Innholdsfortegnelse for November 2015 i History Extra

“A major new BBC historical drama, The Last Kingdom, is due to hit our screens in the next few weeks. The eight-part series is based on novels by Bernard Cornwell and will take viewers into the world of late ninth-century England when the country was divided between the Vikings and the Anglo-Saxons. Historian Ryan Lavelle has acted as a consultant for the series and for this month’s cover feature (page 22) he explores the complex relationship between the Norse invaders and those who sought to repel them, most notably Alfred the Great. As Ryan explains, diplomacy was just as important as warfare when it came to Anglo-Saxon survival. Britain’s most recent battle for survival occurred in the Second World War, when facing the march of Nazi Germany. This conflict was…

“London’s Royal Society was the most important scientific invention of the 17th century. The first of its kind, it was soon imitated in cities all over Europe. Previously, natural philosophers had met privately to discuss why things happen. In contrast, the new experimental investigators banded together to make things happen. By creating scientific societies, they made knowledge public and acquired the collective influence they lacked as individuals. By promoting the advantages of scientific research, these societies attracted government investment and were celebrated as major contributors to the booming industrial economy. By the 19th century, scientific societies had put science into society. The greatest hero of the early Royal Society was Francis Bacon, the former lord chancellor who had laid down guiding principles for scientific enquiry in the early 17th century.…

@HistoryExtra: Which British battle do you think affected us the most and why? Eric Jay The battle that changed ‘us’ most has to be Hastings, 1066. Its Norman v Saxon aftermath is still largely underestimated for the radical changes that flowed from this battle – for everyone, not just the nobility Richard West The Somme. Nearly a century on and we’re still coming to terms with the casualties, especially in the north of England Philip L Meers The battle of Culloden, 1746. The failure of the Jacobite cause strengthened the position of a Protestant monarchy. Arguably this enabled the country to settle into a relative peace at home, enabling the rapid expansion of the middle class and allowing the country to focus upon the growth of its international influence David…

Joe Murray Joe grew up in a County Durham mining community. He arrived in Gallipoli with the Hood Battalion of the Royal Naval Division in April 1915 and was soon moved to engineering duties as a sapper. Out in Gallipoli, Ordinary Seaman Joe Murray was still attached to the VIII Corps Mining Company. The weather had been getting cooler but on 26 November a terrible rainstorm lashed down on them. Flash floods engulfed the gullies, building up behind the trench lines and then breaking through by sheer weight of water. “All of a sudden the dam would break and the whole volume came down carrying everything before it. Corpses, all sorts of gear, some people drowning. The Turks were standing about and so were we. There was no trench to…

England, Arise: The People, the King and the Great Revolt of 1381 by Juliet Barker Abacus, 528 pages, £10.99 In the summer of 1381, after years of unrest caused by rising taxes and a diminishing population, the flames of rebellion suddenly sprang into life. Within a few short weeks, they had consumed almost the whole of England and looked set to raze the monarchy itself to the ground. People from every corner of the kingdom took up arms against what they saw as unjust suppression by the church and state, as well as by its boy king, Richard II. The reforms they called for were so radical that, if they had been realised, every aspect of English government and society would have been utterly transformed. Respected historian Juliet Barker tells…

EXHIBITION / FREE ENTRY Alice in Wonderland The British Library, London 20 November–17 April 2016 - 01937 546546 • bl.uk This month sees the launch of an exhibition to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the publication of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson’s much-loved children’s book, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – following the escapades of the titular girl after she follows a talking, clothed white rabbit down a hole in a riverbank. Originally written for the daughter of a family friend – Alice Liddell – Dodgson’s book (authored under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll) was a publishing sensation, popular with both children and adults, including Queen Victoria. The exhibition, which explores how the story of Alice has captured the imaginations of artists, readers and writers over the years, also features Dodgson’s original manuscript, complete…

Ryan Lavelle I’ve been fascinated by the Anglo-Saxons’ defence against and accommodation with Viking invaders. This was a time when people’s identities could be shaped according to circumstances, and the Anglo-Saxons saw and dealt with Vikings as more than just pagan foes. • Ryan explores Anglo-Saxon England on page 22 Alison Weir Recently I have been exploring the story of a royal intriguer who dabbled perilously in Tudor politics at the courts of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I. She’s largely forgotten now, however, so I’ve been working to retrieve a feisty lady from obscurity. • Alison traces Margaret Douglas’s life on page 60 Loyd Grossman Benjamin West’s life is a rags-to-riches story worthy of a novel, which also illuminates some of the key artistic and intellectual trends of the 18th…

The shock of abolition Matt Elton writes eloquently on the shocking normality of the slave trade (News, September). However, I believe what was really shocking about slavery was its abolition. Slavery had been an accepted institution in human societies for millennia – the ancient Greeks and Romans had it, the contemporary Ottomans and Persians had it, as did virtually every civilised nation in western Europe and the states of northern Africa (who supplied the raw material to European slave traders). Given that historical and contemporary context, I can understand why we indulged in slavery and the trade. Slavery was an accepted and legally sanctioned institution in the colonies (although not in England, as proved by the court case Somerset v Stewart in 1772). It took very British notions of fairness,…

“I went to Featherstone the other day. A small stop on the local line from Pontefract to Wakefield, it was the scene of dramatic events in the Great Miners’ Lockout of 1893. By the cemetery I stood where Keir Hardie made his speech calling for the creation of a Labour party, and I found myself musing on the party’s history at this moment of what the commentators are already calling “cataclysmic change”: the golden time of 1945; Wilson’s four victories; the heady days of New Labour; and now the travails of the last few years culminating in doom-laden predictions of Labour’s demise. From Hardie to Corbyn, it has been an extraordinary story. For me it was a sentimental journey. My first job after university was as a journalist in Leeds,…

“The whole race… is war-mad, high-spirited and quick to battle… And so when they are stirred up they assemble in their bands for battle quite openly and without forethought.” So wrote the Greek historian Strabo about the Celts at the beginning of the first century AD. It is a generalisation that has coloured our view of the northern neighbours of the Romans and Greeks ever since. Celts first came into the consciousness of early modern historians in the 16th and 17th centuries when the works of classical writers like Strabo, Caesar and Livy were becoming widely available. These texts describe how the many barbarian tribes of western and central Europe came into conflict with the Roman and Greek worlds. The writers called these disparate peoples ‘Celts’ or ‘Gauls’ – a…

Voltaire (1694-1778) Voltaire, whose real name was François-Marie Arouet, valued style and audience appeal as much as scholarship, and incorporated social and cultural history into the age-old tradition of political narrative. Voltaire’s Essai sur les Moeurs (1756) was the first call-to-action of philosophical history, but the three years he spent in political exile in England helped to mould his approach to history writing. Voltaire’s Le Siècle de Louis XIV (1751) increased his already considerable fame earned as a playwright, wit and radical thinker. David Hume (1711-76) Hume is now more widely regarded as a philosopher than a historian. However, his philosophical writings were not a commercial success. Thanks to the income from his History of England (1754–61), Hume was able to remark that he “was become not only independent, but…

In 1536 a young woman lay in the Tower of London under sentence of death. Her crime was to fall in love – treason in the eyes of King Henry VIII, who believed that her lover had designs on his throne. This wasn’t Anne Boleyn, who famously lost her head that year, but the king’s near heiress, Lady Margaret Douglas, who had secretly precontracted herself to Lord Thomas Howard, half-brother of the Duke of Norfolk. The Act of Attainder passed against Thomas was the first ever to legislate on royal marriages, and decreed that any man espousing or defiling a relative of the king, without royal assent, was a traitor – and both would suffer death. Thus Margaret and Thomas stood condemned under a statute that had not been in…

The Mistresses of Cliveden: Three Centuries of Scandal, Power and Intrigue by Natalie Livingstone Hutchinson, 512 pages, £25 Scandalous women who dare to be different have always been irresistible – not just in life but in print. That’s certainly true of Cliveden’s mistresses in this ambitious biography of the opulent stately home. The stories of five intriguing and very different women are neatly framed by the evolution of the house itself, from its conception as a romantic country hideaway for the Duke of Buckingham’s lover in the 1660s, to its purchase as a hotel by the author’s husband in 2012. The “lustful, greedy” Anna Maria, Countess of Shrewsbury, who captivated Buckingham, made the most of her charms but ultimately became Cliveden’s lost mistress after a House of Lords ruling forced…

The village of Haworth, perched on the edge of the South Pennine moors, would be a quaint but unremarkable Yorkshire village but for its unique connection to one of British history’s most famous literary families. But its sleepy tea rooms and antiquarian bookshops are a far cry from the crowded industrial town it was in 1820, when red-haired, Irish-born Patrick Brontë moved his young family into Haworth parsonage after taking up the post of curate. It’s clear on arrival at Haworth that the bleak, windswept moors were reflected in the settings for many of the sisters’ books, particularly Emily’s Gothic masterpiece, Wuthering Heights. The exposed and isolated moorland setting of Top Withens, an abandoned farmhouse about three miles from Haworth, is thought to have been Emily’s inspiration for the location…

My first visit to Bali five years ago was a huge culture shock. Though I had explored other Indonesian islands, nothing could prepare me for such a unique culture. This beautiful island has weathered the storm of modern times rather well, and remains a cultural gem with an idyllic landscape. International tourism has certainly had an impact, but the Balinese people are infallibly friendly, and there is always something new to discover. The beliefs of maritime south-east Asia find their focus in Bali. The island is known as a Hindu enclave in largely Muslim Indonesia, but the Balinese also piously respect their ancestors and carefully placate the indigenous spirits dwelling in the island. Nothing is considered to be inanimate, be it a stone, a tree or a motorcar. During the…

Sloe gin With the enclosure of the countryside in the 16th and 17th centuries came a huge increase in blackthorn bushes, used to divide up fields, and therefore lots of sloes. The popularity of gin at the time meant that there was an ideal way of making otherwise quite unpalatable sloes a bit more exciting. Sloe gin is a great drink to prepare in time for Christmas and the long winter months that follow. love the whole I process, from picking the sloes to hiding the bottles in a dark corner to mature. I’ve never made sloe gin the same way twice – it’s always a bit haphazard – but for me the two most important things are not to use too much sugar, and to wait three months before…

23 November 1963 The Doctor steps inside the Tardis for the very first time An unpromising BBC schedule-filler takes its first strides towards becoming a British cultural institution Settling down before the television in the early evening of 23 November 1963, few people could have imagined they were about to witness the start of a British cultural institution. Indeed, many were still in shock at the news from across the Atlantic, where, a day earlier, John F Kennedy had been shot dead in Dallas, Texas. Even as its unearthly title music filled the air, few knew what to expect from Doctor Who. The Radio Times had billed the programme as “an adventure in space and time”, explaining that its heroes might find themselves in “a distant galaxy where civilisation has…

Debate rages over ‘Nazi gold train’ discovery Two men who claim they have found a Nazi train laden with gold in Poland say they have “irrefutable evidence” of its existence, despite so far failing to publicly substantiate the claim. Local legend says that a train filled with gold, guns and gems went missing near the city of Walbrzych in late 1944 or 1945, but officials have cast doubt on stories of its discovery. The Polish military is now thought to be investigating the potential site. A ‘ritual arena’ has been found near Stonehenge The remains of a huge stone monument have been discovered by archaeologists working two miles from the site of Stonehenge in Wiltshire. The series of between 90 and 100 standing stones are thought to be 4,500 years…

An inquest was held in London for the death of a young man, Walter Cowle, who had previously been employed as an envelope-cutter. On a recent night out in Soho, Cowle had visited the Carlisle Arms Tavern, on Bateman Street, to meet with friends. Some way into the evening the conversation turned to tricks and feats each could perform, and, perhaps on a dare, Cowle claimed he had the ability to place a large billiard ball in his mouth and close his teeth. His friends were eager to see this trick performed, and so the landlord was requested to produce one – which he did after several assurances that Cowle would not actually put the ball in his mouth, but would use sleight of hand to amuse and trick the…

I was pleased to see that you included with Joel Greenberg’s recent article about Alan Turing (Alan Turing: The Man, The Enigma, October) a photograph of the 16-year-old Alan Turing taken in 1928 while at Sherborne School. But I was sorry that no mention was made of his time at the school. The years Turing spent at Sherborne School (1926–31) played an important part in his later development. We can trace Turing’s interest in cryptography directly back to his school years. In 1928, Turing borrowed a copy of Rouse Ball’s Mathematical Recreations and Essays from the school library. The book includes a chapter on the art of constructing cryptographs and ciphers, stating: “Their usefulness on certain occasions, especially in time of war, is obvious, while it may be a matter…

The word Celtic was loosely used by the classical writers and has continued to be loosely used in more recent times to such a degree that some commentators question whether it has any value at all. Julius Caesar, however, very specifically said that the region between the rivers Garonne and Seine was known to its inhabitants as Celtica and this is supported by a late fourth-century BC writer, Pytheas, who refers to the projecting mass of the Armorican peninsula as Keltike. But no ancient writer refers to the Britons as Celts. The poem Ora Maritima, which makes use of sources going back to the sixth century, calls Britain “the island of the Albiones”, adding that Ireland was inhabited by the Hierni, but the more widely used name was Prettanike or…

1515 Margaret is born at Harbottle Castle, Northumberland. Because she is born in England, she is her uncle Henry VIII’s subject, and as such has a strong claim to the throne. 1527 Margaret’s parents, Archibald Douglas, Earl of Angus, and Margaret Tudor (right) divorce, which raises enduring questions about Margaret’s legitimacy. 1530 She arrives at the English court, where she is treated as a princess of the blood. She will serve five of Henry VIII’s wives. 1536-37 Margaret secretly precontracts herself to Lord Thomas Howard. Both are imprisoned in the Tower. Margaret is released, but Thomas dies of an illness. 1544 Margaret marries Matthew Stuart, Earl of Lennox. It is a love match. 1562-63 Margaret is kept under house arrest at Sheen for plotting to marry her son, Lord Darnley,…

Augustus: The Biography by Jochen Bleicken Allen Lane, 784 pages, £30 This is a superb account of the grand-nephew of Julius Caesar, Gaius Octavius. Born into a wealthy Italian family of no serious distinction in the small town of Velletrae, he became Octavianus when adopted (aged 18) by Caesar as his son and heir, and was to emerge as Rome’s first emperor, Augustus. Jochen Bleicken argues that being Caesar’s heir meant nothing more than it did for the heir of any other aristocrat: it implied he had an advantageous foot on the political ladder, but what he made of it was up to him. After Caesar’s assassination in 44 BC, Cicero for one was not at all certain Octavian would become a ‘good citizen’, and few would have bet on…

The Hundred Years War, Volume IV: Cursed Kings by Jonathan Sumption Faber and Faber, 928 pages, £40 On 23 November 1407, riding home singing after a long, well-lubricated supper, the king of France’s brother was assassinated by agents of his cousin John, Duke of Burgundy. On 10 September 1419, John was violently murdered under the gaze of the French dauphin. These two deaths plunged France into civil war. As a monk displaying John’s remains is said to have remarked: “It was through the hole in this skull that the English entered France.” French politics dissolved into factional rivalry. Henry V seized the opportunity not only for short-lived victory at Agincourt, but to conquer Normandy as far as the gates of Paris. Charles VI reigned in France, his long periods of…

Falling Angels Tracy Chevalier (2001) In Edwardian England, unhappily married Kitty Coleman seeks new fulfilment, first in a disastrous affair and then by reinventing herself as a suffragette. Her life is transformed through her involvement in the campaign, but her husband grows ever more angry with her for flouting convention. Falling Angels summons up a vanished world in which society and women’s status were in transition. Half of the Human Race Anthony Quinn (2012) Constance Callaway is a suffragette, drawn into ever more radical action for the cause, who endures the painful indignity of force-feeding in Holloway prison. Will Maitland, meanwhile, is an honourable county cricketer with unthinkingly traditional views on society and the relationship between the sexes. Quinn’s subtle novel follows the love affair between these two very different…

1 St Mary's with Holy Apostles, Scarborough Where Anne Brontë is buried In May 1849, Anne Brontë arrived in Scarborough accompanied by sister Charlotte, and school friend Ellen Nussey. Three days later she succumbed to tuberculosis and was buried in Scarborough at her own request – she is the only Brontë not to be buried in the family vault in Haworth. scarborough-stmarys.org.uk 2 Hollybank School, Mirfield, West Yorkshire Where the sisters were schooled Charlotte, Anne and Emily all attended Roe Head School – now Hollybank School – at various points, with Charlotte teaching there from 1835–38. It was at Roe Head that the sisters met lifelong friend Ellen Nussey. Today a plaque commemorates the building’s Brontë connections. hollybanktrust.com 3 North Lees Hall, Hathersage, Derbyshire Where Jane Eyre may have been…

BEST TIME TO GO Bali’s dry season falls between April and September, when temperatures average around 27°C. Major Hindu rituals and festivals take place throughout the year, with additional street processions and offerings a regular occurrence. GETTING THERE Bali’s only airport is Ngurah Rai International Airport (also known as Denpasar) but there is currently no direct flight to Bali from Europe. UK travellers can reach Bali via Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Hong Kong or Bangkok. WHAT TO PACK The sun can be fierce, so it’s sensible to carry a wide-brimmed hat or a parasol. Sunscreen is also a must, and insect repellent is useful. WHAT TO BRING BACK Beautiful wooden carvings and ikat , a woven silk or cotton cloth of dyed threads READERS’ VIEWS I would definitely recommend the sacred…

1. Who had a painful encounter with ‘Little Jock’ Elliot in Liddesdale, Scotland in October 1566? 2. Who were the adversaries in the Flagstaff War of 1845-46? 3. Who wrote The History of England By a Partial, Prejudiced and Ignorant Historian in 1791? 4. The first in England was Waverley; the first in Scotland was Melrose. Which was the first in Wales? 5. What is Admiral Jervis reputed to have said when quizzed about the possibility of a French invasion during the Napoleonic Wars? 6. This late Neolithic or early Bronze Age stone stands in Rudston churchyard, East Yorkshire. What is its claim to fame? QUIZ ANSWERS 1. James Hepburn, 4th Earl of Bothwell (future husband of Mary, Queen of Scots). Elliot was a border reiver who surprised and wounded…

Hypatia was a Greek mathematician, astronomer and philosopher from the Egyptian city of Alexandria, then under Roman rule. There she was head of the Neoplatonist school, at which she lectured on various subjects, as well as being a staunch defender of the city’s Great Library. She was brutally murdered by a mob of Christian zealots, possibly working on the orders of Alexandria’s archbishop, Cyril. When did you first hear about Hypatia? I was 11 years of age and had just started at Bolton-on-Dearne secondary modern in South Yorkshire. Because our class wasn’t making any progress, the headmaster brought in his wife – a disciplinarian in stockings and spectacles. She said: “I’m going to tell you about a remarkable woman called Hypatia who gave her life for education. She studied at…