Tudor Monastery Farm

The farm team arrive at Weald and Downland in West Sussex. There are domestic tasks to tackle, from lighting fires with flint, making meals with depleted crops during the hunger gap and using a tread wheel to fetch water from the well.

Ruth, Peter and Tom explore the Tudor industry of wool production, known as `the jewel in the realm' of the English economy, it accounted for around half the country's wealth.

The team focus on preparing the staple foods of everyday Tudor life: bread and ale. A hard-working Tudor farmer could consume a two pound loaf and drink eight pints of weak ale in a day.

Lead was an important building material and Tom and Peter mine their own using Tudor techniques, while Ruth makes a stained glass window. On the rivers owned by the monastery, tenant farmers could rent fishing rights.

The team explore the hospitality of Tudor England. With no provision for the poor from the state, the monasteries played a key role in providing charity for those in need, but funding charity also meant extending hospitality to wealthy donors.

Ruth Goodman and archaeologists Peter Ginn and Tom Pinfold celebrate harvest with a feast, preserve food for the winter, put on a play, and reflect on how the landscape of Britain and the lives of its people were forever changed by the Dissolution.