Why were the Tudors obsessed with kissing each other, and what made them stop?
England today has a reputation for reserve, but in the late Middle Ages and Tudor period foreign visitors were often struck by how freely the English kissed in greeting. So when, and why, did that habit fade?
- Serafina Kenny
Published: June 20, 2026 at 11:15 AM
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Compared with parts of southern Europe, England now tends to be seen as a relatively restrained culture, less comfortable with public displays of affection and far less given to greeting friends or acquaintances with a kiss. But this modern image of English reserve would have surprised some foreign visitors to late medieval and Tudor England.
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In the 15th and 16th centuries, travellers from the continent repeatedly remarked on how openly affectionate the English seemed to be.
As historian Ian Mortimer noted, speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast, that sits awkwardly with modern assumptions. “We’re not known for being particularly amorous in our approach to strangers,” he says. But the historical evidence suggests that English attitudes to kissing were once rather less squeamish.
Kissing in Tudor England
By the 16th century, London was attracting increasing numbers of foreign visitors, especially wealthy young European men travelling for education, diplomacy or curiosity. They toured famous sites such as St Paul’s Cathedral and the Tower of London, and many recorded their impressions in travel journals.
One of them was Alessandro Magno, a Venetian visitor who wrote about England in 1562. He was surprised, he wrote, to see English men and women kissing “in the middle of the street as at home”.
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Magno also described a rough-and-ready game played between young men and women who did not necessarily know each other, in which the women were thrown to the ground and only allowed to rise after they had been kissed. “Here they kiss each other a great deal,” he observed.
What startled him even more was that this custom extended into domestic hospitality. “If a stranger enters a house and does not first of all kiss the mistress on the lips,” he wrote, “they think him badly brought up.”
This was not a new Tudor habit. There is evidence that such customs had deeper roots in Britain.
Before he became Pope Pius II, Enea Silvio Piccolomini travelled widely through Europe, including Scotland in the 1430s. In his autobiography, he also commented on local kissing customs. The exact nuance depends on the translation, but the general point is clear: he found the relative ease and informality of kissing striking enough to mention.
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One modern translation renders his observation as meaning that in Scotland “a woman’s kiss means less than a handshake does in Italy”. In other words, kissing did not necessarily carry the emotional or erotic charge that later societies would assume. It could instead function as a routine social gesture.
Another well-known testimony of British kissing culture comes from Erasmus, the great Dutch humanist scholar, who visited England around the turn of the 16th century.
He was enchanted by the English habit of greeting with kisses. In one oft-quoted letter, he described the country as a place where kisses greeted arrivals, departures and chance encounters alike. According to a 1901 translation of his epistles, he wrote that wherever one went in England, one was welcomed and dismissed with kisses, and that “wherever a meeting takes place there is kissing in abundance”.
Erasmus was so delighted by the custom that he urged his friend, the poet Faustus Andrelinus, to travel to England and experience it for himself.
Kissing and the plague
At times, however, the custom came under pressure.
In 1439, King Henry VI permitted his subjects to omit one particularly significant act of ceremonial kissing: kissing the royal hand. This was no trivial matter. Such a kiss was a visible expression of allegiance, and there were concerns that omitting it might cast doubt on a subject’s loyalty.
A 15th century English manuscript illustration of a man dying from plague. The Black Death, which reached England in 1348, killed perhaps half the population and transformed the medieval imagination. (Photo by Getty Images)
The reason for relaxing the custom was the return of plague. England suffered repeated outbreaks of the Black Death and related epidemics across the 14th and 15th centuries, and in 1439 contemporaries regarded the disease as especially severe.
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Although people did not understand germs in the modern sense, they were not oblivious to contagion. As the historian Dr Hannes Kleineke has argued, there was at least a practical awareness that physical closeness could help spread disease. Suspending the kiss of allegiance, then, shows that even in a society accustomed to kissing, public health emergencies could temporarily alter accepted behaviour.
But though the plague interrupted the practice, it did not end it.
A German visitor to London in the 1460s reported that among the English “to offer a kiss is the same as to hold out the right hand, for they do not shake hands”. That comparison suggests that kissing occupied the social role that a handshake would later fill: a conventional, everyday gesture of greeting.
Why kissing fell out of fashion
So what changed?
One important factor was religion. As England turned towards Protestantism in the 16th century, certain traditional forms of physical greeting began to attract suspicion. Kissing could be associated with the Catholic “kiss of peace” exchanged during the mass, as well as with the greeting customs of Catholic countries such as France and Italy.
At the same time, broader moral and social changes altered how kissing was understood. As English culture absorbed more puritanical values, kissing increasingly came to be seen as an intimate act.
That shift had consequences for relations between both men and women, and men with one another. As ideas about sexuality hardened, and as same-sex desire became more explicitly named and legislated against, forms of physical closeness that had once been socially permissible became more suspect.
Later examples show that non-romantic kissing did not vanish from English life altogether. Lord Nelson is famously said to have asked Captain Sir Thomas Hardy to kiss him as he lay dying after the battle of Trafalgar, though historians continue to debate exactly what was said and what it meant.
Even so, by then the world described by Erasmus and Magno had largely receded. The easy, customary kissing of strangers, guests and acquaintances was no longer a normal feature of English social behaviour.
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Ian Mortimer was speaking to Spencer Mizen on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation.
Authors
Serafina KennyFreelance journalist
Serafina Kenny is a freelance journalist specialising in the history of health, relationships, and social culture
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