Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

How well do American and European secondary schools train children in history? Beach is a world-weary type and so is rarely surprised by just how badly his students do: but he does sometimes find himself wondering whether we couldn’t do better. Here is a nice example of the low levels of general knowledge among university […]

Ok a re-release but I somehow missed this… John Dougill, In Search of Japan’s Hidden Christians  

Try and decode this Babylonian text from the seventh century B.C. After Anu [a god] had created the heaven Heaven had created the earth The earth had created the rivers, The rivers had created the marsh And the marsh had created the worm. The worm went weeping before Shamash [god of Justice] His tears flowing […]

Simon R. Doubleday, The Wise King Mirror of kings… Not my favourite genre but this one is in Spain.

Beach has over the years collected, particularly with the help of readers, a number of stories of blood spilling and witches. The idea is that by spilling blood, typically taken with a bramble, you can cure the witch’s overlooking. There are though some variations on this theme, including to judge by this report from 15 […]

British soldier with French girls

In the 1980s Beach read an article on Ronald Reagan that described the then President (born in 1911) talking to veterans of Gettysburg as a child. It was a spark on kindling for the historic imagination. Here is a striking nineteenth-century equivalent that has given Beach much pleasure today. It was recorded in 1851 in […]

The death of a unicorn at the hands of a bear (?)

John Widdowson is one of our finest British folklorists and some of his most interesting work has been on how to scare the living bejesus out of ten year olds. Indeed, his first book had the winsome name If You Don’t Be Good and describes how parents, in the 1960s and 1970s, in Newfoundland (Canada), […]

Sorry again…

Civil war veteran on the steps of a jet engine…

Greystone was a converted manor house in Wiltshire (UK) that Gareth Knight (pictured), perhaps the most celebrated post-war British ritualist, used for his magic. From 1977 to 1983 a series of rituals were carried out by Gareth to connect the upper with the lower world: the aim was to bring earth and the underworld back […]

Apologies….

There are good historical records of armies fighting animals, armies fighting frost bite (the Wehrmacht from 1941 onwards) and one doubtful case of an army accidentally fighting itself. But Beach has recently been reading about a remarkable instance of an army that fought a river, and lost. The year is 1221, the army in question […]

A Foot in the River: Felipe Fernandez-Armesto Intrigued by this one: always had good experiences of FFA, a fine combination of productive megalomania and wit