Want to walk the halls of Anne Boleyn's childhood home, or explore the castles that made up Henry the 8th's English stronghold.

With a subscription to History Hit, you can dive into our Tudor past alongside the world's leaving historians and archaeologists.

You also unlock hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a brand new release

every single week.

Covering everything from the ancient world to World War II.

Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe.

Hello, I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb and welcome welcome to Not Just the Tudors from History Hit,

the podcasts in which we explore everything from Anne Boleyn to the Aztecs,

from Holbein to the Huguenots, from Shakespeare to Samarise,

relieved by regular doses of murder, espionage and witchcraft.

Not in other words, just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors.

If you imagine Tudor Island only in terms of dramatic rebellions or famous clashes, moments when the whole country seemed to erupt in conflict, you're not alone.

But those big events only tell part of the story. Much of the Tudor takeover, if we want to call it that,

happened more quietly through everyday pressure and steady intrusion into local life. That's the world we're exploring today. Now, for anyone less familiar with this period, it's worth stepping

back for a moment. When the Tudors came to power in 1485, English authority in Ireland was limited to a small region around Dublin known as the Paleo. Beyond that, most of the island was governed by powerful Gaelic lords or old English families who operated with considerable independence. Over the next century, however, Tudor monarchs from Henry V to to Elizabeth I attempted to extend royal control across the entire island. They introduced new laws,

planted English settlers, built garrisons, and increasingly relied on military force to break local power structures.

Our guest today, Dr David Edwards of University College Cork, is one of the leading historians of Early Modern Ireland. His work invites us to shift our focus away from the headline rebellions and look instead at how the Tudor government actually operated on the ground and how it managed to extend its authority into places it had never controlled before.

And a key part of that story is the widespread use of martial law.

In England, martial law was meant to be rare, used only in emergencies.

But in Ireland, it became something very different, a regular tool of government.

It allowed small groups of officers to act with sweeping powers, often without

close oversight, and often in ways that blurred the line between enforcing order and exploiting the

...