It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a woman in possession of a love of history, must be in want of a blog.
The eighteenth century was, as any landlubber knows, the Golden Age of swashbuckling Pirates-of-the-Caribbean style piracy. Eighteenth-century pirates (as opposed to their unglamorous modern counterparts) have acquired their own roguish mystique. What is less commonly known is that women, too, had their place in eighteenth-century piracy. I remember, when I was small, being entranced by their stories in my Ladybird …
Continue reading Anne Bonny and Mary Read, two 18th-century pirates
Francia was the largest and most sophisticated kingdom in early medieval Europe, lasting from the 5th to 9th centuries. At it greatest extent, Francia was twice as large as modern France, stretching from the Pyrenees to Bavaria, from Rome to Saxony. It was huge and unwieldy. Given this, how was a Frankish king supposed to …
In August 1328, a priest in Derbyshire was beaten up and his church robbed by a gang of armed thugs. Perhaps that sounds unsurprising; it fits well into the popular view of medieval lawlessness, vigilante justice and endemic violence. However, this particular incident wasn't random violence perpetrated by drunken idiots, but a calculated act carried …
Continue reading The 14th-century Mafia? Folville, Coterel & Co