Book excerpt: Inside the Tudor Home sheds light on how people lived in the sixteenth century from plush royal palaces to wattle-and-daub cottages and everything in between. Power. Politics. Prosperity. Plague. Tudor England; a country replete with sprawling landscapes, dense forests and twisting urban labyrinths. This is a place of stagnation and of progress; of glorious cultural revolution, where the wheel of fortune is forever turning. From the plush royal palaces to the draughtiest of wattle-and-daub cottages, sixteenth-century England revolved around the people who formed the beating heart of Tudor society. These people celebrated scientific progress and lamented religious persecution; championed the rights of women and the underrepresented; fell in love with sweethearts, cared for pets and mourned the deaths of their loved ones. In her first book, Bethan Catherine Watts sheds light on the Tudor home and the everyday lives of those who lived there.