Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

What is wrong with this picture? We have here two Elizabethan nobles: Sir Thomas Wroughton (d. 1597) and Lady Anne Wroughton of Broad Hinton in Wiltshire: their manor house would in later centuries host and house such notables as John Evelyn and the Iron Duke of Wellington. Thomas was a member of the upper ranks […]

Practical jokes were often fairly of poor fare in the nineteenth century. However, there is something amusingly diabolical about this one, particularly if you remember that no one died and that the wife hunter learnt  that there were probably better ways to find true love . It appears that a Manchester tradesman short time ago […]

At least twice a year there are news stories about zombie-proof burials. Archaeologists dig up a body that has been given special treatment by gravediggers: we have enjoyed some of these stories at StrangeHistory in the past including a particularly haunting one from Ireland. Sometimes corpses are decapitated and the head placed between the legs; sometimes […]

In the 1960s, date unspecified, a southern English paper the Hackney and Kingsland Gazette published the following letter, a memoir from one Mr S.C. Thomas, who had lived in the area in the First World War. His memories had taken him back to October 1916 when he and Hilda Cavanagh had gone out for a […]

A bragging post today. This morning a copy of Marjorie Johnson’s Seeing Fairies: From the Lost Archives of the Fairy Investigation Society arrived by express delivery: major kudos in the village when the red van drives up and the courier demands a signature, the butcher and the baker came out to watch. Regular or perhaps […]

The burial of children is always extremely melancholy. The very tragedy of putting a loved child in the ground – memories of an Anglo-Saxon grave in Oxfordshire covered previously by this blog – leads relations, siblings and particularly parents to an unusual pitch of grief and in that grief they sometimes make unusual decisions. Certainly, […]

Duelling was a sensible institution that, from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, reminded young men, and sometimes women, of a particular social class that – never mind how they had been spoilt growing up – words and actions had consequences. Most individuals who paced around in Hyde Park  slashing the air with their swords, […]

  I came across this story while looking into the history of magic rings. It is some, shall we say, marginalia, written into the back of a volume that was subsequently scanned by Google. This is not the first time I’ve come across an intriguing reference on an online scan, but this one begged more […]

Battles have been fought in some odd places: in sewers, on iced lakes, in factories, across impossibly high mountains… But a battle on a tennis court is surely unique? Other strange examples: drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com The scrap in question took place in April 1944 at the bungalow at Kohima and was one of […]

This is an almost unbelievable story that made a splash in the UK in the late May of 1833. We quote one G.S.Gowing who was the owner of a ship, but who was not a witness. On Monday last, the 20th inst., a fishing vessel belonging to Lowestoft [Norfolk], Robert Gowing master, engaged in the […]

One of our occasional series of ghost stories from the English press. This one appeared in 1940 – as if a World War wasn’t enough to keep you busy – and relates to Devonport (Plymouth) in the south-west. Note that the south-west is over-represented in English newsreports of Fortean affairs. Relieved peace once more reigns […]

This peculiar creature appeared in a seventeenth-century English pamphlet. The pamphlet limits itself to two pages and tells a simple story. The true Portraiture of a prodigious Monster, taken in the Mountains of Zardana [in Syria]. the following Description whereof was sent to Madrid, Octob. 20, 1654, and from thence to Don Olonzo de Cardines, […]

From long before the times of Trimalchio there have been extraordinarily sumptuous banquets. These died away with the shriveling of economic possibilities in the early Middle Ages but then returned with avengeance in the fourteenth and fifteenth century. A British contribution to the category of exaggerated banquets and one for the immortal meal tag was […]

Robert Herrick is famous today for his bit part in The Dead Poet’s Society, where he makes Robin Williams look good (briefly). But he had a much greater range, writing about sex, alcohol, sex, death, sex, folklore, sex and (rather unconvincingly) God. Basically, his poems smelt of semen and noone who has ever read his […]

Challacombe is a small village to the west of Exmoor in Devon in the south-west of the UK. On the edge of the moor there are many ‘hillocks of earth and stones, cast up anciently in large quantity’, i.e. prehistoric burial mounds. So far so normal, this is a classic landscape in a marginal agricultural area, that […]