Episode 255 was on the concept of Privacy in Tudor England. And also, how that was changing in the 16th century. In fact, we combine chimneys and letter writing to get… privacy!
Below the episode you’ll find a transcript for easy reading.
Hello, and welcome to the Renaissance English History Podcast, a part of the Agora Podcast Network and the original Tudor History Podcast, telling stories of Tudor England since 2009. I am your host, Heather Teysko, and I’m a storyteller who makes history accessible because I believe it’s a pathway to understanding who we are, our place in the universe, and being deeply in touch with our own humanity.
This is episode 255, maybe 254, I don’t know, I’ve lost count, but in it we are going to talk about the idea of privacy in Tudor England, which is, uh, not the same as ours if it existed at all. I first thought about doing this episode, um, I don’t know, a week or so ago I was reading BBC History magazine and there was an article in there on, uh, The, uh, history of toilets and toilet usage and all kinds of fun things like that.
But they talked about the communal toilets that the Romans had and existed all the way up through the Tudor period. And then I thought, oh yeah, you know, the idea of like communal bathrooming when you’re just sitting there having a nice gossip with your buddies doing your business. I thought that might be a fun thing to talk about.
I don’t know. Then I thought, I probably couldn’t make an entire episode out of communal bathrooms, as fun as that might be, um, but I thought we could then work it into an episode on the idea of privacy. And actually I did talk about this a little bit about, I don’t know, six or seven years ago I was doing a series on the Tudor home tour, and I talked about throughout the 16th century we see this idea of privacy start to change.
And where once we had everyone sleeping around a central fire in the Great Hall, the chimney made it possible to heat different rooms at different levels without having to have just one fire in the middle of a Great Hall. And how the chimney actually helped to contribute to the rise of the idea of privacy.
So, I thought, let’s just take that and run with it. And make an episode out of it. But you guys, I am still on such a high after Tudorcon. What a blast we had. All the people online, all the people in person. It was so cool to just spend the weekend nerding out on Tudor history. I’ll be releasing some highlights and some videos over the course of the next couple of months.
And, uh, you know, you can see some of the fun we had. And we already have a date planned for next year, so that is fun. Thank you to everybody who came, both online and in person. Obviously, we can’t do it if no one comes. So, thank you for coming and making it possible. It was so fun to meet so many people, see new friends, old friends, and, uh, yeah, I just, I just had such a blast.
So, that was fun. Alright! Let us get started. So, my friend, imagine walking into a grand Tudor palace, somewhere like Hampton Court, and stumbling into a room called the Great House of Easement, a large communal toilet with rows of seats and no cubicles. It wasn’t just a place for people to do their business, it was a social hub where court gossip was passed around as freely as anything else.
This might feel a bit shocking, gross today, but in the early Tudor period, privacy was an almost alien concept. Whether it was eating, sleeping, going to the bathroom, having relations, these activities often took place in communal settings. where being alone was unusual. But things began to change during the 16th century.
Over time, privacy slowly evolved from something that no one even thought about, like it wasn’t even a thing that you would consider, to something that people started to actually crave and expect. From communal bathrooms and shared spaces, The Tudor period saw a gradual transition toward the creation of personal spaces and the concept of privacy as a luxury, especially for the upper classes.
This shift wasn’t just practical, it was a reflection of the changing power dynamics and societal expectations of the time. So today we are going to talk about how privacy transformed from an afterthought or a non existent thought to an expectation. During the reign of the Tudors and what that says about society in general.
So let’s start at the top with the royal residences. From the early Middle Ages, royal palaces were built with a distinct separation between public and private spaces, although the concept of privacy wasn’t what we understand it today. In royal places, private sections were created not just for the monarch’s comfort, but also to reinforce their power.
Access to the innermost rooms was a privilege reserved only for the closest courtiers, advisors, and family members. This exclusivity gave the monarch control over who could approach them, and when, turning privacy into a symbol of influence. By the time Henry VIII came to the throne, the demand for privacy had increased, both for personal reasons and political.
Henry’s royal apartments at Hampton Court are a perfect example. The palace’s layout followed a clear hierarchy of spaces, with each chamber representing a new level of exclusivity. The further you ventured from the Great Hall, the more private and intimate was the setting. The King’s most trusted advisors and courtiers might gain access to the outer rooms, but only a select few were permitted into the innermost chambers, such as the Privy Chamber, where matters of state and personal affairs were discussed in greater secrecy.
This architecture of privacy wasn’t static. As rooms filled with those vying for the king’s attention, Henry would retreat further into the palace, expanding his apartments to ensure that he could control access to himself even more tightly. Private chambers began to multiply, like a cellular growth, as Henry sought to create spaces that were ever more exclusive.
By the time of his reign, this trend had become a hallmark of Tudor power. The king’s ability to withdraw from the public gaze physically and politically was a clear signal of his own authority. In creating these private spaces, Henry not only shaped the physical environment in his palaces, but also set a precedent for how monarchs and eventually nobles and trickling down to, uh, us normal people would live.
Privacy became a luxury, one that reflected both personal desires and political necessity. The nobles, of course, jumped on the bandwagon and started to take advantage of some of the architectural innovation that were trickling down. Wealthy courtiers started to incorporate private chambers and restricted areas in their own homes emulating the king.
Privacy was no longer just for the monarch, it became a sign of status and power. marking those who had risen in rank. Over time, this architectural trend would evolve into more individualized and personal spaces that are more familiar to us today. So the monarch’s privacy was often tied to power and control, but privacy in the daily lives of the Tudor nobility was much more closely related to societal status and gender.
For noble women, especially those at court, privacy took on a different meaning. Women’s private chambers, such as the queen’s apartments or the rooms of ladies in waiting, were spaces that allowed for personal reflection, modesty, and more intimate conversation. For queens and noblewomen, private spaces were also about protection, both physical and reputational.
The Tudor court was a place of intense scrutiny, where gossip and scandal could make or break one’s position. The Tudor Having private spaces allowed women to conduct affairs of the household or engage in personal correspondence away from the public eye, offering a measure of security in a world that was often unkind to women in the public sphere.
Additionally, these private chambers became places where power was wielded in more subtle ways. Women might discuss courtly matters, arrange marriages, or influence the king’s decisions from within the privacy of their own rooms. In Tudor England, communal spaces were still a dominant feature of daily life, particularly when it came to activities that we now consider highly private.
A vivid example of this is the Great House of Easement at Hampton Court, a multi seated communal toilet that I talked about in the beginning where courtiers would sit side by side, carrying on conversations while tending to their most personal needs. In many ways, it mirrored the open, communal nature of Tudor society where privacy was a luxury even for the highest ranking individuals.
For most people during this period, privacy wasn’t something that they expected or sought. Eating, sleeping, bathing, even going to the toilet were social activities, opportunities to converse and to gossip. The concept of privacy as we know it was still in its infancy, especially for the lower classes. In castles and in manors, communal bathrooms or open air facilities were the norm, with no expectation that one would handle such affairs alone.
But this began to change, particularly in the second half of the Tudor period. As private chambers and secret rooms multiplied in royal palaces, the same shift began to happen in other aspects of daily life. Communal spaces for intimate activities, like going to the toilet, started to fade away, Nobles and monarchs alike began to seek out privacy not just as a luxury, but as a sign of prestige and control.
The more exclusive one’s access to private spaces, the higher their status at court. This transition from public to private living was slow, but steady. Over time, even the simple act of using the toilet became private, with the communal bathrooms of the earlier period giving way to more secluded facilities.
While this trend didn’t take full hold until after the Tudor period, its roots can be seen in the increasing architectural focus on privacy and exclusivity. By the end of the 16th century, the idea of having private personal spaces had taken firm hold reflecting a broader cultural shift toward individualism and away from communal living.
I’m also going to use this opportunity to talk about the architectural changes that. Encouraged privacy, and like I said, kind of started with the chimney, and we really see this one great example is at Hardwick Hall. The chimney, the magic of the chimney is that it allowed for second stories to be built.
In the past, there was just a central hearth, no chimney, ceiling super high, maybe even windows up there for the smoke to get out. But with the chimney, you can seal off those high spaces. and put rooms upstairs as well. And that allowed for a new room called the Great Chamber. And the Great Chamber was a place where the homeowner and their family discovered the fact that they could do things on their own, away from the servants.
The Great Chamber allowed the lord and the lady and the family to do all the things they had done in the main hall before, but With just themselves, without the, without the servants, without anyone else around. So they would use the Great Hall for banquets and things like that. But then they had personal space that they could go to, and that actually really began to revolutionize the way everyone interacted, not just with their servants, but even with their equals.
With this discovery of personal space, people wanted to have rooms where they could escape not just the servants. But also, their family as well. In the 15th century, we started to see new names of rooms that were used to describe these new arrangements. We started to see names of rooms called the privy, the study, the closet, the parlor, library, suite, lodging, things like that.
16th century, these were filtering down to the middling classes as well. And we go from an entire household living in the Great Hall to people splitting off into all of these other rooms as well. We talked about the bathroom aspect of communal living. There’s also the bedroom, which was not private at all.
Bedrooms had been shared by servants and by children. Children would have slept on a trundle bed underneath the main bed. One example that really shows the lack of privacy. Even the concept of privacy comes from the 17th century historian Thomas Aubrey about a time when William Roper came to see Thomas More.
William Roper was telling Thomas More that he wanted to marry one of Thomas’s daughters, but he didn’t care which one. So Thomas takes him and marches him upstairs. Both of his daughters were sleeping on the trundle bed next to the parental bed. And so Thomas pulled the blankets off both girls so that William Roper could appraise them.
So there’s a a definite ick factor there for us today to think about that. Um, but it’s also just interesting to think that two girls of marriageable age were sleeping together in a trundle bed right next to their parents, which is something that we probably would not be doing today. So all of these different things in life, having marital relations, sleeping, all of that was done much more publicly than it is today.
Even the end of life was public because it was done in the bedroom, and the bedroom was a communal space, really. By the 19th and 20th century, death happened in hospitals, away from the household. And so, dying, experience of death became a much less public aspect than it was in the past. And of course, the one sweeping event that changed the way people viewed privacy, Um, the way people viewed most things in the 16th century, right in the middle of it was the Reformation.
The Reformation actually, with its focus on the individual’s relationship with God, the inner life, less about outward performances, outward going to church and having it be a performance, but more about your inward relationship with God, that actually led to an increase in privacy. Very interesting, right?
Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Before the Reformation, religion was a communal activity. Mass was public. The act of worship was something shared by the congregation. There wasn’t very much room for personal devotion or for private reflection. The church was the center of social life, of spiritual life, was all very public, even something like basically going to confession.
It’s all very communal, but the emphasis with the Protestant Reformation on a personal connection with God. led to an increase in private acts of worship and reflection. Individuals were encouraged to read the Bible in their own language, which meant that religious devotion could now take place in the privacy of your own home.
The printing press meant that people could have access to a Bible that might not have had access to it before, and they could read the Bible and they could commune with God and with their spiritual life in private rather than just in public churches. This change also fostered a sense of personal responsibility for one’s own spiritual life, which made privacy much more valuable.
The Reformation also brought about these new ideas on modesty, particularly when it came to personal behavior. Public displays of excess, whether in dress or behavior or indulgence, were discouraged and the concept of personal modesty became tied to both moral and spiritual purity. As religious reforms called for more modest, introspective lives.
Privacy became increasingly important not just as a means of physical separation, but also a moral necessity. This new emphasis on private devotion and modesty influenced every level of society, but it had a particularly significant effect on the upper classes. Private prayer rooms, once rare, became more common in the homes of the nobility, further entrenching the idea that privacy was a marker of piety and personal virtue.
As the Tudor period progressed, the rise of literacy and the availability of paper led to an increase in personal correspondence. Letter writing became one of the most intimate forms of communication, offering a level of privacy that had previously been rare. Unlike communal spaces where conversation was overheard, letters allowed for secretive exchanges where thoughts and emotions could be expressed without the risk of public scrutiny.
For members of the Tudor court, letter writing became an essential way to maintain personal connections and navigate the intricate web of politics and power. Henry VIII’s court was rife with secret correspondences. You also look at the examples that we have of Henry’s letters to Anne Boleyn. They’re filled with, you know, this longing, very personal thoughts, these very personal desires that one probably wouldn’t have wanted published.
So we start to see this broader shift toward the idea of individual privacy for everyone. Anyone who can write letters can now write their thoughts, their very personal thoughts. People had a private means of communication that didn’t require physical proximity. This allowed for a new level of confidentiality, allowing nobles and monarchs.
to engage in personal and political matters without the entire court knowing. So the development of letters was another important step in the evolution of privacy during the Tudor period. So you guys, we get all of these things. We get the Reformation, we get chimneys, and we get letters, all leading to an increase in privacy.
Of course, there were other things too, but those are some of the really big things. So what, what we saw at the beginning of the Tudor period, this largely communal existence where even personal activities like eating, um, like sleeping are shared. We slowly shift towards a world where there are private spaces that became a symbol of power and personal necessity.
We see the rise of privy chambers in royal palaces and more secluded spaces in noble homes, second stories where you can escape to your own place. This began to mirror the growing desire for separation and exclusivity. By the end of the Tudor period, privacy had evolved from a concept that most people never would have even thought about, to an expected part of daily life, at least for the elite, but it was beginning to trickle down as well.
It was no longer just a luxury, it had become a reflection of power, status, and personal autonomy. Setting the stage for further development of private life in the centuries to come. So there we have it. Some thoughts on private, private lives, privacy in the Tudor period. What do you think? I have to say, I very much enjoy my alone time.
So I’m not sure how I could have managed with having everything be public. But of course, I wouldn’t have thought about it because it wouldn’t have been something I would have thought about because there wasn’t any other option, right? Kind of like if. In 500 years, there’s some brand new way of living. I don’t know.
I can’t even, I can’t even consider it. Right. I can’t even conceive of it. And people would be like, Oh, imagine 500 years ago when they didn’t have whatever. Like who knows? Right. So I don’t know. It’s just interesting. What do you think? What do you think about privacy? Tell me, tell me in the comments, or you can always email me.
You can always text me 8016TESYKO. Or, my friend, you can hop into the Tudor Learning Circle, TudorLearningCircle. com. It’s a social network just for Tudor history nerds. So hop on in there. Tell me what you thought about this or anything else related to Tudor history. My friend, thank you so much for listening.
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).
