Hello, friend, welcome back to the Renaissance English History Podcast, a part of the Agora podcast network, and the original Tudor Podcast, telling stories of 16th century England since 2009.

I am your host, Heather, your resident history nerd, and the person who once got totally

sidetracked while researching something for this podcast and wound up reading a 300-year-old

recipe for cleaning your teeth with burnt rosemary ash. And honestly, it still wasn't as

weird as some of what we're going to talk about today. Because today, we are answering your questions,

or at least the questions that the internet thinks you're asking. So, picture it. I'm minding my own

business, and I was on Google, and I started to type, did the tutors have? And then I saw the auto

suggestions. And I thought, well, there's an episode. So today we are diving into all of the most

Googled tutor curiosities. Did the tutors have lice? Did they have sugar? Guns, toilets,

fireworks, pets? Some of these questions are perfectly valid.

Others are delightfully weird, but all of them tell us something fascinating about daily life in

Tudor England. This is a history grab bag full of itchy heads, stinky chamber pots,

greyhounds and ruffs, and the occasional musket.

So go get yourself a cup of coffee, or if you're feeling festive, a goblet of watered down sack,

and let's get right into it. So the first question that Google has you asking is, did the tutors have

lice? Oh yes, yes they did, and not just lice. Fleeze, bedbugs,

mites, and other unwelcome roommates. If you had skin and hair and you lived in the 16th century,

you were almost certainly hosting a few passengers. Hair lice was especially common. Most people,

including the nobility, washed infrequently by modern

standards. Instead of regular hair washing, they would comb their hair with fine-toothed combs,

sprinkle their scalps with powders or scented herbs, and pretend like they were clean.

Queen Elizabeth reportedly wore wigs in her later years.

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