Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

I have no idea… Probably the artist didn’t either…

This guest post sets out the experiences of one of the first walkers on England’s best long-distance trail just after it had opened in 1965. I still keep one bit of kit in my rucksack that goes back to my 1965 trip up the Pennine Way. It’s a small blue, plastic container with a cracked, click-on […]

Fourteenth century illustration of Marco Polo’s travels…  

Florence was famous in the renaissance for its relative tolerance for homosexuality. True, after one sermon by Bernardino of Siena bonfires were prepared for any ‘sodomites’ and Savonarola and his allies were also violently disposed towards homosexual citizens. However, homosexuals were not, outside of Christian rhetoric, routinely burnt and in many cases ‘the Office of […]

Beautiful late medieval painting of painting

In 1897 one Mr West of Shirland Road, Paddington London began a series of seances to discover the truth about life on Mars. H.G.Wells’ War of the Worlds had just come out and perhaps the ‘spirits’ wanted to calm human fears about the red-skinned ones. In any case, a Martian named Silver Pearl offered to […]

Those damn medieval monkeys again. Why did they find them so fascinating?  

The copy of 50 Shades arrived on a pendrive. The movie was in English but had Chinese subtitles. Instead of the regulation 125 minutes the film ran to 120 minutes. The reason? Every sex scene had been cut from the sex film of the year by censors: think Indiana Jones without the stunts, Lord of the […]

Fairies appear in nineteenth-century folklore collections, seventeenth-century spells, sixteenth-century plays, tenth-century charms and (at least in Ireland) early medieval tales. How wonderful it would be to drag the evidence back into the Roman period and beyond for our native fauns. One strategy for doing so has been to turn to Romano-British inscriptions which may (just […]

It is sometimes said that the furthest travelled people in the ancient and medieval world were slaves. Consider four points. First, average men and women were not foolish enough to pass beyond the frontiers. Second, when they were foolish enough to travel they often risked becoming slaves (St Patrick, Frumentius… there are many examples). Third, […]

Late medieval cannibalism

Get thee gone, Demon!

There have recently emerged a selection of Edwardian mugshots from North Shields, an industrial town in the grimiest part of the industrial north: lots of Beach’s ancestors came from this part of the world and had to fight to get out. Leenks has put up the individuals in question with the following comment: ‘When looking […]

  Dickey Chapelle celebrated American photographer has just trod on a mine.    

This story combines three Beachcombing interests: first, mesmerism, and second, the practical joke framed, third, in an immortal meal, one that many readers would have killed to have attended. We are in the town of Hexham in the north of England in 1871. Mr Morgan, a professor of mesmerism has come to town to impress […]