Why so much of the Tudors?

Well, maybe ... I dunno, I think you can make all roads lead to the Tudors if you want to, but I suppose what I'm saying is, there are other ways to look at it, and we are so used to thinking about the Tudors as a great turning point/central moment, that it's probably good for us to try to think of other things.

I mean, long after 1453, rural English people are still collecting French books to read; French remains a language of choice for aristocrats reading the prototypes of novels for centuries (and I know that tends to be seen as 'something different happening,' but I'm not sure it is really). Elizabeth I's precocious translation of Marguerite Porete's French text is part of all this - she's still very much embedded in a culture of language exchange that, to me, looks quite like what was going on a century or two (or even three) centuries before that.

What really turbocharged English was losing French possessions in the Hundred Years War.

Which ended in 1453 (in opther news, Constantinople fell, marking the fall of the Roman Empire)

Paving the way for the conclusion of the Wars of the Roses and ...

(dramatic trumpet stabs)

Henry Tudor ....

Ok, I don't think there's much point here.

Yet you still talk about fashion.

The disregard and contempt of the conquering Normans for the Anglo Saxon conquered is not a matter of fashion. It’s a matter of fact. I really don’t know why you’re trying to keep flogging the dead horse, except that’s exactly what conquering peoples often do to the conquered, and in England it never really stopped. The mark is there on the language we are using. It did diminish, and that diminishment, an official one at least which nevertheless left the elites clear to start economic warfare, shows up most clearly by the time of the Tudors: although there was a beginning of rapprochement from the 14th century the increased spread of writing and literature thanks to the printing press permitted propaganda games more easily then, and Henry VII was clearly not totally inept. Perhaps that is your ‘later time’, so why keep on arguing?

But whatever game you think you’re playing is obscure and rather pointless to me. Scholarship? It’s called rewriting the past and is the tool of authoritarianism. Or just you being bored and looking for a kind of fun which is also obscure to me.

Sorry if you feel it's waffling. I was mostly thinking about the later period, immediately before the Tudors, yes.

But the whole 'filthy pleb conquered' idea is ... weird. And out of date.

This is not about fashion. It's about detailed source work. People started looking at the languages actually in use, and the way they were used, and found that it was common for people to slip fluidly between two or three of the 'main' languages of England.

I know you know when the printing press was invented; my point was that people tend to imagine it meant a sudden huge increase in books available and in literacy, and the picture is more complicated than that.

I don't think the coming of the printing press to England really influenced the resurgence of English - it'd be too late a development, surely?

I'm sorry if I offended you by saying these ideas are old-fashioned - but, honestly, they are. This is a subject on which an awful lot of research has been done.

Now, if you'd accused me of being 'woke' or bowing to fashion because I don't tend to use the term 'Anglo-Saxon' or 'Dark Ages' then I'd understand (even if I disagree). But most of what I'm talking about isn't considered trendy, edgy scholarship at all.

Of course, the language of the pre-Conquest Anglo Saxons that we are both gleefully referring to as English, is as often called Anglo-Saxon as Old English, as a recognition of its vast differences from the post-Conquest language, Middle English. Vast differences caused by the social consequences of the Conquest. It was actually in the 14th century that monarchs first started using English - middle as it had become - after they had largely lost land claims on the continent and were stuck in the middle of an angry hostile population. But the printing press ensured that the resurgence in the language would be more widespread later.

I’ll also have to look this up and see if there’s any trace of it now and try to grasp their reasoning, because of course one of the events creating an army of dispossessed who were desperate enough to live in Victorian slum conditions on factory time was enclosure. The factory owners would have had to find or create desperately poor and powerless working class somehow.

Exactly which time period are you waffling about? Because for two- three hundreds of years after the Conquest there were still problems between Norman’s and Anglo Saxons. I’m not saying g the two languages did not exist at the same time, merely that English was suppressed, as it was the tongue of the filthy pleb conquered, not the new superior elite. Personally, btw, I couldn’t give a toss about which ideas are ‘fashionable’, although I remember that apologists for the Norman conquest became very fashionable along with neoliberalism, Blair and the rebirth of propaganda.

Anyone can look up when the printing press was invented.

When I went round Notre Dame, back in the 90s, the tour guide spoke a single stream of English, French, German, Italian and Spanish.

He would "commence parler en Deustch und cambio a espanol to conclude"

Weirdly it seemed to make sense.

Either that or it was some sort of immersive Eurovision experience.

Because of Anne Boleyn

(Btw, if you want a quick illustration of language mixing in legal documents, google 'testamenta eboracensis' and look at wills proved in York. You will consistently find people writing wills in mixtures of English, French and Latin. It is totally normal to do this.)

No, they did coexist. Try reading something like 'The French of England' (Jocelyn Wogan-Browne). Or even her earlier 'The Idea of the Vernacular'. Ardis Butterfield's 'The Familiar Enemy' is also good on English/French culture. I did my PhD on language relations in medieval England; I'm absoluterly not wrong.

I don't for one minute believe that England had a single 'identity' to be riven, either. Englishness (and Welshness, and Cornishness, and so on) meant different things to different people, as they still do. But that doesn't map neatly onto what happened in 1066.

There wasn't an 'explosion' of writing in the Tudor period. The changes are subtle and complex; manuscript and print coexist for a very long period. People are often surprised, for example, by the fact that manuscript copies of the Wycliffite Bible are quite numerous, whereas later printed editions of Coverdale and Tyndale are less so - it's not the case that suddenly, printing happened and book production skyrocketed.

Honestly, this stuff has been being discussed for at least 20 years if not 40; it is disconcerting how people cling on to old ideas.

We covered all of those and more by the time I took my History GCSE.

Modern Capitalism ... The Romans had markets and economics and industry

Many years ago, the excellent The Long View on Radio 4 did a programme on the Enclosures and I was surprised and disappointed to learn that things would not have been much different now, if they hadn’t taken place. I don’t know enough to disagree and perhaps current historical thinking would have a different view, but the historians on the programme had no doubt

Capitalism started with Enclosure, and without the thousands of dispossessed or flooding into urban areas caused by Enclosure there wouldn’t have been enough desperate people to put up with 14 hour days for 6 days a week under factory time. And Enclosure started under the Tudors, was given a boost by the Dissolution. When I said that time was a time of huge economic change I was referring to the wholesale shift to viewing land as a commodity for buying and selling.

Bloody good short summary of Enclosure and its economic impacts (ed, but not on women particularly) https://thelandmagazine.org.uk/articles/short-history-enclosure-britain

It also, at least to me, draws clear parallels with our own time. Neoliberalism = Neo- liberalism, and not for nothing did the last Tory government reference Henry VIII laws.

That too fits in with the Kell theory - Mary was his mistress comparatively early on, certainly before her younger sister came to court.

We know about at least 2 others of his offspring who lived to a fair age, though of course Mary and Elizabeth were both girls (unless you believe the recent theory that Elizabeth was really a man???). And the death rate for children back then was pretty high when you consider that Henry's brother Arthur died young of illness at a similar age to his son Edward.

But in general I do agree that Henry himself was the most probable likely cause of much of his wives' issues with bearing live healthy children - with the number of mistresses he had as well as wives you'd expect there to be a fair few byblows hanging around, certainly more than we know about.

Both her children could have been, I thought... she was Henry's mistress while married to William Carey so either could be their father/s. Although if she had two healthy children who lived to adulthood, perhaps they weren't Henry's.

There was also speculation that Anne Boleyn's sister Mary's first son may well have been Henry's.

We also have to take into consideration that fit as he was (when young), Henry did have a penchant for over indulgence in everything he did which could have had an impact on fertility. Plenty of lead poisoning those days what with pewter being a common metal used to make eating and drinking vessels, and some of their more "interesting" ideas about medication and health

The kell theory accounts for her son, as he was the first child she had by Henry. Women who have a kell positive partner, and are kell negative, have issues with subsequent pregnancy. Mary was not Catherine's first pregnancy, but may have had the negative gene and so survived. It's all theory anyway as we won't be digging them all up to do genetic sequencing, but fun to theorise.

Henry and all six of his wives were all cousins; they were all descendants of Edward I. That might explain it too. Especially since he didn't have a problem with Bessie Blount.

Pretty sure they have no idea of Magna Carta, precious little understanding of democracy. I discovered in trying to talk about it they know nothing about the history of education in this country and have no understanding of women's fight for their rights.

Makes it easier to take them away again.

Yes, I find this theory fascinating too. Far more likely that the "problem" was with Henry than with every woman he ever met.

If my kid learnt about anything other than slavery and 2 world wars (heavy emphasis on the second one and the creation of the NHS got a little look in there) there was precious little evidence of it. There was a bit about Romans, Greeks and Victorians at primary but who remembers much of what they did at primary?

Pretty sure they have no idea of Magna Carta, precious little understanding of democracy. I discovered in trying to talk about it they know nothing about the history of education in this country and have no understanding of women's fight for their rights.

The Tudors, the printing press and the advent of realistic portraits all came about at a similar time. It's a lot easier to to reproduce things in modern times when there are sources easily available. The saxons simply weren't writing as much down, or learning to read it. There is always mileage in being the first and they were the first to be written about in such depth. Everyone knows Neil Armstrong as the first on the moon, but not the Alan's that followed.

We don't know so much about women's lives as history was overwhelmingly written by men. But also particular men. Religious ones that weren't allowed to mix with women and ones that worked for the king. I imagine the monks would have had a lot to say about the dissolution of the monasteries if they had been allowed. The help they gave the poor that disappeared overnight must have been devastating, all so Henry could power grab.