Hello and welcome to the Renaissance English History Podcast, a part of the Agora Podcast Network.

I'm your host, Heather Tuscoe, 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 more deeply in touch with our own humanity.

This is episode 173 and it's about taking the waters or spa days as we might know them.

The show notes will be up at englandcast.com slash spa. About a year ago or so I did an episode on the

tutor bathroom during the little series on the tutor home that I did and in

that episode I talked about the decline of public baths under Henry the 8th.

Baths had been quite popular up until the early 16th century with people going there to have

parties and eat a nice meal while also getting clean.

But Henry, ever the fastidious monarch, was worried about disease spreading.

The thing was that most people,

especially men, who went to the bath houses, got more than a simple meal in a bath. And as syphilis cases began to rise in the early 16th century, they were often centered around those very same

bath houses.

So the entire bath culture got a bad wrap for several decades when it wasn't actually the fault of the water at all, but the extracurricular activities that were going on in the bathhouse.

But then under Elizabeth, you start to see a rise in people going to spa towns to take the waters.

Mary Queen of Scots was often being given permission to go, and Elizabeth's favorite, Robert

Dudley, died while en route to Baths at Buxton. So I got curious about this change because I started,

you know, to notice in letters people talking about

going to the baths later on.

And I wondered how that change started to happen.

So how do we go from this culture where Henry the 8th shuts down all bathing and bath houses

and everything to a place where the nobility and even Mary Queen of Scots is going off to take

...