Hello, friend, and welcome to the Renaissance English History Podcast, a part of the

Agora podcast network and the original Tudor History podcast, 16 years of telling Tudor history this summer.

How exciting.

Anyway, I am your host, Heather.

I am, as always, just delighted that you are here with me spending the next 20 minutes or so together talking about Tutor history, which is, you know, one of my favorite things to talk about.

So today we are going to talk about

childhood in Tudor, England. So this is inspired by a book that I just got called Tudor Children by

Nicholas Orm. And I highly recommend that you also check this book out. If you are interested,

I want to take a deeper dive. So this is just going to be kind of the surface level on childhood in Tudor, England. So let us get right into it. It is a chilly February morning in 1547 in the village of North Patherton in Somerset, a clerk scratches a name into the parish register.

John, son of Robert Hill, baptized this day. The baby is just a few hours old, and already his name is part of the public record.

He's been swaddled tightly, like a little cloth burrito, with only his red round face peeking out. His mother lies nearby,

exhausted, but alive, which is something not to be taken for granted. A midwife tends to her

quietly. The father has chosen two local men as godparents, Robert's business partners, perhaps,

and a woman from the next cottage over,

a fitting spiritual mother. There's no portrait of this baby, no family Bible with his

birth recorded in Gold Leaf, no cot in a separate nursery. But this child, like tens of thousands

born in the tutor period, has already entered the complex web of expectations,

religion, and community. We know we tend to imagine Tudor children as either a miniature

adults, because that's how they're often painted, or as long-lost lambs wandering barefoot

through a brutal world that didn't see them as people. The truth, as it usually does,

lies somewhere in the middle, and that middle is where we are headed today. So let's get

started with birth and infancy. To be born in Tudor England was to step into a world that

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