A Calm Winter's Night in the Kitchens of Hampton Court Palace | History for Sleep

Settle in for a slow, gentle winter's night below stairs at Hampton Court Palace. In the early 1540s, with Henry VIII's court in residence, we wander the great Tudor kitchens after supper: the six roasting hearths of the Great Kitchen, the eighty-gallon cauldron of the Boiling House, the twelve-foot oven of the Pastry, the cellars beneath the Great Hall and the clerks of the Greencloth with their keys and ledgers. We meet the spit boys, the scullions and the cooks who slept on straw by the banked fires, and follow the leftovers to the poor at the palace gate. Then the centuries drift quietly past, from Elizabeth's privy kitchen to the Georgian chocolate kitchen. A calm, unhurried history for sleep, told softly from below stairs. Some companions are imagined from the records; every fact is sourced.