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Fritter-filled Paunches: Pancake day in Reformation England
By Elly Barnett – @eleanorrbarnett On the Monday before Lent, wrote comedic poet John Taylor in 1639, a farmer returned home to his wife ‘busily making Pancakes for him and his family’. After he criticised the quality of the fare – ‘the coursenesse of the flower, the taste of the Suite [suet- fat], the thicknesse of the Batter’…
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The roots of vegetable politics
By Carys Brown (@HistoryCarys) Boris Johnson’s declaration last week that Brexit ‘can be good for carrots too’ caused a mixture of despair, mild amusement, and utter confusion. For those trying to get their heads around Britain’s Brexit-based future, this was hardly the ‘clarity’ they demanded. What few registered, however, was that Johnson had unwittingly tapped into a…
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Remembering Martin Luther King Jr.
By Tom Smith (@TomEtesonSmith) Last Wednesday, 4 April, the world commemorated the assassination fifty years earlier of a man widely regarded as one of the twentieth century’s greatest figures. Martin Luther King Jr. is best remembered for having played an instrumental role in securing the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting…
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Gossip, men, and Victorian politics
By Cherish Watton (@CherishWatton) Gossip in politics today brings to mind the political rumour-mill from the fallout of Brexit, political infighting, or frequent leaks from the White House criticising the Trump administration. But gossip, the ability ‘to talk idly, mostly about other people’s affairs’, isn’t unique to twenty-first-century politics.[1] In the Victorian period, it could…
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Independence and interdependence: one Scot’s perspective on Anglo-Scottish relations in early-seventeenth-century London
By Laura Flannigan | @LFlannigan17 Notions of Scottish devolution or independence from England and the rest of the United Kingdom have been reiterated across the last few generations, with the 2014 ‘IndyRef’ and its potential sequel only the most recent examples. Much of the discussion south of the border hangs on how Scotland could think…
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