MaryAnn Bernal's Blog, page 83
September 10, 2016
Everything you know about 17th-century London is wrong
History Extra
Guy Fawkes and the Gunpowder Plotters, 1605. Contrary to popular belief, Guy Fawkes was not executed for masterminding the Gunpowder Plot. (Photo by Print Collector/Getty Images)
In a city as historically dense as London, facts and faces can get jumbled as readily as oats in a box of muesli. Take the statue of Lady Justice on top of the Old Bailey [the Central Criminal Court of England and Wales], for example: many believe that she is blindfolded; she is not. Tourists look for the Union Flag above Buckingham Palace as a sign that the queen is at home; in fact it means she’s away. Even cast-iron ‘truths’ can turn out to be distortions: while the Tower of London did indeed see famous beheadings in the Tudor period, more than half of all executions in the fortress were conducted in the 20th century.
Of all eras, the 17th century seems to have generated more mistruths than most. This was a period that saw the beginnings of the press (newspapers), the first stirrings of scientific discourse and the city’s great chroniclers such as Pepys, Evelyn and, latterly, Defoe. It was also a time of tumultuous events, with plague, war, fire and political upheaval striking the nation as rarely before. Many of us carry around a working knowledge of these heady days, but how much of it is accurate? Here are four myths busted…
Guy Fawkes was not executed for masterminding the Gunpowder PlotThe century began with a bang. Almost. Guy Fawkes and co-conspirators famously plotted to blow up the Houses of Parliament, and the king with them. But it didn’t quite happen as many of us believe...
Every year, thousands of people make life-size effigies of the Catholic Yorkshireman, then set him on fire for the delight of their children. This is the man who plotted not just to bring down the system, but to blow up the king and his government too. In 1605, his actions were branded as treachery and treason. Today, we would call him a terrorist. But does Fawkes truly deserve the animosity of centuries?
His story is well known to every British school child. Guy Fawkes, real name Guido Fawkes, was angry at the state for its anti-Catholic prejudice. He brought together a team of conspirators intent on killing King James and his cronies during the State Opening of Parliament. Under the cover of night they broke into the House of Lords and loaded the cellar with barrels of gunpowder. The plot was, however, discovered on the eve of success, thanks to an anonymous tip-off. Fawkes was arrested, tortured and eventually gave the names of his auxiliaries. All were eventually captured and executed.
But this story is wrong in almost every respect.
Fawkes was not the ringleader. He was merely the first to be captured when the guards caught him red-handed and alone in the gunpowder cellar. The true mastermind was Robert Catesby. He led the team of 13 conspirators – Fawkes had no special place in the hierarchy, but was chosen to light the fuse at the assassination attempt. Nor was he born as Guido. That was a nickname he adopted while fighting for the Catholic Spanish in the Eighty Years’ War. Plain old Guy was his birth name.
And contrary to popular belief, the conspirators did not break into the Houses of Parliament. In fact, they took a lease out on the undercroft and had lawful access to the space. The gunpowder stash was built up over a number of months before the plague-delayed opening of Parliament on 5 November.
Fawkes did indeed receive the death penalty for High Treason, and was dragged to the gallows in Old Palace Yard to be hanged, drawn and quartered. This terrifying procedure would first see the condemned man dangle by the neck until barely conscious. After being cut down, his genitals would be sliced off and his belly opened. His entrails would then be scooped out and burnt with his testicles. Finally, the fading man would be chopped into parts, which would, in gory sequel, be displayed in public locations as a warning to others.
It didn’t quite happen like that, though. Before the executioner could begin the gruesome act, Fawkes leapt from the gallows, breaking his neck and sparing himself the excruciating fate the law had set out for him. In short, he was not executed, but took his own life.
Other conspirators also escaped the chop. Ringleader Robert Catesby and several others were killed in a gunfight with authorities in Staffordshire, while another plotter died from illness at the Tower of London before he could stand trial.
The Great Fire of London was not the greatest of all London’s firesSeptember 1666, and it seemed to Londoners that the whole world was aflame. Samuel Pepys described the scene:
“We stayed till, it being darkish, we saw the fire as only one entire arch of fire from this to the other side the bridge, and in a bow up the hill for an arch of above a mile long: it made me weep to see it. The churches, houses, and all on fire and flaming at once; and a horrid noise the flames made, and the cracking of houses at their ruin.”
The Great Fire of London, as it came to be known, certainly devastated the City of London. An estimated 80,000 people lived there; 70,000 became homeless. Almost all the City of London’s churches were destroyed, including the medieval St Paul’s Cathedral. To those who bore witness, it must have felt like the greatest calamity in the city’s history.
In many ways, however, the Great Fire was just another of many such tragedies, because London has fallen to conflagration on numerous occasions. The earliest came at the hands of Boudica in around 60 AD, less than 20 years after the founding of the Roman town. Suetonius, the Governor of Britain, had to decide where to make his stand against Boudica’s rebellion. London was not ideal as a battleground and he pulled all troops out of the town. The city was defenceless, and the Queen of the Iceni was merciless. If Roman accounts are to be believed, she slaughtered thousands of inhabitants and set the town ablaze. If you dig deep enough, anywhere in the City of London you can still find a thick destruction layer of ash and red debris from this conflagration.
Other fires followed. Archaeology suggests another great Roman fire around 125 AD, in which all but the most sturdy buildings were consumed. We do not know the death toll. 1087, the year that William the Conqueror died, also saw a mighty blaze comparable to the Great Fire. It, too, destroyed St Paul’s Cathedral, wrecking “other churches and the largest and fairest part of the whole city”. The calamity was repeated just two generations later in the great fire of 1135. In fact, fires were such a common occurrence that the medieval city must have remained as pockmarked as its disease-ravaged denizens.
Samuel Pepys. Colourised version of the painting by John Hayls. (Photo by Culture Club/Getty Images)
The most tragic blaze occurred in 1212. It started in Southwark, taking hold of St Mary Overie (what today we call Southwark Cathedral). Londoners rushed from the city onto the newly built London Bridge to lend assistance, and to gawp. Alas, the wind was up. Sparks from the fire arced across the Thames to the northern end of the bridge, where they took hold. Trapped between the two fires, the horrified onlookers succumbed to smoke inhalation, or jumped to their ends in the treacherous Thames. Later accounts put the subsequent death toll as high as 3,000. Although likely to be an exaggeration, there is no doubt that this incident ranks as one of London’s worst disasters. By comparison, the Great Fire of 1666 is thought to have claimed just six lives, according to official records (but amid such confusion, and with the limitations of 17th century communication, it would be impossible to accurately account for everybody. Many more people surely lost their lives in the crowded tenements of the City of London).
The early fires of London are mostly obscure today. We remember the 1666 conflagration partly because it was so well recorded by Pepys and others, but also because it served as the fountainhead for so much of the modern city. The cathedral and churches of Sir Christopher Wren soon arose like gleaming white phoenixes. Brick and stone replaced wood and straw as the chief building materials. The fire also accelerated the growth of what would become the West End. The fields of Covent Garden and Holborn had already disappeared beneath a tide of development. The fire served as a fillip for more house building around the periphery of the City of London. In the years immediately following the fire, districts such as Soho and Bloomsbury began to spread out as wealthy merchants and nobles sought new housing away from the ancient centre. Like a rose bush pruned, London must be disfigured before it can grow.
The Great Fire of London did not wipe out the Great PlagueWhich brings us on to one of the great canards in London’s history. Did the 1666 fire really put an end to the Great Plague? It’s a claim that’s tempted educators for centuries. The timing looks perfect: everybody falls ill in 1665, then a vast, cleansing fire wipes out the disease in 1666. A neat and tidy ‘just-so’ story, but correlation does not always imply causation.
For starters, the plague had eased considerably by September 1666, the month of the fire. Already by February that year the Royal Court and entourage had moved back to the capital. In March, the Lord Chancellor deemed London as crowded as it had ever been seen. When the Great Fire swept through London half a year later, it struck a city that was already well on the road to recovery. It should also be remembered that the fire only damaged the City proper. The suburbs, including plague-intensive regions such as St Giles, were completely untouched by the blaze. The fire had no direct effect on the disease in these quarters.
While the Great Fire did not wipe out the plague, it did help bring about conditions that would be less favourable to further outbreaks. The city was rebuilt to better standards, and (slightly) more sanitary conditions prevailed. These improvements were no doubt a contributory factor in keeping plague at bay in the centuries since.
'The Pestilence 1665’. Illustration of figures burying bodies in the aftermath of the plague. (Photo by Guildhall Library & Art Gallery/Heritage Images/Getty Images)
A few other myths persist about the Great Plague of 1665–66. It was by no means the only disease to ravage England, nor the worst. The so-called Black Death of 1348–1350 wiped out a much higher percentage of the population – perhaps a third of England. By contrast, the 1665 plague was largely centred on London. It killed 15 per cent of those in the capital, and therefore an even smaller percentage across the country as a whole.
Earlier 17th century epidemics, notably in 1603 and 1625, were not quite so virulent as the Great Plague of 1665, but they weren’t far off. The 1665 epidemic gets more attention for several reasons. It was the last big outbreak of plague in this country. Many contemporary accounts survive, unlike earlier medieval plagues. And it just so happened to occur at a time when plenty of other major events were taking place. That the plague struck London not long after the restoration of the monarchy and just before the Great Fire of 1666 helps secure its place in our historical memory.
Plague doctors did not go about their business in beaked masksFinally, we can also pooh-pooh one of the most terrifying icons of the plague: the beaked helmet. Visual depictions of the disease often show sinister figures roaming the streets in these eccentric headpieces. They served as a kind of primitive gas mask for plague doctors. The beak-like appendage would be stuffed with lavender and other sweet smelling aromatics in a bid to ward off the foul odours often blamed for the plague. Accentuating the macabre look, the doctors would also sport a broad-brimmed hat and ankle-length overcoat. A wooden cane completed the costume, and allowed physicians to examine patients without the need for personal contact.
A plague doctor in protective clothing, c1656. Engraving by Paul Furst after J Colombina. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
While this protective gear is well documented on the continent, particularly in Italy, there is no good evidence that the costume was ever worn in London. It can’t be entirely ruled out, but one would have thought that such a distinctive ensemble would have made it onto the pages of Pepys’s diary, or some other first-hand account of the plague.
Matt Brown is the author of Everything You Know About London Is Wrong (Batsford, 2016).
Guy Fawkes and the Gunpowder Plotters, 1605. Contrary to popular belief, Guy Fawkes was not executed for masterminding the Gunpowder Plot. (Photo by Print Collector/Getty Images) In a city as historically dense as London, facts and faces can get jumbled as readily as oats in a box of muesli. Take the statue of Lady Justice on top of the Old Bailey [the Central Criminal Court of England and Wales], for example: many believe that she is blindfolded; she is not. Tourists look for the Union Flag above Buckingham Palace as a sign that the queen is at home; in fact it means she’s away. Even cast-iron ‘truths’ can turn out to be distortions: while the Tower of London did indeed see famous beheadings in the Tudor period, more than half of all executions in the fortress were conducted in the 20th century.
Of all eras, the 17th century seems to have generated more mistruths than most. This was a period that saw the beginnings of the press (newspapers), the first stirrings of scientific discourse and the city’s great chroniclers such as Pepys, Evelyn and, latterly, Defoe. It was also a time of tumultuous events, with plague, war, fire and political upheaval striking the nation as rarely before. Many of us carry around a working knowledge of these heady days, but how much of it is accurate? Here are four myths busted…
Guy Fawkes was not executed for masterminding the Gunpowder PlotThe century began with a bang. Almost. Guy Fawkes and co-conspirators famously plotted to blow up the Houses of Parliament, and the king with them. But it didn’t quite happen as many of us believe...
Every year, thousands of people make life-size effigies of the Catholic Yorkshireman, then set him on fire for the delight of their children. This is the man who plotted not just to bring down the system, but to blow up the king and his government too. In 1605, his actions were branded as treachery and treason. Today, we would call him a terrorist. But does Fawkes truly deserve the animosity of centuries?
His story is well known to every British school child. Guy Fawkes, real name Guido Fawkes, was angry at the state for its anti-Catholic prejudice. He brought together a team of conspirators intent on killing King James and his cronies during the State Opening of Parliament. Under the cover of night they broke into the House of Lords and loaded the cellar with barrels of gunpowder. The plot was, however, discovered on the eve of success, thanks to an anonymous tip-off. Fawkes was arrested, tortured and eventually gave the names of his auxiliaries. All were eventually captured and executed.
But this story is wrong in almost every respect.
Fawkes was not the ringleader. He was merely the first to be captured when the guards caught him red-handed and alone in the gunpowder cellar. The true mastermind was Robert Catesby. He led the team of 13 conspirators – Fawkes had no special place in the hierarchy, but was chosen to light the fuse at the assassination attempt. Nor was he born as Guido. That was a nickname he adopted while fighting for the Catholic Spanish in the Eighty Years’ War. Plain old Guy was his birth name.
And contrary to popular belief, the conspirators did not break into the Houses of Parliament. In fact, they took a lease out on the undercroft and had lawful access to the space. The gunpowder stash was built up over a number of months before the plague-delayed opening of Parliament on 5 November.
Fawkes did indeed receive the death penalty for High Treason, and was dragged to the gallows in Old Palace Yard to be hanged, drawn and quartered. This terrifying procedure would first see the condemned man dangle by the neck until barely conscious. After being cut down, his genitals would be sliced off and his belly opened. His entrails would then be scooped out and burnt with his testicles. Finally, the fading man would be chopped into parts, which would, in gory sequel, be displayed in public locations as a warning to others.
It didn’t quite happen like that, though. Before the executioner could begin the gruesome act, Fawkes leapt from the gallows, breaking his neck and sparing himself the excruciating fate the law had set out for him. In short, he was not executed, but took his own life.
Other conspirators also escaped the chop. Ringleader Robert Catesby and several others were killed in a gunfight with authorities in Staffordshire, while another plotter died from illness at the Tower of London before he could stand trial.
The Great Fire of London was not the greatest of all London’s firesSeptember 1666, and it seemed to Londoners that the whole world was aflame. Samuel Pepys described the scene:
“We stayed till, it being darkish, we saw the fire as only one entire arch of fire from this to the other side the bridge, and in a bow up the hill for an arch of above a mile long: it made me weep to see it. The churches, houses, and all on fire and flaming at once; and a horrid noise the flames made, and the cracking of houses at their ruin.”
The Great Fire of London, as it came to be known, certainly devastated the City of London. An estimated 80,000 people lived there; 70,000 became homeless. Almost all the City of London’s churches were destroyed, including the medieval St Paul’s Cathedral. To those who bore witness, it must have felt like the greatest calamity in the city’s history.
In many ways, however, the Great Fire was just another of many such tragedies, because London has fallen to conflagration on numerous occasions. The earliest came at the hands of Boudica in around 60 AD, less than 20 years after the founding of the Roman town. Suetonius, the Governor of Britain, had to decide where to make his stand against Boudica’s rebellion. London was not ideal as a battleground and he pulled all troops out of the town. The city was defenceless, and the Queen of the Iceni was merciless. If Roman accounts are to be believed, she slaughtered thousands of inhabitants and set the town ablaze. If you dig deep enough, anywhere in the City of London you can still find a thick destruction layer of ash and red debris from this conflagration.
Other fires followed. Archaeology suggests another great Roman fire around 125 AD, in which all but the most sturdy buildings were consumed. We do not know the death toll. 1087, the year that William the Conqueror died, also saw a mighty blaze comparable to the Great Fire. It, too, destroyed St Paul’s Cathedral, wrecking “other churches and the largest and fairest part of the whole city”. The calamity was repeated just two generations later in the great fire of 1135. In fact, fires were such a common occurrence that the medieval city must have remained as pockmarked as its disease-ravaged denizens.
Samuel Pepys. Colourised version of the painting by John Hayls. (Photo by Culture Club/Getty Images)
The most tragic blaze occurred in 1212. It started in Southwark, taking hold of St Mary Overie (what today we call Southwark Cathedral). Londoners rushed from the city onto the newly built London Bridge to lend assistance, and to gawp. Alas, the wind was up. Sparks from the fire arced across the Thames to the northern end of the bridge, where they took hold. Trapped between the two fires, the horrified onlookers succumbed to smoke inhalation, or jumped to their ends in the treacherous Thames. Later accounts put the subsequent death toll as high as 3,000. Although likely to be an exaggeration, there is no doubt that this incident ranks as one of London’s worst disasters. By comparison, the Great Fire of 1666 is thought to have claimed just six lives, according to official records (but amid such confusion, and with the limitations of 17th century communication, it would be impossible to accurately account for everybody. Many more people surely lost their lives in the crowded tenements of the City of London).
The early fires of London are mostly obscure today. We remember the 1666 conflagration partly because it was so well recorded by Pepys and others, but also because it served as the fountainhead for so much of the modern city. The cathedral and churches of Sir Christopher Wren soon arose like gleaming white phoenixes. Brick and stone replaced wood and straw as the chief building materials. The fire also accelerated the growth of what would become the West End. The fields of Covent Garden and Holborn had already disappeared beneath a tide of development. The fire served as a fillip for more house building around the periphery of the City of London. In the years immediately following the fire, districts such as Soho and Bloomsbury began to spread out as wealthy merchants and nobles sought new housing away from the ancient centre. Like a rose bush pruned, London must be disfigured before it can grow.
The Great Fire of London did not wipe out the Great PlagueWhich brings us on to one of the great canards in London’s history. Did the 1666 fire really put an end to the Great Plague? It’s a claim that’s tempted educators for centuries. The timing looks perfect: everybody falls ill in 1665, then a vast, cleansing fire wipes out the disease in 1666. A neat and tidy ‘just-so’ story, but correlation does not always imply causation.
For starters, the plague had eased considerably by September 1666, the month of the fire. Already by February that year the Royal Court and entourage had moved back to the capital. In March, the Lord Chancellor deemed London as crowded as it had ever been seen. When the Great Fire swept through London half a year later, it struck a city that was already well on the road to recovery. It should also be remembered that the fire only damaged the City proper. The suburbs, including plague-intensive regions such as St Giles, were completely untouched by the blaze. The fire had no direct effect on the disease in these quarters.
While the Great Fire did not wipe out the plague, it did help bring about conditions that would be less favourable to further outbreaks. The city was rebuilt to better standards, and (slightly) more sanitary conditions prevailed. These improvements were no doubt a contributory factor in keeping plague at bay in the centuries since.
'The Pestilence 1665’. Illustration of figures burying bodies in the aftermath of the plague. (Photo by Guildhall Library & Art Gallery/Heritage Images/Getty Images)
A few other myths persist about the Great Plague of 1665–66. It was by no means the only disease to ravage England, nor the worst. The so-called Black Death of 1348–1350 wiped out a much higher percentage of the population – perhaps a third of England. By contrast, the 1665 plague was largely centred on London. It killed 15 per cent of those in the capital, and therefore an even smaller percentage across the country as a whole.
Earlier 17th century epidemics, notably in 1603 and 1625, were not quite so virulent as the Great Plague of 1665, but they weren’t far off. The 1665 epidemic gets more attention for several reasons. It was the last big outbreak of plague in this country. Many contemporary accounts survive, unlike earlier medieval plagues. And it just so happened to occur at a time when plenty of other major events were taking place. That the plague struck London not long after the restoration of the monarchy and just before the Great Fire of 1666 helps secure its place in our historical memory.
Plague doctors did not go about their business in beaked masksFinally, we can also pooh-pooh one of the most terrifying icons of the plague: the beaked helmet. Visual depictions of the disease often show sinister figures roaming the streets in these eccentric headpieces. They served as a kind of primitive gas mask for plague doctors. The beak-like appendage would be stuffed with lavender and other sweet smelling aromatics in a bid to ward off the foul odours often blamed for the plague. Accentuating the macabre look, the doctors would also sport a broad-brimmed hat and ankle-length overcoat. A wooden cane completed the costume, and allowed physicians to examine patients without the need for personal contact.
A plague doctor in protective clothing, c1656. Engraving by Paul Furst after J Colombina. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
While this protective gear is well documented on the continent, particularly in Italy, there is no good evidence that the costume was ever worn in London. It can’t be entirely ruled out, but one would have thought that such a distinctive ensemble would have made it onto the pages of Pepys’s diary, or some other first-hand account of the plague.
Matt Brown is the author of Everything You Know About London Is Wrong (Batsford, 2016).
September 9, 2016
Big Ben blown up: the radio sketch that sent Britain into panic
History Extra
In 1926 a short, and seemingly innocuous, radio sketch sparked panic in Britain. (Getty Images)
The politics of fear has become central to statecraft, and the modern world is badly scared. In the past, as well, full-blown panic seems to have flared up with almost ludicrous ease. On the wintry evening of 16 January 1926, for instance, many people in Britain panicked after listening to a short, and seemingly innocuous, radio sketch.
Its author was 38-year-old Father Ronald Arbuthnott Knox, a convivial priest with a taste for New Testament commentary, Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, and detective stories. Father Ronald Knox’s play, Broadcasting from the Barricades was transmitted at 7.40pm on Saturday evening, 16 January, from the George Street Studios of the BBC in Edinburgh. After being prefaced by a statement informing listeners that it was a work of humour, the play took the form of a news broadcast, interrupted by music from the Savoy Hotel, in which Father Knox described an unemployed crowd that went wild.
The newsreader announced that the unemployed, stirred to action by troublemakers such as Mr Popplebury, the Secretary of the National Movement for Abolishing Theatre Queues, had rioted. The red tide of revolution had swept over the great landmarks of London: Trafalgar Square had been overrun; the National Gallery sacked; and Big Ben had been reduced to a heap of rubble by mortar attack. Henceforth, Greenwich time would be tolled by the repeating watch of Uncle Leslie, a popular children’s storyteller from Edinburgh.
There was murder, too. The newsreader reported that Sir Theophilus Gooch of the Committee for the Inspection of Insanitary Dwellings had been roasted alive in Trafalgar Square. Mr Wotherspoon, Minister of Transport (a position of huge importance, then as now), had been hung from a lamp post in the Vauxhall Bridge Road. A moment later, the BBC issued a formal apology: Wotherspoon had not been hung from a lamp post but from a tramway post.
The play’s author Father Ronald Knox (second from right) as a guest on the BBC’s Brains Trust in 1941. (BBC Picture Archives)
Fiddling while the city burnsThe listeners were once again serenaded with the Savoy Band but this was suddenly interrupted with news that the crowd had blown up the Savoy Hotel. Finally, the crowd was reported to be moving toward BBC London offices. The final words uttered were: “One moment please ... Mr Popplebury, secretary of the National Movement for Abolishing Theatre Queues, with several other members of the crowd, is now in the waiting room. They are reading copies of the Radio Times. Good-night everybody; good-night.”
Reading this satire today, it seems unbelievable that many radio listeners panicked. But that is what happened. The 20-minute programme was scarcely over before listeners all over the country became agitated. JCS MacGregor had been involved creating realistic sound effects (an unusual development in the 1920s) for the broadcast. It fell to him to explain that the show had been satire, not news. In his words: “Knox and the producer had scarcely left the building, and the debris of the Savoy Hotel was still lying about in the studio, when the telephone rang. Was it really true, asked an agitated voice, that revolution had broken out in London? I gave reassurances ... The next caller was more difficult. His wife had a weak heart, and had fainted at the news; and when he gathered from me that the whole thing was fictitious, he exploded. What, he asked with some vigour, did the BBC mean by it? Did we realise that we had grossly misled the country, and were playing into the hands of the Bolshevists?”
Other listeners began besieging local police stations, radio stations, newspaper offices, and the Savoy Hotel, demanding “how soon the tide of civil war might be expected to sweep in [our] direction”. The manager of the Savoy calculated that in addition to around 200 local calls, the hotel answered hundreds of trunk calls from all parts of the country, including Ireland, Scotland, Hull, Manchester, Newcastle and Leeds, asking whether they should cancel their room bookings. Others sought reassurance about the safety of friends staying at the hotel.
The Savoy Hotel – a BBC radio broadcast in 1926 reported that it had been blown up. (Mary Evans Picture Library)
In Newcastle, the sheriff was nervously uncertain about what precautions he should be taking to ensure that anarchy did not spread to his part of the country, while the wife of the lord mayor of Newcastle was reported to have been “greatly upset” at being unable to contact her husband (who was out at dinner) to inform him about the rising “red tide of revolution”. The Irish Telegraph could not restrain from reporting that numerous listeners rang their offices, breathlessly enquiring: “Is it true that the House of Commons is blown up?”
Luckily, it was a short-lived panic, over within 24 hours. Those responsible for the broadcast were amazed that listeners had been fooled by tales of revolution led by a Mr Popplebury, Secretary of the National Movement for Abolishing Theatre Queues. The idea that the children’s character, Uncle Leslie, would take over sounding the time after Big Ben’s demise was also clearly ludicrous. But the BBC was forced to apologise: “London is safe, Big Ben is still chiming and all is well”, it announced. The apology added, however, that it was “hardly credible that if we were giving out news of such a national crisis we should intersperse snatches of dance music”. Nevertheless, it bowed to pressure to “take no risks with its public’s average standard of intelligence” in the future and Knox refused to speak on radio again until 1930.
Why might such a satirical programme prove so frightening? In part, the panic caused by the broadcast reflected wider economic and political insecurities ravaging the nation. Left-wing papers were quick to identify class-based fears to be at the heart of the panic. “Supposing the imaginary news announcer told his listeners that a Tory mob had marched on Eccleston Square and blown up the offices of the TUC!”, exclaimed the Daily Herald.
The Leeds Weekly Citizen was also queasy about “this kind of allusion to the unemployed, at a time when so many are suffering so badly from the failure of our social system to provide them with work and sustenance”. By 1926, an estimated 12.5 per cent of workers were unemployed, and the numbers were rising. Furthermore, a few months before Knox’s broadcast, miners had risen up with the cry “enough is enough”, striking against bosses who threatened their already precarious livelihoods.
Unemployment demonstration c1920: radio listeners were receptive to the broadcast in the era’s climate of social unrest. (Getty Images)
Another development alarming the middle class was the polarisation of politics in Britain, with the establishment in 1920 of the Communist Party of Great Britain. Although the Communist Party was feared out of all proportion to its membership, “Red internationalism” rendered the Communists a threat to “British values”. The Daily Herald reported that the broadcast incited the “political passions” of listeners. The paper disclosed that at one dinner party, the broadcast inflamed the “violent anti-Labour convictions” of the host, at which point he began to angrily lecture his guests about the pernicious events allegedly taking place in London. Might “the left” have succeeded in mobilising disaffected workers?
Media coverage of Father Knox’s Broadcast from the Barricades was quick to link the broadcast to an alleged Communist threat. For instance, on the same page that the Daily Mail published its account of the panic, it printed a column entitled “Lying Propaganda”. This informed readers that around 250,000 broadsheets “full of illiterate Communist violence and shameful perversions of truth” were being distributed weekly throughout the United Kingdom. “Their only object is to create hatred and discontent and to bring about a state of affairs which may give the disgusting tyranny of Communism a chance to seize upon this country”, the paper warned.
The fact that the news of a riotous crowd in London was broadcast on the radio was also crucial. BBC monopoly of the radio waves and its government-guaranteed political neutrality made radio news profoundly authoritative. As one panic-stricken person hoarsely maintained on the telephone to a journalist for a Liberal Welsh paper immediately after being informed that the broadcast was a hoax: “No ... there must be something in it, we have heard it over the wireless”.
When this call was followed by many others, even the journalist answering the telephone began to have his doubts, wondering if, after all, “there was not something in it”. Similarly, the Daily Mail reported that when people were told it was a hoax, they refused to believe it: “We have heard it on the wireless”, they reminded the sceptical newspaper reporters, “Why, we have even heard the explosions!” In 1926, radio had a unique ability to spark intense panic in its hapless listeners.
Joanna Bourke is professor of history at Birkbeck College and the author of Fear: A Cultural History (Virago, 2005).
In 1926 a short, and seemingly innocuous, radio sketch sparked panic in Britain. (Getty Images) The politics of fear has become central to statecraft, and the modern world is badly scared. In the past, as well, full-blown panic seems to have flared up with almost ludicrous ease. On the wintry evening of 16 January 1926, for instance, many people in Britain panicked after listening to a short, and seemingly innocuous, radio sketch.
Its author was 38-year-old Father Ronald Arbuthnott Knox, a convivial priest with a taste for New Testament commentary, Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, and detective stories. Father Ronald Knox’s play, Broadcasting from the Barricades was transmitted at 7.40pm on Saturday evening, 16 January, from the George Street Studios of the BBC in Edinburgh. After being prefaced by a statement informing listeners that it was a work of humour, the play took the form of a news broadcast, interrupted by music from the Savoy Hotel, in which Father Knox described an unemployed crowd that went wild.
The newsreader announced that the unemployed, stirred to action by troublemakers such as Mr Popplebury, the Secretary of the National Movement for Abolishing Theatre Queues, had rioted. The red tide of revolution had swept over the great landmarks of London: Trafalgar Square had been overrun; the National Gallery sacked; and Big Ben had been reduced to a heap of rubble by mortar attack. Henceforth, Greenwich time would be tolled by the repeating watch of Uncle Leslie, a popular children’s storyteller from Edinburgh.
There was murder, too. The newsreader reported that Sir Theophilus Gooch of the Committee for the Inspection of Insanitary Dwellings had been roasted alive in Trafalgar Square. Mr Wotherspoon, Minister of Transport (a position of huge importance, then as now), had been hung from a lamp post in the Vauxhall Bridge Road. A moment later, the BBC issued a formal apology: Wotherspoon had not been hung from a lamp post but from a tramway post.
The play’s author Father Ronald Knox (second from right) as a guest on the BBC’s Brains Trust in 1941. (BBC Picture Archives)Fiddling while the city burnsThe listeners were once again serenaded with the Savoy Band but this was suddenly interrupted with news that the crowd had blown up the Savoy Hotel. Finally, the crowd was reported to be moving toward BBC London offices. The final words uttered were: “One moment please ... Mr Popplebury, secretary of the National Movement for Abolishing Theatre Queues, with several other members of the crowd, is now in the waiting room. They are reading copies of the Radio Times. Good-night everybody; good-night.”
Reading this satire today, it seems unbelievable that many radio listeners panicked. But that is what happened. The 20-minute programme was scarcely over before listeners all over the country became agitated. JCS MacGregor had been involved creating realistic sound effects (an unusual development in the 1920s) for the broadcast. It fell to him to explain that the show had been satire, not news. In his words: “Knox and the producer had scarcely left the building, and the debris of the Savoy Hotel was still lying about in the studio, when the telephone rang. Was it really true, asked an agitated voice, that revolution had broken out in London? I gave reassurances ... The next caller was more difficult. His wife had a weak heart, and had fainted at the news; and when he gathered from me that the whole thing was fictitious, he exploded. What, he asked with some vigour, did the BBC mean by it? Did we realise that we had grossly misled the country, and were playing into the hands of the Bolshevists?”
Other listeners began besieging local police stations, radio stations, newspaper offices, and the Savoy Hotel, demanding “how soon the tide of civil war might be expected to sweep in [our] direction”. The manager of the Savoy calculated that in addition to around 200 local calls, the hotel answered hundreds of trunk calls from all parts of the country, including Ireland, Scotland, Hull, Manchester, Newcastle and Leeds, asking whether they should cancel their room bookings. Others sought reassurance about the safety of friends staying at the hotel.
The Savoy Hotel – a BBC radio broadcast in 1926 reported that it had been blown up. (Mary Evans Picture Library)
In Newcastle, the sheriff was nervously uncertain about what precautions he should be taking to ensure that anarchy did not spread to his part of the country, while the wife of the lord mayor of Newcastle was reported to have been “greatly upset” at being unable to contact her husband (who was out at dinner) to inform him about the rising “red tide of revolution”. The Irish Telegraph could not restrain from reporting that numerous listeners rang their offices, breathlessly enquiring: “Is it true that the House of Commons is blown up?”
Luckily, it was a short-lived panic, over within 24 hours. Those responsible for the broadcast were amazed that listeners had been fooled by tales of revolution led by a Mr Popplebury, Secretary of the National Movement for Abolishing Theatre Queues. The idea that the children’s character, Uncle Leslie, would take over sounding the time after Big Ben’s demise was also clearly ludicrous. But the BBC was forced to apologise: “London is safe, Big Ben is still chiming and all is well”, it announced. The apology added, however, that it was “hardly credible that if we were giving out news of such a national crisis we should intersperse snatches of dance music”. Nevertheless, it bowed to pressure to “take no risks with its public’s average standard of intelligence” in the future and Knox refused to speak on radio again until 1930.
Why might such a satirical programme prove so frightening? In part, the panic caused by the broadcast reflected wider economic and political insecurities ravaging the nation. Left-wing papers were quick to identify class-based fears to be at the heart of the panic. “Supposing the imaginary news announcer told his listeners that a Tory mob had marched on Eccleston Square and blown up the offices of the TUC!”, exclaimed the Daily Herald.
The Leeds Weekly Citizen was also queasy about “this kind of allusion to the unemployed, at a time when so many are suffering so badly from the failure of our social system to provide them with work and sustenance”. By 1926, an estimated 12.5 per cent of workers were unemployed, and the numbers were rising. Furthermore, a few months before Knox’s broadcast, miners had risen up with the cry “enough is enough”, striking against bosses who threatened their already precarious livelihoods.
Unemployment demonstration c1920: radio listeners were receptive to the broadcast in the era’s climate of social unrest. (Getty Images)Another development alarming the middle class was the polarisation of politics in Britain, with the establishment in 1920 of the Communist Party of Great Britain. Although the Communist Party was feared out of all proportion to its membership, “Red internationalism” rendered the Communists a threat to “British values”. The Daily Herald reported that the broadcast incited the “political passions” of listeners. The paper disclosed that at one dinner party, the broadcast inflamed the “violent anti-Labour convictions” of the host, at which point he began to angrily lecture his guests about the pernicious events allegedly taking place in London. Might “the left” have succeeded in mobilising disaffected workers?
Media coverage of Father Knox’s Broadcast from the Barricades was quick to link the broadcast to an alleged Communist threat. For instance, on the same page that the Daily Mail published its account of the panic, it printed a column entitled “Lying Propaganda”. This informed readers that around 250,000 broadsheets “full of illiterate Communist violence and shameful perversions of truth” were being distributed weekly throughout the United Kingdom. “Their only object is to create hatred and discontent and to bring about a state of affairs which may give the disgusting tyranny of Communism a chance to seize upon this country”, the paper warned.
The fact that the news of a riotous crowd in London was broadcast on the radio was also crucial. BBC monopoly of the radio waves and its government-guaranteed political neutrality made radio news profoundly authoritative. As one panic-stricken person hoarsely maintained on the telephone to a journalist for a Liberal Welsh paper immediately after being informed that the broadcast was a hoax: “No ... there must be something in it, we have heard it over the wireless”.
When this call was followed by many others, even the journalist answering the telephone began to have his doubts, wondering if, after all, “there was not something in it”. Similarly, the Daily Mail reported that when people were told it was a hoax, they refused to believe it: “We have heard it on the wireless”, they reminded the sceptical newspaper reporters, “Why, we have even heard the explosions!” In 1926, radio had a unique ability to spark intense panic in its hapless listeners.
Joanna Bourke is professor of history at Birkbeck College and the author of Fear: A Cultural History (Virago, 2005).
September 8, 2016
Murder, conspiracy and execution: six centuries of scandalous royal deaths
History Extra
The execution of Charles I, 30 January 1649. Charles’s death signalled the abolition of the monarchy, and the establishment of a republic in England. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
Royal status brings with it privilege and power – but also danger, particularly the risk of assassination by those craving that power. From the Norman conquest to Charles’s execution in 1649, many British men, women and children of royal blood died in extraordinary circumstances. Deaths early in that period were often shrouded in mystery, but by the 17th century circumstances had changed to an extraordinary extent – for the first time an executioner severed the head of a king of England: Charles I, condemned by his own people…
William II meets his fate in the forestOn 2 August 1100 King William II, third son of William the Conqueror, was hunting in the New Forest. The chronicler William of Malmesbury reported that after dinner the king, nicknamed ‘Rufus’, went into the forest “attended by few persons”, notably a gentleman named Walter Tirel. While most of the king’s party “employed in the chase, were dispersed as chance directed,” Tirel remained with the king. As the sun began to set, William spotted a stag and “drawing his bow and letting fly an arrow, slightly wounded” it.
In his excitement the king began to run towards the injured target, and at that point Tirel, “conceiving a noble exploit” in that the king’s attention was occupied elsewhere, “pierced his breast with a fatal arrow”. William fell to the ground and Tirel, seeing that the king was dead, immediately “leaped swiftly upon his horse, and escaped by spurring him to his utmost speed”.
Upon discovering William’s body, the rest of his party fled and, in an attempt to protect their own interests, readied themselves to declare their allegiance to the next king. It was left to a few countrymen to convey the dead king’s corpse to Winchester Cathedral by cart, “the blood dripping from it all the way”.
Was William’s death an accident, or was it murder? An accident was possible, but there were many who believed otherwise. William’s younger brother immediately assumed the throne and swiftly had himself crowned Henry I. Henry had much to gain from his brother’s death, and Tirel may have been in his employ. William had, however, been an unpopular king, and his death was “lamented by few”.
King William II of England, aka William Rufus, c1100. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
The Lionheart and eyeless ArtAlmost 100 years later, Henry I’s great-grandson, Richard I, also met a violent end at the point of an arrow, but in very different circumstances. Richard had spent the majority of his 10-year reign fighting abroad on crusade; he was a brave solider who inspired loyalty in his men. In 1199, while he was besieging the Château de Châlus-Chabrol, a crossbow bolt struck him in the shoulder. Though the shot did not kill him, it penetrated deep into his body. Though removal of the bolt by a surgeon was a painful ordeal, Richard survived – but before long the wound became infected and gangrene set in. It became clear that the king’s days were numbered, and on 6 April, 11 days after he was shot, “the man devoted to martial deeds, breathed his last.”
Richard was succeeded by his younger brother, John. However, though John was accepted as king of England he had a rival for his French lands: Arthur of Brittany, son of John’s brother, Geoffrey, who had died over a decade earlier. In 1202, John’s forces captured Arthur at Mirebeau, where the latter had been attempting to besiege the castle in which his grandmother (John’s mother), Eleanor of Aquitaine, was sheltering. Arthur was taken to Falaise, where – it was later claimed – John gave orders for his 16-year-old nephew to be “deprived of his eyes and genitals”, but the jailer refused to obey such a cruel command. Shortly afterwards, the boy was moved to Rouen where, on the evening of 3 April 1203, it seems that John himself, “drunk with wine and possessed of the Devil”, killed Arthur personally. The young boy’s lifeless body was reputedly weighed down with a heavy stone and thrown into the river Seine.
In the two centuries after the murder of Arthur of Brittany, both Edward II and Richard II were deposed. The latter was almost certainly starved to death in Pontefract Castle, but controversy still surrounds the end of Edward II – he may have been murdered in Berkeley Castle, but several modern historians are of the opinion that he escaped abroad.
Richard I, aka ‘Richard the Lionheart’, depicted plunging his fist into a lion's throat, c1180. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
The bloody Wars of the RosesIn the middle of the 15th century, the Wars of the Roses broke out, causing a profusion of bloodshed that did not exclude royal or noble families. After a struggle that saw the Lancastrian King Henry VI deposed in favour of the Yorkist Edward IV, and a brief period of restoration for Henry VI (commonly referred to as the readeption), on 4 May 1471 the armies of Lancaster and York met at Tewkesbury, where Edward IV won “a famous victory”. It was a fierce battle during which around 2,000 Lancastrians were slain, and the battlefield is still referred to as ‘Bloody Meadow.’
For Henry’s son and heir, the 18-year-old Prince Edward of Lancaster, Tewkesbury had been his first experience of war, and one that he would not survive. Reports of the precise manner of the prince’s death vary: most sources state that the he was killed in the field, whereas the Yorkist author of the Arrivall of Edward IV, who claimed to be a servant of Edward IV’s and a witness to many of the events about which he wrote, asserts that Edward “was taken fleeing to the townwards, and slain in the field”. Later Tudor historians, however, implied that the prince had been murdered “by the avenging hands of certain persons,” on the orders of Edward IV. Whatever the circumstances, the Lancastrian heir had been removed; now all that remained was for his father to be eliminated.
While the battle of Tewkesbury raged, Henry VI was a prisoner in the Tower of London. Following his victory, Edward IV travelled to London in triumph, arriving on 21 May. That same evening, Henry VI was reportedly praying in his oratory within the Wakefield Tower when he “was put to death”. Though the author of the Arrivall stated that Henry died of “pure displeasure and melancholy” as a result of being told of the death of his son, there is little doubt that he died violently. The examination of his skull in 1911 revealed that to one piece “there was still attached some of the hair, which was brown in colour, save in one place, where it was much darker and apparently matted with blood,” consistent with a blow to the head. Many believed that Henry had been murdered at the hands of the king’s brother Richard, Duke of Gloucester, but though Richard may have been present, the order undoubtedly came from Edward IV.
Henry VI , c1450. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
The slaughter also extended to Edward’s own family. The relationship Edward shared with his younger brother George, Duke of Clarence, was tumultuous, to say the least. After several estrangements and reconciliations, in 1477 Clarence finally went too far. Convinced that his brother was conspiring against him, Edward had Clarence arrested; at the beginning of February 1478, he was tried and condemned to death. On 18 February Clarence was executed within the confines of the Tower of London. According to several contemporary sources, at his own request the duke was drowned after being “plunged into a jar of sweet wine” in the Bowyer Tower. Clarence’s daughter, Margaret Pole, was later painted wearing a bracelet with a barrel charm, which appears to support this story. The duke’s death orphaned both Margaret and her younger brother Edward, Earl of Warwick. Like their father, both would meet violent ends.
The princes in the TowerEdward IV died unexpectedly on 9 April 1483, leaving as successor his 12-year-old son, also Edward, at that time staying at Ludlow Castle. After his father’s death, the young Prince Edward set out for London but was intercepted en route by his uncle Richard, Duke of Gloucester, who lodged Edward and his brother Prince Richard in the Tower of London. Having been declared illegitimate, on 26 June Edward was deposed in favour of his uncle, who took the throne as Richard III.
Rumours about the fate of the ‘princes in the Tower’ soon began to circulate. Many believe that they were murdered “lying in their beds” on the orders of Richard III, and the skeletons of two youths discovered in the Tower in 1674 seems to support this theory. Some, however, insist that the boys did not die in the Tower but managed to escape. Though their ultimate fate is still obscure, one thing is certain: after the coronation of Richard III on 6 July, neither boy was seen alive again.
‘The Young Princes in the Tower', 1831. After a painting by Hippolyte De La Roche (1797–1856), commonly known as Paul Delaroche. From the Connoisseur VOL XXVII, 1910. (Photo by The Print Collector/Print Collector/Getty Images)
Richard III did not hold his throne for long. In 1485 his army was confronted by the forces of the Lancastrian Henry Tudor at Bosworth in Leicestershire. Richard fought bravely in his attempt to defend his crown, but was “pierced with many mortal wounds”, and became the last king of England to be killed on the battlefield. Thanks to the discovery of his skeleton in Leicester, we now know that a blow to the head killed Richard, and that his body was subjected to a number of “humiliation” wounds after his death.
Richard’s successor, Henry VII, ordered the execution of the Duke of Clarence’s son, the Earl of Warwick, beheaded In 1499 for conspiring with the pretender Perkin Warbeck to overthrow the king. Warwick’s sister, Margaret Pole, was executed in 1541 by command of Henry VIII on charges of treason. In her late sixties and condemned on evidence that was almost certainly falsified, Margaret’s death shocked her contemporaries, one of whom observed that her execution was conducted by “a wretched and blundering youth” who “literally hacked her head and shoulders to pieces in the most pitiful manner” so that she bled to death.
Henry VIII’s wivesHenry VIII also notoriously executed two of his wives. Anne Boleyn and Katherine Howard were both condemned on charges of adultery, treason, and, in Anne’s case, incest with her own brother. Anne was almost certainly innocent of the crimes of which she was accused; nevertheless, on the morning of 19 May 1536 she became the first queen of England to be executed. Although her death within the confines of the Tower of London was intended to be a private affair, conducted away from the eyes of curious Londoners, around 1,000 people watched as her head was struck from her body with one strike of a French executioner’s sword.
In 1554 Lady Jane Grey also met her fate at the headsman’s axe. So, too, did Mary, Queen of Scots, executed in February 1587 on the orders of Elizabeth I. The first queen regnant to be beheaded, Mary was decapitated at Fotheringhay Castle in a bloody scene: it took three strokes of the axe to remove her head.
The execution of Mary, Queen of Scots at Fotheringhay Castle, 1587. From ‘The Island Race’, a book written by Sir Winston Churchill and published in 1964 that covers the history of the British Isles from pre-Roman times to the Victorian era. (Photo by Universal History Archive/UIG via Getty Images)
Mary’s grandson was to suffer a similar ignominious end the following century. Having been defeated in the Civil War, in January 1649 Charles I became the first English monarch to be tried and condemned for treason – there was no precedent for the lawful killing of a king. On the date of his execution, 30 January, Charles stepped out of Banqueting House in Whitehall on to a public scaffold. His head was removed amid a great groan from the crowd, and it was observed that many of those who attended dipped their handkerchiefs in the late king’s blood as a memento.
Charles’s death signalled the abolition of the monarchy, and the establishment of a republic in England. In a public display of contempt for the monarchy, he became the only king of England to be murdered by his subjects. It was a far cry from the dark and mysterious circumstances surrounding the death of William ‘Rufus’ and those other ill-fated royals who came before.
Nicola Tallis is a British historian and author. Her new book Crown of Blood: The Deadly Inheritance of Lady Jane Grey is published by Michael O’Mara Books on 3 November 2016.
The execution of Charles I, 30 January 1649. Charles’s death signalled the abolition of the monarchy, and the establishment of a republic in England. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images) Royal status brings with it privilege and power – but also danger, particularly the risk of assassination by those craving that power. From the Norman conquest to Charles’s execution in 1649, many British men, women and children of royal blood died in extraordinary circumstances. Deaths early in that period were often shrouded in mystery, but by the 17th century circumstances had changed to an extraordinary extent – for the first time an executioner severed the head of a king of England: Charles I, condemned by his own people…
William II meets his fate in the forestOn 2 August 1100 King William II, third son of William the Conqueror, was hunting in the New Forest. The chronicler William of Malmesbury reported that after dinner the king, nicknamed ‘Rufus’, went into the forest “attended by few persons”, notably a gentleman named Walter Tirel. While most of the king’s party “employed in the chase, were dispersed as chance directed,” Tirel remained with the king. As the sun began to set, William spotted a stag and “drawing his bow and letting fly an arrow, slightly wounded” it.
In his excitement the king began to run towards the injured target, and at that point Tirel, “conceiving a noble exploit” in that the king’s attention was occupied elsewhere, “pierced his breast with a fatal arrow”. William fell to the ground and Tirel, seeing that the king was dead, immediately “leaped swiftly upon his horse, and escaped by spurring him to his utmost speed”.
Upon discovering William’s body, the rest of his party fled and, in an attempt to protect their own interests, readied themselves to declare their allegiance to the next king. It was left to a few countrymen to convey the dead king’s corpse to Winchester Cathedral by cart, “the blood dripping from it all the way”.
Was William’s death an accident, or was it murder? An accident was possible, but there were many who believed otherwise. William’s younger brother immediately assumed the throne and swiftly had himself crowned Henry I. Henry had much to gain from his brother’s death, and Tirel may have been in his employ. William had, however, been an unpopular king, and his death was “lamented by few”.
King William II of England, aka William Rufus, c1100. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
The Lionheart and eyeless ArtAlmost 100 years later, Henry I’s great-grandson, Richard I, also met a violent end at the point of an arrow, but in very different circumstances. Richard had spent the majority of his 10-year reign fighting abroad on crusade; he was a brave solider who inspired loyalty in his men. In 1199, while he was besieging the Château de Châlus-Chabrol, a crossbow bolt struck him in the shoulder. Though the shot did not kill him, it penetrated deep into his body. Though removal of the bolt by a surgeon was a painful ordeal, Richard survived – but before long the wound became infected and gangrene set in. It became clear that the king’s days were numbered, and on 6 April, 11 days after he was shot, “the man devoted to martial deeds, breathed his last.”
Richard was succeeded by his younger brother, John. However, though John was accepted as king of England he had a rival for his French lands: Arthur of Brittany, son of John’s brother, Geoffrey, who had died over a decade earlier. In 1202, John’s forces captured Arthur at Mirebeau, where the latter had been attempting to besiege the castle in which his grandmother (John’s mother), Eleanor of Aquitaine, was sheltering. Arthur was taken to Falaise, where – it was later claimed – John gave orders for his 16-year-old nephew to be “deprived of his eyes and genitals”, but the jailer refused to obey such a cruel command. Shortly afterwards, the boy was moved to Rouen where, on the evening of 3 April 1203, it seems that John himself, “drunk with wine and possessed of the Devil”, killed Arthur personally. The young boy’s lifeless body was reputedly weighed down with a heavy stone and thrown into the river Seine.
In the two centuries after the murder of Arthur of Brittany, both Edward II and Richard II were deposed. The latter was almost certainly starved to death in Pontefract Castle, but controversy still surrounds the end of Edward II – he may have been murdered in Berkeley Castle, but several modern historians are of the opinion that he escaped abroad.
Richard I, aka ‘Richard the Lionheart’, depicted plunging his fist into a lion's throat, c1180. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
The bloody Wars of the RosesIn the middle of the 15th century, the Wars of the Roses broke out, causing a profusion of bloodshed that did not exclude royal or noble families. After a struggle that saw the Lancastrian King Henry VI deposed in favour of the Yorkist Edward IV, and a brief period of restoration for Henry VI (commonly referred to as the readeption), on 4 May 1471 the armies of Lancaster and York met at Tewkesbury, where Edward IV won “a famous victory”. It was a fierce battle during which around 2,000 Lancastrians were slain, and the battlefield is still referred to as ‘Bloody Meadow.’
For Henry’s son and heir, the 18-year-old Prince Edward of Lancaster, Tewkesbury had been his first experience of war, and one that he would not survive. Reports of the precise manner of the prince’s death vary: most sources state that the he was killed in the field, whereas the Yorkist author of the Arrivall of Edward IV, who claimed to be a servant of Edward IV’s and a witness to many of the events about which he wrote, asserts that Edward “was taken fleeing to the townwards, and slain in the field”. Later Tudor historians, however, implied that the prince had been murdered “by the avenging hands of certain persons,” on the orders of Edward IV. Whatever the circumstances, the Lancastrian heir had been removed; now all that remained was for his father to be eliminated.
While the battle of Tewkesbury raged, Henry VI was a prisoner in the Tower of London. Following his victory, Edward IV travelled to London in triumph, arriving on 21 May. That same evening, Henry VI was reportedly praying in his oratory within the Wakefield Tower when he “was put to death”. Though the author of the Arrivall stated that Henry died of “pure displeasure and melancholy” as a result of being told of the death of his son, there is little doubt that he died violently. The examination of his skull in 1911 revealed that to one piece “there was still attached some of the hair, which was brown in colour, save in one place, where it was much darker and apparently matted with blood,” consistent with a blow to the head. Many believed that Henry had been murdered at the hands of the king’s brother Richard, Duke of Gloucester, but though Richard may have been present, the order undoubtedly came from Edward IV.
Henry VI , c1450. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
The slaughter also extended to Edward’s own family. The relationship Edward shared with his younger brother George, Duke of Clarence, was tumultuous, to say the least. After several estrangements and reconciliations, in 1477 Clarence finally went too far. Convinced that his brother was conspiring against him, Edward had Clarence arrested; at the beginning of February 1478, he was tried and condemned to death. On 18 February Clarence was executed within the confines of the Tower of London. According to several contemporary sources, at his own request the duke was drowned after being “plunged into a jar of sweet wine” in the Bowyer Tower. Clarence’s daughter, Margaret Pole, was later painted wearing a bracelet with a barrel charm, which appears to support this story. The duke’s death orphaned both Margaret and her younger brother Edward, Earl of Warwick. Like their father, both would meet violent ends.
The princes in the TowerEdward IV died unexpectedly on 9 April 1483, leaving as successor his 12-year-old son, also Edward, at that time staying at Ludlow Castle. After his father’s death, the young Prince Edward set out for London but was intercepted en route by his uncle Richard, Duke of Gloucester, who lodged Edward and his brother Prince Richard in the Tower of London. Having been declared illegitimate, on 26 June Edward was deposed in favour of his uncle, who took the throne as Richard III.
Rumours about the fate of the ‘princes in the Tower’ soon began to circulate. Many believe that they were murdered “lying in their beds” on the orders of Richard III, and the skeletons of two youths discovered in the Tower in 1674 seems to support this theory. Some, however, insist that the boys did not die in the Tower but managed to escape. Though their ultimate fate is still obscure, one thing is certain: after the coronation of Richard III on 6 July, neither boy was seen alive again.
‘The Young Princes in the Tower', 1831. After a painting by Hippolyte De La Roche (1797–1856), commonly known as Paul Delaroche. From the Connoisseur VOL XXVII, 1910. (Photo by The Print Collector/Print Collector/Getty Images)
Richard III did not hold his throne for long. In 1485 his army was confronted by the forces of the Lancastrian Henry Tudor at Bosworth in Leicestershire. Richard fought bravely in his attempt to defend his crown, but was “pierced with many mortal wounds”, and became the last king of England to be killed on the battlefield. Thanks to the discovery of his skeleton in Leicester, we now know that a blow to the head killed Richard, and that his body was subjected to a number of “humiliation” wounds after his death.
Richard’s successor, Henry VII, ordered the execution of the Duke of Clarence’s son, the Earl of Warwick, beheaded In 1499 for conspiring with the pretender Perkin Warbeck to overthrow the king. Warwick’s sister, Margaret Pole, was executed in 1541 by command of Henry VIII on charges of treason. In her late sixties and condemned on evidence that was almost certainly falsified, Margaret’s death shocked her contemporaries, one of whom observed that her execution was conducted by “a wretched and blundering youth” who “literally hacked her head and shoulders to pieces in the most pitiful manner” so that she bled to death.
Henry VIII’s wivesHenry VIII also notoriously executed two of his wives. Anne Boleyn and Katherine Howard were both condemned on charges of adultery, treason, and, in Anne’s case, incest with her own brother. Anne was almost certainly innocent of the crimes of which she was accused; nevertheless, on the morning of 19 May 1536 she became the first queen of England to be executed. Although her death within the confines of the Tower of London was intended to be a private affair, conducted away from the eyes of curious Londoners, around 1,000 people watched as her head was struck from her body with one strike of a French executioner’s sword.
In 1554 Lady Jane Grey also met her fate at the headsman’s axe. So, too, did Mary, Queen of Scots, executed in February 1587 on the orders of Elizabeth I. The first queen regnant to be beheaded, Mary was decapitated at Fotheringhay Castle in a bloody scene: it took three strokes of the axe to remove her head.
The execution of Mary, Queen of Scots at Fotheringhay Castle, 1587. From ‘The Island Race’, a book written by Sir Winston Churchill and published in 1964 that covers the history of the British Isles from pre-Roman times to the Victorian era. (Photo by Universal History Archive/UIG via Getty Images)
Mary’s grandson was to suffer a similar ignominious end the following century. Having been defeated in the Civil War, in January 1649 Charles I became the first English monarch to be tried and condemned for treason – there was no precedent for the lawful killing of a king. On the date of his execution, 30 January, Charles stepped out of Banqueting House in Whitehall on to a public scaffold. His head was removed amid a great groan from the crowd, and it was observed that many of those who attended dipped their handkerchiefs in the late king’s blood as a memento.
Charles’s death signalled the abolition of the monarchy, and the establishment of a republic in England. In a public display of contempt for the monarchy, he became the only king of England to be murdered by his subjects. It was a far cry from the dark and mysterious circumstances surrounding the death of William ‘Rufus’ and those other ill-fated royals who came before.
Nicola Tallis is a British historian and author. Her new book Crown of Blood: The Deadly Inheritance of Lady Jane Grey is published by Michael O’Mara Books on 3 November 2016.
September 7, 2016
10 things you (probably) didn’t know about the Great Fire of London
History Extra
Great Fire of London, September 1666. (Photo by Time Life Pictures/Mansell/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images)
On 5 September 1666, the 33-year-old Samuel Pepys climbed the steeple of the ancient church of All Hallows-by-the-Tower and was met with the “the saddest sight of desolation that I ever saw; everywhere great fires, oyle-cellars, and brimstone, and other things burning”. Leaving the church, he wandered along Gracechurch Street, Fenchurch Street and Lombard Street towards the Royal Exchange, which he found to be “a sad sight” with all the pillars and statues (except one of Sir Thomas Gresham) destroyed. The ground scorched his feet and he found nothing but dust, ash and ruins. It was the fourth day of the Great Fire of London and, though some parts of the city would continue to burn for months, the worst of the destruction was finally over.
Thanks in part to Pepys’s vivid diary entries, the story of the Great Fire is well known. Alongside the fortunes of Henry VIII’s wives, the Battle of Britain and the fate of Guy Fawkes, it forms part of a scattering of familiar islands in the muddy quagmire of British history. We all know, roughly speaking, what happened: during the early hours of 2 September 1666, a fire broke out in Thomas Farriner’s bakehouse on Pudding Lane, which blazed and spread with such ferocity and speed that within a few days the old City of London was reduced to a charred ruin. More than 13,000 houses, 87 churches and 44 livery halls were destroyed, the historic city gates were wrecked, and the Guildhall, St Paul’s Cathedral, Baynard’s Castle and the Royal Exchange were severely damaged – in some cases, beyond repair.
Those with more than a passing knowledge of the crucial facts might be aware of accounts of King Charles II fighting the fire alongside his brother, the Duke of York; of Samuel Pepys taking pains to bury his prized parmesan cheese; or of the French watchmaker Robert Hubert meeting his death at Tyburn after (falsely) claiming to have started the blaze. Here are 10 more facts you may not know about the Great Fire of London…
1) It did not start on Pudding LaneThomas Farriner’s bakehouse was not located on Pudding Lane proper. Hearth Tax records created just before the fire place Farriner’s bakehouse on Fish Yard, a small enclave off Pudding Lane. His immediate neighbours included a waterbearer named Henry More, a sexton [a person who looks after a church and churchyard] named Thomas Birt, the parish ‘clearke’, a plasterer named George Porter, one Alice Spencer, a widow named Mrs Mary Whittacre, and a turner named John Bibie.
Billingsgate, London, pictured in 1598. Until boundary changes in 2003, the ward included Pudding Lane. (Photo by Culture Club/Getty Images)
2) The Great Fire of London was not Thomas Farriner’s first brush with troubleIn 1627, the then 10- or 11-year-old Thomas Farriner was discovered by a city constable wandering alone within the city walls, having run away from his master [it is not known why he had a master at this time]. He was detained at Bridewell Prison, where the incident was recorded in the book of minutes.
During the 17th century, Bridewell (a former Tudor palace) was a kind of proto-correctional facility where young waifs and strays would often be sent to receive a rudimentary education, many of them then cherry-picked to become apprentices to the prison’s patrons.
During the boy’s hearing, it transpired that he had attempted to run away from his master three or four times previously. Farriner was released, only to be detained once more in 1628 for the same reason. A year later he was apprenticed as a baker under one Thomas Dodson.
3) Far from levelling the city, the Great Fire of London scorched the skin and flesh from the city’s buildings – but their skeletons remainedThe ruins of many of London’s buildings had to be demolished before rebuilding work could begin. A sketch from 1673 by Thomas Wyck shows the extent of the ruins of St Paul’s Cathedral that remained. John Evelyn described the remaining stones as standing upright, fragile and “calcined”.
What’s more, the burning lasted months, not days: Pepys recorded that cellars were still burning in March of the following year. With plenty of nooks and crannies to commandeer, gangs operated among the ruins, pretending to offer travellers a ‘link’ (escorted passage) – only to rob them blind and leave them for dead. Many of those who lost their homes and livelihood to the fire built temporary shacks on the ruins of their former homes and shops until this was prohibited.
Old St Paul's Cathedral burning in the Great Fire of London, 1666. By Wenceslaus Hollar. (Photo by Guildhall Library & Art Gallery/Heritage Images/Getty Images)
4) At the time of the Great Fire, England was engaged in a costly war with the Dutch Republic and was gearing up for one last battleThe conflict, known as the Second Anglo-Dutch War, was the second of three 17th-century maritime wars to be fought between the English and the Dutch over transatlantic trade supremacy. By September 1666 there had already been five major engagements: the battle of Lowestoft (1665); the battle of Vågen (1665); the Four Days’ Battle (1666); St James’s Day Battle (1666); and Holmes’s Bonfire (1666).
In the confusion of the blaze, some believed that the Great Fire of London had been started by Dutch merchants in retaliation for the last of these engagements – a vicious raid on the Dutch islands of Vlieland and Terschelling – which had occurred barely a month earlier. That attack had been orchestrated by Sir Robert Holmes (renowned for his short fuse and unpredictable nature) and resulted in the destruction of an estimated 150 Dutch merchant ships and, crucially, the torching of the town of West-Terschelling.
While the attack was celebrated with bonfires and bells in London, it appalled the Dutch, and there was rioting in Amsterdam. Aphra Behn – at that time an English spy stationed in Antwerp – wrote how she had seen a letter from a merchant’s wife “that desires her husband to com [sic] to Amsterdam home for that theare [sic] never was so great a desolation & mourning”. Behn was supposed to travel to Dort to continue her espionage, but declared that she “dare as well be hang’d as go”.
5) Though we do not know exactly how many people died as a result of the Great Fire of London, it was almost certainly more than commonly accepted figuresIn the traditional telling of the Great Fire story, the human cost is negligible. Indeed, only a few years after the blaze, Edward Chamberlayne claimed that “not above six or eight persons were burnt,” and an Essex vicar named Ralph Josselin noted that “few perished in the flames.” There was undoubtedly enough warning to ensure that a large proportion of London’s population vacated hazardous areas, but for every sick person helped out of their house, there must have been others with no one to aid them. What’s more, parish records hint at a far greater death toll than previously supposed.
At the parish of St Giles Cripplegate, for example, the number of burials increased by a third (presumably a result of citizens from destroyed parishes using this surviving church). Interestingly, there was a disproportionate rise (by two-thirds) in the number of deaths due to being “aged” and an increase in deaths attributed to “fright”. Likewise, the parish records of St Boltoph Bishopsgate show that the mean age at the time of death rose by an astonishing 12 years, from 18.3 to 31.3. This suggests either that older people were more likely to die in the month of September or that, in an age in which infanticide was rife, the deaths of young infants were not being recorded – perhaps even both.
The diarist John Evelyn certainly believed that the foul smell in the air at the time of the fire was caused by the bodies, beds and other combustible goods of “some poor creatures”, and the poet John Dryden – who, it must be said, was out of London at the time – wrote of “helpless infants left amidst the fire”. When reports reached France, a substantial loss of life was implied: “The letters from London speak of the terrible sights of persons burned to death and calcined limbs, making it easy to believe the terror though it cannot be exactly described. The old, tender children and many sick and helpless persons were all burned in their beds and served as fuel for the flames.”
6) Louis XIV of France offered to helpIt took more than a week for news of the fire to reach the French royal court in Paris, but when it did there was talk of little else. The Venetian ambassador in the French capital declared that “this accident… will be memorable through all the centuries.”
Privately, Louis XIV must have been thrilled. It was wrongly believed that the fire had destroyed England’s magazine stores and that the English navy would be forced to retire. Because of a 1662 treaty with the Dutch Republic, France had been obliged to enter the Anglo-Dutch War on the side of the Dutch, but the French king had neither the appetite nor the navy to play an active role.
Louis XIV publicly ordered that he would not tolerate “any rejoicings about it [the Great Fire], being such a deplorable accident involving injury to so many unhappy people”, and offered to send aid in the shape of food provisions and anything else that might be required to relieve the suffering of those left destitute.
King Louis XIV of France, c1690. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
7) There had been a genuine plot to burn the City of LondonIn April 1666, a group of parliamentarians led by John Rathbone and William Saunders were tried at the Old Bailey and found guilty of conspiring to assassinate Charles II, overthrow government and fire the City of London, letting down the portcullis to keep out assistance. The trial was recorded in the London Gazette, which revealed that the plotters purportedly had the support of a conspirator in Holland and had planned to execute their “Hellish design” on the anniversary of Oliver Cromwell’s death, 3 September.
8) People let their imaginations run away with themBy 6 September, news of the fire had travelled as far as Berwick, where local soldiers claimed that they had seen visions of “ships in the air”. Reporting the phenomenon back to Whitehall, one Mr Scott assured his contact that he believed it to have just been their imaginations. As he travelled across Wiltshire to gather more information about the fire, Bulstrode Whitelocke bumped into his friend Sir Seymour Pyle who had “had too much wine”. Pyle claimed that there had been a huge fight between 60,000 Presbyterians and the militia, which had resulted in the death and imprisonment of 30,000 rebels. Whitelocke soon discovered that Pyle had been “drunke & swearing & lying att almost every word”.
London Bridge on fire during the Great Fire of London, 1666. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
9) The Great Fire of London was predictedA few weeks before the fire, one Mr Light claimed to have been asked by a “zealous Papist”: “You expect great things in ’66, and think that Rome will be destroyed, but what if it be London?”
Meanwhile, five months before the fire Elizabeth Styles claimed to have been told by a Frenchman that at some point between June and October there would not be “a house left between Temple Bar and London Bridge”.
In 1651, an astrologer named William Lilly created a pamphlet entitled Monarchy or No Monarchy that contained illustrative predictions of the future state of England. The images depicted not only a city blazing with fire, but scenes of naval warfare, infestations of rodents, mass death and starvation. Unsurprisingly, Lilly was called in for questioning following the fire of 1666.
10) The Great Fire wasn’t the only blaze in London in 1666London was thrown into a panic during the evening of 9 November when a fire broke out in the Horse Guard House, next to Whitehall Palace. It was believed that the blaze had been caused by a candle falling into some straw. According to Samuel Pepys, the whole city was put on alarm by the “horrid great fire” and a lady even fell into fits of fear. With drums beating and guards running up and down the streets, by 10pm the fire was extinguished, with little damage caused.
Rebecca Rideal is a specialist factual television producer and writer whose credits include The Adventurers’ Guide to Britain, Bloody Tales of the Tower and David Attenborough’s First Life. She runs the online magazine The History Vault and is currently studying for her PhD on Restoration London during the Great Plague and the Great Fire at University College London.
Her latest book, 1666: Plague, War and Hellfire (John Murray, 2016), is out now.
Great Fire of London, September 1666. (Photo by Time Life Pictures/Mansell/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images) On 5 September 1666, the 33-year-old Samuel Pepys climbed the steeple of the ancient church of All Hallows-by-the-Tower and was met with the “the saddest sight of desolation that I ever saw; everywhere great fires, oyle-cellars, and brimstone, and other things burning”. Leaving the church, he wandered along Gracechurch Street, Fenchurch Street and Lombard Street towards the Royal Exchange, which he found to be “a sad sight” with all the pillars and statues (except one of Sir Thomas Gresham) destroyed. The ground scorched his feet and he found nothing but dust, ash and ruins. It was the fourth day of the Great Fire of London and, though some parts of the city would continue to burn for months, the worst of the destruction was finally over.
Thanks in part to Pepys’s vivid diary entries, the story of the Great Fire is well known. Alongside the fortunes of Henry VIII’s wives, the Battle of Britain and the fate of Guy Fawkes, it forms part of a scattering of familiar islands in the muddy quagmire of British history. We all know, roughly speaking, what happened: during the early hours of 2 September 1666, a fire broke out in Thomas Farriner’s bakehouse on Pudding Lane, which blazed and spread with such ferocity and speed that within a few days the old City of London was reduced to a charred ruin. More than 13,000 houses, 87 churches and 44 livery halls were destroyed, the historic city gates were wrecked, and the Guildhall, St Paul’s Cathedral, Baynard’s Castle and the Royal Exchange were severely damaged – in some cases, beyond repair.
Those with more than a passing knowledge of the crucial facts might be aware of accounts of King Charles II fighting the fire alongside his brother, the Duke of York; of Samuel Pepys taking pains to bury his prized parmesan cheese; or of the French watchmaker Robert Hubert meeting his death at Tyburn after (falsely) claiming to have started the blaze. Here are 10 more facts you may not know about the Great Fire of London…
1) It did not start on Pudding LaneThomas Farriner’s bakehouse was not located on Pudding Lane proper. Hearth Tax records created just before the fire place Farriner’s bakehouse on Fish Yard, a small enclave off Pudding Lane. His immediate neighbours included a waterbearer named Henry More, a sexton [a person who looks after a church and churchyard] named Thomas Birt, the parish ‘clearke’, a plasterer named George Porter, one Alice Spencer, a widow named Mrs Mary Whittacre, and a turner named John Bibie.
Billingsgate, London, pictured in 1598. Until boundary changes in 2003, the ward included Pudding Lane. (Photo by Culture Club/Getty Images)2) The Great Fire of London was not Thomas Farriner’s first brush with troubleIn 1627, the then 10- or 11-year-old Thomas Farriner was discovered by a city constable wandering alone within the city walls, having run away from his master [it is not known why he had a master at this time]. He was detained at Bridewell Prison, where the incident was recorded in the book of minutes.
During the 17th century, Bridewell (a former Tudor palace) was a kind of proto-correctional facility where young waifs and strays would often be sent to receive a rudimentary education, many of them then cherry-picked to become apprentices to the prison’s patrons.
During the boy’s hearing, it transpired that he had attempted to run away from his master three or four times previously. Farriner was released, only to be detained once more in 1628 for the same reason. A year later he was apprenticed as a baker under one Thomas Dodson.
3) Far from levelling the city, the Great Fire of London scorched the skin and flesh from the city’s buildings – but their skeletons remainedThe ruins of many of London’s buildings had to be demolished before rebuilding work could begin. A sketch from 1673 by Thomas Wyck shows the extent of the ruins of St Paul’s Cathedral that remained. John Evelyn described the remaining stones as standing upright, fragile and “calcined”.
What’s more, the burning lasted months, not days: Pepys recorded that cellars were still burning in March of the following year. With plenty of nooks and crannies to commandeer, gangs operated among the ruins, pretending to offer travellers a ‘link’ (escorted passage) – only to rob them blind and leave them for dead. Many of those who lost their homes and livelihood to the fire built temporary shacks on the ruins of their former homes and shops until this was prohibited.
Old St Paul's Cathedral burning in the Great Fire of London, 1666. By Wenceslaus Hollar. (Photo by Guildhall Library & Art Gallery/Heritage Images/Getty Images)4) At the time of the Great Fire, England was engaged in a costly war with the Dutch Republic and was gearing up for one last battleThe conflict, known as the Second Anglo-Dutch War, was the second of three 17th-century maritime wars to be fought between the English and the Dutch over transatlantic trade supremacy. By September 1666 there had already been five major engagements: the battle of Lowestoft (1665); the battle of Vågen (1665); the Four Days’ Battle (1666); St James’s Day Battle (1666); and Holmes’s Bonfire (1666).
In the confusion of the blaze, some believed that the Great Fire of London had been started by Dutch merchants in retaliation for the last of these engagements – a vicious raid on the Dutch islands of Vlieland and Terschelling – which had occurred barely a month earlier. That attack had been orchestrated by Sir Robert Holmes (renowned for his short fuse and unpredictable nature) and resulted in the destruction of an estimated 150 Dutch merchant ships and, crucially, the torching of the town of West-Terschelling.
While the attack was celebrated with bonfires and bells in London, it appalled the Dutch, and there was rioting in Amsterdam. Aphra Behn – at that time an English spy stationed in Antwerp – wrote how she had seen a letter from a merchant’s wife “that desires her husband to com [sic] to Amsterdam home for that theare [sic] never was so great a desolation & mourning”. Behn was supposed to travel to Dort to continue her espionage, but declared that she “dare as well be hang’d as go”.
5) Though we do not know exactly how many people died as a result of the Great Fire of London, it was almost certainly more than commonly accepted figuresIn the traditional telling of the Great Fire story, the human cost is negligible. Indeed, only a few years after the blaze, Edward Chamberlayne claimed that “not above six or eight persons were burnt,” and an Essex vicar named Ralph Josselin noted that “few perished in the flames.” There was undoubtedly enough warning to ensure that a large proportion of London’s population vacated hazardous areas, but for every sick person helped out of their house, there must have been others with no one to aid them. What’s more, parish records hint at a far greater death toll than previously supposed.
At the parish of St Giles Cripplegate, for example, the number of burials increased by a third (presumably a result of citizens from destroyed parishes using this surviving church). Interestingly, there was a disproportionate rise (by two-thirds) in the number of deaths due to being “aged” and an increase in deaths attributed to “fright”. Likewise, the parish records of St Boltoph Bishopsgate show that the mean age at the time of death rose by an astonishing 12 years, from 18.3 to 31.3. This suggests either that older people were more likely to die in the month of September or that, in an age in which infanticide was rife, the deaths of young infants were not being recorded – perhaps even both.
The diarist John Evelyn certainly believed that the foul smell in the air at the time of the fire was caused by the bodies, beds and other combustible goods of “some poor creatures”, and the poet John Dryden – who, it must be said, was out of London at the time – wrote of “helpless infants left amidst the fire”. When reports reached France, a substantial loss of life was implied: “The letters from London speak of the terrible sights of persons burned to death and calcined limbs, making it easy to believe the terror though it cannot be exactly described. The old, tender children and many sick and helpless persons were all burned in their beds and served as fuel for the flames.”
6) Louis XIV of France offered to helpIt took more than a week for news of the fire to reach the French royal court in Paris, but when it did there was talk of little else. The Venetian ambassador in the French capital declared that “this accident… will be memorable through all the centuries.”
Privately, Louis XIV must have been thrilled. It was wrongly believed that the fire had destroyed England’s magazine stores and that the English navy would be forced to retire. Because of a 1662 treaty with the Dutch Republic, France had been obliged to enter the Anglo-Dutch War on the side of the Dutch, but the French king had neither the appetite nor the navy to play an active role.
Louis XIV publicly ordered that he would not tolerate “any rejoicings about it [the Great Fire], being such a deplorable accident involving injury to so many unhappy people”, and offered to send aid in the shape of food provisions and anything else that might be required to relieve the suffering of those left destitute.
King Louis XIV of France, c1690. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
7) There had been a genuine plot to burn the City of LondonIn April 1666, a group of parliamentarians led by John Rathbone and William Saunders were tried at the Old Bailey and found guilty of conspiring to assassinate Charles II, overthrow government and fire the City of London, letting down the portcullis to keep out assistance. The trial was recorded in the London Gazette, which revealed that the plotters purportedly had the support of a conspirator in Holland and had planned to execute their “Hellish design” on the anniversary of Oliver Cromwell’s death, 3 September.
8) People let their imaginations run away with themBy 6 September, news of the fire had travelled as far as Berwick, where local soldiers claimed that they had seen visions of “ships in the air”. Reporting the phenomenon back to Whitehall, one Mr Scott assured his contact that he believed it to have just been their imaginations. As he travelled across Wiltshire to gather more information about the fire, Bulstrode Whitelocke bumped into his friend Sir Seymour Pyle who had “had too much wine”. Pyle claimed that there had been a huge fight between 60,000 Presbyterians and the militia, which had resulted in the death and imprisonment of 30,000 rebels. Whitelocke soon discovered that Pyle had been “drunke & swearing & lying att almost every word”.
London Bridge on fire during the Great Fire of London, 1666. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)9) The Great Fire of London was predictedA few weeks before the fire, one Mr Light claimed to have been asked by a “zealous Papist”: “You expect great things in ’66, and think that Rome will be destroyed, but what if it be London?”
Meanwhile, five months before the fire Elizabeth Styles claimed to have been told by a Frenchman that at some point between June and October there would not be “a house left between Temple Bar and London Bridge”.
In 1651, an astrologer named William Lilly created a pamphlet entitled Monarchy or No Monarchy that contained illustrative predictions of the future state of England. The images depicted not only a city blazing with fire, but scenes of naval warfare, infestations of rodents, mass death and starvation. Unsurprisingly, Lilly was called in for questioning following the fire of 1666.
10) The Great Fire wasn’t the only blaze in London in 1666London was thrown into a panic during the evening of 9 November when a fire broke out in the Horse Guard House, next to Whitehall Palace. It was believed that the blaze had been caused by a candle falling into some straw. According to Samuel Pepys, the whole city was put on alarm by the “horrid great fire” and a lady even fell into fits of fear. With drums beating and guards running up and down the streets, by 10pm the fire was extinguished, with little damage caused.
Rebecca Rideal is a specialist factual television producer and writer whose credits include The Adventurers’ Guide to Britain, Bloody Tales of the Tower and David Attenborough’s First Life. She runs the online magazine The History Vault and is currently studying for her PhD on Restoration London during the Great Plague and the Great Fire at University College London.
Her latest book, 1666: Plague, War and Hellfire (John Murray, 2016), is out now.
September 6, 2016
Coffee, plague and the Great Fire: the pleasures and perils of Restoration London
History Extra
Great Plague of 1665, London. Contemporary engraving. (Photo by PHAS/UIG via Getty Images)
Two of the greatest disasters in London’s history both occurred in the 1660s: plague and fire struck the city in successive years. Neither was a novelty. The bubonic plague was endemic – there were outbreaks in 1603 and 1625 that killed tens of thousands – but neither was as bad as the Great Plague of 1665. By some estimates it caused the deaths of a quarter of London’s population. Fire, meanwhile, was a permanent danger in a 17th-century city but it is difficult to exaggerate the damage caused by the Great Fire. “In three days the most flourishing city in the world is a ruinous heap,” one official wrote, and he was right. More than 13,000 houses were gone and so too were 87 parish churches, St Paul’s Cathedral, 44 Livery Company halls and three of the city gates. Almost miraculously there was only a handful of deaths recorded – less than 10 according to most authorities.
If you were a Londoner in the 17th century, however, death was an ever-present possibility. All sorts of things could carry you off. Examination of just one of the weekly ‘bills of mortality’, the official death statistics of the day, for 1665 is revealing. Given the year it is no surprise that by far the greatest number of fatalities – more than 7,000 – were caused by the plague. Other diseases, however, also took their toll. Just over 100 deaths were ascribed to ‘spotted fever’; 134 to ‘consumption’; 64 to ‘convulsion’ and 51 to ‘griping in the guts’. Three unfortunates were so troubled by ‘wind’ that it proved fatal to them. Some 43 women died in childbirth. In addition there were the one-off accidents: one man was “burnt in his bed by a candle at St Giles Cripplegate”; another was “killed by a fall from the belfry at All-Hallows-the-Great”.
Doctors perform a caesarean section, c1650. Some 43 women in London died in childbirth in 1665. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
DiseasePlague was only the scariest of an assortment of diseases that might befall you. Smallpox was prevalent, killing thousands and disfiguring many more. The unmistakable ‘pockmarks’, signs that a person had survived the disease, would have been visible on the faces of a remarkably high proportion of London’s citizens, perhaps as many as half. Tuberculosis was another prolific killer, its symptoms exacerbated by the smoke and poor air of the city. It is easy to forget just how many of the medical advances we take for granted today were made in the past 150 years. Three-and-a-half centuries ago physicians were largely helpless in the face of most illnesses. It is little wonder, then, that people resorted to remedies and ‘cures’ that now seem bizarre. The London Pharmacopoeia, or list of drugs, issued by the College of Physicians in 1618 and reprinted several times later in the century, suggested such dubious ingredients for its prescriptions as dog excrement, moss from a recently buried skull and the saliva of a fasting man.
SmogThe city itself was not a healthy place. Pollution of all kinds was ever present. Smog was not just a consequence of the Industrial Revolution. The burning of sea-coal in domestic fires meant that 17th-century London was as foul-smelling and filled with sulphurous smoke as the Victorian city. John Evelyn claimed that nearly half the deaths in the city were caused by it and that “the inhabitants are never free from coughs and importunate rheumatisms, spitting of impostumated and corrupt matter”.
The city streets were mostly narrow, packed and filthy. A 1662 Act of Parliament admitted that “the common highways leading unto and from the cities of London and Westminster” were “miry and foul” and were thus “noisome, dangerous and inconvenient to the inhabitants”. Drainage was poor – in some areas non-existent – and faeces, both human and animal, befouled the roads. The dangers of being deluged by filth and rubbish thrown from windows were such that the wise pedestrian strove to walk under the projecting upper storeys of the houses. Jostling for the best positions next to the walls could lead to fights and even, on occasions, deaths.
CrimeThe streets were also ill-lit and dark, perfect for footpads and robbers. Although their heyday was in the following century, highwaymen (muggers) had begun to demand that travellers on the edges of the city should stand and deliver. One of the most famous was Claude Duval, who began his career as a ‘gentleman of the road’ in 1666. Many of the stories told of Duval are later inventions by writers with a romantic imagination, but it may well be true that he once invited the wife of one of his victims to dance a coranto with him on the roadside and then charged her husband £100 for the entertainment the dancing had provided. He was captured in January 1670, drunk, in a pub called the Hole-in-the-Wall in Chandos Street, found guilty of robbery and, despite attempts to persuade the king to pardon him, was hanged at Tyburn.
The highwayman John Cottingham robbing a mail wagon, c1680. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
Duval was an aristocrat of crime. More typical were the petty pickpockets who stole purses and handkerchiefs or the housebreakers who ran off with bed linen, clothes and anything else they could carry. Punishment for such crimes was draconian. In theory at least, if the value of stolen goods exceeded 12 pence, theft was punishable by death. In practice, many judges and magistrates found reasons to avoid the letter of the law but plenty of people – men, women and even children – were condemned to “dancing on air” at Tyburn largely because their poverty and desperation had driven them to theft.
Unexpected pleasuresAnd yet, despite all the perils of 17th-century London, life in the great city was not all gloom and doom. Its citizens found much to amuse and delight them. Pleasures that had been banned under Cromwell’s Commonwealth returned with Charles II’s restoration. John Aubrey reported that “Maypoles which in the late hypocritical times ‘twas forbidden to set up now were set up in every cross-way” and “the tallest maypole ever seen” was erected in the Strand. The late hypocritical times had, of course, not been kind to the theatre but the stage enjoyed a renaissance under Charles. The king loved plays in general and, in particular, some of the actresses who appeared in them. (Nell Gwynne famously began her career selling oranges to theatregoers, progressed to roles in comedies and ended up in the royal bed. And she was not the only actress to catch the king’s eye.) A new theatre was built in Drury Lane and another was created in Lincoln’s Inn Fields by converting an old tennis court.
Nell Gwynne, c1670. (Photo by Edward Gooch/Getty Images)
Music was another source of entertainment, from street musicians and strolling ballad-singers to makeshift concerts at gatherings of friends. The diarist Samuel Pepys was passionately fond of music, which he called “the thing of the world I love most”. He played the flageolet, a kind of early flute, and was possessed of a fine singing voice. Even he, however, drew the line at the bagpipes which, he reckoned, produced “mighty barbarous music”. He paid for his wife to take dancing lessons, although he grew very jealous of Mr Pembleton, the dancing master, who was, he decided, becoming far too friendly with his pupil. Eventually, he himself also took lessons from Pembleton and was soon reporting merry evenings when the three of them “danced three or four country dances”.
Cruel entertainmentCruder and crueller entertainments than country dancing could be found in Southwark, the centre of the theatrical world in Shakespeare’s time and also home to less attractive pursuits. Bear-baiting, in which a hobbled and occasionally blind bear was set upon by a pack of dogs, was enjoyed by many. So too was bull-baiting. In his diary entry for 14 August 1666, Pepys records his visit to the Bear Garden with his wife and a friend where they saw “some good sport of the bull’s tossing of the dogs”. The diarist did have the grace to admit that it was “a very rude and nasty pleasure”. Four years later another great diarist of the period, John Evelyn, “went with some friends to the Bear Garden where was cock-fighting, dog-fighting, bear and bull-baiting, it being a famous day for all these butcherly sports”. While he was there, “one of the bulls tossed a dog full into a lady’s lap as she sat in one of the boxes”.
Bear Garden, Southwark, London, after its third rebuilding, 1648. By this time plays and prize-fighting had been added to the original entertainment of bear-baiting. Woodcut based on a detail in the Bohemian etcher and engraver Wenceslaus Hollar's view of London. (Photo by Ann Ronan Pictures/Print Collector/Getty Images)
Perhaps the lady was not too bothered. After all, this was an age in which the average Londoner necessarily had a strong stomach. Executions provided a form of public theatre, as they were to do for nearly 200 years to come. In the years after Charles II’s restoration, those who had condemned his father to death were pursued relentlessly by the regime. Many were executed and the heads of some of these regicides were stuck on top of the city gates, often remaining there for years. Oliver Cromwell was posthumously disinterred from his supposedly final resting place in Westminster Abbey and his skull placed on a spike above Westminster Hall, where it stayed for more than 20 years. Many citizens and visitors to the city flocked to see it.
More edifying excursions could be made to outlying villages like Islington and Highgate, to New Spring Gardens (later Vauxhall Gardens) south of the river and to the royal parks. For those with an inquisitive mind, cabinets of curiosities were the museums of the day. One, advertised as open for business in the Strand in June 1661, offered the sight of “an entire Egyptian mummy with all the hieroglyphics”. The collection of the botanist John Tradescant included a deerskin cloak that had once supposedly belonged to the Native American chieftain Powhatan, father of Pocahontas, and which is now in Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum. Another magnet for visitors was the royal menagerie, housed in the Tower of London, which was home to the city’s more exotic animals. Pepys took a party of women and children there in May 1662 and “showed them the lions”.
Food and drinkFor those who could afford it, food was rich and plentiful. One meal for 12 persons from 1663 consisted of “a fricassee of rabbits and chicken, a leg of mutton boiled, three carps in a dish, a great dish of a side of lamb, a dish of roasted pigeons, a dish of four lobsters, three tarts, a most rare lamprey pie, and a dish of anchovies”. Vegetables are not mentioned, either because they were not on the table at all or because they were considered too ordinary to describe. The poor, of course, could only dream of dining so lavishly. They would have rarely eaten meat at all, although oysters, today considered rather upmarket, were then so plentiful that they were a staple food for Londoners of all classes.
In pre-refrigeration days, it was difficult to keep food fresh. Pepys was mortified when he invited a colleague to dinner, and a sturgeon was brought to the table, “upon which I saw very many little worms creeping”.
New drinks had recently arrived in town. Hot chocolate came from the New World via Spain, but the most successful novelty was coffee. The first coffeehouse in London was opened in an alley off Cornhill in 1652 by a Greek man named Pasqua Rosee (who was originally from Sicily and had lived in Smyrna). Ten years later there were nearly 100 of them. They were used almost exclusively by men.
Men enjoying a drink and a chat in a coffee shop, 1674. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
One of the unfortunate consequences of the fashion for this “newfangled, abominable, heathenish liquor”, according to The Women’s Petition Against Coffee, a pamphlet published in 1674, was the sapping of the nation’s virility. “Our gallants,” the pamphlet’s writer claimed, “are become mere cock-sparrows” who “are not able to stand to it, and in the very first charge fall down flat before us.” Better, perhaps, to stick to more traditional drinks like beer and ale, which were consumed at home and in the hundreds of taverns that catered to the city’s thirsty population.
The Londoners of the 1660s had to face crises unmatched in the city’s history until the Second World War. They struggled to survive in a dangerous world, one in which life was cheap and death could be just around the corner, but they did so with the energy and capacity for enjoyment for which the inhabitants of this great city have always been known.
Nick Rennison is the author of The Book of London Lists (Canongate, 2006) and co-editor, with Travis Elborough, of A London Year (Frances Lincoln, 2013).
Great Plague of 1665, London. Contemporary engraving. (Photo by PHAS/UIG via Getty Images)
Two of the greatest disasters in London’s history both occurred in the 1660s: plague and fire struck the city in successive years. Neither was a novelty. The bubonic plague was endemic – there were outbreaks in 1603 and 1625 that killed tens of thousands – but neither was as bad as the Great Plague of 1665. By some estimates it caused the deaths of a quarter of London’s population. Fire, meanwhile, was a permanent danger in a 17th-century city but it is difficult to exaggerate the damage caused by the Great Fire. “In three days the most flourishing city in the world is a ruinous heap,” one official wrote, and he was right. More than 13,000 houses were gone and so too were 87 parish churches, St Paul’s Cathedral, 44 Livery Company halls and three of the city gates. Almost miraculously there was only a handful of deaths recorded – less than 10 according to most authorities.
If you were a Londoner in the 17th century, however, death was an ever-present possibility. All sorts of things could carry you off. Examination of just one of the weekly ‘bills of mortality’, the official death statistics of the day, for 1665 is revealing. Given the year it is no surprise that by far the greatest number of fatalities – more than 7,000 – were caused by the plague. Other diseases, however, also took their toll. Just over 100 deaths were ascribed to ‘spotted fever’; 134 to ‘consumption’; 64 to ‘convulsion’ and 51 to ‘griping in the guts’. Three unfortunates were so troubled by ‘wind’ that it proved fatal to them. Some 43 women died in childbirth. In addition there were the one-off accidents: one man was “burnt in his bed by a candle at St Giles Cripplegate”; another was “killed by a fall from the belfry at All-Hallows-the-Great”.
Doctors perform a caesarean section, c1650. Some 43 women in London died in childbirth in 1665. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
DiseasePlague was only the scariest of an assortment of diseases that might befall you. Smallpox was prevalent, killing thousands and disfiguring many more. The unmistakable ‘pockmarks’, signs that a person had survived the disease, would have been visible on the faces of a remarkably high proportion of London’s citizens, perhaps as many as half. Tuberculosis was another prolific killer, its symptoms exacerbated by the smoke and poor air of the city. It is easy to forget just how many of the medical advances we take for granted today were made in the past 150 years. Three-and-a-half centuries ago physicians were largely helpless in the face of most illnesses. It is little wonder, then, that people resorted to remedies and ‘cures’ that now seem bizarre. The London Pharmacopoeia, or list of drugs, issued by the College of Physicians in 1618 and reprinted several times later in the century, suggested such dubious ingredients for its prescriptions as dog excrement, moss from a recently buried skull and the saliva of a fasting man.
SmogThe city itself was not a healthy place. Pollution of all kinds was ever present. Smog was not just a consequence of the Industrial Revolution. The burning of sea-coal in domestic fires meant that 17th-century London was as foul-smelling and filled with sulphurous smoke as the Victorian city. John Evelyn claimed that nearly half the deaths in the city were caused by it and that “the inhabitants are never free from coughs and importunate rheumatisms, spitting of impostumated and corrupt matter”.
The city streets were mostly narrow, packed and filthy. A 1662 Act of Parliament admitted that “the common highways leading unto and from the cities of London and Westminster” were “miry and foul” and were thus “noisome, dangerous and inconvenient to the inhabitants”. Drainage was poor – in some areas non-existent – and faeces, both human and animal, befouled the roads. The dangers of being deluged by filth and rubbish thrown from windows were such that the wise pedestrian strove to walk under the projecting upper storeys of the houses. Jostling for the best positions next to the walls could lead to fights and even, on occasions, deaths.
CrimeThe streets were also ill-lit and dark, perfect for footpads and robbers. Although their heyday was in the following century, highwaymen (muggers) had begun to demand that travellers on the edges of the city should stand and deliver. One of the most famous was Claude Duval, who began his career as a ‘gentleman of the road’ in 1666. Many of the stories told of Duval are later inventions by writers with a romantic imagination, but it may well be true that he once invited the wife of one of his victims to dance a coranto with him on the roadside and then charged her husband £100 for the entertainment the dancing had provided. He was captured in January 1670, drunk, in a pub called the Hole-in-the-Wall in Chandos Street, found guilty of robbery and, despite attempts to persuade the king to pardon him, was hanged at Tyburn.
The highwayman John Cottingham robbing a mail wagon, c1680. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
Duval was an aristocrat of crime. More typical were the petty pickpockets who stole purses and handkerchiefs or the housebreakers who ran off with bed linen, clothes and anything else they could carry. Punishment for such crimes was draconian. In theory at least, if the value of stolen goods exceeded 12 pence, theft was punishable by death. In practice, many judges and magistrates found reasons to avoid the letter of the law but plenty of people – men, women and even children – were condemned to “dancing on air” at Tyburn largely because their poverty and desperation had driven them to theft.
Unexpected pleasuresAnd yet, despite all the perils of 17th-century London, life in the great city was not all gloom and doom. Its citizens found much to amuse and delight them. Pleasures that had been banned under Cromwell’s Commonwealth returned with Charles II’s restoration. John Aubrey reported that “Maypoles which in the late hypocritical times ‘twas forbidden to set up now were set up in every cross-way” and “the tallest maypole ever seen” was erected in the Strand. The late hypocritical times had, of course, not been kind to the theatre but the stage enjoyed a renaissance under Charles. The king loved plays in general and, in particular, some of the actresses who appeared in them. (Nell Gwynne famously began her career selling oranges to theatregoers, progressed to roles in comedies and ended up in the royal bed. And she was not the only actress to catch the king’s eye.) A new theatre was built in Drury Lane and another was created in Lincoln’s Inn Fields by converting an old tennis court.
Nell Gwynne, c1670. (Photo by Edward Gooch/Getty Images)
Music was another source of entertainment, from street musicians and strolling ballad-singers to makeshift concerts at gatherings of friends. The diarist Samuel Pepys was passionately fond of music, which he called “the thing of the world I love most”. He played the flageolet, a kind of early flute, and was possessed of a fine singing voice. Even he, however, drew the line at the bagpipes which, he reckoned, produced “mighty barbarous music”. He paid for his wife to take dancing lessons, although he grew very jealous of Mr Pembleton, the dancing master, who was, he decided, becoming far too friendly with his pupil. Eventually, he himself also took lessons from Pembleton and was soon reporting merry evenings when the three of them “danced three or four country dances”.
Cruel entertainmentCruder and crueller entertainments than country dancing could be found in Southwark, the centre of the theatrical world in Shakespeare’s time and also home to less attractive pursuits. Bear-baiting, in which a hobbled and occasionally blind bear was set upon by a pack of dogs, was enjoyed by many. So too was bull-baiting. In his diary entry for 14 August 1666, Pepys records his visit to the Bear Garden with his wife and a friend where they saw “some good sport of the bull’s tossing of the dogs”. The diarist did have the grace to admit that it was “a very rude and nasty pleasure”. Four years later another great diarist of the period, John Evelyn, “went with some friends to the Bear Garden where was cock-fighting, dog-fighting, bear and bull-baiting, it being a famous day for all these butcherly sports”. While he was there, “one of the bulls tossed a dog full into a lady’s lap as she sat in one of the boxes”.
Bear Garden, Southwark, London, after its third rebuilding, 1648. By this time plays and prize-fighting had been added to the original entertainment of bear-baiting. Woodcut based on a detail in the Bohemian etcher and engraver Wenceslaus Hollar's view of London. (Photo by Ann Ronan Pictures/Print Collector/Getty Images)
Perhaps the lady was not too bothered. After all, this was an age in which the average Londoner necessarily had a strong stomach. Executions provided a form of public theatre, as they were to do for nearly 200 years to come. In the years after Charles II’s restoration, those who had condemned his father to death were pursued relentlessly by the regime. Many were executed and the heads of some of these regicides were stuck on top of the city gates, often remaining there for years. Oliver Cromwell was posthumously disinterred from his supposedly final resting place in Westminster Abbey and his skull placed on a spike above Westminster Hall, where it stayed for more than 20 years. Many citizens and visitors to the city flocked to see it.
More edifying excursions could be made to outlying villages like Islington and Highgate, to New Spring Gardens (later Vauxhall Gardens) south of the river and to the royal parks. For those with an inquisitive mind, cabinets of curiosities were the museums of the day. One, advertised as open for business in the Strand in June 1661, offered the sight of “an entire Egyptian mummy with all the hieroglyphics”. The collection of the botanist John Tradescant included a deerskin cloak that had once supposedly belonged to the Native American chieftain Powhatan, father of Pocahontas, and which is now in Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum. Another magnet for visitors was the royal menagerie, housed in the Tower of London, which was home to the city’s more exotic animals. Pepys took a party of women and children there in May 1662 and “showed them the lions”.
Food and drinkFor those who could afford it, food was rich and plentiful. One meal for 12 persons from 1663 consisted of “a fricassee of rabbits and chicken, a leg of mutton boiled, three carps in a dish, a great dish of a side of lamb, a dish of roasted pigeons, a dish of four lobsters, three tarts, a most rare lamprey pie, and a dish of anchovies”. Vegetables are not mentioned, either because they were not on the table at all or because they were considered too ordinary to describe. The poor, of course, could only dream of dining so lavishly. They would have rarely eaten meat at all, although oysters, today considered rather upmarket, were then so plentiful that they were a staple food for Londoners of all classes.
In pre-refrigeration days, it was difficult to keep food fresh. Pepys was mortified when he invited a colleague to dinner, and a sturgeon was brought to the table, “upon which I saw very many little worms creeping”.
New drinks had recently arrived in town. Hot chocolate came from the New World via Spain, but the most successful novelty was coffee. The first coffeehouse in London was opened in an alley off Cornhill in 1652 by a Greek man named Pasqua Rosee (who was originally from Sicily and had lived in Smyrna). Ten years later there were nearly 100 of them. They were used almost exclusively by men.
Men enjoying a drink and a chat in a coffee shop, 1674. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
One of the unfortunate consequences of the fashion for this “newfangled, abominable, heathenish liquor”, according to The Women’s Petition Against Coffee, a pamphlet published in 1674, was the sapping of the nation’s virility. “Our gallants,” the pamphlet’s writer claimed, “are become mere cock-sparrows” who “are not able to stand to it, and in the very first charge fall down flat before us.” Better, perhaps, to stick to more traditional drinks like beer and ale, which were consumed at home and in the hundreds of taverns that catered to the city’s thirsty population.
The Londoners of the 1660s had to face crises unmatched in the city’s history until the Second World War. They struggled to survive in a dangerous world, one in which life was cheap and death could be just around the corner, but they did so with the energy and capacity for enjoyment for which the inhabitants of this great city have always been known.
Nick Rennison is the author of The Book of London Lists (Canongate, 2006) and co-editor, with Travis Elborough, of A London Year (Frances Lincoln, 2013).
September 5, 2016
Medieval London’s worst smells
History Extra
A woman emptying a chamber pot. "The sewers and the streets were virtually indistinguishable", says Dan Snow. Wood carving, 1489. (Photo by Archiv Gerstenberg/ullstein bild via Getty Images)
1) The peopleThe population would have absolutely stunk. They did not wash very often. They often didn’t have more than one set of clothes. There was very little idea of personal sanitation, and in the summer they would all have been hot and sweaty.
The only source of water for washing was the river and we know gong farmers, people that emptied the latrines, would have gone and washed there. But of course the river was also the receptacle for all the mess. We think people would have avoided washing in the winter. After a period of warmer weather from about the 10th to the 13th centuries, it got quite cool again and so sometimes the Thames would have been frozen for weeks on end, so there would have been limited opportunities to bathe there. I think you’d probably avoid bathing in the river if it was cold.
Given how much perfume the richer people wore, I think it’s fair to assume that some of the slummy areas, the overcrowded areas, were pretty stinking, partly thanks to the inhabitants. Nonetheless, our information is that people did regard washing as rather effete. Bathing just wasn’t that regular – it’s a total inversion of our modern obsession with daily washing.
2) The ThamesThe river was basically the only means of getting sewage, certainly liquid waste, out of the city. The river was the way they got drinking water but also where they dumped all their waste. No wonder the fish died – it would have been absolutely foul.
The off-cuts, the various bits of offal, things that weren’t going to be eaten from the butchers, these were wheeled down in wheelbarrows to the Thames and dumped off a specially constructed pier in an attempt to put them in the middle of the river, the fastest-flowing part. Corpses would have been knocking about in the river too.
Dick Whittington built public privies over the river, suspended on wooden piles where you could go and excrete straight in the water. It was seen as a handy way to get rid of human waste.
One advantage that London had over Paris is that at least the river was very tidal, so there is relatively fresh water coming in twice a day – it’s acting as a huge flushing system for London. The Seine is not tidal – it’s very placid, gently flowing – so it would have been absolutely filthy.
3) The streetsThe sewers and the streets were virtually indistinguishable. There really wasn’t much of a sewerage system, there would just be gutters running down the edge of some streets. And indeed ditches that were dug down the middle of the street with a slight camber on them as well.
The streets were the receptacles for all waste. There were chamber pots being emptied into them. There were the entrails of slaughtered animals, the dead cats, the dogs. Barber-surgeons were obsessed by letting blood and that would have been drained off in the street as well. We know that in the summer, when the rain didn’t come, the streets would have just piled high with the detritus of the city.
The street would have been so disgusting that the people wore pattens. These were worn over a normal shoe and were effectively wooden clogs raising you off the ground. They would elevate you above the human effluent and the mess that was in the streets.
‘Pattens’ comes from patt, meaning animal hoof. In fact, the guild for shoemakers in Britain is still called the Worshipful Company of Pattenmakers. They made me a pair and I attempted to walk around on fish entrails, cow poo, mud and stuff – it was great fun.
4) TanneriesTanning was an incredibly important process. It turns animal hides into leather, which is obviously hugely useful. I went through the tanning process and it was a totally rancid thing to do. There are huge amounts of waste products at every stage. There’s alkali run-off from the initial process of soaking the hides. There’s the urine and
dog poo that you use to treat the hides. You have to separate the subcutaneous fat from the animal skin with a big knife, to shave all the residual fat off the hide. That is basically a waste product.
Tanning was an absolutely foul process, which stank, and also created chemical compounds sometimes that were actually very, very dangerous – they’d burn your mouth.
The authorities tried to regulate where the tanneries and the slaughterhouses could be. As the medieval period went on, there was an attempt to regulate London more.
Dan Snow guts a pig the medieval way in a slaughterhouse. (BBC)
5) The latrinesWealthy families would have had a private latrine in the back garden and obviously that had to be cleaned out, by gong farmers or muckrackers. Otherwise, latrines were communal. One man called Richard the Raker famously drowned in one of these cesspits.
Gong farmers and muckrakers were well paid. They would come in at night and shovel the waste out, using carts to carry it away. There’s no way of controlling the smell but you could try to keep on top of it by emptying the cesspits. As you can imagine, if there was torrential rain they’d overflow and just join the mess in the streets.
Thanks to the Books of Assizes, which contain records of complaints by neighbours, we know about two dodgy plumbers who built a toilet over the street with an overhang so that the waste would just drop down into the street. We also know about a woman who used guttering to carry away her waste. Her neighbours complained because when it rained their gutters became full of her excrement.
Dan Snow is an author and historian who has written, researched and presented many TV documentaries. He spoke to Jonathan Wright about his BBC Two series Filthy Cities, which he presented in 2011.
A woman emptying a chamber pot. "The sewers and the streets were virtually indistinguishable", says Dan Snow. Wood carving, 1489. (Photo by Archiv Gerstenberg/ullstein bild via Getty Images) 1) The peopleThe population would have absolutely stunk. They did not wash very often. They often didn’t have more than one set of clothes. There was very little idea of personal sanitation, and in the summer they would all have been hot and sweaty.
The only source of water for washing was the river and we know gong farmers, people that emptied the latrines, would have gone and washed there. But of course the river was also the receptacle for all the mess. We think people would have avoided washing in the winter. After a period of warmer weather from about the 10th to the 13th centuries, it got quite cool again and so sometimes the Thames would have been frozen for weeks on end, so there would have been limited opportunities to bathe there. I think you’d probably avoid bathing in the river if it was cold.
Given how much perfume the richer people wore, I think it’s fair to assume that some of the slummy areas, the overcrowded areas, were pretty stinking, partly thanks to the inhabitants. Nonetheless, our information is that people did regard washing as rather effete. Bathing just wasn’t that regular – it’s a total inversion of our modern obsession with daily washing.
2) The ThamesThe river was basically the only means of getting sewage, certainly liquid waste, out of the city. The river was the way they got drinking water but also where they dumped all their waste. No wonder the fish died – it would have been absolutely foul.
The off-cuts, the various bits of offal, things that weren’t going to be eaten from the butchers, these were wheeled down in wheelbarrows to the Thames and dumped off a specially constructed pier in an attempt to put them in the middle of the river, the fastest-flowing part. Corpses would have been knocking about in the river too.
Dick Whittington built public privies over the river, suspended on wooden piles where you could go and excrete straight in the water. It was seen as a handy way to get rid of human waste.
One advantage that London had over Paris is that at least the river was very tidal, so there is relatively fresh water coming in twice a day – it’s acting as a huge flushing system for London. The Seine is not tidal – it’s very placid, gently flowing – so it would have been absolutely filthy.
3) The streetsThe sewers and the streets were virtually indistinguishable. There really wasn’t much of a sewerage system, there would just be gutters running down the edge of some streets. And indeed ditches that were dug down the middle of the street with a slight camber on them as well.
The streets were the receptacles for all waste. There were chamber pots being emptied into them. There were the entrails of slaughtered animals, the dead cats, the dogs. Barber-surgeons were obsessed by letting blood and that would have been drained off in the street as well. We know that in the summer, when the rain didn’t come, the streets would have just piled high with the detritus of the city.
The street would have been so disgusting that the people wore pattens. These were worn over a normal shoe and were effectively wooden clogs raising you off the ground. They would elevate you above the human effluent and the mess that was in the streets.
‘Pattens’ comes from patt, meaning animal hoof. In fact, the guild for shoemakers in Britain is still called the Worshipful Company of Pattenmakers. They made me a pair and I attempted to walk around on fish entrails, cow poo, mud and stuff – it was great fun.
4) TanneriesTanning was an incredibly important process. It turns animal hides into leather, which is obviously hugely useful. I went through the tanning process and it was a totally rancid thing to do. There are huge amounts of waste products at every stage. There’s alkali run-off from the initial process of soaking the hides. There’s the urine and
dog poo that you use to treat the hides. You have to separate the subcutaneous fat from the animal skin with a big knife, to shave all the residual fat off the hide. That is basically a waste product.
Tanning was an absolutely foul process, which stank, and also created chemical compounds sometimes that were actually very, very dangerous – they’d burn your mouth.
The authorities tried to regulate where the tanneries and the slaughterhouses could be. As the medieval period went on, there was an attempt to regulate London more.
Dan Snow guts a pig the medieval way in a slaughterhouse. (BBC)
5) The latrinesWealthy families would have had a private latrine in the back garden and obviously that had to be cleaned out, by gong farmers or muckrackers. Otherwise, latrines were communal. One man called Richard the Raker famously drowned in one of these cesspits.
Gong farmers and muckrakers were well paid. They would come in at night and shovel the waste out, using carts to carry it away. There’s no way of controlling the smell but you could try to keep on top of it by emptying the cesspits. As you can imagine, if there was torrential rain they’d overflow and just join the mess in the streets.
Thanks to the Books of Assizes, which contain records of complaints by neighbours, we know about two dodgy plumbers who built a toilet over the street with an overhang so that the waste would just drop down into the street. We also know about a woman who used guttering to carry away her waste. Her neighbours complained because when it rained their gutters became full of her excrement.
Dan Snow is an author and historian who has written, researched and presented many TV documentaries. He spoke to Jonathan Wright about his BBC Two series Filthy Cities, which he presented in 2011.
September 4, 2016
10 things you (probably) didn’t know about the history of London
History Extra
Between 1613 and 1754, a legal loophole meant that on-the-spot marriages could be carried out in an area surrounding the Fleet Debtors’ Prison known as the ‘Liberties of the Fleet’
In Lost London, published by Michael O’Mara Books, Guard reveals intriguing stories that lie beneath the city’s familiar streets, to take readers on a journey through London’s overlooked past. Here, writing for History Extra, Guard lists 10 things you (probably) didn’t know about the history of London…
The origin of Charing CrossAlso known as Eleanor’s Cross, the original Charing Cross was erected by Edward I following the death of his wife of 36 years, Eleanor of Castile, in 1290.
Edward had a memorial cross erected at every resting place of her funeral procession, the last being in the village of Charing – a stopover between the City of London and Westminster. The cross, built in the forecourt of Charing Cross station, is a Victorian replacement of the original, 180 yards away from its former location, now marked by a statue of Charles I on horseback looking down Whitehall.
The invention of Chelsea bunsIn the early 1700s, Chelsea Bun House was opened in Jew’s Row (now Pimlico Road), and it became the site of the invention of Chelsea buns. Its proprietor, Richard Hand, decorated the interior with clocks and curious artefacts.
In its day, the Bun House was hugely famous, prompting Jonathan Swift to celebrate the “Rrrrrrrare Chelsea buns” after he visited in 1711. It even found popularity among royalty, with both George II and George III visiting with their wives and children.
So successful was the business that on Good Fridays, crowds of more than 50,000 people gathered outside the premises to purchase its products.
Chelsea Bun House in Jew’s Row (now Pimlico Road)
St Paul’s was briefly trumpedA vast rotunda known as the Colosseum was built in Regent’s Park by Decimus Burton between 1824 and 1827, featuring a dome very slightly larger than that of St Paul’s Cathedral. It housed a huge canvas panorama of London, painted by Thomas Hornor.
However, the attraction’s initial popularity soon waned, and in 1831 the building was sold to opera singer John Barham, whose dream to turn it into an opera house took both his fortune and his health. Briefly used for magic-lantern shows, the Colosseum was demolished in 1874 or 1875, and is now covered by Cambridge Gate.
It was high class on the StrandFor 800 years before the Embankment was built, the Strand was the site of many of London’s finest houses – it boasted river views and close proximity to the City and Westminster.
Durham House, an example of one such fine residence, was originally built in the mid-14th century as the town house of the Bishop of Durham [though there was a residence of the Bishop of Durham on this site since at least 1220). It went on to serve as residence to both Cardinal Wolsey and Anne Boleyn, and eventually became the home of Sir Walter Ralegh. While living there, Ralegh was memorably drenched with beer by a servant who feared that his master had caught fire when he found him smoking.
Durham House
Euston’s lost archWhen Euston station was first opened in 1837, its entrance was dominated by Euston Arch, which stood 70ft high and was supported by four Doric columns, to make it the largest arch in Great Britain.
Some 100 years later, with the Victoria and Adelaide hotels having been built either side, the arch was recognised as a major landmark, and “the most imposing entrance to a London terminus”.
When the station entrance was completely redesigned and rebuilt in 1962, the heedless demolition of the arch galvanised the nascent preservation movement. Although it failed to save the arch, many other historic buildings owe their survival to groups formed as a result.
The very first Globe theatreConsidering that it is perhaps the most famous theatre in the world, the original Globe had a surprisingly short – though highly eventful – existence. It was built by Lord Chamberlain’s Men, a company of actors that included the most famous playwright of them all, William Shakespeare.
Opened in 1599, the Globe played host to Shakespeare for 14 years, during which time he wrote many of his greatest works. The theatre was destroyed by fire in 1613 after its thatch was accidentally set alight by a cannon during a performance of Henry VIII.
A new theatre was built in 1614, but was demolished in 1644 when all plays were banned by the Puritan parliament.
The original Globe theatre
London’s Las VegasBetween 1613 and 1754, a legal loophole meant that on-the-spot marriages could be carried out in an area surrounding the Fleet Debtors’ Prison known as the ‘Liberties of the Fleet’. There is suspicion that some illicit matches took place, against the will of one or other of the parties, but judging from the number of unions made (estimated to be almost 250,000 in just 60 years up to 1753), it seems more likely that the ability to marry without parental consent might well have been the more common motivation.
The Liberties of the Fleet in many ways resembled Las Vegas of today – a notorious area famed for debauchery, where the reach of the law was restricted.
The London Stock Exchange was originally a coffee shopIn 1680, Jonathan Miles opened Jonathan’s Coffee Shop in Bank. By 1690 there were more than 100 companies trading their shares in the city, and traders would meet at Jonathan’s to gather news from other traders, and from merchants entering the city via the Thames.
At Jonathan’s, the news was written up on boards behind the bar. Over time, traders developed a network of runners who would bring them all the latest on returning ships.
When the Coffee House burnt down in the Cornhill fire of 1748, it was immediately rebuilt with the support of brokers, and was given the name New Jonathan’s. It was renamed the Stock Exchange in 1773.
Jonathan’s Coffee Shop in Bank
The glamorous lifetime of Thorney IslandOriginally formed by a loop of the Thames and the division of the Tyburn River, it is thought that Thorney Island may have been inhabited by the Romans.
King Offa (who died in 796) issued a charter describing it as a “loco terribili”, while its modern name derived from the thorns that covered the area. It went on to become the site of Westminster Abbey and Westminster Palace, now better known as the Houses of Parliament.
With the land drained and the river covered over, Thorney Island has long since disappeared, although the name lives on in Thorney Street, which runs parallel to Millbank, off Horseferry Road.
Impaled heads on London BridgeLondon Bridge has long been central to life in the capital, but one of its more macabre purposes was as a site for the display of traitors’ heads, impaled on spikes to serve as a warning to others.
In the late 16th century, Paul Hentzner, a German visitor to the city, made some notes on the bridge: “Upon this is built a tower, on whose top the heads of such as have been executed for high treason are placed on iron spikes: we counted above thirty.”
Among those known to have suffered this fate through the centuries are William Wallace, Sir Thomas More and Thomas Cromwell.
London Bridge
Lost London: An A-Z of Forgotten Llandmarks and Lost Traditions by Richard Guard, published by Michael O’Mara Books, is now on sale. To find out more, click here.
Between 1613 and 1754, a legal loophole meant that on-the-spot marriages could be carried out in an area surrounding the Fleet Debtors’ Prison known as the ‘Liberties of the Fleet’ In Lost London, published by Michael O’Mara Books, Guard reveals intriguing stories that lie beneath the city’s familiar streets, to take readers on a journey through London’s overlooked past. Here, writing for History Extra, Guard lists 10 things you (probably) didn’t know about the history of London…
The origin of Charing CrossAlso known as Eleanor’s Cross, the original Charing Cross was erected by Edward I following the death of his wife of 36 years, Eleanor of Castile, in 1290.
Edward had a memorial cross erected at every resting place of her funeral procession, the last being in the village of Charing – a stopover between the City of London and Westminster. The cross, built in the forecourt of Charing Cross station, is a Victorian replacement of the original, 180 yards away from its former location, now marked by a statue of Charles I on horseback looking down Whitehall.
The invention of Chelsea bunsIn the early 1700s, Chelsea Bun House was opened in Jew’s Row (now Pimlico Road), and it became the site of the invention of Chelsea buns. Its proprietor, Richard Hand, decorated the interior with clocks and curious artefacts.
In its day, the Bun House was hugely famous, prompting Jonathan Swift to celebrate the “Rrrrrrrare Chelsea buns” after he visited in 1711. It even found popularity among royalty, with both George II and George III visiting with their wives and children.
So successful was the business that on Good Fridays, crowds of more than 50,000 people gathered outside the premises to purchase its products.
Chelsea Bun House in Jew’s Row (now Pimlico Road)St Paul’s was briefly trumpedA vast rotunda known as the Colosseum was built in Regent’s Park by Decimus Burton between 1824 and 1827, featuring a dome very slightly larger than that of St Paul’s Cathedral. It housed a huge canvas panorama of London, painted by Thomas Hornor.
However, the attraction’s initial popularity soon waned, and in 1831 the building was sold to opera singer John Barham, whose dream to turn it into an opera house took both his fortune and his health. Briefly used for magic-lantern shows, the Colosseum was demolished in 1874 or 1875, and is now covered by Cambridge Gate.
It was high class on the StrandFor 800 years before the Embankment was built, the Strand was the site of many of London’s finest houses – it boasted river views and close proximity to the City and Westminster.
Durham House, an example of one such fine residence, was originally built in the mid-14th century as the town house of the Bishop of Durham [though there was a residence of the Bishop of Durham on this site since at least 1220). It went on to serve as residence to both Cardinal Wolsey and Anne Boleyn, and eventually became the home of Sir Walter Ralegh. While living there, Ralegh was memorably drenched with beer by a servant who feared that his master had caught fire when he found him smoking.
Durham House
Euston’s lost archWhen Euston station was first opened in 1837, its entrance was dominated by Euston Arch, which stood 70ft high and was supported by four Doric columns, to make it the largest arch in Great Britain.
Some 100 years later, with the Victoria and Adelaide hotels having been built either side, the arch was recognised as a major landmark, and “the most imposing entrance to a London terminus”.
When the station entrance was completely redesigned and rebuilt in 1962, the heedless demolition of the arch galvanised the nascent preservation movement. Although it failed to save the arch, many other historic buildings owe their survival to groups formed as a result.
The very first Globe theatreConsidering that it is perhaps the most famous theatre in the world, the original Globe had a surprisingly short – though highly eventful – existence. It was built by Lord Chamberlain’s Men, a company of actors that included the most famous playwright of them all, William Shakespeare.
Opened in 1599, the Globe played host to Shakespeare for 14 years, during which time he wrote many of his greatest works. The theatre was destroyed by fire in 1613 after its thatch was accidentally set alight by a cannon during a performance of Henry VIII.
A new theatre was built in 1614, but was demolished in 1644 when all plays were banned by the Puritan parliament.
The original Globe theatre
London’s Las VegasBetween 1613 and 1754, a legal loophole meant that on-the-spot marriages could be carried out in an area surrounding the Fleet Debtors’ Prison known as the ‘Liberties of the Fleet’. There is suspicion that some illicit matches took place, against the will of one or other of the parties, but judging from the number of unions made (estimated to be almost 250,000 in just 60 years up to 1753), it seems more likely that the ability to marry without parental consent might well have been the more common motivation.
The Liberties of the Fleet in many ways resembled Las Vegas of today – a notorious area famed for debauchery, where the reach of the law was restricted.
The London Stock Exchange was originally a coffee shopIn 1680, Jonathan Miles opened Jonathan’s Coffee Shop in Bank. By 1690 there were more than 100 companies trading their shares in the city, and traders would meet at Jonathan’s to gather news from other traders, and from merchants entering the city via the Thames.
At Jonathan’s, the news was written up on boards behind the bar. Over time, traders developed a network of runners who would bring them all the latest on returning ships.
When the Coffee House burnt down in the Cornhill fire of 1748, it was immediately rebuilt with the support of brokers, and was given the name New Jonathan’s. It was renamed the Stock Exchange in 1773.
Jonathan’s Coffee Shop in Bank
The glamorous lifetime of Thorney IslandOriginally formed by a loop of the Thames and the division of the Tyburn River, it is thought that Thorney Island may have been inhabited by the Romans.
King Offa (who died in 796) issued a charter describing it as a “loco terribili”, while its modern name derived from the thorns that covered the area. It went on to become the site of Westminster Abbey and Westminster Palace, now better known as the Houses of Parliament.
With the land drained and the river covered over, Thorney Island has long since disappeared, although the name lives on in Thorney Street, which runs parallel to Millbank, off Horseferry Road.
Impaled heads on London BridgeLondon Bridge has long been central to life in the capital, but one of its more macabre purposes was as a site for the display of traitors’ heads, impaled on spikes to serve as a warning to others.
In the late 16th century, Paul Hentzner, a German visitor to the city, made some notes on the bridge: “Upon this is built a tower, on whose top the heads of such as have been executed for high treason are placed on iron spikes: we counted above thirty.”
Among those known to have suffered this fate through the centuries are William Wallace, Sir Thomas More and Thomas Cromwell.
London BridgeLost London: An A-Z of Forgotten Llandmarks and Lost Traditions by Richard Guard, published by Michael O’Mara Books, is now on sale. To find out more, click here.
September 3, 2016
Translation of 3,000-Year-Old Egyptian Will Reveals Family Disputes Similar to Today
Ancient Origins
Unlike ancient Latin and Greek texts, Egyptian hieroglyphs have been mostly inaccessible for the average ancient history enthusiast. But this is beginning to change with a collection of texts that have been translated into English for modern readers and put into one volume for the first time. Stories and legal documents included in the work paint a clearer picture of what everyday life was like for the ancient Egyptians.
The new book, called Writings from Ancient Egypt is the work of Egyptologist Toby Wilkinson, a fellow of Clare College at Cambridge University. Wilkinson created the volume to enable the general public to witness the beauty and, as the Guardian says “rich literary tradition” that was created over 3,500 years, and covers countless papyri and tomb walls. Wilkinson told The Guardian, “What will surprise people are the insights behind the well-known facade of ancient Egypt, behind the image that everyone has of the pharaohs, Tutankhamun’s mask and the pyramids.”
Stele of Minnakht, chief of the scribes during the reign of Ay (c. 1321 BC). (
Clio20/CC BY SA 3.0
)One of the interesting items included within the collection is a will suggesting that family disputes are not a new phenomenon. The document, called The Will of Naunakht , tells the story of a woman who decided only some of her eight children should be recipients of her estate and clearly disinherits others for not taking care of her in her old age.
Naunakht was a woman who lived in Thebes at the end of the New Kingdom period. Her last will and testament was drawn in November 1147 BC – the third year of the reign of Ramesses V. She was married twice – first to a scribe and then to a tomb workman. Like other women in pharaonic Egypt she had legal rights that equaled her male counterparts. She chose to exercise her ability to dispose of her wealth in a manner that suited her, probably while increasing the familial turmoil that would surround her death. The translated will states:
Egyptian woman carrying goods. Figurine from an 11th dynasty offering. ( Titi Sitria/CC BY SA 3.0 )Not only does Naunakht go against the general practice of dividing her property equally amongst her offspring, she also specifies even more explicitly why some of the children were unworthy (for example one had already received and spent his “fair share” of copper vessels). The document says:
Feminism and the Battle for Women’s Rights in Ancient Egypt Unravelling the literacy of the Egyptian Pharaohs Easy as Alep, Bet, Gimel? Cambridge Research Explores Social Context of Ancient Writing Finally, Naunakht’s last will and testament declares that the whole family had to reunite for a second legal hearing one year later to confirm their acceptance of her final wishes. Those who contested the will in the future could be recipients of a severe punishment - “a hundred blows” and his property.
Family Group of Three. Middle Kingdom limestone. (c. 1850-1800 BC) (
Public Domain
)Some of the other texts in Writings from Ancient Egypt include: a tale of a shipwrecked sailor, a story on a giant snake which rules a magical island, inscriptions referring to a natural disaster, songs, and letters stressing prominent concerns and interests.
The Smithsonian suggests that the new book is a groundbreaking work, saying that:
Weighing of the heart scene, with Ammit sitting, from the book of the dead of Hunefer. (
Public Domain
)Wilkinson has pointed out that there are some translations already available of some of the documents included in his collection, however he said that those translations were made well over 100 years ago, so they are difficult for most modern readers. However, by translating the texts himself, he said that “he was struck by human emotions to which people could relate today.”Top Image: Part of the Book of the Dead of the scribe Nebqed, under the reign of Amenophis III (1391-1353 BC), 18th dynasty. Followed by his mother Amenemheb and his wife Meryt, Nebqed is depicted meeting the Egyptian god of the dead. Source:
Public Domain
By Alicia McDermott
Unlike ancient Latin and Greek texts, Egyptian hieroglyphs have been mostly inaccessible for the average ancient history enthusiast. But this is beginning to change with a collection of texts that have been translated into English for modern readers and put into one volume for the first time. Stories and legal documents included in the work paint a clearer picture of what everyday life was like for the ancient Egyptians.
The new book, called Writings from Ancient Egypt is the work of Egyptologist Toby Wilkinson, a fellow of Clare College at Cambridge University. Wilkinson created the volume to enable the general public to witness the beauty and, as the Guardian says “rich literary tradition” that was created over 3,500 years, and covers countless papyri and tomb walls. Wilkinson told The Guardian, “What will surprise people are the insights behind the well-known facade of ancient Egypt, behind the image that everyone has of the pharaohs, Tutankhamun’s mask and the pyramids.”
Stele of Minnakht, chief of the scribes during the reign of Ay (c. 1321 BC). (
Clio20/CC BY SA 3.0
)One of the interesting items included within the collection is a will suggesting that family disputes are not a new phenomenon. The document, called The Will of Naunakht , tells the story of a woman who decided only some of her eight children should be recipients of her estate and clearly disinherits others for not taking care of her in her old age. Naunakht was a woman who lived in Thebes at the end of the New Kingdom period. Her last will and testament was drawn in November 1147 BC – the third year of the reign of Ramesses V. She was married twice – first to a scribe and then to a tomb workman. Like other women in pharaonic Egypt she had legal rights that equaled her male counterparts. She chose to exercise her ability to dispose of her wealth in a manner that suited her, probably while increasing the familial turmoil that would surround her death. The translated will states:
“As for me, I am a free woman of the land of Pharaoh. I brought up these eight servants of yours and gave them a household – everything as is customarily done for those of their standing. But, look, I am grown old and, look, they do not care for me in turn. Whichever of them has given me a hand, to him will I give of my property; whichever has not, to him will I not give my property.” (Wilkinson, 2016)Egypt Remembers: Ancient accounts of the Great Exodus Buddhism in Ancient Egypt and Meroe – Beliefs Revealed Through Ancient Script 4,000-year-old Ancient Egyptian manuscript measuring more than 8ft has been rediscovered in Cairo
Egyptian woman carrying goods. Figurine from an 11th dynasty offering. ( Titi Sitria/CC BY SA 3.0 )Not only does Naunakht go against the general practice of dividing her property equally amongst her offspring, she also specifies even more explicitly why some of the children were unworthy (for example one had already received and spent his “fair share” of copper vessels). The document says: “And as for my copper cauldron which I gave to him to buy bread for himself and the copper tool […] and the copper vase […] and the copper adze […] – they shall comprise his share. He shall not share in any further copper; it shall go to his brothers and sisters.” (Wilkinson, 2016)Perhaps even more surprising, Naunakht breaks a modern mother’s rule and shares the secret that they do play favorites with their children! Her preferred child was given her most valued asset - a bronze washing-bowl). The translation says: “She said, ‘I have given him a bronze washing-bowl as a bonus over and above his fellow and ten sacks of emmer.’ (Wilkinson, 2016)
Feminism and the Battle for Women’s Rights in Ancient Egypt Unravelling the literacy of the Egyptian Pharaohs Easy as Alep, Bet, Gimel? Cambridge Research Explores Social Context of Ancient Writing Finally, Naunakht’s last will and testament declares that the whole family had to reunite for a second legal hearing one year later to confirm their acceptance of her final wishes. Those who contested the will in the future could be recipients of a severe punishment - “a hundred blows” and his property.
Family Group of Three. Middle Kingdom limestone. (c. 1850-1800 BC) (
Public Domain
)Some of the other texts in Writings from Ancient Egypt include: a tale of a shipwrecked sailor, a story on a giant snake which rules a magical island, inscriptions referring to a natural disaster, songs, and letters stressing prominent concerns and interests.The Smithsonian suggests that the new book is a groundbreaking work, saying that:
“Before this new volume, the Egyptian Book of the Dead has been the most widely available text from ancient Egypt. While that collection is interesting and includes spells that give instructions to the dead on how to make it to the afterlife, it’s not easy reading. Unlike Greek myths or Roman epics, it does not offer non-academic readers much insight into daily Egyptian life or thought.”
Weighing of the heart scene, with Ammit sitting, from the book of the dead of Hunefer. (
Public Domain
)Wilkinson has pointed out that there are some translations already available of some of the documents included in his collection, however he said that those translations were made well over 100 years ago, so they are difficult for most modern readers. However, by translating the texts himself, he said that “he was struck by human emotions to which people could relate today.”Top Image: Part of the Book of the Dead of the scribe Nebqed, under the reign of Amenophis III (1391-1353 BC), 18th dynasty. Followed by his mother Amenemheb and his wife Meryt, Nebqed is depicted meeting the Egyptian god of the dead. Source:
Public Domain
By Alicia McDermottSeptember 2, 2016
5,000-Year-Old Mystery Structure Discovered Near Stone Age Temple in Scotland
Ancient Origins
A mysterious Stone Age building has been unearthed at the Ness of Brodgar in Orkney, Scotland. Researchers discovered it while excavating a Neolithic midden (rubbish dump.) It is located near one of Scotland's most famous rings of standing stones – the Ring of Brodgar.
According to The Herald Scotland, the site contains a Stone Age temple, and the discovery of the structure helped to re-date the location.
While digging at the Ring of Brodgar on Orkney, the researchers found the layout of a series of slabs which are unlike anything previously found on the island. The structure is 4 meters (13 ft.) long and it was unearthed amongst the remains of Neolithic rubbish.
Aerial view of the structure. (
James Robertson/Orkneyskycam.co.uk
)The walls of the construction are 10 meters (33 ft.) wide and the researchers say that the structure is about 5,000 years old. They speculate that the building was covered over by the huge midden, but it could possibly be a chambered tomb. The researchers also found human remains – a human arm bone.
DiscoverStone AgeScotlandNeolithicExcavation (archaeology)
The team of researchers is led by Nick Card, an archaeologist at the University of the Highlands and Islands, who believes that the bone was deliberately placed and could possibly be the remains of a respected original founder of the large complex.
The Ring of Brodgar, the Neolithic Henge of Orkney IslandStone Age Orkney Islanders Dismembered Deceased Relatives and Defleshed their BonesThe slabs, also called orthostats, have rounded edges and appear to have been weathered or worked in the same way as standing stones found at Stenness just 0.3 miles (0.48 km) away.
Sunset at the Standing Stones of Stenness, Orkney. (
Fantoman400/CC BY SA 3.0
)As the site director, Nick Card, said:
Since 2002, the researchers have discovered many impressive artifacts, including artwork, pottery, animal bones, stone tools and parts of buildings at the site. These findings make this location one of the most interesting Neolithic sites in Scotland. It was inhabited between 3,200 and 2,200 BC - the same period as another famous site located just a few miles away on Orkney – Skara Brae.
Old settlement Skara Brae in 2012, Orkney Island, Scotland. (
Chmee2/CC BY SA 3.0
)The site in the Ness of Brodgar is located on a peninsula of land just a few hundred meters wide that divides two saltwater lochs.
It seems that the two or three constructions (i.e. the Ring of Brodgar, Standing Stones of Stenness, and the recently uncovered structure) were a ceremonial corridor. However, the exact purpose of the Stone Age temple, nicknamed ''The Neolithic Cathedral'', is unknown. The director of excavations suggests that it could have been a whole complex that created a ceremonial center.
Incredible sophistication of 5,000-year-old temple complex on Orkney IslandStorms wash away sand revealing 4,000-year-old child skeleton in Orkney
2014 image of work at the Neolithic settlement at Brodgar, Scotland. (
AlastairG/CC BY SA 2.0
)On August 19, 2016, Natalia Klimczak reported on another discovery related to Orkney on Ancient Origins. She wrote that a team of researchers from the University of Adelaide revealed an explanation to one of the greatest mysteries of the British standing stone monuments. They say that the great stone circles were constructed specifically in line with the movements of the Sun and Moon 5,000 years ago.
An article in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports says the researchers used innovative 2D and 3D technology to construct quantitative tests of the alignment patterns of the standing stones. The researchers explained in their article that nobody had ever statistically determined that a single stone circle was constructed with astronomical phenomena in mind.
Earlier, researchers supposed that it may be so, but there was no concrete evidence which could confirm this belief before the present study. The researchers examined some of the oldest great stone circles built in Scotland, for example Callanish, on the Isle of Lewis, and Stenness, Isle of Orkney ─ both predating Stonehenge's standing stones by about 500 years.
The Neolithic stones of Callanish. (
Chris Combe/CC BY 2.0
)Thus, Orkney Island continues to be a hotspot for archaeologists – what will be unearthed there next?
Top image: Ring of Brodgar, a Neolithic stone circle and henge monument, with the Loch of Harray in the background. ( Stevekeiretsu/CC BY SA 3.0 ) Detail: Aerial view of the newly-uncovered structure. ( James Robertson )
By Natalia Klimzcak
A mysterious Stone Age building has been unearthed at the Ness of Brodgar in Orkney, Scotland. Researchers discovered it while excavating a Neolithic midden (rubbish dump.) It is located near one of Scotland's most famous rings of standing stones – the Ring of Brodgar.
According to The Herald Scotland, the site contains a Stone Age temple, and the discovery of the structure helped to re-date the location.
While digging at the Ring of Brodgar on Orkney, the researchers found the layout of a series of slabs which are unlike anything previously found on the island. The structure is 4 meters (13 ft.) long and it was unearthed amongst the remains of Neolithic rubbish.
Aerial view of the structure. (
James Robertson/Orkneyskycam.co.uk
)The walls of the construction are 10 meters (33 ft.) wide and the researchers say that the structure is about 5,000 years old. They speculate that the building was covered over by the huge midden, but it could possibly be a chambered tomb. The researchers also found human remains – a human arm bone.DiscoverStone AgeScotlandNeolithicExcavation (archaeology)
The team of researchers is led by Nick Card, an archaeologist at the University of the Highlands and Islands, who believes that the bone was deliberately placed and could possibly be the remains of a respected original founder of the large complex.
The Ring of Brodgar, the Neolithic Henge of Orkney IslandStone Age Orkney Islanders Dismembered Deceased Relatives and Defleshed their BonesThe slabs, also called orthostats, have rounded edges and appear to have been weathered or worked in the same way as standing stones found at Stenness just 0.3 miles (0.48 km) away.
Sunset at the Standing Stones of Stenness, Orkney. (
Fantoman400/CC BY SA 3.0
)As the site director, Nick Card, said:"The sheer size and scale of the stones unearthed are unprecedented on this site. The way the stones are built into the construction is also unique to the Ness. This all suggests that they may have been re-used and taken from elsewhere. Perhaps they may be part of a stone circle that pre-dates the main Ness site. It is all a bit of mystery and we won't know more until we do more work."
Since 2002, the researchers have discovered many impressive artifacts, including artwork, pottery, animal bones, stone tools and parts of buildings at the site. These findings make this location one of the most interesting Neolithic sites in Scotland. It was inhabited between 3,200 and 2,200 BC - the same period as another famous site located just a few miles away on Orkney – Skara Brae.
Old settlement Skara Brae in 2012, Orkney Island, Scotland. (
Chmee2/CC BY SA 3.0
)The site in the Ness of Brodgar is located on a peninsula of land just a few hundred meters wide that divides two saltwater lochs.It seems that the two or three constructions (i.e. the Ring of Brodgar, Standing Stones of Stenness, and the recently uncovered structure) were a ceremonial corridor. However, the exact purpose of the Stone Age temple, nicknamed ''The Neolithic Cathedral'', is unknown. The director of excavations suggests that it could have been a whole complex that created a ceremonial center.
Incredible sophistication of 5,000-year-old temple complex on Orkney IslandStorms wash away sand revealing 4,000-year-old child skeleton in Orkney
2014 image of work at the Neolithic settlement at Brodgar, Scotland. (
AlastairG/CC BY SA 2.0
)On August 19, 2016, Natalia Klimczak reported on another discovery related to Orkney on Ancient Origins. She wrote that a team of researchers from the University of Adelaide revealed an explanation to one of the greatest mysteries of the British standing stone monuments. They say that the great stone circles were constructed specifically in line with the movements of the Sun and Moon 5,000 years ago.An article in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports says the researchers used innovative 2D and 3D technology to construct quantitative tests of the alignment patterns of the standing stones. The researchers explained in their article that nobody had ever statistically determined that a single stone circle was constructed with astronomical phenomena in mind.
Earlier, researchers supposed that it may be so, but there was no concrete evidence which could confirm this belief before the present study. The researchers examined some of the oldest great stone circles built in Scotland, for example Callanish, on the Isle of Lewis, and Stenness, Isle of Orkney ─ both predating Stonehenge's standing stones by about 500 years.
The Neolithic stones of Callanish. (
Chris Combe/CC BY 2.0
)Thus, Orkney Island continues to be a hotspot for archaeologists – what will be unearthed there next?Top image: Ring of Brodgar, a Neolithic stone circle and henge monument, with the Loch of Harray in the background. ( Stevekeiretsu/CC BY SA 3.0 ) Detail: Aerial view of the newly-uncovered structure. ( James Robertson )
By Natalia Klimzcak
September 1, 2016
The 10 worst Britons in history
History Extra
Illustrations by Jonty Clark
The result is a fascinating, if not strictly scientific, top 10, showing the most wicked, harmful and downright evil character of each century in the past thousand years. The rogue’s gallery includes some famous, and not so famous (or infamous) names: there’s a king, a prime minister and (somewhat surprisingly) a couple of churchmen. It’s a thought-provoking and perhaps controversial list. Read on to discover who were the worst Brits of all...
1000–1100Eadric StreonaNominated by Professor Sarah Foot of Sheffield University
Illustration by Jonty Clark
Eadric Streona (died 1017) might have been Aethelred II’s chief counsellor and ealdorman of Mercia – but he has a reputation for deception, treachery and murder.
I nominate him because of the villainous part he played in England’s defeat by the Danish king, Cnut. He was implicated in the murder of Gunnhild and Pallig in 1002 and of Ealdorman Aelfhelm in 1006 – at which time the ealdorman’s two sons, Wulfheah and Ufegeat, were blinded. In 1009 when the English were ready to attack the Danes a Chronicler reported that the whole people “was hindered by Ealdorman Eadric, then as it always was”. In 1015 he was directly involved in the murder of two thegns (noblemen) – Sigeferth and Morcar – who, according to chronicles, he “enticed” into his chamber where they were “basely killed”.
In the same year, having been in command of King Aethelred’s army, he changed sides and joined Cnut. He subsequently switched sides a further couple of times, in 1016 joining first Edmund Ironside and then deserting him at the battle at Assandun (Ashingdon) to rejoin Cnut who pursued Edmund into Gloucestershire where the latter died in mysterious circumstances.
This cruel, unscrupulous individual grew rich out of the proceeds of royal taxation and was a traitor to the English cause. But having being initially rewarded by Cnut – when he’d become king of all England – Eadric was killed in 1017 having outlived his usefulness to the new regime. It was a fitting end.
Sarah Foot is the author of Monastic life in Anglo-Saxon England (Cambridge University Press, 2006).
1100–1200 Thomas BecketNominated by Professor John Hudson of St Andrews University
Illustration by Jonty Clark
There are a handful of characters in history about whom prejudice seems impossible to avoid. One such is Thomas Becket (c 1120–70), Archbishop of Canterbury. He divided England in a way that even many churchmen who shared some of his views thought unnecessary and self-indulgent. And he has remained a figure inspiring both devotion and detestation.
He was a founder of gesture politics, with the most acute of eye for what would now be called the photo-opportunity. He was also a master of the soundbite. When put on trial in front of a secular court, he refused to accept its jurisdiction, stating “such as I am, I am your father; I will not hear your judgement”. He pushed his way from the court chamber, bearing his cross before him. Complex issues were confronted by a mixture of inflexibility and grand display.
When he left England during his dispute with Henry II, he went to the kingdom of France, furthering the conflict between Henry and the French king, and at the very least opening himself to the accusation of being a traitor. Certainly he was viewed by some as hypocritical, as he changed dramatically from his ostentatious life-style before he was archbishop. As archbishop, he also looked to contemporary medical views for help in retaining some enjoyable habits, claiming to have to drink wine rather than water because it better suited his stomach.
He was also greedy. In 1164 he was brought to trial in part on charges of embezzlement during his time as royal chancellor, the position he held before he became archbishop of Canterbury. The truth of such charges must remain uncertain. However, the wealth of Thomas and his following by the late 1150s was immense and famous. How did he assemble such wealth? Presumably by profiting from his position in the royal administration.
Those who share my prejudice against Becket may consider his assassination in Canterbury Cathedral on 29 December 1170 a fittingly grisly end. However, it also ensured that, as a martyr, he became a saint with a cult that spread with tremendous speed.
John Hudson is author of The Oxford History of the Laws of England (Oxford University Press).
1200–1300King JohnNominated by historian Marc Morris
Illustration by Jonty Clark
Once described as a man of “superhuman wickedness”, King John of England (1167–1216) has had a pretty awful press. Perhaps his most damning critic was Matthew Paris, a monk at St Albans, who in the mid 13th century wrote: “Foul as it is, Hell itself is defiled by the fouler presence of King John”.
This kind of verdict was eagerly seized on by 19th-century historians to create the monster of legend, the Bad King John. However, the fact remains that John committed some wicked deeds and was a deeply unpleasant person. He was unpleasant in many ways – in the way he behaved towards people; he was untrusting; he would snigger at people while they talked; he couldn’t resist kicking a man when he was down. What’s more, he was a bully and a gloater. Stories about his cruelty are legion, and the deed which has most damned him in the eyes of the world is the murder, possibly by his own hands, of his nephew Arthur – a rival for the throne.
Granted, John was competent when it came to the small-scale tyrant stuff – he could lead an army, he was energetic and dynamic – but his charisma was all negative. He didn’t inspire loyalty, so people deserted him. That was partly why he lost his father’s continental lands – in effect, squandering the family inheritance.
He was clearly one of the worst kings in English history and his reign will always by defined by that one great evil deed – the murder of his nephew. One good thing to come out of his reign was Magna Carta, an attempt to limit his abuses and ensure they could not be repeated.
Marc Morris is author of The Bigod Earls of Norfolk in the Thirteenth Century (Boydell, 2005).
1300–1400 Hugh Despenser (the Younger)Nominated by Nigel Saul, professor of medieval history at Royal Holloway, London University
Illustration by Jonty Clark
I nominate Edward II’s appalling favourite, the Younger Hugh Despenser (died 1326). Despenser was neither so well known nor so notorious as his predecessor in Edward’s favour, Piers Gaveston, but he was far worse. Gaveston was just a playboy. Despenser was pure evil.
Dominant at court in the last years of Edward’s reign, he set about eliminating his enemies and amassing a vast territorial empire in South Wales. His rapacity knew no bounds. He gobbled up the lands and possessions forfeited by those who opposed him and his king. He browbeat the weak and the vulnerable into signing away their estates. He tricked people into parting with their property.
Women were especially vulnerable to his ambitions. Alice Lacy, the Earl of Lancaster’s widow, was thrown into prison and forced to sign away her rights. The widow of Sir John Gifford of Brimpsfield was ejected from her estates. Lady Baret of Swansea was allegedly tortured so badly that she went out of her mind. Visiting merchants were robbed of their property. In a stained glass window in Tewkesbury Abbey, Despenser looks all arrogant and swagger.
But pride cometh before the fall. In the autumn of 1326 the tyrannical regime Despenser headed was toppled, and Edward deposed. At Hereford in November he was visited with the full penalties of the traitor. He was drawn, and then hanged from a gallows 50 feet high; his intestines were torn out and burned in front of him.
Nigel Saul is author of The Three Richards: Richard I, Richard II and Richard III (Hambledon & London, 2005).
1400–1500 Thomas ArundelNominated by Miri Rubin, professor of history at Queen Mary, University of London
Illustration by Jonty Clark
Thomas Arundel (1353–1414), administrator and archbishop of Canterbury, earns his place in this list of infamy not for a single infamous act, but for the long-term effect of his success in bringing together church and state, as never before, in the persecution of unorthodox religious opinion.
In this link between religious ideas and sedition lay the foundation for a system of persecution of religious ideas in England which would be used by rulers for centuries. Until Arundel, England had no part in the intensive inquisitorial and persecutory activities which had long been common practice on much of the Continent. The Concordat between Henry IV and Arundel gradually created such a system through ordinances and statutes.
At Oxford in 1407 he phrased ordinances – later extended as Constitutions for the realm – which limited the translation and reading of the Bible in English. The programme was completed shortly after his death, when secular officials, royal justices and sheriffs, were required by oath to enquire into heresy wherever their powers took them. As a result, he made life harder for a generation of people who wished to express and explore their religious ideas, to read the Bible in a language they understood, and discuss the “big questions”, while his clearing out of “venomous weeds” from Oxford meant that intellectual life there became bland for a very long time.
Above all, by enlisting royal officials, and encouraging neighbours to snoop, suspect and inform – he authorised a thoroughly unpleasant involvement of the state in people’s lives.
Miri Rubin is author of The Hollow Crown: A History of Britain in the Late Middle Ages (Penguin, 2005).
1500–1600Sir Richard Rich, Lord Rich of LeighsNominated by David Loades, emeritus professor of history at the University of Wales
Illustration by Jonty Clark
I’ve chosen Sir Richard Rich (1496/7–1567), who seems to have had no principles, political or religious, but simply joined whichever side seemed likeliest to further his career.
According to John Foxe (author of the Acts & Monuments of the English Martyrs, first published in 1563), he was personally responsible for the torture of Anne Askew – who’d broken off her marriage to an orthodox Catholic – in 1546 and was charged with heresy. He is reputed to have operated the machine himself despite the fact that women (and especially gentlewomen) were supposed to be exempt from torture.
He is alleged to have committed perjury to secure the conviction of Thomas More for treason. He promoted Protestantism under Edward VI, and then persecuted Protestants under Mary.
A lawyer by profession, Rich was a man who was constantly on the make, constantly on the lookout for the main chance. He became a powerful minister to Henry VIII and was Lord Chancellor during much of King Edward VI’s reign.
It is difficult to quite know what to make of him personally but nobody seems to have been very fond of him. Greedy he certainly was, and cruel – to judge from the Anne Askew affair. He was responsible for several burnings of heretics in Essex, and acted as a bigot because it was convenient to appear as such at that time.
In short, Rich was a slippery and unprincipled opportunist. For centuries after his death his name was a byword in the county of Essex for wickedness. Right up to the 20th century, it was said “better a poor man at ease than Lord Rich of Leighs”.
David Loades is the author of Intrigue and Treason: the Tudor Court 1547–1558 (Pearson, 2004).
1600–1700 Titus OatesNominated by John Adamson, a fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge University
Illustration by Jonty Clark
The self-styled Dr Titus Oates (1649–1705) was in a league of his own, both in the depths of his vileness – a comprehensive blend of vanity, murderous con-trickery, and serpentine guile – and the scale of the evil for which he was responsible.
He was the principal promoter, in 1678, of the fantasy that there was a Jesuit conspiracy to assassinate Charles II (with silver bullets) as a prelude to a French-backed Catholic reconquest of the country.
Undoubtedly his most evil act was allowing 16 innocent laymen, and eight Catholic priests, to go to a hideous death (the penalty for treason being partial hanging, castration and disembowelment alive, and then the quartering of the corpse) as a result of his spurious accusations.
Oates’s entire career was built on the purveyance of various forms of malice and falsity. At the height of the Popish Plot mania, he laid an indictment against the Lord Chief Justice who, refusing to succumb to the popular hysteria, had acquitted four of the men implicated by Oates’s accusations. He would have willingly sent these four, and the Chief Justice, to the gallows for his own aggrandisement.
Anyone who is prepared to see innocent men go to their deaths – and particularly grisly deaths at that – on accusations that he knows to be false qualifies as cruel, bloodthirsty, and a bigot. What makes Oates’s knavery all the more invidious is that his motives appear to have been largely financial: he expected, and eventually obtained, a substantial reward from the Whig interests which profited from his accusations.
In 1678–79, Oates’s actions arguably brought the country close to the brink of another civil war. And while Oates did not create anti-Popery, his fantasies certainly sharply exacerbated a religious hatred that would endure in British society well into the 19th century. In short, he was a thoroughly odious individual.
John Adamson is author of The Noble Revolt: The Overthrow of Charles I
(Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2007).
1700–1800Duke of CumberlandNominated by Professor Rab Houston, chair of modern history at St Andrews University
Illustration by Jonty Clark
The Duke of Cumberland (Prince William Augustus, 1721–65) showed his wickedness in many ways, not least in his contempt for opponents and for his own men who failed to live up to his strict standards.
He showed a particular disdain for the defeated Jacobites after the battle of Culloden in 1746, who he regarded as cowardly, dishonourable and undeserving of mercy. Thus fleeing soldiers were pursued and slaughtered while the wounded could expect no help except to be shot, bayoneted or clubbed to death.
At a time when the etiquette of warfare was considered very important, Cumberland was able to dispense with it by labelling the Highlanders as inhuman savages. He even condemned officers who had shown mercy to the Jacobite soldiers after the battle, when his orders were to give no quarter. The Highlanders hated him, renaming a weed Stinking Billy in mockery of the English renaming of a flower Sweet William in his honour.
In effect, he used the full power of the fiscal-military British state to commit genocide on the mainland of Britain. He was the equal of Cromwell in Ireland, terrorising a whole people into submission.
The English welcomed the Duke’s victory but opinion turned against him equally quickly. He acquired the title of Butcher because, when told that he was to be made an honorary freeman of a London company for his services against the Jacobites, some wag said it would have to be the Butchers. The Duke’s successes were recognised by his being voted an income of £40,000 per annum in addition to his revenue as a prince of the royal house. It was, in effect, blood money earned by war crimes.
While much of Cumberland’s reputation rests on the immediate events surrounding Culloden, he was also a strong advocate and savage pursuer of the suppression of Highland culture. He left behind him the largest army of occupation ever seen in Britain in order to pacify the Highlands while permanent fortifications were built.
He contributed to a policy of cultural imperialism by disarming the Highlands, abolishing the wearing of Highland dress, suppressing certain surnames linked with the rebellion and seeking to extirpate Catholicism from the land. He even suggested transporting whole clans like the Camerons and MacPhersons to the colonies – a sort of ethnic cleansing.
By helping to destroy the social nexus of the clan that was at the heart of Highland society, he helped sever the bond between chiefs and clanspeople that had been the basis of Highland society for centuries.
Lastly, by institutionalising the prejudice that the Highlanders were uncivilised, Cumberland also contributed to the racist views responsible for their later misfortunes.
Rab Houston is the editor of The New Penguin History of Scotland: From the Earliest Times to the Present Day (Penguin, 2005).
1800–1900Jack the RipperNominated by Professor Clive Emsley of the Open University
Illustration by Jonty Clark
No-one can touch the serial killer Jack the Ripper for sheer wickedness during 19th-century Britain. Firstly, because he preyed on the most pathetic and vulnerable women in London’s East End. Secondly, for the sheer horror of his brutal crimes.
During his murder spree in the autumn of 1888, Jack the Ripper definitely killed five prostitutes – and possibly a couple of other women too – in the most appalling and extreme circumstances. His victims were disembowelled, their intestines draped over their shoulders and their breasts cut off. This man was manifestly a savage brute and while he may have had mental problems – he must have had, to do what he did – they can’t excuse his terrible actions.
The murders had huge repercussions at the time – and have influenced our view of serial killers ever since. For months after the murders women across the land, be it in Norwich or Newcastle, were terrified to go out at night. And while the press might have coined the name by which this most notorious serial killer is known, this does not detract from the savagery of his crimes. Of course, we assume it was “Jack”, and it probably was, but it just might have been “Jill”.
The Ripper has become a villain – for all time – and his shadow extends to the present day. And the way in which the world responds to modern serial killers such as the Yorkshire Ripper is influenced by the way we responded to the most notorious serial killer of all, Jack the Ripper.
All sorts of people have been accused of being Jack the Ripper: the painter Walter Sickert; rogue royals; Freemasons, you name it – but it seems unlikely we’ll ever know his true identity. However, this has just served to add to the mystique surrounding this most wicked of men.
Clive Emsley is the author of Hard Men: Violence in England since 1750 (Hambledon, 2005).
1900–2000Oswald MosleyNominated by Professor Joanna Bourke of the School of History, Classics, and Archaeology, Birkbeck College, London
Illustration by Jonty Clark
Oswald Mosley (1896–1980) was the founder of the British Union of Fascists (BUF) in 1932. He remains an inspiration for far-right groups in Britain and thus continues to have a pernicious impact on our society. His authoritarian politics relied on anti-Semitism and anti-immigration, and the party’s willingness to use violence was most notoriously exhibited at the Fascist rally at Olympia in 1934.
His most evil act was inciting anti-Semitic feeling and in 1934, the BUF launched an anti-Semitic campaign in the East End of London, home to one-third of British Jews. He attacked the “big Jews” for threatening the economy and the “little Jews” for “swamping” British cultural identity. While he never succeeded in turning Britain Fascist, 70 per cent of respondents under 30 chose Fascism, when asked to choose between it and Communism, in a Gallup Poll in 1937.
He was handsome and charming, and his early career – in the Conservative and then Labour Party – showed him to be a man of ideas and energy. In the early 1920s, his opposition to the “Old Men” who supervised the carnage of the First World War won him many supporters. However he was vain, megalomaniac, and had delusions of grandeur, although Attlee observed that his theatrical displays were routinely derided (at one meeting, when Mosley strode on stage with his arm uplifted, a voice called out, “Yes, Oswald dear, you may go to the lavatory”).
It would be difficult to find a more unpopular politician than Mosley in 1945: he was widely regarded as a traitor and a symbol of Fascism. On his death in 1980 his son Nicholas concluded that his father was a man whose “right hand dealt with grandiose ideas and glory” while his left hand “let the rat out of the sewer”.
Joanna Bourke is the author of An Intimate History of Killing: Face-to-Face Killing in Twentieth Century Warfare (Granta, 2000).
Illustrations by Jonty Clark The result is a fascinating, if not strictly scientific, top 10, showing the most wicked, harmful and downright evil character of each century in the past thousand years. The rogue’s gallery includes some famous, and not so famous (or infamous) names: there’s a king, a prime minister and (somewhat surprisingly) a couple of churchmen. It’s a thought-provoking and perhaps controversial list. Read on to discover who were the worst Brits of all...
1000–1100Eadric StreonaNominated by Professor Sarah Foot of Sheffield University
Illustration by Jonty Clark
Eadric Streona (died 1017) might have been Aethelred II’s chief counsellor and ealdorman of Mercia – but he has a reputation for deception, treachery and murder.
I nominate him because of the villainous part he played in England’s defeat by the Danish king, Cnut. He was implicated in the murder of Gunnhild and Pallig in 1002 and of Ealdorman Aelfhelm in 1006 – at which time the ealdorman’s two sons, Wulfheah and Ufegeat, were blinded. In 1009 when the English were ready to attack the Danes a Chronicler reported that the whole people “was hindered by Ealdorman Eadric, then as it always was”. In 1015 he was directly involved in the murder of two thegns (noblemen) – Sigeferth and Morcar – who, according to chronicles, he “enticed” into his chamber where they were “basely killed”.
In the same year, having been in command of King Aethelred’s army, he changed sides and joined Cnut. He subsequently switched sides a further couple of times, in 1016 joining first Edmund Ironside and then deserting him at the battle at Assandun (Ashingdon) to rejoin Cnut who pursued Edmund into Gloucestershire where the latter died in mysterious circumstances.
This cruel, unscrupulous individual grew rich out of the proceeds of royal taxation and was a traitor to the English cause. But having being initially rewarded by Cnut – when he’d become king of all England – Eadric was killed in 1017 having outlived his usefulness to the new regime. It was a fitting end.
Sarah Foot is the author of Monastic life in Anglo-Saxon England (Cambridge University Press, 2006).
1100–1200 Thomas BecketNominated by Professor John Hudson of St Andrews University
Illustration by Jonty Clark
There are a handful of characters in history about whom prejudice seems impossible to avoid. One such is Thomas Becket (c 1120–70), Archbishop of Canterbury. He divided England in a way that even many churchmen who shared some of his views thought unnecessary and self-indulgent. And he has remained a figure inspiring both devotion and detestation.
He was a founder of gesture politics, with the most acute of eye for what would now be called the photo-opportunity. He was also a master of the soundbite. When put on trial in front of a secular court, he refused to accept its jurisdiction, stating “such as I am, I am your father; I will not hear your judgement”. He pushed his way from the court chamber, bearing his cross before him. Complex issues were confronted by a mixture of inflexibility and grand display.
When he left England during his dispute with Henry II, he went to the kingdom of France, furthering the conflict between Henry and the French king, and at the very least opening himself to the accusation of being a traitor. Certainly he was viewed by some as hypocritical, as he changed dramatically from his ostentatious life-style before he was archbishop. As archbishop, he also looked to contemporary medical views for help in retaining some enjoyable habits, claiming to have to drink wine rather than water because it better suited his stomach.
He was also greedy. In 1164 he was brought to trial in part on charges of embezzlement during his time as royal chancellor, the position he held before he became archbishop of Canterbury. The truth of such charges must remain uncertain. However, the wealth of Thomas and his following by the late 1150s was immense and famous. How did he assemble such wealth? Presumably by profiting from his position in the royal administration.
Those who share my prejudice against Becket may consider his assassination in Canterbury Cathedral on 29 December 1170 a fittingly grisly end. However, it also ensured that, as a martyr, he became a saint with a cult that spread with tremendous speed.
John Hudson is author of The Oxford History of the Laws of England (Oxford University Press).
1200–1300King JohnNominated by historian Marc Morris
Illustration by Jonty Clark
Once described as a man of “superhuman wickedness”, King John of England (1167–1216) has had a pretty awful press. Perhaps his most damning critic was Matthew Paris, a monk at St Albans, who in the mid 13th century wrote: “Foul as it is, Hell itself is defiled by the fouler presence of King John”.
This kind of verdict was eagerly seized on by 19th-century historians to create the monster of legend, the Bad King John. However, the fact remains that John committed some wicked deeds and was a deeply unpleasant person. He was unpleasant in many ways – in the way he behaved towards people; he was untrusting; he would snigger at people while they talked; he couldn’t resist kicking a man when he was down. What’s more, he was a bully and a gloater. Stories about his cruelty are legion, and the deed which has most damned him in the eyes of the world is the murder, possibly by his own hands, of his nephew Arthur – a rival for the throne.
Granted, John was competent when it came to the small-scale tyrant stuff – he could lead an army, he was energetic and dynamic – but his charisma was all negative. He didn’t inspire loyalty, so people deserted him. That was partly why he lost his father’s continental lands – in effect, squandering the family inheritance.
He was clearly one of the worst kings in English history and his reign will always by defined by that one great evil deed – the murder of his nephew. One good thing to come out of his reign was Magna Carta, an attempt to limit his abuses and ensure they could not be repeated.
Marc Morris is author of The Bigod Earls of Norfolk in the Thirteenth Century (Boydell, 2005).
1300–1400 Hugh Despenser (the Younger)Nominated by Nigel Saul, professor of medieval history at Royal Holloway, London University
Illustration by Jonty Clark
I nominate Edward II’s appalling favourite, the Younger Hugh Despenser (died 1326). Despenser was neither so well known nor so notorious as his predecessor in Edward’s favour, Piers Gaveston, but he was far worse. Gaveston was just a playboy. Despenser was pure evil.
Dominant at court in the last years of Edward’s reign, he set about eliminating his enemies and amassing a vast territorial empire in South Wales. His rapacity knew no bounds. He gobbled up the lands and possessions forfeited by those who opposed him and his king. He browbeat the weak and the vulnerable into signing away their estates. He tricked people into parting with their property.
Women were especially vulnerable to his ambitions. Alice Lacy, the Earl of Lancaster’s widow, was thrown into prison and forced to sign away her rights. The widow of Sir John Gifford of Brimpsfield was ejected from her estates. Lady Baret of Swansea was allegedly tortured so badly that she went out of her mind. Visiting merchants were robbed of their property. In a stained glass window in Tewkesbury Abbey, Despenser looks all arrogant and swagger.
But pride cometh before the fall. In the autumn of 1326 the tyrannical regime Despenser headed was toppled, and Edward deposed. At Hereford in November he was visited with the full penalties of the traitor. He was drawn, and then hanged from a gallows 50 feet high; his intestines were torn out and burned in front of him.
Nigel Saul is author of The Three Richards: Richard I, Richard II and Richard III (Hambledon & London, 2005).
1400–1500 Thomas ArundelNominated by Miri Rubin, professor of history at Queen Mary, University of London
Illustration by Jonty Clark
Thomas Arundel (1353–1414), administrator and archbishop of Canterbury, earns his place in this list of infamy not for a single infamous act, but for the long-term effect of his success in bringing together church and state, as never before, in the persecution of unorthodox religious opinion.
In this link between religious ideas and sedition lay the foundation for a system of persecution of religious ideas in England which would be used by rulers for centuries. Until Arundel, England had no part in the intensive inquisitorial and persecutory activities which had long been common practice on much of the Continent. The Concordat between Henry IV and Arundel gradually created such a system through ordinances and statutes.
At Oxford in 1407 he phrased ordinances – later extended as Constitutions for the realm – which limited the translation and reading of the Bible in English. The programme was completed shortly after his death, when secular officials, royal justices and sheriffs, were required by oath to enquire into heresy wherever their powers took them. As a result, he made life harder for a generation of people who wished to express and explore their religious ideas, to read the Bible in a language they understood, and discuss the “big questions”, while his clearing out of “venomous weeds” from Oxford meant that intellectual life there became bland for a very long time.
Above all, by enlisting royal officials, and encouraging neighbours to snoop, suspect and inform – he authorised a thoroughly unpleasant involvement of the state in people’s lives.
Miri Rubin is author of The Hollow Crown: A History of Britain in the Late Middle Ages (Penguin, 2005).
1500–1600Sir Richard Rich, Lord Rich of LeighsNominated by David Loades, emeritus professor of history at the University of Wales
Illustration by Jonty Clark
I’ve chosen Sir Richard Rich (1496/7–1567), who seems to have had no principles, political or religious, but simply joined whichever side seemed likeliest to further his career.
According to John Foxe (author of the Acts & Monuments of the English Martyrs, first published in 1563), he was personally responsible for the torture of Anne Askew – who’d broken off her marriage to an orthodox Catholic – in 1546 and was charged with heresy. He is reputed to have operated the machine himself despite the fact that women (and especially gentlewomen) were supposed to be exempt from torture.
He is alleged to have committed perjury to secure the conviction of Thomas More for treason. He promoted Protestantism under Edward VI, and then persecuted Protestants under Mary.
A lawyer by profession, Rich was a man who was constantly on the make, constantly on the lookout for the main chance. He became a powerful minister to Henry VIII and was Lord Chancellor during much of King Edward VI’s reign.
It is difficult to quite know what to make of him personally but nobody seems to have been very fond of him. Greedy he certainly was, and cruel – to judge from the Anne Askew affair. He was responsible for several burnings of heretics in Essex, and acted as a bigot because it was convenient to appear as such at that time.
In short, Rich was a slippery and unprincipled opportunist. For centuries after his death his name was a byword in the county of Essex for wickedness. Right up to the 20th century, it was said “better a poor man at ease than Lord Rich of Leighs”.
David Loades is the author of Intrigue and Treason: the Tudor Court 1547–1558 (Pearson, 2004).
1600–1700 Titus OatesNominated by John Adamson, a fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge University
Illustration by Jonty Clark
The self-styled Dr Titus Oates (1649–1705) was in a league of his own, both in the depths of his vileness – a comprehensive blend of vanity, murderous con-trickery, and serpentine guile – and the scale of the evil for which he was responsible.
He was the principal promoter, in 1678, of the fantasy that there was a Jesuit conspiracy to assassinate Charles II (with silver bullets) as a prelude to a French-backed Catholic reconquest of the country.
Undoubtedly his most evil act was allowing 16 innocent laymen, and eight Catholic priests, to go to a hideous death (the penalty for treason being partial hanging, castration and disembowelment alive, and then the quartering of the corpse) as a result of his spurious accusations.
Oates’s entire career was built on the purveyance of various forms of malice and falsity. At the height of the Popish Plot mania, he laid an indictment against the Lord Chief Justice who, refusing to succumb to the popular hysteria, had acquitted four of the men implicated by Oates’s accusations. He would have willingly sent these four, and the Chief Justice, to the gallows for his own aggrandisement.
Anyone who is prepared to see innocent men go to their deaths – and particularly grisly deaths at that – on accusations that he knows to be false qualifies as cruel, bloodthirsty, and a bigot. What makes Oates’s knavery all the more invidious is that his motives appear to have been largely financial: he expected, and eventually obtained, a substantial reward from the Whig interests which profited from his accusations.
In 1678–79, Oates’s actions arguably brought the country close to the brink of another civil war. And while Oates did not create anti-Popery, his fantasies certainly sharply exacerbated a religious hatred that would endure in British society well into the 19th century. In short, he was a thoroughly odious individual.
John Adamson is author of The Noble Revolt: The Overthrow of Charles I
(Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2007).
1700–1800Duke of CumberlandNominated by Professor Rab Houston, chair of modern history at St Andrews University
Illustration by Jonty Clark
The Duke of Cumberland (Prince William Augustus, 1721–65) showed his wickedness in many ways, not least in his contempt for opponents and for his own men who failed to live up to his strict standards.
He showed a particular disdain for the defeated Jacobites after the battle of Culloden in 1746, who he regarded as cowardly, dishonourable and undeserving of mercy. Thus fleeing soldiers were pursued and slaughtered while the wounded could expect no help except to be shot, bayoneted or clubbed to death.
At a time when the etiquette of warfare was considered very important, Cumberland was able to dispense with it by labelling the Highlanders as inhuman savages. He even condemned officers who had shown mercy to the Jacobite soldiers after the battle, when his orders were to give no quarter. The Highlanders hated him, renaming a weed Stinking Billy in mockery of the English renaming of a flower Sweet William in his honour.
In effect, he used the full power of the fiscal-military British state to commit genocide on the mainland of Britain. He was the equal of Cromwell in Ireland, terrorising a whole people into submission.
The English welcomed the Duke’s victory but opinion turned against him equally quickly. He acquired the title of Butcher because, when told that he was to be made an honorary freeman of a London company for his services against the Jacobites, some wag said it would have to be the Butchers. The Duke’s successes were recognised by his being voted an income of £40,000 per annum in addition to his revenue as a prince of the royal house. It was, in effect, blood money earned by war crimes.
While much of Cumberland’s reputation rests on the immediate events surrounding Culloden, he was also a strong advocate and savage pursuer of the suppression of Highland culture. He left behind him the largest army of occupation ever seen in Britain in order to pacify the Highlands while permanent fortifications were built.
He contributed to a policy of cultural imperialism by disarming the Highlands, abolishing the wearing of Highland dress, suppressing certain surnames linked with the rebellion and seeking to extirpate Catholicism from the land. He even suggested transporting whole clans like the Camerons and MacPhersons to the colonies – a sort of ethnic cleansing.
By helping to destroy the social nexus of the clan that was at the heart of Highland society, he helped sever the bond between chiefs and clanspeople that had been the basis of Highland society for centuries.
Lastly, by institutionalising the prejudice that the Highlanders were uncivilised, Cumberland also contributed to the racist views responsible for their later misfortunes.
Rab Houston is the editor of The New Penguin History of Scotland: From the Earliest Times to the Present Day (Penguin, 2005).
1800–1900Jack the RipperNominated by Professor Clive Emsley of the Open University
Illustration by Jonty Clark
No-one can touch the serial killer Jack the Ripper for sheer wickedness during 19th-century Britain. Firstly, because he preyed on the most pathetic and vulnerable women in London’s East End. Secondly, for the sheer horror of his brutal crimes.
During his murder spree in the autumn of 1888, Jack the Ripper definitely killed five prostitutes – and possibly a couple of other women too – in the most appalling and extreme circumstances. His victims were disembowelled, their intestines draped over their shoulders and their breasts cut off. This man was manifestly a savage brute and while he may have had mental problems – he must have had, to do what he did – they can’t excuse his terrible actions.
The murders had huge repercussions at the time – and have influenced our view of serial killers ever since. For months after the murders women across the land, be it in Norwich or Newcastle, were terrified to go out at night. And while the press might have coined the name by which this most notorious serial killer is known, this does not detract from the savagery of his crimes. Of course, we assume it was “Jack”, and it probably was, but it just might have been “Jill”.
The Ripper has become a villain – for all time – and his shadow extends to the present day. And the way in which the world responds to modern serial killers such as the Yorkshire Ripper is influenced by the way we responded to the most notorious serial killer of all, Jack the Ripper.
All sorts of people have been accused of being Jack the Ripper: the painter Walter Sickert; rogue royals; Freemasons, you name it – but it seems unlikely we’ll ever know his true identity. However, this has just served to add to the mystique surrounding this most wicked of men.
Clive Emsley is the author of Hard Men: Violence in England since 1750 (Hambledon, 2005).
1900–2000Oswald MosleyNominated by Professor Joanna Bourke of the School of History, Classics, and Archaeology, Birkbeck College, London
Illustration by Jonty Clark
Oswald Mosley (1896–1980) was the founder of the British Union of Fascists (BUF) in 1932. He remains an inspiration for far-right groups in Britain and thus continues to have a pernicious impact on our society. His authoritarian politics relied on anti-Semitism and anti-immigration, and the party’s willingness to use violence was most notoriously exhibited at the Fascist rally at Olympia in 1934.
His most evil act was inciting anti-Semitic feeling and in 1934, the BUF launched an anti-Semitic campaign in the East End of London, home to one-third of British Jews. He attacked the “big Jews” for threatening the economy and the “little Jews” for “swamping” British cultural identity. While he never succeeded in turning Britain Fascist, 70 per cent of respondents under 30 chose Fascism, when asked to choose between it and Communism, in a Gallup Poll in 1937.
He was handsome and charming, and his early career – in the Conservative and then Labour Party – showed him to be a man of ideas and energy. In the early 1920s, his opposition to the “Old Men” who supervised the carnage of the First World War won him many supporters. However he was vain, megalomaniac, and had delusions of grandeur, although Attlee observed that his theatrical displays were routinely derided (at one meeting, when Mosley strode on stage with his arm uplifted, a voice called out, “Yes, Oswald dear, you may go to the lavatory”).
It would be difficult to find a more unpopular politician than Mosley in 1945: he was widely regarded as a traitor and a symbol of Fascism. On his death in 1980 his son Nicholas concluded that his father was a man whose “right hand dealt with grandiose ideas and glory” while his left hand “let the rat out of the sewer”.
Joanna Bourke is the author of An Intimate History of Killing: Face-to-Face Killing in Twentieth Century Warfare (Granta, 2000).
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