On 11th July 1302. outside of the Flemish city of Courtrai, an army of weavers, dyers, fishermen, and carpenters defeated the finest knightly army in Western Europe. It was Philippe the Fair’s arrest of his [...]
The Japanese drive to become a great power required the domination of China. They defeated the Chinese in war in the 1890s and took away Korea. They soon infiltrated Manchuria, which had rich reserves of [...]
It would not have taken Midshipman Horatio Nelson long to earn that life board ship – at least below decks – was harsh, cramped,uncomfortable, malodorous, and exhausting. Midshipmen – as many as twenty aboard a [...]
While there was a considerable difference in the housing of the upper and lower middle classes, this did not apply to the family. Monogamy was the rule in Ancient Egypt. Only the pharaoh had one or more harems (in later centuries this was also the case with princes and those in the positions of power) but this did not in the least undermine the husband – wife relationship.
The centre of administration of the Pictish kingdom in the 9th century was Forteviot on the River Earn. Close by the Dunkeld, King Kenneth MacAlpin (Cináed mac Ailpín) set up a new religious centre about 850AD. This was an acknowledgement of the fact that Iona was now no longer tenable as a religious capital, although the monastery was eventually re-established and it remained the burial place of Pictish kings until the time of Donald Ban.
In June 1864 Lewis Carroll was in London seeing to the publication of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. On June 22nd he visited Lambeth Palace and while there (he notes in his diary) ‘the librarian, Mr Stubbs, showed me some interesting old MSS and relics’. I wonder whether one of those old manuscripts was not Lambeth MS 448: even the most casual reader cannot ignore the great number of decapitations recorded there. Alas, Alice was already with the publishers, so that manuscript cannot be the source for the Queen of Hearts.
Discover a time capsule of interwar life at the Worksop home of the Straw family who decided to leave their house unchanged for many decades. Opening the door of 7 Blyth Grove is like taking the time machine back to the 1920s. The house is a treasure chest of fascinating objects, fashions and memories from interwar Britain.
In a room at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, high above the fragments of early civilisations that are housed there, a camera dome flashes out light, yielding detailed, high-quality images of ancient written tablets. Thanks to this process of Reflectance Imaging Technology (RTI) our knowledge of the world’s oldest undeciphered writing, known as proto-Elamite and dating to before 3000 BC, is undergoing a transformation.
