May 1, 2019 • 31 mins
On May Day in 1517 a riot was carried out by apprentices, journeymen and other workers. While this was an uprising of laborers, this incident, called the Evil May-day or Ill May-day, was also rooted in immigration and xenophobia in Tudor London.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, the production
of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome
to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry.
This episode is coming out on May Feet. Happy may Day.
Happy may Day. As a holiday, May Day has come
(00:23):
to have two different and sometimes overlapping meetings. There's the
one going back to medieval Europe. That's the holiday with
the celebration of the return of spring, full of greenery
and may poles in general merriment, and of course that
has its roots and much earlier springtime and fertility festivities
than in eighty nine. Socialist and communist organizations also selected
(00:45):
May first as International Workers Day, also known as Labor Day,
and over the next few decades May Day increasingly took
on those connotations. So then in n Pope Pious the
twelfth responded by naming May for also as the feast
of Saint Joseph the Worker, so keeping that whole connotation
connected to labor and also emphasizing a religious element over
(01:09):
the connections to communism and socialism. Sometimes people look back
in history and describe one particular May Day in fifteen
seventeen as being a really early example of both of
these meetings at the same time thanks to a riot
that was primarily carried out by working people, those being
apprentices and journeymen and other people in similar circumstances. But
(01:33):
while this was an uprising of laborers, this incident, which
is called the Evil may Day or Ill may Day Riot,
was also rooted in immigration and xenophobia in Tutor London.
Most of the workers who took part in this riot
were apprenticed in London's guild system in the sixteenth century.
Guilds formed the economic and political backbone of life in London.
(01:56):
These organizations had started to form pretty organically the tenth
and eleven centuries as more people moved into towns. People
who worked in the same trade tended to live near
each other, both supporting and learning from one another and
keeping an eye on the competition. So these informal groups
of working people gradually coalesced into more formal associations. Those
(02:18):
evolved into guilds. Because some of the guilds started wearing
livery to distinguish themselves from one another, they're also called
livery companies and livery companies still exist today, but in
sort of slightly different uh form and back in the
medieval period, guilds trained new members through apprenticeships, and they
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set standards for their work and for the behavior of
all their members, including things meant to protect all their
trade secrets. Failure to live up to these standards could
lead to a range of punishments, including physical punishments and fines,
having your tools confiscated, or being completely expelled from the guild.
Being expelled from the guild was extremely serious in London.
(03:03):
To practice a trade, you had to have the freedom
of the city, and that freedom was conferred by being
in a guild, and the guilds effectively had a monopoly
on their specific trade, so if you weren't in a
guild anymore, you almost certainly lost your livelihood. Conversely, during
their heyday, being in a guild also offered a person
some protection, including being cared for in their later years.
(03:26):
When we were on our tour last year and I
got to go to the book Binders Museum, the docent
who was taking me on a guided tour of it
described the book Binders Guild as being like part professional organization,
part organized crime. A lot of stuff that would not
necessarily fly today in a professional organization, and then these
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guilds in London came to wield huge political power as well.
By fifteen fifteen, there were forty eight of them and
they had been arranged into a hierarchy based in the
on their wealth and their importance. This hierarchy was developed
by London's aldermen to try to put a stop to
ongoing rivalries and jockeying for power among the guilds. There
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was a lot of fighting a disagreement among them all,
and creating this hierarchy was meant to put a stop
to that. About twenty years after the events were talking
about today, the twelve highest ranking guilds became known as
the twelve grade Companies, and they had even more political
power than all of the others. The guilds essentially governed
their members through strict enforcement of their own rules and policies,
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and they were also a major part of governing the
city itself. London's freemen elected aldermen from each of the
city's wards, and the livery companies also elected the Lord Mayor,
who was second only to the monarch in the context
of the city's affairs. So by the sixteenth century, the
guilds were essentially running the city government of London, although
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not everyone was in a guild by any stretch, and
guilds weren't the only source of social or political power.
For example, most guilds didn't admit women, so women weren't
really part of this process, although women frequently worked with
their husbands or their male relatives who were guild members.
And then there was also this overlapping system of parishes
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with parish priests and other clergy who were also a
critical part of the social framework and sort of keeping
the standards of society going. There were also a couple
of huge exceptions to the guild's political power in London.
One was the monarch. Even though London was self governing,
the monarchs still had the power to make decisions that
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affected the city or to overrule decisions that were made
by the city government or the individual guilds. The other exception,
which connected back to the monarch, was the existence of liberties.
Starting in the medieval period, monarchs had designated various entities
as liberties, and then a liberty existed outside the city's jurisdiction.
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In some cases, it wasn't really even under the jurisdiction
of the monarch. Most of these liberties were affiliated with
the church and so they were under ecclesiastical control, but
some were more affiliated with a specific lord and under
his control. Since liberties were essentially their own jurisdiction, they
got to set their own rules about who could live there,
what trades they could practice, and how they could run
(06:17):
their Businesses and monasteries, churches, nobles and anyone else with
status as a liberty had plenty of incentives to basically
create their own market. An obvious incentive was money. If
a liberty was effectively establishing its own marketplace that was
free from the restrictions of the city and the guilds,
that could be really lucrative. And then another incentive was
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the types of goods that were available. Artisans from elsewhere
in Europe were often making goods or using materials and
techniques that weren't otherwise available in England, So if a
liberty was giving sanctuary to foreign artisans, it was getting
access to different types of goods and different styles of workmanship,
many of which were in very high demand from the
(07:02):
country's wealthiest residents, and the monarch had plenty of incentive
to not just allow this, but to encourage it. One
of the monarch's sources of income was customs duties from
trade with other countries, so it was in the monarch's
financial interests to encourage these trading relationships. Plus, the monarch
and the nobility really liked luxury goods like silk and
(07:25):
spices that just weren't made locally in England. Cutting back
on imports from other countries meant losing access to these things.
They were not excited about that idea at all. So
this interconnected world of guilds and liberties and the monarchy
bread a lot of frustration and resentment among working people
(07:45):
in sixteenth century London. By then London had a population
of roughly fifty thousand people, although I saw some estimates
as high as a hundred thousand when I was working
on this. Between one thousand and fifteen hundred of them,
or between two and three percent, were immigrants, or in
the language of the time, aliens or strangers. These immigrants
(08:07):
had come to London for a variety of reasons, and
we're all across the economic spectrum. Some were regular artisans
and craftspeople who were fleeing war or other violence. London
was also becoming wealthier, which made it more attractive to
people who thought they might have a better life in
another country. The most prosperous immigrants were often in England
at the invitation of the king, or were acting as
(08:30):
representative of a wealthy family or business headquartered somewhere else
in Europe. Speaking in very broad strokes, so we're talking
about trends here and not every individual immigrant. Flemish and
Dutch immigrants were often working in cloth related industries, especially
related to fine wool and weaving. French and German immigrants
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included artisans along with wealthier merchants. Italian immigrants were often
associated with banking. London's Lombard Street, with all of its
banks and merchant houses, was named for the Lombardy region
of northern Italy, where all of those bankers and merchants
were from, or most of them were from. There was
also a small community of Africans and people of African descent,
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many of whom were working as musicians or other entertainers,
although the riot that we're talking about today does not
seem to have been focused on them at all. And
of course, among all of these nationalities there were also
people who weren't working any particular craft or trade. There
were diplomats and courtiers and other wealthier people. By the
fifteen teens, many English workers thought there were too many
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strangers in London, that the city was literally being overrun,
and English artisans and craftspeople were being crowded out by
foreign competition. This perception was exacerbated by the fact that
immigrants tended to be clustered into very specific parts of
the city, into sanctuaries or the estates of wealthy people
from their native country. They also made up a large
(09:58):
portion of several industry ease. For example, about half of
London's Tanners and Cooper's were immigrants. So people were making
a lot of the same arguments that you hear today
against immigration. But at the same time, a much bigger
source of competition for jobs was migration from within England,
not from elsewhere. These were from rural areas and smaller
(10:20):
towns into London. Rural poverty was a huge problem due
to agricultural changes, including the enclosure movement, and this led
people to move into cities, especially into London, trying to
find work. About five per cent of England's population lived
in London, but about fifteen percent of England's population lived
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in London at some point in their lives, so while
unemployment was a real problem, immigrants were really not the
cause of this problem, and the apprentices were particularly disgruntled.
At this point in English history, apprenticeships were prestigious, but
they were also very difficult. Most apprentices were in their
teens and their lives were strictly managed by the master
(11:03):
of the guild. So these young men, whose lives were
very tightly controlled, thought they were preparing for work in
an economy that was inherently stacked against them. In April
of fifteen sixteen, flyers were posted all around London about
how strangers in the wool trade we're getting rich off
the King's favor while English people suffered. King Henry the
(11:25):
Eighth ordered the handwriting of every apprentice to be compared
to these notices to try to figure out who had
done it. This came to a head just over a
year later, and we're going to talk about that after
we first have a little sponsor break. In the spring
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of fifteen seventeen, English craftsmen living in London were fed up,
and the words of chronicler Edward Hall quote, the multitude
of strangers was so great about London that the poor
English artificers could scarce any living and most of all,
the strangers were so proud that they disdained, mocked, and
oppressed the Englishman, which was the beginning of the grudge.
(12:09):
To particular foreigners had drawn a lot of the city's ire.
One was John Mautie of France, who was a royal secretary.
He maintained an estate called green Gate, where his position
allowed him to offer sanctuary to other people from France,
and it was commonly believed that the immigrants at green
Gate included lots of pickpockets and unlicensed wool carters. It's
(12:31):
not clear at all how much of this was accurate
and how much was just rumor about this prominent french
Man and the people that he was sheltering, but the
people of London definitely believed it and took it as
a sign of everything that was wrong with immigrants. The
other was Italian merchant Francesco de Barti. De Party imported
fine fabrics into England, and he exported English wool back
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to Italy. One of his customers was King Henry the
Eighth himself, and the King was fond enough of Party
that he granted him a license to import his fabric
without having to pay customs on it, which people thought
was really unfair. On top of that, he had, according
to accounts of the time, enticed an englishman's wife to
come and live with him and to bring all of
(13:14):
the households gold and silver with her. Her husband had
filed a lawsuit against Devarty, leading Debarti to insult him
in court before filing a suit of his own. Devarti's
suit alleged that the woman's husband owed him money for
the cost of her lodging. Again, it's not totally clear
how much of this was true, but once again people
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believed it, and it speaks to the whole idea that
immigrants were disdaining and mocking the English. Yeah, a lot
of the things that people were upset about in terms
of specific foreigners in London sounds like tabloid fodder that
may or may not have been true, but people were
definitely riled up about it. So printing was still a
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fairly new innovation in English in fifteen seventeen. William Caxton
is believed to be the person who introduced movable type
into England. About forty years before that, a little less
than forty years so printing still wasn't widely available for
everyday use, and that's why those bills that were posted
around town in fifteen sixteen had been handwritten. Plus the
(14:18):
vast majority of people couldn't read, so if somebody had
a message to get out, they weren't printing flyers and
and widely distributing them. As what happened later on in history,
the best way to do it was really to speak somewhere,
or to get somebody else, preferably somebody who had an
audience to do it for them. So one common tactic
was to get members of the clergy to speak from
(14:41):
the pulpit about the issue. A broker called John Lincoln
was one of the people trying to convince the English
clergy to speak out against immigrants. First, he approached a
man named doctor Standish, who was scheduled to give an
Easter sermon in fifteen seventeen. Standish, however, had the favor
of many members of the aristocracy who were wealthier and
(15:02):
more powerful and not so opposed to England's immigrant population,
so Standish refused. He might have also thought this was
a bad idea, so Lincoln went to another man, Dr Bell,
sometimes spelled Dr Beale, and he was cannon at St
Mary without Bishop's Gate, and this was more commonly known
as St Mary's Spittle because of a hospital there. So
(15:24):
Dr Bell was to give a public sermon at St
mary Spittle on April fourteenth, and that was the Tuesday
of Easter Week, and unlike Dr Standish, Doctor Bell was
persuaded to make his sermon that day on the subject
of England's immigrant population. On the fourteen Doctor Bell began
his sermon by reading a bill or petition that someone else,
(15:45):
presumably Lincoln, had written. It read quote, to all you,
the worshipful lords and masters of this city, that will
take compassion over the poor people your neighbors, and also
of the great importable hurts, losses, and hindrances, whereof preceding
the extreme poverty to all the King's subjects that inhabit
within this city and suburbs of the same. For so
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it is that the aliens and strangers eat the bread
from the poor fatherless children, and take the living from
all the artificers, and the intercourse from all merchants, whereby
poverty is so much increased that every man bewaileth the
misery of other for craftsmen be brought to beggary, and
merchants to neediness. And then Belle's own sermon began, quote,
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this land was given to Englishmen, and as birds would
defend their nests, so ought Englishmen to cherish and defend themselves,
and to hurt and grieve aliens for the common wheal.
He went on to say that quote by God's law,
it was lawful to fight for their country. And ever
he suddenly moved the people to rebel against the strangers
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and break the king's peace. About a week after this
very inflammatory sermon, words started to spread that the much
hated Francesco de Bardie had once again been mocking english people,
and this time boasting that he could treat the mayor's
wife the same way that he had the other english
woman we talked about earlier in the story. Then on April,
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a group of apprentices attacked several foreigners and threw them
into a canal. Those apprentices were arrested and sent to
Newgate prison. Rumors started to spread that there would be
a general uprising of apprentices against foreigners on the May
Day Holiday, which was in fifteen seventeen, a public holiday
celebrated with feasting, jousting, and plays featuring Robin Hood so
(17:37):
fairly early in the reign of King Henry the Eighth.
He had ascended to the throne in fifteen o nine,
and in fifteen seventeen he was twenty five years old.
He had been spending most of his time as monarch
traveling from one of his estates to the next, feasting
and carousing, while leaving most of the actual ruling to
his advisors. At first, these had generally been advisors to
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his late father, but by the time the events we're
talking about today rolled around, Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, Archbishop of
York and Lord Chancellor of England, had become one of
the most powerful men in the country and the sort
of top guy of Henry the eighth. Wolsey heard about
the rumored uprising and summoned the Lord Mayor of London
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and the city's alderman on April twenty ninth. They talked
over several options for keeping order, including stationing members of
the City Watch around the parts of the city that
seemed to be the most at risk, but calling out
the Watch seemed like it might incite violence rather than
deter it. So they ultimately decided on a curfew to
begin at nine pm on the twenty nine and end
(18:40):
at seven am on May Day. They made this decision
though at about eight thirty pm on the twenty ninth. Otherwise,
neither Wolsey, the Lord mayor or anyone else really made
many preparations for preventing or responding to this rumored uprising. Yeah,
that's They basically called for a curfew with about half
an our notice and no good way to thread the word.
(19:04):
What were you guys talking about before? I mean, it's
a great question, uh. Alderman John Mandy returned to his
word after this meeting and found some apprentices in the
street playing at fencing. He told them to get inside,
and they refused and turned on him, which sparked several
hours of violence. Most of the participants were apprentices or journeymen.
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Some were watermen who worked on London's waterways. A few
women were involved as well, along with a few members
of the clergy. First, the rioters descended on Newgate Prison
to free the men who had been jailed for attacking
foreigners the day before, and then they started moving through London,
attacking and looting foreign owned businesses and destroying their wares.
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Much of the riot was focused on Cheapside, which was
home to numerous markets and businesses. Its name comes from
an old English word which is spelled c e A
p a n and it meant to buy, and many
of its streets are named for the things that you
could buy there and immigrants homes were attacked as well,
including the homes of Francisco de Bardi and John Maute.
(20:10):
Sir Thomas Moore, author of Utopia, was one of London's
under sheriffs at this point, and he confronted the crowd
outside of St Martin's Le Grand, which was a liberty
sheltering a whole lot of immigrants. He tried to encourage
them to disperse. At first it seemed like he might
be successful, but then the residents of the liberty started
fighting back against this assembled crowd, throwing things like stones
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and hot water at them that reignited the violence. The
crowd also attacked an area in Aldgate that was home
to a number of foreign shoemakers and their shops. They
broke into the stores and they threw the shoes and
boots out into the street. While the riot was going on,
the official response was basically non existent. Sir Richard Chumley,
(20:55):
Lieutenant of the Tower, apparently fired some artillery into the city,
something that he was heavily criticized for doing, but which
doesn't seem to have seriously injured or killed anyone. Otherwise,
not much effort was made to stop the violence or
to protect people in property. About one thousand people participated
in this rioting, which finally wound down at about three am.
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Then at about five am, the Duke of Norfolk dispatched
more than one thousand armed retainers to restore order. Even
though the violence had pretty much petered out by this point,
the Duke and his men took most of the credit
for it, especially in people's letters back home, like if
you're an Italian merchant representing your your Italian merchant house,
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you're writing your letter back to the Home Office. Like
there was like oh, and then this Duke came totally
put everything back in order to save the day. Henry
the eighth was furious about how all this was handled.
So we will get to the aftermath and his response
after another quick sponsor break. The official response to the
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evil made a was extreme, especially considering that there was
no loss of life that we know of, and none
mentioned in any accounts of the day. First, hundreds of
people were arrested. Some of them were as the youngest
thirteen years old. Two d seventy eight people were charged
with treason. The treason charge came because, in a general sense,
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the people who were attacked were under the protection of
the king, but more specifically, it was considered treason if
an English citizen attacked a citizen of any nation that
had a treaty in place with England. King Henry the
eighth had signed a treaty with Charles, Prince of Spain,
Archduke of Austria and Duke of Burgundy and Robin on
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February third, fifteen sixteen. A couple of years after these events,
Charles would become Holy Roman Emperor Charles the fifth. The
Netherlands was part of the Spanish Habsburg Empire, so the
English attack on dutchmigrants fit this definition of treason. A
Court of Oyer and Terminer was established to investigate this
incident and to try the people who were accused. On
(23:09):
May fourth, the alleged ring leaders were paraded through the
streets of London with nooses around their next past gallows
that had been built for the occasion. Thirteen people from
that first group were convicted and hanged. The next day,
six of them were also drawn and quartered, and their
bodies were left hanging for days afterward. John Lincoln was
(23:29):
tried with a separate group. On May seven. He was hanged,
but the others who were convicted were reprieved at the
last minute at the gallows. Dr Bell and other clergy
who were involved were imprisoned in the Tower of London.
On May eleventh, the Mayor, the Alderman, and the Recorder
of London went to the King to appeal for mercy
for the now roughly four hundred people who were jailed
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for taking part of this riot, including eleven women. The
general public was way more sympathetic to the rioters than
to the emigrants whose homes and businesses had been had
been destroyed, so to most people in London these hangings
seemed truly extreme. But even though the King had already
decided to pardon everyone else, he couldn't just let them
(24:13):
all go because that would seem weak, so he took
care of things with a huge spectacle. On May two,
those four hundred or so people were paraded through the
streets again with nooses around their necks to Westminster. Once
they got there, they were made to beg for the
King's forgiveness. The Queen Catherine of Aragon was there and
(24:33):
appealed to the King to grant them all clemency. In
some accounts, the King's sisters, Margaret, Queen of Scotland and Mary,
Queen of France, were also part of this whole event,
and the King then pardoned them all. They also heard
a long address from Cardinal Wolsey, who told them quote
to lead good lives and comply with the royal will,
(24:54):
which was that strangers should be well treated in this country.
Almost immediately after this, and epidemic of sweating sickness broke
out in London, and then there was an outbreak of plague,
but neither of these things overshadowed the May Day Riot.
It became the subject of ballads and plays, many of
which made it sound like a blood bath rather than
a property riot. In the decades after the riot, all
(25:17):
the issues that had contributed to it continued to influence
life in London. The city's population grew dramatically during the
later Tutor era, especially as the Protestant Reformation and Catholic
counter Reformation led to warfare and displacement. Elsewhere in Europe,
the apprentice system started to break down in the seventeenth century,
and a series of poor laws criminalized unemployment and poverty,
(25:41):
which became rampant in the face of all of this
social and economic change. These changes were underway when the
play The Book of Sir Thomas Moore was written, which
was about seventy or eighty years after the riots. The
plays authorship isn't entirely clear, but the depiction of more
Speech at St Martin's is widely attributed to William Shakespeare,
(26:03):
and a copy of that speech is the only known
script in Shakespeare's handwriting that exists today. This play probably
wasn't performed during the Elizabethan era when it was written,
thanks to the influence of royal censor Edmund Tilney, and
then in more recent years, the speech has been commonly
used in the context of refugee and immigrant rights. In
the play, more Speech to the Rioters goes this way,
(26:27):
You'll put down strangers, kill them, cut their throats, possess
their houses, and lead the majesty of law in lamb
to slip him like a hound. Alas alas say now
the king and he is Clement. If the offender Mourne
should so much come too short of your great trespass
as but to banish you, whither would you go? What country,
(26:48):
by the nature of your error should give you harbor?
Go you to France or Flanders, to any German province,
Spain or Portugal, nay, anywhere that not adheres to England.
Why you must needs be strangers? Would you be pleased
to find a nation of such barbarous temper that breaking
out in hideous violence would not afford you an abode
(27:11):
on earth? Wet, they're detested, knives against your throats, spurn
you like dogs, and like as if that God owed
not nor made not you, not that the elements were
not all appropriate to your comforts, but chartered unto them,
What would you think to be used? Thus, this is
the stranger's case, and this your mountainous in humanity. Rioting
(27:34):
by apprentices also became something of a tradition in early
modern London, and we are going to revisit that in
our next Saturday Classic. Do you have a riotous piece
of listener mail? I do have some listener mail it's
it's not riot, it is it is, uh, just a
little bit of knowledge about something tangentially related to the
(27:57):
podcast you pass around. This email is from Jack X,
and Jack says, Hi, Tracy and Holly. I'm a longtime listener,
first time writer, and I wanted to tell you that
I really love your show. It's my constant companion on
my work commute in and out of New York City
every day, and I've learned so much. I'm sure you're
getting spammed right now by everyone who saw the commercial
during Monday's Game of Thrones series premiere, But just in
(28:18):
case it was missed, I'm writing to tell you about
Gentleman Jack, a new HBO drama series about Ann Lister.
As soon as I saw the name, I immediately squealed
like a history fan girl and decided to write in.
And story is fascinating to me. A series of coded
messages forbidden love and subverting social norms is a sure
fire intrigue if there ever was one. While I'm sure
(28:40):
HBO will also take plenty of liberties, it's nice to
see stories like this getting a chance to be told
in the mainstream. They eight part HBO drama is in
eighteen thirty two West Yorkshire, England, and starts with Anne's
work to revitalize her inherited home of Shibden Hall. Premieres
next Monday, April. I will most certainly be adding this
to my watch list. Thank you both for such a
(29:01):
great podcast, and I hope you have a great time
in Paris despite the unfortunate events of yesterday's fire, which
is utterly devastating. I was just there in the fall
of eighteen and I teared up when I saw footage
of the flames. Thank you again, Jack's thank you for
this email. Jack's I definitely did see the Enlist commercial
while watching Game of Thrones. By the time today's episode
(29:22):
comes out, it's gonna be well beyond April. So back
when I was researching the episode about and Lister, at
that point the show had been announced as something called
Shipden Hall, and in my research I had found sort
of the announcement of you know, new TV series about
an list called Shipden Hall to go into production, and
(29:46):
then I couldn't find anything else about Shipden Hall when
it was time to actually you know, record the episode,
so I didn't really mention it. I don't think in
the episode itself, and it was because by that point
it had been renamed Gentleman Jack Um, so I was
pleasantly surprised to learn that it wasn't one of those
shows that sort of gets announced and then never quite
(30:06):
makes it to people's TV screens. Since it is on HBO,
I am imagining that it will be very adult, just
in case you're thinking of checking it out, But I
definitely am going to do that because I'm excited about it.
So thank you again, Jack's for sending this note so
could pass it on to other people who might be
interested and don't watch Game of Thrones or the other
(30:29):
stuff on HBO or where they're probably advertising this. Uh
if you would like to write to us about this
or any other podcast or history podcast at how stuff
Works dot com. And we are also all over social
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and Instagram. You can come to our website we just
missed in History dot com. You'll find the show notes
(30:49):
for all the episodes Holly and I have worked on
together and the ones for today's episode. You can read
the primary sources that we read from and marvel at
their ingenious spelling but his spelling was not remotely standardized
at this point in English history. You can also subscribe
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(31:17):
in History Class is a production of I Heart Radio's
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Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, the production
of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome
to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry.
This episode is coming out on May Feet. Happy may Day.
Happy may Day. As a holiday, May Day has come
(00:23):
to have two different and sometimes overlapping meetings. There's the
one going back to medieval Europe. That's the holiday with
the celebration of the return of spring, full of greenery
and may poles in general merriment, and of course that
has its roots and much earlier springtime and fertility festivities
than in eighty nine. Socialist and communist organizations also selected
(00:45):
May first as International Workers Day, also known as Labor Day,
and over the next few decades May Day increasingly took
on those connotations. So then in n Pope Pious the
twelfth responded by naming May for also as the feast
of Saint Joseph the Worker, so keeping that whole connotation
connected to labor and also emphasizing a religious element over
(01:09):
the connections to communism and socialism. Sometimes people look back
in history and describe one particular May Day in fifteen
seventeen as being a really early example of both of
these meetings at the same time thanks to a riot
that was primarily carried out by working people, those being
apprentices and journeymen and other people in similar circumstances. But
(01:33):
while this was an uprising of laborers, this incident, which
is called the Evil may Day or Ill may Day Riot,
was also rooted in immigration and xenophobia in Tutor London.
Most of the workers who took part in this riot
were apprenticed in London's guild system in the sixteenth century.
Guilds formed the economic and political backbone of life in London.
(01:56):
These organizations had started to form pretty organically the tenth
and eleven centuries as more people moved into towns. People
who worked in the same trade tended to live near
each other, both supporting and learning from one another and
keeping an eye on the competition. So these informal groups
of working people gradually coalesced into more formal associations. Those
(02:18):
evolved into guilds. Because some of the guilds started wearing
livery to distinguish themselves from one another, they're also called
livery companies and livery companies still exist today, but in
sort of slightly different uh form and back in the
medieval period, guilds trained new members through apprenticeships, and they
(02:39):
set standards for their work and for the behavior of
all their members, including things meant to protect all their
trade secrets. Failure to live up to these standards could
lead to a range of punishments, including physical punishments and fines,
having your tools confiscated, or being completely expelled from the guild.
Being expelled from the guild was extremely serious in London.
(03:03):
To practice a trade, you had to have the freedom
of the city, and that freedom was conferred by being
in a guild, and the guilds effectively had a monopoly
on their specific trade, so if you weren't in a
guild anymore, you almost certainly lost your livelihood. Conversely, during
their heyday, being in a guild also offered a person
some protection, including being cared for in their later years.
(03:26):
When we were on our tour last year and I
got to go to the book Binders Museum, the docent
who was taking me on a guided tour of it
described the book Binders Guild as being like part professional organization,
part organized crime. A lot of stuff that would not
necessarily fly today in a professional organization, and then these
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guilds in London came to wield huge political power as well.
By fifteen fifteen, there were forty eight of them and
they had been arranged into a hierarchy based in the
on their wealth and their importance. This hierarchy was developed
by London's aldermen to try to put a stop to
ongoing rivalries and jockeying for power among the guilds. There
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was a lot of fighting a disagreement among them all,
and creating this hierarchy was meant to put a stop
to that. About twenty years after the events were talking
about today, the twelve highest ranking guilds became known as
the twelve grade Companies, and they had even more political
power than all of the others. The guilds essentially governed
their members through strict enforcement of their own rules and policies,
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and they were also a major part of governing the
city itself. London's freemen elected aldermen from each of the
city's wards, and the livery companies also elected the Lord Mayor,
who was second only to the monarch in the context
of the city's affairs. So by the sixteenth century, the
guilds were essentially running the city government of London, although
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not everyone was in a guild by any stretch, and
guilds weren't the only source of social or political power.
For example, most guilds didn't admit women, so women weren't
really part of this process, although women frequently worked with
their husbands or their male relatives who were guild members.
And then there was also this overlapping system of parishes
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with parish priests and other clergy who were also a
critical part of the social framework and sort of keeping
the standards of society going. There were also a couple
of huge exceptions to the guild's political power in London.
One was the monarch. Even though London was self governing,
the monarchs still had the power to make decisions that
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affected the city or to overrule decisions that were made
by the city government or the individual guilds. The other exception,
which connected back to the monarch, was the existence of liberties.
Starting in the medieval period, monarchs had designated various entities
as liberties, and then a liberty existed outside the city's jurisdiction.
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In some cases, it wasn't really even under the jurisdiction
of the monarch. Most of these liberties were affiliated with
the church and so they were under ecclesiastical control, but
some were more affiliated with a specific lord and under
his control. Since liberties were essentially their own jurisdiction, they
got to set their own rules about who could live there,
what trades they could practice, and how they could run
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their Businesses and monasteries, churches, nobles and anyone else with
status as a liberty had plenty of incentives to basically
create their own market. An obvious incentive was money. If
a liberty was effectively establishing its own marketplace that was
free from the restrictions of the city and the guilds,
that could be really lucrative. And then another incentive was
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the types of goods that were available. Artisans from elsewhere
in Europe were often making goods or using materials and
techniques that weren't otherwise available in England, So if a
liberty was giving sanctuary to foreign artisans, it was getting
access to different types of goods and different styles of workmanship,
many of which were in very high demand from the
(07:02):
country's wealthiest residents, and the monarch had plenty of incentive
to not just allow this, but to encourage it. One
of the monarch's sources of income was customs duties from
trade with other countries, so it was in the monarch's
financial interests to encourage these trading relationships. Plus, the monarch
and the nobility really liked luxury goods like silk and
(07:25):
spices that just weren't made locally in England. Cutting back
on imports from other countries meant losing access to these things.
They were not excited about that idea at all. So
this interconnected world of guilds and liberties and the monarchy
bread a lot of frustration and resentment among working people
(07:45):
in sixteenth century London. By then London had a population
of roughly fifty thousand people, although I saw some estimates
as high as a hundred thousand when I was working
on this. Between one thousand and fifteen hundred of them,
or between two and three percent, were immigrants, or in
the language of the time, aliens or strangers. These immigrants
(08:07):
had come to London for a variety of reasons, and
we're all across the economic spectrum. Some were regular artisans
and craftspeople who were fleeing war or other violence. London
was also becoming wealthier, which made it more attractive to
people who thought they might have a better life in
another country. The most prosperous immigrants were often in England
at the invitation of the king, or were acting as
(08:30):
representative of a wealthy family or business headquartered somewhere else
in Europe. Speaking in very broad strokes, so we're talking
about trends here and not every individual immigrant. Flemish and
Dutch immigrants were often working in cloth related industries, especially
related to fine wool and weaving. French and German immigrants
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included artisans along with wealthier merchants. Italian immigrants were often
associated with banking. London's Lombard Street, with all of its
banks and merchant houses, was named for the Lombardy region
of northern Italy, where all of those bankers and merchants
were from, or most of them were from. There was
also a small community of Africans and people of African descent,
(09:14):
many of whom were working as musicians or other entertainers,
although the riot that we're talking about today does not
seem to have been focused on them at all. And
of course, among all of these nationalities there were also
people who weren't working any particular craft or trade. There
were diplomats and courtiers and other wealthier people. By the
fifteen teens, many English workers thought there were too many
(09:36):
strangers in London, that the city was literally being overrun,
and English artisans and craftspeople were being crowded out by
foreign competition. This perception was exacerbated by the fact that
immigrants tended to be clustered into very specific parts of
the city, into sanctuaries or the estates of wealthy people
from their native country. They also made up a large
(09:58):
portion of several industry ease. For example, about half of
London's Tanners and Cooper's were immigrants. So people were making
a lot of the same arguments that you hear today
against immigration. But at the same time, a much bigger
source of competition for jobs was migration from within England,
not from elsewhere. These were from rural areas and smaller
(10:20):
towns into London. Rural poverty was a huge problem due
to agricultural changes, including the enclosure movement, and this led
people to move into cities, especially into London, trying to
find work. About five per cent of England's population lived
in London, but about fifteen percent of England's population lived
(10:40):
in London at some point in their lives, so while
unemployment was a real problem, immigrants were really not the
cause of this problem, and the apprentices were particularly disgruntled.
At this point in English history, apprenticeships were prestigious, but
they were also very difficult. Most apprentices were in their
teens and their lives were strictly managed by the master
(11:03):
of the guild. So these young men, whose lives were
very tightly controlled, thought they were preparing for work in
an economy that was inherently stacked against them. In April
of fifteen sixteen, flyers were posted all around London about
how strangers in the wool trade we're getting rich off
the King's favor while English people suffered. King Henry the
(11:25):
Eighth ordered the handwriting of every apprentice to be compared
to these notices to try to figure out who had
done it. This came to a head just over a
year later, and we're going to talk about that after
we first have a little sponsor break. In the spring
(11:46):
of fifteen seventeen, English craftsmen living in London were fed up,
and the words of chronicler Edward Hall quote, the multitude
of strangers was so great about London that the poor
English artificers could scarce any living and most of all,
the strangers were so proud that they disdained, mocked, and
oppressed the Englishman, which was the beginning of the grudge.
(12:09):
To particular foreigners had drawn a lot of the city's ire.
One was John Mautie of France, who was a royal secretary.
He maintained an estate called green Gate, where his position
allowed him to offer sanctuary to other people from France,
and it was commonly believed that the immigrants at green
Gate included lots of pickpockets and unlicensed wool carters. It's
(12:31):
not clear at all how much of this was accurate
and how much was just rumor about this prominent french
Man and the people that he was sheltering, but the
people of London definitely believed it and took it as
a sign of everything that was wrong with immigrants. The
other was Italian merchant Francesco de Barti. De Party imported
fine fabrics into England, and he exported English wool back
(12:54):
to Italy. One of his customers was King Henry the
Eighth himself, and the King was fond enough of Party
that he granted him a license to import his fabric
without having to pay customs on it, which people thought
was really unfair. On top of that, he had, according
to accounts of the time, enticed an englishman's wife to
come and live with him and to bring all of
(13:14):
the households gold and silver with her. Her husband had
filed a lawsuit against Devarty, leading Debarti to insult him
in court before filing a suit of his own. Devarti's
suit alleged that the woman's husband owed him money for
the cost of her lodging. Again, it's not totally clear
how much of this was true, but once again people
(13:34):
believed it, and it speaks to the whole idea that
immigrants were disdaining and mocking the English. Yeah, a lot
of the things that people were upset about in terms
of specific foreigners in London sounds like tabloid fodder that
may or may not have been true, but people were
definitely riled up about it. So printing was still a
(13:57):
fairly new innovation in English in fifteen seventeen. William Caxton
is believed to be the person who introduced movable type
into England. About forty years before that, a little less
than forty years so printing still wasn't widely available for
everyday use, and that's why those bills that were posted
around town in fifteen sixteen had been handwritten. Plus the
(14:18):
vast majority of people couldn't read, so if somebody had
a message to get out, they weren't printing flyers and
and widely distributing them. As what happened later on in history,
the best way to do it was really to speak somewhere,
or to get somebody else, preferably somebody who had an
audience to do it for them. So one common tactic
was to get members of the clergy to speak from
(14:41):
the pulpit about the issue. A broker called John Lincoln
was one of the people trying to convince the English
clergy to speak out against immigrants. First, he approached a
man named doctor Standish, who was scheduled to give an
Easter sermon in fifteen seventeen. Standish, however, had the favor
of many members of the aristocracy who were wealthier and
(15:02):
more powerful and not so opposed to England's immigrant population,
so Standish refused. He might have also thought this was
a bad idea, so Lincoln went to another man, Dr Bell,
sometimes spelled Dr Beale, and he was cannon at St
Mary without Bishop's Gate, and this was more commonly known
as St Mary's Spittle because of a hospital there. So
(15:24):
Dr Bell was to give a public sermon at St
mary Spittle on April fourteenth, and that was the Tuesday
of Easter Week, and unlike Dr Standish, Doctor Bell was
persuaded to make his sermon that day on the subject
of England's immigrant population. On the fourteen Doctor Bell began
his sermon by reading a bill or petition that someone else,
(15:45):
presumably Lincoln, had written. It read quote, to all you,
the worshipful lords and masters of this city, that will
take compassion over the poor people your neighbors, and also
of the great importable hurts, losses, and hindrances, whereof preceding
the extreme poverty to all the King's subjects that inhabit
within this city and suburbs of the same. For so
(16:07):
it is that the aliens and strangers eat the bread
from the poor fatherless children, and take the living from
all the artificers, and the intercourse from all merchants, whereby
poverty is so much increased that every man bewaileth the
misery of other for craftsmen be brought to beggary, and
merchants to neediness. And then Belle's own sermon began, quote,
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this land was given to Englishmen, and as birds would
defend their nests, so ought Englishmen to cherish and defend themselves,
and to hurt and grieve aliens for the common wheal.
He went on to say that quote by God's law,
it was lawful to fight for their country. And ever
he suddenly moved the people to rebel against the strangers
(16:50):
and break the king's peace. About a week after this
very inflammatory sermon, words started to spread that the much
hated Francesco de Bardie had once again been mocking english people,
and this time boasting that he could treat the mayor's
wife the same way that he had the other english
woman we talked about earlier in the story. Then on April,
(17:12):
a group of apprentices attacked several foreigners and threw them
into a canal. Those apprentices were arrested and sent to
Newgate prison. Rumors started to spread that there would be
a general uprising of apprentices against foreigners on the May
Day Holiday, which was in fifteen seventeen, a public holiday
celebrated with feasting, jousting, and plays featuring Robin Hood so
(17:37):
fairly early in the reign of King Henry the Eighth.
He had ascended to the throne in fifteen o nine,
and in fifteen seventeen he was twenty five years old.
He had been spending most of his time as monarch
traveling from one of his estates to the next, feasting
and carousing, while leaving most of the actual ruling to
his advisors. At first, these had generally been advisors to
(17:58):
his late father, but by the time the events we're
talking about today rolled around, Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, Archbishop of
York and Lord Chancellor of England, had become one of
the most powerful men in the country and the sort
of top guy of Henry the eighth. Wolsey heard about
the rumored uprising and summoned the Lord Mayor of London
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and the city's alderman on April twenty ninth. They talked
over several options for keeping order, including stationing members of
the City Watch around the parts of the city that
seemed to be the most at risk, but calling out
the Watch seemed like it might incite violence rather than
deter it. So they ultimately decided on a curfew to
begin at nine pm on the twenty nine and end
(18:40):
at seven am on May Day. They made this decision
though at about eight thirty pm on the twenty ninth. Otherwise,
neither Wolsey, the Lord mayor or anyone else really made
many preparations for preventing or responding to this rumored uprising. Yeah,
that's They basically called for a curfew with about half
an our notice and no good way to thread the word.
(19:04):
What were you guys talking about before? I mean, it's
a great question, uh. Alderman John Mandy returned to his
word after this meeting and found some apprentices in the
street playing at fencing. He told them to get inside,
and they refused and turned on him, which sparked several
hours of violence. Most of the participants were apprentices or journeymen.
(19:26):
Some were watermen who worked on London's waterways. A few
women were involved as well, along with a few members
of the clergy. First, the rioters descended on Newgate Prison
to free the men who had been jailed for attacking
foreigners the day before, and then they started moving through London,
attacking and looting foreign owned businesses and destroying their wares.
(19:48):
Much of the riot was focused on Cheapside, which was
home to numerous markets and businesses. Its name comes from
an old English word which is spelled c e A
p a n and it meant to buy, and many
of its streets are named for the things that you
could buy there and immigrants homes were attacked as well,
including the homes of Francisco de Bardi and John Maute.
(20:10):
Sir Thomas Moore, author of Utopia, was one of London's
under sheriffs at this point, and he confronted the crowd
outside of St Martin's Le Grand, which was a liberty
sheltering a whole lot of immigrants. He tried to encourage
them to disperse. At first it seemed like he might
be successful, but then the residents of the liberty started
fighting back against this assembled crowd, throwing things like stones
(20:33):
and hot water at them that reignited the violence. The
crowd also attacked an area in Aldgate that was home
to a number of foreign shoemakers and their shops. They
broke into the stores and they threw the shoes and
boots out into the street. While the riot was going on,
the official response was basically non existent. Sir Richard Chumley,
(20:55):
Lieutenant of the Tower, apparently fired some artillery into the city,
something that he was heavily criticized for doing, but which
doesn't seem to have seriously injured or killed anyone. Otherwise,
not much effort was made to stop the violence or
to protect people in property. About one thousand people participated
in this rioting, which finally wound down at about three am.
(21:17):
Then at about five am, the Duke of Norfolk dispatched
more than one thousand armed retainers to restore order. Even
though the violence had pretty much petered out by this point,
the Duke and his men took most of the credit
for it, especially in people's letters back home, like if
you're an Italian merchant representing your your Italian merchant house,
(21:38):
you're writing your letter back to the Home Office. Like
there was like oh, and then this Duke came totally
put everything back in order to save the day. Henry
the eighth was furious about how all this was handled.
So we will get to the aftermath and his response
after another quick sponsor break. The official response to the
(22:05):
evil made a was extreme, especially considering that there was
no loss of life that we know of, and none
mentioned in any accounts of the day. First, hundreds of
people were arrested. Some of them were as the youngest
thirteen years old. Two d seventy eight people were charged
with treason. The treason charge came because, in a general sense,
(22:26):
the people who were attacked were under the protection of
the king, but more specifically, it was considered treason if
an English citizen attacked a citizen of any nation that
had a treaty in place with England. King Henry the
eighth had signed a treaty with Charles, Prince of Spain,
Archduke of Austria and Duke of Burgundy and Robin on
(22:47):
February third, fifteen sixteen. A couple of years after these events,
Charles would become Holy Roman Emperor Charles the fifth. The
Netherlands was part of the Spanish Habsburg Empire, so the
English attack on dutchmigrants fit this definition of treason. A
Court of Oyer and Terminer was established to investigate this
incident and to try the people who were accused. On
(23:09):
May fourth, the alleged ring leaders were paraded through the
streets of London with nooses around their next past gallows
that had been built for the occasion. Thirteen people from
that first group were convicted and hanged. The next day,
six of them were also drawn and quartered, and their
bodies were left hanging for days afterward. John Lincoln was
(23:29):
tried with a separate group. On May seven. He was hanged,
but the others who were convicted were reprieved at the
last minute at the gallows. Dr Bell and other clergy
who were involved were imprisoned in the Tower of London.
On May eleventh, the Mayor, the Alderman, and the Recorder
of London went to the King to appeal for mercy
for the now roughly four hundred people who were jailed
(23:52):
for taking part of this riot, including eleven women. The
general public was way more sympathetic to the rioters than
to the emigrants whose homes and businesses had been had
been destroyed, so to most people in London these hangings
seemed truly extreme. But even though the King had already
decided to pardon everyone else, he couldn't just let them
(24:13):
all go because that would seem weak, so he took
care of things with a huge spectacle. On May two,
those four hundred or so people were paraded through the
streets again with nooses around their necks to Westminster. Once
they got there, they were made to beg for the
King's forgiveness. The Queen Catherine of Aragon was there and
(24:33):
appealed to the King to grant them all clemency. In
some accounts, the King's sisters, Margaret, Queen of Scotland and Mary,
Queen of France, were also part of this whole event,
and the King then pardoned them all. They also heard
a long address from Cardinal Wolsey, who told them quote
to lead good lives and comply with the royal will,
(24:54):
which was that strangers should be well treated in this country.
Almost immediately after this, and epidemic of sweating sickness broke
out in London, and then there was an outbreak of plague,
but neither of these things overshadowed the May Day Riot.
It became the subject of ballads and plays, many of
which made it sound like a blood bath rather than
a property riot. In the decades after the riot, all
(25:17):
the issues that had contributed to it continued to influence
life in London. The city's population grew dramatically during the
later Tutor era, especially as the Protestant Reformation and Catholic
counter Reformation led to warfare and displacement. Elsewhere in Europe,
the apprentice system started to break down in the seventeenth century,
and a series of poor laws criminalized unemployment and poverty,
(25:41):
which became rampant in the face of all of this
social and economic change. These changes were underway when the
play The Book of Sir Thomas Moore was written, which
was about seventy or eighty years after the riots. The
plays authorship isn't entirely clear, but the depiction of more
Speech at St Martin's is widely attributed to William Shakespeare,
(26:03):
and a copy of that speech is the only known
script in Shakespeare's handwriting that exists today. This play probably
wasn't performed during the Elizabethan era when it was written,
thanks to the influence of royal censor Edmund Tilney, and
then in more recent years, the speech has been commonly
used in the context of refugee and immigrant rights. In
the play, more Speech to the Rioters goes this way,
(26:27):
You'll put down strangers, kill them, cut their throats, possess
their houses, and lead the majesty of law in lamb
to slip him like a hound. Alas alas say now
the king and he is Clement. If the offender Mourne
should so much come too short of your great trespass
as but to banish you, whither would you go? What country,
(26:48):
by the nature of your error should give you harbor?
Go you to France or Flanders, to any German province,
Spain or Portugal, nay, anywhere that not adheres to England.
Why you must needs be strangers? Would you be pleased
to find a nation of such barbarous temper that breaking
out in hideous violence would not afford you an abode
(27:11):
on earth? Wet, they're detested, knives against your throats, spurn
you like dogs, and like as if that God owed
not nor made not you, not that the elements were
not all appropriate to your comforts, but chartered unto them,
What would you think to be used? Thus, this is
the stranger's case, and this your mountainous in humanity. Rioting
(27:34):
by apprentices also became something of a tradition in early
modern London, and we are going to revisit that in
our next Saturday Classic. Do you have a riotous piece
of listener mail? I do have some listener mail it's
it's not riot, it is it is, uh, just a
little bit of knowledge about something tangentially related to the
(27:57):
podcast you pass around. This email is from Jack X,
and Jack says, Hi, Tracy and Holly. I'm a longtime listener,
first time writer, and I wanted to tell you that
I really love your show. It's my constant companion on
my work commute in and out of New York City
every day, and I've learned so much. I'm sure you're
getting spammed right now by everyone who saw the commercial
during Monday's Game of Thrones series premiere, But just in
(28:18):
case it was missed, I'm writing to tell you about
Gentleman Jack, a new HBO drama series about Ann Lister.
As soon as I saw the name, I immediately squealed
like a history fan girl and decided to write in.
And story is fascinating to me. A series of coded
messages forbidden love and subverting social norms is a sure
fire intrigue if there ever was one. While I'm sure
(28:40):
HBO will also take plenty of liberties, it's nice to
see stories like this getting a chance to be told
in the mainstream. They eight part HBO drama is in
eighteen thirty two West Yorkshire, England, and starts with Anne's
work to revitalize her inherited home of Shibden Hall. Premieres
next Monday, April. I will most certainly be adding this
to my watch list. Thank you both for such a
(29:01):
great podcast, and I hope you have a great time
in Paris despite the unfortunate events of yesterday's fire, which
is utterly devastating. I was just there in the fall
of eighteen and I teared up when I saw footage
of the flames. Thank you again, Jack's thank you for
this email. Jack's I definitely did see the Enlist commercial
while watching Game of Thrones. By the time today's episode
(29:22):
comes out, it's gonna be well beyond April. So back
when I was researching the episode about and Lister, at
that point the show had been announced as something called
Shipden Hall, and in my research I had found sort
of the announcement of you know, new TV series about
an list called Shipden Hall to go into production, and
(29:46):
then I couldn't find anything else about Shipden Hall when
it was time to actually you know, record the episode,
so I didn't really mention it. I don't think in
the episode itself, and it was because by that point
it had been renamed Gentleman Jack Um, so I was
pleasantly surprised to learn that it wasn't one of those
shows that sort of gets announced and then never quite
(30:06):
makes it to people's TV screens. Since it is on HBO,
I am imagining that it will be very adult, just
in case you're thinking of checking it out, But I
definitely am going to do that because I'm excited about it.
So thank you again, Jack's for sending this note so
could pass it on to other people who might be
interested and don't watch Game of Thrones or the other
(30:29):
stuff on HBO or where they're probably advertising this. Uh
if you would like to write to us about this
or any other podcast or history podcast at how stuff
Works dot com. And we are also all over social
media at miss in History. That's where you'll find our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest,
and Instagram. You can come to our website we just
missed in History dot com. You'll find the show notes
(30:49):
for all the episodes Holly and I have worked on
together and the ones for today's episode. You can read
the primary sources that we read from and marvel at
their ingenious spelling but his spelling was not remotely standardized
at this point in English history. You can also subscribe
to our show on Apple podcast, I heart radio app,
and anywhere else you get your podcasts. Stuff You Missed
(31:17):
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If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
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Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.