If you follow us on Twitter, then you will be well aware of our obsession with castles (we even coined #CastleOfTheWeek). Standing as shining symbols of strength, wealth and status; castles were the strongholds that once held the powers of the realm. Built as both fortresses and residences alike, they stood as beacons of authority and were the centre of…
Author: HistoricalHoney
Can You Cancan?
Ooh la-la! Long skirts, frilly petticoats, stockings, feathers, whooping and high kicking ladies in a line. This is the saucy and sassy image we conjure up when visualising a performance of the cancan. The outfits hark back to Parisian fashions of the 1890s, but the dance has rather inauspicious origins some 60 years earlier. It…
How hindsight could have saved the people of Pompeii
When Vesuvius erupted on the morning of 24 August, AD 79, the local population was utterly unprepared. Frustratingly evidence today suggest that all the tell-tale signs were there to warn them if only they had known what to look for. But as we all know, you can’t change the past with hindsight… So let’s take a look back at those…
The Reluctant Bride by Beverley Eikli
A young woman has her head turned by a dashing soldier, who turns out to be a ne’er-do-well, and then slowly falls in love with a man who seems cold and aloof on first meeting, but who has a heart of gold. So good, so Pride and Prejudice. But the superficial similarity with Jane Austen’s…
It’s Archaeology… In YOUR hands!
Polly Heffer, archaeology graduate and DigVentures intern, describes why crowd-funding is a new and exciting future for archaeology – and how DigVentures is leading the way… A new way to fund archaeology is here. Crowd-funding is a way to put power in the hands of the public: you choose who and what you want to invest your time and…
Underworld London by Catharine Arnold
The striking image of William Fitzosbert’s limp, dead body hanging from the Tyburn Tree outside London is the opening scene in the latest of Catherine Arnolds books based within the capital. The author, whose previous London studies have considered the sin, madness and death that have filled the cities streets, is now considering perhaps the…
‘Titanic II’: A man overboard?
In the wise words of The Beautiful South: “You don’t back a horse called Striding Snail, you don’t name your boat Titanic II.” Recently in the news it was revealed that billionaire Clive Palmer has plans to launch a “Titanic II” in 2016, which will sail the same, intended route of the fateful Titanic I. Now, if I…
Elizabeth Woodville – The White Queen
Forget Anne Boleyn – when it comes to one Queen to cause the most controversy, face accusations of witchcraft and have more enemies than you can shake a stick at then look no further than good old Henry VIII’s maternal grandmother – Elizabeth Woodville. Source: en.wikipedia.org Now, Elizabeth’s rags-to-riches story is something straight out of…
Tweets from beyond the grave
This is a story about how one historian’s research has brought a 16-year-old girl’s diary back to life…exactly one hundred years to the day since it was first written. Twitter might fulfil many functions, but bringing people back to life isn’t usually one of them. And yet, in the case of Olive Higgins, a 16-year-old girl…
The Queens Man By Rory Clements
In Elizabethan England, where a person’s religious faith could cost them their lives, a suspected plot to overthrow the Queen and replace her with the Catholic Mary Queen of Scots overshadows everything. John Shakespeare, our protagonist, is sent on Queens’s duty to discover the source of this plot. His mission leads him to his home…