The Tudor Home Hidden Killers

Nowadays, we think of the Tudor home

as an icon of Britishness.

Timber-framed, maybe thatched, a cottage.

Sounds wonderful.

But these quaint, pretty relics of the past

belie the revolution in technology

that changed them and us.

This is the great age of change.

It's one of the reasons we all love the Tudor period so much,

because it's the age of discovery

and there's a sense that anything is possible.

One place this change was most evident

was in the home.

Domestic life was transformed.

But, as with anything new, there were risks.

From the new technology that warmed our rooms...

Whoa!

..to the exotic foods that filled the table...

You're using luxury to show off,

but there's hidden death behind it, I'm afraid.

This feels really naughty.

..and the radical treatments introduced to the medicine cabinets.

New life-threatening changes made their way

into the heart of the Tudor home.

With the help of modern science and historic records,

I'll investigate what really went on in the Tudor household.

I'll find out about the hidden dangers

and what killed Tudors in their very own houses.

Welcome to the treacherous world of the real Tudor home.

This house dates from the end of the Tudor age,

around 1590.

At the time, there was an emergence of people with new wealth

who had aspirations for their homes.

This is the house of someone in the middling sort.

Those are the middle ranks of society

in a pre-capitalist age,

before the talk of classes makes any sense,

so, it's professionals, artisans, yeoman farmers

and, in this case, a successful merchant.

The increasingly wealthy people of the middling sort

built new kinds of houses

and the unforeseen consequence

was that they introduced hidden killers to the home.

But how, exactly, did these beautiful buildings

threaten the lives of the merchants and yeomen who inhabited them?

Many previously unknown dangers made their way back here

from newly-discovered distant lands,

some arriving directly in their kitchens and dining rooms.

This was an age of discovery that transformed Tudor life

and exploration, conquest, colonisation and trade

all had their impact on the Tudor home in various guises.

The middling sort benefited from a boom in trade,

prospering from the new markets and goods becoming available.

New items and imported luxuries, from food to furniture,

helped make the home more comfortable than ever before.

The Tudor period is definitely the start

of a real investment in material things

for relatively ordinary people.

So there's a huge increase in the number and quality of items

that people would have had in their homes.

From rich textile hangings and furnishings,

to more furniture...

..additional bedding

and many more items of tableware.

Costly, showy items, like pewter,

are definitely the kind of thing that you want to invest in

and display in the home

as a way of indicating that you have wealth, you have status.

It's part of your, sort of, self-fashioning of your identity.

And it was in the dining room

where the taste for the new and exotic was clearly visible

Overseas trade brought new goods.

Potatoes, tomatoes

and the abundance of things that were previously rare,

like this.

Did you know, until the 1540s,

the English didn't have a word for this colour?

And, of course, it led to the mass production of a substance

so valuable and delicious,

that it would become known as white gold.

Oh, not tobacco.

Sugar.

Sugar had been a fantastically expensive commodity

throughout the Middle Ages,

but in Tudor times, the price dropped sharply.

Through using slave labour,

production costs were kept low.

So, on the back of the slave trade,

sugar became an attainable luxury

for people of the middling sort.

The rather bland medieval diet of

bread, pottage, beans, lentils,

oats, dairy and eggs, occasional meat

and, if absolutely necessary, vegetables,

began to be enhanced with sugar.

What's the process by which we can produce sugar?

It comes in to your house looking like this,

as a sugar loaf,

but, it has to be broken up.

Someone's got to sit there with a hammer

and, then, a pestle and mortar

and if you want, sort of, an icing sugar to sprinkle over things,

there's a lovely dish which is just a salad of lemons,

sprinkled with dusted sugar,

well, then, some poor lad's got to sit there

and push it through a silk sieve.

So, there's work hours in sugar, as well as expense.

Sugar becomes something that's a sort of desirable...

way of displaying status.

So, you might use sweet treats at the end of a meal,

the banquet course, it's known as.

With no sense that sugar could be bad for you

they would even show off and play with sugar,

disguising it to look like some other delicacy.

So, we've got here a little dish of nuts.

There's little sugar shells

with a little bit of sugar and almond in the middle,

like a marzipan,

dusted with cinnamon to give it the nutty colour

and you get to eat a pure sweet.

And what's this?

Well, why on earth did I lay out some bacon out on the table

when we're supposed to being spoilt?

And bacon is a working man's food,

but not in this case.

It's been made to look like bacon

by dying some of the sugar with cochineal

and leaving the rest white to look like fat,

but it's in fact all sugar.

And what are these?

Those are little Tudor roses in sugar

and the middle one, I've covered that in silver leaf,

so the one that looks silver is actually pure silver on top...

-Wow.

-..and that's showing your diners real luxury

cos you've taking a luxury ingredient like sugar,

put man hours into it

and then put a precious metal on top as well.

From nowhere, sugar became the must-have item

at any well-to-do meal.

What would it have been like to have all this sugar?

It must have been really intense.

Yes, I don't think we can really imagine it.

We've grown up with sugar all of our lives.

It's in most of our foods somewhere, even bread.

So, to go somewhere where your diet

has been virtually sugar-free,

and be given a table full of sugar,

I think it's going to be a huge release of energy.

Of course, you've got to have wine at a banquet.

So, if you've just had sugar and alcohol for the first time,

you're going to be buzzy.

So, why don't you try one of the sugar nuts?

This feels really naughty.

As sugar became more popular

and its consumption more widespread,

the wealthy, ostentatious sugar lover

would have little idea of the trouble that lay ahead.

In the Museum of London's storage vaults,

Dr Jelena Bekvalac studies the remains of almost 20,000 bodies

spanning the city's history.

It's a unique resource

that reveals changes in disease patterns over time.

I've come to see what evidence 16th-century teeth can provide

for the impact of sugar on our health.

Jelena, tell me about these different skulls.

What are they telling us?

Well, what they're showing us and telling us

is the changes that we might see in the dentition and dental health.

We see a marked change

from medieval period, the early medieval period,

coming through up until the more recent times.

If I just turn this back over here,

you can see you've got a lovely set of teeth here.

And this is medieval?

Yes. So, this is early medieval,

and, I mean, they're a fairly young individual,

they are an adult,

but you can see here that

you haven't got any changes of decay.

You've got lovely enamel formation

but if we come to this individual,

you can see here that you've lost the molars.

If you look at the mandible, you can just see there

you've just got roots of the teeth

where they've just really sort of been rotted away

and the decay has completely destroyed all the enamel.

So, this one's a medieval skull and this one dates from?

Probably about sort of the mid-16th century.

So, this is later on and this is then sort of the time then

you've had sugar being introduced.

It's more freely available,

and you can see the consequences in their teeth.

So, in both the upper and the lower jaw,

you've got these huge gaps.

Imagine how painful it would have been to go through that.

It must have been absolutely horrendous

because I've had toothache and an abscess

and it was absolutely horrible. It was really, really nasty,

so, to have had that amount of teeth affected

must have been absolutely ghastly.

Unfortunately, the methods people in the Tudor period used

to clean their teeth didn't really help.

In fact, they unwittingly made things worse.

The Tudors would use toothpicks a lot

and they would wipe their teeth with tooth cloths.

And they would use a variety of powders and pastes and solutions,

often with rosewater,

actually, often with sugar or honey in it, as well,

which is not very helpful with the decay.

They would sometimes use alabaster sticks

and, with particularly tough stains,

they might use a powder,

which was ground coral and pumice stone,

which would also take away the enamel, of course.

They also had kissing comfits,

which were perfumed sweets

which would take away bad breath, but did nothing for the decay.

Tragically, the Tudors had no idea

that they were in the grip of what would become

a centuries-long addiction.

It's the sweet taste of sugar that attracts us all,

but part of the reason for that

is that it has an effect on the chemicals of our body.

Sugar helps us absorb an amino acid called tryptophan,

which is used to make the neurotransmitter serotonin

and this a chemical that affects the brain

to make us feel happy and content.

It's one of the... Sort of like a pleasure chemical

and so, sugar is linked to that.

And so it's thought that that's why people like sugar

and that's why it's sometimes described as being addictive.

In 1592, the Tudors began recording deaths

in mortality bills.

They include all manner of apparent causes

and all the biggest killers make an appearance.

Plague,

fever,

consumption

and, surprisingly, teeth are there too.

Bad teeth?

Can you really die from bad teeth?

Yes.

Yes.

Absolutely. Tooth disease can be a killer.

Teeth are deadly.

If you've got that amount of decay happening

and that can then also affect the bones,

so, you can then form an abscess,

and if that's then draining internally,

you've got all that poison actually going inside you.

That can cause you a lot of problems with your health.

Teeth are pretty deadly, actually.

The acid's bacteria produce eat into the teeth

allowing infection to take root.

Bacteria can then get into the bloodstream

and attack other parts of the body.

But without antibiotics,

there was little the Tudor dentist could do

beyond pulling teeth.

MAN SCREAMS

They would have had no understanding at all

of the fact that sugar was damaging the rest of the body,

so, high sugar levels could be predisposing them

to develop diseases like diabetes

and then the bacteria from the decaying teeth

would be damaging, perhaps, the heart valves and the kidneys.

So, it could be causing damage to all of the internal organs

and they would have no idea until it was too late.

MAN SCREAMS AND BONE CRUNCHES

So, sugar really can be a killer.

Yes, cos if you're affected that badly,

then it can have that really awful effect on your on your health

and then cause your...you know, your demise, cause you to die.

Sugar was a slow-burn killer,

taking centuries for its true impact to be felt.

Now, it's considered by some to be responsible for

some of the greatest health problems of our time.

The biggest danger, though, wasn't what they ate,

but the very construction of the home itself.

I'm making my way into the main room of the house

on the trail of the next killer.

In fact, it's sitting right here,

hidden in plain sight.

It's not the fireplace,

but the chimney.

Before the chimney was widely adopted,

early Tudor homes, like medieval houses before them,

could easily fill up with life-threatening smoke.

The typical Tudor house

was a long house, then.

It was, you know, a great hall house.

There was a fire in the centre.

A little hole in the roof took the smoke away.

These early makeshift vents didn't work well,

allowing noxious fumes to build up in the home.

The chimney offered a brilliant solution.

The change from having an atmosphere indoors,

where you're constantly breathing smoke,

and your eyes are weeping,

to having one where its drawing

and you've got clean air round you, is enormous.

And, certainly, anybody who could afford to

would've moved over as soon as he'd got to grips of

the idea of this new technology being available.

Not only did the chimney make the home more comfortable,

it had a dramatic impact on its overall layout.

Over the course of the Tudor period,

with the introduction of...

to begin with, quite experimental chimneys.

More opportunities become possible

for pushing the fire to the side of the room,

enclosing the fire.

It allows you to subdivide that space

making possible new ideas of privacy and comfort,

to some extent.

So, the chimney ushered in

the biggest change to the middling sorts' home

for many centuries.

For the first time,

ordinary homes could have an upstairs level,

separate rooms to sleep in...

..a kitchen...

..and a room to dine in...

..and each one had its own chimney.

It revolutionised domestic life.

But these comforts came at a price.

The chimney brought a host of hidden dangers.

As the century went on,

there were regular reports of fires sweeping through whole towns...

And in Shakespeare's birthplace of Stratford-upon-Avon,

there were two major fires.

One in 1594 that burnt down half the town

and another a year later destroyed the remaining half.

To find out what caused these fires,

the Tudors examined the construction of the chimney.

In the rush to introduce this new technology,

you get a builder in or you do the work yourself,

not necessarily to the highest specification.

There's no building regulations,

so, a lot of these early chimneys are built

out of really inappropriate materials.

Timber and wattle, so that's earth.

You could stock your fire and light it.

The wood would burn,

the sparks would go up the back of the chimney

and, then, all of a sudden,

the wicker on the back of the chimney would catch alight

and that could smoulder for hours and hours.

You and your family would be fast asleep

and that chimney was burning away unknowingly.

And, then, of course, that would spread to the roof

and then you wouldn't be getting out of the building then.

As well as using flammable materials in its construction,

Tudor builders had yet to work out the basic principles

that make a chimney function.

It took quite a while before they realised that

you had to have an aperture in the front of the fireplace

that was no more than 10 times the narrowest point in the chimney.

If you don't do that, then, it won't draw properly,

you'll get smoke spilling back into the room.

The draw is the suction effect

that quite literally draws smoke and gasses

away from the fire,

up the chimney

and out of the house.

But if the draw's not strong enough,

smoke lingers in the chimney for far too long

with deadly consequences.

The smoke used to sit about halfway up the chimney

and it would just tumble.

Now, anybody who knows anything about fires

knows smoke is unburnt fuel.

Forensic Fire Expert, Emma Wilson,

can demonstrate the impact of unburnt fuel

in a Tudor chimney.

The smoke that has been produced by the fire

at the base of the chimney ignites,

and all of the smoke that's exiting the chimney

begins to flame very quickly.

The smoke itself catches fire?

The smoke catches fire,

yes, and I've got an experiment to show you

how combustible smoke can be.

OK, here we go.

Whoa!

So without an effective draw,

thick soot deposits build up inside the chimney.

Smoke hangs around in the flue

until the heat builds up to ignition point.

It's easy to see this effect in Emma's experimental chimney.

So you can see the gas is coming out the top.

Start to get the ticking.

There you are, we've got flames out the top already.

Gosh.

Imagine the effect of these flames

on a thatched roof.

So I suppose at first

people didn't realise that this happened with chimneys.

No. If you'd never had a chimney before,

how would you know that this could happen?

How would you know that you had to clean the inside of your chimney?

So, when people first started using chimneys,

I imagine,

you built it and you thought that was it.

Whereas actually,

we now know that cleaning your chimney regularly

is something you've just got to do to prevent, erm...

chimney fires from occurring.

In Tudor times, as today,

the consequences of fire

could be devastating.

Pamphlets, like this one from 1586,

poetically chart the emotional impact

of these frequent fires.

So the chimney could be lethal...

They describe really horrendous,

heart-rending

experiences of the individuals

losing, obviously, their lives,

their children and their property.

And there's quite a bit of attention

paid in these accounts to

the kinds of goods being lost and burnt

and a sense of just tremendous ruin and loss...

There are accounts of a third of towns being taken out

by these major fires that are sometimes traced back to

just one individual not looking after their chimney properly.

So, the chimney could be lethal.

But the biggest cause of death was not fire itself.

Dr Steven Gunn is conducting important, new research

into some 9,000 coroners' inquest records

from around the country during this period.

These documents are a unique source of statistical data

about Tudor life.

And provide a whole new insight

into death in the Tudor home.

We actually, in the coroners' reports,

find that there are more house collapses

killing people than house fires

because Tudor houses are mostly made out of things that burn quite easily.

They're mostly timber-framed, but they burn quite slowly,

so people have the chance to get out.

The problem is they're building chimneys onto houses

and of course, chimneys are large structures,

so we have chimneys collapsing

during fires, or when fires are lit inside them.

Brick was the wonder-material that distinguished

the architecture of the Tudor Age.

But it turns out that early bricks had a hidden weakness

when it comes to the defining feature of a 16th-century house.

Coal and wood,

they would burn inside a chimney,

wood at about 1,000 degrees C

and coal at about 1,200 degrees C.

And that was way more than the brick could handle.

So, the bricks just couldn't handle the heat whatsoever

and they would explode.

The mortar that was holding the bricks together would expand,

then it would contract, fall out, the bricks would be split

and the chimney would come crashing down.

BRICKS CRASH DOWN

So, for example, we've got an accident in Kent in 1518

with a fire that breaks out at a house in Wingham in Kent.

Several men run to put the fire out,

Thomas Adams, one of them's called, Arthur Oven, another one,

they get to help put the fire out with other people,

but again, in the course of the fire,

the brick chimney collapses on top of them.

So it's actually the collapsing material rather than the fire itself

that kills them in the end.

The Tudors gradually came to understand the risks to life

and property that chimneys could pose.

To tackle the problem, they drew up what were, effectively,

the very first health and safety laws for chimneys.

There are ordinances, for example, issued in Oxford in 1582

that actually make it the responsibility of each

individual householder to, er, construct their chimneys

and their roofs in appropriate materials.

So not thatch for the roof but tile or slate

and brick or stone for the chimney...

But even these laws couldn't prevent

the Great Fire of London, 84 years later.

Despite all the new luxuries of Tudor life

and the proliferation of grand multi-roomed houses,

in many ways the house remained firmly lodged

in the medieval period.

Much of what we think of as the basics of domestic life

simply weren't there.

For us, there's nothing more fundamental than the utility

and convenience of running water.

But for the Tudors, there was no such thing as a bathroom

or a shower.

My next hidden killer

lies outside the four walls of the house.

The woman of the house, and it almost certainly was the woman,

needed to bring every drop of water that the family required

to the door.

This bucket, became a familiar and tedious burden.

Water is a very heavy substance

and so if you've got to acquire it

from any distance for your household

that's going to be, erm,

quite a major part of the effort that's put in during the day.

All sorts of chores that we today do inside our cosy, modern homes,

the Tudors were forced to do outside

particularly washing and laundry.

This meant spending an awful lot of time

down at the nearest water source,

in all weathers, all year round.

Effectively making them an extension to the home.

Because ponds and streams played such a major role in daily life,

it's no surprise that they also appear in literature,

often lethally.

"But long it could not be till that...

Many of Shakespeare's plays,

and much writing of the time, feature characters drowning.

And analysis of the coroners' reports reveals,

for the first time, the number of deaths due to drowning

in the Tudor period.

The biggest contrast with today is the amount of drowning.

So, in 2010 in the UK, about 2% of accidental deaths were drownings.

In our period in the 16th century it's more like 40%.

Gosh! Why so many?

Well, people were exposed to open water

in lots and lots of different contexts.

The single largest cause is probably fetching water.

But then there are lots of other things that people have to do

for household purposes that involve going to the water.

You have to take animals to water,

you often have to travel across water

and, of course, the other thing is people have to wash their clothes.

We've got an accident here with a young woman,

she's described as a spinster, so an unmarried woman,

called Ursual Redsole.

This is 1556 and it says,

"She went to a pond, she was washing a little tunic called a petticoat

"and she was sitting on a bridge

"called a plank."

And she fell off the plank into the pond and she drowned.

So, why did so many drown?

And often in quite shallow water?

In the interests of science, I'm donning authentic Tudor garb,

and heading down to a nearby pool.

On a fresh spring morning, the water temperature's around 12 degrees.

The coroners' reports suggest it was all too easy to slip

and fall into the water, with potentially lethal consequences.

And immediately it's really, really cold

so much so that it's making me gasp.

WATER RUSHES

Our first reflex when our body hits cold water is to gasp.

SHE GASPS

You have a sudden intake in air and it's completely involuntary,

and there's nothing you can do about it. And if you're under the water

when that happens, you breathe in water.

And as soon as that cold water hits the back of your throat,

your larynx, your voice box, it can cause it to go into spasm.

And that will effectively suffocate you.

Even in relatively mild weather like this,

the water temperature is a shock.

My reaction may sound extreme,

but the cold really makes me gasp to catch my breath.

Water takes heat away from your body 25 times more quickly

than in air of the same temperature.

So you very rapidly lose heat from the body

and as soon as that happens your bodily functions just stop working.

As well as the cold and the shock, it's difficult to keep my balance.

My clothes are dragging, getting caught up.

-SHE GASPS

-And it's hard to get a footing

because it's very slippery and if you imagine there was any sort

of current at all it would be very easy to go under.

SHE GASPS

And then the difficulty with getting out

is that immediately my clothes are getting very heavy.

This is all wool and it's getting completely waterlogged.

Wool is uniquely good at absorbing moisture.

Under the microscope, it reveals itself to have

a surprisingly complex physical and chemical structure.

It's made up of two internal layers.

While the outer layer is water, dirt and stain-repellent,

the inner layer is highly absorbent,

so wool can take in more moisture

than any other fibre before becoming saturated.

Oh, my goodness, my clothes have doubled in weight.

-SHE LAUGHS

-It's like lifting up a huge bag.

SHE GROANS

I'm not just imagining it.

Wool can absorb up to one and a half times it's dry weight,

which means my clothes are much heavier as I try to get out.

I didn't feel it when I was submerged,

but as soon as I tried to stand up, it's a hefty, added burden.

It's really not easy, struggling to stand up on slippery mud

while freezing cold, and weighed down by wet wool.

So it was a combination of heavy clothing, slippery banks,

and the shock of the cold water that made drowning so prevalent.

The Tudors were certainly aware of the problem

and as the 16th century wore on, they began to take precautions.

Towards the end of the Tudor period,

people began to put covers on village wells.

They fenced off water courses.

They installed water pumps.

And as communities worked together to create safe sources of water,

so the risk of death by drowning declined.

The idea of the home as something encompassed by four walls

is a very modern notion.

So much of their domestic life involved the space outside

as well as the rooms inside.

For the Tudors, instead the house was open and permeable.

Humans...and animals,

tumbled in and out in a colourful cacophonous mess

from sunrise to sundown.

HEN CACKLES

The famous Dutch humanist Erasmus visited Cambridge

and he was disgusted by the state of the rushes.

These were the straw and the hay that they would put on the ground

to keep the house warm, to keep the house dry.

And he said that, occasionally, they would change the top layer

but the bottom layer would sometimes stay there for 20-odd years.

And it was full of ale,

it was full of fish juice, it was full of vomit,

it was full of the leakage of men, and of dogs

and of other abominations not fit to mention.

You'd have somebody who was called a gong farmer,

who would clean your cesspit out for you.

Disease was obviously rife

there was dysentery, cholera, typhoid

three of the biggest ones in the Tudor period,

which would kill you no problems at all.

So if you went to work one day with a cut on your arm or your leg

and the gentry was going to the toilet and it covered you.

It was only a matter of time before one of those diseases

came knocking on the door.

In these circumstances, then,

it's easy to understand how something as basic and natural

as childbirth was very dangerous.

Around 20 out of every 1,000 women died in childbirth,

in comparison to eight maternal deaths per 100,000 births,

in Britain today.

When women give birth, obviously, they're very vulnerable to infection.

The lining of the womb is a raw wound

and there may be cuts and tears in the genital tract.

And all of those give an opportunity for infective organisms like bacteria

to get into the blood stream and that can be a very dangerous thing.

Because people had no idea about how infections were caused.

The concept of micro-organisms like viruses or bacteria

causing disease, that came hundreds of years later.

Infection was a huge hidden killer in Tudor times,

as we can understand from the coroners' inquest reports.

That medical context explains why we have many of these accidental deaths

because lots of these are people who cut themselves or break a limb.

They might cut themselves on a knife, they might break a leg

falling out of a tree in the yard next to their house picking fruit

or whatever, and they wouldn't die from that now.

But under 16th-century circumstances,

they have infection in a wound

or they have a blood clot which causes them problems

from a broken leg and so, actually, the coroners' inquest reports

report them dying five days, ten days, 15 days after the accident.

But they still say that the accident was obviously

the thing that caused it.

The coroners' reports tell us that between 1558 and 1560

unusual deaths from accidents around the country include...

"Death from crushed testicles after playing games at Christmas."

"56 deaths were due to archery.

"And one to an escaped bear."

But, whatever the cause of injury or sickness

get ill in the 15th or 16th century

and you'd be unlikely to call in a professional doctor,

except in extremis.

Most people of the middling sort

would treat themselves at home using herbs and ingredients

from recipes passed down through the generations.

For the Tudor housewife,

the medicine cabinet was limited to her knowledge

and what was grown locally.

In the garden of a home of the middling sort,

there would be a special section

laid out specifically for growing herbs.

Remedies for daily ailments.

In effect, a Tudor first aid kit.

In a big Tudor house they would have their own physic garden

and there's a vast early modern what's called a pharmacopoeia,

which is a body of herbal knowledge and an understanding of which plants

can help you, which plants can heal you

and what conditions they can be used to treat.

Now even the smallest cottage in the village,

the person living there will have that same knowledge

even if they don't have the physic garden,

but they'll know where to go in their local area to go and pick herbs.

Stuart Peachey is custodian of a small Tudor-style physic garden.

What sort of plants did they think were useful medicinally?

Well, we've got things like tansy here.

Now, tansy's useful in springtime about the end of Lent

because they thought that the intestinal worms they suffered from

was partly result of all the fish that they'd eaten

over that Lenten period.

And tansy's very good

because it's a relatively mild poison that kills the worms.

Next to that we've got rue.

Now rue is one of a battery of different plants

that can be used to induce abortion.

Penny royal is another one.

Lungwort with its spotted leaves there,

that one is good for infections of the lung, easing the chest

and would have been used as a general herb in that area.

So the Tudor garden's really the ultimate in

organic natural medicine?

Absolutely. It's free as well as far as they're concerned.

According to some sources, 150 plants were considered

to have useful medicinal qualities, all grown in the garden

and prepared in the home.

People have this vast storehouse of medical knowledge and remedies

and they passed them around and that might be to their families.

It might be to their friends and neighbours

and, of course, when that happens the medicine spreads out in, sort of,

ever-growing circles.

It's also worth remembering that virtually our entire corpus

of medical remedies, tablets today are based on plants.

We are still using perhaps the same plants, but we're distilling them

or using them in different ways. The power lies within the chemicals,

in the plants and that's what worked then and it works now.

But herbal cures weren't without their dangers.

Get the dose wrong, and you'd find yourself in trouble.

Many of these plants are safe in small doses,

and toxic in high doses. For example, something like tansy

which, actually, was very widely used as a way of

purging worms from your body in the springtime,

later in the year that becomes toxic as the active ingredients

build up in concentration and you can make yourself quite ill with it.

And mixed up with some effective, practical cures,

were some very odd believes.

There was this idea that something that looks like the thing

you're trying to treat, might actually help it.

And so there's a plant that's been called pilewort, for example,

because its roots look a bit like piles,

and this was used to treat haemorrhoids or piles.

Because the plant looked a bit like what it was treating.

These superstitious beliefs along with the unpredictability

of some herbal cures, meant that Tudor medicine always

had the potential to go disastrously wrong.

But a radical German invention seemed poised to change

all of this for the better.

Johanes Guttenburg had invented his moveable type printing press

40 years before the Tudor era.

One of the things that is changing with medicine at this point

is that with the introduction of printing,

which occurs just before the start of the Tudor period,

it is far easier to disseminate knowledge.

People have written books on medicine since classical times,

but what you're now seeing is the printed page making that

more widely available.

Initially, printing presses were used mainly

to produce religious texts.

But by the mid-16th century, printers had found a new market -

publishing home manuals, a mixture of remedies and recipes.

These books were enormous.

John Gerard's runs to about 1,700 pages.

Profusely illustrated and designed to enable you to clearly identify

the plants and know what their effects are

and what the toxicities are, to some extent,

as well as what the benefits are.

Bestsellers were reprinted over and over again to meet popular demand.

Historians estimate that maybe 400,000 medical books were printed

altogether in the Tudor period.

Suddenly those who could afford it had access to thousands of recipes

in just one book - far beyond their previous knowledge.

And all written by a supposed medical expert.

At first glance, the books appear to contain no shortage of sound advice,

like John Gerard's recommendation against planting deadly nightshade.

These medical books made their way into the Tudor home

where they would have played a pivotal role in everyday life...

or death.

They are there to help people in the absence of a doctor.

They're, sort of, called things like Every Man His Own Physician.

And they may be set out by body parts, so therefore you just simply

leaf your way through and find something that's wrong with you.

But the medical tomes weren't necessarily the wonderful cure-alls

they first appeared to be.

Some of the recipes found in their pages seem very odd today.

This is Andrew Boorde's Breviary Of Health, a medical treatise

that was something of a bestseller in the 16th century.

And it includes all sorts of remedies,

including this one here for the palsy.

So it says, "Take a fox with all the skin and all the body quartered

"and with the heart, liver and lungs and the fatness of the entrails,

"stones and kidneys,

"steepeth it long in running water with calamint balm and caraways

"and bathe the patient in the water of it,

"and the smell of a fox is good for the palsy."

To the Tudors, cures like this were rooted in perfectly reasonable ideas

about the body and disease.

A living thing, something that has been alive

has what's called an animus, a living spirit.

And so if part of you is withered, dying,

then it makes a perfect logical sense to use something

from something that's been alive and restore the spirit to yourself.

Cures incorporating the blood and bacteria-ridden guts of an animal

stood a high chance of being fatal if applied to an open wound.

Like this remedy for a sexually transmitted disease.

Nicholas Culpeper's 1618 herbal has a remedy for the clap,

which is to kill a chicken and while it's still warm

to dip your privy parts in it, to soothe and calm.

But there was a basic problem with all the cures.

they were all based on a fundamental misunderstanding.

The trouble with all the recipes and cures in the home manuals

is that they are pre-scientific.

The Tudors simply didn't know about the bacterial pathogens

that cause infection and disease.

Their theory of the body was of the four humours.

Four key fluids that needed to be kept in balance to remain healthy.

Disease was simply thought to be a result of

an imbalance of the humours.

Nowadays we know that there's no scientific basis for that at all,

but if you've got a theory of disease that's simply wrong,

how can you cure it?

Unfortunately for the Tudors,

they believed they were following sound medical advice.

These are scientific men, leaders of the medical world

writing these texts and the danger is then

that they become effectively gospel.

The knowledge in the books would have been perceived

as being at the cutting edge of medicine.

And the recipes endured for so long because really effective treatments

for infectious disease were still hundreds of years away.

Part of the problem was that no-one had seen inside the body

for centuries.

Human dissection had been banned throughout the Middle Ages.

But in the 1540s, Henry VIII allowed surgeons to use the bodies

of those hanged at the gallows for their medical research.

Detailed studies of human anatomy became widely available

for the first time, marking the beginnings of scientific enquiry

into the body.

But they didn't come soon enough to help with our next problem.

I'm going upstairs, into the bedroom to find our next hidden killer.

People are as promiscuous in the past as they are today.

It's certainly socially frowned upon and all the printed literature

and all the religious literature and all the morality says

you shouldn't do it, but people still do it.

You've only got to look at the court cases and the illegitimacy records

and the bastardy bonds to see how many illegitimate children

were being born as a result of unmarried sex.

Children weren't the only consequences of such activities.

In 1497, a disease was recorded in the British Isles

for the first time.

And its route in seemed to be via the most intimate of acts

in the most private place in the home...

the bedroom.

Hospitals were being deluged with people suffering from a disease

they'd never seen before.

William Clowes, a doctor in London,

noted that every other patient at his hospital had the same symptoms.

William Clowes produced a medical treatise

describing the symptoms of the disease.

So he talks about it producing "pains or aches, ulcers, nodes

"and foul scabs with corruption of the bones."

Then he goes on here and talks about "venomous pustules,

"scabs upon the forehead, brows, face and beard,"

as about the secret parts.

Its cause, he says, was that it was "a pestilent infection

"of filthy lust."

A sickness "very loathesome, odious, troublesome and dangerous.

"A notable testimony of the just wrath of God."

We now know that in fact, these horrific symptoms

were caused by a virulent bacterial infection which we call syphilis

While they may not have understood its bacterial origin,

the Tudors knew enough to link its progress to sex.

The symptoms are very manifest.

And to a society that's obsessed with signs and symptoms,

it's very clear to them how this has come about.

The first stage gives the characteristic boils

and marks on the sexual organs.

So it's seen as a result of sin, of promiscuity.

Many Tudor towns had their bawdy house or brothel,

and these certainly aided the spread of the disease.

Errant husbands carried the infection

right back into the heart of the home as a poem of the time warns.

Whatever the source of infection the association with illicit sex

meant a sufferer was certain to become a social outcast.

It carried a terrible stigma if you had syphilis scars,

then you were seen as a sinner, you were seen as a prostitute,

you were branded a syphilitic whore.

Consequently, the telltale signs of syphilis

were sometimes cleverly disguised.

It was a real stigma to have damage to your nose

because people knew immediately

that you must have late stages of syphilis.

And so they even made wooden and metal false noses so that

people could try and cover up the damage that syphilis had done.

So, you must have really thought...

Here, in the Museum of London's bioarchaeology department

there's further evidence of the impact of the disease

on the city's population.

Some of the treatises I've looked at from the 16th century talk about

things like ulcers in the head and on the corners of the mouth

and things like that.

Do you ever come across anything like that?

Yeah, we do. We have an individual here that we can see

from their skull that they're actually showing these lesions

that we would identify as being associated with venereal syphilis.

You can see here that's incredibly destructive.

And if you imagine this poor soul being alive

and there's so much of it eaten away - it's horrific.

It must have been absolutely horrendous because you've got

those changes that we can then see, obviously, now in the dry bone.

But then you would've had the changes that would then be

expressed in the soft tissues in the skin as sores.

We might see the infection affecting your eye,

which then can lead to blindness.

Or also then, sort of, around the nasal area and then you can destroy

the soft tissues of that part of your face, as well.

The bones show how sufferers could have lived with syphilis

for decades. The bacteria slowly eating away

different parts of the body.

And with so many victims, a lot of effort went into finding a remedy.

The problem was -

all too often the so-called cures could also finish you off.

This little volume by Clowes is full of all sorts of remedies

for dealing with syphilis.

Page after page suggest different cures which indicates somewhat

that none of them worked.

And after 40 or 50 pages of these various cures,

Clowes identifies one more, he says -

"This is for the curation of the disease called the French pox."

And it's called 'quicksilver', that is mercury.

Mercury had long been thought of as a useful treatment

for skin conditions because it seemed to have a beneficial effect.

From around the 1300s it had been used to treat skin complaints.

So whether it was psoriasis, or leprosy or any sort of infection,

they would put mercury on it.

And so when they saw that people with syphilis

were developing skin lesions they thought they would use

the usual treatment for skin lesions which was mercury.

Mercury can be administered in all manner of different ways.

A man's penis can be injected with mercury.

There is, sort of, what you might think of as, a bit of,

adulterated underpants which have been dipped in mercury.

You can put those on, and that would do it.

It may have had an affect locally on the area that was being treated.

But of course we know that the initial chancre,

the first sign of syphilis, would actually heal up

and go on its own anyway within several weeks.

And so perhaps after several weeks of mercury treatment,

if the skin lesion had gone, they would assume it was

because of the mercury rather than the natural course of the disease.

Some of the ways Tudor doctors applied mercury to the body

were ingenious.

I took one of the more complex recipes to a specialist laboratory

to analyse its make-up.

Baxter's Cream was a blend of...

We mixed it together and...

surprisingly it actually formed a nice...even suspension.

We were expecting to see globules of elemental mercury

but in fact it ended up being a nice, silver cream...which is shown here.

Wow.

In the final concentration, it contains 35% of elemental mercury.

35%?

Yes. So huge concentrations.

Why didn't they just put mercury straight onto the skin?

You couldn't apply elemental mercury to the skin

because it would just fall off.

So this was a method of putting mercury into a cream

and then to actually put this on the skin

to treat the lesions from the syphilis.

So this is actually very clever.

So they've made a way of making a cream so that, actually,

mercury could be absorbed into it and then rubbed into the skin.

Yes. And it also tells us that they are able to make a cream...

which can be applied to the skin to give the same concentration

of pure elemental mercury vapour.

They knew what they were doing?

Yes, they did, yeah, it's incredible that they knew how to do that.

Would it have had an impact?

Well, elemental mercury doesn't actually

diffuse through the skin very quickly.

About 1% of this cream would go through the skin.

But the main hazards are actually due to the inhalation.

That's why we can't take the mercury cream out of a sealed container -

it's lethal.

When we measure the concentration of mercury vapour

coming from the cream,

it's off the scale.

At a body temperature, say,

of around 34 to 37 degrees centigrade that would have released

a gas phase concentration of about 50mg per meter cubed.

And the work room air limit that we can tolerate today is 0.02.

So that's over 2,500 times more concentrated.

Wow, that's extraordinary!

So even if you weren't afflicted,

being in the room, administering the treatment,

would have been hazardous.

Mercury typically affects the nervous system

and so it can cause pins and needles, numbness in the hands

and it can affect all of the nerves.

You could start to lose your sense of balance

and not be able to tell exactly where you are in relation to the world.

But then once it starts to affect the rest of the nervous system,

it can get to the brain, and it can cause dementia,

memory loss, convulsions, and then even death.

So while Tudors showed great invention,

they were actually making the bedroom itself

a deadly chemical trap, filling it with poisonous vapours.

They would use great doses of it.

So much so, actually, that one doctor said

that after examining the bone of someone who died of syphilis

he could see quicksilver quivering underneath it.

And amazingly even today, historians can't agree

on where syphilis came from.

There are a couple of theories.

One, that Christopher Columbus brought syphilis back

from the New World and that was the first time it had been introduced

to Europe and that's why it suddenly appeared.

But another suggestion is that there was some mutation

in the bacterium around that time.

It suddenly became much more virulent and destructive

and caused this severe disease that suddenly appeared.

So nobody really knows.

There would be no effective cure for syphilis until centuries later

with the advent of antibiotics.

To treat syphilis properly, and all infection,

doctors first needed an accurate understanding of the body,

and a better theory of disease.

They needed equipment.

The first microscopes, for example, were developed in the last decade

of the Tudor period.

Without a doubt, the Tudor century witnessed a revolution

in the way people lived their lives.

The changes that took place created the Tudor house we know today

with its picturesque beams and fireplaces.

New technologies had transformed the fundamental nature of domestic life.

And had started to usher in the Modern Age.

As with any period of change there were dangers, some of which

took centuries to expose and some of which are with us still.

Their roots firmly located in the Tudor age.