Tudor England Below Stairs

You know the six wives by heart, and you still have no idea what a Tudor morning smelled like, who lit the fires, or how a rumour travelled from the scullery to the king's ear.

This audiobook takes you below stairs. Each chapter opens on a real, documented person, a royal cook sweating over the spit, a laundress boiling the linen, a wet nurse, a spy planted in a bishop's household, a court fool, a musician, a Thames waterman and a plague searcher, and follows one ordinary working day. Through their hands you learn what Tudor England actually ate and drank, how people washed and slept, how disease, gossip and the new religion moved from room to room in a great house, and why the myths you grew up with fall apart on contact with the records.

By the last chapter, Wolf Hall and Hampton Court feel like places you have worked in. Press play, and let the servants show you their England.