Innholdsfortegnelse for February 2022 i History Extra

Writing in the New Statesman in December, historian and broadcaster David Olusoga (@DavidOlusoga) declared: “Historians should repeatedly point out that the ‘rewriting of history’ is not some act of professional misconduct but literally the job of professional historians.” Other Twitter historians agreed, in strident terms. David M Perry (@Lollardfish), for instance, responded with an all-caps “LITERALLY OUR JOB.” Another David (@History David) concurred, issuing the rallying cry that “it’s time to fight for the soul of the discipline – misinformation is destroying history’s credibility”. Corinne Fowler (@corinne_fowler) made the important point that “if we want historians to share their research or assist institutions without being fashioned into targets for hatred, intimidation and smear campaigns we need to act. Today it’s someone else. Tomorrow it could be you.” Reflecting on 1930s…

10 FEBRUARY 1355 Oxford students spark a riot A row over bad wine spills over into violence It was St Scholastica Day in 1355 and Oxford’s students were in the mood to celebrate. Among them were Walter de Spryngeheuse and Roger de Chesterfield, who went for a drink at the Swindlestock Tavern on the Carfax junction, but they ended up painting the town much redder than they had anticipated. No sooner had the students ordered some wine than passions rose. It began with the pair complaining that the wine was poor and demanding fresh drinks. The landlord refused. A few terse words were exchanged, peppered with “stubborn and saucy language”. The students started throwing wine and hit the barman with his own pot. The argument degenerated into a rolling brawl,…

LETTER OF THE MONTH Digging deeper Further to Dr Wragg Sykes’s fascinating feature on early female archaeologists (Spades, Soil and Sisterhood, December), it’s worth stating that recent research suggests that Christian MacLagan may not have been the earliest female archaeologist in Britain. The discoveries of Alicia Spottiswoode, formally known as “Lady John Scott”, were published earlier than MacLagan’s. Both women featured in the Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, but Lady John appeared in 1865 and MacLagan in the early 1870s. Meanwhile, the art historian Dr Madeleine Pelling has recently spoken to the London-based Society of Antiquaries about some female antiquaries of the 1780s, who would now almost certainly be regarded as pioneering archaeologists. It’s always difficult to claim anyone as “the first” or “the earliest”, especially in…

It has been said that Henry VIII changed the heart, mind and face of Britain more than anyone or anything else between the Normar conquest and the industrial revolution. In the year of his accession, a Venetian accurately predicted: “For the future, the whole world will talk of him.” Another Italian declared that Henry “excelled all who ever wore a crown”. One contemporary wrote: “I know not where in all the histories I have read to find one king equal to him.” To his contemporaries, Henry VIII was a great man – a legend in his own lifetime. Today, historians recognise that he left an extraordinary legacy: modern Britain. Launching the English Reformation, Henry broke with the pope and founded the Church of England with himself as its supreme head.…

In 1936, a group of archaeologists working at Maiden Castle, near Dorchester, made a grisly discovery. Scattered near the east gate of this ancient hillfort were at least 52 Iron Age skeletons, some with horrific injuries to the head, back and shoulders. For the excavation director, Mortimer Wheeler, the cause of these terrible injuries was clear. He interpreted the skeletons as part of a war cemetery, bodies lying “in tragic profusion, displaying the marks of battle”. To him, these were the men and women of the Durotriges tribe, who had, in the first century AD, vainly defended their hilltop home against advancing Roman troops. “What happened here was plain to see,” Wheeler was later to write. The Roman infantry, under the covering fire of missiles, had “advanced up the slope,…

“The Georgian era was a time of experimentation and invention” Rhiannon Davies: The subtitle of your book is The Deeds and Misdeeds of 15th-Century Britain. Can we call the actions of the past “misdeeds”? Penelope J Corfield I certainly don’t think, as historians, we should be patting the past on the head and saying, “Oh, this is the good old days”, but neither should we criticise and pronounce: “These are the bad old days.” We should be trying to look at the picture in the round and assess both what people thought at the time, and what we think now, looking back retrospectively. Obviously, we have to allow that some standards change, but at the same time, just as in international law, we can say that some things are beyond…

The Greeks: A Global History by Roderick Beaton Faber, 608 pages, £25 Philip of Macedon – father of Alexander the Great – was famously victorious in the Olympic chariot race of 356 BC. The path to victory was not without its speedbumps, though, among them a disagreement over whether Philip was Greek enough to participate in the games at all. He definitely spoke the language, but only Greek athletes were accepted. The question here is what makes someone part of a community – and the Macedonian/ Greek debate is one that has rumbled on through the centuries. In Roderick Beaton’s magnificent new gallop through well over 3,000 years of history, the “Greeks” of the title are defined as those who speak the Greek language. But, as Philip’s case shows and…

George V: Never a Dull Moment by Jane Ridley Chatto, 576 pages, £30 King George V reigned from 1910 to 1936 – turbulent years that witnessed the First World War, the Russian Revolution, the extension of the suffrage to women, the rise of fascism and the Great Depression. He oversaw the monarchy’s modernisation, its embrace of democracy, its engagement with Labour and its support for imperial reform as the British empire became the Commonwealth. As a wave of other European dynasties collapsed, he engineered the British crown’s survival, helped by his astute and pragmatic wife, Queen Mary. Yet, as Jane Ridley points out in this riveting new book, the previous biographers of George emphasised his pastimes – such as stamp-collecting or shooting a startling number of birds (he shot 11,006…

FICTION The Language of Food by Annabel Abbs (Simon & Schuster, 416 pages, £14.99) Food, glorious food When aspiring poet Eliza Acton was told that her future lay in cookery books, not sonnets, she was at first dismayed. But – despite her lack of culinary skills – she wrote the book her publisher wanted. With the help of her assistant Ann Kirby, their recipes became a Victorian sensation. Told through the voices of both women, Annabel Abbs weaves a compelling tale of friendship, freedom and food. TUDOR Tudor Roses: From Margaret Beaufort to Elizabeth I by Amy Licence (Amberley, 448 pages, £25) Flowers and thorns Rather than focusing on the dynasty’s men, Amy Licence turns her gaze to the ladies of the Tudor era. We meet the women who wielded…

Miles Russell “It’s long been thought that all the tribes of Iron Age Britain vigorously resisted the Roman invasion, with some fighting to the death inside their hillfort enclosures. Archaeology, however, is telling us a very different story.” Miles explores tribal responses to the Roman invasion of Britain on page 50 Penelope J Corfield “The interlinking between the past and present is the thing that fascinates me most: what we can learn from the past, and also how the past influences us. I don’t take the view that we’re in a separate capsule looking back – we’re part of a big, big process.” Penelope discusses her new book about 18th-century Britain on page 76 Francis Young “Folklore is something that unites Great Britain. Variations of the same stories are told…

When did people first seriously consider the possibilities of cloning? The roots of cloning go back to the late 19th century, but a major breakthrough came when scientists “reprogrammed” a frog egg cell with DNA in 1952, producing two identical individuals. A few years later, John Gurdon applied this principle to frog gut cells – work for which he subsequently won a Nobel Prize – but none of these grew into adults, and cloning mammals proved more difficult still. How was Dolly the sheep cloned, and what was the public reaction? In 1996, researchers at the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh replaced the genetic material in a sheep egg cell with DNA from an adult cell. While hundreds of embryos were created, only one survived to term. Born in July, the…

David I was medieval Scotland’s greatest ruler, and is a towering figure in British history. During a reign lasting 29 years, he redrew the political map of these islands and laid the foundations both of the Scottish state that endured for four centuries and of the institutions that still frame Scottish society today. Youngest of the six sons of Malcolm III and St Margaret, David had never been expected to rule. Raised in England at the court of the future Henry I, he trained as a knight and judicial agent of the crown. His reward was a marriage that brought the honour of Huntingdon and claims to Northumbria. Huntingdon gave him lordship over laymen and clerics whose military skills, literacy and administrative experience he brought north when he became king…

Edward (right), born in 1442, was the eldest surviving son of Richard, Duke of York. After his father’s death at the battle of Wakefield in 1460, he became the head of the House of York in the Wars of the Roses – the three-decade fight for the English throne against the House of Lancaster. A brilliant military leader, in 1461 (aged just 18) he won victories at Mortimer’s Cross – after which Henry VI was deposed – and Towton. Edward was crowned king on 28 June 1461 but spent much of the next decade fighting for his throne. Briefly deposed in 1470, the following year he won a decisive victory at Tewkesbury that saw the death of the Lancastrian heir Edward of Westminster and, subsequently, of Henry VI. Edward’s throne…

All other contenders step aside: Elizabeth I has taken the stage. As the younger, forgotten and – in some eyes – illegitimate daughter of Henry VIII, in her early years she had little prospect of ever inheriting the throne. It is one of history’s greatest ironies that her father went to so much trouble (not to mention wedding so many wives) to beget a son – yet it was Elizabeth who became his longest-reigning and most successful heir by a country mile. Elizabeth’s mother was Anne Boleyn, executed at Henry’s orders on trumped-up charges of adultery when Elizabeth was not yet three years old. Anne’s name was still anathema to most of Elizabeth’s subjects when she inherited the throne upon the death of her half-sister, Mary, in 1558. “It is…

BBC at 100 PART 2 “The corporation was expanding so quickly that even the luxurious Broadcasting House was too small from the beginning” On Saturday 26 September 1931, less than a decade after its creation, the BBC began the eight-month-long task of packing its bags and moving from the cramped rabbit warren of Savoy Hill to a gleaming purpose-built headquarters building in Portland Place. When the first programmes were broadcast from this new home the following May, the occasion did not just mark a more comfortable working life for staff – it announced the BBC’s arrival as a grand institution at the heart of the nation. The BBC had described Savoy Hill as the place where it had “spent its childhood and grew up to man’s estate”. Now it had…

23 August 1939 The German and Soviet foreign ministers sign the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, later known as the Nazi-Soviet Pact. This non-aggression agreement gives Hitler and Stalin time to expand their armies ahead of a likely conflict between the two nations. 22 June 1941 Germany and its allies launch Operation Barbarossa, the largest land invasion in history. Some 3.5 million Axis troops, 3,600 tanks and more than a thousand combat aircraft enter the Soviet Union. They shatter the Soviet defences and quickly make huge gains. August 1941 Hitler sends some of his armies south-east in search of much-needed resources. They occupy Ukraine and then move to the Caucasus, hoping to use Soviet oilfields to top up German supplies. Their subsequent redeployment to the Moscow front is interrupted by heavy autumn rains.…

The Ruin of All Witches: Life and Death in the New World by Malcolm Gaskill >Allen Lane, 336 pages, £20 In February 1651, in the little settler town of Springfield, Massachusetts, Jonathan Taylor woke in terror in the middle of the night. “Snakes!” he exclaimed to his perplexed wife. In a dream or vision that had seemed to Jonathan wholly real, snakes slithered towards him as he lay in bed, bit him on the forehead and spoke the word “death”. Jonathan fell into a malaria-like fever and, pretty soon, he joined a crowd of fellow townspeople accusing the brick-maker Hugh Parsons and his troubled wife, Mary, of witchcraft. The Ruin of All Witches is the story of Hugh and Mary’s trial, their lives before being accused, the tragic breakdown of…

Reaktion Books, 336 pages, £15.99 Tucked away in an otherwise unremarkable 1988 Local Government Act, Section 28 became one of the most infamous pieces of legislation of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government. It banned local authorities in England, Scotland and Wales from “intentionally promoting homosexuality” or from schools promoting “homosexuality as a pretended family relationship”. As author and Lancaster University professor Paul Baker sets out in this vivid look at the legislation and its effects, Section 28 represented “the culmination of the moral panic around homosexuality that took place over the 1980s”. He sets this panic into its broader historical context, charting the long-burning cultural and political embers ignited when a London school stocked Jenny Lives with Eric and Martin, the tale of a girl’s life with her father and his…

Eleanor of Aquitaine c1122-1204 “Eleanor ensured that the most important people in Europe dealt with her, a woman, on equal terms – practically unheard of at that time” IN PROFILE Eleanor of Aquitaine was queen of France (1137–52) as Louis VII’s wife, and queen of England (1154–89) as Henry II’s wife. She bore 10 children, among them two future English kings, Richard I and John. After participating in an unsuccessful revolt against her second husband, she was imprisoned for 16 years but lived to the age of about 82. She is buried at Fontevraud Abbey in the Loire Valley, France When did you first hear about Eleanor? On an episode of In Our Time on BBC Radio 4 a few years ago. I’m a medieval history fan so she piqued…

EYE-OPENER Hidden figures Seemingly depicting ghostly figures, perhaps in negative, the image above is in fact evidence of an early sketch by Dutch artist Rembrandt of his famous 1642 work commonly known as The Night Watch – discovered beneath the painting itself. The complex nature of the finished artwork means that experts have long believed that Rembrandt must have created a preparatory drawing on the canvas, but this is the first time the theory has been proven correct. A team of art historians, restorers and technical experts at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam used the latest imaging techniques to scan the painting, which revealed traces of calcium contained within the chalk-rich paint that Rembrandt used to create the sketch. The resulting image features a number of subtle differences from the more…

“Æthelstan’s assemblies are seen as the origin of the English parliament” Who was the greatest British monarch? There’s a nice debate for a winter’s evening! In this issue, 12 historians nominate their choices – and I’m sure you’ll have your own thoughts, too. A few weeks ago, The Rest Is History podcast ran a similar exercise, though specifically about English monarchs – and it yielded a big surprise. Topping the poll, which attracted some 84,000 voters, wasn’t one of the usual suspects – Elizabeth I, Victoria, Edward I, Henry II or William the Conqueror – but... wait for it... Æthelstan. There was talk of a fix, and I have to say that some influential advocates clearly had an axe to grind (indeed, I was dubbed the “Team Æthelstan coach!”). Nonetheless,…

“The film doesn’t engage with one of the main drivers behind the violence” The recent Netflix movie The Harder They Fall – a black western, a rarity in the genre – tells a story featuring real-life characters including Rufus Buck and Cherokee Bill. Westerns almost universally depict cowboys and outlaws as white men, yet historians estimate that about 25 per cent were in fact African-Americans – including some of the most accomplished. Set in an almost entirely black context and starring black actors such as Idris Elba and LaKeith Stanfield, the film doesn’t show the mixed ethnicity of the historical figures behind the main characters – many of whom had mixed African, European and Native American ancestry – nor the multi-“racial” society in which they lived. As such, the film…

Great-grandson of William the Conqueror, the young Henry came to the throne as the founder of a new dynasty from Angers on the Loire. It was named “Plantagenet” after the sprig of broom (plant de genet) worn as a badge by his father, Geoffrey, count of Anjou. After almost two decades of civil war in which England had been partitioned between the supporters of his mother, the Empress Matilda, and the usurper king Stephen of Blois, Henry’s first task was to restore peace. This he did in short order, seizing the castles of his more intransigent barons and demanding a return to the status quo of his grandfather’s day. In the process, English law was rewritten, with centralised royal justice now made accessible to many who had previously been ruled…

As the platinum jubilee of Elizabeth II approaches, it is worth noting that her Stuart predecessor James VI & I enjoyed one of the longest British reigns – as king of Scotland for 58 years from 1567 until his death in 1625. The last 22 of those years were also spent as king of England and Ireland. The impressive length of his royal tenure is a tribute to sheer tenacity. James was crowned as a “cradle king”, aged just 13 months, following the forced deposition of his Catholic mother, Mary, Queen of Scots. His father, Lord Darnley, was murdered before James turned one. The infant king also survived violent civil wars and the rapid turnover of successive regents including his grandfather, the Earl of Lennox, who was assassinated in 1571.…

George V was an unexpected king for unexpected times. A second son, he found himself heir to the throne when his older brother, Eddy, died in 1892. Becoming king in 1910, after the death of his gregarious, high-living and popular father, Edward VII, the inexperienced, poorly educated George faced historic crises on a scale unimaginable to his predecessors. His reign encompassed Britain’s first modern total war, between 1914 and 1918 – a conflict that stoked anti-monarchism across continental Europe. War-weary populations, blaming royal leaders, toppled a string of monarchies, many related to the British. Most famously, in 1917 the war triggered revolution, and communism, in Russia. At home, voting reforms in 1918 and 1928 enfranchised women and large numbers of working-class men. The labour movement became a major political force…

On a July evening in 1930, 10,000 people crowded into London’s Royal Albert Hall, hoping to catch a glimpse of their hero, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and perhaps even hear him speak. Sure enough, the celebrated author turned up right on time. Dressed in an evening suit, the man behind the Sherlock Holmes phenomenon took his seat on stage and began to talk. But there was something very strange about Doyle – he was dead. The event at the Albert Hall was a seance – an attempt to communicate with “the other side”. Doyle, who had died just a few days earlier, was the world’s most famous proponent of spiritualism – a religious movement based on the belief that the living can speak to the dead. In life, the author…

On 11 June 2020, a statue in Bristol was damaged. But while the media debates continued to rage about the toppling of the figure of slave trader Edward Colston during a Black Lives Matter protest the previous week, the defacement of this bronze bust in the St Pauls area attracted little comment. Arguably, though, the man depicted, the groundbreaking playwright and actor Alfred Fagon, is much more relevant to Bristol’s residents today than the controversial merchant who lived three centuries earlier. Born in southern Jamaica in 1937, one of 11 children of an orange-plantation worker, Fagon migrated to Britain in 1955 when his homeland was still a colony of the empire. Initially, the teenager worked for British Rail in Nottingham before a stint in the army – during which he…

Hana Videen on studying Old English “When we study history, we often focus on events and individual people. By looking at history through language you gain a different perspective. If it’s a language you are familiar with, you might even be able to identify more with the people and society behind that text. And looking beyond the source’s narrative can tell you so much more about the daily lives of those who lived at that time.” Tom Morris on a strange 1856 murder in a Dublin railway station “This was a really mysterious case. The victim was found dead in his office, surrounded by piles of gold and silver coins amounting to well over £1,000: a huge sum at the time. Strangely, the door was also locked from the inside.…

@HelenPins Elizabeth: The Forgotten Years by John Guy. It’s about the twilight of a reign, getting behind the myth and propaganda of “Gloriana”. Probably my favourite book on Elizabeth, because it’s all slipping away from her in a time of national crisis. @PamC Crown and Sceptre: A New History of the British Monarchy from William the Conqueror to Elizabeth II by Tracy Borman. @stevie Possibly a bit left Held, but I really liked Queen Anne: The Politics of Passion by Anne Somerset. It’s very interesting to see how the historiography of her has changed. @DrRJWarren I found Antonia Fraser’s Marie Antoinette absolutely compelling when I read it years ago.…

John Murray, 336 pages, £20 The title alone of The Ocean of the Streams of Story, a vast 11th-century compendium of fantastical Indian tales, is enough to kindle the imagination. Structured as a recursive loop of fluid and overlapping tales, the experience of reading The Ocean is, according to Nicholas Jubber, not all that dissimilar to the “interconnecting, narrative promiscuity” and “relentless polyphony” of surfing the world wide web. Though the sheer raw imaginative capacity of such collections may be enough to transfix us, The Fairy Tellers reminds us of a truth hidden in plain sight whenever we approach classic tales of the fantastic: that, while these tales are in one sense timeless and their forms may have changed over the years, they still have named human authors. Jubber’s book…

“Portraits are a powerful way to preserve the strength and humanity of the people at the heart of the history” The programme features seven Holocaust survivors sitting for portrait artists. How did it come about? We were invited to make the documentary to accompany an existing Royal Collections project [the portraits will be displayed at the Queen’s Gallery], and we jumped at the opportunity. These survivor stories are incredibly powerful and important. As someone with an interest in the arts, I found it fascinating to explore the creative responses to this chapter of our history. The testimony of the survivors forms the central narrative of the film. They all have unique stories, but there are common elements in how their lives changed and the experiences they had in the camps…