Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

This is a uniquely charming Victorian confidence trick to add to our collection. Enjoy! Hull Fair is acknowledged to be one of the largest of its kind in the country. Thousands of excursionists flock into the city on October 11th, and the succeeding days, and every blackguard, thief, and confidence trickster in the North of […]

This is an unusually well written ghost account from Liverpool. It does not appear to come up in any of Tom Slemen’s work on Liverpool (though Beach waits to be contradicted!). This appeared in the Liverpool Post in 1891. Note that in Ireland (with which Liverpool has strong migrant links) this could almost be a […]

St Thomas and the divine sword…

Want to die? Try fighting a duel in a balloon with blunderbusses and ‘without a parachute’. Two aeronauts, recently arrived at New York, Messrs. John Lewis, from England, and Tarteifter, native of Prussia, met about three weeks ago at Johns Woods, where both intended to make public ascents, and at the end of a dispute […]

From Cumbria, apparently a prehistoric ‘rath’ interpreted as a tilting ground…

Just in case you need to swim a long way…

Loved this one…

Location: Only attested in the English West Country and only found in one source (Anon 1870) Aim: To discover the name of your future spouse. Ingredients: a bowl, water, some paper, pens and scissors, a literate family member. Method: West Country Spell (anon 1870) (i) Get a literate family member to write out all 26 […]

The Toros of Guisando in Spain

Big Ben the great bell that rings out from Westminster is a central part of British identity: not least because its chimes have, for many years, sounded on national radio and television programs. It would hardly be surprising then that there are superstitions about Big Ben, but what is surprising is that these seem not […]

These words came from an article in All the Year Round 1869 trying to explain ghosts as problems of sensation. It is unusually well written, and goes into some areas of perception that modern studies don’t deal with: we tend to be obsessed by sight. Next to sight, hearing is the sense most frequently imposed […]

In 1989 Janet Abu-Lughod published her Before European Hegemony. In a series of graphics and discussions she attempted to map out not the trade routes, but the trade zones (‘trade circuits’) that divided up Eurasia and, indeed, Africa to the north of the Sahara and down the Horn. As with many bold economic books, these […]

A study in British attitudes, this one, in the decades before the famine.

Beach is coming back to the Battle of the Frigidus in 394, by all means click the link if you need to refresh your memory. As Theodosius is bringing his army up to fight Eugenius’s army something rather strange is described by the historian Rufinus. But the pagans [Eugenius’ army], who are always giving fresh […]

‘The clocks go back…’