Hello and welcome to Talking Tudors, a fortnightly podcast about the ever-fascinating Tudor dynasty.

My name is Natalie Gruniger and I'll be your host and guide on this journey through 16th century England.

Are you ready to step through the veil of time into the dazzling and dangerous world of the Tudor court?

Without further ado, it's time to talk Tudors.

Hello, everyone.

Welcome back to another episode of Talking Tudors.

I'm your host, Natalie Gruniger.

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Now onto today's episode, I'm thrilled to welcome Professor Stephen Gunn to the show to talk about accidental deaths in Tudor England.

Stephen is fellow and tutor in history at Merton College, Oxford, and professor of early modern history.

He teaches and researches the history of later medieval and early modern Britain and Europe.

His books include Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, Henry VII's New Men and the Making of Tudor England, and An Accidental History of Tudor England, From Daily Life to Sun and Death.

He speaks regularly to historical association branches and similar groups, and has contributed to radio and TV programs such as In Our Time, Great Lives, Time Team, and CUNCOM Britain.

He is currently researching life and death in Tudor prisons and the political cultures of 16th century European aristocracies.

Let's dive straight into our conversation.

Welcome to Talking Tudors, Stephen.

How are you?

I'm very well, thank you.

How are you?

I'm well, thank you.

Thank you so much.

It would be great if you would just say hello to our listeners and our viewers and just tell us a little bit about you and your background.

Well, hello, everybody.

I teach British and European history between about 1300 and 1700 here at Merton College in Oxford.

My research has been mostly about different aspects of 15th and 16th century England on politics and government and international relations and war, with some work on the Netherlands and other parts of Europe as well.

And most recently, I've been working on everyday life and accidental death in 16th century England, which I think is what we're here to talk about this evening.

Absolutely.

We certainly are.

So you are the principal investigator, I believe, for that research project.

Can you tell us a little bit about it and also what its aims are?

The aim of the project was to use coroner's inquests, investigations held when people died suddenly or unexpectedly or violently, to look at accidental death.

Historians had used them in the past to look at murder and to look at suicide, but they hadn't used them so much to look at accidents.

But in fact, as I hope we can show, accidents tell you an awful lot about what people are doing all day.

and we had about 9,000 coroner's inquests from 16th century England covering almost the whole country.

They don't cover every part because some places had different administrative systems, but pretty wide ranging from the far north down to the far southwest and roughly in proportion to the number of people living in each area of the country.

So a lot of accidents in Yorkshire where there are a lot of people, fewer accidents in more thinly populated places like say Worcestershire or Oxfordshire at the time.

Okay.

And so could you tell us a little bit more about these actual documents, how they were drawn up, sort of when they were drawn up, and what information they do indeed record?

If someone died suddenly or violently, particularly if there was any chance it was a murder or a suicide, then the local officials, local residents would call him the coroner.

There were two to four probably coroners per county, depending on the size of the county.

The coroner would turn up.

People who have done very detailed work on the administrative system have shown that some coroners turned up very fast and other coroners turned up rather more slowly if they had other things they thought were more important to do.

In theory, the courts was just meant to be left there on the ground until they arrived.

And you do get some coroners who tell people off locally for burying people before they get there.

Coroner turned up, they would summon a jury of local men, between 12 and 24 men.

And we've tried to look at who the jurors were, comparing the lists of jurors with lists from taxation records.

And what you can show is, in a sense, what you'd expect.

They are mostly adult men, maybe fathers, heads of families when possible, and from the middle of society.

So gentlemen from the top of society didn't really sit very often, occasionally in very controversial cases.

Labourers and household servants from the bottom of society didn't sit very much, although labourers more than servants, I think, because just as with 17th century debates about who might have the vote in parliamentary elections, people thought servants weren't really independent because they were just at someone else's beck and call, whereas labourers might be head of a household, so you certainly get labourers sitting.

Most jurors would be husbandmen, small farmers, yeomen, big farmers, rural or urban craftsmen.

So the jury would come together and their role was to find out what happened.

And they could indeed ask to go away for.

A week or two weeks or something to make inquiries.

There are certainly signs that they investigated the sites of the accident because they will sometimes talk about how a particular riverbank was very slippery or a particular piece of water was not well fenced off.

And they would explain as best they could how the person dead in front of them had come to be dead.

And rather gruesomely, but also usefully, they would describe the wounds on the body because obviously you needed to describe that the evidence you saw on the body matched the account that you were making of what had happened to someone.

So if you said, well, nobody killed them, a tree fell on their head, you would then say a tree fell on their head and their skull was broken through to their brain and that's why they died.

So we get these quite detailed descriptions of exactly what injury the person had sustained.

And in a way, reassuringly, occasionally the jurors would say, we honestly can't work out what happened.

They would say, well, this person was found in the river.

There were no marks of any violence on them.

Their body had turned white, so they'd also been in the water some time, but exactly where they fell in or how they fell in, we honestly don't know.

And so what does all this information, sounds like a lot of information, actually tell us about everyday life in this period?

Well, because people had accidents doing so many different things.

It actually tells you about a lot of areas of everyday life.

If you think about it, most of the sources we use for looking at Tudor history, when they're about people who aren't famous people, they tend to be about economic transactions.

It's people being paid for doing work, or people being regulated in the way that they bought and sold things in a market, or people participating in very specific activities or institutions, giving money towards parish church or something like that, paying poor relief, being in receipt of poor relief.

So these are all things generated by particular institutions and particular kinds of social relationship.

Whereas.

Getting killed in an accident can happen to anybody anywhere.

So we have lots of people traveling because they fall off bridges or they get kicked by horses.

We have lots of people working in lots of different kinds of works, some of which maybe we can talk about later on.

We have lots of people at home, sometimes in very basic things like their house collapses on them.

And so you start to realize once you think about it, things that make sense, but things that maybe you wouldn't have thought of before you start looking at these records.

For example, far fewer people seem to die in house fires than house collapses because timber-framed houses burn down quite easily, but they burn down comparatively slowly so you can get out.

Whereas obviously, if a timber-framed house just collapses on you, then it's collapsed on you and you're trapped underneath it.

So all sorts of areas of people's lives really come out and all sorts of people because a large number of these accidents happen to children.

So people are certainly taking note of children being killed in accidents.

A significant proportion, though a minority of them happen to women, possibly because women weren't doing the same kinds of work that exposed men to danger, although women are subject to all kinds of dangers in and around the home.

And people who are very high in society have accidents.

They fall off horses.

They're in houses that fall in or burn down.

They fall downstairs in houses.

And people ride down at the bottom of society.

So we have some people where the jurors say, well, we don't know who this person was.

They were just a wandering poor person who fell in the river or fell off the cliff and that's all we can really say.

Yeah, and so after sort of looking at all these different documents and sources, what would you say are some of the most common hazards in this period and what insights might that offer us as well?

Work with animals is very prominent in a way, as you'd expect.

People are traveling either on foot or riding or in carts, and many cart accidents involve misbehavior on the part of the horses or oxen drawing the cart.

People are obviously working with animals in agriculture as well, milking cows.

They have pigs around the house, washing sheep.

There's a rather strange statistic that if you're killed in an accident involving an animal and more than one person is killed, the animal's most likely to be a sheep because people take sheep into fast-flowing rivers to wash them before they shear the wool off.

And if you're washing a sheep, the sheep gets panicky, you get knocked over in the fast-flowing river, other people working with you will come and try and help you.

So sometimes two, three, four people drown in those circumstances.

Whereas if one person is just kicked by a horse, that's just one person being kicked by a horse.

So horses kill far more people than sheep do, but sheep cause far more people in multiple accidents to die.

So animals are important.

Open water, about 40% of these are drownings.

And it's just a reminder that there's open water everywhere, a lot of drainage, ditches and streams, as well as big rivers, a lot of ponds in the landscape, and very easy to fall in and very hard to get out, partly because not that many people can swim, but also because their clothing is made of thick woolen cloth on the outside and wool or linen underclothing, which means that they absorb water very, very fast when they fall in, and that seems to make it hard for people to get out of water once they fall into it.

Yes, I know.

If you've ever fallen into a pool fully dressed, you can suddenly get a sense of how difficult that must have been.

And so did you find there were any patterns with the accidental deaths in terms of, you know, class, gender, any sort of thing like that?

And also, you know, could they be seasonal, the accidents, I suppose?

All of those are true.

So obviously certain kinds of work that, for example, agricultural labourers did were dangerous in a way that gentlemen and gentlewomen just wouldn't have done them.

Conversely, lots and lots of people are riding horses.

Rich people are riding expensive horses and poor people are riding cheap horses, but you can fall off an expensive horse just like you can fall off a cheap horse.

So we have a judge who falls off a very expensive horse and hits his head on a stone.

Just as we have people, for example, who don't own a horse, but have been riding the plow horse back from the field after plowing, and then they fall off the plow horse.

So there are varieties of the same kinds of accidents that happen to people at different social levels.

In terms of gender, the really big distinction is water fetching, because very large numbers of women drown fetching water.

And you can work out what proportion of women's deaths at different ages are fetching water.

And the highest proportion is young girls between about seven and 14.

Or young women between 14 and 21, classic age for household servants.

And it looks as though, A, they may be fetching an awful lot of water.

And unlike older married women, they're not doing such a wide variety of different jobs.

They're not taking food to market so much.

They're not looking after children so much.

Well, there are obviously some young household told them to be looking after the children in the household.

But also, it may be particularly with the young girls that they don't have the strength.

Sometimes it says that the girl filled the bucket and then she overbalanced because the bucket was so heavy once she'd filled it.

So fetching water is really lethal for women.

And it's interesting, if you look at books on women's work in early modern England, that often they don't really mention fetching water because it's just so obvious, I think, to contemporaries that that's what you do, that just as we don't say, what did I do today?

Well, I turned the tap on several times.

In the same way, gentlewomen don't write in their diaries, well, my maids fetched several buckets of water today, because obviously their maids fetched several buckets of water.

So that would be a nice example of gendered things.

Similarly, digging is almost entirely male.

Digging both in industrial mining situations, so digging for coal or digging for lead ore or iron ore, but also digging in marl pits for marl to change the acidity of the soil, which seems to be a very widespread thing in certain areas of the country where you have marl, which is sort of chalky accretions, limestone accretions in the soil that you can dig up and spread on the soil to make it less acid.

Those pits collapse a lot, and they collapse for reasons.

Once you think about it, we can all relate to.

Because after all, if you have a choice between digging out a whole new pit where you've got to get all the soil and plants and stuff off the top, or going into a pit other people have already dug and just scraping away a bit more under the overhang, it just looks so obvious that you can probably get away with scraping a bit more under the overhang.

Then lots of people do that, and sooner or later, the overhanging part collapses on them.

So that would be classic men's work.

There are also big distinctions by age, because up to about the age of seven children are not working very much very occasionally they're keeping an eye on animals and things so mostly their accidents are play accidents and there are lots of young children in the population because the population is rising in the 16th century and death rates for the young are quite high maybe as many as half of under fives die so there are just lots of small children around and they're playing out on the street and being run over by carts and kicked by horses and things like that.

And also in and around the home, they are falling into large buckets of water.

They're running into vats of boiled brewing mash for brewing ale.

And so there are a lot of hazards in the home that children are exposed to.

And obviously those things adults aren't exposed to, but then some of the work adults are doing with carts or with things like felling trees.

Those are really dangerous for adults.

It does sound like a dangerous time.

It's confirming the fact that I would like to travel back just to look, but not to participate because there's a lot going on, certainly.

And so you've obviously spent a great deal of time researching this period.

Was there anything that you came across that surprised you, a discovery perhaps, or one of the reports that was particularly surprising for you?

There were things that we were surprised to be able to work out.

So one of those is because for the musters of the militia in Gloucestershire in the early 17th century, there's a remarkable list of all the adult men in Gloucestershire ready to serve in the militia telling you what their occupations are.

So historians have often used this to look at the proportion of people doing different occupations in the population.

If you compare that with the proportion of accident victims, you realize that some jobs are just very dangerous in the 16th century.

And the thing that really sticks out is working in mills, water mills and windmills.

Because they have comparatively fast-moving machinery compared with anything else that's there in the 16th century.

And it's machinery made of wood, so you have to grease it to keep it working well.

And the temptation not to stop it all running while you grease it and thereby lose a good blowing wind for turning your mill or a good flow of water for turning your mill seems to have been overwhelming.

So lots of people are trying to grease the machinery while it's going around and their clothes get caught or their hair gets caught and they get dragged in to the machine.

So millers have a very fortunately high death rate.

And the safe job appears to be the textile industry.

So weaving cloth.

Lots of weavers get killed, but they get killed falling into rivers, being kicked by horses, playing football, all kinds of other ways of getting killed.

They don't get killed weaving.

So it looks as though it's actually very difficult to kill yourself weaving in the 16th century.

So that sort of comparison is interesting.

And then There are accidents which are just remarkable because they're unique and they shed light on things you would never have expected.

So we have a small boy in London.

Who's run over by a cart.

Nothing surprising about that.

But the reason he was run over by the cart was that the horse drawing the cart suddenly bolted when it saw what was being done to advertise a bear baiting show, which was to lead a bear and a bull through the streets near London by Charing Cross, banging a big drum to attract people's attention so they would know that this bear baiting show was being advertised.

And not surprising, the horse rather took panic at the sight of the bear and the bull and the sound of the very loud drum.

And that was what caused the accident.

And so there are numbers of other either remarkably unusual or freakish accidents like that.

You've got a poor lady who's sitting by the fire warming herself and the bacon hanging up to smoke in the chimney falls off and lands on top of her.

So there are very, very strange things like that.

Somebody who falls into the fire when he's had too much to drink and he's to dance on one leg in the kitchen.

And then we have someone else who equally kills himself dancing in the kitchen, but it's because he spins around too much and impales himself on the roasting spit.

There are some very, very strange accidents out there.

But again, they tell us something about what was going on in 16th century England, even if it wasn't going on as much as people falling in rivers or being kicked by horses or playing football or falling out of fruit trees.

There are some very, you asked earlier about seasonal accidents.

The fruit harvest is dangerous.

Fruit trees kill more people than guns in these accidents.

And the hay and corn harvest, the wheat and barley harvests, are also dangerous because sides are very sharp.

And you have lots of carting accidents, trying to drive carts over very bumpy fields and in and out of field gates and trying to load them in a hurry before it rains.

Because people know the weather is unpredictable.

You've got to load up fast if you can.

Lots of people fall off carts trying to tie the load on when the rope breaks because they're pulling it too hard.

So there are just lots of different.

Ordinary bits of everyday life that you can suddenly shed light on using this, as well as these very bizarre things that just make you stop and think, my goodness.

Absolutely.

And I have to ask you about the football as a football fan.

So what is going on at this point that football is so dangerous?

So there are a number of problems with 16th century football.

There aren't any pitches.

So people are just playing on fields.

So people will fall over and hit their head on a stone or impale themselves on a tree stump or things like that.

There aren't really many rules.

It appears to be quite like American football, but without all the padding.

So you can tackle more or less anybody that you feel like.

And we have one man who ends up dead himself, which is probably why the jurors included the account.

But they say, as he ran onto the pitch, he shouted, let us make work for the surgeon.

So he was obviously in there for a bit of a punch up and got what was coming to him.

The other key thing is that people play with their knives still in their belts.

And to begin with, you think, how ridiculous, why on earth did they not take their knives off before they started playing?

But then you think, well, there isn't really a pitch, you're just playing in the fields between two villages.

There's nowhere obvious to leave your knife.

And if everybody leaves their knives in a pile, quite a lot of 16th century knives look like quite a lot of other 16th century knives.

Then you go back for your knife and somebody else has picked up your knife and you say, that's my knife.

And he says, no, it isn't.

Do you want to make an issue of it?

These things can be quite difficult.

And if you go away from the match with no knife, you can't have any lunch because you've got no way of cutting out your food.

So suddenly playing with a knife in your belt starts to make more sense.

But it doesn't mean that lots of people fall over and stab themselves in the leg or they tackle somebody else and stab them in the leg.

So, once you start to think about 16th century football, you can start to see why it's dangerous.

And the alternative sports are, in a way, just as bad.

They haven't yet invented cricket in the 16th century, or they're in process of inventing cricket in the 16th century.

So, the summer sport is throwing the hammer, but it doesn't have the safety case that they now have in the Olympics.

So, you're throwing the hammer, but if people get up and run in front of you at the wrong moment, then they get hit on the head by the sledgehammer that you're throwing.

So there are lots of sports.

Some young men, it seems, turn to bell ringing as a sort of aggressive, competitive kind of sport, make a lot of noise ringing bells.

But then there are lots of bell ringing accidents where ropes get caught around people, pull them up in the air and drop them head first on the stone floor of the church.

So almost whatever you try in the 16th century, something can go wrong.

But then stories in newspapers today suggest that almost anything you try now, something can go wrong.

In some ways, we're safer.

And in other ways, maybe we've got no more sense than they had.

Absolutely.

It's so fascinating, the information you can get from these seemingly kind of might look a little bit boring on the surface, these sorts of documents, but they do provide a lot of information.

I have to ask, so obviously, you know, you worked with all these documents.

Were there any common challenges that you found associated with working with coroner's reports from this period?

There are different sorts of challenges.

There are practical challenges in that some of them are quite badly damaged, so they're quite hard to read, and some are missing.

So, there are coroner's inquests that we know would have been heard, but the files just don't survive anymore.

So we have a few gaps like that.

So there's that kind of practical challenge.

There are challenges in that often the clerks, so most of the reports are written down in Latin, but sometimes the clerk didn't know the right Latin word for things.

So sometimes they're quite vague.

Other times, more helpfully in a way, they will use a very vague Latin expression and then just put in the English expression that the jurors have used.

So they will say, person was picking flowers, called, and then they'll say primroses or marigolds because they clearly think, well, what on earth is the Latin for a primrose?

Who knows?

I'll just say flowers, called, and then put in the English word.

So that's useful.

But occasionally they use words that you really don't know what they are.

We have a cart that had a bull clothes hide on it, and we've still got no idea what a bull clothes hide was.

So there are things like that.

There are also, I suppose, emotional challenges in a way, because some of these accidents, particularly things happening to small children, are really very upsetting.

And you have to think, well, that's very upsetting.

But in a way, you're paying respect to the people to whom they happened by writing about it and bringing them back to people's memory, even if what you're writing about is something that must have been absolutely horrific at the time.

And there are people who run over their own children with their cart.

There are mothers who return to find that their baby's being attacked by a pig.

It's horrible, horrible things.

But they're part of life then.

And to think properly about what life was like, we have to take those things into account as well.

Yeah, absolutely.

And I imagine that our listeners are eager to find out more.

So, where can they go if they'd like to learn a little bit more about the project and your work as well?

Well, the obvious place for the project is the book, which came out in the summer, which is called An Accidental History of Tudor England.

We've also put all our data up on the internet.

So it's not a sophisticated interactive website or anything.

It's just an Excel spreadsheet, which is also a CSV file if people want an even simpler version.

But if people Google Tudor accidents or other search engines that are available, as people always say, Oxford Tudor accidents, then sooner or later they will find that.

That will also take us to the project website, where we used to have a discovery of the month, Colin.

We stopped having discoveries of the month since we brought the book out, but there's quite a lot of material there on the website.

What we're hoping to move on to next is to look at people who die of disease in Tudor prisons.

So we'll try and put some stuff about that up on the website as well, if we manage to get that project funded.

Well, I will add some links to those on the show notes so that people can find that easily.

And that sounds, oh, your next project sounds intriguing as well.

I look forward to hearing more about that.

Now, Stephen, just before I let you go, there's something I do when I first have guests on the show.

And this is just a quick 10 questions to get to know you a little bit better.

So because we're all book lovers here, what is a book that you're currently reading or perhaps one you've just recently read?

I'm in the middle of reading volume four out of five of Jonathan Sumption's big history of the Hundred Years' War, partly because I teach later medieval British history as well as early modern British history.

So Hundred Years' War is one of the things I'm teaching at the moment.

And it is a really big, sweeping history of the Hundred Years' War and viewed very much from the French end as well as the English end and bringing in Scotland and the Iberian Peninsula and so on.

And anywhere where the Hundred Years' War went on, he will take you.

So it's a long read, but I would recommend that to me.

And what about a historic site, you obviously teaching in a beautiful area that you like to visit, you find inspiring?

I used to teach at the University of Newcastle, and I'm very fond of Dunstanborough Castle, which is on the coast in Northumberland.

It's one of the places Margaret of Anjou went when she was on her travels around the north of England in the Walls of the Roses.

And you can't drive to it.

You have to park in a village nearby and walk along the coast to it.

There are eider ducks in the sea off the castle very often.

And so as bleak, ruined castles go, but bleak, ruined castles within reasonably good reach of somewhere you can get a cup of tea and buy some kippers and so on, it's a very good place.

So I'd recommend that.

Yeah, that does sound lovely.

Very atmospheric.

I'll have to look that one up.

And so what do you like to do to relax and just unwind?

I quite enjoy playing table tennis when I get the chance.

What about a new skill?

If you had some time to learn a new skill?

What might that be?

I enjoy languages.

It would need a lot of time, but I suppose a difficult language, a language that's a distance from languages I've already learned, may be.

Maybe European languages are not like other European languages, like Finnish or Hungarian, or maybe Mandarin, but I'm not sure.

I probably haven't got a long enough life left to learn Mandarin.

But the only time I went to China, I tried to teach myself to say, I don't understand in Mandarin, because that was the expression I was most likely to need.

And now I'm curious.

So what languages do you speak, Stephen?

Well, I suppose I speak English, French, and German because I do French and German at school.

And then I read Dutch because I did a project.

I've done work on the Netherlands quite a lot.

I probably read French better than I read German and speak German better than I speak French, like a lot of English people.

That's impressive that you're doing it.

I'm currently studying Latin, I have to say.

It's complicated, but beautiful, beautiful though.

I think, like a lot of historians, my Latin is fine for what I use it for, but it's just as soon as I try and use it for anything else.

So, all these legal records and chorus ingress for its day, and the said John fell off the said horse into the said river, that's fine.

Once you get 16th century diplomats who are channeling Cicero in a way in which they describe the political situation, I get very lost very quickly.

Yeah, it's very different, isn't it?

Absolutely.

And what about a travel destination, maybe one that you haven't visited that's on your bucket list?

I've always liked the idea, I've never been, liked the idea of going to Istanbul just because of the way that different overlapping civilizations are there.

I haven't got around to it yet.

Maybe one day I will.

That's one that's on my list as well.

And so when you were a child, Stephen, what did you hope to become when you were older?

Did you have any sort of dream jobs in mind?

I think I always found the ideas in science subjects very interesting, particularly paleontology, fossils, but also some of the ideas in physics and things like that.

But my maths hit a ceiling really when I was about 16 or 17.

I found not that I couldn't practically do what I had to do with things like calculus, but I stopped understanding what was happening.

Whereas with things like languages, I still understood what was happening and thought, oh, well, if you change that around like that, it would work like that, wouldn't it?

So, one of my daughters studied maths and she's tried endlessly to draw graphs and say, no, look, this is a better way to understand calculus, but I still haven't quite got my head around what's happening when you integrate something.

No doubt anybody viewing this will think, oh my goodness, she knows, poor old fool.

Anyway, but yes, and I'm still very intrigued by it, but I'm fortunate to teach in an environment where I have lunch with scientists every day.

So, to some extent, you get some idea what they're up to, which is nice.

And we do have a lot of listeners here on Talking Tutors that would like to become historians, hope to become historians.

Do you have any sort of top tips for them?

In terms of sort of.

Professional skills for historians.

I think thinking all the time about what you can and can't do with different kinds of historical sources is actually a very useful thing.

We're just about to do admissions interviews here for students for next year and actually getting people talking about how you can use almost anything that they seem to be interested in, whether it's science fiction films or newspapers or a local big house or whatever it is, how you can use that as evidence to think about history and to reconstruct the past.

I think that's just a very useful skill for people to develop and to try out on lots of different things.

And the very last question that I ask all my guests is for the Tudor takeaway.

So this is something for our listeners to go off and explore after the episode.

Sometimes people give websites, you know, films to watch, songs to listen to.

Do you have a takeaway for us?

I think I would send people, not necessarily because it's maybe a long way away from people to the museum, but at least to the website for the Mary Rose, because I think the Mary Rose has been one of the great discoveries of my lifetime as a historian.

I think it was being raised probably when I was a graduate student.

And so the steady uncovering of life on board the ship in all its different aspects, and the amazing variety of objects that they've managed to recover, and the range of people on the ship that you can think about using all those different objects.

All the equipment for the barber-surgeon is one of the famous bits of it.

But there are all sorts of different things coming up on the Mary Rose, which the people looking after the Mary Rose are able to use to think about lots of different areas of Tudor life, right down to the level of the investigation of the bones from the sailors, which shows that many of them had actually grown up in the Mediterranean or elsewhere.

So there were possibly people being drafted off ships that had come into England from other places, and they were just being press-ganged effectively to come and serve on Henry VIII's ships.

So there's an enormous range of new things that we're finding out from the Mary Rose, and I think I would point people towards that.

What a wonderful takeaway.

Yes, I haven't been since the refurbishment.

It's been a long time, actually, so I do need to get there again.

And Stephen, thank you so much for taking the time to talk Tudors with us.

It's been wonderful to learn a little bit more about your work.

Well, you're very welcome.

Well, that brings us to the end of this episode of Talking Tudors.

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