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Changing rooms in eighteenth-century London
By Carys Brown | @HistoryCarys On 8 February 1750, some time between the hours of 12 and 1 o’clock in the afternoon, Baptist Minister Benjamin Wallin was ‘musing’ at his desk in the upstairs study of his Southwark home when he suddenly ‘felt the Desk move the floor shake and the Front of the house seemed to…
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Reformation parallels: the case of Gottschalk of Orbais
By Robert Evans @R_AH_Evans Five hundred years ago this October, the German monk, Martin Luther (probably) nailed his famous 95 theses to Wittenberg’s cathedral door. This sparked a lengthy and complex process of religious transformation across Europe. Luther’s views continue to have consequences for the modern world and as this anniversary approaches, there are many questions…
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1. Blackmail, murder, and a trail gone cold
By Carys Brown | @HistoryCarys 5 December 1730 Dear Sir, You are desired to leave 19 pounds in the church yard under the further…tree by one a clock to morrow night if you put any Watsh on [or] Disobey our commande by G-d you and your family shall be outerly Destroyd and your house burnt as Jacks was…
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Experiencing the law in sixteenth-century England
By Laura Flannigan (@LFlannigan17) ‘To London once my stepps I bent, Where trouth in no wyse should be faint, To westmynster-ward I forthwith went, To a man of law to make complaint. I sayd, “for marys love, that holy saynt / Pyty the poore that wold proceede.” But, for lack of mony, I cold not spede.…
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4. Journal of William Dixon, 1811
By Nicholas Dixon One of the most memorable sets of items I have found in an archive is the journals and notebooks of William Dixon (1756-1824), a farmer from the village of Holton le Moor in Lincolnshire. Deposited in the Lincolnshire Archives, 54 of these roughly bound volumes survive, some of them with pages recycled…
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