The Tudor law that forced an occult practice underground for centuries
As well as creating new regulations on faith, Henry VIII’s 16th-century government also decided which kinds of knowledge were legitimate – and which were criminal
The people who controlled Tudor England made certain that any belief that didn’t align with strictly Christian values was deemed to be highly suspicious, and likely criminal. Witchcraft and demonology were stark examples, but Henry VIII himself also passed a law that criminalised palmistry: the reading of one’s fate from the palm of the hand.
Henry VIII ruled from 1509 to 1547, presiding over one of the most transformative periods in English and wider British history. His reign encompassed religious revolution, repeated rebellions and an unprecedented expansion of royal authority.
But while Tudor governments worked to centralise authority and standardise religious belief after decades of dynastic instability, many elite thinkers continued to explore esoteric ideas in private: the truth was, the early modern period was the perfect hotbed for alternative ideas to flourish.
The people who lived in the early 16th century were wracked by uncertainty. England was still emerging from the Wars of the Roses, and Henry VIII was only the second Tudor king; his claim to the throne rested on recent victory in battle rather than ancient lineage, making loyalty to the crown a constant concern. Early modern governance relied heavily on local surveillance and reputation, and strangers presented a challenge to that system.
Roma communities were newly visible in England in the early 1500s. As historian Alison Bashford explains, speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast, contemporary Europeans believed these communities came from Egypt. “Hence the term ‘gypsy’,” she says.
It was a misidentification that would shape Tudor laws, based on false ideas that Roma people came from a place imbued with ancient, supposedly occult forms of knowledge.
The Egyptian Acts and Tudor control
Under Henry VIII, Parliament passed a series of statutes known collectively as the Egyptian Acts. They aimed to fix populations in place and eliminate practices that escaped oversight.
But they had a much longer reach than you might first think.
“Henry VIII’s Egyptian Acts actually run through the 18th and 19th centuries,” says Bashford. “They’re the forerunners of vagrancy acts that continue well into the 20th century.”
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These laws targeted cultural practises that didn’t fit within church or guild oversight. The aim was to impose a Tudor vision of order, in which authority flowed from crown to institution to subject. One law that is a perfect example of this attempted authority was the ban of the practice of palmistry.
“As far back as Henry VIII’s time, one of the clauses in the original Egyptian Act was to render unlawful the telling of fortunes from the palm,” explains Bashford.
Practising palmistry required no licensing and no formal apprenticeship or qualifications. It was an unregulated, and – to Tudor society – incomprehensible form of secret knowledge that posed a tangible threat to the established social and religious order.
Knowledge after the Reformation
The ban of palmistry sits within the broader context of the English Reformation. Henry VIII’s break with Rome in the 1530s fundamentally altered how knowledge and authority were organised in England. By dissolving monasteries, abolishing papal authority, and declaring himself Supreme Head of the Church, Henry concentrated interpretive power in the crown – and thus himself.
Palmistry fell victim to this because of who practised it – and how. It was associated with the occult, with women, oral transmission, and independence that didn’t rely on parishes or churches.
But by banning this form of knowledge, the king had also turned it into a magnet for some of the elites who were interested in the esoteric.
To demonstrate that point, Bashford points to the 17th century and one of England’s most celebrated intellectual pioneers: Isaac Newton.
“Isaac Newton bought what were then called chiromancy books. He bought one called Palmistry: The Secrets Thereof Disclosed,” Bashford says. But just because the elite had discovered a fascination with the subject didn’t mean that the laws were changed. It persisted for centuries.
“That law continues through the 18th century and the 19th century,” Bashford explains. “It comes into vagrancy law after the Napoleonic Wars. It remains in place through the 1890s, when a whole number of palmists suddenly proliferating in the West End [of London] are charged … under a clause that has its origin in the Egyptian Acts.”
The cultural survival of hidden knowledge
Still, the tradition persisted in Roma communities.
“All the way along [the story of palmistry] are Roma people themselves – almost always women – traditionally telling fortunes from the palm,” says Bashford.
By the 19th century, Roma fortune tellers were fixtures of British leisure culture – Bashford cites Blackpool as a place where it became a key feature of entertainment as the country’s religious tensions began to fade. What the Tudors had framed as a threat to state order steadily became a form of risqué fun-making, imbued with a cultural mystique and links to occult and spiritual traditions.
But Henry VIII’s ban on palmistry had never been exclusively about religion and superstition. It was about consolidating authority, and keeping power in the hands of the ‘right’ people.
Alison Bashford was speaking to Elinor Evans on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation.
Authors
James Osborne is a digital content producer at HistoryExtra