Derek Wilson is a successful popularizing historian, and having written on Hans Holbein, Francis Walsingham, and Henry VIII, he has published enough to know what can make history popular--lucid prose, ample illustrations, and some attempt to connect the past to a reader's present. Though the Tudors hardly need any help to become more popular, this short, accessible book has these features in abundance, and will therefore be of value and interest to school children, undergraduates new to the period, and educators. These are not the only groups the publisher has in mind. Their promotional material suggests Wilson's book will be useful to people who visit what they term the "several major tourist destinations in England with a Tudor theme" or who celebrate "the Tudor era" in the "Renaissance festivals" that occur "across the United States or Canada," as well as "any costume designer, set designer, prop manager, author or re- enactor."
Given the needs of such audiences, Wilson's book does not aim to offer any radical re-readings of archival material relevant to early Tudor life, or any particularly novel or revisionist readings. Yet it does quite deliberately present a subtle, unsettling, and engaging response to recent popular figurings of the period. The popularity of such figurings, most notably the 2007-10 television series The Tudors, but also "feature films, lurid novels" (5) and not-so- lurid ones, testify to our obsession with the peccadilloes, passions, and personalities of the early 1500s. Wilson's book taps into but complicates the bases of that obsession: his focus is on the (very) gritty practicalities of everyday life--what ordinary people ate, where they slept, how they worked and travelled. The tone is set by the general editor's preface. Here Peter Furtado notes that though "the mixture of high politics and low scandal" makes the period "so compelling" and "memorable," "Tudor England was not just the goings-on of Westminster, the Tower and Hampton Court" (5). The body of Wilson's book bears this out, with observations that convey a resolute concern with the realities of the religious, political, economic, and material pressures people endured: "Distress could provoke social upheaval" (40). This is, in essence, and to its credit, very class- conscious historiography: "power and wealth were being concentrated in fewer and fewer hands" as "English capitalism was emerging" (37). So the section on "Home" opens with a walk-through of a rich household, commenting on the innovations in architecture and furnishings afforded by the wealth generated by enclosures and the dissolution of the monasteries. Yet the guided tour comes to an abrupt halt as we are informed that "the country houses of the rich are 'untypical'" because "nothing had changed" in the domestic situations of those at "the bottom of the social scale" (15). For all the period's apparent splendours, we are repeatedly told that people lived "close to death" (27, 73). The "gastronomic riches" of an aristocratic feast would have made a "yeoman farmer" imagine "he had been transported to some fairy kingdom" (45). Sartorial finery was beyond the majority, for whom clothes "were neither status symbols nor 'armour'" but "simply necessary coverings" (53). The England that emerges from this book is dominated by Henry and his influence, but is also conflicted, unhappy, unruly, and anti-authoritarian. As such, it consistently deflates whatever romance has recently been attached to early Tudor England.
As aforementioned, Wilson's sentences are rarely multi-clause and rely on clear and consistent subjects, and simple, everyday verbs and noun phrases. For example: "Few people in early Tudor England got about very much" (21). This is an inclusive, if not reductive, clarity. There are usually one or more illustrations per page, often (though not always) contemporary to the period being discussed. While this certainly helps make the book's content comprehensible to non- specialists, on odd occasions it generates anachronism: London's density is illustrated by an engraving of a city street from the 1790s (12-13). Sometimes this ahistoricism is acknowledged: a nineteenth- century print of a joust is captioned as "fanciful" (68)--but why include it then? Sometimes commingling past and present serves to reinforce the attempt to make the book connect with readers: several images are of re-enactments in Tudor dress, implying this is a world we can appreciate, if not inhabit, now. In his content too, Wilson does try to consider the past with reference to the present: urban "guildmasters" are described as "the Tudor equivalents of monopolistic fat cats" (33). Yet Wilson is canny enough not to push these continuities too far, and, instead, seeks to help readers reflect on historical discontinuities. These occurred in the period (the Reformation, enclosures), and between the period and our own: in the early sixteenth century clothing codes and laws "were much stricter" than now, being based "not on age, but on social status" (49). If the categories under which the material is organised partly reflect modern rather than early modern preoccupations, this allows ironic twists. The chapter on "Leisure" observes: "if Henry's subjects thought that they were going to share in a carefree golden age....they were mistaken." (67).
Give or take the odd typographical error ("hadvanished" [9]), the book is well-produced. Listing places to visit is a good idea for the people this book is aimed at. Yet perhaps it could have catered better for its intended readership with a timeline and recommendations for further reading. Equally, the wealth of literary and cultural production in the period does not really register here, aside from a few mentions of Thomas More's Utopia. Of course, that may seem appropriate in a book focused on "ordinary" life, but it does suggest that "ordinary" life and "culture" are somehow separate, which they aren't. More coverage of the kinds of Henrician ballads and broadsides featured in something like H.R Wouhuysen's 1992 The Penguin Book of Renaissance Verse 1509-1659 would not have gone amiss.
According to the publisher's promotional material, this book is part of a series that will offer "a complete social history of Britain" by asking the question: "How did the Brits live, what did they eat, and what did they expect from life?" But this book is about England (and Wales, at a push) not Britain. There was no such thing as Tudor Britain (or "Brits") in any meaningful political sense, and Wilson himself rightly notes Scotland was a "separate kingdom" (10). More, then, could have been made of the fact that England was not an island, and what went on it was conditioned by developments in all points of the compass, on the continent and otherwise. Perhaps this will change in the second volume, covering the later (and last) years of the Tudors.