Ordering Tudor England

Dr Flannigan’s lecture gives an insight into Tudor England, explaining that throughout the Tudor ‘long’ Century (1485-1603) there were five rulers who governed 2-4 million people over their cumulative territories. Dr Flannigan introduces that the secular order of Tudor England existed alongside the parallel Church system, and the implications of this. Essential to any order, Dr Flannigan explains, is the ability to communicate – a challenge when not all subjects could read. However, Tudor monarchs were able to develop their ‘image culture’ though royal progresses and court ceremony, which projected the grandeur and magnificence of the monarchy, and proclamations which reinforced the order of the day. Dr Flannigan also introduces some subjects’ responses to the ceremony they experienced, indicating an element of collaboration between subjects and sovereign.

Dr Laura Flannigan
Dr Laura Flannigan


Dr Flannigan is a Junior Research Fellow in History at St John’s College. She is a historian of politics and political culture in late-medieval and early modern England, between the fifteenth-century ‘Wars of the Roses’ and the Civil War of the 1640s. Dr Flannigan’s work combines a detailed analysis of the inner workings of government with attention to the social dynamics driving the institutionalisation of justice-giving at the centre of power. You can read more about Dr Flannigan and her research and teaching here.

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