Issue 22

Margaret Clitherow grew up in a York marked by the religious upheavals of the English Reformation, eventually becoming one of the city’s most venerated martyrs. Her conversion to Catholicism in the 1570s and her clandestine efforts to shelter priests placed her at the heart of the city’s fierce religious struggles. Dr Rachel Delman explores the streets and spaces Margaret once inhabited, contemplating how her life continues to shape the city’s spiritual and historical landscape today.

St Augustine’s Abbey had been an important monastic centre for close to 1,000 years prior to its dissolution in 1539. Conveniently located on the route between London and Dover, St Augustine’s was one of only a few monasteries retained by Henry VIII for his own use. Dr Emma J. Wells explores the history of St Augustine’s Abbey and its conversion to a royal palace.

Durham House was one of the thirteen great houses built for bishops and courtiers on the Strand, the main route from the city of London to royal Westminster. Owned by the see of Durham, and, for a time, the Crown, it is connected to many of the most prominent members of the Tudor court. Dr Elizabeth Norton explores the history of this once magnificent, and now long-gone, episcopal and royal mansion.

Whilst Anne Boleyn’s face is iconic yet strangely elusive, with the paucity of portraits from her lifetime fuelling the debate about what she looked like, much more survives of her cultural material. Dr Own Emmerson argues that examining the objects Anne owned, the spaces she shaped, and the emblems, mottos, and architectural language she used, tells us much about the image of herself that Anne wished to project.

Pitchford Hall in Shropshire is one of England’s finest surviving Tudor half-timbered houses. In 2016, after nearly twenty four years of neglect, the house came back into the hands of the family who have owned Pitchford estate since the fifteenth century, when James Nason and his wife, Rowena Colthurst, purchased the near-derelict property. We spoke to James about the rescue, restoration, and day-to-day realities of living in, and caring for, this Grade I listed home.

Sarah, The Tudor Travel Guide, takes us on a journey told in stone tracing the long, difficult years Mary, Queen of Scots spent in England — from Workington Hall in Cumbria, where she first set foot on English soil, to Fotheringhay Castle in Northamptonshire, the site of the final act in this Scottish tragedy. It is a story of tightening control, shifting calculations in Elizabeth I’s council, and of a queen who remained, to the last, a potent symbol of Catholic resistance and dynastic threat.