Ray Dalio
You know, he would look at these.
- [34:36]
Thomas Gramelski
Men and he would say, don't worry.
- [34:38]
Ray Dalio
Sonny, you'll have as good a face as as any of us when I'm done with you.
- [34:42]
Thomas Gramelski
Join me, Alex von Tunzelman for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes Wherever you get your podcasts.