Innholdsfortegnelse for October 2020 i History Extra

“We know how the story ends. Anne Boleyn, Henry VIII’s second wife, was executed in May 1536, having been tried and sentenced to death for committing high treason. But at the time, none of this was certain. No queen of England had been executed before, and even after the trial was over, doubts remained as to whether Henry would accede to the killing of his wife (who was almost certainly innocent). In our cover feature, on page 20, Tracy Borman returns to this dark chapter in English history, revealing how the main players navigated these uncertain times. It was during the reign of Anne Boleyn’s daughter, Elizabeth I, that English settlers first attempted to colonise North America, and a few decades later, in 1620, the Mayflower crossed the Atlantic, carrying…

LETTER OF THE MONTH Medieval values I greatly enjoyed the History Extra podcast Lionheart of Stone: the Medieval Statue Debate (released 17 July) which highlighted the lack of discussion of medieval figures in current debates about historical statues, and explored the ways in which they represent the past and their relevance today. Dr Simon John suggests that the 19th- century statue of 12th-century crusader-king Richard I outside of parliament in London (below left) is a symbol of Englishness: chivalry, monarchical authority and Christianity. I found it fascinating how John highlights the void between this idea of ‘Englishness’ and the reality of the diversity of the people of England and, more accurately, Great Britain that our parliament represents. As a medievalist, I think the Lionheart statue is a beautiful piece of…

Despite the summer heat enveloping the walled city of Lahore in late June 1839, a chilling sense of anxiety and grief pervaded the hearts of Punjabi ministers and courtiers gathered inside the royal chambers of the imperial palace. Their master, Maharajah Ranjit Singh, lay senseless and on the verge of death in his opulent bedchamber, inside the Lahore Fort. Countless prayers were being offered for his recovery, and vast sums of alms – gold, jewels and elephants, no less – were given away from the fabulous riches of the Sikh imperial treasury, in the desperate hope of saving Ranjit Singh’s life, or at least procuring God’s mercy for his soul. The palatial apartments occupied by the ailing maharajah were originally constructed centuries before by the great Mughal emperors, but they…

When did people start wearing glasses? Various ancient peoples knew of the magnifying properties of lenses. There’s fragmentary evidence that the ancient Egyptians may have used them, while the Roman emperor Nero improved his view of gladiatorial games by watching them through an emerald. By AD 1000, the Persian scholar Ibn Sahl had written a famous treatise on optics. In it he described “reading stones” – made of quartz or rock crystal, or glass spheres cut in half – which could be placed over a text to magnify it. Eyeglass technology had advanced further still by the early years of the Italian Renaissance. We know this because several writers, including Petrarch (1304-74), were describing people holding pairs of lenses over their eyes, or suspending them from the bridge of their…

Eels were an important commodity, used for barter – especially in places like the Fens – and as an in-kind currency in early medieval England. But what were the fish actually worth? Individually, eels were quite cheap. In the mid-14th century, a single eel cost roughly the equivalent of 48 pence in today’s currency. But the English caught millions of eels each year, leading to the question: what were eels worth relative to other commodities? This table uses coinage costs from the 14th century…

Sarah Lefanu on authors in the Boer War “Arthur Conan Doyle hadn’t practised for ten years due to the suc- cess of his Sherlock Holmes books, but was so keen to get out to the Boer War that he signed up with a field hospital as a surgeon. The war was also an excuse for him to leave his personal problems behind – his wife had TB and he’d fallen in love with someone else. This often happens in wars – people go for their own personal reasons as much as higher ideals such as patriotism.” Jonathan Lichtenstein on retracing his father’s Kindertransport journey “I became aware of my father’s experience in the Second World War when I was very young. He would make no mentions of Hitler, of Nazis,…

This latest biography of Richard III opens with a startling rollcall of Ricardian failures: the shortest reign of a crowned king since the Norman conquest; the first and last king since Harold Godwinson to die in battle – and not killed defending his shores against invasion, but hacked to death by his own subjects. Considering this litany of catastrophes, Horrox’s subtitle seems entirely apt. The question of whether Richard III failed is never in doubt, but why he failed is carefully deconstructed. Given the debate around this most contentious monarch, a complex and contradictory man emerges in this zippy narrative. Richard may have been disillusioned with his brother Edward IV’s lascivious court, but that didn’t stop him revelling in the luxuries of kingship himself. Horrox is studiously even-handed, not least…

Priya Atwal I first became fascinated by the powerful queens of the Sikh empire when I was aged 19. Now, my new book explores the history of this once great Indian kingdom, finally placing these forgotten women back at the heart of its story. Priya charts the meteoric rise and fall of the Sikh empire on page 28 John Wyatt Greenlee Trying to figure out why 17th-century maps of London included Dutch eel ships has led me to study the role eels have played in English history, including learning about eels as a de facto medieval currency for rental payments. John reveals the important role eels played in the medieval economy on page 43 Isabel Wilkerson The American caste system grew out of the desire to categorise people to build…

A recent episode of BBC Radio long- running debate series The Moral Maze on the morality of the British empire (available to listen to on BBC Sounds) prompted an impassioned discussion which extended far beyond the programme. Kim A Wagner (@KimAtiWagner) tweeted: “If you wouldn’t do a programme on the morality of Nazi Germany, you shouldn’t be doing it on the British empire. It is analytically so incredibly inept and could only have been conceived by someone profoundly ignorant about history.” Yet, others were less sure whether the underlying premise was necessarily wrong. Samir Puri (@purisamir1) responded directly: “This kind of relativisation is not helpful… You are comparing 12 years of Nazi Germany to circa five centuries of British empire. Different spans of time give rise to moral questions of…

Mission to Mexico An Irish nobleman and antiquarian squandered much of his fortune on an attempt to show that the indigenous people of Mexico were descendants of the Lost Tribes of Israel. In the 1830s, Viscount Kingsbor- ough published at his own expense a multi-volume book entitled Antiquities of Mexico, intended to prove his theory. The project ruined him. Unable to pay the printer’s bill, he was sent to a debtors’ prison in Dublin where he contracted typhus and died soon after his release. Sex and vegetables Sufferers from sexually transmitted diseases in 18th-century London were told they could cure themselves by drinking a vegetable syrup. According to Isaac Swainson, the quack doctor who peddled it, ‘Velnos’ Vegetable Syrup’ was also useful in the treatment of leprosy, gout, scrofula and…

Ellie Cawthorne: Your new book argues that the history of the United States is best understood if we view it as a caste system – with many traits in common with other caste systems, most notably India and Nazi Germany. How do you define caste, and why do you think that it’s a useful way of describing the divisions that have run through American society? Isabel Wilkerson: I define caste as an arbitrary artificial hierarchy. In the American context, this hierarchy has meant that people’s life chances and what they are permitted to do have been related to and dependent upon what they look like. It’s also important to say that I distinguish caste from race. While caste is a concept that’s thousands of years old, race is fairly new…

Rebecca Clifford has written a wonderful and important book. It’s wonderful because she is a gifted historian who writes with immense clarity – and important because it corrects so many false perceptions about what it was like to survive the Holocaust as a Jewish child. She reveals, for example, that it simply isn’t necessarily the case that the most horrendous period of these children’s lives was the years during the Second World War. In fact, for many children – protected and hidden by non-Jews – this was often a time when they felt secure. Even more counterintuitive is the fact that, as Clifford says, in some instances it was possible that “daily life in a Nazi camp could be relatively stable for a small child”. In many cases, the biggest…

For anyone who genuinely wants to understand why black life continues to be devalued, and the global nature of the problem, Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972) is a must-read. It’s now 40 years since Rodney was assassinated in Guyana, where he had organised a political party in opposition to the dominant regime, but his work continues to be influential. The book is a forensic account of the devastation caused to the continent by colonialism. Too often we imagine that, once the colonial period ended, there was a seamless transition into independent nations that could compete on the world stage. Rodney shows how Africa was purposefully underdeveloped, starting with the wreckage caused by transatlantic slavery. Europe and, later, the US then drained away Africa’s significant mineral wealth, building only…

Your new book is set in Manchester in 1867. What tensions were simmering in the city at that time? In 1867, police sergeant Charles Brett was shot when the prison van he was guarding was ambushed by a gang of armed men. Two of the prisoners inside the van were leaders of the Fenian Brotherhood, a secret organisation which had attempted a rebellion in Ireland six months earlier. The killing sparked widespread anger and fear. There was a sense, among some, that the city’s large Irish community now represented an enemy within, and there were rumours of plans to blow up the Manchester gasworks and even to kidnap or assassinate the Queen as she travelled south from Balmoral. That fevered atmosphere is the context of the novel. What was the…

“So many people knew their parents had gone through the Holocaust and grew up with this shadow of trauma” Barrister and TV presenter ROBERT RINDER tells us about his two-part documentary dealing with the legacy of the Holocaust and its impact on his family – and why it’s vital to talk about the trauma How did My Family, the Holocaust and Me come about? It grew out of Who Do You Think You Are? [in a 2018 episode of the BBC genealogy series, production company Wall to Wall researched the stories of Rinder’s relatives lost in the Holocaust], and the extraordinary response it generated. I was probably the least famous person to appear in that series, but it attracted a wave of viewers. One good news story is that…

Medieval genius Seb Falk explores scientific knowledge in the Middle Ages, showing how this was far from an era of ignorance Lessons of old Neil Oliver on what he thinks modern societies could learn from the ancient world Belgian refugees Alison Fell tells the stories of the thousands of Belgians who fled to Britain during the First World War The 300 Andrew Bayliss revisits one of the most dramatic battles of ancient history: Thermopylae…

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The medieval historian and researcher Mark Ormrod, who had a distinguished career at the University of York, has died following a long illness. He was 62. Ormrod, who completed a doctorate at the University of Oxford in 1984, worked at the University of Sheffield and Queens University Belfast before joining York in 1990. Over the following decades he held positions including director of the Centre for Medieval Studies and head of the department of history, and in 2009 he became the first dean of the new Faculty of Arts and Humanities. His work on the Middle Ages explored such diverse areas as 15th-century immigration and the role of women in governance, and his books include a major 2011 biography of Edward III. Although he retired his university post in 2017,…

“We should keep rewriting history: our ‘island story’ is not set in stone” I had made up my mind not to talk about the ‘Life in the UK’ British history test. Earlier this summer, 181 historians and authors had their say about its factual inaccuracies; about the lack of social history; the omission of black history; the downplaying of Britain’s role in the slave trade. But this, in a real sense, represents the ‘official’ narrative of our history. When the prime minister said, in response to the fall of Edward Colston’s statue in Bristol, “we cannot pretend to have a different history”, we have to assume that this is what he means. It all jogged a memory. In 2011, I did a talk at a history conference about one of…

“Paraguay’s child-soldiers fought with wooden sticks, painted as muskets” Outside of South America – where it remains an open wound – the War of the Triple Alliance is largely forgotten. It lasted from 1864 to 1870 and pitted Paraguay against a coalition consisting of Uruguay, Argentina and Brazil. By many measures, it counts among the most devastating wars of the 19th century. The root cause of the War of the Triple Alliance was the disputed borders that the independent nations of South America inherited from the Spanish and Portuguese empires, from which they had won their independence. The immediate cause, however, was the policies of Francisco Solano López, the leader of Paraguay. In the 1860s, López catastrophically misread the balance of power in the region and over-played his hand. (Though…

In theory, Anne Boleyn’s execution had created a precedent for the lawful killing of an anointed queen. The various protocols were tested again less than six years later when, in February 1542, Henry’s fifth wife, Catherine Howard, was sent to her death. Like Anne, her crime was adultery. But unlike Anne, her guilt was beyond question. Henry ordered that Catherine’s execution should take place on Tower Green. As before, it was scheduled for early in the morning. Just like Anne’s, the event was postponed – not to clear the Tower of would-be supporters, but to give the near-hysterical Catherine the chance to compose herself. This is where the similarities ended. There was no Calais swordsman this time; Catherine was instead dispatched with an axe. Neither is there any record of…

In recent years our eyes have been opened to black histories in Britain before the Windrush generation, stretching back through the world wars, on to the Victorian era and beyond. The numbers were small, but the presence was significant, as the black characters in Elizabethan and Jacobean plays show. Much further back, there were Africans in Roman Britain, from Mauretania, today’s Morocco and Algeria. Among them was Victor, the former slave of a cavalry soldier called Numerianus, who is described as “natione Maurum” (“of the Moorish nation”) on a second-century AD tombstone from modern-day South Shields. Then there’s near silence. In the thousand years between the end of Roman Britain and the first British overseas explorations under the Tudors, people of colour are far less visible. Their stories cause barely…

In 1194, the monks of Ramsey Abbey in Huntingdonshire needed a way across a local fen, and landowner Ralph Tuberville had a road that he was willing to lease. In return for the use of his elevated causeway, the Ramsey monks agreed to pay Tuber- ville a yearly in-kind rent of 1,000 eels, two pounds each of pepper and ginger, and a pair of scarlet trousers. The abbey later renegotiated the deal with Ralph’s widow, who did not want any more trousers, instead demanding half a mark in coins and 60 cartloads of firewood. And 1,000 eels. The idea of accepting eels as rental payment may strike modern readers as unusual. But in early medieval England (1000-1300), eel-rents were commonplace. During the period, before there was enough available coinage, landlords…

1585 The first of two unsuccessful attempts to found an English colony at Roanoke takes place, in What is now North Carolina. The fate of the colonists of the second expedition remains a mystery. 1607 The first permanent settlement is established at Jamestown, Virginia by the Virginia Company of London. By the time it is abandoned in 1699, English settlement in America is securely established. 1610 English settlers establish the Newfoundland colony. This settlement has significance beyond its small population – for, thanks to its survival, the idea of transatlantic travel and settlement becomes entrenched. 1620 On 11 November (Old Style calendar), afte an unsuccessful attempt to sail south, the Mayflower returns to Provincetown Harbour in Cape Cod and lays anchor. Shortly after, its passengers set foot on American soil…

The military history of the crusader states is currently a popular topic. Steve Tibble’s second foray into the subject – following 2018’s The Crusader Armies: 1099-1187 – sits alongside several other recent books intended for the general reader. What sets this apart is that it seeks, by deconstructing these states’ military strategies, to challenge modern preconceptions regarding the lack of intelligence (or mindless brutality) of medieval crusading leaders. The book begins with the battle of the Springs of Cresson on 1 May 1187, when a small Templar and Hospitaller force was all but annihilated by a numerically superior Muslim army. This defeat paved the way for Saladin’s famous victory at Hattin and the loss of Jerusalem a few months later, and Tibble traces how events in the crusader states, primarily…

The International Brigades have occupied a central place in British historical memory for decades. The 35,000 men and women who travelled from all over the world to defend the democratic Second Spanish Republic have been the object of a vast literature, and remain a key part of the popular imagination of anti-fascism in interwar Europe. Giles Tremlett’s book provides a comprehensive narrative history of the Brigaders, while exploring the volunteers’ role in Spain and beyond. A connoisseur of the Iberian past, Tremlett has authored a number of books on Spanish history while working for The Guardian in Madrid. The International Brigades takes a chronological approach, and each of its 52 short chapters deals with a particular event of the Spanish Civil War and introduces a number of volunteers who take…

WWII Keep calm and carry on In uncertain times like these, is there any comfort to be had from looking back on past crises? Gavin Mortimer thinks so. He draws on more than 200 interviews with those who lived through the Second World War to identify 12 qualities of ‘the greatest generation’ – courage, stoicism, selflessness – that still inspire today. It’s the worldviews of wartime greats like Dame Vera Lynn distilled into a self-help book. FICTION Seedy underworld The fourth instalment in Hodgson’s Thomas Hawkins thriller series throws readers right back into the grimy, stinking streets of 18th-century London. Unsurprisingly, the happy ending Thomas has built for himself with illicit bookshop owner Kitty Sparks is short-lived, and before long he is drawn back into the ugly underbelly of city…

Jawaharlal Nehru 1889–1964 IN PROFILE Jawaharlal Nehru was the first prime minister of India and has been hailed as one of the architects of the modern Indian nation state. After training to be a barrister in England, Nehru returned to his native India, became prominent in the Indian National Congress movement and in 1929 called for complete independence from the British Raj. He became premier upon Indian independence in 1947, introduced widespread reforms and remained in office until his death in 1964. “Jawaharlal Nehru put his own life on the line when he saw a Muslim tailor being attacked by a mob intent on killing him” When did you first hear about Jawaharlal Nehru? I really only got to know him in any deep way as an adult, after reading…