Accidental Deaths in Tudor England

Summary

Accidental Deaths in Tudor England: A Comprehensive Exploration

In the June 16, 2025 episode of Not Just the Tudors, hosted by Professor Suzannah Lipscomb of History Hit, listeners are invited to delve into the often-overlooked realm of accidental deaths in Tudor England. Joined by distinguished historians Professor Stephen Gunn and Dr. Tomasz Gromowski, the episode uncovers the daily dangers faced by ordinary people during one of history’s most intriguing periods. This detailed summary captures the essence of their enlightening discussion, providing insights and noteworthy observations for both history enthusiasts and casual listeners alike.

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1. Introduction to the Episode and Its Scope ([02:15] - [05:52])

Professor Lipscomb sets the stage by introducing the episode's focus on accidental deaths in Tudor England, a subject derived from extensive research into over 9,000 coroner's inquest reports from 1500 to 1600. These records offer a window into the lives and untimely deaths of ordinary Tudor citizens, revealing the myriad ways in which daily activities could lead to fatal outcomes.

Professor Susannah Lipscomb ([02:15]):
"This is the sort of account of an accidental death in Tudor England that can be gleaned from the coroner's inquest reports filed between 1500 and 1600."

2. Sources and Their Reliability ([05:52] - [12:30])

The primary sources for this research are coroner's inquest reports, which meticulously document the circumstances surrounding accidental deaths. These records not only detail how individuals met their ends but also provide a glimpse into the societal norms and daily practices of the time.

Professor Stephen Gunn ([06:02]):
"They tell us what people are doing all day because they tell us what goes wrong when people are doing those things all day."

The historians discuss the composition of the juries responsible for these inquests—typically middle-aged men from the local community—highlighting their role in ensuring the accuracy and fairness of the verdicts. They also address the limitations of these sources, noting that certain deaths, such as those from widespread diseases like the plague, were often excluded unless they resulted from specific, dramatic incidents.

3. Occupational Hazards in Tudor England ([12:30] - [17:29])

A significant portion of the episode examines the dangers associated with various occupations. Milling and tree felling emerge as particularly perilous jobs due to the lack of safety mechanisms and the reliance on manual labor and rudimentary tools.

Professor Stephen Gunn ([14:42]):
"The job that is really lethal is being a miller, because mills have, by the 16th century standards, fast-moving and powerful machinery."

Similarly, tree fellers faced life-threatening risks from unpredictable tree falls and the absence of modern safety protocols. The unpredictability of tree growth in mixed forests further exacerbated these dangers, making controlled felling nearly impossible.

4. The Interplay of Disease and Accidental Deaths ([17:29] - [22:18])

The episode explores how health conditions, particularly fevers and epidemics, increased the likelihood of accidents. Individuals suffering from illnesses were more prone to disorientation and impaired judgment, leading to fatal missteps.

Professor Susannah Lipscomb ([18:44]):
"People have very strong fevers that disorientate them and so they just make miscalculations."

One poignant example discussed is a maidservant who, overwhelmed by a high fever, disastrously fell into a pond while attempting to quench her thirst, highlighting the intersection of health and accidental death.

5. Domestic Dangers and Gender Roles ([22:18] - [30:02])

The responsibilities of daily household tasks, predominantly undertaken by women and children, often involved significant risks. Fetching water, doing laundry, and other domestic chores were leading causes of accidental deaths, especially among young girls.

Professor Stephen Gunn ([24:22]):
"Fetching water is women's work. And that's something that historians hadn't really thought about enough in the past."

Children, particularly those under the age of fourteen, were highly vulnerable to accidents such as drowning while fetching water or being injured while assisting in household tasks. The lack of supervision combined with the hazardous nature of these activities contributed to the high mortality rates among young females.

6. Animal-Related Accidents ([40:53] - [51:56])

Interactions with animals presented another layer of danger. Horses, a staple of Tudor transportation and agriculture, were responsible for numerous accidents, including kicks, trampling, and falls. Additionally, livestock like pigs posed threats, with instances of pigs attacking infants documented in contemporary accounts.

Professor Stephen Gunn ([44:03]):
"Horses are interesting because there are very large numbers of horse accidents."

Bear baiting and other animal-based entertainments also led to fatalities, illustrating the broader risks associated with animals in both work and leisure contexts.

7. Structural and Environmental Hazards ([30:02] - [40:53])

Timber-framed houses, though common, were susceptible to structural failures such as beams collapsing, especially during repairs or construction. Environmental factors like extreme weather exacerbated these risks, leading to deaths from falls, exposure, and building collapses.

Professor Susannah Lipscomb ([38:35]):
"Timber framing seems to be a major problem...when they're trying to mend their house and help their neighbors."

Such structural accidents underscored the precariousness of Tudor domestic life, where the very homes meant to provide shelter could become sources of danger.

8. Distinguishing Accidental from Violent Deaths ([35:59] - [37:59])

A critical analysis was conducted on whether some accidental deaths might have masked underlying violence, such as domestic abuse. The juries often distinguished between unintentional accidents and homicides, though societal biases sometimes influenced these decisions.

Professor Stephen Gunn ([37:59]):
"The jurors...come out rather on the side of the masters and mistresses rather than on the side of the servants."

This segment highlights the complexities in interpreting historical records, where the line between accident and deliberate harm could sometimes blur.

9. Comparisons with Modern Accidental Deaths ([52:15] - [58:45])

Drawing parallels between Tudor and contemporary accidental deaths, the historians note similarities in the types and proportions of accidents, despite differences in technology and societal structures. For instance, Tudor traffic accidents involving horses and carts resemble modern vehicle-related fatalities in terms of victim distribution.

Professor Stephen Gunn ([56:13]):
"Accidents involving vehicles stood in for modern traffic accidents, with similar proportions of drivers and passengers being victims."

Such comparisons underscore the universal aspects of human vulnerability to accidents across centuries.

10. Emotional Impact and Ethical Considerations ([57:29] - [61:05])

Addressing the sensitive nature of their research, the authors emphasized the importance of respecting the individuals behind the historical records. They aimed to portray these lives with dignity, avoiding sensationalism while acknowledging the profound personal tragedies involved.

Dr. Tomasz Gromowski ([60:23]):
"We have to make sure that it’s not too sensational and that we show a degree of respect for those people who, after all, died in tragic circumstances."

This respectful approach ensures that the narratives of these ordinary individuals are honored and remembered appropriately.

11. Conclusion and Final Reflections ([61:05] - [61:54])

Professor Lipscomb concludes the episode by highlighting the significance of these findings in broadening our understanding of Tudor society beyond the aristocracy. The discussions presented by Professors Gunn and Gromowski offer a nuanced perspective on the everyday lives and deaths of ordinary people, enriching the historical narrative of the Tudor era.

Professor Susannah Lipscomb ([61:05]):
"Thank you for the wonderful tour...there are so many more examples to read about in your work."

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Notable Quotes:

• Professor Stephen Gunn ([14:42]):
  "The job that is really lethal is being a miller, because mills have, by the 16th century standards, fast-moving and powerful machinery."

• Professor Susannah Lipscomb ([18:44]):
  "People have very strong fevers that disorientate them and so they just make miscalculations."

• Professor Stephen Gunn ([24:22]):
  "Fetching water is women's work. And that's something that historians hadn't really thought about enough in the past."

• Dr. Tomasz Gromowski ([60:23]):
  "We have to make sure that it’s not too sensational and that we show a degree of respect for those people who, after all, died in tragic circumstances."

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Conclusion

This episode of Not Just the Tudors offers a profound exploration of the hidden dangers and societal norms of Tudor England. By focusing on accidental deaths, Professors Lipscomb, Gunn, and Gromowski illuminate the everyday struggles and vulnerabilities of ordinary people, providing a more comprehensive understanding of the period. The meticulous use of primary sources and the thoughtful interpretation of the data present a compelling narrative that challenges and enriches our perception of Tudor life.

Transcript

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

Hello, I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb. If you'd like Not Just the Tudors ad Free to get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to historyhit With a historyhit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my own recent two part series, A World Torn, the Dissolution of the Monasteries and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com subscribe.

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[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

Hello, I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb and welcome to Not Just the Tudors From History, the podcast in which we explore everything from Anne Boleyn to the Aztecs, from Holbein to the Huguenots, from Shakespeare to samurais, relieved by regular doses of murder, espionage and witchcraft. Not, in other words, just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors. At 8pm on 21 August 1565, in Saint Saviour's parish in London, near the Clink Prison, James Johnson was in an alley called Dead Man's Lane. He should have heeded its name, but he'd drunk too much alcohol and was asleep on the ground when he roused himself, as the jurors in his inquest would conclude. Barely possessed of a healthy and calm mind from his great drunkenness, he wobbled down the alley to empty his his boughs into a ditch, breaches around his ankles, he bent over and fell in face first, where he suffocated in the water, mud and filth. This is the sort of account of an accidental death in Tudor England that can be gleaned from the coroner's inquest reports filed between 1500 and 1600. By telling us how ordinary people died, they also tell us how they lived. We learn of the predictable dangers of leisure activities like archery and football, with its alarmingly few rules. But even maypole dancing, play watching and flower picking could be fatal. And how could William west beach, apparently sober, have imagined, as he danced in Goodleaf Baker's kitchen, that he would spin around and impale himself on the roasting spit? From the coroner's reports, we learned, too, that at a time where somewhere between half and two thirds of the workforce worked in agriculture, the whole business of crop growing and harvesting was fraught with danger. Scythes, my guests tell me, were a real menace. And haystacks killed more people than firearms, and death by cart or wagon was more common than road traffic deaths are today, perhaps because one could not only be run over, but fall out and overturn. And if I were to give you one piece of advice should you find yourself in Tudor keep away from the water. Whether people were washing, bathing, doing the dishes or laundry, swimming, fishing, taking their horse to water, cutting reeds to make pots, pipes, or crossing bridges, the ponds, lakes and rivers of England took their revenge. And it's not hard to understand why. Once I confess for a television program called Hidden Killers of the Tudor Home, I waded into a pond wearing heavy woolen Tudor clothing. It was extremely difficult to pull myself out again. Having investigated the Deaths of over 9,000 victims of accidental death in Tudor England in an amazing research project funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, my guests today have now written a new book exploring the fate of these victims. It's called An Accidental History of Tudor England From Daily Life to Sudden Death. The authors and my guests are Professor Stephen Gunn, Fellow and Tutor in History at Merton College, Oxford, whose previous books include Henry VII's New Men and the Making of Tudor England and the English People at War in the age of Henry VIII, and Dr. Tomasz Gromowski, research Fellow in the Humanities at Wolfson College, Oxford, and also a researcher in the Faculty of History at Cambridge. As well as reading their book, you can also find out more about the [e-mail] I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb, and you're listening to Not Just the Tudors from History Hit. Welcome, both of you, to the podcast.

[McDonald's]

Good to Be Here.

[Professor Stephen Gunn]

Hello.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

So, first of all, let's talk about these amazing sources that you've relied on and the kind of history that they can open up for us.

[McDonald's]

Well, as I think you said in the introduction, they tell us what people are doing all day because they tell us what goes wrong when people are doing those things all day. And that means that things that are already famous in Tudor history, like getting ready to face the Spanish Armada or putting on a bonfire display to entertain Queen Elizabeth I come up in the accidents when something goes wrong. But also things that we don't really think about come up all the time, and in some cases, things that, because they don't come up in other sources, historians haven't really thought to write about at all.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

Amber, I suppose one of the questions that you must have posed to you slightly irritating, niggly question that we need to get out of the way is how typical are these deaths, as far as you can tell?

[McDonald's]

Well, obviously that's hard to answer. We know that the point of the inquest was to find out had somebody been murdered, had they committed suicide, was it an accident or was it what they call death by divine visitation, which is a death without an obvious secondary cause, but one that isn't just obviously by disease. So, for example, deaths from plague, you don't have a coroner's inquest because presumably it's obvious to everybody that somebody's died from plague. So there are some areas of life, then, that this doesn't tell us about, doesn't, for example, tell us us much about childbirth, unless something goes very dramatically wrong. But there are lots of areas of life that it does tell us about. We can show, for example, that the numbers of reports from different areas of the country are roughly proportionate to the number of people living in the country. So they're a bit skewed by area, but not very skewed by area. Interestingly, they're not skewed by what kind of people they are. So we have very large numbers of reports on accidental deaths of children, even though you might think that people would think, we know maybe half of children died before they were five from disease in Tudor England. So people might think, well, another child's died in an accident, but they would probably have died from disease in the next few years anyway. But they don't think like that. They do have inquests into children, and sometimes people have wondered whether there are fewer accidental death inquests for women than for men. But in practice, if you look at small children and girls, the proportions are much more even than they are for adult women. And adult men, which suggests that the dangerous things adult women were doing, like childbirth, didn't register as accidents. Whereas the dangerous things that adult men were doing, like driving carts and wielding sides and so on, did register as accidents.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

That's really interesting.

[Professor Stephen Gunn]

Yeah. In terms of types of accidents or in terms of things that were dangerous to do at that time, we know that certain things were more typical in the sense that they were happening fairly often. So for example, as you've already told us, there were lots of accidents related to water because people were around water a lot of the time and there were all kinds of unpleasant things that could happen to them while they were washing themselves or washing, washing their clothes. Similarly, there were lots of accidents related to transport. So there were people who would be run over by carts. In some cases those cars were driven by themselves and they would for number of reasons slip from the cart and be run over by day by their own carts. This was sometimes related to the dam and not being entirely sober while driving. So these are the kinds of accidents that we come across quite often and that's why we believe that they were fairly, fairly typical. This was something that was happening all the time.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

And I'm going to ask you lots more questions about what we learn about ordinary life. But just one last question about the sources. Can we trust them? I mean, how are the reports created? Do we need to think about the definition of, of an accident and were the reasons that recording it as an accident might be preferable to some other cause of death?

[McDonald's]

Well, there are two sides to this. There's how do they get the information and there's what do they think about accidents? So the how they get the information side. Coroners, it's a job that several usual men have in each county covering different areas of the county. Their job is to go and investigate these deaths when they're called in. So it may be that there are accidents to which they're never called in. Though occasionally we have coroners turning up and saying, you've got to disinter that body because I'm afraid I've got to investigate the death. So they're quite serious about investigating them and the way they do it is by calling together a jury. We've looked at what kind of men sit on the juries and they're the kind of people who sit on other juries in 16th century England. So they're all men. They're mostly middle aged men so far as we can tell. And they're from the middle of society. They don't seem to Be the poorest people, not many labourers, they're not from the richest end of society, not many gentry, except if you've got controversial cases, perhaps people killed in duels. And they're people who are local, but not entirely local, because some of them are from the village where the thing happens, but some of them are always from the villages around, presumably to stop any kind of local cover up. If jurors produce a dishonest verdict, they can be prosecuted in the court of Star Chamber and fined. So there are various incentives for getting it right. And also because they're ordinary people who live in the village, they're people who actually understand how accidents happen. So they know which bit of a riverbank is slippery and they know what can go wrong when you're cutting down an oak tree in the wood. And so I think that gives us reasonable confidence that they know what they're talking about. What do they think is an accident? Well, there are clearly, for example, things where they think some kind of negligence is involved and they'll use wording that suggests that they'll say somebody fell by not paying enough attention. And sometimes that's a kind of wording that shows they think it's not people's fault. So they say small children fall into rivers because they don't understand that rivers are dangerous sometimes. They clearly are saying that they think it's people's fault. And particularly the jurors are very critical of young men who, for example, play football when they've already got an injury in their leg and they should have realized it would make it worse. So to some extent you can see things through the eyes of the juror. Our problem, I suppose, is sometimes we see things too much through the eyes of the jurors because we think, well, we're middle aged men too. I'm sure we would have disapproved of that in the 16th century. But in general, we think they're pretty good sources for finding out the kinds of things that we want to find out.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

So let's start by thinking about occupational life and what we can learn about demography. Can we identify the more dangerous jobs?

[McDonald's]

The best way to do that seem to us to be to find a source that tells you what proportion of people are doing what jobs and then compare that with the proportion of people having accidents. And the best source for doing it is a muster of the Gloucestershire Militia earlier in the 17th century, in which, very unusually for militia muster lists, it doesn't only tell you the names of all the adult men in Gloucestershire, it also tells you what job almost all of them did. So you can then compare the proportion of people doing a particular job in Gloucestershire with the proportion of people having an accident. And most occupations match reasonably closely. The really standout difference is that weaving appears to be very safe. It's very hard to injure yourself weaving. There are lots of people who are weavers who get killed in accidents, but it's all when they're walking down the street and they get kicked by a horse or they're going for a swim after work and they drown, things like that. The job that is really lethal is being a miller, because mills have, by the 16th century standards fast moving and powerful machinery. They have sources of power that are quite hard to control, fast flowing water and unpredictable wind. They have outputs from the power that are big and dangerous millstones, and you've got to change millstones over or hoist them up to recut the grooves in them. And above all, they have wooden cogs and machinery in the middle, which in order to keep working efficiently, ideally, if you can do it without interrupting the power supply, you need to keep greasing. So it's people greasing wooden mill machinery, probably with tallow from animals. And they get their clothes caught, they get their hair caught, they get their fingers caught, and of course, because the machinery is turning, they get dragged in. And the jurors produce these quite gruesome, but also quite fascinating second by second descriptions of how someone gets their finger caught and then their arm gets pulled in and then their chest gets pulled in and there's various bits of them get crushed and that's what kills them.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

Tomas, what's the next most dangerous job that comes to mind?

[Professor Stephen Gunn]

Well, it's not necessarily a job because different people could be doing this, regardless of the official occupation or status. But tree felling, which didn't involve any machinery, as in the case of mills, but was equally dangerous because quite often, for a number of reasons, they could be not control the falling tree in a way that we do nowadays, or try to do nowadays, all the health and safety and training that you receive as a professional lumberjack. So this was non existent, obviously, in the 16th century, and they desperately needed a large amount of timber for different purposes. So quite often those people had no qualifications at all and also no understandings of physics, it seems, because quite often they would not realize that the tree would fall into a certain direction where they happened to be standing or someone else was happened to be to be standing and watching. So I would say that this was as dangerous as Being felling trees was as dangerous as being a miller and could lead to equally gruesome accidents with very, very terrible injuries. Kosciuski if you think about it, a large piece of wood falling onto you with great force, in most instances it led to instant death.

[McDonald's]

Tree fellings also. It's an interesting illustration of two other things that we've worked out, one of which is that a lot of these accidents are dependent on what the environment was like at the time. So one of the reasons it's very hard to fell trees in Tudor England is that you don't have lots and lots of trees of the same sort, all planted in neat rows in the way that you might do in a timber plantation. Now you have trees of different sorts, all mixed up with each other and all grow reasonably naturally. And so you're trying to cut down an oak tree at a time when you've got a beech tree one side of it and an elm the other side of it, and as it falls, it might snag on one or the other. And the other thing that we've kept realizing but is, is worth stressing because there's always a danger of looking at these things and thinking, well, those foolish people. Look at those accidents they had. Tudor people are not stupid. And what many of them will do is think, well, I've got to control the fall of this tree. I'll tie a rope to the top of it to steer it away from my house or to steer it away from whatever else you don't want it to. But of course, to tie the rope to the top, you've got to climb the tree. And so people fall out of trees when they're climbing the tree to tie the rope to the top. And again and again in different sorts of accidents, we found the same thing that people, they realize there's a risk and they try and avoid the risk. But whatever you do to avoid the risk, some other kind of risk might be created, or there's still some room for something to go wrong.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

And you mentioned that the jurors might point out the negligence of the people who. Who die. Do we see any charges against owners or employers for negligence?

[McDonald's]

They're not charges, but they do make recommendations. So they'll make recommendations like saying that bridge is not safe for people to walk across and the owner should mend it, or that millstream people keep falling into it, they should put a fence along the side. And interestingly, one of the coroners whose reports are most insistent about divine providence, which is a theme that comes up More and more as the 16th century goes on. So he has this wording that he says people died by misfortune, which is divine providence. But he's also a coroner whose reports several times will set out these very practical remedies for how to solve a problem, which again, conflicts a bit with the way we tend to think about it, where we think, oh well, people in the 16th century either said, oh well, it's all providence, it's all witchcraft. So they didn't think let's mend the fence, but actually they thought, it's all providence, and they thought, let's mend the fence.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

Yes, that's fascinating, isn't it? He's like, if God wants to kill this person, that's fine, but we're going to make sure he really does want to kill the person by making sure there's good fencing here first. Accidents increase in times of illness, you write. Why? And what's the evidence of this?

[McDonald's]

The big thing is fever, particularly in the late 1550s when there's various kinds of epidemics going around that seem to give people bad fevers, like the first major flu outbreak apparently in English history. And it looks as though medically it may be that the fever's causing some kind of inflammation of the brain membrane. But certainly what the jurors report is that people have very strong fevers that disorientate them and so they just make miscalculations. Or from the juror's point of view, some of these people are just wandering around, not sure what to do. We've got a. Someone who is probably a young maidservant because somebody else has locked the front door of the house at night, she's running a high fever, she comes downstairs, she can't get out of the door from the kitchen. Well, she's in a timber framed wattle and daub house. So she can do this. She just smashes a hole in the wall because she's so desperate to get outside for a drink of water and then she's so disorientated that she falls into the pond. So that's the most obvious example really of how the other diseases that people have affect the way in which they have accidents. Plus of course, people who try to treat themselves for something and then the treatment goes wrong. We've got one very unfortunate young woman who is suffering badly with worms and thinks she'll kill the worms by mixing some arsenic in beer and drinking it. And it doesn't work out.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

Well, no one can imagine. And you've been able to identify common conditions or diseases and their fatality rate as well, haven't you?

[McDonald's]

You can't do it directly for the disease because obviously there are lots of people who have the disease and die from the disease, but don't come up as an accident. But you can certainly show what kinds of diseases people are suffering from at different times. The source, if we're allowed a brief advert that we'd like to try and work on next, is coroner's inquest for people who die of disease in prison and for those they do record what the diseases were. So you can see different epidemics sweeping through different prisons at different times. And you can even work out in a rather macabre way, whether from the point where your fellow prisoners first spot your symptoms, do you die faster from dysentery or from jail fever, which are the two main things that people seem to be recorded as dying of in prison.

[Professor Stephen Gunn]

Yes, and quite often we have corners providing additional information about the health condition of a person who died in unfortunate circumstances, just to provide that extra context and possibly an explanation as to what exactly happened. So quite often you would have corners explaining that this person probably ended up drowning because at the time when they were crossing a bridge, they had a sudden seizure because they had been suffering from epilepsy for a long time and they ended up in water because of that. Quite often we would see coroners explaining that someone fell again into water or from a bridge or indeed from a tree collecting apples because of their age and because of the fact that the age caused them to be less agile than a person younger than themselves would be. So there are all those extra information about health of those victims at the time of the accident and in the. But immediately preceding the accident. So that is also quite useful from our perspective when we try to find out what happens and in what circumstances, and what was that person doing and why at the time of accident.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

When you get to work on those prison records, no doubt you'll be dealing with the lack of hygiene being deadly, but the work you've done so far, it is the pursuit of hygiene that appears to be the problem. Can we talk about the date danger of performing one's ablutions?

[McDonald's]

Yes, well, under two headings, really. So the. The first one is that Tudor medical books tell you not to have a bath because it's not good for you, because the pores on your skin open up and the disease gets in. But farm laborers don't know that because they don't read medical books. So June and July, there are men jumping into rivers all over England. And you can show that it happens late afternoon and early evening. So it's the end of a hard day's work. Sometimes it says at the end of a hard day's work they were hot and they want wash and so they strip off and get in the river. In some cases they know they can't swim, so they're wading in, trying to wash themselves and then they lose their footing. Some cases they obviously know they can swim and they try and swim, but they get cramp or they get tangled up in water, weeds or whatever. So washing is a problem. The other problem is toilet functions, which obviously happen all the way through the year for all people. And there are again quite elaborate arrangements. So people will have a pit at the far end of their backyard or back garden with a wooden seat over it sometimes, but your wooden seat can break and then you're falling downwards into the cesspit. There are public conveniences sometimes on the banks of rivers, but again, people can fall out or seats can break. And also, particularly people staying in unfamiliar places like inns, there are lots of people who fall down the stairs trying to go and find where the privy is. So again, they're doing their best to make sensible provision for how to do things. But things are still capable of going wrong.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

And one is struck in those instances by the danger of daily activities. And there are others too. Doing the laundry. We've mentioned fetching water, and a lot of these things seem particularly dangerous for women.

[McDonald's]

Washing clothes and doing the washing up, crockery and things that appears to be women's work. But also crucially, fetching water is women's work. And I think that's something that historians hadn't really thought about enough in the past because fetching water is such a very everyday activity that nobody writes in their diary today, my maid servants went out to fetch three buckets of water and nobody writes in an account book, oh, we paid the maid extra because she got three buckets of water. It's so obvious. Just the equivalent of turning on the tap today is saying to your maid servant, and it nearly always is a maid servant. So only about a quarter of the people who drown fetching water are male and half of those are boys under 14. So it looks as though if you're a Tudor man, you think, I need a bucket of water. Where's the nearest woman? Can't find a woman. Well, all right, is there a boy around somewhere? And men do fetch water, but they fetch water for fairly specific work related things. So Gardeners will fetch water for watering their plants with people making barrels will fetch water to cool down the metal hoops when they're putting them onto the barrel. But that's all quite specific. Whereas everyday household water fetching appears to be women's work. And interestingly, proportionately the death rate is highest amongst girls before they reach their teens and teenage female household servants. Probably just because house. Well, maybe because housewives are stronger, because some of these young girls, they pick up the bucket of water and they haven't got the strength to carry it and they fall over into the pond. But also, housewives are doing a wider range of dangerous things in terms of cooking malting, malting barley for brewing. It turns out to be quite dangerous, probably dealing more with farm animals and household animals than younger girls are. So for young girls in particular, fetching water becomes a really, really major cause of death.

[Professor Stephen Gunn]

Yes, it's also interesting that the. Many of the Cronus reports are very explicit about this fetching water and who does it and on whose requests, because quite often they would say such and such was fetching water and she was ordered to do so by her master or her mistress, or that such and such servant was fetching water for the use in her master's or mistress house. On quite a few occasions they emphasize it very strongly that they were performing the task, the specific task of. Of getting water for the master, for the mistress.

[McDonald's]

And that's probably particularly important because drowning is a prime means of suicide in the 16th century. So the jurors want to be very clear that they're saying this was not suicide. This person had every reason to go to this river, they had a bucket with them, they were doing it because they'd been told to do it. And so there's no suspicion at all this was suicide. This really was an accident.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

It's interesting that you've mentioned that there are quite a number of children involved in that work. And we see. I mean, I say older children really, we mean primary school children involved in the workplace quite a lot. But you've also have many, many stories of very young children. So what were the dangers of the home for them? Do you get the impression they were less supervised than they are today?

[McDonald's]

Well, it's a mixture between. They're less supervised because everybody's very busy and there are just hazards inside the house and outside the house, which they wouldn't be there today. The most obvious thing inside the house is large volumes of uncovered liquid inside the house, because most households are doing some kind of home brewing. Some Households are soaking food or soaking the washing before they do it. So there are tubs of water all over the place in houses and small children fall into them. And one of the interesting things about the ways in which the reports tell the story of what happens is that they take things which presumably everybody knows children always do, and they put that into the account of what happens in a way which presumably nobody actually knows whether it happens or not. The obvious example is they'll often say this child, who might be, say, 18 months old, was looking at their reflection in the water in this tub and then they fell in. Well, presumably if people watched the child looking at their reflection in the water and they fell in, they would have gone and dragged them out again. But they're trying to explain why would a child fall head first into a tub of water? And that seems to be part of the explanation. So children, when they're very small and first mobile 2 and 3 year olds, open fires are a problem. They're falling into fires, but more often uncovered water and other liquids in the household. As soon as they get a bit older and they're going out, then actually lots of children of 4 and 5 seem to be just wandering around the village and they get run over by carts and kicked by horses. They're playing, they're just hanging out. We've got one, I think three year old who's sitting on the bank of a drainage ditch making mud pies and then falls in. And the jurors actually say making certain pies called cakes out of mud. And then from about seven, probably a lot of children are starting to work. Looks as though Tudor people think about people's ages, often in blocks of seven. So up to about seven, you're a small child, you can't really do very much. Seven to 14, you're a useful child who can work, but obviously you can't work like an adult. 14 to 21, you're an adolescent, you can do lots of work, but you're probably a bit unpredictable because your humors are all boiling up in your body in various different ways. And then 21 to 28, you're heading off towards adulthood.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

I love that summary.

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[Professor Stephen Gunn]

Yes, and sometimes we get evidence of children doing work that they were not supposed to do and even evidence of people who were around at the time of being fully aware that this is improper for them to to get involved. So I, I remember this particular accident when a boy was delivering food a meal to men working in the in the field and they encouraged him to have a go at ploughing and it ended badly as we can imagine, because he was simply too young and couldn't control the plough and the horses. So this is another type of accidents that we come across also once they get a bit older, as Stephen explained, they start wandering around the household, and sometimes they venture into workshops with lots of tools of all kinds, and quite often they get very badly injured. So I remember this particular case of a boy who went into his father's blacksmith shop and he ended up being struck by a hammer. I think it was a heavy hammer that fell on him. And he didn't die immediately, but he died from a heavy blow to the head soon after. So that was happening a lot as well.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

And do your sources give any indication of the emotional impact of children's deaths?

[McDonald's]

Occasionally. We've got a small girl in a gentry household, the house still survives in Essex, who wanders off when nobody's looking and falls into the moat. And the first person to notice it is a female household servant who's coming back to the house and sees her down in the moat and she can't speak. She just rushes in screaming because she's so distraught that she can't explain what the matter is. But she takes people outside, the father and the mother rush out, the father goes down into the moat, drags the girl out, but they can't really revive her. So things like that. You do get a sudden sense of the. Of the impact of loss of children. And like a lot of other evidence that historians have found over the years, it gives the lie again to the idea that because death rates among small children were so high, people were slightly take it or leave it about their children. People are extremely distressed when small children die. And you also see parents and sometimes brothers and sisters or neighbors who will go looking for children who've gone missing, and they'll look for them for hours or days until they find them where they've fallen into a ditch or something else has gone wrong.

[Professor Stephen Gunn]

Yes, and occasionally parents or sibling seeing children in trouble would rush to help them and they would end up drowning or falling themselves. So we've seen a few inquests with multiple victims, and it all started with a child or someone, someone young or disabled, being in trouble. And what followed was unsuccessful resc. Attempts, and then more victims followed.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

On the contrary. Do you sometimes, however, get the impression that the verdict of accidental death is covering parental violence or the mistreatment of servants?

[McDonald's]

Mistreatment of servants is the most obvious one because the jurors, they have, I suppose, quite a legal or, if you like, scientific set of rules to apply, particularly in circumstances where masters or mistresses have beaten servants and the servant subsequently dies. So is that homicide, whether the distinction between murder and manslaughter is just separating out really, in the 16th century. But is that some kind of homicide or is that an accident? And usually with the accident, there's some other thing that then happens. So the servant falls off a cart or whatever, and the jurors are deciding, well, was it the falling off the cart, was it the being beaten by the master or mistress? And so then they'll ask quite rational questions like, well, the mistress beat him on the shoulders, but the big suppurating injury he died from was on his legs. So presumably it can't have been the beating that caused that. And they also have rather, if you like, technical rules about, well, how big was the stick? So they talk about what was the circumference of the stick. So if someone is just being hit across the shoulders with a thin birch and then they die from an injury to their legs and the cart, the jurors think, well, that's pretty obvious. But they do talk about it, they take it into account. They say, well, we know that his mistress beat him because he wasn't working properly beat him across the shoulders on this particular day. So there's a bit of that. The cases which are, we can't show they're related to domestic violence, but they must be related to domestic mistreatment of some sort are runaway servants. And you'll get servants who are quite young, 8, 9, 10 year olds who run away from the houses where they're servants. And the jurors, to be honest, are pretty unsympathetic. They'll say, well, they ran away for no good reason and they wandered around in the snow for three days and then they slept under a hedge and then they dug. But then this is where we have to remember that the jurors are middle aged men who are heads of household, who may well have servants themselves, may well have children who they think are unruly and therefore they do come out rather on the side of the masters and mistresses rather than on the side of the servants.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

Yes, I must say I found that particular part of the book where we had accounts of young children, as they seemed to me, who were employed and then who had run away and died in their circumstances very, very moving. And I will ask you a bit about handling that towards the end of our conversation. So can we talk a bit about structural dangers? I mean, we've talked about Tudor houses and how you can break a hole in them if you need to get some water. We might assume that fire might be a primary cause of accidental death, but there seem to have been Plenty of other contenders.

[McDonald's]

Yeah, it's interesting. Tudor houses burn quite easily because they're timber framed, but they burn quite slowly and they're very often only one or one and a half or at most two stories. So unlike being in a very tall building now, you've got reasonable amount of time to get out. There is a fire in one village in Yorkshire where several houses burned with people inside them. And the jurors actually say, well, this is because there was such a strong wind blowing that the fire spread very, very quickly. And they obviously think, well, you have to explain why houses would burn down with people inside them, because normally they. That doesn't happen, as we know obviously from the Great Fire of London. So in fact, a bigger problem than fire is structural collapse. Because timber framed houses, if something goes wrong with the timber framing, then the big timber beams will come down on top of you and they'll come down on top of you when you're asleep, or they'll come down on top of you when you're just sitting on a chair in the house. And so the problem with timber framing is it just keeps coming up. It keeps coming up when they're trying to, to build timber framed houses or when they're trying to demolish timber framed houses, take them to pieces, or when they're trying to mend them. We've got one case where a man is trying to mend one of the beams in his house and he's got his wife helping and she's holding up the other end of the beam, pitched up on a pitchfork and the end of the beam slides off the pitchfork and comes down and hits her. So people are trying DIY type repairs to timber framed houses. We've got people with their neighbors building barns. Rather reminiscent of the barn building scene in the film Witness. Apparently lots of people working together to put the frame of a barn up. So timber framing seems to be a major problem. And also again, one the jurors understand because they use all these technical terms for the different kinds of beams that are falling over and which beam should have been joined to which other beam, but it didn't work. So it looks as though that's the kind of thing that lots of, again, middle aged men who are heads of household know about because that's how their house is built. And they have to mend their house and help their neighbors men their. As.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

One of the things they might have been putting in those barns was hay or perhaps animals. We've got a couple of different circumstances in which people might die. The Dangers of the agricultural life, the harvest particularly, and the relationship between people and animals in the 16th century. Can you give me some ideas about those?

[McDonald's]

Well, hay is problematic because people suffocate under it. You've got very large haystacks inside barns and also out in the fields and going along on carts and they'll fall on top of people. And we've got one unfortunate man who's working all day in the harvest in Yorkshire and pops into a hut for a quick sleep at about 6 o' clock because he's presumably worn out and the hay in the hut falls on top of him. So hay is problematic. The animals themselves are problematic. Bulls obviously more aggressive than cows, but cows can be quite aggressive too. Horses, very large numbers of accidents with horses, which we can go into in more detail if we want to. But two surprising things from our points of view, one of them is pigs because pigs will attack babies. And there are contemporary books that talk about the risk of that, contemporary 16th century books, even Chaucer talks about it actually. And they're just rooting around in houses looking for food and if there's a baby there, they'll, they'll bite the baby. So that's pigs, sheep. There's even one 16th century book that says don't worry, sheep aren't dangerous. Well, the sheep themselves aren't dangerous, but the fast flowing rivers into which you take the sheep to wash them before you shear them are dangerous. So again, that produces drownings and it will produce multiple drown is because people are working in teams and so people will jump in or go down the river to help the people that they're working with. And then lots of people start to get wet and waterlogged in the way that you talked about at the start.

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[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

It's interesting that the reference about pigs in my work on 16th century France, I remember coming across a reference to a half eaten baby on a dung heap and the implication in the there thinking about it was that it had been a hog. But tell me a bit more about horses then.

[McDonald's]

Horses are interesting because there are very large numbers of horse accidents. There's an Italian observer ambassador in England in the 1550s who says, well England is amazing because everybody rides horses, even the peasants ride horses. Which he, he finds rather surprising coming from his Italian context because England is a comparatively underpopulated country, two and a half, three million people spread across a large area and quite agriculturally rich compared with some parts of Europe. And so there are a lot of animals, a lot of horses around and so lots of people are kicked by horses, run over by horses, but also lots of people fall off horses. One of the keys to it is that a lot of people aren't riding their own horse, horse. So this is workmen riding the plough horse back from the fields. This is people who are driving a cart and just decide they'll ride along on the horse rather than sitting on the cart. And also you have, because the objects involved in the accident are valued, you can show that rich people are riding expensive horses and poor people are riding cheap horses. So the whole world of horse riding you can reconstruct in various different ways. They even often tell you the colour of the horse. So you can tell which the most expensive colours of horse are and which the cheaper colours.

[Professor Stephen Gunn]

Yes, and often we also have this additional information about whether the horse was properly trained to do horse riding on it and what was its health condition at the time of the accident. So obviously lame horses were more likely to fall over and that would lead to an accident, possible injury and death. So so clearly horses at the type of horse that was being used at the time of accident was very important and something that they considered very relevant to include in coroner's report.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

Animals feature quite a lot also in people's leisure time. What are the dangerous activities that people are using to entertain themselves?

[McDonald's]

Well, there's a certain amount of horse racing, but more lethal than that is bear baiting because the bears get loose sometimes and go and attack people. There's a boy, nobody seems to know his name, so he may have come in from the countryside who's killed near the marketplace in Carlisle when a bear gets loose. Also bear baiting people I think are gambling on how well their fighting dog will do against the bear compared with other people's fighting dogs. So you have dog owners who are getting, getting in too close to the bear to try to spur their dog on to attack the bear more enthusiastically, more violently. So bears are in some cases sort of taking out the middleman by not attacking the dog but attacking the dog's owner and in other cases just getting loose and going, attacking people. And there's one poor woman who's pulled out of her house in Hereford by a bear that just breaks into the house, roaming loose through the streets of Hereford. So bear baiting is to us, it's the most obviously barbaric of the Tudors animal based pastimes. But it is one where the bears take a certain toll of the, of the human population as well.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

The bears fight back. And we also have instances where actually it's birds that prove more dangerous than mammals, which was very surprising to me.

[McDonald's]

Yes, again, the birds aren't attacking people directly. It's just as I suppose the parallel would be fishing, where a lot of people are fishing and falling into the water while fishing or getting their nets tangled up and then the net being tangled up pulls them into the water. Or fish traps. Lots of mills have wicker fish traps attached to them. But then lifting out a full fish trap or lowering an empty fish trap back into the water, you can easily lose your balance and fall into the water. Well, the equivalent with birds. Part of the problem is guns, because guns get more popular as the 16th century goes on. For most of the 16th century, fewer than one in a hundred accidental deaths involve guns. By the 1580s and 1590s it's up to about one in 50. Guns are widely used for shooting birds because you can shoot a bird with a crossbow, but you have to hit the bird very accurately with your one crossbow bolt. Whereas if you fire pellets, so hail shot shot that breaks up into lots of little pieces at a bird, you've got a lot more chance of actually hitting the bird and also not completely destroying the bird, which if you want to eat the bird, you don't want to do, which if you just fired a full scout, stale musket ball or arquebus ball at the bird, then you wouldn't have much bird left. So hunting is a reason people are wandering around the countryside with guns and for example, passing them to each other over a hedge. Such that the trigger on the gun gets snagged on the hedge and shoots the person who's passing it across. So all sorts of things can go wrong. If you go hunting for birds with a gun. The other thing that people are doing a lot, because young rooks in particular, but also other kinds of crow are aggressive. Great delicacy. People are climbing up trees to take them out of the nest. But then of course they're climbing up the tree so they can fall out of the tree. So we're back to things can go wrong when you climb trees, as they do of course, with picking fruit. So another of those firearms related statistics is that more people get killed picking fruit than with firearms.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

And a very common way of dying. We've talked about this before, Steve, and yet it's one of the facts about Tudor England from your research that sticks with me most of all. Or everybody needed a knife as part of their everyday life and they tend to wear them at times when you think maybe it would have been a good idea to take them off.

[McDonald's]

Yes. Well, people wear knives and you can show from where the injuries come when they have an accident with a knife that they're nearly always wearing them hanging at their belt because if people fall over, it stabs them in the thigh or it stabs them in the belly. So it appears to be hung usually in the belt. There you have people who have their knife tucked into their sleeve or tucked into the their hose or all sorts of places. People have knives on them because they need them to cut up their food. And knives are quite cheap. They seem to be fairly accessible. So even children will quite often have knives. What they don't do is take them off if they're playing football or wrestling. And to begin with, again, you think, well, how foolish. Well, surely they should have taken them off. But then when you think football doesn't really have a pitch, they're just playing across a series of fields, sometimes even from one village to the next between two churches. Searches. So where's the obvious place where you would put your knife? And almost everybody's knife looks the same. So how if you went back to it, would you know it was your knife? And if somebody else picks up your knife and you say that's my knife, might he get a bit upset about it and start waving the knife at you? And lots of things can go wrong if people are waving knives at each other. So again, it's one of these things where you begin to think, well, what on earth are they doing? But actually then you think well, actually, maybe that's the rational thing to do in the circumstances. You keep your knife on you rather hope you don't fall over onto it if somebody tackles you playing football and you hit the ground.

[Professor Stephen Gunn]

Yes, they would even wear knives to bed. I would call this one accident of someone who was already asleep. And he apparently, according to the coroner's report, he rolled over during his sleep and he impaled himself onto his knife. All right, so this is how attached they were to the knife. And I think that also part of the problem was that. But nowadays our instinct would be that if we have to carry a knife around, we would put it some sort of protective cover in a sheath. And what they were doing a lot, apparently was simply stacking the knife through their belt, or they would just carry it around holding it in their hands with a naked blade, which obviously increases the likelihood of something potentially dangerous happen. So it's those cultural practices and cultural differences between the 16th century and what we'll do nowadays that also play the role here.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

I mean, this is some of the examples of the more unusual things that you have learned from the coroner's evidence. I was struck also by, for example, the conclusions about mobility. What are the things that you have learned that you thought you couldn't have imagined learning from this evidence?

[McDonald's]

Well, the really large scale one is the water fetching thing. The mobility one is interesting because again, again, books will give you very different impressions of how much women are out and about in 16th century society. Some people think, oh, women stay at home and keep quiet most of the time. Some people say, oh, women are doing all sorts of different things. In practice, women are traveling almost as much as men, although often backwards and forwards to market. They're often traveling by themselves. They're traveling in really quite alarming weather. There's a terrible snowstorm in, in winter 1542, on the borders between England and Wales, Herefordshire and Shropshire. And numbers of women walking home from market, from towns to villages a few miles away, are just buried in the snow. And similarly, you have numbers of women who are either shopping or selling at market all day drinking alcohol slowly, because drinking alcohol is safer than drinking water because it kills the germs. But just slightly miscalculating, at least as the jurors see it. And therefore, or they have had a bit too much to drink by the time they try and walk several miles home and they get very tired and they stop for a sleep under a hedge. And then perhaps because they've got alcohol in the system, they lose heat rapidly and die of exposure. And you have quite young girls being sent to do errands, Girls being sent with a horse to go and pay some money to somebody in the town and come back again. So quite a lot of responsibility seems to be not only on housewives, but even on quite young women. Women. And that, I think, is one of the surprises. The milling stuff actually is a major surprise as well, because I've not. Although people have looked at the reputation of millers in the 16th century, where they do have a reputation for being profiteers. And the people talk about the miller's golden thumb, where he measures things in a way that always is to his advantage. So you never get quite as much flour back as you were expecting when you take your grain to the miller for milling. The fact that that milling is actually really quite dangerous maybe puts that into perspective. This is dangerous work. And you think you ought to be well paid for it if you're a miller.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

If we compare with accidental death today, how similar were the fates of Those in the 16th century and how our chances of survival are they better or similar? When it comes to accidents, it's very.

[McDonald's]

Very hard to do proper statistics on this stuff. Partly because there are things which do get counted as accidents by them. Like two people are having a fight and they didn't mean to kill each other. So that's an accident. If one person's knife goes into the other, which wouldn't be counted as an accident. Now there are things that we count as accidents, like people tripping on curbs and falling over, which probably people don't really notice or think about in the same way in the 16th century century. That said, sometimes the statistics are very similar in a way that mirrors the fact that our bodies are similar to theirs. So they will be seriously injured and die quite fast if they get a major head injury in the same way as we will be seriously injured and die quite fast if we get a major hedge injury. Injuries in the legs today kill a lot more people than injuries in the arms because of the big blood vessels in the upper part of the leg. Well, that's also true. True in the 16th century. So some of these basic physical things are the same. And then some of the things just in terms of people's physical interaction with the environment are quite similar. So a lot of us die in falls, A lot of them died in falls. But people now who die in falls are often older people falling downstairs or falling in the street in those circumstances. Quite often they were elderly people, but they were falling out of fruit Trees while picking fruit. Or our single oldest victim is said by the jurors to be 106 years old and he was a Thatcher who was up on top of a house trying to thatch it and just fell off the roof of the house. So there are similar sorts of things that happen to people, but just in very different circumstances.

[Professor Stephen Gunn]

If you think about it nowadays, one of the major causes of accidental death is car accidents or traffic accidents. And if you look at those 16th century statistics, a lot of those people would die in similar circumstances. Obviously they were not run over by a motor vehicle, but they would be run over by a vehicle that was pulled by horses or oxen, or they would die as a result of a crash between two cars, or they would fall off a fast moving horse. So all those could be classified as traffic accidents, if you think about it.

[McDonald's]

Yeah. And interestingly, the proportions are not that different from what they are now. So the proportion of people driving the cart and people in the cart who get killed is roughly similar to the proportion of people driving and in motor vehicles who get killed. Now, the proportion of pedestrian bystanders is similar. The proportion of children killed is much higher in the 16th century, but there are a lot more children around in the 16th century now, the proportion of people on bicycles is high, but the equivalent then is people who are riding horses trying to get past carts or being forced off bridges when a cart's trying to come over the bridge. Fewer people on horses die than people on cycles now, but you can sort of match things up a bit. Bit.

[Professor Stephen Gunn]

It's also cases like parts of vehicles becoming detached from the vehicle while it's in movement and then hitting bystanders. So this apparently happens quite a lot in towns, especially nowadays. And this was also happening quite Frequently in the 16th century, the wheels becoming detached from the cart and hitting someone who was sitting in front of their house. The street shafts that were used to hold whatever the cart was carrying at the time would become detached, would fall off and would hit someone who was passing by or who was standing by the road. There are lots of obvious similarities and.

[McDonald's]

It'S the sort of thing where again, you can compare what happens in the accidents with what 16th century advice books say. There is a very useful 16th century advice book on how to drive your cart which says things like. Like be careful going uphill, but be even more careful going downhill. And a lot more accidents happen going downhill because they've got no brakes than going uphill. It says things like, watch out for small children running in the road, like all advice books. It's not perfect, because what it doesn't say is, don't fall asleep when you're driving. But quite a lot of people fall asleep while driving in the front of a car and just fall off the front of the cart. So, again, you can never write the perfect book of advice.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

Finally, then, in looking, looking at these cases and writing about them in this wonderful book, you are bringing to our attention the lives of many people we would otherwise know nothing about. But all we know of most of these people is how they died. And this is sobering, difficult, sometimes upsetting material to work with and to write about too, I imagine. Getting the right tone. How did you manage both these challenges?

[McDonald's]

Well, I think readers will have to judge whether we got it right. What we've tried to do is treat people in the past with the respect that they deserve. And I think the thing that we've taken comfort from is the sense that if we weren't trying to write about these people, then nobody would be thinking about them at all. So often very tragic things happen to these people, but very tragic things happen to people at Henry VIII and Elizabeth's court. And we talk a lot about those. We don't talk very much about very tragic things that happen to very ordinary people, but in a sense, they're just as worthy of taking seriously as things that happen to famous people. And if we've done it right, that's what we've tried to do.

[Professor Stephen Gunn]

Yeah, we had quite a few discussions about this, how to make sure that we present this material in such a way that it's not too sensational and that we show a degree of respect for those people who, after all, died in tragic circumstances, which must have been an enormous show for their families and friends. So we have given it much thought, I must say.

[McDonald's]

But then occasionally there are things where you just think, what do they think they were doing? So well, on the one hand you think, what do they think they were doing? But then on the other hand you think, well, I suppose I've done things like that. So there's a man who thinks, actually, actually, rather than bother with all the levers and stuff, it's just much easier to shut the gate on the mill stream, on the water mill, just by jumping on it. And the jurors say, well, he'd done it a number of times and it worked fine. And of course, eventually he jumps on the gate and slips off. But we've all taken shortcuts like that or worked out our own way of doing things. Every time I climb on a chair to get a book off the shelf. I think, maybe I shouldn't be doing this. But then you think, oh, well, maybe life's too short to spend the whole time worrying. Worrying about.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

Yes, of course. I suppose that's the other effect of writing about accidents. You become very aware of all the dangers in the world around you. Well, thank you so much for this wonderful tour through some of the ways in which people could die and the ways in which people could live in Tudor England. And there's so many more examples to read about in your work. Thank you for the time you give me today.

[McDonald's]

Thank you very much.

[Professor Stephen Gunn]

Thank you.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

Thanks for listening to not just the Tudors and to my researcher, Alice Smith and my producer, Rob Weinberg. And do join me, Professor Susannah Lipscomb next time for another episode of Not Just the Tudors from History. Hit.

[Unknown]

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[Hannah]

Hi guys, it's Hannah from Giggly Squad with some around the corner. I wanted to tell you guys how I'm staying comf comfy and stylish. Lululemon is my secret weapon. There are plenty of copycats out there, but nothing compares to the Lululemon fabrics and fit. I've literally had my pair of Lululemon leggings since college and I'm out of college. I know I don't look it, but I am. The quality is next level. I especially love the Lululemon Align collection. It's made with this weightless, buttery, soft nulu fabric that feels like next to nothing. It's so soft. Whether you're in align pants, shorts, a bra, tank, skirt, a dress, you get non stop flexibility in every direction so you can stretch the summer limits. Align even wicks, sweat and as a sweaty girl, I love this. You know it's going to be my best friend when I play tennis this summer. Shop the Align collection [e-mail] or your nearest Lululemon store.