Hello and welcome to the Renaissance English History Podcast, a part of the Agora Podcast Network and the original Tudor history podcast telling stories of

Tudor England since 2009. I am 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, are a place

in the universe, and being deeply in touch with our own humanity. This is episode

255, maybe 254, I don't know, I've lost count. But in it, we are going to talk about the idea

of privacy in Tudor England, which is not the same as ours if it existed at all.

I first thought about doing this episode.

I don't know, a week or so ago was reading BBC History Magazine,

and there was an article in there on the history of toilets and toilet usage and all kinds of fun things like

that. But they talked about the communal toilets that the Romans had and existed all the way up

through the Tudor period. And then I thought, oh yeah, you know, the idea of like communal

bathrooming when you're just sitting there having a nice gossip with your buddies doing your business.

I thought that might be a fun thing to talk about. I don't know. But then I thought I probably couldn't make an entire episode out of communal bathrooms, as fun as that might be.

But I thought we could then work it into an episode on the idea of privacy.

And actually, I did talk about this a little bit about, I don't know, six or seven years ago,

I was doing a series on the Tudor Home

Tour. And I talked about throughout the 16th century, we see this idea of privacy start to

change and where once we had everyone sleeping around the central fire in the Great Hall,

the chimney made it possible to heat different rooms at different

levels without having to have just one fire in the middle of a great hall and how the chimney

actually helped to contribute to the rise of the idea of privacy.

So I thought, let's just take that and run with it and make an episode

...