Innholdsfortegnelse for October 2025 i History Extra

23 OCTOBER 1091 A tornado wreaks devastation on London The medieval storm destroys St Mary-le-Bow church and other landmarks The autumn sky over London darkened rapidly as a towering whirlwind descended without warning from the clouds. What followed was one of the most violent storms recorded in medieval Europe. The tornado ripped through the heart of the city, snapping timber and flinging debris like missiles. London Bridge, then a wooden structure rebuilt by William the Conqueror, was torn apart. More than 600 homes, mostly fragile wooden dwellings, were flattened as if made of straw. On Cheapside, at the centre of the chaos, St Mary-le-Bow church was obliterated and four enormous rafters around 8 metres long were hurled to the ground with such force that only a small fraction remained above…

Complements the BBC One drama King and Conqueror It was a terrible start to an extraordinary year. 1066 was barely five days old when Edward the Confessor, king of the English, succumbed to a short illness and breathed his last. Just a week earlier, crowds had gathered to witness the consecration of Westminster Abbey, Edward's personal passion project – and his final resting place. Now the people of England braced themselves for an uncertain future. Edward's 23 years on the throne had not been easy. He had restored the English royal line after a period of Danish rule under Cnut the Great and his sons. A political pragmatist, he weathered squabbles among the nobles. He was, chroniclers agreed, a good and righteous Christian. Yet Edward had one huge frailty: he…

Richmond Palace, 22 March 1603. Elizabeth I – the self-proclaimed Virgin Queen who had ruled England for 44 years, seeing off the Armada, healing religious divisions and creating a court so magnificent it was the envy of Europe – lay dying. Her anxious advisers clustered around her bedside, urging her to do the thing she had resisted throughout her long reign: name her successor. Rousing herself from her stupor, the 69-year-old queen declared: “I will that a king succeed me, and what king, but my nearest kinsman, the king of Scots?” Wanting to make completely sure, her chief minister, Robert Cecil, asked whether that was her “absolute resolution” – to which she irritably retorted: “I pray you trouble me no more, I'll have none but him.” That “kinsman” was James…

POLITICAL “Do the Americas, North and South, share a common history?” Gilbert M Joseph lauds a masterful new analysis of the intertwined stories of the western continents page 77 CULTURAL “The author challenges the misconception that in ‘the past' it was rare to live to old age” Pat Thane enjoys a book exploring attitudes to old age through history page 74 ROMAN “The world of the gladiator inspires us to explore ideas of freedom and slavery, sex, honour and death” Guy de la Bédoyère is impressed by a novel look at the Roman arena page 72 RELIGION “Local spiritual needs were met by fusing religious beliefs and practices to create new faiths” Emma Wilby is fascinated by an examination of Europe's last pagan peoples page 76 INTERVIEW Victoria Bateman on women's vital but unsung roles in economies throughout…

DIARY By Jonathan Wright and Danny Bird HISTORY COOKBOOK Soul cakes CITIES Kingston, Jamaica EXHIBITION Fashion queen Step into a world of opulence and scandal at the UK's first exhibition dedicated to history's most fashionable queen, Marie Antoinette. From her own silk slippers and final handwritten note, to the ill-fated royal's influence on dazzling couture by Dior, Chanel and Westwood, discover more than 250 exquisite objects – many never seen outside France before. Costumes from Sofia Coppola's 2006 movie, Marie Antoinette, immersive scent experiences and fantastical reinterpretations of the queen's style bring this iconic figure to life. Marie Antoinette Style V&A, South Kensington, London / 20 September 2025–22 March 2026 / vam.ac.uk What's on this week? Visit historyextra.com for updates on upcoming history TV and radio programmes TV Back on…

Stronghold Crusader: Definitive Edition FireFly Studios / £16.99 Originally released in 2002, Stronghold Crusader was a spin-offfrom the medieval castle-builder Stronghold, shifting the action from England to the sun-scorched Levant. Two decades on, a new version of the game has made its debut. Stronghold Crusader: Definitive Edition returns players to the desert fortresses that dotted the fragile, bloodied boundaries between Christendom and the Islamic world. The historical setting spans the late 11th to late 12th centuries: a period bookmarked by the First and Third Crusades. The game evokes this fractious world by handing players control in different campaigns, including the climactic siege of Jerusalem. It's a respectful remaster of the 2002 version, a clean, well-presented return to a title that has long held cult status among real-time strategy fans. The…

Matt Elton How do the kinds of records created now and in the recent past differ from those left in previous centuries? Jane Winters Records and sources now come in a whole range of formats. In some cases, they are very familiar analogue sources that have become digital, whereas in others they are in a completely new format. Newspapers offer a great example of how this has changed: we used to read them only in physical form. Then those physical newspapers were digitised, keeping essentially the same structure. We now have both physical and digital newspapers, which differ in both form and content. An issue of The Guardian published in print today will not contain the same information as the online version: there will also be multimedia material and lots…

Early on 8 November 1942, Adolf Hitler's special train was en route from Berlin to Munich when it was stopped at a small station in the Thuringian Forest to receive an urgent message from the Foreign Office. A day earlier, Hitler's HQ staff had received a “very disturbing signal” from German agents in Gibraltar, informing them that a large Allied troop convoy had passed heading in an easterly direction. Most on the train assumed the convoy was bound for Libya, a colony of Germany's ally Italy since 1912. But its true destination was revealed by the Foreign Office communiqué: “A US expeditionary corps is disembarking in Algiers and Oran,” ports in French-controlled Algeria. Hitler was aghast. Aware that French North Africa (Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco, controlled by the collaborationist Vichy…

Did Victorians really eat ancient Egyptian mummies? In short, yes: the Victorians did indeed think eating mummified remains pilfered from ancient Egyptian tombs was a good idea, although they did not come up with the idea themselves. The morbid practice had begun much earlier, in the Middle Ages. At the time of the crusades, Europeans travelled to the Holy Land in large numbers and started hearing about mūmiyā, a tar-like substance known in Persia for its healing qualities. Through misunderstandings and poor translations, the belief spread that mūmiyā referred to a substance found on mummified bodies and this evolved to mean the actual bodies themselves. Ground-up mummies, or mummia, therefore became a medicine in medieval Europe: if swallowed or rubbed on the skin, mummia was thought to cure a host…

Halloween trick-or-treating is seemingly an excuse for kids to consume far too many sweets. But this modern tradition has a more virtuous – and tastier! – origin: soul cakes. The word ‘Halloween’ is a truncated version of ‘All Hallows’ Eve', the day before All Hallows' Day (or All Saints' Day), which falls on 1 November. In medieval Catholicism, the period around this and All Soul's Day on 2 November was a time to remember the dead. In parts of England, biscuits or cakes, often marked with a cross, were doled out to help souls pass through Purgatory, an intermediate state between Earth and Heaven. In 17th-century Shropshire, for example, visitors called round neighbouring houses and were offered a soul cake to the rhyme, ‘A soule-cake, a soule-cake/Have mercy on all…

1 National Gallery of Jamaica Art and soul The oldest and largest public art museum in the English-speaking Caribbean, established in 1974, features both historical and contemporary art – paintings, portraits, wooden creations and more. It originally focused largely on Jamaican artists, but now also showcases those in other parts of the Caribbean and among the Caribbean diaspora. The flagship exhibition is the Kingston Biennial, shaped by a high-profile guest curator, but there are also permanent collections highlighting key artists and periods in Jamaican cultural history. The AD Scott Collection, for instance, traces the evolution of the country's art in the years before and following independence in 1962. Particularly fascinating for those interested in Jamaica's history is the Pre-20th Century Collection. This features artefacts dating back to the 11th century…

Trudy Sellick rose before dawn on 12 March 1970. An audio typist, she was keen to complete a most important task before starting work. So by 7am she was waiting for the doors to open at her local polling station for the by-election in Bridgwater, Somerset. That moment is notable not just for her dedication to democracy, but because it was her 18th birthday that morning – and she became the first British teenager to cast a vote in a parliamentary election. “I wanted to be the first 18-year-old in the country to vote,” she said, “and got up early to make sure.” The teenage vote is again making headlines. Keir Starmer's Labour government is moving to lower the voting age to 16 before the next general election, in a…

LETTER OF THE MONTH Historical horsepower Your interesting feature about the role of medieval warhorses in shaping British history (August) reminded me of a subsequent occasion in which horsepower became a critical factor. In April 1660, with the collapse of republican rule, Roundhead general John Lambert escaped from the Tower of London and called an Easter Sunday rendezvous at the civil war battlefield of Edgehill in a last-ditch attempt to mobilise supporters and stop Charles II taking power. Only a few New Model Army regiments heeded the call before Lambert, a former key adviser to Oliver Cromwell who had once been tipped to succeed him as lord protector, was intercepted by government troops. Lambert galloped away, but was recaptured when his warhorse got stuck in a ploughed field. The charger…

8–10 November 1942 The Allies unleash Operation Torch. Three task forces land in Vichy-controlled French North Africa and, after a fierce but brief struggle, capture the ports of Casablanca in Morocco, and Oran and Algiers in Algeria 15 November–6 December 1942 Led by Lieutenant General Kenneth Anderson, the British First Army narrowly fails in its attempt to reach and capture Tunis, the Tunisian capital, before enough Axis troops are in place to stop it 22–25 December 1942 A brutal see-saw contest for Longstop Hill, a strategically vital area of high ground en route to Tunis, ends with German troops in possession 14–24 January 1943 American and British leaders meet at the Casablanca Conference (above) in French Morocco. Winston Churchill persuades President Franklin D Roosevelt to delay the cross-Channel invasion until…

Carthage burned for six days. After three long years of siege, in the spring of 146 BC Roman soldiers finally broke through the city's defences and began to slaughter the population. But still the Carthaginians resisted. Street by street, they threw themselves at their enemy. Rome's relentless military machine moved from the city's ports, across the temple-filled marketplace and up the streets that lined the central hill. There they were assailed by projectiles hurled down from roofs by women, children and old men. Yet the Romans' fierce assault on that already ancient city on the north African coast could not be stopped. They went from house to house, ascending to roofs, rooting out Carthaginians from their hiding places. Houses burned and bodies lined the streets while a unit of ‘sweeper’…

There were 13 men: unlucky for someone. They were dressed to kill – but so was everyone else. In what was essentially an army camp, crammed with armed men, the assailants blended right in. Moving casually but intently through the bustling camp outside Aleppo in Syria, past stalls and shopkeepers, beggars and soldiers, they headed towards their target. Suddenly their progress was checked by a shout from behind: “What are you doing here?” Cover blown, their response was shocking: an explosion of violence, weapons flashing, blood splashing. The team of Assassins erupted into the tent where their victim sat unawares, surrounded by generals, lackeys and bodyguards. The attackers' daggers and swords struck once more. The target that day in January 1175 was a Kurdish general, Salah al-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub…

The most intriguing aspect of this book is that it's written as a sort of ‘life in the day' of the Colosseum, that vast edifice begun in Rome by the emperor Vespasian (AD 69–79) to entertain the masses. It's an engaging way to tackle this most emotive, disgusting and enthralling side of Roman life, and takes account of the evidence that is scattered across space and time “to build a composite picture of a typical night and day at the gladiatorial games”. As one dives further into the book, though, it transpires that this is really a much broader survey – and a very successful one, at that – not just of gladiators but of the wider Roman world. The Colosseum was home to all sorts of public spectacles, but…

What is America? And who is an American? These questions lie at the heart of Greg Grandin's provocative new book, which also wrestles with a broader question: do the Americas, North and South, share a common history? Grandin undertakes a comparative exploration of “the New World's long history of ideological and ethical contestation”, looking as far back as the Spanish conquest and the Puritan settlement, and as far forward as globalisation's muddled present. His mode of analysis is steeped in what philosophers refer to as “immanent critique… a form of dissent in which challengers don't dismiss the legitimacy of their rivals' worldview but rather accuse them of not living up to their own stated ideals”. He sees it as a particularly useful method for considering the dynamic, interactive relationship between…

Across 1 Legal term, dating to the 1500s, for eg a deed held temporarily by a third party (6) 4 Another name for the Maze Prison, County Down, housing paramilitary prisoners from the early 1970s (4,4) 10 Scottish sea basin, principal naval base in the two world wars (5,4) 11 African republic gaining independence in 1960 with Hamani Diori as its president (5) 12 Scottish valley, scene of an infamous massacre in 1692 (7) 14 Army officer whose three-decade rule in Indonesia began in 1967 (7) 15 Member of one of the largest ethnic groups in the Middle East, which has never obtained a permanent nation state (4) 16 Member of one of a series of Christian military expeditions against Muslim powers (8) 20 Madeleine ____, US's first female secretary of state, who pushed for Nato military intervention…