Hello and welcome back to another new episode on the historic Royal Palaces podcast, the podcast that tells the histories and stories from our six palaces.

For this week's episode, we're bringing you another talk from our archives.

We all know Henry VIII was an extravagant king, but in this talk we hear how he carried that extravagance to a new level

with temporary palaces that travelled with him to events such as the field of cloth of gold.

In part two today, we'll hear from curator Charles Varys, who will talk to us a bit more about Tudor Royal Tense,

and particularly the experimental archaeology project that took place a few years ago at historic royal palaces.

The Portable Palace's project, as its title affirms, is concerned with two major types of

effemoral structure, royal tents and timber lodgings.

Now, we've just heard from Olden about the

more robust and lesser known of these structures. I would like to now consider their more familiar

counterparts, namely tents. Now, a short stroll around Hampton Court Palace, which I think you're

going to get a chance to do on your lunch break, we'll bring you face to face with a number of depictions of tents from the Royal Collection,

like this one that we saw earlier.

But these are just the tip of a rather fine iceberg.

Tents appear to have been a ubiquitous feature of medieval and Renaissance life, which emerged through a range of sources.

They appear like a slim but vibrant scene throughout romance stories, chronicles, illuminated manuscript, works of art, and a plethora of administrative documents.

Their popularity was not surprising. Tents were multifunctional,

being symbolic, as well as practical and decorative. On the one hand, they were incredibly

practical and well suited to the peripatetic, warlike and dramatic characteristics of England's

medieval and Renaissance kings. They added theatre to public display and provided

temporary setting for the statecraft in diverse surroundings. What's more, their martial associations,

as we've just heard, made them useful reminders of the military nature of kingship. Tents could

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