Sublime

when she was employed recently on the BBC production of Wolf Hall to be the hand double and weave some finger-loop braid,

The first permanent theatre was built in 1576, in Shoreditch, by James Burbage and four of his fellow actors from the Earl of Leicester’s professional acting troupe.

To my eternal delight, the wreck of the Mary Rose, Henry VIII’s flagship, preserved its firewood deep in its hull for the marine archaeologists to find and bring to the surface in the late 1970s. What was found matched almost exactly the wish list of a Tudor cook and the regulations governing the sale of firewood. Over 600 logs were found, comprisi

From the 1550s onwards a steady stream of literature warns of the numerous cons that could be practised upon the unwary. Apparently a small industry making loaded dice existed within the King’s Bench and Marshalsea prisons, but the master of the craft was a man named Bird who lived in Holborn and produced fourteen different types of loaded dice to

Lady’s bedstraw, or Galium verum, was considered to be the finest. Not only is it very soft to sleep on, but it smells of freshly mown hay even when dry and old, and it helps to deter insects, in particular fleas and body lice.

A first thy Poet, never let him lacke A comely cleanly Shirt unto his backe. Cleane Linnen, is my Mistris, and my Theme John Taylor, In Praise of Cleane Linen (1624)

A little practical thought quickly points out that nothing disguises the taste of bad meat, that spices were considerably more expensive than a new fresh piece of meat, and that rotten meat makes you sick regardless of its taste. If received wisdom was wrong and food was not highly spiced for disguising taste, was it highly spiced at all? Such thou

Henry VIII started keeping four professional actors and their boy apprentice as part of his household just as the townsmen’s mystery plays were beginning to fade away under the eye of the Reformed Church.