For ordinary Tudors, death lurked around every corner with these surprising ways to die

“These are a very good way to look at the whole of Tudor life. People have accidents at home and relaxing, playing sport, playing football, traveling, whether riding horses or walking along. Every different area of people’s life throws up different kinds of accidents,” explains historian Steven Gunn, co-author with Tomasz Gromelski of An Accidental History of Tudor England, speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast.

The deadliest sport? Tudor football

Football was one of the few leisure activities available to most men in Tudor villages and towns. Games were usually held on holidays or Sundays after church, when labourers could spare the time. The ‘ball’ was heavy and stitched from leather, and the pitch might be the village green, a field, or even the streets.

There were no fixed numbers of players. Matches could involve dozens of men – sometimes entire parishes – who competed to force the ball towards a goal agreed in advance. Tackling was brutal, kicking and tripping were common, and injuries were part of the game. As a result, Gunn states, “Tudor football was very dangerous.”

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“If two people just run into each other, that’s an accident. If one person tackles another in a particularly brutal way, breaks their leg and they then die … that’s a homicide by misfortune,” Gunn explains.

If these games were so dangerous, why did they carry on?

The matches were popular in part, says Gunn, because they were communal. They brought villages together, sometimes to compete against neighbouring parishes, though they also revealed the risks of a society without formalised medical care. The law was clear that football deaths weren’t deliberate murders, but the man responsible still had to seek a royal pardon. It was a reminder that such violence, even if accepted as distinguishable from murder, had a price to pay.

Fights that weren’t meant to kill

Tudor society was hierarchical, but also quarrelsome. Disputes over land boundaries, debts, insults or drunken slights could easily spill out into scuffles. Wrestling was a common form of entertainment, and even neighbours might grapple in jest or anger.

“There are certainly disputes in which people are fighting. Mostly those seem to be cases where it’s not intended to be fatal,” Gunn notes.

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Juries were often sympathetic if both parties had been drinking or if the fight was thought to be spontaneous.

Still, the presence of knives, sticks or farming tools meant that a quarrel could quickly turn deadly.

Dinner table dangers

Meals were another source of risk. Tudors ate with their fingers and personal knives, and every man and woman carried a blade daily, used to cut bread, cheese, meat and fruit.

“Everybody needs a knife to cut their food up. People very rarely use forks in the 16th century; forks are quite exotic. That means everybody's got a knife and you have lots of accidents with knives.”

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These knives were carried around in a similar way to how someone might carry a wallet or keys today: they were part of a personal toolkit. “People have got knives hanging on their belts, [because] you can't not have a knife or, or you can't have your dinner.”

But this ubiquity also meant that any trip or fall could instantly turn deadly. “They fall over running along and their knife goes into their leg. And lots of these knife injuries are either in the thigh or in the belly.”

With no knowledge of antiseptics or antibiotics, even a shallow wound could lead to a deadly infection.

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Tools that doubled as Tudor weapons

Most Tudor men, and many women, worked with tools that could easily kill if misused. Farming implements such as scythes and axes were essential but hazardous. But it wasn’t just work itself that was dangerous: getting to the workplace was too, with no paved roads or bridges.

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“People have accidents travelling … or just trying to cross bridges in the landscape, which could just be a plank of wood,” Gunn notes.

Add to that the fact that carts and carriages were often unstable, their wheels prone to snapping on rutted tracks. Rivers were often crossed by simple wooden planks or ferries that could capsize. Even short journeys between villages could prove treacherous, especially in winter when ice or floodwaters made roads impassable.

A kaleidoscope of everyday dangers

The coroners’ records that Gunn highlights reveal an era of history in which the ordinary could soon become deadly. To live as an ordinary Tudor was to navigate constant risks.

As Gunn puts it, the records provide “a pretty kaleidoscopic picture of the ways that people lived in 16th-century England.”

Steven Gunn was speaking to Ellie Cawthorne on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation.