"The French invented the guillotine"
The decapitation machine now known as the guillotine was not a French invention and wasn’t invented by Joseph Guillotin. The origins of this macabre device are medieval, although the date of...
Did Japan ever sign the Geneva Convention after the Second World War?
Drawn up by international committee in 1929, the Geneva Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War was ratified by 47 governments. Japan signed but, like the USSR, failed to ratify the...
“There is a Nobel Prize for economics”
Historically Alfred Nobel never instituted a prize in economics. In 1888 a French newspaper prematurely published Nobel’s obituary, claiming that the inventor of dynamite “became rich by...
What is the Knollys Red Rose Rent?
In the 14th century Sir Robert Knollys built a footbridge to connect two properties he owned on either side of Seething Lane in the City of London. Building the bridge breached city regulations and...
Were the English gods really identical to those of the Vikings?
Both the pagan English and the pagan Vikings were Germanic peoples from north-western Europe. They shared many cultural traits, including a pantheon of pagan gods. The English were Christianised...
Was Buffalo Bill Italian?
William Cody, the showman also known as Buffalo Bill, was born in Iowa and was as American as they come. Cody died in 1917 but, by then, he had taken his wild west shows around the world. In the...
In her heyday, Nellie Bly was possibly the most famous woman in America, but she has been largely forgotten. Born in Pennsylvania in 1864, Elizabeth Jane Cochrane took the pen-name of Nellie Bly from...
Recently, in the splendid BBC Lark Rise to Candleford series, a measles outbreak resulted in the harvest being put at jeopardy. While I have always known that women laboured in the fields ‘gleaning’ in the Victorian/Edwardian era, I do not have any knowledge of how the village harvest system operated. Did they have village co-operative ownership of the crops?
Lark Rise to Candleford is indeed a great series, set in the late 19th century. At this time, much of the land was owned by large landowners, who then rented farms to individual farmers to work...
Haxey is a village in Lincolnshire which, like a number of other towns and villages throughout England, has its own traditional sporting event. In Haxey it is a riotous struggle to transport a...
“Vampires were buried with a stake through their heart”
There are very few historical accounts of vampirism in Great Britain and where these stories do occur, the solution is never a stake.
William of Newburgh’s Historia Rerum Anglicarum, written in...
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