Date/Time
Date(s) - 10/06/2016
3:00 pm - 4:30 pm
Location
182 JSB
Category(ies)
Charlotte Stanford will present for the Humanities Center’s weekly colloquium on Thursday, October 6, 2016. The presentation will be held at 3:00 PM in room 4101 JFSB.
Title: “Tracking Henry VIII’s Construction Crews: Job Security and Mobility for the Building Trades in 1530s London”
Henry VIII was probably the most prolific builder of any English monarch. He owned over 50 residences and was constantly ordering renovation and redecoration projects. The vast crew of masons, carpenters, and bricklayers who worked on these royal sites have often been assumed to have been “impressed” into forced labor in order to finish work for this impatient monarch. Tracking the names of individuals through surviving payroll records, however, it becomes evident that the king’s agents had a core of permanently employed workers who were mostly local and who belonged to families established in the building trades. At the same time there was a large group of constantly rotating unskilled laborers. Analysis of these building accounts helps develop a picture of the lives and employment opportunities of these skilled and unskilled workmen during the dynamic era of the early Reformation.
Refreshments will be served.
