Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

You are reading through a medieval or early modern English record and you come across the name Vitalis or alternatively Creature, as you will from time to time. Two random examples. Vitalis, son of Richard Engaine, and Sara his wife, released his manor of Dagworth in 1217 to Margery de Cressi. 1550, Nov 5. Buried […]

Peter Marsden, Your Noblest Shippe: Anatomy of a Tudor Warship (31 Jul 2015, The Mary Rose Trust) This volume is concerned primarily with a detailed description of the Mary Rose and how she operated as a functional warship. Commencing with a discussion of the place of the Mary Rose in the development of warships; her […]

Can bells drive away thunder and lightning? Well, d’oh, obviously not. But most of us know that for centuries that western Christians believed that bells did have this power. What Beach had not understood until today was that there was an early modern attempt to explain the science behind bells and thunder: that is the notion that […]

One of Britain’s most lovely cathedrals, Coventry, bombed out in Nov 14 1940.    

Beach has recently been searching for nineteenth-century urban legends, a real challenge because the category did not exist as an idea, though of course incredible ‘true’ stories circulated. Perhaps this is one of them. The pickpocket who is so clever that he or she puts the wallet back once everything is stolen. Folkestone is filling […]

Black policeman protects a Klan member. 1970s? 19 Sept 2015: Bruce T writes ‘It’s been awhile, but I believe that photo is from the Skokie Protests in suburban Chicago, circa 1979. The Klan and Neo-Nazi’s tried several times to march in the suburb of Skokie, home to a large Jewish population, and the highest number […]

Imagine a single story that manages to combine three favourite Beachombian tags: crime, fairies, and practical jokes. Enjoy. And similarly, as people in a certain parish in the diocese of Besançon [north-east France] believed in parallel things, some jokers dressed up as women and, appearing in this way, they entered the house of a rich peasant […]

It happens to us all

This account dates to southern England and 1873, but to judge from some dating clues in the texts the old man who wrote this extract was probably a boy in the early part of the nineteenth century when he heard the story: perhaps in the 1810s or 1820s? It sounds, meanwhile, as if James Carter, […]

Battle of Britain pilots run for their planes.

Margaret Murray (obit 1963) was a brilliantly creative and ill disciplined scholar who not satisfied with the mysteries of the pyramids (she was an Egyptologist) decided to sort out European witchcraft in two books: The Witch Cult in Western Europe (1921) and The God of the Witches (1931). Modern scholars universally reject her methods, while […]

Greek troops head towards the Italian invasion

There are many stories of snakes from world folklore becoming parts of human households and being fed by grateful family members. In some parts of the globe, in the early modern Baltic for instance, this practice seems to have had cultic associations. In most of the world there are folk stories about snakes saved by […]

Basil plays in township in South Africa

Before starting out his research on swindles and confidence tricksters, Beach would never have imagined that there could be a mermaid con. This one came from the Gold Coast in Africa and was reported by the head of British administration there in 1923. Not Eve Pos, 6 Oct 1923, 3 A rogue will tell a […]