Rachael is a trademark attorney and blogs about English history and pop culture. You can read her blog here:
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Transcript of Tudor Trademarks (Tudorcon 2021)
Rachael:
Thanks. Actually, y’all may have seen this, I brought a box of books downstairs to just like, if anyone has a break, and they want to flip through a book, you can do that. They are my books, so please don’t take them. But I just thought it’d be a fun way to share the book wealth with other people so we can have fun conversations about that. And I have chronic neck pain and arthritis issues. So I do have to have this. I’ll try to step out away from the notes, so y’all can actually see my face as much as I can.
As Heather said, I am a trademark attorney by day and a Tudor enthusiast by night. I blog at RachaelDickzen.com, mostly on English history in pop culture. So if you like Six The Musical or The Crown or anything like that, I do that. But this is about trademarks.
So we have very formalized systems and meanings for different types of intellectual property these days. But in Tudor times, IP was much more informal, and far more nebulous. I will define them, I’m not expecting you to know what trademarks are, I promise. There’s so many rabbit holes I went down on this, that I had to physically restrain myself from going too far. So it’s just a review, but I hope to investigate a lot of these things more in the future, and I hope you enjoy.
Modern Trademarks
First, so we can compare and contrast, I wanted to talk about modern trademarks. So a trademark is a recognizable expression indicating the source of products and services. Most commonly you see words and signs. But also trademarks can also be a product and package design, or sounds, smells, even store layouts can also serve as trademarks.
They’re kind of a shortcut. The idea is they’re a shortcut that conveys immediate meaning to consumers about the products and services. They help you make purchasing decisions. It helps you make decisions about, if it’s a company you want to support or not. If the product has been good for you in the past, if you want to purchase it again.
It allows standardization of goods so that you know the Coca-Cola you buy in Florida will be the same you buy in Alaska. These are very efficient. Studies show that even three-year-old children can recognize a ton of trademarks, even those that do not focus their marketing ad kits.
They’re also useful for helping with manufacturer accountability and consumer protection. So if you have a faulty product or a dangerous product, the government can take action, and you can do something about it. In almost every country in the world, companies can protect their trademarks with governments registration, which isn’t required, but it’s usually very helpful and in the courts. So that is modern day.
Oh, yeah, these symbols, you’ve probably seen them everywhere. A TM means you’re claiming something as a trademark. And the circles © actually does mean it is a registered trademark in both the US and the UK. I have no idea about other countries. But yeah, so that’s modern trademarks.
Early English “Trademarks“
Early English marks by contrast, there’s a reason I put trademarks in quotation marks at the beginning. Because a lot of these things aren’t necessarily indicating the source in the same way we would consider trademarks today. Design and images were commonly used to demonstrate social identification and ownership of specific property. They were sometimes required for consumer protection. And with economic progress, they did begin to serve more of a true trademark purpose as we would see them today.
Designs were super useful in a time where almost no one could read. And in some way, those brands were even more valuable at that time. Because before industrialization, all of these goods that you bought were much more expensive relative to the income of the average consumer than they are today.
So if you bought a shirt, and it fell apart in a month, you probably couldn’t replace it if you were an average consumer into England. They were very expensive. Unfortunately, a lot of the early consumer protection laws weren’t about clothing or something like that. They were more immediate concerns like based on food or drink, something you could see of “Oh my god, Bobby drunk the ale and he’s dead now.” So those are the earliest consumer protection laws by the way, having to do with food. We’ll talk about that later.
But there are, of course, some very intense harms. Even if that’s not the case, if your sword falls apart while you’re in battle, that could be bad. But these very real harms had very few remedies at the time. Lawsuits were very costly. Warranties were extremely rare, there were almost no purchaser protection laws. Even if you could go to the courts, they generally were very much caveat emptor the “buyer beware”.
And a lot of times you couldn’t even find these merchants who sold you these goods because they traveled from fair to fair. So over time, it became very important for people to use marks. Like if they produce quality goods, and they’re proud of their goods, and they want their consumers, their customers to keep coming back to them, they start using marks. So with economic growth and advancement, we get more of that.
Generally, there’s no formalized governmental registration of any of these things. There were a few guild registrations, and there was the College of Arms for heraldry, but it isn’t quite a trademark. But I’ll discuss that a little bit more.
To give you an idea of what these images are, in the upper left is the mark of a bellfounder. So something that can be easily made with a chisel or a knife. The upper right is the coat of arms of the Draper’s Guild, which was the first guild in London established to have a coat of arms. The lower left shows an ale stake, which I will tell you all about. It’s one of my favorite things. And then the bottom right actually is a mark used by Bishop Hugh Oldham of Exeter. So just to whet your appetite.
Heraldry
Something you might not think of as a trademark is heraldry. These combined symbols, designs, colors, and words for quick identification. Although they didn’t generally serve products, if you have a coat of arms, you could kind of see it as a quasi-service mark. Because people who held coat of arms were often in charge of a large amount of land or tenants or they had responsibilities.
So it could be useful for other people to recognize them from a distance and be like, “Oh, no, the boss is coming! I need to make sure everything looks good for him.” Or even have some accountability if they’re behaving badly, to the extent that nobles were ever held accountable for anything.
Although I should note, you could get a coat of arms, even if you were not noble. They did cost money. And you did have to have a certain amount of reputation to get them. But you could obtain them.
But yes, so they had a social and reputational identifier much like modern trademarks we know. We see designs on shields and stuff going back ages, but a first product indicating that it identified a specific person dates back to the 1100’s. And heraldry was first seen in battle most often like you want to know who you should wack with your sword or who shouldn’t wack with your sword. So that kind of coat of arms are often very simple, so you could easily identify them.
And over time, they became more complex as they were less used in battle. What we think of as a coat of arms is technically called a heraldic achievement. And a coat of arms is one element of it. But it’s such a common nomenclature that everyone just calls it that today. The term coat of arms actually came from fabric covering the armor. So it was literally a coat for your arms.
So these are all examples of canting arms, which are visual patterns, and they’re my favorite thing. There will be French in here and I’m terrible at French so I apologize for anyone. Yeah, there’s going to be bad French involved here. On the left is Henry of Arundell’s coat of arms, which features six standings swallows which an old French are called Hirondelle.
The middle y’all might recognize it was a big deal a couple of years ago. This is John Shakespeare‘scoat of arms. So the father of William Shakespeare. It was William probably obtained it for his dad because he had more money, and then William used it after his dad’s death. There’s a pattern here as well. If you’ll notice the falcon is holding a spear. You might even say he is shaking it.
Then on the right is the coat of arms of William Maltravers. So it takes a little more thought. This is called A Fret Or, and the idea is it makes things difficult to pass apparently translates to “mal” and “traverse” in French so Maltravers.
Also, it was kind of the wild west for a long time there wasn’t any control over it. Some kings started to limit who could get a coat of arms. Henry V had a proclamation in 49 forbidding all those who hadn’t borne arms at the Battle of Agincourt from carrying arms except by inheritance or grant from the crown. Then later, under Henry VIII, he actually had officials going out around the country. And if you didn’t have the right to use a coat of arms, they would stop you.
So this is an example of Cadency, which is the systemic way to distinguish arms displayed by descendants when they have not been granted arms in their own right. This is still a system used today, and it’s actually far more systemized today. You can actually look up the royal family’s coat of arms and see how they differ.
This also demonstrates the use of coat of arms to demonstrate claims of lineage or history. So Edward III’s starts off with the golden lions, which are very old marks associated with English royalty, which probably dated back to the 1100’s.
Geoffrey Plantagenet, Count of Anjou, father Henry II, and I believe the husband of Matilda, who we were talking about earlier, his tomb bears the golden lions on his shield. So that’s very old. Edward started crossing in the fleur-de-lis on his coat of arms when he started claiming this throne of France. So that’s kind of like a claim and a threat at the same time.
A similar claim and a threat with coat of arms you might be familiar with is in at least the Elizabethan times, Mary, Queen of Scots quartered the English royal coat of arms with her own, and it was the whole thing.
Coats of arms
So to give you some examples, these white things across the top of the coat of arms are called labels, and then the little icons on them differentiating the different ones are called brisures. I could get so much more in-depth on this because heraldry is really complicated, but I just wanted to give you a quick example of how those would look for sons. Daughters can also have of arms, although I believe they’re generally in diamonds when that happens and probably didn’t happen in the 1300’s.
I did want to distinguish between coats of arms and badges real quick. We’re probably very familiar with badges because of the Tudor Rose and that sort of thing. Coats of arms are registered at the College of Arms, and are only worn by the bearer. Badges are worn by retainers and supporters, and they’re less controlled. You can change them over time and plenty of people did to suit their political purposes. You can think of them more like a collective membership mark, like a certified public accountant or realtor or a motorcycle club. The people supporting the king or the noble or whoever’s badge it was, would wear it to signify their membership.
So to give you some examples, in the middle, we have the coat of arms of Henry VII, which again feature those lions and the fleur-de-lis. There are several badges of his as well. On the left is the Tudor rose, which combined the Lancaster rose and the York rose, which were both in use, although they were not the main badges of those families at the time. So that served great propaganda purpose for him.
On the right is the portcullis badge, which was his mother’s Margaret Beaufort’s and indicates his defense. The one on the right actually features the crown in a hawthorn bush, which refers to a legend that after the bottle of Battle of Bosworth, the crown was pulled out of a hawthorn bush, and that’s how Henry Tudor was crowned. Then on the right is a greyhound, which was also used by Henry VII. He also used the dragon a lot to indicate his Welsh background.
Over time, groups started to use coats of arms as well, not just individuals. These things have slightly more of a modern trademark meaning as universities started to use them to indicate the quality of their services. Or guilds use them to indicate that the people as part of that guild have a certain level of experience and quality of products under them. So these often incorporate symbolism to refer to their history or their values.
So the one on the left is King’s College Cambridge coat of arms, given in 1441, this is the first academic coat of arms in England, and possibly anywhere else. The idea behind this one you can tell it was granted. It was started by a royal because again, we see the lion and the fleur-de-lis early on. It was started by Henry VI. The idea was the yellow flowers on it were supposed to signify the flowers of every kind of learning, and the black field was supposed to be stability over time.
In the middle is the coat of arms of London, which predates registration of coat of arms. We don’t actually know how old it is, but at least 1390. This feature is a very important symbol of England’s – the Cross of St. George, which by legend, conquered the dragons. So it also features dragons. The cross of St. George actually has been seen identifying English soldiers in battles back to 1270. So that’s another important mark representing England over time.
On the right is the coat of arms of the Worshipful Company of Grocers from 1532. They use cloves because they sold cloves and the camel at the top represented the camel that would bring them from a long way away.
Fun trivia, a lot of companies today have coats of arms that you might not think about. If you’re familiar with the supermarket chain Tescos from England, they have a coat of arms which also features cloves in this grand tradition.
Bread fraud
So we’re moving away from heraldry now into marks which served for consumer protection purposes. I don’t know if y’all knew this, but bread fraud was kind of a thing in medieval times. It was so rampant that bakers literally had a bad reputation. People didn’t like bakers in general, because they were concerned that they were cheating you on the size of the bread, or the quality, or the price.
Heather actually did an episode in which she mentioned bread adulteration was a serious concern, which was even memorialized in Jack and the Beanstalk – “I’ll grind your bones to make my bread.” I don’t know if there were actually human bones in bread. But it does indicate that sort of concern. More likely than bones was resins or chalk, or things that you really don’t want to be eating. Sawdust, yes.
So a lot of municipalities started to put in rules into place requiring bakers to mark their bread. So they start could start controlling these. And these were actually the result of national laws, regulating price weight and quality of bread and ale. So back to 1267 is like the earliest Assize of Bread and Ale to start acknowledging this problem and trying to regulate it.
That did not require marks at the time, but as localities tried to figure out how to actually enforce it, marks became required. This wasn’t in every municipality, but we know there were at least some. This law is from 1419 in London, and it basically says, they shall have the press of their seal appearing on their bread, so that you can identify them.
So, on the left, this is actually a communion bread marker. I have tried so hard to find a commercial bread marker, I have looked through so many museum collections, I have not found them. Possible options, I may not be looking in the right place.
If anyone knows about bread seals, please talk to me later. There may have been an understanding that you could use a knife to mark something in the bread just in a more simple way. Or perhaps the commercial ones were made out of materials that have deteriorated over time. It’s hard to tell. But that gives you an example of what they may have looked like.
The punishments for bread fraud were intense. One example was you’d get the loaf tied around your neck, and then you would be drawn in a wagon to the stocks. Second offense, you were actually in the stocks, and then the third offense, you’d have your oven pulled down and you would be forced to leave the trade altogether. We have a lot of records of people tried for bread fraud.
Ale stake
As I mentioned, we also had the assizes bread also dealt with ale, which was another big concern. So this here is an ale stake, it is literally a stick sticking out of… People commonly brewed ale at home, and then sold the extras just to their neighbors. And you would hang up an ale stake to indicate that you were selling the ale.
This custom may have originated with the Romans, who would put vine leaves outside of centers of commerce that served wine, and they brought it to England when they conquered it. They don’t have that many vines in England, at least grapevines. So these were replaced in branches, and bushes.
Over time, this custom began to be required by law in some places. With the idea that you needed to know who was selling ale so you could go and test it, to make sure it was safe, and that they were following all the laws regarding it. Some municipalities actually required specific signs. I believe in Chester, they were required to have signs that had like a hand on it. But a lot of people did the ale stakes thing.
The ale testers who sound like they have a great job, but they also had to drink the bad ale, would go around, make sure they were there, test it. They had the ability to change the price because the price of ale was set based on its strength so they could alter that a lot of times. Again, if there was adulteration, that would be a big concern.
There were some reports of one ale-conner commenting that the ale he tested looked thick and white as if pigs had wrestled in it. So there was probably clay in it and yeah, gross. Punishments for that were often pretty intense as well, just like with the bread. Someone who brewed and sold bad beer often got the ducking stool in dirty water. Scotland also, in some places, required them to pay fines and give ale to the poor. Although I don’t know if the poor wants that ale.
But this ale stake tradition turned over time into pub signs. Ale was generally made at home by women. Brewed beer, which I believe adds in hops for preservation purposes, started moving towards a more commercial marketplace and being made by men. As that happens, they move more towards signs and pubs instead of people selling it out of their homes.
These pub signs often took names inspired by notable royals or people. They were inspired by their location I will give examples, I promise. But also people sometimes had to change their pub name if politics made their previous name just a poor life choice.
I don’t have any pictures of actual Tudor pub signs, I don’t know if any exist. Apparently, there was a large fire at some point. But this pub claims to date from 1251. It’s an old man and the sign. You can see an example of what a sign from that time may have looked like. So they’re still using words, but there’s a big old sign for the people that can’t read and just want to come get their beer.
So this slide, again these are all modern, but they give you examples of a lot of names and signs used from that time. So I’ve mentioned notable people’s names. The Rising Sun was a name used for Edward III, and the rose and crown was super popular around the time of the Tudors.
Beforehand, people sometimes would use names like The White Lion from Edward IV, or the White Boar from Richard III. Once Henry Tudor came to the throne, you might want to quickly change your name from the White Boar to make sure that you’re in favor with the king.
Locational names included the Fighting Cox, which was a name often used near animal fighting arenas, which was very common then. Or The Plough near the communal compile, or The Library was apparently pretty popular in pubs near universities, or The Strugglers, near hangman areas.
You’d see a lot of religious marks around churches and monasteries. The crossed keys apparently refers to the keys of St. Peter. So that may have been a name used then, although of course, then, when the Protestant Reformation came along, you might have changed your name to something more flattering to the king like the King’s Head. So there were a lot of pubs called the King’s Head when the Protestant Reformation happened, and it became not a good idea to have names referring to saints or things like that.
The Cat and Fiddle is a fun one. There’s probably an urban myth saying that this name came from Catherine of Aragon – “Catherine le Fidèle” (Catherine the faithful). In reality, it was probably named after a governor of Calais, whose name was Caton le Fidèle. But it’s a fun story. And there are lots of Cats and Fiddles across London to this day. So those are the signs I have at least some examples for.
We’re moving to some signs I have no examples for. Unfortunately. Because I don’t think we have any brothels in London today with signs, but we know they were there. Various Tudors – Henrys tried to shut down the brothels and they failed every time.
We have records documenting the brothel names from early 1500’s and from late 1500’s. And as you’ll see, a lot of these are similar to the pub names. Some of them are similar. They don’t really change that much over time. These could be read as innuendo, but a lot of them just indicated that the Tudors didn’t have a lot of imagination when it came to names.
Lots of Henrys, lots of Edwards, lots of boar heads, lots of crossed keys. So we got a lot of that. So we know that in 1822, licensed brothels continued throughout Elizabethan England in London. Fun fact, at one point when Henry VIII tried to shut them down, what happened is they just moved from the one district they had all been to just scattered throughout the town. So in some ways, he actually may have just encouraged their trade further, because they were now everywhere.
Broad Arrow
This one’s a little bit of a one off one. This is not a consumer protection thing. It’s not heraldry. But it’s a symbol that actually is still used today, so I wanted to talk about it. The broad arrow indicates royal ownership. It’s of unknown origin.
For a long time, people thought it came from one family’s heraldic device but then we found records that it was used centuries before this family ever got involved with the English military. We even have records from Samuel Pepys the famous diarist talking about the mark and saying no one knew where it came from. It was used on receipt by Edward III’s butler back in the 1330’s.
We had a fun counterfeit trial in 1386, where a guy commandeered ale with the arrow and then was forced to stand in the pillory for impersonating an officer in the royal household. Bad metal was marked with the broad arrow for forfeit and was melted down and given to the…
It was found on items in the Mary Rose, which went down in 1545. Then it’s mentioned in several letters by Thomas Gresham, who later founded the Royal Exchange under Elizabeth I. So it was commonly used even then to mark importation of goods. And even to this day it’s used.
It was used in Colonial America to mark lands, to mark trees. It was used in Colonial India. Apparently, in the 1800’s, it was put on convicts’ uniforms, which is horrifying. They eventually stopped using that because they realized maybe it was a bad look to claim that the convicts were the property of the crown.
But it was popular enough that you actually can find satirical cartoons from the time that if they ever portrayed a convict it would have the broad arrow on it. It’s still seen on license plates on military bases in some areas today. There’s still a law saying you can’t use this, it still counts as a criminal offense to reproduce this without authority, or use it on any goods without permission.
I did want to say I read in one source that this was seen as a brand on horses during battles in the Hundred Years’ War in 1346. I could not confirm this anywhere. But it’s a good time to talk about the fact that branding was almost certainly used on horses and livestock throughout medieval England and Tudor times.
I haven’t talked about it too much, because it’s hard to find research supporting that. But we know it probably happens if you haven’t fenced in all your property, you have to tell your cows apart somehow. But that’s the broad arrow.
Less regulated marks
All right, we’re moving into less regulated marks, and more merchant source-indicating marks. I’m starting with little regulated marks. Here in the upper right are goldsmith marks from 1521. The leopard’s head was used to control the use of silver and gold, and that dates back to the 1300’s.
The design changed a little over time, but that generally meant like this metal is kosher. The date letter indicates the date, and they were used for each different year. Then there’s a couple maker’s marks, examples indicating the origin or source. So again, if it was a faulty item or something, you could trace it back to who made it.
Then on the left, we have stonemason marks, which are fascinating. As you can see, these all are fairly simple, the sort of thing you could make with a chisel in stone. These and merchant marks which I’ll talk about in a second, often incorporated more ancient marking symbolism, commonly referred to as witch markings which were designed to ward off evil and bring in good luck.
So a lot of those sort of things would be conjoined V’s and W’s, which apparently calls on the protection of the Virgin Mary. Crosses, X’s, diagonal lines, if you see marks that look like butterflies, all of those are witch markings that we’ve seen in a lot of places.
These are not that but there you see a lot of those elements incorporated. Because if you’re a stonemason building a big building, or if you’re a merchant whose products are on ships for months at a time, you might want some good luck and warding off of evil to keep things going well.
Stonemason marks are interesting. They’re used in so many different ways in buildings all over England and Europe. Sometimes you’ll see them on one stone, sometimes you’ll see them on multiple.
They may have been used to mark work done for payment purposes. They may have been used as a quality control. They may have been a signature, and it may it probably varies quite a lot regionally. But you’ll see them all over the place. It’s really complicated and something I want to look into more in the future.
Then merchant marks below, you’d see these on buildings, you’d see them on ledgers, you’ll see them signed with contracts and stuff like that. In the bottom right, one of my favorite things I found is Thomas Howell was a draper in Elizabethan times who requested some money to found a school for maidens, as he called it. To this day, there’s a school for girls with his name on it, and they use his merchant mark as the logo. I thought it was cool.
Printer’s marks
So printer’s marks. As the printing industry got underway, printers started to put their marks in the front of books to indicate who made them. They indicate the source. It also helps serve as sort of a nascent copyright measure to help track what’s going on. Over time, they got a little more complicated.
So in the upper left is actually the printer’s mark of William Caxton, who was thought to be the first person to introduce a printing press to England in 1476. This is pretty simple. You’ll see he does have one of those indecipherable little prints like symbols in the middle.
To the right is one from Robert Copeland, who was under Henry VIII. He again has one of these merchant marks incorporated into it that we saw on the previous slide. He’s smart because he’s got the badge of Henry VIII on one side, and a pomegranate on the other for Catherine of Aragon. So we know that he was trying to kind of suck up to people there.
In the lower-left, we get back into that fun trend of puns. Because this is Richard Grafton’s printer’s mark. A ton is a barrel of wine. If you’ll note there is a graft of a tree growing out of a barrel of wine, so “graft ton”. He also has a merchant mark on there, that still seems to be something. The Latin apparently has a pun in it as well. It’s “accipe insitum verbum”. It’s a Bible verse that translates to receive the engrafted word. So we love those puns.
In the middle, we have the printer’s mark of Thomas Woodcock. As you’ll see, it’s a rooster otherwise known as a cock standing on a pile of wood. That is awesome. His Latin unfortunately translates to “I will sing to the Lord.” It’s not a pun, but it is still cool.
Then on the right is a title page indicating how these printer’s marks would often work. This is printed by Richard Field. It includes an anchor, and some Latin, and leafy bows. All of these marks you’ll see it indicates the printer’s skill. It makes it harder to copy when you have all these intricate designs put in.
So Richard Field actually printed some of Shakespeare‘s poems. So he was a cool guy. I know it says “Printed for VVIlliam Ponfonby” on the bottom, which might confuse things. He was the publisher who paid the printer to print the books. By the end of the Elizabethan period that was becoming more separated.
Oh, I totally forgot, the printer marks also often in reference to the signs on the print shop, which again, I have no pictures of. But they often were very simplified versions of the printer marks you’d see in the books.
Product characteristics
So this is my final topic, product characteristics as quasi trademarks. I mean, one big way to defend your reputation as a business was to make merchandise that was difficult to duplicate, and incorporating conspicuous identifying characteristics in your products. These were less tracing them back to individual companies for the most part, and were more about location at this point.
A great example of this is Venetian glass. Venice was so protective of their glassmaking techniques that they started – they were the first patent laws in the world there were. They restricted their glassmakers movement outside of the country, so much so that we actually have records that glassmakers who went to other countries and tried to teach their techniques would sometimes have assassins sent after them. They were that intense. Actually, a ton of the earliest English patents were for glass, for Italians that came from Venice and wanted those same protections.
Cloth dimension is a really interesting one. So because nothing was industrialized then, everything was handmade. Dimensions of cloth depend on the size of the equipment used in the manufacturer. So the looms in the tabs had to be the correct size. It would be hard to standardize those if you’re building them all individually, so it was common for city’s guilds to require all members to make sure they had specific measurements so they could distinguish that town’s cloth from other people’s cloth.
So we have evidence from letters from merchants requesting “We want cloth that’s 21 Ls long,” because that indicates that it’s from Chester or something like that. A lot of municipalities actually required that any imported cloth be measured publicly before they even cut it to ensure that they knew the source. That source of that cloth often indicated different cities made different types of cloth that was intended for different uses. It was just a really great way to ensure you knew what you were getting just by measuring the cloth.
The Royal Almain Armoury is also a great example of conspicuous characteristics, also known as Greenwich armour style. Almain is an archaic name for German. Henry VIII founded this armory by bringing over a bunch of German armors. As you can see, they have very distinctive decorative armor.
We’ve got some very good records of them because we have an album of a ton of their designs under Queen Elizabeth. So on the left is the armor of Henry VIII with designs by Hans Holbein. Then one over the white armor is Sir Christopher Hatton‘s. It actually incorporates lovers’ knots and Tudor roses, and probably was commissioned to impress Elizabeth I.
The black and gold one is George Clifford‘s, which also includes lovers’ knot, Tudor roses, and fleur-de-lis. Then on the far right is William Somerset’s. There’s no symbolism and it’s just cool. So if you wore something like this on the battlefield, people would know exactly where it came from.
So in conclusion to sort of tie it all together, trademarks grew and evolved along with England’s economic and population growth. Their use expanded, and they became far more indicative of the source and quality of products over time. Just basically, the more people needed to communicate with others about their goods and services, the more prevalent and complex those trademarks became. So I hope you enjoy it.
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Heather Teysko is the creator, writer, and producer of The Renaissance English History Podcast, the original Tudor history podcast, started in 2009. She's been writing about history online for over 25 years, since her first site on Colonial American history became number one in history on Yahoo in 1998. In 2019 she created Tudorcon, which is now a yearly event, in addition to writing books, and running TudorFair.com - a whimsical Tudor Merch shop.
She has been passionate about Tudor England since she first read Alison Weir's The Six Wives of Henry VIII 30 years ago, and subsequently moved to London after college to spend her time immersed in Tudor history (how exciting when she got to interview Alison for the first time!). In addition to history, she is passionate about travel, and has lived in 3 countries and 4 states (not counting her perpetual state of confusion), and her family (who help her host her YouTube channel occasionally).
