On that sunny day in July, surrounded by thousands of heavy music fans, I saw more battle jackets in a single place than ever before. Among them was the one worn by my partner. He suggested that I should make one for myself.

The crowd at Black Sabbath’s ‘Back to the Beginning’ concert, including two men in the foreground wearing battle jackets. Thomas Cardwell describes battle jackets – variously known as battle vests, patch jackets, or cut-offs – as a denim jacket, usually with the sleeves removed, decorated with patches, badges, studs, handmade artwork, and other embellishments, created by the owner to display their musical taste and allegiances. Photo by Andy Buchanan/AFP via Getty Images.

However, despite having worked as a music journalist for publications in Australia and the UK, organised gigs, and managed several friends’ bands over the years, I don’t think I feel passionately enough about enough bands (or certainly not enough of the same genre) to fill a cut-off denim jacket with embroidered patches.

But as I waited in the bar queue, or maybe the toilet queue (no, it must have been the bar queue, because the Black Sabbath farewell show was one of those rare gigs where there was barely any queue for the women’s toilet!), I had an idea.

Maybe I could create a women’s history battle jacket.

The more I thought about it, the more excited I became by the idea, because – and bear with me here – there are actually some significant commonalities between the development of heavy metal and its community of fans, and the development of the field of women’s history and the community of people who practise it.

Let me elaborate.

Origin story

The academic field of women’s history was born under the influence of the second wave feminist movement of the 1960s. It coincided with a broadening interest in social history, which focuses on the lives of ordinary people – such as the working class – rather than the traditional ‘great man history’ largely focused on titled elites and political and military leaders.

Around the same time, four young working-class men were turning to music as an escape from factory life in Birmingham, in the West Midlands of England. Their band would soon be known as Black Sabbath, and they are credited with creating heavy metal.

Both the history field and the style of music came to be in the same era, amid (or at least, alongside study of) the same social milieu.

The importance of community amid marginalisation

As I’ve written previously, it took a social movement, a community of women, to carry the idea and the practise of women’s history forward. But decades on from the field’s establishment, women remain under-represented in the teaching and production of history.

Similarly, while Black Sabbath invented a new style of music, it was the fans that created the genre. Battle jackets are a marker of their membership of the “metalhead” community, a group “set apart from the mainstream”. Their clothing expresses solidarity and allegiance, not only to an alternative form of music, but an alternative way of life.

The participant community was critical to the establishment of both the history field and the music genre, and heavy metal fans are seen as outsiders (albeit self-styled), just as women’s history remains marginalised.

There’s an unwritten rule that a battle jacket should focus on a single musical genre, or even a single band. But equally, members of the metalhead community don’t have a problem breaking rules. Cardwell interviewed a long-time metal fan called Pete who described his battle jacket as “documenting my life and my taste in music, and consequently there’s a lot of non-metal stuff on here as well, which really fucks people off! […] all your ‘true metal heads’ go ‘How can you have that next to that?!’ And I say ‘Because I like ‘em. Got a problem?!’.” My partner – whose jacket is pictured here – subscribes to the ‘no rules’ philosophy.

Subverting gender stereotypes

A sign of authenticity of a battle jacket and its maker is that the patches are hand sewn. Some jackets even feature hand embroidery. Cardwell has pointed out the contrast here: that the masculine-coded world of heavy metal employs the feminine-coded skill of needlework as part of its identity fashioning.

It’s that same up-ending of gender expectations that I’m going for in my creation: using textile art to celebrate the rich field of women’s history and make the point that women’s contributions to the past go far beyond just their sewing and spinning skills and are worthy of deeper exploration.

(There’s an infuriating story relating to Bathsua Makin, a great woman scholar of the 17th Century, who, at the age of 16, presented a collection of her writings, in six different languages, to King James I. It was recorded that James responded: “but can shee spin?”. Sigh. Of course, if women did/do choose to pursue the textile arts, those skills should be celebrated, and not considered “just what ladies do […] for their own amusement”.)

A women’s history battle jacket

My battle-for-women’s-representation-in-history jacket.

Battle jackets are meant to be added to. They’re an article of living cultural heritage that reflect the maker’s musical influences and inspirations; chart the artists, albums, gigs, and festivals that have had an impact on that person’s life.

My battle-for-women’s-representation-in-history jacket is still a work in progress. Its focus is on the women who have done the work – fought the battle – to uncover women’s presence and contributions in the past, to recover the women previously ‘hidden from history’. I’ve dedicated the back of my jacket to my own (still early career) experience as a historian, spotlighting those whose research I’ve most frequently cited and/or been inspired by. The front celebrates the community aspect of the field, and I invite my fellow women’s history community members to help me add to it; to tell me: who and/or what am I missing?

Who’s who

Front:

• Anon […] was often a woman’ Virginia Woolf quote button: for the women writers obscured from the historic record by the barriers of social and cultural convention.
• Head and heart pins: because for many women (myself included) doing women’s history is an intellectual as well as an emotional practice.
• Women’s Lib patch: replica of a 1970s patch – it was amid this movement that the academic field of women’s history was born.
• Resist ‘the marginalisation of women in history’ pin.
• Suffrage movement ribbons: because the first wave feminist movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries (of which women’s suffrage was a large focus) did inspire a series of women’s history works, however visibility and momentum was lost when the movement fragmented after the First World War.
• Women’s History Network patch: one of the many communities (this one UK based) that celebrates, supports, and furthers our practice today.

Back:

• Clio (central image): the ancient Greek muse of history.
• Christin De Pizan (image): one of the earliest professional writers in Europe and author of one of the earliest histories of women, the 15th Century ‘The Book of the City of Ladies’.
• Gerda Lerner: established the first post-graduate degree in women’s history in the United States at Sarah Lawrence College and was influential in pushing for a new approach to doing women’s history. She urged practitioners to go beyond ‘women worthies’ or ‘compensatory history’ (which focuses only on notable women, not the vast majority of ordinary women), beyond ‘contribution history’ (which examines women’s roles and achievements in relation to men/within male-defined society), to go beyond all existing methodologies and conceptual frameworks (none of which could “fit the complexities of the historical experience of all women”) and “explore the possibility that what we call women’s history may actually be the study of a separate women’s culture”; a culture of experiences, consciousness, and the tensions between “prescribed patriarchal assumptions and women’s efforts to attain autonomy and emancipation”.
• Natalie Zemon Davis: taught one of the first courses in North America on the history of women and gender at Toronto University, and was also a pioneer in microhistory, which is particularly well suited to exploring the ordinary and the marginalised, such as the lives of women. I took inspiration from her work (particularly ‘The Return of Martin Guerre’ and ‘Women on the Margins’) in writing my own microhistory of 17th Century Essex proprietress Elizabeth Goever.
• June Purvis: Founding and Managing Editor of the ‘Women’s History Review’ journal. I have a particular soft spot for Purvis for her article about debate and controversy in women’s history in Britain, in which she set out a seven-point opposition to gender history as an alternative to women’s history. It included concerns about turning women into “social constructs”, de-radicalising women’s history to make it “less threatening to the male establishment”, and that gender history implicitly denied the existence of patriarchy and the existence of women as a political and subordinate class. She concluded that it was critical that women were kept centre stage to avoid “our past being pushed back into obscurity, yet again, and of being marginalized and distorted through a male lens”.
• Arlette Farge: celebrated for her ability to read sources ‘against the grain’ and use judicial and legal records to recover the voices of ordinary people, including women. She also (like me) loves an archive!
• Sheila Rowbotham: her 1973 book ‘Hidden from History: 300 Years of Women’s Oppression and the Fight Against It’ was one of the first works of women’s history published in the UK around the time the field was formalised, and was similarly inspired by Rowbotham’s involvement in the second wave feminist movement.
• ‘The Five’ by Hallie Rubenhold (cover image): the book that opened my eyes to the potential of historical non-fiction and inspired me to professionalise my own interest in history by doing a master’s degree.
• Maureen Bell: created ‘A Dictionary of Women in the London Book Trade, 1540-1730’ for her dissertation and kindly shared it with me for an essay I was writing on the subject. The ‘Dictionary’ (and other articles Bell has written about individual women) proved that, despite gendered assumptions to the contrary, it was common for women to be involved, on a day-to-day basis, at different levels within the Stationers’ Company and its associated trades, “buying and assigning copies; taking, transferring and freeing apprentices; pirating other people’s copies; being prosecuted, fined and imprisoned by the authorities; entering into partnerships and congers; and controlling stock, workers and businesses for years at a time”.
• Amy Louise Erickson: her book ‘Women & Property in Early Modern England’ has been an invaluable resource to help me understand this period, including in my study of women’s wills.
• Amy M. Froide: I’ve cited her work on single women in multiple of my own essays and stories, including her analysis of data from various 17th Century English communities which revealed that at least one third of adult women were single, and the majority of these (3:2 in Southampton, for example) were unmarried rather than widowed – challenging assumptions that all single women in this period were ‘wives in waiting’.

Sources:

• Kate Andrews, ‘Back to Black: celebrating heavy metal heritage’, The National Lottery Heritage Fund (2016).
• Maureen Bell, ‘A Dictionary of Women in the London Book Trade, 1540-1730’ (1983).
• Thomas Cardwell, ‘Battle Jackets: Wearing Metal Identity’, The Cambridge Companion to Metal Music (2023).
• Amy M. Froide, ‘Hidden Women: Rediscovering the Singlewomen of Early Modern England’, Local Population Studies (2002).

• ‘History’, BlackSabbath.com.

• Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Feminist Consciousness: From the Middle Ages to Eighteen-Seventy (1993); ‘Placing Women in History: Definitions and Challenges’, Feminist Studies, 3.1/2 (1975).
• Fiona Montgomery and Christine Collette, The European Women’s History Reader (2002).
• Lauren Alex O’Hagan, ‘“My Musical Armour”: Exploring Metalhead Identity through the Battle Jacket’, Rock Music Studies, vol. 9, no. 1 (2022).
• Carol Pal, ‘Bathsua Makin: female scholars and the reformation of learning’, Republic of Women: Rethinking the Republic of Letters in the Seventeenth Century (2012).
• June Purvis, ‘From “Women Worthies” to Poststructuralism? Debate and Controversy in Women’s History in Britain’, Women’s History: Britain, 1850-1945: An Introduction (1995).

However, I get the sense they weren’t as highly regarded as I’d like to believe.

A painting commemorating the founding members was set in the Life Drawing Room, which women could not enter, so Moser and Kauffmann were depicted as portraits on the right-hand wall, rather than actual people in the scene. Also, they weren’t allowed any role in the RA’s governance.

It would be another 168 years before the next woman, painter Laura Knight, was elected as a full Academician in 1936. And it wasn’t until 1967 that women were invited to the RA’s annual dinner.

‘The Portraits of the Academicians of the Royal Academy, 1771-72’, oil on canvas, by Johan Zoffany. (Public domain.)

Amid this backdrop, it’s not surprising that art considered too feminine was excluded by the RA. In 1770 it banned “Needle-work, artificial Flowers, cut Paper, Shell-work, or any such baubles” from its exhibitions. They were considered crafts and therefore “lower arts”. Joshua Reynolds, the RA’s president at the time, described such artforms as “just what ladies do […] for their own amusement”.

Enter Mary Linwood to prove that belief wrong.

‘Miss Mary Linwood, Artist in Needlework’, oil painting, c.1800, by John Hoppner (a Royal Academician!). Image © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Linwood (1755-1845) was a needlework artist who expertly rendered brush strokes in stitches in her detailed embroidered versions of famous paintings. She worked with wool on linen cloth, using hundreds of colours, different thicknesses of thread, and different lengths of stitch, to create texture and depth. The technique was called ‘needle painting’. The Victoria & Albert Museum in London (V&A) describes Linwood as “the most renowned practitioner” of the art.

She began exhibiting her artworks in her twenties, and in 1786 was awarded a medal for her ‘The Head of King Lear’ embroidery (ironically, after an original painting by Joshua Reynolds!) by the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce.

Linwood’s award-winning ‘The Head of King Lear’, left; and detail, right. It was part of an exhibition at Leicester Museums from September 2025 to February 2026 which explored her life, art, and legacy. Photographs courtesy of Soraya Smithson.

In 1787 Linwood held her first solo exhibition in London. Between 1798-1901 she had a semi-permanent exhibition at Hanover Square Concert Rooms in London, which then went on tour to Scotland, Ireland, and “the chief provincial towns”.

A 1798 newspaper article about the Hanover Square exhibition said: “[…] the world has never witnessed a more striking monument of genius and application, than this truly surprising and admirable collection. The astonishing effect in so many varied styles of subject, their accurate resemblance to the original paintings, and happy distribution, make [it] one of the most agreeable recreations afforded by the Metropolis.”

By 1809 Linwood had bought property on Leicester Square in London and created her own permanent exhibition space. It was the first gallery in the UK owned and run by a woman (and the first art exhibition to be illuminated by gas light).

‘View of Mary Linwood’s gallery’, watercolour, c.1810. Image © Victoria and Albert Museum, London. The railing along the gallery wall was to “keep the company at the requisite distance for properly viewing” the art.

A contemporary guidebook to London ‘exhibitions, public establishments, and remarkable objects’ described the gallery as displaying “between sixty and seventy exquisite copies, in needle-work, of the finest pictures of the English and foreign schools”. As well as the “principal room” – “a fine gallery, of excellent proportions, hung with scarlet broad cloth, and gold bullion tassels, and Greek borders” with art on one side and windows and seating on the other – Linwood’s gallery included a small room made up like “the cell of a prison” which housed her version of James Northcote’s picture of Lady Jane Grey on the eve of her execution, and another “tasteful room, or boudoir” devoted solely to her recreation of Carlo Dolci’s ‘Salvator Mundi’. Other art on display included thread paintings of works by Reynolds, Thomas Gainsborough, and Italy’s Raphael.

The guidebook author, John Feltham, said it was difficult to “single out the best pieces from among so much excellence”.

‘Salvator Mundi, after Carlo Dolci’, c.1798, by Mary Linwood, left; and detail, right. Image courtesy of the Royal Collection Trust / © His Majesty King Charles III. Linwood’s Dictionary of National Biography entry says this work “was regarded as her masterpiece”. She left it to Queen Victoria and it remains in the Royal Collection.

Linwood’s gallery was a hit. It was open from 10am until dusk, and visitors were charged two shillings and sixpence to enter (just over £9 in today’s money). So popular and profitable was it, that in 1813 Linwood was able to donate £155 (£9,500 today) to the infirmary in her hometown of Leicester from “the sums received from the Exhibition of [her] much admired Works”.

A newspaper article typical of the praise Linwood’s work and gallery received described her in 1840 as “the ingenious artiste whose pictorial embroidery has thrown perennial fame around the region of Leicester-square”.

‘Napoleon Bonaparte’, needlework by Mary Linwood, 1825. Image © Victoria and Albert Museum, London. 

The gallery remained open for over 35 years, until Linwood’s death in 1845. Obituaries for her appeared in at least 26 newspapers across the UK, describing her as “one of the most gifted and remarkable women of the age in which she lived”.

Linwood rarely chose to sell her work and only around 20 pieces by her are known to exist today.

When she died, the contents of her gallery was actioned (curiously, the sale achieved much less than the praise Linwood and her work received during her lifetime would have suggested – making only around £1,000, or £107,000 in today’s money).

But this had little impact on the legacy she left her extended family, friends, and charities. Linwood’s estate was worth over £45,000 (about £4.8million), a fortune made largely from her art gallery ticket sales.

‘Picture of embroidered worsted with landscape after painting by Salvator Rosa’, by Mary Linwood, 1790-1819. Image © Victoria and Albert Museum, London. It’s not clear if this is the exact piece they’re talking about, but the V&A says: “On one occasion her copy of a painting by the Italian artist Salvator Rosa was sold for more than the original”.

Sources:

• ‘A brief history of the RA’, The Royal Academy.
• Aris’s Birmingham Gazette, 26 March 1798, via The British Newspaper Archive.
• John Feltham, The picture of London, for 1810; being a correct guide to all the curiosities, amusements, exhibitions, public establishments, and remarkable objects, in and near London (1810).
• Leicester Journal, 5 February 1813, via The British Newspaper Archive.
• ‘Leicester Square, North Side, and Lisle Street Area: Leicester Estate, Leicester House and Leicester Square North Side (Nos 1-16)’, Survey of London: Volumes 33 and 34, St Anne Soho, ed. F H W Sheppard (1966), via British History Online.
• ‘Mary Linwood Art, Stitch & Life’, Leicester Museums & Galleries (2025-2026).
• ‘Miss Mary Linwood, Artist in Needlework’; ‘View of Mary Linwood’s gallery’, Collections – Victoria and Albert Museum.
• Morning Herald (London), 6 May 1840, via The British Newspaper Archive.
• The Patriot, 10 March 1845, via The British Newspaper Archive.
• William Cosmo Monkhouse, ‘Linwood, Mary, Dictionary of National Biography, Volume 33 (1885-1900).
• ‘Now You See Us: Women Artists in Britain 1520-1920’, Tate Britain (2024).
• Amanda Vickery, ‘Hidden from history: the Royal Academy’s female founders’, RA Magazine, Summer 2016.

Enjoy!

History writing

• The on-going hunt for a rare California gold-rush-era book by the first Native American novelist, Cheesquatalawny (AKA Yellow Bird, AKA John Rollin Ridge).
• How Alice Martin turned the fragments of writing of the women in her family – stories of desire and yearning, of ambition and hidden pains; the things women have done and felt and hidden for centuries – into a novel.
• An American man has recorded 10,000 gigs – mostly rock and alternative artists – over the past 37 years; a group of volunteers is digitising and putting the music online. Explore the Aadam Jacobs collection.
• “This is [historical research] for you: after hours of looking at different kinds of sources and piecing together a narrative, you usually reach a point where you have to shrug, turn around, and walk back.”
• You may have seen the photo of the poor Victorian girl, but you probably haven’t known the story of the life of Adelaide Springett, until now.

History

The original manuscript of Jack Kerouac’s ‘On The Road’. The finished novel differs in several ways to the first draft, including the changing of the real names of his friends to pseudonyms. For example, the scroll starts: “I first met Neal not long after my father died”, while the book begins: “I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up”.

In October 2012, I was lucky enough to see, in the flesh – or, the fibre, I guess – Jack Kerouac’s original ‘On The Road’ scroll.

The manuscript was written over three weeks in April 1951. It’s 120 feet long, typed on a continuous length of pages Kerouac stuck together in advance to prevent his creative flow being interrupted by having to feed individual sheets of paper into his typewriter.

The scroll is now browned with age and ragged at the edges in places. It’s typed without paragraph breaks and features multiple pencil annotations – crossings out, bracketing of passages and paragraphs, sentences circled and arrowed into different places.

Just as Dean Moriarty (Neal Cassady) marvels to Sal Paradise (Kerouac) in the book, the scroll embodies the notion of just “getting it all down without modified restraints and hang-ups on literary inhibitions and grammatical fears”.

In March 2026, Kerouac’s original scroll was sold by Christie’s in New York for over $12million (almost £9m), making it the most expensive literary manuscript to sell at auction, regardless of period or origin. It beat its own earlier record of $2.4m/£1.8m (for a 20th Century work) in 2001, and the previous overall record holder, a copy of Shakespeare’s first folio, which sold for $10m/£7.4m in 2020.

Find out more, including the history of the demand for/value of other items that Kerouac left behind.

The first 50 feet of Kerouac’s scroll unrolled and on display at the British Library in 2012.

Just below the piece of plastic holding the manuscript flat is the famous ‘burn, burn, burn’ passage. On the scroll it reads: “[…] the only people that interest me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones that never yawn or say a commonplace thing..but burn, burn, burn like roman candles across the night.” (It also has some pencil annotations, including the insertion of the word ‘yellow’ before ‘roman candles’). The version in the book reads: “[…] the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centrelight pop and everybody goes ‘Awww!’.”

Writing

Typos are embarrassing. I spotted one in my own story the other week (after I’d published it, of course) and I couldn’t have logged into my content management system to change it more quickly if I’d tried!

So spare a thought for – or take some comfort from – the writers and publishers featured in an exhibition at the Yale University Library all about literary mistakes.

Or do as James Joyce did and insist “These are not misprints but beauties of my style hitherto undreamt of.”

This fortnight I’m spinning off from the story of Alice Cornwallis being gifted property in her own name (which was itself a spin-off from my look at the history and significance of John Stow’s ‘A Survey of London’), into a centuries-spanning, two-act tale of women’s struggle for inheritance.

The topic jumped out to me while recently watching a documentary about Knole, a stately home in Kent, southeast England.

The women of this story – who I was aware of individually, but not connected to this place – both lived at Knole in different periods. Both left important written legacies penned during and inspired by their time there. And both – despite having titles, money, and status – could not overcome the patriarchal cultural and legal conventions that prevented them from inheriting ancestral property.

The west front of Knole.

Fun fact before we get started: Knole is another one of those grand buildings – this one owned at the time by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer – where, in 1538, King Henry VIII did his ol’: “I like what you’ve done with the place, you don’t mind if I take it, do you?!” (See also: Hampton Court Palace and Whitehall Palace).

Anne Clifford (1590-1676)

Anne, Countess of Pembroke (Lady Anne Clifford), by William Larkin, oil on panel, c.1618. Image © National Portrait Gallery, London (NPG 6976).

Anne was the daughter of George Clifford, 3rd Earl of Cumberland, and his wife, Margaret. She had two brothers who died young, making her the family’s sole heir. Or so she thought.

When George died in 1605, rather than leaving the extensive Clifford estate (which included five castles) to Anne, he left it to his brother, Francis.

What’s interesting is that George’s will contravened family deeds (or, an ‘entail’) dating back to the 13th Century that said property should descend lineally to the eldest direct heir, regardless of their gender.

Anne was rightly angered at being denied, and with the support of her mother, launched a legal bid to claim her inheritance.

In an article for a yearbook about politics, patronage and literature in England 1558-1658, Barbara K. Lewalski described the case as the two women “setting themselves against the entire Jacobean patriarchy: male relatives, their husbands, court society, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and King James himself”.

In 1609 Anne married Richard Sackville, 3rd Earl of Dorset, and moved to Knole. They had five children together – three sons, who died young, and two daughters. Now under the legal coverture of her husband, Richard took charge of Anne’s lawsuit and pressured her to accept a pay-out. She refused.

She recorded details of the legal battle, the ups and downs of her marriage, and life at Knole, in her diary. It survives as a valuable example of women’s personal writing from the 17th Century. (Vita Sackville-West edited and published the diary with her own introduction in 1923.)

Anne left Knole in 1624 when Richard died (by this stage he had racked up huge debts, sold Knole, and was renting it back). She married again (to Philip Herbert, 4th Earl of Pembroke), and continued to fight for her inheritance.

Despite the Clifford custom that dictated Anne should have inherited the estate – backed up by evidence she provided from extensive historical and genealogical research – court rulings went against her.

She refused to accept offers of a settlement from her uncle Francis, who died in 1641, or his son Henry, whom her family’s estate then passed to. Anne’s only hope was that her cousin would die without a surviving son, in which case everything would revert to her.

Lewalski described that Anne “saw herself as a kind of female David taking on the Goliath of the patriarchal power structure to claim the rights of a daughter and preserve the interests of a female line”.

Anne, Countess of Pembroke (Lady Anne Clifford), after Sir Peter Lely, oil on canvas, feigned oval, c.1650, based on a work of c.1646. Image © National Portrait Gallery, London (NPG 402).

Her persistence eventually paid off. In 1643, almost 40 years after her father’s death and the start of her legal battle, Anne won by default, when Henry died heirless.

Now in her 50s (and after another few years waiting out the worst of the Civil War), Anne could finally return to her ancestral homelands in the north of England. She devoted the final three decades of her life to restoring the five castles (some of which had been left to ruin) and other buildings across her properties, and supporting the local poor. She also published ‘The Great Books of Record’, a three-volume Clifford family history based on the research she’d conducted during her legal battle.

When Anne died in 1676, her long-fought-for inheritance meant she was one of the wealthiest women in the country. She left the Clifford estate to her surviving daughter, Margaret.

Vita Sackville-West (1892-1962)

Vita Sackville-West, by Howard Coster, print, c.1927. Image © National Portrait Gallery, London (NPG x10667).

Vita (baptised Victoria Mary) was the only child of Lionel Sackville-West and his wife (who was also his first cousin) Victoria. She was born at the family’s ancestral home, Knole, which her father later inherited in 1908, making him 3rd Baron Sackville.

Vita developed a profound attachment to Knole. In her writings, she described it variously as a maternal figure and as a lover. But it was a doomed love. As a daughter – under the laws of male primogeniture – she was unable to inherit it.

But rather than challenging her denial of hereditary privilege in the courts, she explored it through writing. So too did one of her lovers, Virginia Woolf.

Vita’s novel, ‘The Edwardians’, tells the story of a brother and sister, their respective destinies of ancestral and feminine inheritance, and their questioning of the ‘natural’ order of the period and their class. It’s set at Chevron, a grand house based on Knole. In her author’s note, Vita wrote: “no character in this book is wholly fictitious”.

Woolf went even further in ‘Orlando’, a time travelling tale in which the title character, based on Vita, changes sex part way through the book. Crucially, even as a woman, Orlando keeps ownership of the ancestral home, which stands in for Knole. Vita’s son, Nigel Nicolson, said of the book: “Virginia by her genius had provided Vita with a unique consolation for having been born a girl, for her exclusion from her inheritance” and described the work as “the longest and most charming love-letter in literature”.

Vita further expressed her dedication to Knole, and explored her family’s relationship to it, in her history ‘Knole and the Sackvilles’. It traces her ancestors’ ownership of the house from the 16th Century to the death of her grandfather in the 19th Century. (It also includes a section on Anne Clifford, who Vita described as “a lady of some fame and a great deal of character” who was “the legal heiress of the North, and the North she would have”.)

Vita Sackville-West, by Howard Coster, 10 x 8 inch film negative, 1934. Image © National Portrait Gallery, London (NPG x12030).

In 1913, Vita had married the diplomat and writer Harold Nicolson, and together they had two surviving sons. (It was an unconventional relationship, which included each taking various same-sex lovers, eg: Virginia Woolf.) After initially moving to a house just a few miles from Knole, the pair bought the run-down Sissinghurst Castle, also in Kent, in 1930. It’s this home that I most closely associate with Vita, and it’s here that she cultivated the property’s now famous garden.

When her father died in 1928, Knole had passed to Vita’s uncle, Charles Sackville-West. It was also around this time that Vita began talks with the National Trust about taking on the property and opening it to the public, which it did from 1946. In so doing, Vita ensured that Knole became an inheritance for all of us.

Sources:

• Susan Bazargan, ‘The Uses of the Land: Vita Sackville-West’s Pastoral Writings and Virginia Woolf’s “Orlando”’, Woolf Studies Annual, Vol. 5 (1999).
• Jane De Gay, ‘Virginia Woolf’s Feminist Historiography in “Orlando”’, Critical Survey, Vol. 19, No. 1 (2007)
• J. Hochstrasser, ‘West, Victoria Mary [Vita] Sackville (1892–1962)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2017).
• Dr Sue Jones, ‘Single Parent History: Lady Anne Clifford – historic legal battles, philanthropy and independence’, Gingerbread (2022).
• ‘Knole’ and sub-pages, The National Trust.
• Barbara K. Lewalski, ‘Re-Writing Patriarchy and Patronage: Margaret Clifford, Anne Clifford, and Aemilia Lanyer’, The Yearbook of English Studies, Vol. 21, Politics, Patronage and Literature in England 1558-1658 (1991).
• Sackville-West, Knole and the Sackvilles (1922).
• ‘Women in history: Lady Anne Clifford’, English Heritage.

Something I didn’t mention then was the former property of a ‘Mistris Cornewallies’. Stow’s passage – part of his description of Aldgate Street (now Leadenhall Street) – reads in full:

“Then is there a faire house, with divers Tenements neere adjoining, sometime belonging to a late dissolved Priory, but since possessed by Mistris Cornewallies, widow, and her heires, by the gift of King Henry the eighth, in reward of fine puddings (as it was commonly said) by her made, wherewith she had presented him: such was the Princely liberality of those times.”

I have discovered that the ‘Mistris’ was called Alice and her surname is the pre-standardised spelling of Cornwallis.

Now, it’s no secret that King Henry VIII liked his food (a suit of armour made for him in 1540 puts his waistline around 138cm). But even so – and even considering “the Princely liberality of those times” – Alice Cornwallis must have made some damn fine desserts to warrant the gift of a house and land.

Could Stow’s account really be true, or was it a case of a story being embellished and/or corrupted over time? After all, Henry VIII had been dead more than 50 years when the first edition of Stow’s ‘Survey’ was published.

I’m always drawn to stories of women who had some agency, or control (eg: property ownership), in periods when they were generally under the legal, financial, and even bodily, authority of first their fathers and then their husbands. So, I was intrigued to investigate further.

And reader, hold on, because it gets more liberal yet.

But first…

Who was Alice Cornwallis and what did she do?

As I’ve written about before, the historic record is overwhelmingly silent when it comes to the details of the lives of ordinary women from the past. As such, I can’t tell you when or where Alice was born.

The earliest reference to her I’ve found is in the records of Privy Purse Expenses of Henry VIII from October 1530 for a payment “To the wife that makes the King puddings at Hampton Court, 6s. 8d.” (That’s about £250 in today’s money, according to the Bank of England’s conversion tools.)

Only six women are known to have been employed indoors in Henry VIII’s household. Alison Sim has written that this was typical of the upper classes in the Tudor period. It cost more to employ men than women, so having a house full of male staff was a status symbol. The names of just two of Henry VIII’s women staff are known to us today: Anne Harris, who worked in the Laundry, and Alice Cornwallis, who worked in the Confectionary, one of more than a dozen departments of the royal kitchen. (Others include familiar names such as the Cellar, Bakehouse, Pantry, and Larder, plus the more whimsical Spicery, Saucery, Buttery, and Wafery.)

One of the kitchen rooms at Hampton Court Palace. Image: Ion Mes / Shutterstock.com.

Tracy Borman, Chief Historian for Historic Royal Palaces, wrote in her book, ‘The Private Lives of the Tudors’, that Henry VIII “so loved [Alice’s] sweet treats”, and listed “custards, fritters, tarts, jelly, cream of almonds and a quince marmalade so thick that it could be sliced” as among his favourite of her recipes.

And excitingly for our purposes, Borman endorses Stow’s account that Henry VIII rewarded Alice for her culinary skills with property in Aldgate.

The “Princely liberality” of Henry VIII’s property gifts

Following a further sift through the letters and papers of Henry VIII and later monarchs, I found six references to Alice, and her husband Edward, and properties in the City of London. They relate to two initial gifts.

I spoke to historian and author Caroline Angus to help me understand these 16th Century records. Angus has transcribed and published the letters and other writings of Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII’s ‘faithful servant and agent’, so knows about the administration of the country around this time.

The first property gift, granted in 1540, was to “Edw. Cornewallis and Alice, his wife” of “the great messuage called the ‘Principall place’ and garden adjoining […] in the parish of St Katharine Cristchurche in London, which belonged to the late monastery of Evesham, Worc” as well as “messuages, lands, &c., in the parish of St. Dunstan in the East, London, which belonged to the said monastery”. (A ‘messuage’ is a house with outbuildings and land.)

This ‘Principall place’ matches the location and description that Stow gives in his ‘Survey’. It would have been located somewhere between what is today an alley called Fenchurch Buildings and Billiter Street. A map of Tudor London c.1520, created by modern historians and archaeologists, shows ‘The Abbots of Eversham’s Inn’ (the said dissolved priory) occupying the same area.

Today the site is home to a towering steel and glass high-rise:

I had to use some extreme reverse zoom to fit the building in a single shot.

The second property gift, granted in 1543, was for “Nine messuages in the parish of St. Katherine Christchurch, and two in that of St. Alban, Wood street, London […] and six in St. Clement’s lane in the parishes of St. Clement within the city and St. Andrew Undreshaft, London”. And what’s interesting about this one – aside from the scale of the gift – is that in this and later references to it, Alice is explicitly named as the sole recipient, with Edward only mentioned for context (eg: “Alice Cornewalles, wife of Edw. Cornewalles”).

So, it wasn’t just one property in Aldgate that Alice was gifted, but 15, in multiple locations (including Aldgate) across the City of London. They must have been damn fine desserts, indeed!

The gifts were initially to receive the rental income from the properties during their lifetimes, but in 1544 and 1545, they were granted the freeholds to the properties and those who would’ve previously received the rental income rights back after Alice and Edward’s deaths were paid out by the Crown. There are further references in the records to Edward and Alice selling some of the properties.

At the time of her death in January 1556, Alice – by then a widow and mother to a 24-year-old son, Thomas – was still in possession of the ‘Principall place’ off Aldgate (now Leadenhall) Street.

Another part of the kitchen complex at Hampton Court Palace. Image: Ion Mes / Shutterstock.com.

The records I have access to don’t explicitly mention puddings or Alice’s role as Confectionary kitchen staff in relation to the property gifts. But are the dots big enough and close enough to join? Those with much closer proximity than me to the people (Stow) and the places/systems involved (Borman) certainly thought so. And does it matter that the specific property Stow mentioned as being gifted for ‘fine puddings’ appears to be the one given to Alice alongside her husband, rather than one of the 15 given exclusively to her? Probably not in the grand scheme of things (and who’s to say the joint gift wasn’t also for the puddings, anyway).

What does it all mean?

Alice Cornwallis was a non-elite woman whose culinary skills shone brightly enough, even from her service-level position, to catch the palette and the attention of a king. She was rewarded with property across the City of London, which she controlled for a decade and a half, and ensured a healthy inheritance for her son.

470 years later, I’m saying her name, recounting her story, and celebrating her skill and good fortune. That’s more of a legacy than most of us can probably expect.

Sources:

• Tracy Borman, The Private Lives of the Tudors: A revelatory glimpse into the lives of Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn, Elizabeth I and more (2016).
• G S Fry, ed. (1896), ‘Abstracts of Inquisitiones Post Mortem For the City of London: Part 1’, British History Online.
• James Gairdner, ed. (1880), ‘Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, Henry VIII’, British History Online.
• C L Kingsford, ed. (1908), A Survey of London. Reprinted From the Text of 1603, British History Online.
• Alison Sim, Food and Feast in Tudor England (2005).
• John Stow, A Survey Of London / The Survey of London (1598 and 1633).
• Alison Weir, Henry VIII: King and Court (2011).

History writing

• Despite the commonly believed etymology of the term, it turns out that in no stage or screen version of ‘Gaslight’ is there an exchange between husband and wife about the dimming of lights in which he tells her she’s imagining it in an attempt to drive her insane.
• 18th Century naval warfare inadvertently saved the papers, and the story, of an international woman wine trader from London.
• A fascinating insight into the practice of Tudor-era miniature portraits and the contemporary experts who decode them.
• More fascinating insights, this time into ancient prayers, charms, and folk remedies associated with pregnancy.
• Meet Wallace Kirsop, the now-92-year-old man who pioneered the study of rare books in Australia and helped establish the concept of special collections in its institutions.

History

Did you grow up with any superstitions around eggshells? From at least as early as the 1st Century AD – as described by Pliny the Elder in his ‘Naturae Historiae’ (‘Natural History’), for example – some people have associated eggshells with a fear of spells and curses, which made them “break the shells […] immediately after eating them, or else pierce them with the spoon that they have used”. In the 16th Century, Reginald Scot was describing in his ‘The Discoverie of Witchcraft’ how believers attributed to witches, among other nefarious traits, the ability to “saile in an egge shell […] through and under the tempestuous seas”. By at least the early 1800s, the two themes had combined into a belief in various places across the UK that egg eaters must crush their shells to prevent witches stealing them to use as boats. In 1934, Elizabeth Fleming wrote a poem about it, called ‘Eggshells’, the first verse of which I’ve animated here:

Writing

If you could time travel, how far back do you think you could go before you stopped being able to understand English? Colin Gorrie created an experiment for you to find out.

That’s what Janelle Jenstad told me when we chatted over Zoom recently. Jenstad is a Professor in the Department of English at University of Victoria, Canada, and the Founder and Director of the Map of Early Modern London. The digital project (among many other fascinating things) uses the ‘Survey’ as a key source to annotate places on the mid-16th-Century ‘Agas’ map, as part of an effort to bring William Shakespeare’s London to life.

“I think Stow is a visionary in his conception of how to tell history,” Jenstad says. “He’s the first person who tells the story of London from London’s perspective.

“The ‘Survey’ is a fascinating text because it’s recording London as it’s growing. I sometimes wonder if he’s writing for old Londoners to remind them what London was, or if he’s writing for new Londoners to interpellate them into his idea of London.”

Who was John Stow?

Born in London in 1524 or 1525 (“depending on which calendar one uses”), John Stow was the son of a candlemaker based in Aldgate, in the east of the city. He was a member of the Merchant Taylors’ Company, but his main interests were literature and antiquarian history.

“He’s a collector of books and manuscripts and seems to make his living primarily from editing and writing,” Jenstad says. “He edited Chaucer and other authors’ works, abridged other chroniclers, wrote about England, wrote about Queen Elizabeth I, and eventually wrote about London.”

Stow’s ‘Survey’ was published across four editions: 1598, 1603, 1618, and 1633. The first two were penned by Stow himself, and the second two overseen and expanded upon after his death in 1605 by his friend and fellow antiquarian, Anthony Munday. (It was later picked up by John Strype in 1720 and further iterations published under his name.) During this time, London’s population changed from around 50,000 in 1550 to around 200,000 in 1600 and around 400,000 in 1650.

The ‘Survey’ changed across time, too: from quarto (around 30cm tall) to folio size (around 40cm tall), from 485 to 990 pages, and from a wide target audience to a more elite one.

“The first edition was quarto size, printed in black letter type, which is considered to be the more accessible font of the period. It’s a sign that Stow was imagining a common readership,” Jenstad says. By the fourth edition, it’s being printed in folio size and is “likely out of the price range of most people; it would be bought by people with money. It goes from being a book of the people in 1598 to being a book of the Corporation of London by 1633.”

Indeed, the 1633 edition features the coats of arms of the City of London and all its livery companies, and Jenstad says “we have records of livery companies paying for copies”.

What actually is the ‘Survey’?

The ‘Survey’ is organised into three sections. The first covers the walls, gates, and bridges of the city, its schools, and its customs, sports, and pastimes. The third section looks at the governance of the city. The second section is the important one, the street-by-street tour of the 25 wards of London, plus the Borough of Southwark and Bridge Ward Without. In the 1633 edition, it expanded to cover around 4miles outside the city walls (“The person who did that work – we’re not entirely sure who it is – seems to have handed in his notes really late, so they’re published at the back of the book.”).

In each ward, Stow first describes the perimeter, then documents the length of each east-to-west street, before covering the streets that branch off it to the north, and then the streets that branch off it to the south. In between are occasional observations – from past and present – about buildings and other landmarks, their etymology, and people associated with them. He starts from the wards in the east of the city, working his way across to the west.

But despite the meticulousness of the mapping, Jenstad cautions that “the content of the ‘Survey’ tends to be biased towards a fairly sanitised version of London”. For example, there’s no mention of crime or prostitution, of entertainment such as bear baiting, of overcrowding, dirt, and sewage.

What is the legacy of Stow’s ‘Survey’?

Jenstad says: “It doesn’t tell us a complete history of London, but then no history ever does. Histories are stories told from a particular perspective. But it’s a wonderful source, as long as you keep in mind what Stow didn’t write about.”

Indeed, she considers Stow’s work among her most valuable resources; so much so that she published her own transcription of the 1633 edition on the Map of Early Modern London site, and is working on a project to “put the four editions side by side and allow you to see how they evolve”.

“The 1633 text in particular should be more widely used than it is by historians. It has so much more information [than the earlier editions] and covers a really crucial period of London’s history – the whole shift to the Stuart era and the lead up to the Civil War. And the fact it says on the title page that it’s ‘now completely finished’.”

Jenstad believes historians tend to default to the 1603 edition, the last one published during Stow’s lifetime, but “I’d really like the 1633 to be the canonical text”.

It’s a fitting hope: that a man who put place before people in the works of his lifetime should not be privileged as a person over the comprehensiveness of those works released after his death.

The 1633 edition, now called ‘The Survey of London’, was printed by Elizabeth Purslow(e), widow of George, who died in 1632. Jenstad says: “This is, if not the first, one of the earliest books that has her name on it. It’s so beautifully printed that I figure she’d been involved in the printing all along.” Image courtesy of the Internet Archive.

When I spoke with Jenstad, she told me the ‘Survey’ wasn’t intended as a literal guidebook. Despite the portable size of the first three editions, she said: “I’m not actually sure that Stow imagined anybody walking around with it in their hand”. She described it instead as a guide to “travel in your mind”.

But what if we did try to use it on the ground?

The privilege of living in London is the ability to see in real life how the city has both changed from, and stayed the same as, the historic descriptions of it. And so, I set out to do just that.

I chose Stow’s local area, Aldgate Ward, and using the text of the 1633 edition, focused on following his description of its bounds – the east-to-west main roads, the north and south streets that run off them, and some of their key landmarks.

Of the 13 streets explicitly mentioned in this portion of the ‘Survey’, all but one of them can be clearly found today, albeit with sometimes changed or slight variations of the names (eg: Stow’s Sugarloafe Alley – off today’s Leadenhall Street, this section of which was formerly known as Aldgate Street – is now Fenchurch Buildings; Woodroofe Lane, leading to Tower Hill, is now Cooper’s Row; Sydon Lane is now Seething Lane; Mart Lane is now Mark Lane). The outlier is Culver Alley, off Fenchurch Street, which from a comparison of 16th and 17th-Century and modern maps, may have been somewhere near to or between today’s Fen Court and Hogarth Court, or may in fact be today’s Cullum Street. A water pump (with wolf head spout), which replaced a former well where Aldgate “divided into twaine”, still stands around the same spot.

Stow wrote: “The principall street of this Ward beginneth at Ealdgate, stretching West to sometime a faire Well, where now a Pumpe is placed. From thence (the way being divided into twaine)…”

The halls of the two livery companies Stow names – Bricklayers and Ironmongers – are gone, now in their place a corporate office building and Rolex store, respectively. And of the five places of worship mentioned, two survive, including St Andrew Undershaft, where Stow is commemorated with a statue showing him at work on his writings.

St Andrew Undershaft, left; and the John Stow memorial statue inside, right.

But she’s also found evidence, from at least the 7th Century, of women’s “significant and almost constant effort” to create women’s histories. The problem she found, however, was that due to social and cultural conditions of the times, rather than these women’s work building successively on each other, they “developed in a repetitive, circular pattern, with generation after generation of women repeating what others had done before them”.

Lerner said that “Women’s History couldn’t be created as an intellectual pursuit in the absence of a social movement of women”; that it required communities of women to carry the ideas forward.

An illustration from ‘The Book of the City of Ladies’ by Christine De Pizan. On the right, women are shown building the city.

It takes a community

Indeed, as Fiona Montgomery and Christine Collete have described, the academic field of women’s history was born “under the influence” of the second wave feminist movement of the 1960s* – a movement of communities of women working together to improve the rights and representation of their fellow women.

It coincided with a broadening interest in social history, which included women-related topics, such as the family, which had previously been considered “ahistorical”. The field also attracted “self-confessed feminist historians” who wanted to “study women on their own terms”.

Sheila Rowbotham directly credited “a political movement” and “discussions in women’s liberation” as the inspiration for her 1973 book ‘Hidden from History: 300 Years of Women’s Oppression and the Fight Against It’.

Small steps, big ambitions

Nicole Bourbonnais has described how early historians of women had a dual focus. First, they looked to recognise the “critical” role women had played in key events that dominated historical studies, and which until this point, were almost exclusively dominated by histories of men: politics, wars, and revolutions. This involved writing not only about “the more visible actors” such as Joan of Arc and Sylvia Pankhurst, but also women like the peasants who had led marches during the French Revolution. Second – since the social and cultural conditions throughout history had confined a large proportion of many women’s experiences to the domestic sphere – they “expanded the limits of historical enquiry”, writing histories of family, childbearing and rearing, of work and labour politics. In so doing, Bourbonnais said, “it challenged us to rethink what counted as historically significant”.

Writing of this same early period in the development of the field of women’s history, Ann D. Gordon, Mari Jo Buhle, and Nancy Schrom Dye, said that historians of women were “redefining and enlarging traditional notions of historical significance”, and that not only were they creating “a new history of women, but also a new history”.

However, even in left-leaning, social historical circles, women’s history still had “to be argued for”. Sally Alexander and Anna Davin recalled in the inaugural issue of ‘History Workshop’ journal in 1976 that “As recently as 1971, when the suggestion was made at a History Workshop session that people working on women’s issues should meet later in the day, there was a roar of laughter”.

Gerda Lerner was willing to do the arguing. She declared the idea of women being a sub-group in history as “wrong”; that while “men have defined their experience as history and left women out”, given women had always made up at least half, sometimes the majority, of the population, history up to this period was in fact “the history of a minority” and should be seen as “merely prehistory”.

She said the stages of women’s history to date – from ‘women worthies’ or ‘compensatory history’, which focused on notable women and didn’t describe “the significance of women’s activities to society as a whole” nor “the experience and history of the mass of women”, to ‘contribution history’, which situated women, their efforts, status, and oppression within “male-defined society” – were important, but unsatisfactory. Lerner believed that to write a new history, a women’s history, there must be “new questions to all of universal history”. The next stage, she said, “may be to explore the possibility that what we call women’s history may actually be the study of a separate women’s culture” which would focus not only on women’s experiences but their consciousness, and the tensions between “prescribed patriarchal assumptions and women’s efforts to attain autonomy and emancipation”.

But alongside this call to action, others within the women’s history field began questioning whether they were focused too narrowly and separately on women.

Challenges from within

Natalie Zemon Davis acknowledged the need to write about women “to rectify the deep and longlasting bias of the historical record”, but that she and many others wanted also to make “the relations between the sexes more just”. She said: “it seems to me that we should be interested in the history of both women and men, that we should not be working only on the subjected sex”.

Joan W. Scott said gender could be used as “a way of rethinking the determinants of the relationships between the sexes”, and that by seeing the word ‘gender’ as purely “a grammatical reference” it could help historians separate biology from culture and explain change as a result of history rather than social engineering. Used in this way, she said, it supported questions about how sex-based roles and functions, and the meaning of ‘man’ and ‘woman’, varied across time and place, how rights and power intersected with masculinity and femininity, and how conforming with or fighting against these things affected people’s lives, practices, and identities. And in the process, it would “bring women from the margins to the center of historical focus”.

However, many other historians of women saw this expansion of scope as a threat to the dedicated work to recover women previously hidden from history. June Hannam described an emphasis on gender-centred history as “controversial”; that an approach which saw the interests of the sexes as similar could lead to women’s specific experiences being lost from view.

June Purvis went even further, setting out a seven-point opposition to gender history, which included concerns about turning women into “social constructs”, de-radicalising women’s history to make it “less threatening to the male establishment”, and that gender history implicitly denied the existence of patriarchy, and the existence of women as a political and subordinate class. She concluded that it was “critical” that women were kept “centre stage” to avoid “our past being pushed back into obscurity, yet again, and of being marginalized and distorted through a male lens”.

The field of women’s history faced other internal challenges, too. Like the women’s liberation movement that helped inspire it, the academy and history practitioners were criticised for a lack of diversity and intersectionality.

Sonya O. Rose described the work of women of colour as “a second major assault” (gender history being the first). She explained that writing by and about women of colour challenged the version of women being reclaimed by white Western historians as, in fact, the experiences of white, often middle-class, women; that domesticity, family structures, community bonds, and women’s role in the public sphere were different for Third World women and women of colour. These writings also promoted, Rose said, the “pivotal idea” that race, gender, and class are “interlocking and interdependent” dimensions and forms of domination. For example, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham has described the “paradoxical nature” of black women’s identity, explaining they are “simultaneously black and female, black and American, and American and female” and that “to be black and female carries the dual burden of racial and sexual oppression”.

*It should be noted that – in line with Lerner’s assertion about women’s history needing a movement of women to thrive – the first wave feminist movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries did inspire a series of women’s history works (one I’ve used multiple times in my own research is Alice Clark’s 1919 ‘Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century’). However, Hannam has said that when the women’s movement fragmented after the First World War, “these pioneering histories tended to be lost from view”. In contrast, in the mid-20th Century – even when the second wave feminist movement began to lose momentum – “the expansion of higher education opened up more jobs for women academics who were able to influence the curriculum and to introduce women’s history courses”.

The work must go on

However, I’d argue that that influence hasn’t extended far enough outside the academy. Decades on from the field’s establishment, women are still significantly under-represented in, for example:

• UK secondary school history lessons – women made up just 7% of named characters in a sample of 28 history textbooks currently in use in classrooms.
• both academic and public history outputs – from a sample of 26,697 articles, books, podcasts, and newsletters published in 2004, just 1.5% focused on women-specific topics, rising to 4.7% when considering women-specific and women-related topics.

However, as my survey of history practitioners found, at least 33% of women who do history are either explicitly or implicitly influenced by this under-representation. And while, yes, they are frustrated, even angry, about the state of the field, they are also determined to drive the change they want to see. As one of my favourite responses in the survey said: “The more the patriarchy gets me down, the harder I go”.

Women may traditionally have been excluded from the history that was recorded, but that doesn’t mean they were absent from or didn’t contribute to the making of it. They were there, and they’re waiting for us to uncover and tell their stories.

Sources:

• Aitken-Burt, Laura, Initial Analysis of Characters Listed in History GCSE and A Level Specifications for AQA, Edexcel and OCR (2025), doi:10.5281/zenodo.15620013.
• Alexander, Sally and Anna Davin, ‘Feminist History’, History Workshop, 0.1 (1976).
• Bourbonnais, Nicole, ‘A Brief History of Women’s History’, London School of Economics (2016)
• Brooks Higginbotham, Evelyn, ‘Beyond The Sound of Silence: Afro-American Women in History’, Gender & History, 1.1 (1989).
• Gordon, Ann D.,  Mari Jo Buhle, and Nancy Schrom Dye, ‘The Problem of Women’s History’, in Liberating Women’s History: Theoretical and Critical Essays, ed. by Berenice A. Carroll (1976).
• Hannam, June, ‘Women’s History, Feminist History’, Making History, the Changing Face of the Profession in Britain, The Institute of Historical Research.
• Lerner, Gerda, The Creation of Feminist Consciousness: From the Middle Ages to Eighteen-Seventy (1993).
• Montgomery, Fiona and Christine Collette, The European Women’s History Reader (2002).
• Purvis, June, ‘From “Women Worthies” to Poststructuralism? Debate and Controversy in Women’s History in Britain’, in Women’s History: Britain, 1850-1945 : An Introduction (1995).
• Rose, Sonya O., ‘Gender History/Women’s History: Is Feminist Scholarship Losing Its Critical Edge?’, Journal of Women’s History, 5.1 (1993).
• Rowbotham, Sheila, Hidden from History: 300 Years of Women’s Oppression and the Fight against It, 3rd edition (1977).
• Scott, Joan W., ‘Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis’, The American Historical Review, 91.5 (1986); Gender and the Politics of History, revised edition (1999).
• Zemon Davis, Natalie, ‘“Women’s History” in Transition: The European Case’, Feminist Studies, 3.3/4 (1976).

Enjoy!

History writing

• It’s incredible to think that sometime in the early 1500s, a precious gold necklace and locket was dropped in a field in the West Midlands of England, and around 500 years later it was dug up intact. It’s perhaps even more precious because it’s a rare piece that shows the love once felt between Henry VIII and his first wife, Katherine of Aragon.
• 8 February, I have learned, is celebrated by some as the ‘anniversary of King Taejong falling off his horse’. For on that day in 1404, Taejong of Joseon, a Korean ruler, was, according to the contemporary ‘Veritable Records of the Joseon Dynasty’, “riding a horse with a bow and arrow, shooting a deer. The horse overturned and he fell from it, but was not injured. He looked around and said, ‘Don’t let the historians know’.” Unfortunately for him – but humorously for us – his request was ignored. (Hat tip to Sam Ottewill-Soulsby via Bluesky.)
• Ed West’s historical crossover articles are full of fascinating tidbits, like the fact 1889 was the year the Eiffel Tower was completed, Adolf Hitler was born, and Nintendo was created. I first stumbled upon part 3, and have since gone back and read part one and part two.
• Discover the often-unrecognised women who typed manuscripts from dictation and messy handwritten drafts, freeing up [male] authors to focus on the development of their work rather than its production.

History

The ceiling of Banqueting House.

Banqueting House, the last remaining building from the old Whitehall Palace in London, has just reopened after two years of conservation. I was lucky enough to visit on its first public open day in February.

Originally known as York Place and owned by Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, Whitehall Palace’s transformation into a royal residence was another case (like Hampton Court Palace) of King Henry VIII going: “I like what you’ve done with the place, you don’t mind if I take it, do you?!”.

The exterior of Banqueting House, photographed previously as part of my relics of old London tour.

But it was actually King James I, in 1619, who commissioned architect Inigo Jones to create the Banqueting House. The result is cited as the first Palladian style building in England. However, it’s perhaps the ceiling for which Banqueting House is most famous. It features paintings by Peter Paul Rubens, commissioned by King Charles I, and installed in 1636. Charles got a final glimpse of them as he was led through the room and out a window to the scaffolding where he was executed in 1649.

A fire in 1698 destroyed everything at Whitehall Palace, except the Banqueting House. In the years since, the building has been used as a chapel and a military museum (it once displayed the skeleton of Napoleon’s horse), but has now returned to its original use as an event space.

A humble request for the next phase of conservation/renovation: return the downstairs, used as a drinking den by King James I, to its former grotto style, complete with fountains and seashell-covered walls.

King James I’s former drinking den in the basement of Banqueting House.

Writing

Julian Sancton shares the ‘research behind [a] banging work of narrative history’: his story about the 21st Century discovery of the sunken 18th Century Spanish galleon, San Jose. “A lot of the book has to do with the joys of archival research. It’s a bit of a challenge to try to make that exciting, but it really is so exciting for me to find treasure in those archives, and I tried to communicate that to the reader.”

In short, I say: ‘public history is doing history in, with, and for the public’. But I’m conscious that’s got a bit of political slogan vibe to it.

Fellow history newsletter-er Lucy Worsley says: “I’m a public historian, which to my mind means doing the kind of history that appeals to people who don’t even know they like history … yet.”

I agree. And that’s part of my ambition, too.

But what also appeals to me is the field’s roots (in this country, at least) in social, working class – and as such, what’s described as ‘radical’ – history.

Public history was born in the UK from historian Raphael Samuel’s History Workshop classes, which he began teaching at Ruskin, an adult-education ‘trade union college’ in Oxford, in 1967.

In contrast to traditional history practice – the professionalisation of which had been heavily influenced in the second half of the 19th Century by the strictly objective and impartial approach of Leopold von Ranke – Samuel believed that people should not just be represented in history, but should represent themselves.

Raphael Samuel (1934-1996) described History Workshop as “an alternative educational practice” that “gave a privileged place to experience” and as such, found its students – working men and women – “peculiarly well-placed to write about many facets of industrial and working class history”.

For example, in the 1970s, student David Douglass published a pamphlet, ‘Pit Life in Co. Durham’, which was an unashamedly part autobiographical, part historical attempt to explain the roots of miners’ militancy.

David Douglass’ ‘Pit Life in Co. Durham’ History Workshop pamphlet.

Samuel thought it remarkable how little of history had been written from the vantage point, and incorporating the real-life experiences, of people themselves. History Workshop was his attempt to change that.

He encouraged participants to “write their own history instead of allowing it to be lost, or learning it at second or third hand; to become producers rather than consumers; and to bring their own experience and understanding to bear upon the record of the past.” He focused particularly on themes which were “hidden from history” and “at odds with the dominant mode of historical publication”.

History Workshop was a course that became a movement, birthed a journal (which has recently released its 100th issue), and carries on its public historical work via a digital magazine.

As for my own public historical work: women (who remain as ‘hidden from history’ as ever) are a key focus. And like Samuel and his students, I too am interested in representing ordinary people like myself (what’s often described as ‘history from below’), as well as exploring the past and present of the streets and locations I encounter in my everyday life.

And when I do sometimes research and write about those from more privileged backgrounds, it’s usually because these people (these women) were radical in some way, defied the expectations and conventions of their time.

And above all, I choose topics that appeal to me, and which I think will appeal to you too, even if you don’t know it yet.

Sources:

• Thomas Cauvin, ‘A Long History of Public History’, in Public History. A Textbook of Practice (2022); ‘New Field, Old Practices: Promises and Challenges of Public History’, magazén, vol. 2, issue 1 (2021).
• Raphael Samuel, ‘On the Methods of History Workshop: A Reply’, History Workshop, no. 9 (1980); Village Life and Labour (1975).
• Bill Schwarz, ‘History on the Move: Reflections on History Workshop’, Radical History Review, 1993.57 (1993).