Why so much of the Tudors?

[HenriettatheChicken]

Just that really. Why so much about the Tudors, particularly Henry VIII? It’s been done again and again and again and we never seem to tire of it. What is it about that period that makes us all so fascinated?

AIBU to not tire of it, whilst accepting there are other interesting period that could be covered?

I find the later Stuarts interesting: civil war, protectorate, restoration, revolution and the union of England and Scotland, all in just over 100 years.

If you're ever in Lewes in Sussex, you can visit the house that Ann of Cleves got as part of her divorce settlement.

I agree, especially about the industrial revolution. The social impact was massive, as people moved from rural areas and cities grew, and without it capitalism wouldn't have happened.

I once heard a historian on the radio positing that it led to the development of the middle class, which weren't really a thing until people started to leave the countryside for the cities and the big factories needed a tier of management between the owners and the manual workers.

I agree with you about 4 July, but a few people in my road are organising a street party that day to celebrate 250 years of US independence

First I knew of it was when I got a flyer through my door telling me that the road was going to be closed from 11am to 7pm and asking everyone to park elsewhere.

This is precisely why DD chose Ancient History rather than History at A-level.

Loved the subject itself, but in her words "I just can't deal with Henry the bloody 8th again!"

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

(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.)

Because of Anne Boleyn

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.

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.

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.

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.