First, the king's crown of gold, the border garnished with six ballases, five sapphires,

five pointed diamonds, 20 rubies, and 19 pearls.

Hello and welcome to the Renaissance English History podcast, a part of the Agora podcast network. I'm your host, Heather Tesco, and I'm a storyteller who makes history accessible

because I believe it's a pathway to understanding who we are, our place in the universe,

and being much more deeply in touch with

our own humanity. This is episode 169, and it's all about Henry VIII's inventory. I got

interested in this because in the last episode, I was talking about salt, and I was talking about the

salt seller that was in Henry's inventory. And it struck me that from time to time,

you see different things mentioned in the inventory. And so I wanted to learn more about this

particular inventory. So that's what we're going to talk about today. So Henry VIII died in

January of 1547. And in September of that year, his son Edward and his counsel, they decided to commission an inventory to be done of all of the possessions and the movable goods, the stuff that Henry had owned when he died.

Now, they did this because they specifically wanted to understand exactly how much the estate of the crown that Henry had left

was worth. People talk about how Henry VIII bankrupted the crown, and that's actually not true

because he left a lot of stuff, jewelry, plate, all of that, and we're going to talk about a little

bit of it to the crown.

And that estate then that belonged to the crown passed from monarch to monarch.

It took about 18 months to complete this inventory.

And the way they did it, they had specialists going out to all of the different palaces,

all of the different country homes that Henry had when he died.

There were a total of 55 homes that Henry had when he died. There were a total of

55 homes that Henry owned when he died. Plus, there were things like forts and ships that

officially belonged to the crown that had stuff on them. So that all had to be inventoried as well.

...