Plague, Prayer and Running Away: How Tudor Londoners Survived the Epidemics
About this episode
The episode explores how Tudor Londoners coped with the plague during the epidemics of the 16th century.
London, summer 1563. The city sounds wrong. The market stalls have gaps. And then you notice the door across the street — a blue cross painted on it, and a man standing outside who wasn't there yesterday. The plague is back. Today we're going street level into the Tudor plague years. What it actually felt like to live in London when the epidemics hit, what ordinary people did to survive, and three specific summers — 1563, 1593, and 1603 — that each killed somewhere between one in eight and one in three Londoners. We also get into what the Tudor government actually did about it (more sophisticated than you'd think), the plague doctors and their beaked masks, the quacks selling dried toads and unicorn horn, and the parish searchers — older women whose job was to examine bodies and determine cause of death, and who are almost entirely invisible in the historical record. Oh, and Elizabeth I had a gallows erected at Windsor to hang anyone who followed her from London. Very her. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
People in this episode
Host: Heather Teysko
Topics covered
- Tudor London
- plague
- epidemics
- survival
- historical record
Keywords
- Tudor
- plague
- London
- epidemics
- survival
- Elizabeth I
- historical record
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: Tudor government, plague doctors, parish searchers
Places: London
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- The Tudor Women Who Controlled Access to the Queen (And Paid the Price)
- The Tudor Legal Loophole That Gave Women Their Lives Back
- The Tudor Woman Who Ran the Household Pharmacy (And Accidentally Poisoned Everyone)
- She Told Two Kings No and Kept Her Castle (And They Had to Wait Until She Died)
- Patriotism in Tudor England: How a Nation Learned to Love Itself
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