2 days ago
Tudor England's unluckiest deaths revealed... including priest who 'tumbled off a toilet seat' and the butcher who walked home in slippers
Forget the Tower, the beheadings and Anne Boleyn's doomed romance with Henry VIII.
If you really want to understand what it meant to live and die in Tudor England, look not to the royal court but to the nation's cesspits, stiles and ale-soaked backstreets.
In their new book, An Accidental History of Tudor England, historians Steven Gunn and Tomasz Gromelski use coroner records to reveal a side of the 16th century rarely seen.
It was a world where death didn't always come by sword or pox, but by misstep, misfortune, and even a pair of overly tight trousers.
Take the elderly clergyman of Westoning, Bedfordshire, who met his maker not in the pulpit, but on the privy.
He 'tumbled backwards off a toilet seat,' according to the inquest report, and was left 'suspended by his hose until he expired'.
In an era of long garments and basic sanitation, even answering nature's call could prove perilous.
Tudor toilets, it turns out, were not to be trifled with.
Outside Trumpington Gate in Cambridge, John Dunkyn, a local baker, fell backwards into his own garden cesspit after a night of drinking.
'Qweasomed' by the stench, the jurors noted, he suffocated in the sewage alone while trapped just yards away from his home.
Alcohol, it seems, featured in more than a few of these cautionary tales.
Roughly one in every hundred accidental deaths studied by Gunn and Gromelski involved a tipsy victim.
Also among them was Thomas Beettes of Brentwood, a butcher who made the wise choice to walk home from the alehouse rather than attempt to ride a horse.
The flaw in his plan? He was wearing slippers.
He slipped into a roadside ditch and drowned in what was an undignified end brought about by soft shoes and strong beer.
James Johnson was another one. In 1565, he got drunk and fell asleep in an alley in Southwark.
He woke up 'barely possessed of a healthy and calm mind' and decided to defecate in a ditch.
Inevitably though, he was unsteady on his feet. He fell into the water and drowned.
An Accidental History of Tudor England is based on records from the period.
Tudor law mandated that suspicious or sudden deaths had to be investigated by a coroner.
Once they had reached a verdict, coroners' reports were filed away at Westminster. Over the course of the 16th century, nearly 9,000 such records were collected.
Even good intentions proved fatal. Nicholas Jenckes was driving a timber cart when he wedged a bottle of ale between his knees for safekeeping.
The cart overturned. The bottle shattered. The resulting horrifying injury - crushed genitals - killed him.
If that sounds grisly, spare a thought for John Olyer. Crossing a stile in the countryside, he slipped and tore what records politely call his 'codd.'
Twelve days later, he died of infection.
Not all fashion is fatal, but for Henry Daunce, a dapper draper of Bury St Edmunds, it may well have been.
In 1526, while bending over to wash his face in a stream, Daunce's doublet and hose were so tight that he toppled headfirst into the water.
With his movement restricted by his stylish ensemble, he couldn't get up again. He drowned; a death by vanity, if ever there was one.
Others died through sheer recklessness. On Whit Sunday in 1588, a day meant for piety and rest, Kent local John Cheeseman, who suffered from a hernia, joined younger revellers at an inn for a night of dancing.
Cheeseman did not heed warnings to take it easy.
'Caring little for his hernia,' the coroner's roll recorded, he danced wildly and repeatedly collapsed, until eventually 'a great part of his entrails was thrust up out of his belly under his skin.'
The official cause of death? His own 'bad conduct'.
He quite literally danced himself to death.
And then there's poor William Hykeman, a waterman on the Isle of Thanet, whose death came by misjudged flirtation.
While fooling around with a reed-cutter named Rose, he threw her to the ground, unaware of the knife at her belt.
One unlucky movement later, the blade was in his thigh and he bled out.
