Forget the Tower, the beheadings and Anne Boleyn's doomed romance with Henry VIII.
If you really want to understand what it meant to live and die in Tudor England, look not to the royal court but to the nation's cesspits, stiles and ale-soaked backstreets.
In their new book, An Accidental History of Tudor England, historians Steven Gunn and Tomasz Gromelski use coroner records to reveal a side of the 16th century rarely seen.
It was a world where death didn't always come by sword or pox, but by misstep, misfortune, and even a pair of overly tight trousers.
Take the elderly clergyman of Westoning, Bedfordshire, who met his maker not in the pulpit, but on the privy.
