Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

The Duke of Monmouth was the illegitimate son of Charles II and a bit of a ‘tosser’ to use the northern vernacular: he looks, in the portrait above, like an underwear model trying to be ‘hot’, or a nineteen year old who has just made it into a boy band. There is no question that he was […]

When we think wild men most readers will think sasquatch and yeti: when people in the nineteenth century (and before) thought wild men they thought lunatics or hermits who had gone to live in the wood and who had lost touch with humanity. Perhaps in mythic terms there is not that much difference? However, this […]

  Nice meets nasty in a train cab.

Here is a weird little story that allegedly appears in St Nicholas’ Parochial Register, Durham for 1568. Mdm. that a certain Italian brought into the cittie of Durham, the 11th day of June, in the yeare above sayd, a very great strange and monstrous serpent, in length sixteen feet, in quantitie and dimentions greater than a […]

Picture based on De la Casas the first anti-colonial text.

The King and Country debate has been described previously on this blog. It was a talk at Oxford Students’ Union 9 Feb 1933, which saw 275 to 153 students vote for the motion ‘that this House will in no circumstances fight for its King and Country’. This surprisingly pacifist stance from a major British institution attracted […]

Married couple lie back and the aupair rocks the cradle.

24 years old, on war work in 1944: four years from breakthrough.  

In Roman times dead babies and fetuses were not cremated as adults: references in Pliny and in Juvenal confirm this, as do archaeological findings. However, a fifth/sixth century Christian writers named Fulgentius (possibly a North African) has been read to mean that these not fully human humans were buried in suggrundaria: Priori tempore suggrundaria antiqui dicebant sepulchra […]

Demons in control of the fort, medieval equivalent of the patients taking over the asylum.

Beach stumbled across this story a couple of weeks ago and thought he’d put it up for the practical jokes tag. There was much interest in the nineteenth century about how the psychological impression of death could cause death. Somewhere Beach has read a French version of this (can anyone help: drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT […]

This is apparently Fortune (see the text) and Fortune (as well as being great in bed) is supposed to be blindfolded (along with Justice and Synagogue), but why the many hands…?

A beautifully realised graphic history of the engagment ring by Vashi led to thoughts about why, in the Western World, the wedding ring is worn on the ring finger, the third finger of the left hand counting from the index. The answer most authorities give, from nineteenth-century reference works, to modern wedding miscellanies, to early […]

Cockney family hanging out the linen in a destroyed upper room: bombed out London, WW2.

Truffles… Where to even begin? Think a five thousand Euro lump of tuber magnatum sweating in your hand; black truffles grated onto steaming pasta and stirred gently in; truffle salt mixed into white basmati rice; a bottle of truffled oil left open to spread that magic odour in a bedroom; the siren’s sweet sound as the […]