Happy summer everybody! (Or, happy winter to my southern hemisphere friends). Just History Posts is approaching its 7th birthday in just a couple of months, and having taken the last few weeks off from posting daily on social media, and with lots of other things going on in my life at the moment, I thought […]
Medieval Mythbusting: Did People Believe the World was Flat?
The general public knows bits about the medieval period. Unfortunately, the general public think they know a lot about the medieval period. Whilst we start learning about this time in our history at school, a lot of what people pick up comes from popular media, in particular films and television series. And, even worse, from […]
Historical Figures: Edward Montagu, Knightly Criminal
Today I am pleased to be hosting another fantastic guest post, this time by author Louise Wyatt. Louise has loved history since discovering Dunster Castle in Somerset aged six years old. Reading and writing as soon as school started, Louise has published three local history books between 2017 and 2018 and more recently, A History of […]
Historic Houses: Sir John Soane’s Museum, a Victorian Wonder
Spring is in the air, and it felt like a perfect time to revisit the Historic Houses series. This tends to be the time of year us Brits start to make plans, as the weather gets (generally) better and the days are now longer again. Years ago I visited Sir John Soane’s Museum in London, […]
Eyam: England’s Infamous Plague Village
In a world still reeling from a global pandemic, it can feel fresh to look at situations from the past that echo that which we have lived through the past few years. But a moment in history that has remained tucked away in my brain for years, ever since reading a historical fiction novel about […]
Victorian Romance: The Art of Cobweb Valentines
Today is Valentine’s Day, a centuries-old holiday celebrating love, strangely on a day commemorating someone’s execution. From the late medieval period in Europe, when courtly love and chivalry were at their peak, it became popular to think of romantic love on this day. By the 18th century, the day had become a time for lovers […]
A Brief Moment of History: Was Queen Elizabeth I Secretly a Man?
There are many historical conspiracy theories that abound (often involving aliens…) but one of my favourite is the peculiar theory that Tudor Queen Elizabeth I was, in fact, a man. Let us explore! The theory was first written down back in the nineteenth century by Dracula author, Bram Stoker. Bram had visited the village of […]
Royston Cave: An Unexplained Enigma
Humans have been drawn to caves since their earliest days. Places of shelter, they sometimes evolved into something new: places of burial, religious ritual, to record one’s history on its walls. Many mysterious workings of humankind have been found across the world, and one English cave adds to this tradition. Royston is a small town […]
Book Review: “River Kings” by Cat Jarman
I like to keep ideas fresh on Just History Posts, and for a while I have toyed with the idea of writing book reviews. As I write history books myself, I read lots of snippets of books and articles for my work, which means for a while now I haven’t actually read many history books […]
Elizabeth II: Before She Was Queen
On Thursday 8th September 2022, Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom and Commonwealth died. She was Britain’s longest-lived and longest-reigning monarch, and the longest serving female head of state in the world. As a Brit and a historian with an interest and knowledge of royal history, it felt only fitting to write something about […]