Tudor Laundresses: Three Very Different Lives Doing the Dirtiest Job at Court

About this episode

This episode explores the lives of three Tudor laundresses and their essential yet overlooked work in maintaining cleanliness at court.

What did it actually take to keep Tudor England clean? Before dawn, before the court woke up, before Henry VIII put on his famous doublet, someone was already up to her elbows in lye, urine, and other people's laundry. That someone was the Tudor laundress, and her story is one I have been wanting to tell for a long time. In this episode we follow three very different women doing the same essential work: the royal laundress at Hampton Court, who washed the king's most intimate linen and had to pretend she knew absolutely nothing about what those sheets revealed; the household laundress in a noble family, including the remarkable story of Bess Holland, who went from washer in the nursery to mistress of the Duke of Norfolk; and the independent washerwoman working on her own, building a business in a world that viewed her very existence with suspicion. Plus: the Tudor hygiene experiment that will completely change how you think about cleanliness, the Flemish refugee who arrived in London and built an empire out of a bucket of starch, and why the most fashionable accessory in Elizabethan England was basically a laundress's worst nightmare. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit…

People in this episode

Host: Heather Teysko

Topics covered

• Tudor history
• laundresses
• royal court
• hygiene
• women's work
• social status
• cleanliness

Keywords

• Tudor laundresses
• Henry VIII
• Hampton Court
• Bess Holland
• laundry
• hygiene
• Elizabethan fashion
• women's history
• social mobility
• cleaning

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Tudor England

Places: Hampton Court, London, Elizabethan England

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