Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

Messing around with numbers for the great European cities over the last two hundred years: I’m not interested so much in the biggest cities as the capitals of the most important countries. Can these be taken as barometers for the successes and failures of their countries? A few things stand out. First, growth is constant […]

Most countries have a lost realm that nationals can get teary eyed about: Italians beating their chest over Istria, the Spanish spitting blood for (and all too often on) Gibraltar, even Islamists weeping about the orange trees of Granada. Britain is no exception: the difference is that the UK’s lost territory was not taken by […]

Beachcombing has made fun in the past of historians and numbers: be they numbers for the population of Britain in Roman times or numbers of prisoners taken by the barbary pirates. Most historical numbers are simply partial facts or very partial facts multiplied by guesses. A classic example of this are the numbers of ‘witches’ […]

Beachcombing had some fun the other day writing about ancient history and population estimates. Last night reading in the ‘wee hours’ he came across another lovely example of this: the insane modern debate about the population of Roman Britain. Now post-war estimates for the population of Roman Britain  have gone as low as 200,000 and […]

                          Numbers are hobgoblins in history, especially prior to the beginning of grown-up records in the late nineteenth century. How many people lived in Roman Britain? Well, in the last forty years estimates have ranged from a couple of hundred thousand to six million. […]