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.”

My rethink was sparked by a recent article by Rita Voltmer which – in the simplest terms – calls out scholar/author/teacher/activist Silvia Federici for continuing to perpetuate myths about the European witch hunts of the 16th and 17th centuries.

I’m not going to lie, I love this painting by John William Waterhouse, which depicts some of the myths we’ll cover below. ‘The Magic Circle’ (slightly cropped), 1886.

Federici is the author of the now-described “cult classic”, ‘Caliban and the Witch’. It started as a pair of essays in the 1980s and was first published as a standalone book in 2004. Since then, it’s had some light revisions across later editions and translations, but, Voltmer says, it has been “unaffected by 40 years of new scholarship”. The problem is, it should have been affected.

In brief (as Voltmer summarises in her article): in ‘Caliban and the Witch’, Federici presents the witch hunts as an international conspiracy by state and church to destroy women’s liberty, their knowledge about nature, abortion, birth control, and magic, and their free sexuality. The underlying agenda was to reduce women to child bearers and raisers to populate the work and military forces of Europe. (There are a few more angles to it, but these are the relevant ones for our purposes.)

“In the 1980s, Federici’s approach was excusable, because witchcraft research was still in its infancy,” Voltmer writes, “However, during the years to come, Federici did not distance herself from these misconceptions, since otherwise her entire theory […] would have collapsed.”

What do we know now?

What’s agreed today (while acknowledging that figures vary greatly across time and place) is that around 50-60,000 people in Europe were executed as witches during the 15th to 18th centuries, and around 75-80% of those people were women.

And while Alison Rowlands has said that “we must accept the fact that the patriarchal organisation of early modern society was […] a necessary precondition for witch-hunts that produced predominantly female victims”, we cannot accurately say it was a case of church/men against women, or even against a particular age, class, or vocation of women.

Research shows, for example, that there was no organised conspiracy (hotspots of persecution, and the pipeline of witch trials to higher courts, were frequently small and/or rural jurisdictions), it was frequently women who defamed and testified against other women as witches (this was used as a tactic for “resolving everyday conflicts”), and that midwives and women healers were neither usual suspects nor usual victims of witch trials.

Voltmer’s article asks: “Why are the myths about the European witch hunts still to be found in Federici’s writing, long after they have been debunked by historians of the period; and why do so many feminists still believe in these myths today?”

Where did the myths begin?

By the late 17th Century two theories had developed around the cause of the witch hunts. One attributed it to the fanatical fantasies, fears, and phobias of churchmen. The other accepted the reality of magical practice and believed persecution was about either a) eradicating the social danger of magic or b) eradicating powerful and rebellious women.

Federici subscribes to the latter of these two theories.

So too, did two men named Jacob Grimm (1785-1863) and Jules Michelet (1798-1874).

Grimm (yes, he of fairy tales fame) claimed to have discovered evidence that German victims of witch trials had been “wise women”, priestesses of a pagan-folk religion, who practiced medicine and fortune-telling. But his vision of these women, Voltmer says, was shaped by the religious and gender norms of the time. His work was, she says, “essentially anti-feminist”.

Michelet built on Grimm’s theory, claiming the existence of a “healing rebel” whose access to the secrets of nature came via Satan. These women spoke with animals, trees, and clouds, acted as doctors and midwives, and provided contraception and abortions. But again, his vision was shaped by his own beliefs: that women were physically and mentally weak, needed male assistance, and would only find true fulfilment as wives, mothers, and carers.

And here’s where things get challenging for the modern feminist. Voltmer describes how Grimm and Michelet’s creation of the ‘witch’ can be traced through much of what has come since. From the 19th Century American feminist Matilda Joslyn Gage, who is considered the first to express a clearly feminist interpretation of the witch hunts, to England’s Margaret Murray, who claimed to have discovered an underground Pagan witch-cult, which in turn helped inspire Gerald Gardner’s founding of the Wicca movement. And from the second wave feminist movement of the 1960s and 70s, which adopted the witch as a symbolic figure of patriarchal resistance, all the way up to Silvia Federici’s latest edition (2021) of ‘Caliban and the Witch’.

“[H]er version of the conspiracy myths of the witch hunt […] derives, with little modification from ‘dead white men’ such as Grimm and Michelet, and breathes their spirit. Thus, ironically, the antifeminist, indeed explicitly misogynist Michelet has become the godfather of the feminist icon of ‘the witch’,” Voltmer says.

She describes this as a case of Gebrauchsgeschichte or ‘useful history’ – “the political use of historical narratives, myths and even fake news to legitimize one’s own (collective or individual) ideology or interests, without regard for the historical consistency or for the accuracy of the narratives deployed”.

A protest sign I photographed at the 2017 Women’s March on London.

For me, there’s another irony here. Whether knowingly or not, the feminists who, for example, invoked the iconography and practices of the ‘witch’ to protest the presidency and the misogyny of Donald Trump could be said to be employing the same approaches he does. Isn’t Trump’s March 2025 executive order to “restor[e] truth and sanity” to American history by focusing only on the positives of the past and “removing improper ideology”, such as discussions about racism, another form of Gebrauchsgeschichte?

Don’t get me wrong, I have joined these same feminists on protest marches against Trump; I have invoked and celebrated the iconography of the ‘witch’; I have even previously written about (based on an outdated source, and since unpublished) women being targeted during the witch hunts for the nature of their work. As I said at the top – the title of this article is aimed at myself as much as anyone else.

But as Voltmer concludes her own article: “the conspiracy myths advanced by Federici obscure the unpleasant fact that it was not the faceless apparatus of the state and its obedient male agents, but was rather specific named men (and women) who as stakeholders, collaborators, and spectators were responsible for the marginalization, persecution, and extermination of the historical ‘witch’ (women and men alike).” And that “the use of fake history about the witch trials is abusing again and again those women and men who had actually been slandered, tortured, and killed as alleged witches”.

It calls to my mind a plaque unveiled in Orkney, in Scotland, in 2019 dedicated to the at least 72 “innocent people” accused of witchcraft there between 1594 and 1645, which declares: “they weren’t witches, ‘they wur cheust folk’ (‘they were just folk’)”.

Furthermore, Voltmer calls for “more awareness and care” in using the label ‘witch’ – a term that still poses the danger of death to women in some parts of Africa and Asia today.

Resources:

• ‘Memorial for “Innocent” Victims of Orkney Witchcraft Trials Unveiled’, The Scotsman (2019)
• ‘Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History’, The White House, (2025)
• Rowlands, Alison, ‘Witchcraft and Gender in Early Modern Europe’ from The Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe and Colonial America, ed. by Brian P. Levak (2014)
• Voltmer, Rita, “Federici’s Witches: Old Male Myths in New Feminist Garb?” in Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft, vol. 20 no. 2, (2025)

Enjoy!

History writing

• Did you know the full extent of the bromance between Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-discoverers of evolution by natural selection?!
• There’s an unlikely link between punk music and corporate innovation – “raw power unleashed by seizing the means of (office paperwork) production”.
• I am a true believer in the incredible possibilities of archives, if we just have the time and patience to explore them (and the lateral thinking about where to look for evidence). Isabelle Appleton shares a case study from among boxes of ‘The Wishing Well’ magazine.
  • Pair with my piece about love in the archives.
• I learned about the Irish tradition of Nollaig na mBan or ‘Women’s Christmas’ too late to celebrate it this year. If it’s new to you too, here’s your prompt to find out more and add it to your calendar for next January 6.
• As I think I’ve mentioned before, Hallie Rubenhold was one of my inspirations to formalise my history practice by getting my master’s degree, so I am always biased to share her work and opinions – here she is on exploring historical crimes and restoring the reputation of maligned women.

History

Is the north entrance of St Edward’s Church in Stow-on-the-Wold, Gloucestershire, the inspiration for JRR Tolkien’s Doors of Durin in ‘The Lord of the Rings’? I can’t say for sure, but to the tens of thousands of people who are said to come to see it each year – including my sister and her partner, who I tagged along with – it’s a compelling enough suggestion to warrant a visit. Either way, it’s a beautiful example of nature versus man, as the tree trunks bulge against the building, the oldest parts of which date from the 12th and 13th centuries.

A still from the 2001 ‘The Lord of the Rings’ movie featuring the Doors of Durin (left); and Tolkien’s illustration of the doors from the original book (right).

Writing

How a switch in writing technique – from longhand to typewriter – impacted not only Friedrich Nietzsche’s proficiency, but his philosophical and creative expression: “Our writing tools are also working on our thoughts.”

A member of the class asked a question along the lines of: ‘Why would anyone / any archive be interested in a woman’s recipe book?’. Internally I seethed at his lack of imagination and the sexist undertones (overtones?) of his comment, while externally – given what I thought was clear from the context of the article and the discussion – I couldn’t help blurting out: “The recipe book is the archive!”.

But let’s give the questioner the benefit of the doubt for a moment (perhaps he hadn’t actually read the article?).

The ‘recipe’ book (or ‘receipt’ book, to use the language of the era) we were talking about wasn’t simply a catalogue of instructions for cooking a nice meal. It was a multi-generational record of, yes, food recipes, but also practical medical knowledge and family history. And the large number of these books that survive to us today (often dating from the early modern period, spanning the 16th to 18th centuries) reveal they weren’t only written by women, either.

As Alexandra Walsham explained in the article we were discussing in class that day, as historic sources, recipe books can reveal fascinating insights into everything from family traditions and dynamics, to domestic lore and informal scientific practice, as well as literacy, record keeping, and life writing practices.

For their owners, these books were family heirlooms, in some cases considered valuable enough to be mentioned in wills. For historians and researchers, they provide a unique glimpse into the private sphere of the early modern household and challenge perceptions around knowledge production and transfer.

Writing on the subject of recipe books, Elaine Leong has said that “while early modern women were actively involved and played a significant role in the making of household knowledge, they were joined in these endeavours by their fathers, husbands, brothers and sons,” and suggests that “communities of knowledge-collectors rather than single authors were behind the making of these books”.

Rather than ‘recipe’ books, Leong says they are better described as “family treasuries of practical knowledge”. Each new keeper benefits from the efforts, the trying and testing, of the generation before, while taking on responsibility for adding to the collection for the next.

And the information these books contain is almost as varied as the ways in which they entered and were passed down through families.

Knowledge transfer

• In 1610, widower Valentyne Bourne began a book which, 26 years later, he bequeathed to his daughter, Elizabeth. Blank pages were left at the end of certain sections, suggesting his hope that she would continue to add to it. These types of books are known as ‘starter’ collections.
• When Mary Cholmeley married Henry Fairfax in 1627, she brought a recipe book with her into her new family. On the front and back covers it features the initials ‘MC’, which may be for Mary, or her mother, Margaret Cholmeley. The Cholmeley/Fairfax book was passed through the extended family for over a century before it was rediscovered in a chemist’s building in the 1880s.
• In the will of Lady Frances Catchmay, who died in 1629, she left instructions that her several books of ‘medicines, preserves and cookery’ should go to her son, William, “Earnestly desiringe and Chardginge him to lett every one of his Brothers and Sisters” have full or partial transcripts. She wished to pass her accumulated knowledge onto not only her eldest child, but all of them.
• When Rhoda Chapman Hussey married Ferdinando Fairfax in 1646, she brought the recipe book she’d used in the home with her first husband, Thomas Hussey. But, in fact, the Wellcome Collection describes this book as originally created by Anne Brumwich, who died 1628. (After the inside front page – where each new owner traditionally writes their name – Rhoda, or “Lady Hussey”, appears in the book for the first time on page 39 with a recipe for a canker in the mouth attributed to her.) The Brumwich/Hussey/Fairfax book passed through at least three generations of Rhoda’s female descendants (and includes a step-daughter’s name on the inside front pages, too) before it was sold as part of a library auction in the early 1900s by the family Rhoda’s great-granddaughter married into.
• Sir Peter Temple created a book “for my dear daughter”, Elianor, around 1656, which includes further recipes contributed into the 18th Century.

The Brumwich/Hussey/Fairfax book, in which the title page (left) says “Mris Anne Brumwich her Booke of Receipts or Medicines, ffor Severall sores and other Infermities”, while the cover (right) features the initials, “R H”, of Rhoda Chapman Hussey. Image courtesy of the Wellcome Collection.

Knowledge production

• The Bourne recipe book, which is held in the Bodleian Library at Oxford University, contains medical, veterinary, and culinary recipes, as well as weights and measures conversion charts, a glossary of medical terms, and extracts from the works of the ancient Greek physician, Galen. It also includes family history (the dates of births, deaths, and marriages) and local history (lists of Norwich mayors and sheriffs, and Norfolk high sheriffs).
• What survives of the Cholmeley/Fairfax book is a “reproduc[tion] in fac-simile of the handwritings” called ‘Arcana Fairfaxiana’, which is held at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. It was produced in 1890 and includes a printed introduction by George Weddell, who discovered the original book in the chemist’s building. The recipes are medical (“The Drinke for the Plage”, “For the swyming in y’ head; given by Mr Vesalius (ye Emperor Charles phisition) to Quene Mary”) and culinary (from making “Cramd Capons”, or stuffed cockerel, to pancakes and gingerbread), as well as covering household tasks such as bleaching, dying, brewing, and preserving. Weddell also describes “occasional appeals to the imagination, in the form of charms or talismans”. There is evidence that recipes were copied from professional sources, such as apothecaries’ books, and contributed by the extended family, including examples written in the hands of Mary’s brother, Henry Cholmeley, and Henry Fairfax’s brother, Ferdinando. Weddell additionally describes the book as “swelled” by numerous cousins and countless nieces.
• Only a single volume of the Catchmay books survives, held in the Wellcome Collection in London. It contains over 950 recipes – starting with “A prayer to be sayd at all tymes to defend thee from thy Enemyes” – that cover everything from dealing with aches, burns, coughs, and colds, to fever, gout, migraines, plague, and pestilence, as well as remedies to staunch bleeding, induce vomiting, and hasten a birth. Some of the recipes include the source, such as “Goodwife Wittmans water to washe corrupte or dangerous woundes withal” and “Mrs Clyffes medicen for the palsey”. Others include a note on effectiveness, such as “A medicen for wartes proved” and “A Reciept to make Sirropp of Roses the Best”. The book also includes remedies for animals, such as “for a beast that hath eaten a taynte worme” and “A medicen for a mangy horse or dogge”, plus a section at the end with 17 dedicated horse recipes across five pages.
• The Brumwich/Hussey/Fairfax book, which is held in the Welcome Collection, stands out to me for the detail of its recipe titles – their specificity, their breadth of purpose, and endorsements of their value or effectiveness. For example: “An aproved medison for all sorts of Agues: to be Layd on six houres before the fit come: & if posible: used before they have had six fits”, “An excellent Balsome curinge many disseases & all desperate wounds in the space of 24 hours”, and “A very rare Receipt of Mrs Huttons which cuered her of a cancer in her breast & for which 3 score pound had been given for the receipt”. They also provide intriguing peaks into broader social history, such as with “A Receipt to prevent miscarrying sent to my Sister Cartwright by her neece the Duchesse of Buckingham” and “An Excelent receipt for the plague wch did help 600 in York & in one house wher 8 were Infected 2 of thm drunk of it & lived the other would not & dyed”.
• The Temple book, which is held by the British Library, starts with medical recipes arranged in rough alphabetical order. This is followed by additional sections of themed recipes under the headings: “Cookery”, “Made wines”, “Perfumes”, “Husbandry” (for sowing crops, etc), “Horses” and “Dogs” (both for diseases), “Fishing’” (recipes for bait, etc), “Rabbits” (recipes for catching), and “Experiments”. Inserted at the end are “The true Receipts of that valuable secret for curing all sorts of Ruptures in men, women and children”, said to have been sold to the King by Thomas Renton. Throughout, the book includes notes on the origin of the recipes and the trustworthiness of their authors, and Temple endorsed particular entries with his initials, “PT”.

An amusing “medicen agaynst dronkenes” from Frances Catchmay’s recipe book. Method: “washe the pivie partes of a man with vineger, & of a woman her teates, or els take a cruste of breade steeped in water & eate it, or drinke the [j]uce of byttony fastinge.” Image courtesy of the Wellcome Collection.

Family archives

A little reading – of the literature and the books themselves – quickly shows that, despite what my classmate thought, early modern era recipe books were (to quote Leong) “not housewifery guides authored by individual women but household books filled to the brim with the collective knowledge of a family”.

She continues: “Husbands and wives, fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters all contributed to, wrote in and owned these books. Sons and daughters inherited the books and the practical knowledge contained within. As new owners sought to individualize and customize the books to their own and their family’s needs, they collected and added new recipes and tested and adapted old ones. The result was a book which lay at the heart of the household, a central place to record practical medical and culinary knowledge. When seen from this angle, it is not surprising that a number of compilers combined family history with recipes, for in some ways the recipe book was [as I blurted!] a kind of family archive.”

Sources:

• Bourne, Valentyne, ‘A Common-Place Book’, 17th Century | Bodleian Archives & Manuscripts.
• Brumwich, Anne (& Others), MS160, Recipe Book Collection: Wellcome Collection, FromThePage.
• Catchmay, Lady Frances (d.1629), MS.184a, Recipe Book Collection: Wellcome Collection, FromThePage.
• ‘Elianor Temple: Collection of recipes made for, by her father: 17th cent’, Stowe MS 1077, British Library Archives and Manuscripts.
• Leong, Elaine, ‘Collecting Knowledge for the Family: Recipes, Gender and Practical Knowledge in the Early Modern English Household’, Centaurus; International Magazine of the History of Science and Medicine, 55.2 (2013).
• Walsham, Alexandra, ‘The Social History of the Archive: Record-Keeping in Early Modern Europe’, Past & Present, 230, Supplement 11 (2016).
• Weddell, George and Fairfax family, ‘Arcana Fairfaxiana Manuscripta : A Manuscript Volume of Apothecaries’ Lore and Housewifery Nearly Three Centuries Old, Used, and Partly Written by the Fairfax Family’ (1890), Internet Archive.

At the same time and place, Anne Styles was working as a maid when she approached Bodenham seeking a spell to save her mistress from a poisoning plot. (This was not the first time Styles had visited, or paid for the services of, the cunning woman.) Bodenham wrote a charm for the mistress. She also persuaded Styles to sign her name in blood in a special red book, as a contract with the devil. Styles couldn’t write, so Bodenham guided the pen for her.

In a 1653 pamphlet detailing the case of Bodenham and Styles, ‘Doctor Lamb [sic] Revived, or, Witchcraft Condemn’d in Anne Bodenham a Servant of His’, Edmond Bower linked Bodenham’s witchcraft and criminality to her literacy, while at the same time linking Style’s illiteracy with vulnerability to the temptation of witchcraft and the devil.

As Frances E Dolan wrote about this case in ‘Reading, writing, and other crimes’: “witchcraft could be associated with either ‘illiteratenesse and want or learning’ or ‘the reading and study of dangerous books’ […] Thus, either literacy or illiteracy can lead women to witchcraft.”

An original copy of Bower’s pamphlet sold in 2021 for £950. Image courtesy of Forum Auctions.

About 60,000 people were executed for the crime of witchcraft in Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries. In the British Isles there were around 5,000 witchcraft trials, more than half of which were in Scotland (and of those in Scotland, it’s estimated at least 54% resulted in execution). At least 75% of the people accused of witchcraft in England and Scotland were women.

In his analysis of demonological texts, Stuart Clarke found that women were overwhelmingly associated with witchcraft, based on the cliches of the period. Indeed, Alison Rowlands has said: “we must accept the fact that the patriarchal organisation of early modern society was […] a necessary precondition for witch-hunts that produced predominantly female victims”. Likewise, Christina Larner has concluded that “witchcraft was not sex-specific but it was sex-related” and that “the women who were accused were those who challenged the patriarchal view of the ideal woman”.

Interestingly, in Keith Thompson’s ‘Religion and The Decline of Magic’, he said that it wasn’t until the 1640s, and the investigations of the self-proclaimed ‘Witchfinder General’ Matthew Hopkins, that records emerge of people testifying to written pacts with the devil.

Frontispiece from Matthew Hopkins’ 1647 ‘The discovery of witches’. Image courtesy of the Wellcome Collection.]

And so, back to the specifics of literacy and witchcraft, and the two Annes of 17th Century Salisbury.

In Bower’s pamphlet, he recounted Anne Bodenham’s description of how she did (under Dr Lambe) – and others could – learn witchcraft: “If those that have a desire to it, doe read in books, and when they come to read further then they can understand, then the Devil will appear to them, and shew them what they would know; and they doing what he would have them, they may learn to doe what they desired to do, and he would teach them.”

Reading being such a significant part of her criminality, Bower tried to use Bodenham’s library against her at her trial. He was particularly interested in “that Book that did raise the Spirits” and the one Styles had signed in blood, which he was sure would include other “names of Witches that had listed themselves under the Devils command”. But the only books Bodenham would allow him to have “were nothing concerning her art”. He concluded the first part of his pamphlet by describing Bodenham’s life as “wicked” and her death as “wofull”.

Meanwhile, the pamphlet continued, after spending several weeks in prison, Anne Styles was allowed to “go away home” and hoped to “begin a holy life”. Part of her plan to earn God’s mercy, to redeem herself for having previously “given my soul to the Devil”, was to overcome her illiteracy!

“I am not yet too old to learn, I will learn to read, sure, if God will be pleased that I shall.”

Um, does anyone else spot the flaw in the logic here? The skill that led one woman to witchcraft was acceptable as part of the redemption from witchcraft of another?!

As Dolan said: “In relation to literacy, most early modern women could not win.”

Sources:

• Bower, Edmund, Doctor Lamb Revived, or, Witchcraft Condemn’d in Anne Bodenham a Servant of His, University of Michigan Library Digital Collections (1653)
• Clark, Stuart, Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (1999)
• Dolan, Frances E., ‘Reading, writing, and other crimes’, in Feminist Readings of Early Modern Culture: Emerging Subjects (1996)
• Larner, Christina, Enemies of God: The Witch-Hunt in Scotland (1981)
• Lee, Sidney, ‘Lambe, John (d.1628), Astrologer’, Dictionary of National Biography 1885-1900, via Wikisource
• Levack, Brian P., The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe (1995)
• Rowlands, Alison, ‘Witchcraft and Gender in Early Modern Europe’, in The Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe and Colonial America (2014)
• Thomas, Keith, Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971)

This end/start of year edition also includes a bonus list of the top three stories I published in 2025 (according to the data) and my favourite three stories I published in 2025 (according to me).

Enjoy!

History writing

• It took her daughter-in-law to believe the extraordinary life stories of Patricia Hartwell and write a memoir that “release[d] Pat from the suspicions around her legend”.
• A writer’s journey to learn the “portable inheritance” of his maternal family’s native language.
• A church restoration inspired research into a pair of 19th Century sisters who went on a North African tour “that very few men had even done, let alone for two women”.
• Linguists have started work on the first complete dictionary of ancient Celtic.
• The secret history of unicorns.

History

View from the gallery of The New Inn down onto the courtyard and towards the front carriage way.

At the end of autumn, I spent a few days in Gloucestershire, southwest England, and made a point of staying at The New Inn, a Grade I-listed Tudor-style former coaching inn built in the mid-15th Century. It was commissioned by a monk, John Twyning, who was attached to the (former) Benedictine Abbey of St Peter, and it passed to the ownership of Gloucester Cathedral after the Dissolution. It occupies three frontages on Northgate Street (two of which are now mobile phone shops) from where you enter through a carriage way into the central courtyard. Above are two storeys (plus an attic level) of ‘chambers’ (now hotel rooms) accessed via open ‘galleries’ (now semi-enclosed balconies and passages). A second carriage way at the far end of the courtyard leads through to an enclosed yard at the back of the building.

Truth be told, as a modern hotel, it’s a little tired; but as a historic building, it’s pretty spectacular, and despite multiple repairs and remodels over the years, it still retains many original features. It’s considered the most complete surviving example of a Medieval galleried courtyard inn in the country.

A few more pics:

The courtyard and galleries of The New Inn, looking towards the rear carriage way and yard.

The front – and arguably, least impressive – view of The New Inn on Northgate Street in Gloucester.

Presuming this tariff is from the time at which the inn was built (and using the Bank of England’s pre-demical currency converter and inflation calculator tools), the cost of superior accommodation in the mid-15th Century would be close to £400 in today’s money.

Writing

An email time machine was able to complete its 20-year mission to send letters to future selves not thanks to technology, but human relationships.

Top three of 2025

Most popular

• What happens on medieval pilgrimage, stays on medieval pilgrimage (NSFW-ish)
• Women’s role in writing the historical record
• Exploring the lives of women through the instructions they left for their deaths

Favourite

(Both the pilgrim badges and women’s wills stories listed above are also among my favourites.)

• The development of commercial photography in the 19th Century was liberating for women
• The historical treasure trove emerging from a family photography business
• The paintings that couldn’t save a marriage (even if they’d tried to, which we can’t definitively say they did)

And finally, in exciting news, linked to one of my previous year’s favourite stories: the film and sound recordings portion of David ‘Doc’ Rowe’s unique folk customs archive has been acquired by the British Library, saving it for future generations.