Search

With most mid-Tudor noble residences lost and survivors like Chesworth Manor in Horsham, Sussex, much altered and stripped of their contents, recapturing the material culture of nearly five hundred years ago is a daunting task. Inventories occasioned by deaths and attainders help document the lifestyles of the then-rich and famous, including Thomas Howard (1473-1554), third Duke of Norfolk, one of the wealthiest and most prominent men in Henry VIII's England. Although a 1549 inventory of Chesworth was published in 1861, Sir Henry Ellis, the author, was unaware of an earlier and fuller survey made after Norfolk's attainder in 1547. Copies of both have long lain overlooked in the Surrey History Centre. Comparing and placing them in a wider context of noble consumption and display opens a window into the past, a reminder of both the luxury and the limitations of daily life of the Tudor nobility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the pervasive portrayal of Islamic imposture in Tudor and Stuart literature, particularly in English rogue pamphlets and comedies, framing Islam as an elaborate deception. It mentions the co-option of Islamicate cultures in astrology, discrediting it as a fraudulent discipline while satirically condemning charlatans. It highlights English playwright Thomas Tomkis' play "Albumazar," revealing the interplay between stargazing, villainy, and language appropriation.

Studies of the evolution of English architecture during the Tudor period rarely mention Lacock Abbey in Wiltshire. Even when noticed, the commentary tends to be brief and poorly informed. Much of this Tudor country house survives intact, albeit masked by later alterations making way for changing uses. This essay unravels the history and development of the Tudor house to reveal a surprisingly important structure that deserves a better understanding. Additionally, and for the first time, the career and work of John Chapman, a little-known master-mason, is explored through the buildings believed to have been created by him and his team. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author explores how history is portrayed in board games and how they can be used in a college history education settings, such as his class on British Tudor history, the early modern history period of 1485-1603. He describes how he sets educational goals by making a group capstone project of the Tudor Period which embraces such skills as interpersonal communication, storytelling, creativity, and problem solving.

In their book I The Typical Tudor: Reconstructing Everyday 16th Century Dress, i Jane Malcolm-Davies and Ninya Mikhaila make an argument for how working- and middle-class people dressed during the Tudor era in England. Each of these garment chapters provides detailed pattern diagrams, construction instructions, interior and exterior photographs of extant garments or fragments of garments as well as process photographs of reconstructed garments made for modern models of a variety of body types. [Extracted from the article]

On the eve of the May Day festival in 1517, a night of anti-immigrant violence broke out in London. Though pre-modern English historians have frequently invoked Evil May Day, as it came to be called, it has only recently been given concerted scholarly attention. The riot itself was ordinary, one amongst dozens in the first decades of the sixteenth century; it reveals, as a reflection of endemic grievance, a constellation of tensions surrounding labour, immigration, masculine identities, and governance in early Tudor London. More extraordinary, and heretofore not much noticed, was the Crown reaction to the Evil May Day disturbances, on which this article focuses. The insurrectionists were prosecuted for high treason rather than the minor charge of riot; a multi-day pageant of severe justice punctuated by theatrical reprieves followed. At least fifteen were put to death within London's city walls and there are indications that the final execution toll was much greater, perhaps as high as forty-three. Such a toll following a mild riot could only have been unexpected and shocking, even if in fact 'only' fifteen rather than forty or more were executed. This was a message from the Crown both strategically conceived and emotionally driven by the king's own rage, fury and fear. Though it was the youthful rioters who constituted most of those put to death in the aftermath, the message was meant primarily for the London civic elite, who had dared to question Crown policy and had failed to control the violence in their city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author discusses scholarship regarding Queen Elizabeth I of Great Britain. She mentions her own interest in and study of Elizabeth, the biographies of Elizabeth that have appeared in the last fifty years, and the variety of perspectives on the woman and her monarchy, some of which incorporate trends in women's history.

This essay argues that an examination of the list of books donated to the Bodleian by Sir Michael Dormer in 1603 complicates our assumptions about the audience for Italian Renaissance literature in the Tudor period. Such study causes us to readjust our knowledge of the kinds of books owned by the gentry when set against the known book collections represented in the standard literature. It demonstrates that, by scrutinizing institutional donation lists in granular detail, we can increase the cumulative bibliographical data available to study book ownership across a wider social spectrum than has previously been accessible to scholars across the disciplines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Let Ovid now be silent", writes Dante in the XXV book of I Inferno i after having described a metamorphosis that he considers superior to those immortalised by the Latin poet. A great deal, as John S. Garrison, Goran Stanivukovic, and the impressive roster of scholars they have assembled for I Ovid and Masculinity in English Renaissance Literature i can demonstrate. But Ovid, unlike Petrarch, does not become the graveyard of failed masculinities, rather a literary model to explore and express maleness in more refined and non-belligerent ways. [Extracted from the article]

Anglophone historians are generally familiar with a handful of treatises on Tudor Ireland, notably Edmund Spenser's A View of the Present State of Ireland. Yet it is less known that there were over six hundred of these treatises written on Ireland during the sixteenth century, and that there is substantial reason to believe that one of the most significant of these was A Breviat of the Conquest of Ireland and of the Decay of the Same written by Patrick Finglas during the reign of Henry VIII. This work of historical analysis and prescriptive policy advice was the most widely read treatise on Ireland during the sixteenth century and is a key text in the formation of the early modern British state. This paper examines Finglas's text and argues for its critical importance in determining how officials and senior ministers viewed Ireland and formulated policy for it during the sixteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the London compters in the early modern period. It reconstructs the layout, personnel and conditions of these prisons, as well as analysing the various reasons why people were imprisoned therein. It argues that the introduction of 'Compter Ordinances' in 1547 and the foundation of a new compter in Wood St. in 1555 were part of a raft of measures introduced by the city elites to tighten their control over municipal institutions in the mid-Tudor period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lydon posited that the Pale emerged from a failed strategy devised by medieval English kings to keep Ireland racially and culturally segregated, with the express aim of preserving English civility safely housed in the Pale, outside of which lived the barbarous Irish. The Pale is ingrained in the Irish psyche and has become synonymous with English rule in Ireland. Ellis asserts that the Pale was not a shifting medieval march but rather a military frontier of standing defences across a broadly defined area with fixed boundaries. [Extracted from the article]

I St John's College, Oxford i Laura Flannigan http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3028-0918 Footnotes 1 Jonathan McGovern, "The Sheriffs of York and Yorkshire in the Tudor Period", I Northern History i 57.1 (2020). JONATHAN MCGOVERN, The Tudor Sheriff: A Study in Early Modern Administration: (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. Thereafter the book explores the "sheriff's" judicial responsibilities as meted out in county courts, sheriffs' tourns, and specialised courts in London and York respectively. [Extracted from the article]

The article explores the portrayal of English statesman Thomas Cromwell in the Wolf Hall historical novel trilogy of English author Hilary Mantel. Topics discussed include the reputation of Cromwell under the reign of Henry VIII, King of England, described in the third book "The Mirror and the Light," the Tudor prototype being represented by Cromwell in the novels, and the distinct characteristics of historical fiction as a literary genre.

The arrival in England of Tyndale's New Testament in the 1520s is still widely heralded as a transformative moment. This article argues that the lingering effects of triumphalist Protestant rhetoric concerning the 'Word of God' have obscured the many other contexts in which it was possible for the laity to encounter the Bible in early Tudor England. They have also glossed over some of the difficulties of transmitting Scripture to a largely illiterate populace. Protestant insistence on the literal interpretation of vernacular Scripture should chiefly be seen as propaganda for the evangelical cause. Early Tudor print culture demonstrates that the reading of Scripture was understood as a complex process involving a spiritual encounter shaped by faith, imagination and emotion, not just a textual encounter. In practice, Tyndale and other reformers, no less than their more conservative opponents, taught the laity that the Bible needed to be 'unlocked' and explained. For the lay reader encountering works of religious devotion and instruction, the ways in which early Tudor print culture mediated the Bible remained heavily indebted to late medieval religious practice. This shaped the context in which the 'Great Bible' of 1539 was conceived and published and this first official English Bible should be recognised as a contested text, which in its final form may have been as much a reflection of late medieval attitudes as the achievement of English Protestants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores cultural, social, political, and theatrical manipulations of the halter (or noose) in the early modern period. It begins with a consideration of what an investigation of the halter might hope to achieve, via E. P. Thompson's analysis of the object's symbolism in later wife sales. It then explores the ambivalent symbolic properties of the halter in mid-sixteenth-century social conflict, before broadening the discussion to consider how the halter entered into diverse literatures of the time. The second half of the essay uses two theatrical case studies to ground further explorations of the halter's cultural capital: Mankind (ca. 1580s), and Edward III (1596). The article concludes by arguing that during the sixteenth century the halter became in effect a property of the state, enmeshed in a dialectic of state-organized punishment and demonstrations of sovereign mercy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the late Elizabethan period Ireland became a critical focus of the Tudor regime as the Nine Years War (c.1593-1603) threatened English rule in the second Tudor kingdom and the country became a theatre of the Anglo-Spanish War (1585-1604). As a result of this military emergency officials in Ireland began composing a deluge of policy papers from the mid-1590s onwards. Over two hundred of these treatises are extant. This paper provides the first systematic overview of this war-time discourse on Ireland. In doing so it sheds light on these writings and their significance for the history of late Elizabethan Ireland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the late Elizabethan period Ireland became a critical focus of the Tudor regime as the Nine Years War (c.1593-1603) threatened English rule in the second Tudor kingdom and the country became a theatre of the Anglo-Spanish War (1585-1604). As a result of this military emergency officials in Ireland began composing a deluge of policy papers from the mid-1590s onwards. Over two hundred of these treatises are extant. This paper provides the first systematic overview of this war-time discourse on Ireland. In doing so it sheds light on these writings and their significance for the history of late Elizabethan Ireland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

R eview Es say E i g h te e n t h- C e n t u r y L i f e Volume 45, Number 2, April 2021 doi 10.1215/00982601-8902692 Copyright 2021 by Duke University Press 68 Serendipitous Failures Lisa L. Moore University of Texas at Austin Jeff Strabone. But in the essay "On the Alliterative Metre, without Rhyme, in Pierce Plowman's Visions", Percy himself misread a thirteenth- century Middle English poem attributed to Robert of Gloucester, calling it "the old alliterative and anapestic meter of the English poets ... in a barbarous age" (296). 7 3 Seward's poems of bardic nationalism influenced many of the younger male poets Strabone discusses. [Extracted from the article]

In 1518 the chief justice of King's Bench initiated an attempt to track successful claims of benefit of clergy on the assize circuits to ensure that laymen could make such claims only once, as mandated by a statute dating from 1490. By doing so he was the first to attempt to create a criminal record in England, where an individual felon's crimes were recorded with the expectation that an earlier crime would have implications for the punishment of a subsequent one. Both this attempt and a later statutory attempt in 1543 were largely unsuccessful, however. They failed, not because of principled opposition or even inertia, but because the well-established bureaucratic structures of the early Tudor period struggled to keep up with the bureaucratic imagination of those who sought to reform or extend the reach of government. The failed attempt to construct a criminal record demonstrates that as the development of print changed information cultures, and the policies of the Tudors led to an intensification of governance, legal records remained profoundly limited by the intellectual and administrative structures within which they operated. Masters of the gathering of information, Tudor governors struggled to adapt old documents to new purposes or to manage information dynamically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Around 1500 Bishop John Morgan of St. David's diocese in Wales submitted a bill to court of Chancery accusing a Welsh woman named Tanglost of attempting to murder him by image magic and as the adulterous lover of Thomas Wyrriot, a gentleman of Pembrokeshire, whose wife Tanglost had likely murdered. This essay examines how Tanglost's case illuminates the intersection of three significant tensions in late medieval Britain. First was the growing fear of women's magic as a weapon aimed against the state and church; the second resulted from clerical efforts to enforce the canon law of marriage, especially in Wales where tradition allowed a wider range of sexual partnerships. The third stemmed from Henry VII's efforts to secure Wales, where resistance to his rule remained. Opposition to Morgan, Henry's appointee, looked suspiciously like opposition to Tudor rule. Far more than an indictment of a village witch, Tanglost's case reveals powerful political and social currents of the early Tudor era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article demonstrates the continuities that persist between early modern English accounts of Jerusalem and pilgrim narratives. Despite Reformed theology's denial of holiness inherent in the physical world, Protestant travelers in the generations after the Reformation relate the traditional pilgrim reaction of prayerful joy in the time-honored places, bring home relics, and record the dimensions of the holiest places, just as pilgrims always had. Recent criticism of early modern travel narratives--which views them as evidence of the increasing secularization of travel in which curiositas, trading interests, and protoimperialism have replaced the old pieties--has not fully registered the extent of the overlap: a persistence of behavior and belief which suggests that travel to the holy land is yet another aspect of post-Reformation culture in which loudly proclaimed skepticism occludes an assimilation of traditional piety. These narratives--and their avid readership--indicate that the journeys to Jerusalem undertaken by early modern Englishmen respond to the pull of holy places that Protestants believe they have abolished. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, Anne Askew has attained something of celebrity status among scholars of Tudor women's writing and, more generally, of Tudor Reformation history. In the course of privileging Askew's examinations above those of other female defendants (such as Elizabeth Young), scholars sometimes equate Askew's rhetorical expertise with legal expertise. Thus, it has been argued that Askew knew the latest developments in Tudor legislation and used this knowledge to her advantage during her examinations. Was Askew aware of legal reforms? How did she and other Protestant defendants formulate their responses? These issues and other questions are addressed by comparing Askew's defense to those of three other Protestants--Elizabeth Young, John Lambert, and William Thorpe. All four examinations appear in John Foxe's Book of Martyrs. All four defendants used the Bible to construct cogent arguments against, and critiques of, their examiners. From this, it is concluded that Protestant defendants such as Askew were highly skilled debaters, but not necessarily experts of Tudor law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Urban agglomeration economies make cities central to theories of modern economic growth. There is historical evidence for the presence of Smithian growth and agglomeration effects in English towns c.1450-1670, but seminal assessments deny the presence of agglomeration effects and productivity gains to Early Modern English towns. This study evaluates the presence of increasing returns to scale (IRS) in aggregate urban economic outputs—the empirical signature of feedbacks between Smithian growth and agglomeration effects—among the towns of 16th century England. To do so, we test a model from settlement scaling theory against the 1524/5 Lay Subsidy returns. Analysis of these data indicates that Tudor towns exhibited IRS—a finding that is robust to alternative interpretations of the data. IRS holds even for the smallest towns in our sample, suggesting the absence of town size thresholds for the emergence of agglomeration effects. Spatial patterning of scaling residuals further suggests regional demand-side interactions with Smithian-agglomeration feedbacks. These findings suggest the presence of agglomeration effects and Smithian growth in pre-industrial English towns. This begs us to reconsider the economic performance of Early Modern English towns, and suggests that the qualitative economic dynamics of contemporary cities may be applicable to premodern settlements in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From the early thirteenth century to the present day, privy councillors have been required to swear an oath of office. This article demonstrates that at least four different council oaths were administered by chancery during the Tudor period, and that William Cecil drafted yet another revised oath in 1558, although this was never finished. The article compares the respective texts and explains the administrative and political reasons for each of the revisions. It goes on to examine evidence from these oaths that suggests developments in the conception of counsel in the sixteenth century. It concludes with transcriptions of the four operational oaths and the Cecilian draft. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on David Hume's History of the Tudors and History of Elizabeth. It mentions James Steuart worked on multiple versions such as Elizabeth's Reign and Mary's Imprisonment such as Revenues of Spain and England, Effects of Toleration, Use of Martial Law and Liberty and Imprisonment. It also mentions common nouns are de-capitalised, long sentences are punctuated or shortened, and standard English spellings are adopted.

This is the first article-length study of the sheriffs of York and Yorkshire in the Tudor period. It argues that the shrievalty was a thriving system which fulfilled diverse vital functions of local government and administration. It begins by introducing the sheriffs of York and Yorkshire, explaining their relationship and manner of appointment. It then explains the principal duties of these sheriffs, namely service on the city council of York, the execution of writs, the keeping of prisoners, the maintenance of law and order and revenue collection. The article proceeds to analyse the sheriffs' judicial responsibilities in the Court of Pleas, tourn and county court. It concludes with information about a broader project conceived by the author: a comprehensive study of the Tudor sheriff across England, Wales and Ireland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent scholarship on the first English translation of Thomas More's "Utopia" has asked how its publication in the 1550s fits with the larger agenda of Protestant Reformers who promoted the book alongside their other civic projects. This article argues that the initiatives of greatest relevance were the new house of correction at Bridewell (est. 1553–57) and the infamous Vagrancy Act of 1547–49, which failed to introduce slavery as a punishment in English law. Evidence of user interactions with the 1550s editions, including indexing, annotation, commonplacing, and quotation, helps to analyze how the text's complicated ideas about penal labor were received and reemphasized by early English readers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In retrospect, the turning point in the Kildare rebellion came with the rebels' failure to capture Dublin, and the ordnance, shot and powder in the king's castle there, during the long siege in summer and autumn 1534, in part because, as this article argues, the city's capture had not initially been seen as an immediate priority. Kildare kept back most of his ordnance and gunners to defend Maynooth castle, and historians have focused instead on the brief siege and capture of Maynooth by the king's army in March. Richard Stanyhurst's description of the rebellion, written forty years later, includes much fiction and special pleading; but Dublin was Stanyhurst's native city, and his Chronicle provides the fullest account of the siege. It is here checked against available contemporary sources, suggesting that it is reliable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Edward Coke is well known for his unhistorical approach to the common law and the ensuing myth of the ancient constitution. He is often taken as representative of common lawyers, an important group in the intellectual life of early modern England. This article expands upon J. G. A. Pocock's seminal work in the field, demonstrating that Coke's historical views are not a Jacobean development or a response to external circumstances. His views had been held, and propagated, since the early stages of his career as a lawyer and were shared by other lawyers. The article then uses evidence of Coke's reading of law books to show how and why Coke reached unhistorical conclusions about the antiquity of the common law. Coke's method was ahistorical, but used an approach to the understanding of texts which was widespread in early modern England. The article demonstrates that Coke's approach to historical sources can also be seen in the work of other lawyers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

That the mid-Tudor Crisis was also a demographic crisis seems to have escaped general notice, partly because of E. A. Wrigley and Roger Schofield's belief that England's population fell by no more than 5.5 to 6.0 percent in the later 1550s, partly because noneconomic historians have viewed it mainly in political and religious terms. Yet a fall in population of 16 to 20 percent has been argued by economic historians using probate records. This study employs a different method, comparing estimated English populations in 1546-48 (based on chantry certificates) with those of 1563 (based on an ecclesiastical census). This has required a preliminary evaluation of the evidence and of the "multipliers" needed to produce the estimated population totals. This comparison suggests a fall in the English national population of around 18 percent, with declines in individual counties ranging between 12 and 27 percent. There was indeed a demographic crisis in England between 1556 and 1560. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines memories of the births of feudal heirs to consider both what witnesses remembered from their past and how they remembered it. It argues that in the early sixteenth century jurors' memories revolved around the life-course markers of birth, marriage, and death, and were recalled in parallel with the same events in the lives of their neighbors. By the later sixteenth century written records came to play a greater role in the process of proving age, as witnesses were increasingly likely to present and witness a father's record of his son's birth rather than recall their own involvement in the event. This shift reflects the ways in which both literacy and family records were rooted within the household, and allows us to see the ways in which the bureaucratic process of proving age changed in response to the changed literacies of English jurors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Margaret More Roper, daughter of Sir Thomas More, was well known in her own day for her facility with Latin and Greek. Although most of her writings are no longer extant, two compositions still exist: a translation of Erasmus's "Precatio dominica" of 1524 and the Alington letter of 1534. Critics generally read these works as evidence of Roper's submission to More's patriarchal control, primarily because neither text demonstrates a literary voice distinct from the agendas of her father. This article argues that Margaret Roper gained covert political power from her ability to symbolize the private life of her father. Because More and his allies cast Margaret Roper as an avatar of More's personal commitment to humanist learning, Roper's writings could first defend More's friendship with Erasmus and later support his opposition to Henry's arrogation of papal power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Richard Beacon's "Solon His Follie" (Oxford, 1594) has stood at the center of efforts to construct a significant republican past for the British Isles prior to the actual experience of republican government during the Interregnum (1649-60). In this interpretation the preeminence of monarchy in late Tudor and early Stuart England did not preclude the development of quasi-republican modes of civic consciousness emphasizing the active life of the citizen, civic virtue, and true nobility. This article offers a critical reappraisal of Beacon's significance to the development of republican consciousness in both England and Ireland during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The central contention is that, although Beacon emphasized the role of classical eloquence in his program for Ireland, this did not signal the emergence of republican consciousness. Beacon's objective was not the promotion and preservation of republican liberty in England, but rather the consolidation of royal sovereignty in Ireland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]