Lauren Johnson is a historian and costumed interpreter with a first-class degree from Oxford University.  

Her debut novel The Arrow of Sherwood, an origin story of Robin Hood rooted in a real, brutal medieval world, was named one of Medievalists.net’s books of the year.  

Her history of the year 1509, So Great a Prince: England and the Accession of Henry VIII, was published recently by Head of Zeus. It explores the fascinating details of early Tudor daily life and the ritual year, alongside the enthralling political intrigues of Henry VIII’s court in his first twelve months as king.  

Lauren has appeared on Channel 4, BBC4, BBC Radio Bristol and BBC Radio Somerset. She was also featured in Stylist magazine, discussing her work as a costumed interpreter.  

Lauren is co-founder of Untold, a theatre company that creates ensemble-driven devised work and new writing to tell stories that have been marginalised in history and the modern day. Her first play, Lady Unknown, explores the life and work of Victorian philanthropist Angela Burdett Coutts.  

Sharing her passion for history with tens of thousands of visitors, Lauren has worked in live costumed interpretation since 2008, based at major heritage sites including the Tower of London and Hampton Court Palace. This gives her a unique insight into the historical worlds of her books and enables her to practise storytelling on every scale, from the most intimate one-to-one interaction to performing for vast crowds in the busiest tourist site in the UK.  

She has also worked with Historic Royal Palaces, the charity who administer Hampton Court Palace, the Tower of London, the Banqueting House, Kensington Palace and Hillsborough Castle, chairing historical debates and creating on-site digital missions for families and schools.  

You can follow her on twitter: @History_Lauren 

Video Transcript:

Lauren Johnson
Historian and author of So Great a Prince

Heather: I have to say I read your first book Arrow of Sherwood and I really enjoyed it I stayed up far too late for about three nights in a row to finish it, and your new book jumps forward a couple of centuries to Henry VIII in 1509. It’s called So Great a Prince and it’s about a year you almost kind of do like a slice of life in 1509, can you explain to me 1509 as this kind of Crossroads for you, can you explain how you came to that why you picked that year–

Lauren: Obviously, it’s a Tudor book, it’s about the first year King Henry VIII’s reign and for me personally when I thought of the Tudors initially I was kind of thinking of The Shakespearean version of the Tudor era, I had in my head artists, and playwrights and printing and all those sorts of things, Henry’s break from Rome on all of the changes. What was really interesting as I was exploring 1509 is that lots of that is not there yet, this is still very much a medieval world and yet when we’re taught. 

History in school it’s like 22nd of August 1495 the Tudors come to the throne and that’s the beginning of the modern age that’s the end of it wasn’t like that at all, still the rituals of the year were based in religion, they were based in agriculture, there was so much about it that was strange to me, kind of bewitching as a result of that and also because it’s very clearly represented in the fact you go from a very clearly medieval King the one that is sort of moving towards the early modern era and who is also a teenager at the time he comes to the throne, it was really intriguing to me to explore the country through the eyes of the King and also through his subjects.

Heather: And you picked up a couple of different people who pop up from time to time in the book. How did you choose those people? Was it because that’s what the records were or kind of interesting stories how did you decide who?

Lauren: We chose it kind of the other way around I specifically wanted in the book look as wide an array of people as possible I wanted as many women as possible I want that as many working class or middle class as possible and people to follow their stories to and also I wanted to go right from Cornwell in the South to York in the North and overseas as well the book also covers the new world which was very new in 1509 so when you in fact that Henry kind of ignored it when he had a fancy dress party with all of the people of the world represented, he only bothered with the three old continents he didn’t have any Americans. 

So what I did basically, I went through as many records as I could in the time available, I looked at wills and legal records, disputes between tenants and their Lords; sometimes literally trying to get a name that I could pin some of this information on instead of saying “if you were a working class person your house would look like this” I could say “William Green’s house would look like this Thomas Percival who was a tailor would be living like this” and then as you said I try and follow those people through the course of a year. And in some cases there was a strange sort of event with them because I decided that I would have 12 chapters around 12 ritual points in the year and one of them would be old souls and old Saints the early November late October that would be focused on death it was a really weird coincidence that one of the people I was interested in what’s a woman called Alice Middleton whose husband was dying at exactly that point of the year in 1509 so I was able to say this is what Alice might have been experiencing this is how she might have seen a sick room and attended her husband so I hope that makes it a little bit more immediate for people.

Heather: Definitely it brings more to life when you see this actual… something about putting a name there and thinking about Alice or thinking about these people makes it definitely more real, it’s interesting because what I like about your book is that you have this sense of kind of optimism that came with Henry, and what Thomas Morris said about this wonderful Prince, that was there in the title of your book and it’s so different from what you normally think of Henry. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that sense that people have off optimism and how Henry kind of made the most of that and embraced it.

Lauren: Well that was interesting as well because, I’ll be honest I’m not a huge fan of Henry VIII necessarily as a person or as a King, and anad have done more at the other end of the spectrum when you’re looking at post 1536 and all the changes that have happened, the wives he’s starting to kill, all of those horrible things that happened later. And it was really interesting to go back and see someone who is not just fully formed yet so when he takes the throne in 1509 Henry is 17, which is just unimaginably young to suddenly have the responsibility of the entire Kingdom. 

He gets married very quickly after coming to the throne, his wife Catherine of Aragon gets pregnant quite quickly afterwards as well and then they lost a child he has an agenda that he wants in terms of making a war with France kind of wants to revive the Hundred Years War which is frustrating. And it seemed that in every turn in that first year and we was learning to negotiate how to bake King that was really interesting to me I thought you said he was greeted with hysterical praise because his father had become so unpopular by the end of his life because of all of the financial shenanigans that we’re going on with Henry VII. I think that everyone just went kind of, “oh something new,” and was delighted by it and it helped that it was apparently very good looking.

Heather: No one would think of the later 1540s one at all

Lauren: Not at all, 17 years old broad shoulders fair hair, fair skin, etc. the ideal really by 15th, 16th century standards.

Heather: So you kind of take everyday life and fit theses different things within these different chapters and I learned a lot about the educational system, and I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that, and something else that doesn’t get as much attention was the medicine; you talked a little bit about that too, and I was wondering if we could start with education. It was interesting to see how much was available for everyday people like it’s something that I often think of, only the nobles had access to teachers so it was interesting to see that regular people if they could afford that and even if there were some free places too. you could talk a little bit about that?

Lauren: I think that was surprising to me as well I don’t think I had realized because I spent a lot of time looking the world of the elite. I worked a lot at Hampton Court Palace for instance so when I’ve been discussing people’s education, it tended to “Oh, the rich would go on living household and they would learn this,” and it was fascinating to learn from instance that it was one any area where people could get almost Universal education twice for a couple of years. 

Around the age of five to seven there was something called a petty school it was also called a psalm school because you would go and learn to sing the psalms and various hymns that you would use as a matter of daily life religiously. But through that you might also pick up a little bit of reading ability probably in English or maybe in recognizing the old letters, unlike you say there were some of opportunities for people to go from Latin reading schools grammar schools; the trouble was for most people that you had to pay a fee for all schooling after the age of seven pretty much. 

If you were sponsored by a local guild maybe a Trade Guild of your local city or a kindly local lady you still have to find the money sort of provide for your own materials. And it was amazing that for instance a laborer in this time an entire day’s wages would be necessary to pay for eight pieces of paper which just goes to show how difficult it could be to get into education at the times. Therefore, for the people who achieved it and maybe went on and who were sponsored through grammar school to become priests, occasionally to become lawyers; progressively there were more of those London professions coming and the people really wanted to be educated, that was something that was kind of a burning desire in the country at that time.

Heather: And I think it was interesting to how you talked about the importance of math even sometimes over reading to be able to manage your accounts, and to manage everything like that too, so I think that was a kind of neat thing to think about this people having basic math skills.

Lauren: Yeah, and I think sometimes the abilities of people in the past… we tend to forget that just because they could work the land it didn’t mean that they had less knowledge than us, they had different knowledge, so as you say accountancy skills could be hugely important for someone who was running a shop whether a man or a woman because both of them did that at this time, or running a household indeed. 

And also the degree to which people could read seems to have been a slightly bit under exaggerated because in The Tudor period to be able to read, to be literate meant you could read Latin and I feel that sort of skewed how we see things when we actually know from guild records that apprentices who were going into learning the trade at an age around 12 a number of guilds said you must be able to read and write before you do this, now clearly whether is reading and writing in English, so people did know things.

Heather: It wasn’t just his collection of people collecting filth.

Lauren: Moving poo from one area to another. Some people did that as a job.

Heather: And they got paid by the ton right.

Lauren: Yes, that’s very sensible, the product of your work was to see if you had a big pile of poo or just a small pile.

Heather: Exactly, it encourages you to get more poop. Can you explain to me some of what you see as major changes between 1509 the one we get early 1530 s, obviously The Break was probably the biggest to bring all those about, but what other kinds of areas we’re changing irrespectively of that?

Lauren: It’s a little difficult to answer that because religion was so fundamental which… again it’s something I think is something I didn’t fully appreciated without ever realizing it I’d been brought up effectively to that of State Protestant, because the Church of England is still kind of in control of schooling in the UK to a much lesser degree obviously then it would have been in the past. 

But it’s still there so I hadn’t appreciated the fact that’s before Henry broke from the Church of Rome the entire concept of the year was sort of determined by the days of religion the high days and holidays literally what you could eat on a specific day was determined by those feasts.

Heather: And you even mentioned in the chapter on marital relationships a person who… her husband wasn’t coming to her bed on certain days and things like that because of their religion, so it dictated everything.

Lauren: And it was very prescriptive when it came to anything sexual the thinks you couldn’t do essentially if you weren’t having sex in the missionary position with your spouse only to have a child then it was wrong.

Heather: And you couldn’t do it on fast days and on sundays and during Lent and…

Lauren: Some random wednesdays it’s a very odd sort of situation to be in, because of that religion is at the heart of everything the people like… it was kind of the beginning of the language of learning as well, you read in Latin, the songs were in Latin, so it was just fundamental. The people who were working in monasteries or in convent were not divorced from the rest of society. 

They were still people with brothers, sisters, uncles, they were people being educated in monasteries and convents there was a huge social support structure there that was swept away as a result of the dissolution of the monasteries and I think it was a huge impact on the country. You can see that in the fact that it leads so much social unrest in 1536 to 1537 was The Pilgrimage of Grace in which almost a third of the country in terms of landmass is involved in this big racing against the kings religious changes. So he brings a lot of uncertainty I think as well politically and domestically and then internationally because it was also the source of problems in international relations.

Heather: It was interesting because you talked also… just now you mentioned the social safety net that the monasteries provided and I thought it was interesting, you talked about the guilds and they weren’t always necessarily related to religion, some of them would be but they were professional guilds too, how they would look after people, can you tell me a little bit about that? 

Lauren: I found it really heartening to read about the guilds because it was a complete Community really that was designed to support each other, they called each other brothers and sisters, they were called fraternities, and they were created expressly to help people, I mean, they’re almost a form of early union, they were created to help people in times when they didn’t have works or they were injured so they couldn’t work so, exactly as you say, there is a safety net there. 

If a Spurrier (someone who made the spurs the knights’ shoes) or a pin maker, if they found themselves in a difficult position financially, then they know that themselves and their family would be supported for a while, which is not something that I would have associated with that era in history, I kind of assumed that that collective was sort of a later, maybe even 19th century situation.

Heather: Yeah it was really interesting when you talked about… there were certain prescribed amounts that if somebody was sick they would give him that amount, that was just there and they didn’t even have to question that, it’s not something that you necessarily think of from something that wasn’t a religious institution. So the guilds, also for everyday people, not nobility the guilds for that class of people dictated so much of their life as well in terms of the apprenticeships and what you could do and the marriage age, they go back and they got married when they were 12 but that was only the noble people getting married when they were that young. The average people got married when they were in their mid-twenties. Can you talked a little about why and how that would have worked?

Lauren: While it did happen occasionally that you would get babies getting married or 6 year olds getting married, it was far more common for most of the population to get married when you had a kind of financial security, so often that meant that the husband would have set himself up in trade. 

Perhaps it meant that the wife would have spent some time in domestic service or herself by being an apprentice and it took them awhile to do that, an apprenticeship was about 7 years the earliest probably that you would finish would be when you were 21 years old; during that time you can’t get married, you can’t setup your own industry, you can’t leave; which was obviously a problem if you were being mistreated in any way by your master and some of the people I found were instances of people who, unfortunately, end up on the legal record because they are suing their master because he has imprisoned them, which is unusual because it seems to have been  more of a positive experience. 

So it took maybe after your early 20s or mid-twenties to actually reach the point where you could get married. Then what I loved was that in order to get married you didn’t need to have an expensive cake or an expensive dress, you could literally… all you needed to do was both of you said “I want to marry you, I freely do this” in front of someone else and then you had sex and that was it; so there’s an instance of someone in 15th Century getting married while milking a cow, you could be doing something else and then you went away and you were married.

Heather: You also talked about the issues that would come up sometime if someone promised marriage and they didn’t… actually said “no no no I didn’t actually marry them” can you talk a little bit about that? how that might have happened sometimes.

Lauren: I certainly had heard previously those kind of stories of Charles Brandon who was one of Henry the eighth’s very good friends who was infamous for this is marital history is an absolute horror show and he’s a very good example to give because what he did plus it was married to someone I think even got pregnant with his child and then he ended that marriage and married that ladies aunt. He took all of her money, ended the second marriage, went back to the first wife who died eventually and then secretly married Henry VIII’s sister. 

So you can see that if all you need is to get consent in a room and then had sex, that could lead to problems, and again there’s legal cases where a woman is saying “we’re definitely married, me and this other man because he said we were married and then we went to bed” and then he’s saying “no, no, no, I said I would marry her and then we went to bed”, it was a completely separate thing. So you get some mothers in particular who became sort of cautious of this situation and refused to let men and women spend time alone, and refused to let anything happen, any shenanigans until it is definitely set in stone and publicly declared that the couple are married, which is very sensible under the circumstances.

Heather: And then you talk also about that’s why they would often get married in the front porch and then go inside for their blessings so that it was all public at the time.

Lauren: Yes, yes, and I thought it was really lovely that you had servants, for instance, who lived within households would get married with the master or mistress presence and they would have some great feast in the hall of the home that they were working within, so it was very important, like you say, to have a public show. Even if it was just something people saw as they were walking through the street. I found really intriguing the fact of proof of age, for instance, when someone was saying, “I’m definitely old enough to inherit my land,” the way that the courts assessed if they were telling the truth was that they would ask people who had been there at the baptism or even at childbirth. So you have these instances of midwives, 20 years after the fact saying “Oh yeah, I was there, I helped his mother and then I carried the candle for him” so it’s literally people’s memories being written down.

Heather: Yeah that’s really beautiful, that’s really neat, I was interested also in… you said you included a lot of women’s stories and I think that was really cool too, to see the role that women played here, because often you tend to think that the women were just at home making babies and they really weren’t, they had a very vibrant experience and had lots of different job opportunities either inheriting a business from her husband or doing their own as you said. Can you talk to me a little bit about the role of women in everyday life?

Lauren: I made a particular decision that if I had a man and a woman who could fill the same little area in the story, then I would use a woman. For instance, I chose Alice Middleton, whose husband died in November 1509, I chose her to follow especifically then I could be looking at someone who was running a household, who was educating her children; but she wasn’t my absolute favorite example of this, I think the absolute best example from this period is a woman called Tomasine Bonaventure who went from being a Cornish servant to a tailor with her own apprentices, with her own people living in her home in London, with a blue velvet saddle on her horse. 

We know from her will, and she is an example of how, although she married in order to get a position, she married a tailor of London 3 times, three different tailors; she became – because she inherited those tailors’ states and apprentices – she became the person who was sort of giving her next husband or authority within the city, maybe the guild. 

She represents to me the fact that without these tily little snippets of information that sometimes documents bring up, it’s very easy to imagine women literally just sat around sewing or cooking and did nothing else, not that those are poor things to be doing, but there was a huge range of tasks that women took on. 

And particularly women effectively like Tomasine, like Alice, they were silent partners in a family business; the problem is that they were silent partners, so they were supporting behind the scenes, their names are not on guild inventures or other documentation. So it’s very difficult to get a handle on it; and it’s only when you have a second document that specifically names those women that you can say “yes, they were definitely involved.” 

There was another case of a late-15th century person within a trade in London who wanted to hand on his estate and his business to his son and I think it goes on for 7 years, 7 years of documents are produced, and it’s only the very last one where it’s referenced that both of their wives are also running these business with them, and if it weren’t for that last document you’d have no idea that the women were also involved; and there must be so many cases where we don’t have that last document, that last piece of the puzzle, but the women were, as well as running household, they were also running businesses with their other halves.

Heather: Can I asked you a question? About something that you didn’t addressed in the book and it kind of popped up for me. So you think about the women who had this kind of out-of-home sort of work, how much inside the home would men do? And I think we often have the whole idea that women are both taking care of the home and out doing the work, double duty kind of thing, but surely with the amount of women who died at childbirth and things like that, men would have more of a say inside the home too than we might normally imagine.

Lauren: Yes, it’s really difficult to answer, essentially things behind closed doors are concealed from us as it’s hard to know, but we can assume, I think, that if the woman is going to have a child, probably in the period where she retreats from the world  in order to have that child and it’s supported my all of her female relatives, neighbors or the local midwife that someone is going to be taking up the slack in her own household. 

It isn’t necessarily going to be a daughter difficult people leave your husband who’s going to be helping out and that’s a really interesting question. Men certainly took interest in children, there’s lots of instances of husbands and wives working together to arranged marriages, which is something that clearly shows an interest in that child’s future. Or arranging apprenticeships for them there’s even an instance of an apprentice who had been mistreated by his master, who had been imprisoned because he had been falsely accused by his master and his father spends certainly months, maybe even years trying to get his son’s case heard in court. 

So that parental element in men’s lives  maybe is sometimes neglected the care that they would have is sometimes seen as a maternal thing but actually it was both parents who concerned for their children. 

Heather: What was the biggest surprise to you when you started researching this book and putting everything together? What surprised you the most about what you were learning from this period?

Lauren: I think the degree of diverse experience which I really wanted to find, and occasionally it was hard to find, but I felt like it was there, that was wonderful to me, that you could find evidence of working class people and sort of follow them through, sometimes literally years of their lives, and also similarly that you could find evidence of people who had journeyed from foreign countries to live in this country, the time that the entire world was sort of expanding outward, I found that really fascinating because it’s an area I haven’t really looked at before, and it turned out to be very personal because the time I was researching the book, and then when it came out, it was the debat of the new referendum in the U.K. and the place of migrants within society. So those things ended up quite overlapping really.

Heather: It’s interesting because there was this video of Ian McKellen doing the Thomas More speech from Shakespeare about the evil May day Riots and that came out just as all the Syrian refugees stuff was kind of going on and it made me think too. And it was something I wanted to ask you, if you could talk about the multiculturalism of London, and not just London, all over England, there were people coming from different countries, even black people and people who we don’t always assume to have been there. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Lauren: Like you say, it wasn’t just London, that was really interesting to me, the fact that there was evidence of a couple of Dutch Princes who were living in York, one of them was enfranchised, he was part of the city community, he was a free man of the city. It was a Dutch Prince and his wife as well, who was then a member of a local religious guild, and then right down on the coast you’ve got Southampton where there’s evidence for Venetian galleys and Genoese ships coming into port, outpourings of italian marines, sometimes even a thousand of them in one port town, of which there would be a number of people of African origin as well. 

We know this because there’s an instance in the 1490s of this, he’s described in the Southampton book of findings as a “black man” so the fact that you would have what we imagine, I think, or what is presented is often a very white, English, often male society actually had an immense diversity in it. 

One of the people who most intrigued me I think was someone called Catalina who was part of Catherine of Aragon’s household, so she came with Catherine in 1501 when Catherine married Prince Arthur, Henry’s old brother. She was part of this huge entourage of people from all over Spain and at that point in history Spain had recently regained control, as they saw it, of Granada in the South, which for hundreds of years had been an independent muslim territory, and Catalina was probably a muslim who had converted to Christianity. She was a moor so she was probably black and the fact that she was there, she was probably seen by Thomas More who describes the arrival of Catherine and describes the black members of the entourage, that she was there at the same time as Henry. 

She perhaps knew things that even Henry didn’t because she looked after Catherine of Aragon’s bed linen, she looked after the secret affairs of the Queen’s chamber, that was just fascinating to me. So it’s not at all the case that this was a period in which all relations between English people and people from foreign countries were problematic, or challenging, although there was that as well at times, but just the knowledged that English culture has been enriched by people from all over the world for so long was really heartening to me.

Heather: Yeah, it was really interesting to read about that, I’m trying to see what other questions I have here… we talked about medicine, we didn’t really talk about medicine, I didn’t ask you that much about medicine yet so if you could talk a little bit about it, something that you don’t really hear much about, like bloodletting and leeches, but if you could talk a little bit about what the average person would have experienced if they got sick and what kind of average knowledge there was for the average people.

Lauren: Tudor medicine was based on something called humoral theory, which was centuries and centuries old and, in fact, continues for centuries and centuries afterwards; in which they believed that the human body was made up of 4 humors in the same way that there are 4 elements, so the human body was kind of linked to the wider world, the wider nature perhaps. 

If those humors got out of alignments then that’s when you got sick so that’s where bloodletting comes in, if you have too much of that humor of blood then you have to let it in order to get well. There’s actually a reasonable degree of logic to all of this, it makes sense to have that kind of idea that you’re always equalizing things, some of the advice that is given in the Tudor period is actually quite common sensical so in order to restore your humor, it’s enough to simply have a bath or go for a walk. 

Or you would just have conversations with people, that’s why incidentally Henry VIII drowned this period, even as a Prince he had fools in his household, people who were expressly there to speak honestly to him, to entertain him, to kind of wail away the hours with him. 

The trouble was though that of course this is an era in which, if you had an epidemic, the best advice you are give even by books of the time and presumably by word of mouth as well was “run away” and it was just not possible for most people to run away if they didn’t have an estate on the other side of the country they could run to. 

And what was quite alarming for people at that time was that there were a couple of new, to them, sicknesses that had developed; one of which was syphilis, which actually arrived in the 1490’s and of which is sometimes called sweating sickness which was completely horrifying. 

This first appears in 1485 at the time that Henry the VII comes to the throne, so it’s not a great beginning to the Tudor period, must be said. In that first outbreak, one report says 15.000 people died in London alone, and what was horrifying is that you would be perfectly well, you’d be walking down the street, you’d fall over and within an hour you were dead. So it was a completely terrifying sickness, and all you could really do if you couldn’t flee it and you had to look after members of your family who were unwell, the advice would be maybe to use vinegar to wash your hands and your face, perhaps because miasmas, corrupt air was believed to be a big part of Tudor medicine as well. Perhaps have some sort of compress over your nose to keep bad smells out; to pour rose water down, to have fires burning all the time and often of course, those things didn’t really work. It makes sense to me why Henry VIII was quite such a hypochondriac as, he was, when that is the situation.

Heather: Definitely, it would be terrifying to have something like that, you’re fine and then you’re not. I want to give you a chance to talk more about your book, and where people can get your book and find out more about you and all your work too. Is there something else that you would like to pop in here that I haven’t asked? 

Lauren: No, no, I don’t need to, that was extensive 

[Both laugh]

Heather: Where can people learn more about you and your work, and buy your books?

Lauren: Well, my website is Lauren-Johnson.com, I also have a blog which is LaurenJohnson1@wordpress and my book is So Great a Prince: England and the ascension of Henry VIII and it’s sold by Pegasus in the U.S. and also I have a new book that will be out in March 2019 called The Shadow King which is all about Henry the 6th, it’s a biography of him so the medical matters have all come back to the fore because Henry the 6th is remembered as being a mad King and he’s the King who lost the Hundred Years War, whose reign saw the beginning of the War of the Roses so it’s been really interesting to step back in time to discover things about him.

Heather: So can you tell me a little bit about what’s your theory? What his sickness was, or do I have to read the book to find that out?

Lauren: [laughs] I will say that I do not believe, as some people say, that he was schizophrenic, I do not believe he was always “mad” and that that made him a poor King, I think he was a really nice man, not a great King and his experiences were stressful enough essentially that let to slightly complex mental health situations but I completely think that he could have recovered and he didn’t because of the events of the War of the Roses.

Heather: So we will stay tuned for that, so thank you so much for being here, and thank you for sharing your knowledge and your research and everybody should go buy your book now because it’s really good.