The Tudor family ruled England from 1485 to 1603.
The Tudor monarchs ruled England from Henry VII in 1485 to the death of Elizabeth I in 1603. It was only a little over a century, but during it the monarchy became stronger, the English Church broke from Rome, overseas voyages expanded and towns and houses changed.
The Tudor period also sits in the middle of a much longer story. Many Tudor developments began in medieval times, while exploration, colonies, trade and political conflict continued under the Stuarts after 1603.
↑ ContentsHenry VII won the crown at Bosworth in 1485 after decades of rivalry among powerful noble families. He worked to strengthen royal government and control the great nobles. A more settled kingdom made it easier for trade and taxation to recover.
England was still largely rural. Most people lived in villages and worked on the land, while London and other towns remained small by modern standards.
↑ ContentsTudor villages still depended on farming, but land use was changing. Sheep and wool could be profitable, and enclosure altered some open-field landscapes. In towns, shops and workshops crowded narrow streets.
By the later Tudor period prosperous merchants and landowners could afford houses with more chimneys, fireplaces, glazed windows, better joinery and substantial furniture. The surviving black-and-white houses we associate with the Tudors often belonged to the better-off, not to everyone.
↑ ContentsHenry VIII’s attempt to end his marriage to Catherine of Aragon led to a break with the authority of the Pope. The king became head of the Church of England. Religion and politics were now tied together in a new way.
Henry’s government dissolved the monasteries and took their lands and wealth. Monastic buildings, estates and responsibilities were redistributed, changing communities as well as religion.
↑ ContentsElizabeth I faced religious divisions at home and growing rivalry with Catholic Spain. English privateers attacked Spanish shipping, while England supported opponents of Spanish rule in the Netherlands.
In 1588 Philip II sent the Spanish Armada to support an invasion of England. English attacks, Spanish difficulties and severe weather all contributed to its failure. The event became an important part of the story England told about itself, although rivalry with Spain continued.
↑ ContentsThe medieval wool trade did not disappear in Tudor times. Cloth became an especially important export, and merchants traded through ports with the Low Countries and other parts of Europe. London grew rapidly as a commercial centre.
Increasing trade helped some merchants and craftspeople become wealthy. Their houses, furniture and possessions show a society in which commercial wealth mattered alongside land ownership.
↑ ContentsEuropean sailors were crossing the Atlantic and finding sea routes that connected Europe much more directly with Africa, Asia and the Americas. English voyages were part of this larger Age of Exploration.
John Cabot sailed across the North Atlantic in 1497. Later sailors such as Francis Drake crossed oceans, traded, fought and raided. These voyages brought new geographical knowledge and opportunities, but they also opened the way to conquest, exploitation and competition for overseas land.
↑ ContentsElizabethan attempts to establish an English colony at Roanoke in North America failed. Permanent English colonies came just after Tudor times: Jamestown was founded in Virginia in 1607 during the reign of James I, and the Plymouth colony was founded in 1620.
That is why the Age of Discovery cannot sensibly stop at 1603. Tudor voyages created experience and ambitions that the Stuarts carried into permanent settlement. Colonisation profoundly affected Indigenous peoples, and Atlantic expansion later became closely connected with forced labour and slavery.
↑ ContentsPrinting made books and arguments easier to reproduce and circulate. Renaissance learning encouraged scholars to study old texts and question accepted ideas, while religious change made reading and debate especially important.
Grammar schools expanded and literacy became useful to merchants, officials and professionals. New knowledge did not reach everyone equally, but the spread of print helped ideas travel much faster than they had in medieval manuscript culture.
↑ ContentsElizabeth died without a child in 1603, and James VI of Scotland also became James I of England. The crowns were now held by the same monarch. Under the Stuarts, overseas colonies expanded and Atlantic and global trade became increasingly important.
The seventeenth century also brought the Gunpowder Plot, conflict between king and Parliament, Civil War, the execution of Charles I, the Commonwealth and the Restoration of Charles II. London suffered plague and the Great Fire, while science, banking, navigation and commerce developed rapidly.
These Stuart changes form the bridge between Tudor England and the later world of expanding trade, finance, empire and eventually industrialisation. Leaving them out would make the next part of the story appear to come from nowhere.
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