Did Tudors Actually Swim? (The Answer Is Weirder Than You Think)

Someone asked me this from their pool. They were floating around listening to the podcast and thought, "did the people I'm obsessed with ever do this?"
And it sent me down a rabbit hole, because the answer is so much more complicated and class-loaded than I expected.
In this episode we cover:
Why Tudors avoided hot baths (and why that was actually logical given what they believed about disease)
Who could swim in Tudor England, and it's the opposite of what you'd expect
The first swimming manual ever published in England, written by a Cambridge academic who was simultaneously being expelled for blowing a horn around the college grounds
The Thames, which was exactly as bad as you're imagining
The superstition sailors swore by to protect themselves from drowning, and why it made complete sense
Tudor history isn't about dirty people who didn't know any better. It's about people with a completely different framework for understanding the world. Water was essential, deadly, and magical to them all at once.

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