It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a woman in possession of a love of history, must be in want of a blog.
Dancing, wrote Philip Stubbes in 1583, is altogether a "horrible vice". In his infamous work The Anatomie of Abuses, Stubbes protested, "what clipping, what culling, what kissing and bussing, what smouching and slabbering of one another: what filthy groping and unclean handling is not practised everywhere in these dancings". For dancing "provoketh lust, and the …
To hear church bells ringing continuously for as long as half an hour, several evenings a week, is no surprise if you live in central Oxford as I do, so I was particularly amused at something I read about today. In 1797 a book called Travels in England During the Reign of Queen Elizabeth was …