Skeletons of the Mary Rose review – how multicultural was Tudor England?

From a Spanish carpenter to a Moorish bodyguard, the skeletons from Henry VIII’s sunken warship reveal a more diverse Tudor population than historians have led us to believe

We were herded into the assembly hall to watch it on 11 October 1982. It was that big an occasion: the raising of Henry VIII’s warship the Mary Rose, 437 years after it was sunk in the Battle of the Solent. We didn’t know anything about anything, except that we might get to see some centuries-old skeletons, but it still felt momentous – because it was.

We didn’t actually get to see any bones that afternoon, but they were there – part of the 30,000 artefacts and remains that were brought up, and  have been painstakingly cleaned, catalogued, analysed and parsed for meaning by the good and patient people of the Mary Rose Trust over the 37 years since. This meticulously made documentary, Skeletons of the Mary Rose, focused on the special investigations, using the latest analytical techniques, being carried out on eight sets of remains and whose contradictory messages have especially intrigued the head of research, Dr Alex Hildred. They do so because they suggest that the idea we have of Tudor England as a country with an all-white, native-born populace – gifted us by an array of all-white, native English historians down the generations – might not be true.

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from The Guardian https://ift.tt/2FiXVez