Innholdsfortegnelse for December 2020 i History Extra

It seems barely a week goes by these days without a new Viking discovery being announced. And the more we learn about these people, the deeper our understanding grows about their world and their behaviour – although, of course, scholarly disagreements remain. In this month’s cover feature, on page 50, Neil Price draws on the latest thinking to examine the Viking psyche, exploring everything from gender identities to magic and warfare. Another theme we’re covering in depth this month is medieval monarchy. On page 37 you’ll find a conversation between Dan Jones and Charles Spencer about the White Ship disaster, which famously left Henry I without a legitimate male heir. The result was almost two decades of the Anarchy, which saw Henry’s daughter, Matilda, battling her cousin Stephen for the…

EYE-OPENER Heading home This ancient limestone plaque, crafted in Mesopotamia in the third millennium BC, is set to be returned to Iraq after having been smuggled out of the country and offered for sale in Britain. Dating from around 2400 BC, the plaque originates from a Sumerian temple and depicts a figure with a ceremonial goblet in its raised right hand. Because it’s one of only about 50 known examples of its kind, its scarcity made it an ideal target for illicit trade. The plaque was intended to be put up for online auction in May 2019, but it was instead seized by the arts and antiques unit of the Metropolitan Police, which has been working with experts from the British Museum to return it to its place of origin.…

Study shows Vikings had diverse roots New research suggests that the Vikings were surprisingly genetically diverse. The six-year project, carried out by teams from the universities of Copenhagen and Cambridge, sequenced DNA material taken from the skeletons of more than 400 people found in Viking cemeteries in Europe and Greenland. The results revealed key regions of what is now Scandinavia had very diverse populations, suggesting the mixing of local people with those from other areas. For instance, DNA evidence indicates that people with Asian genetic heritage travelled to Scandinavia – suggesting a ‘Viking’ identity was cultural, not genetic. “These results show what we as archaeologists have known for quite a long time – that the idea of a pure ‘Viking nation’ is really not reflected in reality at all,” said…

Sixty years ago, on Friday 9 December 1960 at 7pm, the now familiar opening titles and theme tune heralded the first episode of Granada’s new soap opera, Coronation Street, performed live on ITV. It was expected to run for 13 episodes. This opening episode is a fine example of social history, Shakespearean in the way that we learn about the street’s residents in conversations between characters. The dialogue and visuals reveal social and cultural norms which would be known to some viewers but new to others. Examples abound. A taken-down notice reading “Please do not ask for credit as a refusal often offends” is explained: “A bit on the slate’s not a bad thing. If you didn’t let some of ‘em have it they wouldn’t spend nearly as much.” But…

Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin both cast long shadows over the 20th century. One, the leader of Nazi Germany, hoped to create a vast new empire underpinned by his racist beliefs; the other wanted to build the first communist state in the fledgling Soviet Union. But despite the differing nature of their goals, the two men were motivated by the same overarching passion: the desire to create what they believed was a utopia here on Earth. Unlike other dictators, many of whom resemble Mafia bosses, these two each thought that they had uncovered the secret of existence. Yet as individual personalities, Hitler and Stalin could scarcely have been further apart. Over the last 30 years, in the course of writing various history books and making many historical documentaries, I’ve met…

When did people first have tattoos? We cannot know for certain precisely how old tattooing is as a practice, though the paleoanthropological evidence suggests that it likely emerged around 45,000 years ago, when other symbolic creative behaviours became consistent in humans. The oldest direct evidence of tattooing we have comes in the form of the preserved body of a Copper Age man named Ötzi, who died around 5,400 years ago in the Austro-Italian Alps. Ötzi’s body is marked with a total of 61 short discrete lines which are tattooed at 15 locations on his body, in the form of tally marks and crosses. In the collection of the British Museum, there are several mummies from pre-dynastic Egypt, both male and female, who bear tattoos of animals and symbols on their…

Every historical age sees extraordinary inequalities of wealth. Whether we are talking about ancient Rome or 20th-century Britain, the pattern is commonly described as a pyramid, with a small number of exceedingly rich individuals at the apex and a large number of poor people at the base. As we all know, the differences between the top and the bottom are extreme – to the extent that some of the super-wealthy have incomes more than a thousand times greater than the national average. But what about the variance in their basic standards of living? Aside from the glitz and the glamour, are the lifestyles of the rich and poor always poles apart? You might assume that the only possible answer to that question is yes. Peasants and slaves never live like…

Stella Dadzie on enslaved women in the West Indies “One of the myths that surrounds enslaved women is that men did all the hard labour. But plantation records reveal that on many of the large estates across the West Indies, women made up the vast majority of the field gangs. This could be because women were seen to have more stamina. There was also very little difference between the price of a man and the price of a woman, suggesting that their labour was seen as equal.” Siân Evans on female transatlantic travellers “The interwar period was an era when many women experienced autonomy, freedom of movement and independence for the first time. They crossed the Atlantic for all sorts of reasons. There was a shortage of men after the…

Scoff: A History of Food and Class in Britain by Pen Vogler Atlantic Books, 480 pages, £20 The history of food, as with any subject-based history, can be interesting in its own right, but it is when it is used as a prism through which to explore wider themes that it becomes truly fascinating. In her latest book, Pen Vogler moves away from writing purely food-in-literature-based books to consider the intersection of food and class throughout history. The introduction is clear-sighted and punchy, posing questions around the supposed universality of food preferences, the right to choose one’s diet, and the thorny issue of who gets to say what is or isn’t desirable. This isn’t a weighty tome though – not a companion volume to the recent spate of books on…

What can you tell us about your latest novel, V2? The action takes place over five days at the end of November 1944, as V2 missiles are launched on London by Germans hidden in occupied Holland. I tell the story through two characters: a German rocket scientist attached to the military unit firing the rockets, and a member of the WAAF. She works in reconnaissance and is a victim of a V2 rocket strike in the early pages of the book. What was it about the V2 rocket that captured your imagination? I’ve always been haunted by the V2 and struck by its extraordinary modernity. It was a sort of hinge between conventional warfare and the missile-based warfare we see today. There was also a kind of Faustian pact in…

Historian and broadcaster LUCY WORSLEY tells us about the return of her series separating historical fact from fib – and why the focus is placed on revolt and rebellion in Britain, France and Russia The linking theme of the new run of History’s Biggest Fibs is revolutions. Why did you choose that focus? If the series were a university course, we would be calling it ‘historiography’ – it’s concerned with the changing interpretation of history. That word has become ‘fibs’, a shorthand we have used for quite a few different programmes now. We decided to look at revolutions because they are fantastic causes of fibs or changing interpretations. To carry out a successful revolution means seizing control of the story and making sure your version triumphs over others. The stories…

Radical Richard Matt Lewis on how Richard III sought to help the common people during his brief reign Nelson in his own words Marianne Czisnik reveals a different side to the British naval hero through his letters to Emma Hamilton Pregnancy cravings Jennifer Evans highlights unusual items expectant mothers consumed in early modern Europe…

Laurence Rees I’ve spent the last 30 years making TV documentaries and writing books about the Third Reich, Stalinism and the Second World War, and I’m intrigued by the similarities and differences between Hitler and Stalin. Laurence explores the tyrants’ twisted dreams about utopia on page 22 Corinne Fowler Country houses are central to the image of Britain’s rural idyll, yet I’ve long wanted to draw greater attention to their links to the British empire. That’s why I’m heading the national education and public history project Colonial Countryside. Corinne reveals the web of colonial connections linked to stately homes on page 44 Ian Mortimer Until writing The Time Traveller’s Guide to Regency Britain, I had never properly understood the depth of misery of the working classes during the industrial revolution…

Public historian Greg Jenner (@greg_jenner) challenged Twitter with a really interesting question that he had been asked by a friend: “Were any popular histories of major wars and/or catastrophes written while the war [or] catastrophe was still ongoing and the outcome unknown?” It was a thought-provoking question, and one that produced a rich variety of responses. Dr Sara Barker (@DrSKBarker) was quick off the blocks, saying: “Several histories of the [16th-century] French Wars of Religion were composed as they were still ongoing – but those wars were so fragmented, no one quite knew how or when they might end.” Dr Rachel Gibbons (@rachel_gibbons) suggested “Jean Froissart’s chronicle of the 14th-century phases of the Hundred Years’ War,” while Graeme Millen (@Weegie_Graeme) noted, interestingly, that “Colonel Robert [Monro’s] memoir of a Scottish…

“History at its most affecting is the tale of a single life through time” We are often told that the majority of history searches in archives, libraries and record offices, both in person and online, concern family history and genealogy. We all want to know about ourselves: where are we from? Who do we think we are? This fundamental human urge to know about our past is the theme of some of the best history books I have read this year. Take, for example, Philippe Sands’ brilliant East West Street. On one level this is a human rights lawyer’s compelling story of the development of the legal concepts of genocide and crimes against humanity. But at its root, it is the tale of a family devastated by the Holocaust, whose…

“Desks went from a niche furniture item to the work station of millions” It seems that the age of the office may be coming to an end. Few people now imagine that after the great experiment in homeworking brought about by the pandemic there will be a wholesale return to the office. For centuries going to the office meant sitting for hours at a desk, an item of furniture firmly associated in our minds with the workplace. Yet for the desk, the homeworking revolution of 2020 represents a return to an earlier chapter of its history, because the desk was formerly part of the domestic realm. The first desks used in the home took their cue from those that had been used by scribes in medieval monasteries. These were small,…

THE SOLDIER 1 “How many of us will be wounded no one knows” Heifu, an ordinary soldier writing two millennia ago, describes war, rebellions – and cut-price cloth China was united by the fearsome First Emperor, Qin Shi Huangdi, in 221 BC. His relentless power was symbolised by the Terracotta Army guarding his tomb: impassive, regimented, unquestioningly obedient to his authority. But, recently, stunning documentary finds have given us a picture of the real-life troops of the First Emperor: soldiers’ letters that bring to mind the Vindolanda tablets, written by Roman troops posted near Hadrian’s Wall. Take this from 6 April 223 BC, in which the brothers Heifu and Jing send greetings to their family back home: “Our unit is about to help in attacks on rebel cities at Huaiyang…

1. Basildon Park and ‘England’s Hindoostan’ So many East India Company men settled in Berkshire in the 18th century that it became known as ‘England’s Hindoostan’. One of those men, Sir Francis Sykes, made his fortune collecting Indian taxes with the help of an Indian merchant named Cantoo Baboo, and in the late 1770s he used that fortune to commission the building of a grand Palladian residence near the river Thames, Basildon Park. For years, Sir Francis Sykes was assisted by Baboo, who won his trust, and of whom Sykes wrote: “I never hided anything from him.” Sykes’s descendent Sir John Sykes has researched his family’s connection to India for 40 years. He found that the lasting alliance between the families of Baboo and Sykes is expressed in details such…

Fatal facial hair A bürgermeister in 16th-century Austria died after tripping over his own beard and breaking his neck. Hans Staininger’s beard was approximately 2 metres long, and he usually kept it rolled up in a leather pouch. In 1567, a fire broke out at the town hall in Braunau am Inn. While attempting to escape the flames, Staininger suffered his fatal fall. His beard was preserved by his family and can still be seen in Braunau’s local history museum. Light-fingered leader King Farouk of Egypt was an accomplished pickpocket who filched Winston Churchill’s watch during a wartime meeting. The king later returned the pocket watch, a family heirloom that had belonged to the first Duke of Marlborough, claiming the theft had only been a practical joke. In truth, Farouk…

Ellie Cawthorne: Your new book examines the close and often complex relationship between wars and societies throughout history. What do we need to understand about that relationship? Margaret MacMillan: There’s long been a sense that military history is something apart. It’s toys for boys – all about guns, battles and strategy. Of course, that’s part of it. But we need to understand that war also has a much more intimate relationship with human society. I see the relationship between war and societies as a two-way thing, and in my book I wanted to give a sense of that long intertwining. It’s very difficult to untangle which comes first. For too long we’ve wanted to avert our eyes from war, viewing it as something distasteful. But we don’t do ourselves any…

Waves Across the South: A New History of Revolution and Empire by Sujit Sivasundaram William Collins, 496 pages, £25 Humans squat by the ocean as “frogs around a pond”, as Plato insightfully observed in Phaedo. But although land occupies a mere third of the Earth’s surface, the history of oceans and maritime engagement has long been subordinated to a terrestrial imagination. Amnesia has long attended on histories of the British empire, which have more often been written as accounts of the conquest of land and territorial settlement through ‘savage wars of peace’. Waves Across the South, however, brilliantly reconstructs how empire was made through voyages across oceans – the Indian and the Pacific – and engages with a diverse patchwork of actors, states, cultures and religions. Conventional histories of empire…

Agent Sonya: Lover, Mother, Soldier, Spy by Ben Macintyre Penguin, 400 pages, £25 Ursula Kuczynski, AKA Sonya, AKA Ursula Burton, AKA Ruth Werner, was a remarkable woman. Ten years old when the Bolsheviks launched their revolution, she was 82 when the Berlin wall was pulled down. Kuczynski attained the rank of colonel in Soviet intelligence, the highest position a female spy held in the Soviet Union. She was an agent runner par excellence, but under the mysticism was a mother of three who frequently had to balance the duties of being a spy with those of running a family. Kuczynski’s story is reasonably well known. After all, she wrote a memoir and several fictional stories that were quasi-auto- biographical. But Macintyre’s re-telling has the distinct advantage of drawing on numerous recently…

FICTION War Lord by Bernard Cornwell (HarperCollins, 352 pages, £20) Epic ending With his 13th book set in the warring kingdoms of ninth and tenth-century England, Bernard Cornwell is finally bringing the story of Uhtred of Bebbanburg to a dramatic conclusion. His hero has returned to the ‘last kingdom’ of Northumbria and faces threats from all sides. Battle is looming. Cornwell superfans should look out for the collector’s edition featuring a specially designed gold-foil case. GLOBAL A History of Islam in 21 Women by Hossein Kamaly (Oneworld, 261 pages, £9.99) NOW IN PAPERBACK World-changing women From Fatima, the seventh-century daughter of the Prophet Muhammad, to the Second World War spy Noor Inayat Khan, this book offers biographical sketches of 21 remarkable Muslim women. Kamaly invites his readers to use these…

TASTE Devonshire squab pie This traditional pie from the south-west of England takes its name from the young pigeon that would originally have been used as filling. However, the version we’ve plumped for here – lamb and apples – is known to have been used as one of the many alternatives from at least the middle of the 18th century onward. Difficulty: 3/10 Preparation time: 20 minutes Baking time: One hour INGREDIENTS 450g cubed lamb 150ml lamb stock One onion, sliced One red apple, thinly sliced Eight ready-to-eat prunes 350g ready-to-roll short crust pastry One egg, beaten Half a teaspoon each of ground cinnamon and ground mace A pinch of ground nutmeg 2 tsp of cornflour 2 tsp of light brown sugar Salt and pepper METHOD 1. Mix the lamb…

George Washington Carver c1864–1943 IN PROFILE George Washington Carver was a celebrated agricultural scientist. Born into slavery in 1860s Missouri, Carver developed a passion for botany which ultimately earned him a post as head of agriculture at Tuskegee Institute, Alabama. Here, his pioneering research into soil depletion transformed the lives of many poor black farmers. He died in 1943, aged around 78. “Carver toured the Deep South in a wagon, distributing ‘how-to’ pamphlets that were accessible to poor black farmers” When did you first hear about George Washington Carver? I’d long known his name. But I only really began to appreciate what an amazing life he’d led a couple of years ago, when I was asked to do a talk at a school during Black History Month. I instantly found…

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Historian Clive Emsley, who explored the history of crime and policing across a long career, has died at the age of 76. Emsley completed a degree at the University of York and undertook research at the University of Cambridge, before joining the newly founded Open University as a lecturer in 1970. He also held the position of visiting professor at institutions in Australia, France, Canada and New Zealand, and in 1995 he was elected president of the International Association for the History of Crime and Criminal Justice, a role he held until his death. Broadening access to historical material was a recurring theme throughout Emsley’s career. He played a key role in developing and cataloguing the Open University’s extensive archive chronicling the history of policing in the UK. He was…

LETTER OF THE MONTH Conjuring the spirits I read with interest about Captain Francis Grose and his contribution to the English language (My History Hero, November). However, Captain Grose also had a hand in creating one of Scotland’s most famous literary figures, Tam O’Shanter by Robert Burns. After publishing The Antiquities of England and Wales, in 1788 Grose came up to Scotland to produce a book in a similar vein, The Antiquities of Scotland. In the course of his research, he was introduced to Robert Burns, and the two became friends immediately. Burns suggested that Grose should include the ruined, reputedly haunted kirk at Alloway (very close to where he was born) in his new book, and Grose agreed on condition that Burns provided a suitably spooky story to go…

There’s no getting away from it: medieval queen-consorts had a fiendishly demanding role. They were expected to emulate the biblical Queen Esther, who was humble, self-effacing, passive, obedient and modest, yet gifted with inner strength. They were also required to be faithful, wise, just and compassionate. Above all, they were exhorted to mirror the virtues of the Virgin Mary and appear gracious, charitable and merciful. A queen who failed to meet these expectations might be branded a ‘Jezebel’, likening her to the most notorious queen in the Bible. As the king’s bed was a symbol of majesty, so the queen’s was the basis of the influence she could exercise in private. Her bedchamber was not just her private domain, but also the seat of her power, the place where she…

The Good Germans: Resisting the Nazis 1933–1945 by Catrine Clay Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 416 pages, £20 Julius Leber was one of many Germans who found themselves at odds with the Nazis when they rose to power. As a leading Social Democrat, he was promptly imprisoned in 1933, where he stoically remained for four years. Upon his release, he began to make plans to bring down the regime, his conviction unwavering. Facing the watchful eye of the Gestapo, Leber worked hard to avoid detection, quickly learning the skills of deception: jumping on trams and trains at the last minute, doubling back, wearing disguises, joining spurious ‘clubs’ which were covers for seditious activities, never using the telephone for anything important, and always looking out for informers. This was not a path of…

The Invention of Medicine by Robin Lane Fox Allen Lane, 432 pages, £25 With uncanny timing, The Invention of Medicine has been published as medical science struggles to meet an immense medical challenge. In it, Robin Lane Fox follows the history of the Greek doctors linked with the name of Hippocrates of Cos, and their development of medicine based on natural causes rather than supernatural intervention. He radically redates their earliest texts to the years following 470 BC, making this some of the earliest Greek prose, scientific or otherwise. Never before has medicine been put so squarely at the centre of ancient life. Lane Fox is a delight to read: he writes with breadth of knowledge, wit and infectious enthusiasm. Full of insight and detail, the narrative takes readers through many…