Shardlake and disability in Tudor times: seven things you need to know

In the Disney+ adaptation Shardlake, streaming from 1 May, our hero (played by Arthur Hughes, who himself has radial dysplasia) is shown to have scoliosis, the same curvature of the spine linked to Plantagenet king Richard III. He is sneered at and spat at. People make the sign of the cross as he passes.

Was this the lot of disabled people who lived in Tudor times? Phillipa Vincent-Connolly, a historian of disability, spoke to us on this very topic for a 2022 episode of the HistoryExtra podcast, uncovering just how complex attitudes to disability were during the Tudor period.

Here are seven things we learned from that conversation that you really need to know.

Those with learning disabilities were considered as natural ‘fools’ – and they were thought to be closer to God, too

“The Tudors thought that natural fools – that is, people with learning disabilities – had a direct line to God, and that God would use them as a conduit to speak truth to people,” says Vincent-Connolly. “If you’re a Christian at this time, you know that God will speak through disabled people as a conduit for the Holy Spirit.

“Because they had no way of acquiring political power or of improving themselves financially or materialistically, they were seen as having no agenda – they just said to people exactly what they thought. This is why they were so cherished by Tudor nobility and by the Tudor court.

Disabled people were expected to be looked after by their families, at least in the first instance

“If the family were unable to for whatever reason – or if the disabled person didn’t have family – then guilds or monasteries that weren’t closed would step in and do charity work to support these people,” says Vincent-Connolly.

“They might try and get them to help work the land or perform a trade – something like basket weaving, washing, any basic task that they could possibly do.”

“When the dissolution of the monasteries took place in the mid 1530s, you had specific almhouses that started to spring up around on the edge of towns, which would take in the elderly, the sick, the disabled.

“It was all based on charitable giving and supporting people if they didn’t have that support in their own communities. But they didn’t really understand why people were born with a disability in the first place.”

Parents were often blamed when children were born with physical disabilities

“If a child was born with a severe deformity, they would probably not have survived very long,” explains Vincent-Connolly. “But if they did then it was considered there was something wrong with the parents.

“The parents must have sinned really badly, or seen something inappropriate that must have affected the baby in the womb, or the mother must have been involved in satanic worship or witchcraft.”

Nobles also took in those with learning disabilities – and often treated them like family

“The religious idea that you had to do good works led more well-off middle-class people and nobility to take the disabled in,” says Vincent-Connolly.

“They’d have them within their households, like a member of the family. They’d educate them, dress them, look after them, feed them.”

One famous example is that of Thomas More, Henry VIII’s chief minister early his reign.

“He took in a gentleman called Henry Patterson – you can see him in the family portrait of Thomas Moore, in the middle of the painting in a yellow gown.

“They had a really good relationship, and More would take him on diplomatic missions abroad to Europe.”

Even Henry VIII had natural fools living with him – a man named William Somer and a woman named Jane Fool, both of whom appear in Henry’s 1545 family portrait. In fact, William Somer was the only person Henry VIII would allow into his presence, for weeks after Jane Seymour died.

His father, Henry VII, had natural fools living at the Tudor Court, and his first high chancellor, Cardinal Thomas Wolsey did also.

Though people with learning disabilities could be well looked after, they might not have had much agency

“Clothes were bought for them. William Somer had leather work for his horse bought for him. Katherine Parr bought Jane Fool a flock of geese to herd around the gardens at Hampton Court Palace to keep her occupied, to give her something to do,” says Vincent-Connolly.

“But because their clothing was bought for them and ordered for them, it shows these people didn’t have any sort of authority over their own money or their own care.

“They had what we’d call carers today, who then were called keepers. The keepers were paid money to look after the likes of Jane Fool and William Somer.”

Physical and intellectual disabilities were described as they were seen – there weren’t any diagnoses

“The Tudors described disability literally by what they saw,” says Vincent-Connolly.

“If you couldn’t walk properly, you were a cripple or you were lame. If you had some sort of mental disorder or you were hysterical, then you were put in the mad category. If you had an intellectual disability, or a learning disability of any kind, you were a natural fool.

All those syndromes that exist now obviously existed then, but the Tudors didn’t have the medical knowledge to be able to diagnose them – and they didn’t label them.”

There was little attempt to treat disabilities in a medical sense – that we know of

“The records are so sparse in terms of what you can find on disability in this particular period,” says Vincent-Connolly.

“Because the Tudors thought that disability was a normal everyday occurrence, they didn’t see it as significant enough to record all of it.”

Phillipa Vincent-Connolly is a historian specialising in the history of disability. She is the author of Disability and the Tudors: All the King’s Fools (2021)