Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

Bureaucracy hell at the moment in Italy so here is a simple but marvelous stocking filler from 1870. Reminds Beach of one of his favourite ever posts, on a hare in a Manx courtroom. Perhaps not quite as good but almost… We are in northern Scotland near Inverness. The other evening, while two servant girls […]

When we experience unusual phenomenon then, of course, our filters are almost as important as the phenomenon itself. Take a series of sheep killing cases that recently made quite an impression on Beach. The narrative breaks down into three sections: Mystery, Mystery Solved, Perception. Each of these in three parts: a, b and c. The […]

Sheep are some of the most benign, unthreatening animals that you can hope to meet. Think of a ewe bleating ineffectually over her young as the farmer comes for his prey, or one of the most pathetic images in the whole of creation, a grown sheep running to suckle when it perceives a threat, almost knocking […]

In 1531 Henry VIII began divorce proceedings with Roman Catholic Church and Latin Europe, the so-called English Reformation: all of modern English history pivots on that date, much as medieval English history pivots on 1066. The betrayal of English Catholicism was a brutal process in which some of the best Britons suffered intoleraby. But if […]