Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

Witches fly in many different cultures: the British anthropologist Needham argued that it was a way of expressing their power, their ability to bring maleficum to all who get in their way or on their nerves. But in the European tradition witches have been associated, above all, with broomsticks: though note that witches were also […]

English is a Germanic language and its closest living relation should be one of the Continental Germanic tongues, German, Dutch and the like. However, try speaking English to a German who knows no English, or try understanding German (with just English) and you will find that they are very distant relations. An Italian listening to Spanish: or […]

Beach has recently been looking lovingly through the various volumes of medieval armour and arms, particularly those of Guy Francis Laking (all online and all free if you have time and inclination). Particularly fascinating is the high silliness of the crests that were put on the top of the helmets. Above is perhaps the only […]

The strangest painting technique ever employed? The Mountain Man of Fan-Yang, an artist from T’ang China perhaps holds the prize in what for Europe would have been the early Middle Ages. The Mountain Man’s preferred method was as follows: as you remember this think about a French or Irish monk inking a manuscript. Mountain man […]

Ronald Hutton (ed), Physical Evidence for Ritual Acts, Sorcery and Witchcraft in Christian Britain: A Feeling for Magic (Palgrave Macmillan 2016) Academic essay collections fall into different categories including such old and tried favourites as: ‘new directions’; ‘pot pouri’; ‘the EU gave us some money so we had a conference’; and ‘x is wrong and […]

      ***Invisible first across the line, look below for the answer*** The Index Biography is a new form of biography pioneered by this blog and introduced in a previous post. The creator must find a biography of a famous individual from history, they must turn to the index and write down eight peripheral facts […]

The Assassins were a well known medieval Shiite sect who delighted in sending out their fida’is (assassins) to kill enemies with daggers. Our word ‘assassinate’ (already used routinely by Dante), of course, comes from these charming individuals. The etymology of Assassin in Arabic has long been supposed to come from the word for hashish (Hashshashin […]

A medieval ivory horn is pictured with two mysterious wooden rods, which look like nunchaku, but were actually ‘silence sticks’, banged together before a sermon. The horn is kept at Assisi among the most precious relics of St Francis (obit 1226), because this horn, says tradition, was brought back by Francis from Egypt as a […]

Modern painters have used blood and vomit as paints and penis, breasts and even eyes as brushes. However, the medieval Chinese sometimes gave the modern paper-tearers a run for their money. Wang Hsia (obit 805), for example, was known as ‘ink-flinger Wang’. He would, first, get drunk, second, hurl ink at his surfaces, third, smear […]

This is one of the great scenes from Catholic hagiography. St Thomas of Aquinas has just been kidnapped by his own family and locked up in a room with a naked woman. OK, yes, yes, we can backpedal a moment…. Thomas was born to a noble Campanian clan and as a younger son, the youngest […]

When Beach wrote his university entrance exams, many decades ago, he waxed unlyrical about Europe’s second sons who went on crusade because there was nothing for them at home. There might have been some genuine pent up passion about killing Moors or walking where He walked, but it was really all about filthy lucre. The […]

The date, sometime in the 1440s; the place, the English village of Long Newnton in what is today Gloucestershire; the meal, a table of chicken; the host, Thomas Carter; the occasion, Thomas’s freedom. Thomas Carter had been born a bondsman sometime in the 1370s  around the time Richard II was crowned king and the first […]

One of the pleasures of writing a history blog is revisiting certainties, some picked up in infancy, and exposing them for the callow lies that they are. Many moons ago when Beach was learning to read he had a ladybird book on Richard the Lionheart. In those revered pages there was an image of a […]

This brilliant illustration is from Hark The curious episode when St Francis preaches to the birds is one of those famous (everyone knows it) but little read (well have you?) experiences in western hagiography. Today Beach tracked down an English translation from this site and more importantly the Latin from Thomas of Celano, Francis’ first […]

We have previously visited a remarkable passage in Malleus Maleficarum (1485) where that work’s author, Heinrich Kramer, describes a penis theft: or rather a penis illusion, because Kramer claims the penis is still ‘there’ but hidden. That account was apparently based on a witness: this account sounds like folklore. Finally, what shall we think about […]