Tag: English History
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Mythical Creatures: Medieval Mermaids
Mermaids are creatures that appear time and again throughout history and across cultures. Typically a mermaid is portrayed as having the top half of a woman, and the bottom half of a fish, though this sometimes varies slightly. The first known stories of mermaids come from Assyria around 1000BC; the goddess Atargatis, who was the…
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Stand and Deliver, Your Money or Your Life: Female Highwaymen of the Seventeenth Century
As yesterday was International Women’s Day, I couldn’t resist writing a female-related post, and for this one I drew inspiration from a local legend in my area of the ‘Wicked Lady’. If you happen to pass through Wheathampstead, Hertfordshire, you will probably notice a pub with the same name, and may hear the legend of…
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Medieval Dating Tips; or, How to Bag Yourself an Eligible Lord or Lady
According to Andreas Capellanus, a late twelfth-century author, “Love is an inborn suffering proceeding from the sight and immoderate thought upon the beauty of the other sex”. This Valentine’s Day, whether you have a special someone or not, I’m sure that, like mine, your Facebook feed is probably full of engagements, gushing declarations of love,…
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The Enduring Appeal of a Lolcat: Ancient and Medieval Cats as Pets
If you have spent as much as half an hour on the internet, then you cannot have missed the fact that the internet is obsessed with cats. From the website that popularised the idea of the Lolcat, to the millions of Youtube videos of the furry creatures (the top result for “cat” on Youtube is…
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Is Selfie Culture New? Vanity Through Time
If you’re one of those pesky ‘Millennials’ then you’ve probably heard someone of an older generation (or even of your own) complaining about the vanity of youths today. We post pictures of ourselves on Twitter, Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram. We send silly pictures to our friends, we show anyone who might follow us on social media…
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Royal People: Boudica, Queen of the Iceni
For this latest post in my Royal People series I go back a lot further than most of my posts have focused on so far, to Roman Britain. Boudica is one of the most famous women in English history, and as I grew up in one of the towns she burnt to the ground, I…
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Origins of Wedding Traditions
With all of the engagements announced over the festive period, my friends and I were discussing weddings we had been to and what we might like for our own weddings one day. My friends seemed mildly impressed by some of my basic knowledge of where some of the traditions we tend to celebrate in England…
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Happy New Year, or End of the World? Early Modern Apocalypse Predictions
If you’ve spent any time on social media in the last few weeks, or pretty much just spoken to anybody, then I am sure you will have heard the chorus of “I can’t wait for 2016 to be over!” “Worst year ever!” “2017 can’t surely be worse?!” and so on. It was only a few…
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Have Yourself a Merry Little (Medieval) Christmas
With Christmas soon approaching, it is only appropriate to have a Christmas themed post! We all have our own Christmas traditions on how we spend our time over the festive season, and lots of these traditions are influenced by the culture we grew up in. But how would you be spending this day if you…
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The Medieval Titanic: The Tragedy of the White Ship Disaster
Every one of us knows the tragic tale of the Titanic. It has been made into a blockbuster film, with a similarly famous theme song, and helped launch Leonardo DiCaprio as a heart-throb (and an almost-oscar-winner meme… until recently). The Titanic certainly was a horrendous disaster, in many ways, and it will probably remain in…
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