WRITER & HISTORIAN
A couple of weeks ago I was invited to contribute a brief film to the A Bit Lit YouTube channel, created by Andy Kesson and others as a forum for thoughts on literature, history and culture during lockdown. So here I am, talking about freedom and confinement, about emotional and spiritual spaces, about monasticism and... Continue Reading →
As the nine-year-old Edward VI rode through London on the way to his coronation in Westminster Abbey in February 1547, he paused for a while to watch a man perform on a tightrope strung from the steeple of St Paul’s. He might have been advised to study the man who rode ahead of him too.... Continue Reading →
I'm delighted to have recorded another episode for Suzannah Lipscomb's brilliant podcast, Not Just the Tudors, this time on Sir Walter Ralegh and the tragic fantasy of El Dorado. It's available to listen to here. My previous episode, in which we discussed the Dissolution of the Monasteries, is available to listen to here. Not Just... Continue Reading →
At 10am on 7 October 1794 a 39-year-old physician named James Parkinson presented himself in Whitehall for interrogation by William Pitt and the Privy Council. They were investigating what became known as the Popgun Plot, an alleged attempt to assassinate George III. Parkinson, a member of the radical London Corresponding Society, knew some of those... Continue Reading →
On 4 August 1540, Thomas Epsam, a former monk of the Benedictine Abbey at Westminster, was brought from Newgate and made to stand before the justices. He had been a prisoner for three years, but still “he wold not aske the kynges pardon nor be sworne to be true to him”, the chronicler Edward Hall... Continue Reading →
Evliya Çelebi was born in Istanbul on 25 March 1611. He is best known in the Anglophone world through the translations of Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall in the 19th century and, more recently, Robert Dankoff. His ten-volume Seyahatname is perhaps the longest piece of travel writing in world literature; Dankoff says the first time he read... Continue Reading →
Sometime around 1340 Ludolph of Sudheim, a German priest travelling around the Holy Land, encountered two elderly men, one from Burgundy, the other from Toulouse, in the mountains by the Dead Sea. They told him they were Knights Templar, taken prisoner by the Mamluks after the fall of Acre in May 1291 – the last,... Continue Reading →
I’ve reviewed Wayward, Vashti Bunyan’s memoir of resilience and redemption in and after the Sixties, for The Quietus. It's online here.
In the last days of 1835 the explorer Robert Schomburgk stood on the shores of Lake Amucu in western central Guiana. In April, the surrounding savannah would be inundated by the rising tides of two nearby river systems creating the illusion of a great body of water; but now, in December, the waters were low.... Continue Reading →
In late medieval Ireland, they had customary words of abuse for one another. Englishobbe. Irishdogg. So deep was the antipathy that one parliament was forced to legislate against such language, on pain of a year in prison and an unspecified fine. But this wasn’t the indigenous Irish and their Anglo-Norman colonisers abusing one another. It... Continue Reading →
Late-medieval Florence was riven by factional disputes based on support for or opposition to papal power. Dante Alighieri, for a brief time one of the city’s six governing officials, was part of the latter party. But after Charles of Valois entered the city in November 1301, Dante’s allies were overthrown; and on 27 January 1301,... Continue Reading →
When change came, it was swift. Until the turn of the 1570s, Edmund Howes writes in his continuation of John Stow’s Annales, “the auncient English fight of sword and buckler was onely had in use”. Bucklers – small shields – were to be bought in any haberdasher. But “shortly after… began long rapiers, and he... Continue Reading →
“Marley was dead: to begin with.” It’s as good a first line for a ghost story as you could imagine. But where did A Christmas Carol begin for its author, Charles Dickens? The answer seems to be the second report of the Children’s Employment Commission, published at the end of February 1843. On 6 March,... Continue Reading →
Slightly Foxed is one of my favourite literary magazines, so I am delighted to have an essay on John Masefield's The Midnight Folk in the Spring issue. I highly recommend subscribing. The link is here.
It was Anne Greene’s great good fortune that, after she had been hanged in the castle yard at Oxford, her body was given to the university’s physicians for dissection. In the summer of 1650, Anne, aged 22, had been seduced by Geoffrey Read, the teenage grandson of her employer Sir Thomas Read at the manor... Continue Reading →
Eunuchs had sung for centuries in the Byzantine church, but it isn’t until the 1550s that records of castrati begin to appear in western Europe. The first known to enter the Sistine Chapel choir was a Spaniard in 1562; Sixtus V authorised their recruitment for St Peter’s in a bull of 1589. By the end... Continue Reading →
William G, one of the two protagonists of Russell Hoban’s third novel Turtle Diary (1975), is walking home from work one evening. He notices a manhole cover for the first time. Its number is K257. At home he looks up K257 in a Mozart Companion and discovers that K257 is the Credo Mass in C.... Continue Reading →
Founded in the early 17th century, the west African kingdom of Dahomey was a bellicose, expansionist state. It is said the king’s primary duty was to ‘make Dahomey always larger’; one 18th-century king, Agaju, boasted that – whereas his grandfather had conquered two countries, his father 18, and his brother, who took the throne before... Continue Reading →
It is strange to think that after Harold was killed at Hastings the crown of England might have gone not to a man of Viking descent born in Normandy but an Anglo-Saxon born in Hungary. Edgar the Ætheling was the son of Edward, nephew of Edward the Confessor, who had fled - or been driven... Continue Reading →
If you stand outside the former Augustinian priory of St Bartholomew the Great in the City of London before evensong, twice a month, you can hear the sound of late medieval London. It is the only active church in the country to have a ring of five bells cast before the Reformation – in this... Continue Reading →
By the autumn of 1895, Edith Lanchester was 24. Born into a prosperous middle-class family, she had studied at London University and Birkbeck and was earning her own living as a clerk at the Cardiff (New South Wales) Gold Mining Company. She was also was already a seasoned socialist campaigner whose ringing voice, it was... Continue Reading →
Mathew Lyons 