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In a sixteenth-century survey of Edward Seymour’s estates, there is a valuable account of his Wiltshire home, Wolf Hall, or, as the Tudors would have known it, Wulfhall. It describes the manor house itself, nestled in 1,263 acres of land made up of gardens, meadows and orchards. The gardens had names, such as the Great Palyd Garden, My Young Lady’s Garden and Mine Old Lady’s Garden. Some of this land was used for pasture and farming, bringing in a revenue of £12 each year, equivalent today to around £5,000. Looking out at the estate in the 1530s, you would have seen parks sustaining horses, red deer and sheep, all surrounded by woodland. Edward Seymour took his own steps to improve and modernise his family home, which had been the Seymours’ seat since the medieval period, by adding a hare warren and a pond, the pond costing him a considerable £43 (around £18,000 today).

Portrait of Henry VIII in 1540, the year after his visit to Wulfhall.
Wellcome Collection, United Kingdom - CC BY 4.0.

The house, which no longer survives today, also sustained a large household dedicated to making the Seymour family comfortable and taking care of their more mundane domestic business. A list of payments to servants at Wolf Hall in 1537, the year Edward’s sister Queen Jane gave birth to Prince Edward, survives and was published in the late nineteenth century. Of the 44 male servants at the house, a man named Sir James was a priest in the family’s private chapel, while a man named Vince was Keeper of the Home Park. The family also had gardeners and labourers ('William the Grubber and John Wynbolt the under-grubber’), and John, a carter who worked with a servant called Wynter. Christopher was the Keeper of the Great Horses, while a man named Gorway worked as the estate’s shepherd. 

There were women, too. Edy is mentioned as working in the ‘day house’, with Jone Cocks her ‘fellow’, or her servant. Awdry was the family’s laundress, earning £1 per year, the same as the carter, with other women Winifred Holt, Margery Garret, Margery Gilman and Elizabeth Burde’s roles not individually specified. Ann Coles was nurse to Edward and Anne Seymour’s son, Lord Beauchamp, and earned £2, 13s and 4 pence annually. ‘Mr Edward Seymour’s nurse’ is not given a name of her own, but followed close behind, earning £2 per year, the same amount as the priest. 


Two years later Awdry and her colleagues would have been working amid a bustle of activity at Wolf Hall as the Seymours prepared to welcome a special guest: Edward's brother in law King Henry VIII. Henry had been married to Edward’s sister Jane in 1536, but she had died after childbirth in October the following year. He would later embark on a politically-driven marriage with Anne of Cleves which lasted just a few months in 1540. At the time of his visit in 1539 to the Seymours though, Henry was, briefly, single. 


The burly king disembarked from his horse on the warm Saturday of 9 August, meeting Edward and his wife Anne at the doors of their home. A record of the supplies purchased for the visit shows that Henry arrived with his ‘nobility and whole household’, while Anne and Edward’s entire household were also present. Cooks set to work creating breads, pastries and other foods, which the 200-strong party washed down with 2 tuns and 3 hogsheads of beer and ale, and cups of both Gascon and sweet varieties of wine. The warm scent of cloves, ginger, cinnamon and nutmeg wafted from the kitchens, as cooks prepared jellies, confectionery and spiced wine, Hippocras. 


Pots and ovens sizzled with fish and seafood as pikes, tenches, lobsters, bream and plaice were prepared. Salmon, trout, eel and sturgeon were also served, with sauces made from mustard, verjuice and vinegar. Two mealtimes were served, ‘dinner’, at 10am and ‘supper’ at around 5pm. A cook and a ‘turnebroche’ (turnspit) were hired specially for the event and were paid 7 shillings and 8 pence for their ‘labor in the kychin’. The diners did not eat in silence, and flutes, trumpets and viols (an early violin), were played to entertain as hungry nobles, members of the royal family and officials enjoyed their meals in the Wiltshire countryside.


Awdry. the laundrywoman, would have been working hard to ensure Edward’s shirts were freshly washed in time for the visit, while other servants strewed fresh rushes on the floor of the house, also mentioned in the account books. The Seymours spent £3 on coals, wood and rushes to ensure the king and his party were comfortable, despite England being at its peak summer season. Edward also decided to spruce up the roof of his barn with a coat of paint, with Philip Cornish, John Befell, Miles Range, John Miles and John Cox paid ‘for their pains taken in painting the rood of my boards barn, with frets upon canvas, against the king’s coming to Wulf-hall, 9 August’. It is likely that this is the barn where the wedding celebrations between Henry and Edward’s sister Jane had been carried out in 1536, a long, thatched building then on the family’s estate. Henry, visiting just two years after his loss of Jane, would not have wanted to see the barn in a state of disrepair or negligence. It was also needed during as a makeshift residence. The Seymours vacated the main house for the king and his nobles, while Edward slept in the barn. The account book states that painters, joiners, carpenters and masons were employed ‘of the barn at Wulf Hall wherein my lord lay and kept his house during the king’s abode there’. Anne and the couple’s children stayed at the nearby Penham Lodge.


The next day, Sunday 10 August, the feasting was more extravagant and not limited to fish, with six oxen and 24 muttons roasted in the Seymour’s kitchens, along with chickens, quails, swans, cranes, pheasants, storks and partridges. More people were present, (around 400), suggesting that members of the local nobility and gentry - and their servants - came to pay their respects to the king. On this day, the cooks also prepared a side dish of samphire, a salty flavoured green plant that grows near the sea, which would have accompanied the various meats and birds. The indulgence continued on the Tuesday, but slightly more modestly, with olives, prunes and ‘great raisins’, accompanying sparrows and a goat. The Seymours must have sighed with relief when the king’s last day arrived, Tuesday 12 August, when they again fed a slightly reduced number of people (230 messes were allocated at the king’s table and 100 at Edward’s). The records show that Henry stayed only for dinner, so we can be sure and his substantial retinue had left before 5pm in the afternoon when supper was normally served. The week of the king’s visit cost the Seymours just over £288, with additional costs including musicians, extra staff and last-minute repairs. Some of the costs were offset by the king’s officers. Although currency calculations are not straight forward, the National Archives Currency Calculator calculated that this sum would have had a modern purchasing power of around £121,000. For a week.


Surviving accounts books are fascinating, because not only do they show the economical value of produce in the sixteenth century but they give an intimate view of a household, its servants and its organisation. In this case, we can gain a greater understanding of how ambitious nobles entertained their monarch. 


Enjoyed this? You might also like Will The Real Jane Seymour Please Stand Up and The Personal Possessions and Jewels of Anne Seymour Duchess of Somerset. 



Interested in Tudor history? You might also like my second book, Power Couples of the Tudor Era, published by Pen and Sword Books, which explores the contributions couples made to their own times as well as how they influenced our own. Edward and Anne Seymour are one of the couple explored in depth. 
Order your copy here. 



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Source: Rev J.E. Jackson, FSA. Wulfhall and The Seymours, 1874.


While researching the life of Anne Stanhope, or Anne Seymour as she was known by her married name, I came across a carefully itemised inventory of her jewels, plate and money as well as some of her other goods.

Anne Seymour, Duchess of Somerset, New York Public Library, Public Domain


The duchess was the wife of the Lord Protector, Duke of Somerset, who ruled England during the early minority of Edward VI. The couple were wealthy and powerful and Anne in particular was said to have had an outspoken and dominant personality. Somerset was elbowed out of his title as Protector in 1549, when, accused of mismanagement of the country, he was forced to resign his post. He was involved again in the king’s council, but hatched a failed plot to overthrow his enemies at court and was sentenced to death. He was beheaded in... 

This is a Substack paid subscriber-only post - read the full article on Substack

You might also like The Women of the Princes in the Tower Mystery and Tudor Power Couple: Giles and Elizabeth Daubeney.

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In my second book, published by Pen and Sword, I look at nine couples who made an impact on their own time, shaping the world in which they lived and affecting the lives of their contemporaries. Anne Seymour and her husband Edward are one of these. Power Couples of the Tudor Era - Influential Duos That Shaped the History of their Time discusses these partnerships, their historical significance and what their actions tell us about life during the Tudor age. We also assess aspects of their personal lives with one another and catch tantalising glimpses of their domestic lives in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. There are tales of strength and support but also stories of jealousy, ambition and the relentless grasping of power - at any cost. Find out more at Pen and Sword Books.




In 1662 England was gripped with excitement. Charles I had been beheaded in January 1649 in an act that abolished the monarchy only for Parliament to establish rule for eleven years and then invite his son, Charles II, to once again take the crown, in 1660. Contemporaries talked of parties, celebrations and drinking as new coins were minted bearing the king's likeness and preparations were made to bring his future bride, Catherine of Braganza, over from Portugal for the royal wedding. In the undercurrent of this craze however, was another. In that year, in the town of Bury St Edmunds, a woman named Amy Duny prepared for her execution on charges of witchcraft.

Head of an old woman, Orazio Borgianni c1610. Met Museum of Art, Public Domain

Amy - and another woman, Rose Callender - appeared in court at a trial that was as dramatic as it was unsettling. It described its victims as members of the Durent, Chandler and Pacy families that all lived close to Amy Duny. On their arrival at the hearing, it was noted that Anne Durent, Susan Chandler and Elizabeth Pacy immediately ‘fell into strange and violent fits, being unable to give in their depositions during the whole assizes’. Another was the infant, William Durent. Durent's mother gave evidence against Amy that, needing to leave the house one day, her neighbour had looked after the young boy. When she returned, Amy told her that she had 'given suck' to the child although, the trial stated, she was an old woman. The mother was understandably displeased, and they exchanged some words, Duny leaving the house in an angry state. While this is strange behaviour to us, it may simply have been Duny's desperate attempts to settle William if he was crying inconsolably and his mother had been taking longer than she expected to come home. The fact that she openly mentioned to Anne that she had put the baby to her breast suggests that she thought nothing bad of it. Her leaving, visibly upset, probably conveys more embarrassment than guilt.

The next eveninig, the child fell into fits which continued for several weeks. The family's physician, Dr Jacob, told the mother to hang the child’s blanket near the chimney all day, and if anything came out of it to throw it into the fire. Dr Jacob was also therefore a sympathiser of the 'witch-craze' of the period, and therefore already suspected this when consulted, as there is no sign that he gave any other medical advice. When they picked the blanket up in the evening, a toad fell out of it. The family caught it and threw it into the fireplace, where it made a ‘horrible noise, and flashed like gunpowder’. Now, her 10-year old daughter Elizabeth also came down with fits. 

In the court, the fits experienced by the children were described as lameness, soreness and a lack of awareness of their senses, and they were sometimes unable to speak, see or hear. They would cough and bring up phlegm, and on other occasions, the horrified jury heard, would vomit crooked pins or a nail. They were unable, during these fits, to speak the name of God or Jesus. Sometimes the children saw mice scurrying around the house, and when thrown into the fire they ‘schreeched out like a rat’. On another occasion, a bee flew towards a child’s face, which was also blamed on the spellcraft of Amy Duny. It was also noted that when children had these fits, where they often clenched their hands into fists, when opened, bent pins would magically appear in their palms. 

 

On another occasion, the trial heard, Amy Duny was found in the family's house and was sent out. Duny allegedly replied ‘you need not be so angry, your child will not live long’ and foretold that the mother would also soon be on crutches. Within three days the child sadly died and soon afterwards the mother had a ‘lameness’ in one of her legs and needed to walk with crutches. It was noted at court that she had arrived using them to walk. The jury also recorded, in shock, a miracle. As soon as Duny was found guilty, ‘Durent was restored to the use of her limbs, and went home without her crutches’. 


Within thirty minutes of the beginning of the trial, Amy Duny was found guilty. As well as Mrs Durent's miraculous return to health, the children’s fits subsided within ‘within half an hour after the witches were convicted’. Amy was executed with Rose Callender, who stood accused of killing a man's horses after she had an argument him. His cart later became stuck in a gate and his horses died.

 

Away from our modern perceptions of witchcraft and the medical explanations we have today of seizures and fits, it is a wonder that Amy Duny's case was ever heard in a court of law. The 'crimes' that she was accused of are vague and there is no evidence for her involvement in any of them. A buzzing bee flying too close to a child's face and a toad taking cover in a child's blanket were cited as among her spells, but are freak instances of nature simply given supernatural meaning.


Amy Duny never confessed to her guilt. It is far more likely that, rather than this being a legitimate act of witchcraft, Mrs Durent was so shocked by Amy offering her breast to her baby to soothe him, that Amy became a scapegoat for his fits, and later, his death. Durent's doctor did not encourage rational thinking either, suspecting witchcraft himself and telling her to throw anything in her son's blanket into the fire. And as for the crutches and the fits of the other children, their actions in court are revealing. The other witnesses, when in the court room, fitted so violently that they were unable to answer any questions. Could they have been 'acting', to get Amy Duny a guilty sentence? If they could not answer questions, they would not have given conflicting evidence and endangered the case, saying anything to contradict Mrs Durent's testimony. As for her crutches, she cast them away the second Amy was declared guilty which suggests, from a medical point of view, that either she did not need them at all, or that any symptoms she had were psychosomatic. At the death of her infant son, Amy needed a reason for it, and in the middle of aching and desperate grief, turned to the older woman who had been in her house and suckled him at her breast: Amy Duny. Amy and Rose were hanged at Bury St Edmunds in 1662.


You might also like Elspeth M'Ewan, the 'Witch' of Balmaclellan, Scotland and How Not to be Executed as a Witch in Tudor and Stuart Britain.


Interested in Tudor history? You might like my second book, Power Couples of the Tudor Era, published by Pen and Sword Books, which explores the contributions Tudor couples made to their own times as well as how they influenced our own. Order your copy here. 



Never want to miss a post? Subscribe to my monthly newsletter here: 





 

Source

Richard Boulton, A compleat history of magick, sorcery, and witchcraft; ... 1715: Vol 1, archive.org


Looking for a bit of medieval action over the summer? We're well into May but we still have a load of medieval-themed days out to keep us busy through these warmer months. Many of them are also accessible by public transport too. If you know of any more, let me know and I'll add them in!


Please check event dates and travel times closer to your intended visit, as schedules may change.


Photo by Matt Benson on Unsplash


Kenilworth Castle – Knights’ Tournament

Dates: August 23–25, 2025

Location: Kenilworth Castle and Elizabethan Garden, Kenilworth, Warwickshire

Event Details: Knights and squires compete in a series of combats, transporting you back to the thirteenth century in the historic grounds of Kenilworth. 

Visit: https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/whats-on/kenilworth-castle-knights-tournament-23-25-aug-2025/


Framlingham Castle – Knights’ Tournament

Dates: August 23–25, 2025

Location: Framlingham Castle, Framlingham, Suffolk

Event Details: Combats and tournaments by armoured knights and squires

Visit: https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/whats-on/kenilworth-castle-knights-tournament-23-25-aug-2025/


Eltham Palace and Gardens – Legendary Joust

Dates: August 2–3, 2025

Location: Eltham Palace and Gardens, Greenwich, London

Event Details: Experience knights competing in a grand medieval joust, with each knight representing a legendary character. 

Visit: https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/whats-on/eltham-palace-legendary-joust-2-3-aug-2025/


Chiltern Open Air Museum – Medieval Jousting

Dates: June 28–29, 2025

Location: Chiltern Open Air Museum, Chalfont St Giles, Buckinghamshire

Event Details: Jousting displays by the Knights of Royal England, in a historic open-air museum. 

Visit: https://www.coam.org.uk/events/medieval-jousting-2025


Hever Castle – Jousting Events

Dates: July 12–August 31, 2025 (select dates)

Location: Hever Castle, Hever, Kent

Event Details: The Knights of Royal England will take part in a joust and combat, and actors as King Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn will be in attendance. 

Visit: https://www.hevercastle.co.uk/whats-on/jousting-events/


Photo by Fas Khan on Unsplash


Tewkesbury Medieval Festival

Dates: July 12–13, 2025

Location: Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire

Event Details: The largest free medieval re-enactment in Europe, featuring battle re-enactments, medieval markets, and jousting.

Visit: https://www.tewkesburymedievalfestival.co.uk


Shrewsbury – Battle of Shrewsbury Medieval Festival

Dates: July 26–27, 2025

Location: Battlefield 1403, Shrewsbury, Shropshire

Event Details: Re-enactments of the Battle of Shrewsbury of 1403, with knights, archers, and living history displays. 

Visit: https://www.myshrewsbury.co.uk/events/battle-of-shrewsbury-medieval-festival-2025-2025-07-26-10-00/


Beaumaris Castle, Anglesey, Wales

Event: Medieval Festival

Dates: 23rd–25th August 2025

Details: Experience medieval life with reenactments, including knights training and battles, set within the historic Beaumaris Castle.

Visit: https://cadw.gov.wales/medieval-festival


Kynren - An Epic Tale of England, Bishop Auckland, County Durham. 

Event: Outdoor theatre show

Dates: 19th July-13th September 2025

Details: Performed by a 1,000 strong cast, see stunts, equestrian feats, combat and choreography relating to 2,000 years of England's history. 

Visit: www.kynren.com 


Wars of the Roses Live, Warwick Castle, Warwick.

Event: Jousting Spectacular

Dates: 24th May - 31st August 2025

Details: A jousting experience based on characters of the Wars of the Roses story

Visit: https://www.warwick-castle.com/explore-1/shows/shows-attractions/wars-of-the-roses-live/


Loxwood Joust, Loxwood Meadow, Sussex.

Event: Jousting and Medieval themed day

Dates: Various dates in August, 2025 - see website for details

Details: Jousts, archery, crafting, music, workshops

Visit: https://loxwoodjoust.co.uk



Have I missed any? Let me know in the comments below!


Please check event details and transport options closer to the dates, as schedules and services can change.


You might also like: Bloody Meadow and the Battle of Tewkesbury and The Women of Warwick Castle.



Interested in women's history? My first book explores the roles of women from all sectors of fifteenth century society and the impact they had on the Wars of the Roses conflict. Order your copy here. 



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Passionate about history. Author and artist, in love with the history of what is now Britain, especially the period 1200-1750. Come and say hi!

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