Dan Snow's History Hit - Not Just the Tudors

Episode Date: April 29, 2021

When thinking about the 16th century the Tudor dynasty often comes to the fore, but the was so much more to this extraordinary period to be explored. In celebration of the launch of her new History Hit podcast, Professor Suzannah Lipscombe joins Dan to discuss all things Not Just the Tudors. This new podcast will look right across the 16th century including the Renaissance, the Aztecs, Henry VIII's wardrobe, werewolves and much, much more. 

Hello everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History. I've got a wonderful bit of news for you all today. This is super exciting. Professor Susanna Lipscomb, one of the most talented historians working anywhere in the world, is joining Team History with her own podcast. It's called Not Just the Tudors, because it's about the 16th century, but it's not just about the Tudors. There's a lot of Tudors in there, don't get me wrong. I mean, she's a Tudor specialist. Hilary Mantel, when writing her acknowledgments for her gigantic, amazing books about Thomas Cromwell, thanks Susie Lipscomb. She cites Susie Lipscomb's work for giving her the kind of context, that bedrock that she needed on which to build these wonderful

characters that she wrote about. So Susie knows her Tudors, but she's going elsewhere. She's going to Northern Italy. She's going to Mexico. She's going to talk about's going elsewhere. She's going to Northern Italy. She's going to Mexico. She's going to talk about Montezuma. She's going to talk about the Tokugawa. She's going to talk about it all. So it's an extraordinary period of history. The end of the Renaissance, the beginning of the modern world in so many ways. So I asked Susie in this episode about the 16th century, why we're all so fascinated by it, the Tudors ask us some big old questions. Who was a better king, Henry VII or Henry VIII? And I ask her that terrible question. Was Elizabeth Tudor, was Elizabeth I overrated as a monarch? The answer she gives may surprise you. If you want to go and subscribe to Susie's wonderful new podcast, I urge you, I urge you to do that. Wherever you

get your pods, type in not just the Tudors and it will appear before you. You urge you, I urge you to do that. Wherever you get your pods, type in not just the Tudors and it will appear before you. You click subscribe, you click all that, have a little listen, then give it a rating. And we're hoping this is just the beginning of Susie joining Team History. We'd love to get her doing some work on the TV channel as well, which you can go and check out. History.tv, documentaries by many of your favourite historians and many that you'll have never heard of of but are truly wonderful head over to history.tv we've got ancient history, we've got Renaissance history

we've got modern history, got it all on there you're going to love it but in the meantime, please have a listen as I welcome Susie Lipscomb to the History at Fold Professor Susanna Lipscomb great to have you on this podcast loved to see you Dan as ever I mean you've only been on the podcast about a thousand times so eventually we thought we need just get you your own pod so you've got your own pod it's all about the Tudors and the rest of the world we're going to talk about your podcast okay so it's about the Tudors the Tudors is everybody's

favorite 16th century dynasty but the thing is I was reading your ideasudors is everybody's favourite 16th century dynasty. But the thing is, I was reading your ideas. The point is, it's the most unbelievable period of history globally as well. So you've got a sweet shop to choose from. I really do. And so whilst we talk about the Tudors, because I love the Tudors, as you know, I'm completely fascinated by Henry VIII. And I love the stories of the 16th century in England. It's also called not just the Tudors, because I think we forget that the century in which we've got Henry VIII and Elizabeth I is also the period where we've got the Aztecs and indeed the Spanish invasion and colonization of the Americas. Or we've got the fall of the Songhai Empire in Africa. Or we've got towards the end of the 16th century, beginning

of the 17th century, we've got the Tokugawa Empire in Japan. So you've got extraordinary change around the world. And this podcast is what I kind of like to think of as the long 16th century. So I'm delving back a bit into the 15th century and borrowing quite far into the 17th century, just basically whatever interests me, and seeking out really exciting, interesting nuggets or big stories. So one of my favourite stories that we've got coming up is about a teenage werewolf in 1603. And I've talked to Jan Makkoson, who has done research on this story, because we all know about the witch trials, but there were also 300 people who were accused of being werewolves. And this is a teenage boy, 13-year-old boy,

shepherd boy who's been chucked out of his home, who claims that he himself is a werewolf and is prosecuted for it. So, you know, these just amazing nuggets of history, as well as this great big story of change and really the beginning of the modern world. You know what? You and I have had many debates about the 18th versus the 16th,

and it's always painful for me to agree with you on this one. Let's start with the Tudors, though. The ultimate question, like, when I walk around the streets of this country and people stop me and say they love history, they just talk about the Tudors. You know more than anybody about the Tudors. You've inspired Hilary Mantel to write those wonderful books. You've made TV shows about it.

Why the Tudors? Like, why not the Stuart the Plantagenet's or non-royal subjects? What is it about that century? What is it about this family? Gosh, I would love to claim that I inspired Hilary Mantel, but I imagine she might beg to differ. But I would say, well, the Tudors. Okay, first of all, it's the fact that we know what they looked like. So for previous centuries of royals, although we have some pictures that date from the 16th century, we can't see their faces and we're quite a visual people. So seeing their faces makes a difference. We also see the evidence of them across our landscape, whether that's the kind of great hulks of the monasteries or whether it's the Tudor house that's got a

little perfect black and white, painted by the Victorians, black and white Tudor house that's got a little perfect black and white, painted by the Victorians, black and white Tudor framed houses with the thatched roof that you might see in Stratford-upon-Avon or whatever, in Lavenham, as I was there the other day, gorgeous houses everywhere. And then we've also, I think, see this as the beginning of modern Britain. So it has, from the 19th century onwards, been a place to which people harked back. Merry old England with the Reformation, the Church of England breaking away with Rome, previous generations of imperialist rhetoric pointed to the navy as the beginning of empire. Now we might say that's for better or worse, but the point is a lot of the things that have

defined the history of Britain ever since started in the Tudor period. And then there's the fact that the stories are just so brilliant, that you've got characters like Anne Boleyn or Thomas Cromwell that you can really get to know because the sources are so good. I mean, I always feel like the 16th century is perfectly positioned because if you go deep back into the Middle Ages, you've got good sources but they're having to work sometimes from tax rolls and things like that and if you go deep into the modern period then there's so much material that you can't get your head around it in a lifetime whereas in the 16th century i think we've got a kind of perfect amount of primary source evidence that allows us to look into people's worlds and get a glimpse of what they might have been thinking

without being so overwhelmed that we can't do anything apart from study one tiny subject in one week of one year. I've been asking people what they want me to ask you about the Shudder period because everyone's got, unlike when I say I'm about to go and do a podcast on the tongue China and everyone looks at me kind of curiously, everyone's got questions they want me to ask you. And one of them is, who was a better king, Henry VII or Henry VIII? Depends what you want your king to do i suppose yes good points at good points yeah well how about not bankrupt the country well okay now i'm showing you cards okay so but in terms of

showing us so what we want is a king who is fiscally responsible and maintains britain's place within europe avoids conflict i mean i I mean, I'm obviously showing my... Yes, that's Henry VII. So if you... That's Henry VII. If you want a king who maybe is a bit extravagant, but makes a big impression. Okay, so in what ways is Henry VIII a better king than his dad?

In what ways is he a better king than his dad? Because he regularly appears on lists of brilliant kings and queens of England, which are themselves flawed. Indeed. But I think it will be because people are thinking about the impression that he has on our idea of England. So when you think of who made England or who made Britain, you don't think, oh, Henry VII, that great, slightly dull, fiscally responsible

king, actually a great warrior king, much more than his son. But Henry VIII makes an impression because he did something dramatic that changed the fate of the country. I don't suppose he was a terribly good king, but I think that it's the impression he makes. And also it's the fact that he married six times. Let's be honest, it's just that he's interesting. Okay, another one is, is Elizabeth I heavily overrated as a monarch? Yes, I think she is, actually. Oh, really?

Oh, wow. Okay, here we go. So she regularly tops the list of monarchs. Again, these lists are absolutely ridiculous clickbait. But anyway, she regularly comes near the top of these lists. You think she doesn't deserve that position? So it's a reputation she gets in the 17th century when people are starting to get bored of the Stuart Kings. So when James I comes to the throne, everyone's kind of tired of this old woman who's been quite naggy and demanding and indecisive and hard to work with and moody. I mean, she hit

some of her servants. There's all sorts of stories of her violence and indecision and how difficult she was to work with. And reports of, say, her godson saying to another courtier, you know, don't go in today, the sun is not shining. Don't put your suit today because she's in a bad mood. But then obviously, things don't go so well with the Stuart Kings, and so a reputation develops of this golden age of Gloriana. She becomes the paragon. That is only exaggerated when we get to the late 17th century, when you've got the exclusion crisis. You're trying to get rid of a Catholic on the throne, and so you have to contrast the last Catholic that was on the throne, Elizabeth's sister, with Elizabeth, the great Protestant queen. And things like Fox's Book of Martyrs are exaggerating this reputation of England as a Protestant country, ineluctably that it would always have become a Protestant

country. And then fast forward a couple of centuries, maybe 150 years, and you get to just after the Industrial Revolution or during the Industrial Revolution where there's a great fondness in say like the 1840s for pre-industrial England and it becomes this hallowed place Sir Walter Raleigh writes all those books people start touring around places like Hampton Court there comes a great fascination with Gothic architecture and all this sort of thing and Elizabeth is held up as a great example because, of course, there's another queen on the throne. So it's another example for Victoria. So basically, Elizabeth benefits from everyone else being a little bit rubbish or everybody else trying to be distinguished by drawing on her reputation. So in practice, actually, I think that her great

genius was that she surrounded herself by great people. So when we look at Elizabeth's age and we look at how good a monarch she was, what we're actually talking about is how William Cecil Lord Burdie was an incredible administrator, or how Sir Francis Walsingham was an amazing spymaster. That's what we're really talking about. Elizabeth is just the person around whom they all pivot. And Drake and Howard getting the job done in 1588 as well. Okay, so another question that came through from a very young member of the audience, for the ones I asked, was did Edward VI, the boy king, did he have agency himself? Was he in charge of the decisions that were going on? Or is he just a puppet? Is he worthy of studying

his own right as a leader? So when he first comes to the throne, he's nine, and I think probably at that point in time, he's not that responsible for the decisions that are being made around him, some massive decisions in terms of iconoclastic revolution. But as he gets older, as he gets into his teens, there's clear evidence of his fingerprints on some of this. And he himself did become quite a radical Protestant. He saw things in black and white, and we get evidence of him listening to some of the sort of real fire and brimstone preachers of the Reformation and taking pleasure in what they said. Some of our impression of him is distorted by what evidence survives from the sources. So there are journals that we know he kept that we don't have, but we have evidence of people seeing him writing in them. And so we have an impression of him that is very partial. But I think it's definitely clear that he is making decisions, still with help from adults, but is making decisions in his teenage years. to make and tries to implement is who should succeed him after he dies, just as his father

had done. And we can really see Edward's hand on that when he's nominating Lady Jane Grey. Speaking of Lady Jane Grey, women in the 16th century, the question I often ask when we're discussing women in history, you've got Elizabeth of York, you've got Henry VII's wife, you've got various women in Henry VIII's life. You've got Lady Jane Grey, Mary I, the first queen regnant in the whole of English history. If it wasn't Jane. Yeah, good point, if it wasn't Jane. And then you've got Elizabeth. So women seem to loom very largely. Now, is that because, accident, quirk, there were the two daughters of Henry

that actually end up sitting on the throne? Or was there something about this period that was kind of different? Or is this just what's happened throughout history, but we've obscured the role of women traditionally in the telling of history? It's that latter point. I mean, there's always been quite a lot of us around, and we've always been quite opinionated. So even though some of the narrative of history has been that which has not shown women's role. I think actually, even when you look at very ordinary women in this period, and I've spent time working on ordinary women in France in this period, actually, even though theoretically they're officially powerless, what I see constantly is that they intervene in the mechanics of power and that they are more

vocal, that they are more opinionated, that they are stronger than they are really entitled to be. So I suspect that there are a couple of things here. One, that in the Tudor period, these characters are just so forefront that they can't be dispelled from the narrative. And two, that actually now we're taking an interest in what women did, and we're starting to question the version of the 16th century that we've inherited from the 19th century. Because most historians over the course of the 20th century relied on the primary sources that had been collected together by great 19th century scholars. So in the 19th century, they gathered up primary sources around

the country and they calendared them. They put them in chronological order and then they summarised them and published those summaries, which are called, for Henry VIII's reign, Letters and Papers, Foreign Domestic for the Reign of Henry VIII, 21 volumes. And it was very neat and handy to rely on those printed editions rather than go back to the manuscript. But the version of the 16th century we get through those printed editions is the version that the 19th century men were looking for. So for example, when it comes to Elizabeth I's reign, they don't mention the documents that talk about magic and the occult and the fact that she's got alchemical laboratories in her palaces because they thought that that was superstitious and nonsense. Whereas actually for the Elizabethans, that's politics. But that

was not a version of history that they were familiar with. And so there are so many ways in which we're kind of recovering the 16th century, and particularly that means recovering women from, frankly, the layer of misogyny from the 19th century that stopped all those stories coming to the fore. But even so, all those stories coming to the fore. But even so, the stories were coming to the fore. And that just gives you some indication of how much women were operating in the 16th century. You're listening to Dance News History.

I've got Professor Susanna Lipscomb on the podcast. It's great. She's got her own new podcast out. You're going to love it. More after this. we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series, Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits.

There are new episodes every week. Are we reaching the point of diminishing returns at the moment? Or are we going to keep discovering amazing stuff in your career about the Tudors? It is quite rare that we discover a new document. It does happen. Sometimes we stumble across something. There are these amazing discoveries. But I think a lot of it is to do with having a new way of looking at them. having a new way of looking at them. We always write history from where we are in the present, and the present is posing a series of questions to us now. For example, the Black Lives Matter movement is posing questions about diversity in the past. In the last few years, there have been some really good books looking at the number of Africans that were present in Tudor England,

for example. That was a question that wasn't being asked a few decades before that, except perhaps very briefly, Peter Fryer wrote a book in the 60s, very briefly touches on it. But the questions that we're now asking after the hashtag MeToo movement have framed a series of questions about the past. We can never escape our present day situation and the fact that that's affecting our minds. But I do think that there's strength in that as well, because it means that we turn to the past with questions that previous generations haven't thought to ask of these documents, and therefore they give us answers that we hadn't been looking for. So it's not always about discovering new documents to discover

new things. And I think that as long as there are new generations we will have new ways of seeing the past what i'm excited about with your pod is the freedom it's given you now if you look at the history of the internet you know whether it's youtubers and people posting or blogging or and now podding is it's just removing the process by which you have to go through this like long commissioning process that you and I know and we bear the scars of the TV thing. Years ago, you and I pitched, I think, a show about Henry VIII's foreign policy and his military policy, because it's always really interesting that Henry's a young man, although his period now famous for the kind of pivot

of England to maritime power, looking towards North America. Actually, he spent the early years of his reign, right? Like gallivanting around like Henry V, knocking about in Northern France. What's so cool, presumably, is that you're now just going to be unleashed and you've spent, well, decades. You start as a child. Decades immersing yourself in Tudor history. And now your commissioning process

is between one ear and the other of Susie Lipscomb. Yeah, I do still think that the Henry VIII War is a good idea. I think there's still loads of stuff that we could discuss there. But yes. Let's do a pod. Let's do a pod. Sure, let's do that. So Henry VIII War is a good idea. I think there's still loads of stuff that we could discuss there. But yes. Let's do a pod. Let's do a pod.

Sure, let's do that. So yeah, no, it's great. So I sat down one afternoon to think about what I'd like to talk about, who I'd like to talk to. An hour or two later, I had 100 ideas because there were so many exciting things to talk about. So all I do is I just get in touch with someone and say, hey, you know, you wrote that amazing book. Can we talk about that? Laura Cumming, you've written this amazing

book about Valesquez that I loved. Can we talk about that? Or Joel Harrington, you've written about the executioner, the role of the executioner in 17th century Germany. Can we talk about that? And it's just been amazing. So the ones I've recorded so far have all just been such a revelation. I mean, this is so fun. And it's such an opportunity to explore details that I hadn't got into in the past, or I've read about them, but I've got questions I want to ask from the authors of these books, or someone's written an academic journal article, but no one outside academia is probably going to read it. But I think it's amazing. And so I think, oh, I'm sure people would like to hear this story. So yeah, it's great. So much freedom. And it means I can go anywhere and talk to anyone. It's just wonderful. I imagine that since we were nippers, the global history of your period has become much

more important and celebrated and written about. And that's true, I think, of all the periods of history that we'd have studied. Presumably, it's also super exciting for you to kind of learn. What I've loved about the pod is just being able to be like, I know absolutely nothing about this thing. And it's so nice to be able to just kind of completely explore it. Yes, there's so much that I don't know. And it's so exciting to find that out. I mean, so we're

starting sort of with the area that I know a little bit about and spreading out into areas I don't know that much about. All my only knowledge of them is having read a historical novel or something. So, okay, put me straight here. I don't know about this. I want to know. And it is really refreshing to be able to go into something that I don't know and to find out about it because the trouble is that whilst I love specialising, I love knowing huge amounts about one period, actually it can also be a bit confining in academia that you kind of get stuck in your period and this is branching out at least geographically and over two centuries as I say I'm colonising the 16th century over a large period and going into a whole range of things.

So it means that I can go and talk to someone about, I don't know, Cervantes and the invention of fiction. Or we could go and discover what was going on in the south of India in the late 17th century or whatever. You know, so it's been really fascinating so far. And I've got so many other things to go and talk to people about. Susanna, thank you very much for coming on this podcast. Tell everyone, obviously, what your podcast is called. It is called Not Just the Tudors. And it is, of course, from History Hit. And you can find it wherever you get your podcasts. Not Just the Tudors. Well, I look forward to it very much.

And we've got lots of episodes coming up. Good luck with it. Thank you very much, Dan. And obviously, folks, we're not going to end this podcast without giving you a sneak preview of Professor Susanna Lipscomb's new wonderful podcast, Not Just the Tudors. This is the kind of top quality stuff

you can expect to hear from one of the world's best broadcasters and historians. Here it is. Oh, and once you listen to it, don't forget to do all the things I'm always asking you to do. I'm sorry about this, but please rate it and like it and subscribe and all that kind of stuff. That's the only way we're going to get Prof Lipscomb's pod to where it belongs. Top of the charts. Thank you. The 16th century was a tumultuous, violent, pivotal age. It laid the foundations for much of what we think of in the modern world. And there's much of it that we recognise.

And yet, it's a period in which people are thinking very different things from the sort of things that we believe and think about. On Twitter, my handle is at 16thCenturyGirl because this is a century I love. And this podcast, not just the Tudors, is a deep dive into what I like to think of as the long 16th century. In practice, I consider anything between about 1492 and 1692

to be fair game. So I'm speaking to scholars and historians about everything of the global long 16th century from the Aztecs to witches, Velazquez to Shakespeare, Mughal India to the Mayflower. Not, in other words, just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors. So what have I got coming up for you? Well, how about the tragic and revealing story of a boy who cried wolf, a teenage werewolf prosecuted in 1603, a young disabled shepherd boy called Jean Grenier.

It all starts in May 1603, and Jean Grenier is a shepherd boy. He left home in February under rather miserable circumstances and he found employment, if that's the right word, with a local farmer to guard some sheep. And this is in the context of widespread wolf attacks. And then he comes across three girls, cowherds, that are probably a bit older than him. Well, one of them is 18, another is 13, so the same age as he is, and we don't actually know the age or the name of the third girl. And these three girls are talking about wolves and werewolves,

very logically, because one of them had been attacked by one of the wolves just a few weeks earlier, and she still had scars on her face to show for that, and she had managed to hit the wolf with her staff and the wolf stepped back and sat on his hind legs and stared at her furiously according to her testimony and then that gave her the opportunity to make her escape and for a cow to escape with her so as the three girls are talking grenier arrives on the scene, and he seeks to try and impress them and try and insert himself into this conversation. And when he realizes that they're talking about wolves, he says, it's sort of like, oh, I run with the wolves. And the girls look at him very skeptically.

So at the end of it, he tells them, apparently as a way of impressing them, that he's a werewolf and that there is this secret dark house in the forest where a certain evil lord lives who has given him a wolf skin and that this wolf skin allows him to transform into a wolf. And very sensibly these three girls report Grenier to the local authorities and they decide to take him in. And then under some pressure of interrogation, he does indeed confess to being a teen wolf. And he also says that his father, Pierre Grenier, the father he'd fallen out with, was also a wolf

and that they'd been running as wolves together for a number of years. We'll consider the extravagance of Henry VIII's wardrobe. He tended to keep purple for very formal days of state, so Christmas and times like that. But yellow, definitely. There are some lovely examples of him ordering some amazing knitted hose in yellow and purple, which he must have looked quite dashing and striking in. And these are ordered in the 1540s. So he wasn't as slim as he'd been either. So he would have been quite a substantial figure in this amazing yellow and purple outfit.

So yes, he liked bright colours. I think that's one of the things that we don't tend to get a sense of, the bright colours and a wide variety. Yes, we tend to think of it all as being slightly sort of russet and browns, don't we? Yes, yes. But actually what you're talking about is that we should think more of sort of Malvolio's cross-gartered yellow stockings. Then there's John Lilly, who wrote at the same time as Shakespeare, was at the time more famous than Shakespeare,

and who was even more keen than Shakespeare on gender-bending characters and queer love affairs. So why have we forgotten him? In the 1580s, for example, which is when Lilly starts writing, and is the early period of the playhouses, only five plays survive from that decade. A decade that would have seen hundreds of plays on stage, we have five plays that go into print in that decade. So a literary witness for literary remains of that period is particularly partial and fragmentary. So I guess that's reason number one. Reason number two is he's writing for a different kind of theatre company to someone like Shakespeare. Shakespeare's writing for adult men with a couple of boy players in his company. Lily is writing for an entirely child company. And we now associate children and kids' performance with, apologies for any mums and dads listening who I'm about to offend in terms of school shows that they might have seen, but we now associate children performing with the kind of school show format. In Elizabethan times, these are royal choir boys who are performing. They are the kind of elite form of performer in the period. So it's a high status performance,

but it's not one we now readily associate with the kind of theatre culture of Shakespeare's time. Lily also writes in prose, where Shakespeare tends to write in verse. So he's a different writer just at the level of what he looks like on the page and how he sounds in the ear and how an actor might want to respond to his work. And then unfortunately there's a history, I think, of misogyny built into what happens to Lily's reputation. Lily's plays are full of completely fantastic female characters. The longest role for a woman in early modern drama is in John Lilly's The Woman in the Moon, a completely fantastic play. It's kind of the female Hamlet in many ways. The character

Pandora is never off the stage. She's actually created on stage by the female deity. God in this play is a woman. She creates the first human woman on stage and then the play is about that woman's life and it's the most amazing role and his plays more generally are full of female characters. There's a play called Galatea which is about two girls who fall in love with each other and there's a long history particularly in the 19th century of his work being demonised on the basis of gender. Believe it or not his name becomes part of that, he's called Lily where Shakespeare has this reassuringly macho name of William which sort of means penis Shakespeare, which sort of means shaking his

penis. So yeah, he's got this kind of double whammy phallic name, whereas Lily has a girl's name. And people really do say that in the 19th century as a reason to be suspicious of him. And he gets strongly associated with French and effeminate forms of masculinity in the 19th century and has never really recovered from those misogynistic attacks on his writing and his identity. And let's feast on some Tudor sweetmeats and think about banqueting in the Tudor period. Banqueting food in particular features in the very early Tudor cookery books and so I discovered more and more and was absolutely fascinated by the whole subject because it's so much more than just very special food. In fact it's a very distinctively Tudor social institution that began at the highest level at the court,

but then over the years filtered down to a sort of new fashion that everybody wanted to copy. And its popularity was aided by a number of different developments at the time, but one of which was definitely that the quantity of sugar that came into England became available at a much more affordable price. Yes, I remember looking at skulls in the Museum of London from the 15th century and from the 16th century. And in the 15th century, they've got a set of teeth that look American, really, you know, perfect teeth. And in the 16th century, it all goes horribly wrong. And there are abscesses and all sorts of damage, presumably because of the introduction of sugar. Definitely. And also, the other problem was that sugar was actually seen as a kind of medicine. So you were actively

encouraged to eat sugar, in particular for all ailments that had something to do with colds, because sugar was regarded for its warming qualities and so when you are cold or you suffered cold symptoms the remedy was sugar. So in the beginning it was not just a food for the rich to display wealth and power but also to keep your body healthy and in good shape. Plus, we'll talk about the Aztecs and human sacrifice, the genius of Valescueth, the dissolution of the monasteries, wayward women incarcerated in Bridewell, the palace that became a prison, 17th century female spies, the English in India, the role of the executioner, the mistresses of Louis XIV, Tokugawa Japan, and many more things. Please join me on this wonderful adventure into this fascinating age.

And also please subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and leave a rating or a comment. It's not just the Tudors, though it is also the Tudors. I feel we have the history on our shoulders. All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country, all were gone and finished. Hi everyone, thanks for reaching the end of this podcast. Most of you are probably asleep, so I'm talking to your snoring forms, but anyone who's awake, it would be great if you could do me a quick favour, head over to wherever you get your

podcasts and rate it five stars and then leave a nice glowing review. It makes a huge difference for some reason to how these podcasts do. Madness, I know, but them's the rules. Then we go further up the charts, more people listen to us and everything will be awesome. So thank you so much. Now sleep well.