Rob Rinder and Ruth Goodman redeem themselves in the The Tudors says CHRISTOPHER STEVENS - with tales of how the humble currant saved civilisation!

The Tudors With Rob Rinder and Ruth Goodman 

Rating: Four stars 

Rating:

History on the box comes in two varieties. There’s the woke type that judges the past according to current fashions, condemning our forebears for failing to live and think like us.

Rob Rinder and Ruth Goodman have strayed close to this self-indulgent style in their current series, which follows a format of pitting rich (boo! hiss!) against poor (sigh! sob!).

But they redeemed themselves in The Tudors (Ch5), the final episode of the run, which investigated the England of 1588, in peril from the Spanish Armada. This was history of the second sort, crammed with the kind of detail that gives us a new perspective on stories we thought we knew from school.

I’d always assumed, for example, that the tradition of eating fish on a Friday was somehow rooted in religion. Not so: apparently it’s more to do with economics and defence of the realm.

An island nation needs sailors. The Tudor exchequer couldn’t afford to maintain a Royal Navy, so in times of peace its seafarers had to earn their living as fishermen. To ensure a strong demand for their catches, eating fish on Fridays became mandatory.

Anyone caught tucking in to mutton instead of mackerel could be thrown in the stocks. These days, about 20 per cent of British people never eat oily fish, and Rob’s revulsion as he tasted a bite of eel told us he’s one of them.

We also had no standing army — but the entire male population was ready for call-up. Every man and boy aged seven to 60 was required to own a bow and at least two arrows, and to be proficient in their use.

It’s hard to escape the conclusion that, even without official Armed Forces, the England of Tudor times was more vigorously defended than it is today.

Best of all was the discovery that our nation owes its survival to the currant, or rather to hundreds of barrels of them — juicy, sun-dried currants that Elizabethans used to sweeten every kind of dish from meat pies to lardy cakes.

Currants paid for the navy that fought off the Spaniards. 

You might say they became the nation’s raisin d’etre. Perhaps Good Queen Bess should have been recrowned as our Sultana.

The monopoly in currants, Rob explained, was held by a London merchant named Thomas Cordell, who lived in Cheapside, round the back of St Paul’s, with his wife and at least seven children. 

To import his goods, Cordell owned numerous ships. He was a Tudor shipping magnate.

And when the Armada billowed into sight off Plymouth Hoe, the monarch simply commandeered Cordell’s fleet for a makeshift navy... with 16,000 men, mostly conscripts, to sail them.

Despite heavy fighting and a long pursuit, only about 100 English sailors were killed — but on the voyage home, about 7,000 died of disease. Think of that next time you eat a currant bun.