Thomas Tusser's Tudor To-Do List for Autumn (Written Entirely in Rhyme)
Renaissance English History Podcast: A Show About the TudorsShow Notes
The harvest is in. Now what? In episode 2 of our autumn series, we head out into the Tudor village with the best guide I could possibly have found: Thomas Tusser, a former choirboy and court musician who walked away from court, became a Suffolk farmer, and wrote an entire farming manual in rhyme.
We crash a harvest home celebration spotted near Windsor by a German traveller in 1598, follow the gleaners into the stubble and the pigs into the woods, and find out why "mast fats up swine, mast kills up kine." Then we spend time with the Tudor farmer's wife, who was winnowing corn, making malt, driving the plough, selling geese at market, and keeping the accounts. And there's a 1523 farming manual that tells husbands and wives to show each other their receipts!
This is episode 2 of 4 in our series on how the Tudors got ready for autumn. If you missed Michaelmas, start there. There's a goose in it.
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