Hello, I'm Lucy Worsley, chief curator at Historic Royal Palluses.

You're listening to our podcast that explores the history and stories of our six palaces.

These talks are a collection of some of our best live events.

I really hope you enjoy listening.

In this intriguing talk, historian Stephen Gunn explores

accidents in Tudor life and uncovers some of the worrying dangers people encountered living

during the era. In the 16th century, as now, if you died in sudden or violent circumstances such that it might have been a murder or it might have been a suicide, then a coroner's inquest was held.

And historians, slightly depressingly, have been more interested in the murders because they show whether we've all been getting more violent or less violent over time, or the suicides, because they show whether we've been getting more or less suicidal over time, than they have in the accidents, which

actually show you, as I hope, to demonstrate, what ordinary people are actually doing all day

when they have these accidents. So this is an inquest from not very far from here, Kingston

the Pond Thames, a fairly standard kind of accident.

Young woman called Isada Della.

Isada is the same name as Isolt, Isolder, that name, who goes to get some water and falls into the river.

And about 40% of these accidental deaths are drownings for various reasons, which we'll

think about.

Now, how good are these coroner's inquests as evidence? One good thing is that they're roughly proportional to the population across the

whole of England. You might think if you look at the map that's just where do they have the most

accidents, that actually Yorkshire people have some peculiar facility for having accidents. But actually, actually, as you see, if you look at the number of

people in the militia, which is meant to be all men between 16 and 60, in Elizabeth's reign,

Yorkshire's just got an awful lot of people in it. So very roughly, places like Yorkshire

with lots of people, places like those East Anglian counties or Kent with quite a lot of people, the orangey, yellowy counties. They have quite a lot of accidents. Places with not many people, Rutland because it's small or Leicestershire, because it's fairly thinly populated. They don't have so many accidents, the light green counties. The slightly anomalous ones, in particular, seem to be the

southwest, where there's quite a lot of people, but not many accidents. There's only one reported

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