How to Die in Tudor England

Renaissance English History Podcast: A Show About the Tudors

Heather Teysko

History

4.6 • 624 Ratings

🗓️ 21 January 2026

⏱️ 22 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

When we think about death in Tudor England, we usually picture executions, plague, or war. But for most people living in 16th-century England, death came much closer to home. In this episode, we explore accidental deaths recorded in coroners’ inquests: drownings while fetching water, fatal after-work swims, farm accidents, falls, fires, and moments of ordinary life that went catastrophically wrong. Drawing on recent research by historian Steven Gunn, these cases reveal what people were actually doing all day, the risks they lived with, and how unforgiving the physical world of Tudor England could be. This isn’t a story about kings or court politics. It’s about laborers, women, children, and families navigating daily work, domestic chores, and leisure in a landscape with very little margin for error. If you’ve ever wondered what Tudor life really looked like beyond the palace walls, this episode offers a stark and fascinating answer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:50.8	When we think about death in Tudor England, we tend to picture the really dramatic stuff.
0:56.8	Executions on Tower Hill, plague carts rumbling through the streets, battlefields, beheadings, bonfires, all very memorable, also not how most people actually died.
1:14.5	For the vast majority of Tudor men, women, and children,
1:21.9	death came in much more mundane ways, a slip, a fall, a bad decision made on an ordinary afternoon, a task that had been done a thousand times before and went wrong on the thousand and first.
1:30.1	So I recently read this book, An Accidental History of Tudor England by Stephen Gunn, and it's so unsettling and useful.
1:37.9	It's built not from chronicles or court gossip, but from coroner's inquest, thousands of them. Records created not to tell
1:47.1	stories, but to establish facts who died, how, where, and whether anyone was to blame. And what
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