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- [00:01]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Want to walk the halls of Anne Boleyn's childhood home? Or explore the castles that made up Henry VIII's English stronghold? With a subscription to History Hit, you can dive into our Tudor past alongside the world's leading historians and archaeologists. You'll also unlock hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a brand new release every single week covering everything from the ancient world to to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com subscribe.
- [00:35]
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- [01:06]
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- [01:35]
Martha Stewart
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- [02:15]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Hello, I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb and welcome to Not Just the T From History Hit, 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. Hello, We've got something a bit different for this episode of Not Just the Tudors because the subjects we're going to explore have all been suggested by you. You'll know that at the end of each episode. I invite you to tell me if there's any subject you'd like me to cover on the podcast, and we've had hundreds of ideas from all over the world for episodes, and since Not Just the tudors started in April 2021. So as we approach our 5th birthday and 500th episode early next year, I can hardly believe it, I thought we could take this opportunity to answer some of your pressing Tudor questions. Thanks to all of you for sending in your ideas and queries. The variety of subjects we're going to cover today is quite, quite wide ranging. We'll be thinking about everything from atheism to cod pieces. Yes, you heard me right. And I'll be calling up a few wonderful historian friends of the podcast to help me answer your questions. Okay, let's jump in with our first question, which comes from a Not Just the Tutors listener in Australia. Hello Dr. Susannah, this is Sharon Howes.
- [04:14]
Listener or Interviewee (various, including Sharon Howes, Christina Stewart, Venka, Graham, Amy Brony, Paul, Alex, Maria Hayward)
From Brisbane in Australia.
- [04:16]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
I've been listening to your podcast for some time and I absolutely love it. I've often heard that Victorian historians have had a lot of influence over what we know about the past, and that their values blemish the history they wrote or rewrote to reflect their own values. Rather than write history factually, it seems that historians today are going back to original sources and making their own minds up rather than relying on what previous historians wrote.
- [04:45]
Listener or Interviewee (various, including Sharon Howes, Christina Stewart, Venka, Graham, Amy Brony, Paul, Alex, Maria Hayward)
Is that the case? And what are some of the things.
- [04:48]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
That we always believe were true about.
- [04:49]
Listener or Interviewee (various, including Sharon Howes, Christina Stewart, Venka, Graham, Amy Brony, Paul, Alex, Maria Hayward)
The Tudors which were actually made up by the Victorians?
- [04:54]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Thank you, Sharon. This is such a great question. So what did the Victorians get wrong about the tutors? Well, you are absolutely right in the way that historians now are starting to look back to the original sources. And in terms of thinking about this, first of all, I guess I want to acknowledge how fundamental the scholarship of Victorian historians has been to our understanding of the Tudors and is still so in the 19th century, the letters, the state papers, the ambassador accounts, all sort of documents that related to the running of the country and related to the kings and queens of Tudor England, were calendared, which is to say that they were located across the archives of Europe. They were then translated, transcribed, summarized into kind of abstract version, put in chronological order, and then those were printed. So the letters and papers of the reign of Henry VIII, foreign and domestic, run to 21 volumes, and quite a few of those volumes have multiple volumes within that. So I don't know, it's maybe 30 odd massive books full of these calendared, summaried versions of the state Papers. I have a particular favorite among these Scholars. It's a man called Gustav Bergenroth. He has the most amazing life story. He narrowly escaped being cut down by the saber of a dragoon guard as he fought for revolution on the barricades of Berlin in 1848. He then followed the gold rush to California in the 1850s, but finding no luck, became a fur trader and a virtual outlaw. And then he kind of reforms himself and becomes a scholar. He was the seventh scholar in the world to enter the archives in Simancas in Spain, and he was sieving through some 100,000 bundles of papers in Spanish, Latin, French, occasionally German or Dutch, deciphering the handwriting, breaking ciphers in order to find documents that related to the history of Tudor England. And this meant living in Symancus. There was no hotel. He had to beg for accommodation from the poor peasants who were living in fairly wretched hovels. You know, there are no panes of glass in the windows, he writes. Bitter blasts, glaring sunlight and pelting rain easily find admittance. So in the summer, it was so hot that, you know, the place was scorched. In the winter, it got so cold in the archives, where they weren't allowed to burn fires, that his ink congealed. That's in 1860-61. And he's there for years and years. In the end, he dies of typhus in 1869, having caught typhus in Symancus. But his work is to prepare the first two volumes, the calendars of state papers relating to Spain that were published in 1863 and 1866. But the key thing to note is that even heroes like Bergenroth, when they're selecting documents, they had to decide what was important enough to make it into the record. So they had to choose which phrases, which extracts to put in the summary, which spin to put on the story it told. So it's not that the Victorians weren't factual, but to summarize means to choose. So the abstracts in the calendars are not a faithful transcription of every word they found. They're also turned into the third person, which makes a difference. And what the Victorians found or thought worthy of interest depended on. On what they were looking for. The questions that we ask of the archives matter. You know, we find that the questions 19th century men thought worth asking about 16th century women might not necessarily be all that interest us. Glynn Parry discovered, for documents relating to Elizabeth I, that those that mentioned magic and the occult and how that was used as a political weapon are not included in the relevant calendar because it was considered superstition and trivial in the 19th century. So the printed calendars are the essential starting point for any work on the 16th century, but they shouldn't be the terminus. Again and again, at crucial moments, the original manuscripts offer a different version of events to that which we receive through the calendars. And in terms of what the Victorians thought or popularized as ideas about the past, I'd say that we get a lot of ideas about women, particularly fitting into the sort of dual categories of either the innocent Virgin Mary type or the Heragos. So Catherine of Aragon's reputation as a woman of piety, much sinned against, but not having any kind of political spine really comes from the Victorians. And the judgments on Catherine Howard as being someone who was promiscuous and. And deserved everything she got that came from the Victorians. And of course, if you think about the kind of paintings that are being Produced in the 19th century, there's an image of Lady Jane Grey being executed that is completely inaccurate in terms of its depiction. But painted at the time by people like Delaroche, these images formed ideas about how we see the past. And I think that we're still throwing off a lot of the impositions and the kind of conceptions that the Victorians had put on the Tudors.
- [10:15]
Listener or Interviewee (various, including Sharon Howes, Christina Stewart, Venka, Graham, Amy Brony, Paul, Alex, Maria Hayward)
Right.
- [10:15]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Well, for our next question, we're going to the other side of the planet from Australia to a listener in Canada. Hi, Susanna.
- [10:23]
Listener or Interviewee (various, including Sharon Howes, Christina Stewart, Venka, Graham, Amy Brony, Paul, Alex, Maria Hayward)
This is Christina Stewart. I listen from Toronto, Ontario, in Canada, and I really love your podcast. Such a great variety of subjects, and I think it's wonderful. I learn things about subjects I haven't even thought about or considered. Anyway, I've been wondering if Henry VIII's son, Edward VI, was ever betrothed to someone or if this was something Henry was working on at the time of his death. I understand at the time, marriages were mostly done for political alliances and usually planned or in motion from a very early age. I look forward to hearing your answer. Thank you very much.
- [11:00]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Thank you, Christina. Thank you for your very kind words. Well, you're absolutely right. Marriages for royals were, generally speaking, for political, dynastic purposes. That's where Henry VIII went wrong. Cause he wanted to marry for love. But when it came to his son, he was thinking about having Edward marry for a sort of political advantage. So Edward was betrothed, first of all to Mary Queen of Scots in 1543. So at the time, Edward was six. Mary would have been seven months old. And the marriage treaty was signed. And the intention here was to un England and Scotland. But after about six months, the Scots rejected the plan and instead Mary went to France, was engaged to and later married the dauphin Francois instead. And then in 1551, Edward was engaged to Elizabeth de Valois. So she was the sister of Francois, who Mary was engaged to. She was the daughter of the French king, Henry ii. And then finally, there's some speculation that Edward may have considered marrying his cousin, Lady Jane Grey, in the months before his death, but she married Guildford Dudley instead. So Edward certainly was being considered and certainly was engaged at various points to various people. But normally speaking, 16 was the age at which a marriage would happen. The age of consent for boys was 14. But they thought it was dangerous for a boy to marry too young because they thought too much sexual activity at a young age could kill. And indeed, Catherine of Aragon's brother Juan had died and they thought that was the reason. So the actual marriages wouldn't have probably happened until he was 16. And of course he dies before he gets to that point. Okay, we're off to the Netherlands now for our next listener question.
- [12:58]
Listener or Interviewee (various, including Sharon Howes, Christina Stewart, Venka, Graham, Amy Brony, Paul, Alex, Maria Hayward)
Hi, Susanna, my name is Venka and I'm a communication specialist in the Netherlands.
- [13:04]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
I always wondered, how did the average person in Tudor times know what religion or faith they had to follow? How were people informed about which were the right and wrong things to believe? These days we have many channels to inform people. But how did this work back then?
- [13:22]
Listener or Interviewee (various, including Sharon Howes, Christina Stewart, Venka, Graham, Amy Brony, Paul, Alex, Maria Hayward)
What channels of communication were used?
- [13:25]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Thank you so much for clarifying this.
- [13:27]
Listener or Interviewee (various, including Sharon Howes, Christina Stewart, Venka, Graham, Amy Brony, Paul, Alex, Maria Hayward)
Communication and PR mystery for me.
- [13:31]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Thank you, Anka. Well, I'm going to call upon someone who would definitely be able to give us some insight into this question. Professor Alec Ryrie. He's been my guest before to talk about the dissolution of the monasteries and also what Catholics and Protestants believed. So what do you make of it, Alec?
- [13:47]
Professor Alec Ryrie
I love this question because it's so important. And for all of us, having grown up in the era of radio and TV and print, if not of digital communication, it's not intuitively obvious how difficult this kind of communication was, how hard any kind of pre modern governments found it to get basic information, even down to who happens to be king at the moment, out to their population. And I think it's one of the reasons why the first thing that any of the Tudor regimes do when they come to power is try to take control of the liturgy, because it's the closest thing that the Tudor governments have to a mass broadcast technology. When Edward VI government introduces the Book of Common Prayer, this is prescribing what the clergy are going to stand up in the pulpit in 9,000 parish churches across the country and say. And the use of the clergy as the most important means of transmission of information goes back a lot further than that. You see this repeatedly in Henry VIII's reign. Again, the very first thing that usually happens in a time of crisis is a general suspension of preaching licenses goes out. That's the equivalent of the moment during a military coup when suddenly the TV news stops broadcasting and they start playing recorded classical music instead. That tells you that something is going on. You have to wait until those in charge are organized enough to tell you what it is, and then usually an order will go out to the clergy to read a proclamation. So something like the act of Six Articles, this anti heresy statute passed by Henry VIII in 1539, it says in the text of the act that it is required to be read from the pulpit of every parish church four times a year. So that kind of, as I say, broadcast technology is built into it. The single most dramatic way of doing this, of really grabbing the population by the scruff of their neck and ensuring that they can't not pay attention to this, is the innovation that Henry VIII comes up with during the divorce crisis, which is to require an oath to impose, on pain of treason, that every adult male should be swearing the Oath of Succession and indeed the Oath of Supremacy can be imposed as well. And the extent to which that then becomes a device which some of his oppone are picking up and you start to see rebels swearing these oaths to bind themselves in. So that's a strikingly new technique that's being drawn on to get people involved. Beyond that, you're reduced to things like reading proclamations in marketplaces, which has a pretty poor cut through in terms of people really finding out what's going on, let alone the rationale behind it. Or you're down to faces on coins. The other technique that the later Tudor regimes develop, which goes beyond what you can do with the liturgy, is the homilies, these full text sermons which are required to be read out from every pulpit, laying down the detailed ruling of what people are supposed to be thinking. What's really hard for us to get a handle on though, is how these various broadcasts are received, to what extent people listen to them and what they make of them when they land. It's a cliche of modern government that people get into power and start trying to pull the levers and they realize they're not connected to anything. That is very difficult to actually affect direct change. Spare a moment's thought for anybody trying to govern Tudor England, where they can send these messages out into the void and they have no more way truly of knowing whether they landed than we do.
- [17:32]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
It's so interesting because it completely changes our view of the power of the Tudor state when you think about the means of communication and also our view of them ensuring that everyone attended church, because one basic reason for making them do that is the only way anyone's going to learn anything they want them to know.
- [17:52]
Professor Alec Ryrie
This business of regulation of information, of course, as in our own times, it's not just about ensuring that the right information is disseminated, but it's about controlling disinformation and misinformation. The problem of rumor is a really persistent one throughout the medieval and the early modern period. But political rumors, or rumors with political dimensions to them can sweep across a county or wider. And if you want proof of just how serious the problems of misinformation can be, look no further than the careers of the pretenders in Henry VII's reign. These two individuals who on the basis of misinformation of one kind or another, end up triggering in the first case a short lived but potentially lethal threat to Henry VII's reign. And in the other, this dragging on foreign policy crisis that lasts for upwards of five years, simply based on their inability to demonstrate decisively that these people are not who they claim to be.
- [18:55]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And that question about the oath Henry VIII making the male population swear to his succession, it's an innovation. Is it used again?
- [19:05]
Professor Alec Ryrie
It's used repeatedly, but never on the same scale. What's really distinctive about the 1534 effort is there really does seem to have been a serious attempt to get the entire adult male population to swear the Oath of Succession. There's a second oath, the Oath of Supremacy, which is the legislation allows it to be administered to anybody, but in practice it's only administered to clergy, magistrates or anybody who has raised suspicion in some way. Whereas the Oath of Succession, the oath to recognize Anne Boleyn as queen and her children as the legitimate heirs, really is imposed, at least as a serious attempt to have it imposed on the whole country. There's never a moment when the succession looks quite so, well, frankly, implausible as it does in that moment. Again, apart from the short lived Jean Grey crisis, you could imagine that had she succeeded in securing the throne, she might well have felt the need to impose something of the same sort of. But oaths of that kind then become a regular part of the Judah state's toolkit, of which maybe the most famous form of that is the Oath of Allegiance that's imposed on Catholics at the beginning of James I's. Right.
- [20:28]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
While I've got you on the line, Alec, I've got another question which is very much in your domain.
- [20:33]
Listener or Interviewee (various, including Sharon Howes, Christina Stewart, Venka, Graham, Amy Brony, Paul, Alex, Maria Hayward)
Hi, Susanna, this is grown from Tetbury in Gloucestershire. I've always wondered about atheists in the Tudor period. Were there non believers and how did they survive at a time when religion was so crucial?
- [20:45]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
I'd love to know.
- [20:46]
Listener or Interviewee (various, including Sharon Howes, Christina Stewart, Venka, Graham, Amy Brony, Paul, Alex, Maria Hayward)
Thanks very much.
- [20:48]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Thank you, Graham, for the question. Alec, so what do you make of this? Were there atheists in the 16th century? Was it conceptually possible? How did they survive this period of religious turbulence?
- [20:57]
Professor Alec Ryrie
Okay, the short answer is yes, there were, and they survived mostly by keeping their heads down. The longer answer is it does depend what you mean by atheists. What you don't find in this period is people with a sophisticated thought through philosophical, consistent alternative to Christian belief. There are the pieces of that out there, if you were the kind of idiosyncratic Epicurean Renaissance philosopher who is interested in looking for them. But there's very little evidence of anybody holding to that sort of thing. What you have is much more that kind of unsophisticated, more emotionally led, oh, it's all nonsense. Rejection of the churches as means of social control, refusing to be bossed around, or the ones who are desperately trying to struggle to hold onto their faith, but in the wake of a bereavement or an illness or something like that, are struggling to persuade themselves that death is not final. It does look awfully much as if dead people really are dead. And in the same way, the way that that sort of deep seated skepticism then gets weaponized by the Reformation itself, one of the traditional forms of that kind of skepticism, and you see it going right back through the Middle Ages and it's being called unbelief, not atheism, because the word hasn't been coined yet, is refusing to believe in the miracle of transubstantiation. So that still looks like bread and wine to me. And then of course, along come the Protestants in the Reformation and saying that's exactly right, you shouldn't believe in this nonsense that the papists are preaching. You instead you should believe in the Bible. And then you find Catholics in response saying, ah, these Protestants are claiming that the Bible has all this authority, but how do they know if they don't have a church to teach them? And so I think one of the dynamics of the Reformation period is that both sides are taking lumps out of each other's faith in a way that can end up empowering a wider skepticism. So that sort of instinctive unbelief has been out there in the population for a long time. I think really it's a perpetual feature of medieval life. But there's something about the religious conflicts of that period which create bigger cracks that it's possible for people to fall between.
- [23:28]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
One last question on this then. Can it be hard to identify people who were unbelievers? Because the word atheist was often used as an insult.
- [23:42]
Professor Alec Ryrie
It is. The word atheist is a 16th century coinage and when you trace back its origins and indeed the way it's being used, it doesn't mean quite what we mean by it nowadays. An atheist is somebody who claims to believe that there is no God. It's a philosophical, it's almost a metaphysical position. Whereas the word atheist in this period means something more like what we might mean by a term like godless or impious, someone who lives as if there were no God, regardless of what they may or may not claim to believe. This is the sort of person who at the time would often be called a practical atheist, which is much more in keeping with the way that a word like atheoi was used in the ancient world. It's a perfectly sensible way for them to use that term in our period. But the shift towards the more strictly defined unbelief or atheism that we now identify with it is something that happens relatively slowly through the 17th into the 18th century. Spinoza in the 60s, 60s and 70s is often seen as the person who first makes that philosophically possible. So there is this long standing tradition that says that atheism in the Tudor period is simply a conceptual impossibility. And that's true. But it's only true if you define atheism in a very limited and frankly anachronistic way.
- [25:12]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Well, thank you, that's fascinating. Thank you for your answers to our questions. Questions.
- [25:16]
Professor Alec Ryrie
Professor Alec Ryrie, Love to be with you again.
- [25:24]
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- [25:54]
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- [25:59]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
That's X E R O.
- [26:02]
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- [26:22]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Conditions apply.
- [26:24]
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- [26:54]
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- [27:38]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Now our next question comes from a listener in the United States.
- [27:42]
Michelle (Listener from Florida)
Hello Professor Lipscomb, My name is Michelle from Florida in the United States. I would be really interested to know more about Henry Fitzroy, the illegitimate son of Henry viii. He has often been mentioned in passing on not just the Tudors, but I've never really heard anyone talk about him and his short life and how, true or not, the rumor was that Henry was looking to make him his heir. He also seems to have captured the fancy of more than one novelist, with one Tanya Hough, mentioning something about unusual circumstances surrounding his death and burial that inspired her to cast him as a vampire in her books. I don't recall that she ever went into much detail, however, so I'd be curious to know if there really was anything unusual about it. Inexplicably. Thank you for your consideration.
- [28:27]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Thank you for the question, Michelle. I did not know that Henry Fitzroy had been portrayed as a vampire. You've made my day. Okay, so Henry Fitzroy was born to Henry VIII's mistress, Elizabeth Bessie Blount, in June 1519, and he was called Henry Fitzroy to announce his parentage. Fitzroy means son of the King, and he was openly acknowledged by Henry. We can see that in the name Thomas Wolsey was the godfather at his christening. And then the big thing is in 1525, when the boy is six years old, he was a noble, so he was made Earl of Nottingham and then Duke of Richmond and Somerset. There were only two other dukes in England at the time. And the fact that Richmond is given this double dukedom makes him the highest ranking peer in the country. And the addition of Somerset is also really important because it suggests perhaps that Henry was smoothing the path towards legitimating his son. Because John Beaufort was a royal bastard, technical term here, illegitimate child who had been legitimated in the 14th century and he had been the Earl of Somerset. And what's interesting is that being illegitimate didn't mean that he lived remotely apart from the king. His biographer, Beverly A. Murphy, has argued that a letter from a. A royal nurse implies that Richmond was part of the royal nursery. And we certainly know that he was often at court after 1530. Observers commented on the closeness of the relationship between the father and the son. So in 1530, the French ambassador, Jean Jacim, Senor de Voix, remarked on Richmond's good looks and how fond the king was of his son. And he describes him like this. He says, a most handsome, urbane and learned young man, very dear to the king on account of his figure, discretion and good manners. He's certainly a wonderful lad for his age. The arrangements that were made for him befitted a king's son. So he was married early to the daughter of one of the highest ranking peers, the Duke of Norfolk, amberlyn's uncle. In 1532, Henry Fitzroy is presented to the King of France, and he's also deployed on occasion to represent the king. So he plays host at a feast in November 1534, when there's a visiting French admiral, he attends. More gruesomely in 1535, the execution of the three Carthusian monks who refused to swear the oath accepting the succession by the king's marriage to Anne Boleyn. And he is said to have resembled the king greatly. They had the same red hair, which reminded onlookers of his parentage. A Venetian ambassador in 1531 says, so much, does he resemble his father? So the question you also asked, though, was about whether he was going to be legitimized. And this is a bit complicated. So May 1536, Elizabeth, daughter to Henry by Anne Boleyn, of course, was bastardized. And in June, just at the time that Thomas Cromwell was assuring Eustace Chapuys that Henry was thinking of making Mary his heir. Henry VIII insisted that Mary submit to swearing an oath that acknowledged Henry as Supreme Head in Earth under Christ of the Church of England, and that the marriage between Henry and Mary's mother, Catherine, had been incestuous and unlawful. So, in other words, Mary is required to declare her own bastardy. The fact that Henry presses for this at this point, when he hasn't done so for the previous years, partly relates to his strength of conviction about his rightful position as Supreme Head. Partly, perhaps, it's that when Catherine of Aragon was alive, he didn't dare push her daughter into swearing this. But the other, and not mutually exclusive, possibility is that Henry had started to reconsider his options. So Chapuy reported in early June that Robert Radcliffe, Earl of Sussex, stated, quote the other day in the Privy Chamber in the King's presence. That is, considering the Princess was a bastard as well as the Duke of Richmond, it was advisable to prefer the male to the female for the succession to the Crown. So if you've got three children and they're all illegitimate, then obviously you're going to prefer the boy. And Chapuys certainly interpreted the timing of Henry's insistence on Mary's oath as evidence that Henry was gearing up to legitimate Richmond. But it's hard to know for certain because of the timing. In early July of 1536, Richmond fell ill and he died on the 23rd of July. And earlier in July, Parliament had passed an act which for the first time did not confine the succession to the legitimate line, but allowed Henry to designate whomever he liked as his successor. The act had not named a successor, it says, for fear if such persons should be so named, they might happen to take great heart and courage and by presumption fall into in obedience and rebellion, which speaks to Henry's growing fear of betrayal. But it's possible that this new act was passed deliberately to open up the succession and with it the possibility that Richmond could one day inherit the throne. But we can't be more certain than that. We've talked on, not just the Tudors before, about Thomas More and the progressive humanist education he provided for his daughters. So I think this next question is going to be a great one to get our teeth into.
- [33:57]
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Hello, my name is Alex and I'm listening to Notches to Tutors in Burlington, Canada. As a female educator, I'm always interested in learning more about what education for women looked like at different periods in history. Something that's always stood out to me is that some of Henry VIII's wives were described as exceptionally or even unusually well educated for the age, while others were not. I'd be interested to know what caused this difference and whether other countries or specific families had more progressive views on education for women. Thank you.
- [34:30]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Thank you, Alex. Yes, it's true. So some of Henry's wives were unusually well educated, chief amongst them, Catherine of Aragon. That was a decision that was made by her mother, Isabelle of Castile. Isabel, who arguably usurped the throne of Castile, had learnt Latin in a year as an adult, and she was determined that her children, four of whom were girls, would be learned. This was practical as much as anything else, because in Castile, women could inherit the throne, so one of them might one day be her heir. All of them would be married to kings and princes of Europe. So Isabelle was equipping them. She wanted them never to be at a disadvantage. And she was surrounded in her court by learned women and men, many of whom were humanists. So Catherine learnt Latin and she read Roman moralists like Seneca and Cicero. She read the Roman historian Sallust, Greeks like Aristotle and translation Church fathers like Jerome and Augustine, the medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas and other authors like Boethius, Thomas a Kempis, Christine de Pisan and Dante. She and Prince Arthur exchanged letters in Latin. But her education was unusual. She started learning French from her sister in law, Marguerite of Austria, because her future mother in law, Elizabeth of York, advised Isabel that the ladies of England do not understand Latin and much less Spanish. Amberlynn was also well educated, not to the extent that Catherine was, but she was well educated because her father was a humanist. So, you know, we've talked about it lots on the podcast before, but a humanist at this time meant someone who looked to classical texts like those of the ancient Greeks and Romans, as a way to train the young for public life. So when Anne went to the continent, she was already regarded as being well educated for her age, and she went there to learn to speak French fluently. And we've already mentioned, of course, that famously, Thomas More educated his daughters. So there are these number of women who are well educated. But by contrast, Jane Seymour, who received a far more typical gentry education, didn't speak any languages other than English, doesn't seem to have been terribly well read. And clearly in the German states, there was a different culture around this because Anne of Cleves didn't learn other languages, she didn't know how to play musical instruments, but she was very good at running a household, which probably other Queens had not been trained in. So I think it's fair to conclude that the quality of a girl's education depended very much on her parents, and that some countries and cultures valued it more than others.
- [37:23]
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- [38:32]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Education, of course, wasn't just about academic study. It was also about learning to dance and play music, and about practical skills like needlework. On which note, I've received a couple of questions about clothing. Amy Brony, also from Canada, has written. As a knitter, I'm curious about how much knitted garments were part of everyday Tudor lives. A single garment takes a long time to make, so were they knitting all the time? How did knitters record and share patterns? How did the wool trade operate at the time? Who did all the knitting in a household? Did men knit children? That's a lot of questions. I'm going to get clothing historian Professor Maria Hayward up on the line to see what she has to say about that one. Maria, hello.
- [39:15]
Listener or Interviewee (various, including Sharon Howes, Christina Stewart, Venka, Graham, Amy Brony, Paul, Alex, Maria Hayward)
Hello. And yes, that is a lot of questions. So I think it's worth sort of saying at the outset that knitted garments were a really important part of Tudor life and they could include sort of accessories. I suppose the most prominent would be stockings and hose, both for men and women, but also hats for men. And then also we know from some surviving examples that we have clothing for children that were knitted from this point onwards, so little mittens and vests. And by the end of the century we're starting to get the beginnings of decorative Jumpers like ganseys, and also those beautiful knitted jackets that then run on into the 17th century. So, as you can tell from that range of garments, they were for both men and women, children and adults, but also there was a range of items and some were much more expensive than others. And I think probably the key thing that really gives us a sense of how important knitting was is the legislation that was passed in 1571 that required men and boys over the age of seven to wear knitted caps. And so this was intended to create a demand. It wasn't necessarily completely successful because it isn't very easy to enforce, but it shows you just how also the Elizabethan government was interested in supporting knitting and developing knitting skills.
- [40:34]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And some of those knitted caps survive on board the Mary Rose, for example. I mean, that must be one of the best places we've got as a sort of source for these things, because, of course, generally speaking, wool doesn't survive over time, so you need to have it preserved in an anoxic environment in order to be able to get these things 500 years later.
- [40:56]
Listener or Interviewee (various, including Sharon Howes, Christina Stewart, Venka, Graham, Amy Brony, Paul, Alex, Maria Hayward)
Yes, absolutely. So the Mary Rose is marvellous because it's obviously a securely dated as well site. The other place where a lot of knitted caps and other knitted items are in the collection of the Museum of London, but some of those were excavated in the late 19th century and they come from less secure sites and dates. But yes, we are very lucky that we have a very rich selection of these knitted items and so they also reflect knitting in the lives of people of the sort of lower middling sorts, which is particularly nice as their clothing doesn't often survive.
- [41:29]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And back to Amy's questions. What else do we know about knitting in society at the time?
- [41:35]
Listener or Interviewee (various, including Sharon Howes, Christina Stewart, Venka, Graham, Amy Brony, Paul, Alex, Maria Hayward)
So I thought the question, you know, knitting takes a long time, so were they knitting all of the time? And I think the answer is probably. It depends on what you're knitting, of course, and who you were and why you were knitting. So. So sort of small accessories such as the sort of the children's mittens and the caps themselves would not take that long to knit. And I suspect that the people that were knitting those might have had multiple items on the go and, you know, you might have had them in multiple places, whereas sort of beautifully finely patterned stockings in a very fine gauge wool or silk will take you a long time. So I think it's a combination of the size of the garment, the thickness of the yarn and the elasticity of the yarn. So I think in that sen wool is Easier for the less specialist knitter to knit quickly with than say a very fine silk or metal thread yarn.
- [42:27]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
In some of my work on France, spinning is a really important activity as a sort of social activity for women. So women gather, sharing light and heat in order to work on something of an evening. And it's a great opportunity to catch up with each other. And perhaps knitting serves that function as well.
- [42:47]
Listener or Interviewee (various, including Sharon Howes, Christina Stewart, Venka, Graham, Amy Brony, Paul, Alex, Maria Hayward)
Yes, definitely. And I think it's really interesting that part of this question hinged on the wool trade. And I think one of the things that's really interesting about England is it's a wool producing country. And as you say, I think a lot of women and children are involved in spinning wool into yarn, both for weaving and for knitting. I think in terms of who's knitting, you know, we have the professional male knitters who work for a lot of the guilds and are producing some of the really high class knitting. But as the century progresses and knitting is seen as a means of providing employment, then I think that's when we're going to start to see whole families of people knitting together. And that may have been quite an intense experience. And then finally you'll have sort of maybe more elite women who are knitting for pleasure. So yes, I think we have multiple sort of knitting scenarios that would have been present in the 16th century.
- [43:40]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Well, that was a wonderful question and a wonderful answer, thank you. But I have another one for you. This is from Paul from Horrobridge in West Devon and he says this. I'd love to know about the origin and demise of the codpiece and the social, political and economic dimensions of this sartorial oddity. I know both you and I are fond of talking about codpiece, which just sounds all wrong. But anyway, maybe you can tell me a bit about this in answer to Paul's question.
- [44:10]
Listener or Interviewee (various, including Sharon Howes, Christina Stewart, Venka, Graham, Amy Brony, Paul, Alex, Maria Hayward)
So I think initially the Codpeace started as a practical solution to how do cover the front opening in men's hose. Admittedly, it's an interesting solution to how do you do that? There are other ways you might have found, including just having a longer doublet. And I think one of the areas where it becomes really interesting is at the end of the 15th century where the government is becoming in the sumptuary law, they pass, they comment about men wearing skimpy doublets which reveal their buttocks and what they refer to as the privy member. So I think obviously there's that sense of, obviously you can see the shape of the male body with hose. But then obviously people take it one step further and they Put the codpiece on the front. What's interesting, I think, is there are again, examples that suggest that men across the whole social spectrum would have had access to hose with a codpiece. And we see it evolve in terms of sort of scale and complexity and shape over time. And essentially, in the English context, that's a long 16th century. So it starts on quite small. It gets bigger and more shaped, more curved by the mid 16th century. And then as we progress into Elizabeth's reign, it gets smaller again. And then by the early 17th century, it's really dropping out of popularity.
- [45:32]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And in terms of Paul's question, thinking about this in a kind of economic or political or social context, what else could we deduce from this very strange piece of clothing?
- [45:43]
Listener or Interviewee (various, including Sharon Howes, Christina Stewart, Venka, Graham, Amy Brony, Paul, Alex, Maria Hayward)
Well, I suppose the biggest impact here it has, I suspect we can see in terms of it socially, obviously it's a male fashion and men are going to be wearing this because other men are, you know, it's the fashionable thing to wear. And again, you get that sense of the sort of the slightly competitive nature of who can wear the largest codpiece with the most bravado. So I think there's definitely an element of that sort of male sociability within that. But also, I think it's worth thinking about that not everybody approved, of course. We get writers such as Philip Stubbs really being very indignant about both the lack of useful purpose of this garment and also all of that sort of sexual innuendo that comes with it. And I think it's interesting that Michel de Montaigne described it as a useless model of a member that we cannot even decently mention by name, but which we show off and parade in public. And so again, you know, he's being very polite about the way in which people criticize this. You know, you made an active choice to wear this as a man and you could reasonably expect that you would get criticism and pushback in sort of certain parts of society and presumably much encouragement in others. I think in terms of political importance for most men, that is not going to of be an element of why you might have one. But, you know, it has been suggested that for Henry viii, one of, you know, the reasons why the codpiece is so prominent in his portraiture is that emphasis on masculinity, fertility and, you know, pre the birth of Edward, that a son will be with us. It's a sure thing. And obviously, once he's fathered Edward, then that absolute assertion of his virility and I think in terms of the economic element and I wouldn't suggest this is the most important consideration. But what is interesting is that as the actual cut and construction of the codpiece evolves and becomes more complex, it means that hoes become more expensive because they require a more skilled tailor to make and fit the hose. And so in that sense, you know, there is an economic dimension to hose with a cod piece of the more complex type type that you know, and especially if you're buying multiple pairs of these over time. But I suspect the economic impact is the smallest of the three in question. I think it's the social element that is the most important.
- [48:14]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And a few follow up thoughts. I mean, by definition, obviously this is a gendered item of clothing and it says something about the boldly patriarchal nature of society, doesn't it, that this sort of thing could be worn. And so I want to ask both that in itself, but also is it true or fair to say that later in the 16th century, when power is held by a woman, we see its decline? And do you think those two things are related?
- [48:42]
Listener or Interviewee (various, including Sharon Howes, Christina Stewart, Venka, Graham, Amy Brony, Paul, Alex, Maria Hayward)
I think so. I think we see men's fashions, especially for the elite. You know, the doublet becomes much tighter, much more fitted, there's much more emphasis on the waist and then the upper stocks of the hose become much fuller and rounder to emphasize the hips. And so in essence, the males silhouette is echoing aspects of the female silhouette. And as you say, yes, the codpiece gets smaller. So why they're vying for the Queen's attention at court, the emphasis, I think they're placing it more on the legs rather than the codpiece, and also on the face, which of course is accentuated by the ruffs. So as you say, I think there definitely is an impact within England in terms of that sense of there being a woman on the throne and what that means, and especially a woman that isn't married. You know, I think those overt displays of masculinity have less of a place at the Elizabethan court than they would have done at the court of Henry viii.
- [49:39]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And one sort of theory about the origin of the codpiece, or at least its expansion, is to do with people like Francois I suffering from syphilis and this being a sort of comfortable piece of clothing in the circumstances. Is there any truth in that?
- [49:55]
Listener or Interviewee (various, including Sharon Howes, Christina Stewart, Venka, Graham, Amy Brony, Paul, Alex, Maria Hayward)
Well, I think the codpiece is purely on the outside of the hose and they're sort of stuffed and solid.
- [50:03]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So it's not a container.
- [50:05]
Listener or Interviewee (various, including Sharon Howes, Christina Stewart, Venka, Graham, Amy Brony, Paul, Alex, Maria Hayward)
The codpiece is not a container. As you say, it's very much for show. But I suppose if you know if it's common knowledge that you're suffering from syphilis, you know, you're going to want to really sort of still stress your sexual prowess. And so the codpiece is going to be an important part of your appearance. Although I think probably it's maybe less to do with that in, obviously, in Henry's case.
- [50:28]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
I think, I think it's extraordinary to think about the fact that actually the codpiece is padded and stuffed and is just really a piece of set dressing.
- [50:38]
Listener or Interviewee (various, including Sharon Howes, Christina Stewart, Venka, Graham, Amy Brony, Paul, Alex, Maria Hayward)
Oh, absolutely. I often get asked, you know, is it something that you could wear like the equivalent of a glove as a man? And the answer is no, it's completely fake. You know, this is in one sense, you know, you can choose how big, how small the shape, you know, it's freely at male discretion.
- [50:54]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So perhaps one could make a case that having a really big cod piece is like having a really big car today.
- [51:00]
Listener or Interviewee (various, including Sharon Howes, Christina Stewart, Venka, Graham, Amy Brony, Paul, Alex, Maria Hayward)
Yes, absolutely.
- [51:02]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Well, Professor Maria Hayward, thank you so much for coming on to answer these questions and it's a delight as ever to hear your insights and to talk to you. Thank you.
- [51:11]
Listener or Interviewee (various, including Sharon Howes, Christina Stewart, Venka, Graham, Amy Brony, Paul, Alex, Maria Hayward)
Thank you very much.
- [51:14]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
My thanks to Professors Maria Haywood and Alec Ryrie for joining me today to help help answer your questions. I do hope you've enjoyed hearing what we've all had to say and that it encourages those of you who've got further questions or ideas for episodes to get in touch in 2026. We're always eager to hear from you. Some of your ideas are simply brilliant. So do drop us a line@notjusthetorshistoryhit.com thank you to my producer, Rob Weinberg, and I look forward to joining you again for another episode. Next time on Not Just the Tutors From History Hit.
- [51:59]
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- [52:29]
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