It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a woman in possession of a love of history, must be in want of a blog.
Mince pies are an inescapable feature of the Christmas period in England. This is great for people like me who are fond of them, though not so much for those odd people who don't have a sweet tooth. Yet if the modern incarnation of the mincemeat pie divides opinion, how much more would the original …
Slate magazine has created an 'Interactive Game of Death' in which you can find out what you might have died of had you been living at various points from 1647 to the present. It churns through historical English and American death records in order to come up with a list of the ailments and accidents which …
Football in the form that we recognise today didn't really begin to coalesce until the 16th and 17th centuries, but English references to games of "fote-ball", "fute-ball", "ffootballe", and so on, start in the late medieval period. At this early stage there were few, if any, regulations. There was no set number of players and no clearly …
Continue reading “This murdering play”: the violent origins of English football