Plague, Prayer and Running Away: How Tudor Londoners Survived the Epidemics

Renaissance English History Podcast: A Show About the Tudors

Heather Teysko

History

4.6 • 624 Ratings

🗓️ 22 May 2026

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

London, summer 1563. The city sounds wrong. The market stalls have gaps. And then you notice the door across the street — a blue cross painted on it, and a man standing outside who wasn't there yesterday. The plague is back. Today we're going street level into the Tudor plague years. What it actually felt like to live in London when the epidemics hit, what ordinary people did to survive, and three specific summers — 1563, 1593, and 1603 — that each killed somewhere between one in eight and one in three Londoners. We also get into what the Tudor government actually did about it (more sophisticated than you'd think), the plague doctors and their beaked masks, the quacks selling dried toads and unicorn horn, and the parish searchers — older women whose job was to examine bodies and determine cause of death, and who are almost entirely invisible in the historical record. Oh, and Elizabeth I had a gallows erected at Windsor to hang anyone who followed her from London. Very her. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:51.4	I want you to imagine London in the summer of 1563.
0:56.1	You wake up and the city, it sounds a little different.
1:00.0	It's quieter than it should be for July morning.
1:03.1	The market stalls that are usually packed by dawn have gaps in them.
1:08.0	Some of them aren't there at all.
1:09.9	The smell, which is always bad in London
1:11.8	in the summer, is worse than usual. And underneath the usual stench of the river and the
1:17.7	animals and the open sewers, there's something else, something sweet and also wrong.
1:26.5	And then you notice the door across the street.
1:28.9	There's a blue cross painted on it
1:31.1	and a man standing outside who wasn't there yesterday.
	...

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