HistoryExtra Home of Britain’s bestselling history magazine and award-winning podcast 2026-09-30T15:01:06.000Z https://www.historyextra.com/author/michaelwood/feed/atom Michael Wood <![CDATA[How cruel was William the Conqueror to the Anglo-Saxons? This document reveals the "miserable" truth]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/how-cruel-was-william-the-conqueror-to-the-anglo-saxons-this-document-reveals-the-miserable-truth/ 2026-09-30T15:01:06.000Z 2026-09-30T15:00:43.000Z I first saw the Tapestry in the old Bibliothèque municipale in Bayeux, almost a lifetime ago now. Its magical power is all the more poignant because it was made by English needlewomen as a record of the brutal conquest of their own land – a defeat so harrowing that it took a century for the English to accept. Some would say they never did.

The Bayeux Tapestry, it’s now agreed, was made in England, probably at Canterbury. Its English sympathies are among its many extraordinary aspects. It tells the tale of the noble hero who fatefully broke his oath – an oath that by tradition was sworn at Bayeux.

There are 626 people depicted on the Tapestry, with just three women – one of them nameless and clutching her child’s hand as her house is burned down and she flees in terror. Of the men who are named, most are kings, dukes and bishops, the key characters in the story. But there are three exceptions that have always intrigued historians. Turold, Wadard and Vitalis are three of the Norman rank and file. Why are they on the Tapestry? That question leads us directly to the matter of who commissioned it, and why.

We can identify the three men in the pages of Domesday Book, William the Conqueror’s survey of England made 20 years after the battle of Hastings. By then, Turold was dead, but his son Ralph is named as holding his father’s land in Kent. Wadard and Vitalis were still living, and had done very well out of the Conquest. What unites the three is that they were all men of Odo – the Conqueror’s half-brother, bishop of Bayeux – who played a famous role at Hastings.

First, Wadard. On the Tapestry we see him on horseback in chain mail directing men gathering supplies after the Norman landing. It’s a small event not mentioned by the historians, but he was evidently a knight in the entourage of Odo. Turning through the folios of Domesday, in 1086 Wadard had land in nine places in Kent. Among them was Nurstead, with its church of St Mildred; at Buckwell he owned a mill and “an alder wood”; and in Dover six houses gifted by Odo, his “protector, deliverer and donor”.

Then there’s Vitalis of Canterbury. He appears on the Tapestry at a crucial moment before the battle, when Duke William interrogates him about the approach of the English army, depicted with almost cinematic skill. In 1086, Vitalis, too, had several holdings: the main one on the coast at Whitstable, with 69 smallholders and five slaves, five salt houses, a church and a small pasture for pigs. I imagine Vitalis enjoying the sea breezes, gazing out to Normandy, a short hop if he wanted to visit home.

Finally, Turold, who appears on the Tapestry earlier in the story. After Harold was wrecked on the French coast in 1065, Turold is one of two messengers of the Norman duke sent to bring the Englishman to William’s court. After 1066, Turold was also rewarded by Odo with estates in Kent and houses in Rochester and Canterbury.

So the three men appear on the Tapestry because their lord wanted to commemorate his own followers who had played their part in the great enterprise that propelled the Normans onto the European stage. That in turn supports what scholars have long suspected – that the sponsor of the Tapestry was none other than Odo of Bayeux himself.

It was, of course, a bitter and violent time. The Conqueror himself was a cruel and grasping man: too relentless to care, even though the world might hate him. According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, “grædinæsse he lufode mid ealle” (“he loved greediness above all”).

As for how the ordinary English felt about these events, we have little evidence, but Wulfwin and Leofwin (brothers, as I take it, who farmed at Siffleton in 1066 before Vitalis took their land) were, I guess, no different from Ælfric at Marsh Gibbon in Buckinghamshire – who, Domesday says, “held it freely in 1066 but now farms at a rent from William, a Norman, graviter et miserabiliter [miserably and with a heavy heart]”.

That’s the other side of the coin to Wadard and Vitalis relaxing on their loungers in the garden of England. And when they made their journeys back to Normandy, joining the crowds at the Bayeux summer relic festival as the Tapestry was displayed round the cathedral nave, they could point proudly and say: “That’s me! I fought at Hastings – on that day when we won England”.

This article was first published in the October 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine

]]> Michael Wood <![CDATA[The Vikings brutalised our ancestors. So why do the English still love them?]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/the-vikings-brutalised-our-ancestors-so-why-do-the-english-still-love-them/ 2026-09-28T10:47:25.000Z 2026-09-04T15:00:00.000Z The excitement of the World Cup is over – with all the ‘might have beens’. For England, one of the highlights of the tournament was the close-fought battle with the Norwegians, before ultimate defeat at the hands of Argentina.

As an early medieval historian, one intervention had me smiling: a message on social media purporting to be from a Norwegian ambassador (though quite likely a spoof):

Our world cup journey ends here, but respect remains. Vikings and Saxons share a long history and in many ways we are family. As I promised, if Norway fell tonight, I would proudly stand behind England for the rest of the tournament. Bring the World Cup home for the sons of Vikings and Saxons! On behalf of Norwegians, good luck cousins!

Cousins? Well, it is a long connection, especially in northern parts of Britain. In a Norse saga describing the events of 1066, when a fleeing Norwegian asks the way from a Yorkshire peasant, he replies: “You’re from Norway, I can tell by the way you speak.” They spoke a dialect of the same language.

In parts of the north, that lasted a very long time, as the pages of the Lakeland Dialect Society show. In 1940 in Narvik, Norway, the Westmorland and Cumberland Field Artillery could make themselves understood in the local shops. In the Wirral, the Norwegian Viking settlement in 902 has left distinctive family names, which are matched by distinctive DNA.

Britain, of course, has long been the goal of migrants coming westwards. Post-Roman settlements from modern north-west Europe transformed the identity of Britain, especially from Jutland, Denmark and Saxony (England, after all, got its name from Angeln in Schleswig), but also from southern Sweden and Norway.

There were intensive migration periods: one in the late Roman world and the so-called Dark Ages, and one in the ninth century, the Age of the Vikings. This had a profound effect on the nature of the English state that emerged in the 10th century. Æthelstan and Edgar ruled an Anglo-Scandinavian kingdom. “We Anglo-Saxons,” Lantfred of Winchester wrote, are a kingdom of “many different peoples, distinct in appearance, speech and custom.” In the 960s, parts of King Edgar’s law codes were “common to all the nation, whether English, Danes or Britons”. But others were regional: “For my Danish subjects, I leave it to them to establish the best secular laws as they see fit.” It was understood that no one law would work everywhere. So Englishness itself, you could say, was more about allegiance to the king, and the law made in his name, than to race or language.

This Anglo-Scandinavian state was ruled by Danish kings in the 11th century: Cnut, Harald and Harthacnut. Cnut ruled a North Sea empire, and for a time the crowns of England, Denmark and Norway were united. But all that changed in 1066 with the Norman conquest. Then a Norman-French aristocracy subdued the country with absolute ruthlessness in a massive rupture with the deep continuities of Anglo-Saxon England. The stark divisions of power, class and language were very long lasting. Some would say they are still with us.

So, the social media poster may have been having a bit of fun in the World Cup. But they justly drew attention to the long connections of England and Scandinavia. Back in the mists of time, the Norwegian kingdom was founded by Harald Finehair in the ninth century. Norwegian tradition says that Harald sent his son Hakon to Æthelstan’s court to learn the arts of kingship. Hence, the boy was known in all the later literature as “Æthelstan’s foster son”. That story has been doubted, but a now lost life of Æthelstan, written in the late 10th century, tells of an embassy of Harald to Æthelstan in York naming Norway’s first ambassadors to England: Helgrim and Osfrid. If we can rely on it, this is the earliest evidence of Harald’s existence, and perhaps, too, of the jesting relationship of the kings portrayed by later saga writers.

So another World Cup of disappointment for England. Friendship with Argentina, for historical reasons, still seems a long way off. But, by the same token, we’ll always have our Viking cousins in Norway!

This article was first published in the September 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine

]]> Michael Wood <![CDATA["He plugged into the electric current of history": why Rudyard Kipling still matters in 2026]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/he-plugged-into-the-electric-current-of-history-why-rudyard-kipling-still-matters-in-2026/ 2026-08-11T10:55:11.000Z 2026-08-07T15:00:53.000Z One glorious morning in early summer I finally went to Bateman’s, the house of Rudyard Kipling. It was a journey I had long intended but never made, despite years of fascination with this extraordinary figure who was once one of the most famous writers in the British empire – indeed, in the world.

It’s an old house in a beautiful valley in East Sussex, at least partly built in 1634 by workers of the Weald, and was home to Kipling, his American wife, Carrie, and their two children. (His first-born daughter, Josephine, had died of pneumonia in 1899, aged just six.) He had been looking for a place in England where he might recreate the lost paradise of his Indian childhood, and here he found it. After his death in 1936, the house was given to the nation with its original furniture, library, desk and typewriter. On the walls are plaster plaques created by his father to illustrate the first edition of his 1901 novel Kim.

The house gives you a portrait of the man: his love of gardening and travel, his attraction to modernity (a 1928 Rolls Royce Phantom is in the shed) and, of course, his obsession with history, focused not only on the empire but on the deep landscape of England.

Kipling was born in 1865 in Bombay (now Mumbai), where his father was head of the art college. He spent his first six years there, described in his autobiography Something of Myself. Then, after a miserable boyhood fostered in Southsea, and military college in Devon, he went back to India, aged 16. Over the next six years he became a writer of incredible productivity, and of staggering fecundity of language and creative imagination. A nightwalker, he frequented smoke-filled opium dens and caravanserais, and consorted with Lahore courtesans.

His early literary successes brought him instant fame. His Indian writings somehow summed up the imperial era – at times jingoistic and racist, yet also critical of empire and deeply empathetic with the people and diversity of India. “I’m in love with the country and would sooner write about her than anything else,” he wrote, aged 20. His famous poem Recessional, published in The Times on Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee in 1897, shocked some readers with its warning of the hubris of empire. Whole generations grew up with his poems, and his phrases entered the language; even George Orwell admitted that, though he hated Kipling’s politics, his racism and his morality, it was impossible not to feel his power.

Kipling was also stalked by tragedy. In the First World War, his son Jack went missing in action. After fruitless searches to discover his fate, Kipling threw himself into the Imperial War Graves Commission; “Known unto God” and “Their names liveth for everymore” are his phrases. By then, his star was fading. Yet during the height of empire, from the 1880s to the 1920s, his had been its voice. He had somehow plugged into the electric current of history, and spoke for everyone – even, and especially, the ordinary soldier, but also the colonised. For a time, that current seemed to flow through him. He found the words to encapsulate an era. Mandalay, Gunga Din, Mother o’ Mine and the rest became ingrained in the English consciousness. Just So Stories and Jungle Book are timeless. If was voted the nation’s favourite poem.

These days he’s been dropped from curriculums worldwide, and many things he wrote can cause offence now. Orwell thought that Kipling had sold out to the ruling class – not so much financially as emotionally. The White Man’s Burden, encouraging US actions in the Philippines, was a crudely racist manifesto. Kipling believed in the mission of the British as a superior culture to reshape the world for the better.

But Kipling was born in 1865; he was of his time, not ours. If we wish to hear the voice of empire, he will be among the key sources for historians of the future – for the emotions, tastes and smells, the idealism and the bigotry, the blighted hopes and crushed ideals. Read him, too, on the futility of war: when his son was killed, he wrote The Children – is there a more powerful war poem in English?

Sitting in his garden, I found myself reflecting on his troubled life and his unique and idiosyncratic art. What should we make of him now? TS Eliot thought that Kipling had a “queer gift of second sight, of transmitting messages from elsewhere, a gift so disconcerting when we are made aware of it that thenceforth we are never sure when it is not present: all this makes a writer impossible wholly to understand – and quite impossible to belittle.”

This article was first published in the August 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine

]]> Michael Wood <![CDATA["A civilisation lasting over 3,500 years possesses huge cultural resilience": turmoil and tenacity in Iran]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/a-civilisation-lasting-over-3500-years-possesses-huge-cultural-resilience-turmoil-and-tenacity-in-iran/ 2026-07-15T14:31:04.000Z 2026-07-15T14:30:43.000Z In the back of our garden in North London is a cypress tree, grown from a seed cone I brought back from Iran years ago. Nearly 10 metres tall now, it is an offspring of a famous sacred tree in Cham, a little Zoroastrian village in central Iran. Standing by it, sipping my morning coffee, I imagine it now beginning to share its wisdom, like sacred trees in so many mythologies of the world.

The cypress has a deep significance in Persian culture, stretching back to long before the arrival of Islam. It is portrayed everywhere on the walls of the ancient palace of Persepolis. When a Persian poet describes his beloved, he might call her “cypress-like”, comparing her poise and shape to the tree swaying in the breeze. The cypress is held to be a model of truthfulness, uprightness and endurance, even a symbol of everlasting life. Its image is carried by Shiite Muslims, too, in the mourning ceremonies for the revered Imam Hussain on the day of Ashura.

There are still Zoroastrians living in Iran. Like the Jews, they have an MP in parliament. Their ancient religion, espousing “good words, good thoughts and good deeds”, dates back to the Indo-European roots of Iran in the Bronze Age. Theirs are perhaps humanity’s oldest living scriptures.

Zoroaster himself was born around 1500 BC in the far north-east of Iran, and his teachings later had a profound influence on Judaism and Christianity. His religion was a dualistic faith in which evil coexists with good. That idea became so ingrained that, when they were conquered by the Muslim Arabs in the seventh century AD, the Iranians resisted the austere monotheism of the Arabs, stubbornly holding onto their ancient traditions, their archaic dualism, their myths and angels, developing a conception of Islam that was uniquely Iranian.

When Iran adopted Shiism in the 16th century, these pre-Islamic beliefs were incorporated by Shiite thinkers into a vast and rich philosophical and religious system that still endures. One characteristic feature, for example, was the belief in an intermediary ‘imaginal world’, accessible through spiritual training. It exists between the outer, observable universe and the metaphysics of Islamic monotheism, filling the historical, cultural and spiritual space between Iranian and Arab Islam.

It was under the Qajar dynasty in the 19th century that Persia, as we called it, had its first real contact with western ideas. As everywhere, the battle with modernity was a hard one. The constitutional crisis of 1906, and the discovery of vast oil reserves in 1908, attracted Britain and then the US. The nationalisation of the oil industry in 1951 led to the overthrow of Iranian democracy two years later, and the repressive rule of the western-backed Shah. The Islamic revolution in 1979 was driven by growing anger about the Shah’s tyranny and the loss of Iranian autonomy and cultural identity. But Ayatollah Khomeini’s return from exile in Paris was never forgiven by the western powers, especially the US, which supported Iraq’s Saddam Hussein against the Islamic republic in an eight-year war that killed perhaps a million people.

After 1979, the Shiite ‘rule of jurists’ was imposed, and hopes of a pluralistic Iran were crushed. Khomeini wanted to internationalise Iranian Islam – in effect, to Arabise it. His attempt to ban the old Zoroastrian New Year festival of Nowruz was symptomatic; there were even calls from hardliners to demolish the palace of Persepolis. My mind goes back to a burning summer day 30 years ago, and a faloodeh (sorbet-like dessert) bar in Yazd. As the owner prepared a glass of delicious iced vermicelli, he was asked why no portraits of the ayatollahs hung in his shop. “I’m not having their pictures on my wall,” he replied. “Those bastards are killing my religion.”

Since then, the people of Iran have endured hard times, especially the women and the young. Still ruled by a vicious theocratic regime that shoots its own protesters, they’re bombed by the US and Israel, sanctioned and blockaded, their economy in ruins. There is no sign that these sufferings will end soon, but one thing is for sure: a civilisation lasting more than 3,500 years possesses huge cultural resilience. Persian poetry, literature, philosophy, art and music are, as the medieval mystics said, “an ocean without a shore”.

The most famous sacred tree in Iran, at Abarkuh near Yazd, has been dated to well over 4,000 years old. One of the most ancient trees on Earth, it has survived every storm of nature and of history. And perhaps a civilisation that has lasted thousands of years, like a great cypress tree, will also in the end always be true to its roots?

This article was first published in the July 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine

]]> Michael Wood <![CDATA[Are we now witnessing the end of the American empire?]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/are-we-now-witnessing-the-end-of-the-american-empire/ 2026-06-22T14:33:17.000Z 2026-06-19T14:30:16.000Z It’s often hard to see the significance of events when we are actually living through them.
But sometimes profound and even cataclysmic change unfolds before our eyes in real time. In the sun-baked streets of Hippo (today’s Annaba in Algeria) in that far-off summer of AD 410, St Augustine immediately saw that the fall of Rome was destined to be epoch making, as his sermons show, when the news came with the first refugees that September.

Arriving in Peru in 1544, Agustin de Zárate foresaw nothing less than the coming of a new age in world history. William Wordsworth and the English radicals who went to Paris to observe the French Revolution felt the unstoppable forces of change in Europe. In the snowy streets of Dresden in the bleak spring of 1933, after elections that brought the Nazis to power, Victor Klemperer understood that catastrophe was coming.

And now, suddenly this spring, the wars in the Near and Middle East have created an entirely new situation. The international rules-based order – for all its faults, in place since 1945 – has seemingly collapsed. The UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, already shaken, is now cast aside. As Pope Leo has said: “The principle established after the Second World War, which prohibited nations from using force to violate the borders of others, has been completely undermined.” How are we to understand this? Where does this moment fit into history’s grand narrative?

The times are moving so fast that it is of course impossible to be certain which way things will go, but historians have immediately responded in ways we haven’t seen before. Antony Beevor, not a man to exaggerate, thinks we are now in a more vulnerable position than in 1939, and the world is totally unprepared for the threats it faces. Alan Lester speaks of “an end of times” feel. Peter Frankopan and Anne Applebaum, among our leading thinkers on history, agree that we are into new territory. We are no longer sure that, as Martin Luther King said, the arc of history bends towards justice.

But the way was long prepared. To try to understand these events, we should go back into history. I have rehearsed this argument before in this column, but I think it bears repeating. Until the 15th century the weight of history – the growth of human population and civilisation – lay in Asia, in the Muslim world, India and China. The classical Greek and Roman world, of course, had great achievements in culture and ideas, and so did western Europe through its renaissances under Charlemagne, in the 12th century, and then in Italy. But the centre of gravity of history (if I can put it that way) was Asiatic.

Then after 1492 and the conquest of the New World, that changed. Small aggressive maritime powers on the Atlantic shore of Europe went out to conquer new lands. Never before in human history had continents been conquered, many of their peoples enslaved and their resources plundered. In the next 500 years, western nations seized much of the world’s wealth. Since the industrial revolution, they have consumed the Earth’s fossil fuels and plunged us into our present existential climate crisis. And now a US administration has precipitated a political emergency that may have done lasting damage to hopes of international solidarity.

With Asia rising again, there is indeed an end of days feel about the hegemony of the west. All this is reinforced by the growing corruption of public discourse by the control of media – an unparalleled assault on freedom of speech. A few billionaires now wield more money and more influence than several nations; many are invested in authoritarian rule, and the subversion of democracy – they use their wealth to buy up swathes of the western media and to obfuscate the forthcoming climate disaster. On their TV screens the public watches the world’s poorest and most vulnerable – the people whom Frantz Fanon called “The Wretched of the Earth” – forced to leave their homes and their lands, in the face of war and famine.

The ramifications are wider than simply the war in the Near East, big as that is. As in earlier times in history, this traumatic moment is already seeing the shifting of the tectonic plates of history. Is the Gulf War America’s Suez, the beginning of the end of the American empire? All we can say for sure at this moment is that time is short, the climate disaster urgent, and cooperation on a worldwide scale is the only way out. Back in Hippo, St Augustine would have seen the writing on his sun-baked wall.

This article was first published in the June 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine

]]> Michael Wood <![CDATA["We all sing, hum and whistle": how music keeps us in tune with history]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/we-all-sing-hum-and-whistle-how-music-keeps-us-in-tune-with-history/ 2026-05-25T15:31:04.000Z 2026-05-25T15:30:59.000Z I recently had the pleasure of working on an amazingly ambitious series of programmes called Key Changes: Radio 3’s Essential History of Classical Music. Presented by Gillian Moore, the year-long series (airing now) covers western musical tradition over the past 1,000 years and begins with Guido of Arezzo’s invention of the musical stave around 1030. It’s been a fantastically interesting project – something perhaps only the BBC could think of these days. The series is an example, too, of how history provides a lens through which every aspect of human achievement can be seen in a fresh light. How did musicians respond to the Black Death? The Reformation? The French Revolution? The world wars?

Music, of course, has always helped us humans transcend our earthly existence, providing entertainment and joy, and also putting us in touch with the transcendent – summoning the gods, as it were. The great sixth-century scholar Boethius, who wrote the most influential book on music in the entire Middle Ages, De institutione musica, said: “Music forms a part of us through our very nature… people of every age and sex are joined by their pleasure of music… music is so naturally united within us that we cannot be free from it, even if we so desired.”

And that’s still true, isn’t it? We all sing, hum, whistle, tap out songs – that’s something we’ve no doubt been doing since the very beginning. Music belongs to everyone, and it evokes the deepest human emotions. Ephemeral sounds made by human beings have been passed down over huge stretches of time, written on papyrus and parchment, printed on paper, recorded on wax cylinders, vinyl, tape and CD, and now digitally stored in the Cloud. Music is everywhere. But how easy to forget what a miracle it is that we can still listen to music from so long ago.

That’s where Guido of Arezzo comes in. He invented the musical stave that evolved into the five lines we know today – an idea so simple and so useful that it has taken over the world. It was coupled with another brilliant idea, also attributed to Guido: the do-re-mi scale. Prior to the 11th century, western music was recorded with neumes – a system of squiggly lines, dots and dashes that could communicate a melody’s general shape but not its actual notes. Guido says that he based his idea on “a very well-known melody” – probably a musical setting of an ode by the Roman poet Horace that had become a popular song. But with that, for the first time ever, music could be read at sight.

The Radio 3 series continues with the story of the first named composer with a biography, Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179). Rediscovered only in the 1970s, Hildegard was an idiosyncratic, polymathic recluse living in a nunnery – but also a visionary who made unearthly sacred music. Her lifetime saw tremendous change in the wider world. The 12th-century Renaissance opened up new ideas on the arts and philosophy, music and song – indeed, on what it is to be human. This has become known as the Age of the Individual.

A seismic shift in culture unfolded as nobles and merchants, churchmen and scholars, artists, writers and musicians broke with old ways of doing and thinking. Feeling, personal expression and, of course, love became paramount in poetry, song and letters. Historians can trace these currents in society, and they are there in music, too. For example, the ‘rock star’ troubadour Bernart de Ventadorn and his fellow wandering minstrels were very much a product of this self-reflexive age.

Bernart, Peire Vidal and the female trobairitz (troubadour) Comtessa de Dia first came to wider notice with the amazing reconstructions of their music by Thomas Binkley in 1970. At the time I was as gripped by them as I was by Jimi Hendrix. Technical virtuosity, charisma, swagger, feeling: Bernart was a world away from the Vikings!

From the troubadours in the sunlit hills of Languedoc, the tale gallops on to the crusades, the Age of Cathedrals and the Black Death, after which Guillaume de Machaut (who lived through the plague) composed his ethereal Mass of Notre Dame.

The first eight shows end in the 16th century, when the historians’ baton is handed on to Suzannah Lipscomb, Kate Williams, Simon Schama, Rana Mitter and Bridget Kendall. A Reithian conception if ever there was one, it’s been a pure pleasure. I for one can’t wait for the Age of Revolution: “Bliss it was to be alive!”

This article was first published in the May 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine

]]> Michael Wood <![CDATA["Today, the defenders of the Enlightenment are in retreat"]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/today-the-defenders-of-the-enlightenment-are-in-retreat/ 2026-05-04T14:31:04.000Z 2026-05-04T14:30:48.000Z I’ve just returned from a trip to Versailles. On a bitterly cold, end-of-winter afternoon, the great symbol of French monarchy, gilded anew for the 2024 Olympics, gleamed against a steel-blue sky. The crowds were huge: it’s one of the biggest tourist draws in France after Disneyland – which is somehow fitting, for Versailles is a fairytale palace, too.

I walked the gardens, browsed the bookshop (stacked with books on Marie Antoinette, of course) and then strolled back through the town to the station. On the way, there was a surprise. In a side street, display boards along an old wall told the story of the National Assembly of the summer of 1789 – the very moment of revolution.

Down a lane, a faded wooden sign over a crumbling gateway marked the site of the Hôtel des Menus-Plaisirs du Roi, where the scenery, costumes, instruments and props used in royal entertainments were stored; it’s now a centre of baroque music. Inside was a tree-lined courtyard and a rain-filled hollow marking the oval outline of the temporary auditorium where the National Assembly met. Here, affronted by the concentration of wealth in the hands of the rich and powerful, the representatives of the people voted to “abolish privilege” and create a Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.

The Rights of Man! Such were the ideals of the Enlightenment, the great 18th-century movement towards rational thought, equality before the law, freedom of conscience, human autonomy, secularism and democracy. That declaration in 1789 came hot on the heels of the American Revolution, whose 250th anniversary we celebrate this year. That, in turn, was inspired by English precedent: Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights 1689.

These ideals have been upheld by western thinkers ever since, despite the horrendous deeds of imperialists across the world in the intervening time, colonising and enslaving other cultures, and fighting catastrophic internecine wars. It was the horrors of the Second World War that inspired the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, signed by all except Saudi Arabia, apartheid South Africa and the Soviet Bloc.

Today, the defenders of the Enlightenment are in retreat. Liberal humanism, we are told, has had its day. In international affairs the rules-based order is gone. From Greenland to Iran there are no constraints on state action save self-interest. The same goes for internal governance. In the US, we’re seeing the tearing-up of the assumptions of American democracy, cherished since 1776. Hillary Clinton has said of President Trump: “He has betrayed the west, he’s betrayed human values… [and] the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.”

Universal? Given the deeds of western colonialism over the past couple of centuries, it is not surprising that some have denied that they are. China, for example, now rejects Enlightenment ideas as non-Chinese. Yet many European observers in the 18th century saw the Qing state as a kind of Enlightenment society, with an (admittedly harsh) legal code, charitable institutions, scientific and literary clubs, poetry circles and even a measure of public opinion.

Common human values in the Confucian and European traditions are evident in, for example, the beginnings of a human rights discourse in 17th and 18th-century China, and even discussion of the principle of the rule of law. As Huang Zongxi wrote in 1661, “You cannot have the rule of man without the rule of law.” Those 18th-century French intellectuals would have agreed. (China, incidentally, was one of the original signatories to the UN Declaration, and its constitution guarantees human rights, including of speech and religion – but only so far as they do not endanger the state. In China, the state has always come first.)

But the ideals of the Enlightenment were European. Of course, they weren’t all created in the 18th century. Some go back to classical Greece and Rome, and some to the early medieval world of the great Carolingian thinkers; all three European renaissances played their part. The debate on universal human rights began in earnest in Europe in the mid-16th century. So these ideas are part of the European way of seeing the world – but they are surely also universal.

On the train back into Paris, thinking on our troubled times, I was struck by the contrasts of Versailles. We walk the gilded halls of the king-emperor, but in the rain-filled hollow on the way to the station, history is still readable – the struggles of real people to make the real world a better place.

This article was first published in the April 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine

]]> Michael Wood <![CDATA[Want to understand modern Britain? Look towards its villages]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/want-to-understand-modern-britain-look-towards-its-villages/ 2026-04-03T14:31:04.000Z 2026-04-03T14:30:16.000Z This year we celebrate 75 years of The Archers. Now, I confess I haven’t listened to the series for a while – not since the riveting plot 10 years back about coercive control, with Rob Titchener and Helen Archer. But, if any show on radio or TV is iconic, it’s The Archers, the story of an English village over time, “an everyday story of country folk”, (though now billed as “a contemporary drama in a rural setting”).

The characters – the Grundys, the Archers, the Pargetters – and the places – Grey Gables, Brookfield Farm, the Bull, St Stephen’s church – have become so real that in 1981 their history was published in Ambridge: An English Village Through the Ages, with photos, maps, court rolls, Tudor wills, even an Æthelstan charter! All fiction, of course, but perfectly realised.

The world’s longest-running radio serial was born out of the Second World War. Its first pilot episodes were broadcast in May 1950 and the series started properly on New Year’s Day 1951, in a snowbound world of austerity and rationing. It was originally created by a veteran of the wartime Ministry of Information, Godfrey Baseley. Based on Cutnall Green and Inkberrow in Worcestershire, the series was driven by the Reithian ideal of ‘inform, educate and entertain’. But it was also designed to reflect reality, conceived as a means of disseminating information to farmers and smallholders to help increase productivity in the era of rationing and food shortages. Originally produced with collaborative input from the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, it has had a farming consultant ever since.

It was an instant hit. Its regular 9 million listeners peaked in 1955 at 20 million, when Grace Archer died in a barn fire. At its heart was a simple idea: that the village is the quintessential microcosm of English life, the imagined community to which we all dream of belonging. England is a village!

We’ve had villages since the Roman period. There were free communities, but most were of dependent peasants. Life was hard, even when not in the grip of plague and famine. The bulk of England’s population was rural; only in the 18th century did the massive shift begin towards towns and cities. By the 19th century we start to view the village with nostalgia – Victorian records like the famous Warwickshire Photographic Survey chronicled an already disappearing way of life.

Since 1945, the past has accelerated away from us at an ever faster rate. In 1969, in his landmark Akenfield: Portrait of an English Village, Ronald Blythe offered an uncompromisingly realistic portrait detailing the end of the old English village, with interviews that are already records for the historian. But the idea was still potent; in 2010 we made our TV series (Michael Wood’s Story of England) on Kibworth, Leicestershire, inspired by the great WG Hoskins who suggested that the whole history of the country could be told through one village. Kibworth was that for our time.

And now time has moved on again. In Ambridge, big farms have replaced smallholders; Grey Gables is a spa hotel. But the myth still endures. And maybe not just a myth. What The Archers shows is that the village still stands for the idea of community, a word more and more in use now as we search for our commonality. A place of 500 or a thousand people, where everyone knows each other, and each other’s business, but who always help out in an emergency; a place where we can still feel connected and hold that dream of a harmonious vision of society.

In reality, of course, the English village has always been shaped by inequality and class conflict. Still today less than 1 per cent of the population owns half the land; a third is still owned by the aristocracy and gentry. Some of us may fret about migrants, but the village always had its newcomers – Frisians, Saxons, Angles, Jutes, Danes, Normans, Huguenots, Africans, West Indians, Bangladeshis, Pakistanis. That is who we are. And today that changing sense of community is being augmented by a huge wave of local historians researching families, farms and places, injecting new energy into the historiography of the village – even though, as is the case for most of us these days, our village is now inside the city.

Hoskins is still right: the whole story can be told in any one place. And now in 2025 if we were to look for a real Ambridge, why not choose somewhere like Handsworth, near Birmingham, home of the Lunar Society of Matthew Boulton and the scientific and social revolutionaries of the 18th century; of Lord Bill Morris of the TUC; of Stevie Winwood, Benjamin Zephaniah and Joan Armatrading. Now wouldn’t that be fun? And how revealing about us, at this new moment in our ever-changing story.

This article was first published in the March 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine

]]> Michael Wood <![CDATA["Forget AI – never has the role of the historian been more urgent"]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/forget-ai-never-has-the-role-of-the-historian-been-more-urgent/ 2026-03-04T17:22:02.000Z 2026-02-27T15:30:44.000Z Recently, I read a news item about the jobs most likely to disappear because of the impact of artificial intelligence (AI). And first among them, along with translators, are historians! Now I’m biased of course, but in times like these, when the president of the United States himself can tell the world that Ukraine started the war with Russia, it seems to me we need historians more than ever. In the face of spreading authoritarian rule and growing rightwing populism, good history is a refuge and a beacon.

Complicating matters further, it often seems as if the owners of the mass media, billionaires who wish to shape debates, don’t want historians any more than they want independent journalists. It seems that from their perspective, the less historically literate the people are, the better. But in an open democratic society, we need informed historical perspectives, the painstaking interrogation of sources, and public explanation and interpretation. History is not only entertainment. In an age of lies and disinformation, history acts as our reality check.

And history, don’t forget, is not a fireside job. Great histories have been written under the intense pressure of events, in the moment. Think of Thucydides writing as the Peloponnesian War raged, or Ibn Khaldun, lowered down a wall in a basket to parley with the monstrous Timur (Tamerlane) at the siege of Damascus. Or what about the heroic Emanuel Ringelblum? Samuel D Kassow’s account of Ringelblum’s efforts to record the experiences of those trapped in the Warsaw ghetto – Who Will Write Our History? – is surely one of the most staggering books about why we write. To be a true historian is to make a kind of pact with the living and the dead – and with future generations. We have a duty to tell the truth.

A new book brings all this into sharp relief. Jean-Pierre Filiu is a distinguished French historian, the author of The Middle East: A Political History from 395 to the Present and Gaza: A History. He has made many visits to Gaza since 1980. But now, one of the big problems for our understanding of the Gazan catastrophe is the Israeli government’s refusal to allow independent journalists – even Israeli ones – into Gaza after war broke out in 2023. Since then, we have depended on the endeavours of incredibly brave Palestinian journalists to tell us what is happening – and Gaza is the most dangerous place in the world to be a journalist.

As a historian, Filiu decided he couldn’t write about the present crisis without being there and talking to the people on the ground. No naïve youngster, on the night of his 63rd birthday, he entered Gaza with a humanitarian group, Médecins Sans Frontières, and as a fluent Arabic speaker he was an active member of their team. He spent 33 days and 34 nights “to see and experience for myself, to retrieve not only the meaning of words in Gaza, but also the simple values of our shared humanity”.

His book is called A Historian in Gaza. It should be read by all who aspire to be historians. In its pages, we read of things we never hear in our news broadcasts. For example, it illuminates the complex conflicts within Gaza between feuding clan groups. These disputes have roots in the client system introduced by the Ottomans and continued by the British, a kind of divide-and-rule approach where competing groups were largely allowed to get on with running the territory on a day-to-day basis. Here we see the desperate Palestinian people suffering under multiple burdens: bombed and shelled by Israeli forces and pushed towards starvation, but also brutalised by competing Islamist groups and extorted by rival militias. Most of all, though, it provides the material for us to judge for ourselves the real meaning of the contested words and ideas we see on our TV screens: war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide.

What does the historian do? At root, the craft is about judgment. What does this source say? Is it true? What is the writer’s bias? Can I prove it? Am I accepting an account because it conforms with how I see the world? More than a book about the Israel-Palestine conflict, A Historian in Gaza is about the nature of power in our time. Because of the hugely expanding reach of social media and its growing influence on the practice of democracy itself, George Orwell’s famous warning in Nineteen Eighty-Four is truer now than ever before. To control the past is to control the future; control the present and you control the past. Forget AI: never has the role of the historian been more urgent.

This article was first published in the February 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine

]]> Michael Wood <![CDATA[Was Homer a real person? Michael Wood on the surprising origins of The Iliad]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/was-homer-a-real-person-michael-wood-on-the-surprising-origins-of-the-iliad/ 2026-02-09T15:09:17.000Z 2026-02-04T15:30:02.000Z Proust’s famous novel is called In Search of Lost Time, and isn’t that the key to why we love history? It’s the urge to recover the lost past. Can we get beyond the mysterious veil to real events and people? Can we even feel how they felt? And as historians, we always hope to find new sources and new ways of seeing.

In our time, many new paths have been opened up by science. For example, scientists have adopted techniques used for decoding the genetic history of humans, not only through their genes, but by tracking transformations in language. This form of historical linguistics, known as time depth linguistics, has helped establish the family tree of languages. One branch, the Indo-European languages, has been known since the 18th century, connecting Greek, Latin, Persian and Sanskrit in the east, and English, Welsh and Old Irish in the west. Now we can see when and where the branches on the family tree diverged. It’s been proved, for example, that, as tradition had always said, Sanskrit-speaking migrants – so called ‘Aryans’ – migrated from Afghanistan into north-west India in the late Bronze Age, the period of the earliest Sanskrit texts in the Rig Veda.

Scholars have applied the same models used in genetic research to one of the most celebrated texts in western culture, Homer’s Iliad. As a tool kit, they used word lists invented by the linguist Morris Swadesh (1909–67) and other scholars. In this case the focus was key words shared among the Indo-European languages. With the Iliad, science came up with a likely date of composition: 762 BC (plus or minus 50 years). The exactness is perhaps illusory: but it corroborates the older ideas of Homeric scholars that the poem dates from the eighth century BC.

It has long been known that the Iliad is the product of oral composition, a tissue of repeat phrases that allowed the poet to improvise his story. In fact, the Homeric epics came out of centuries of oral transmission. The heroes’ weapons are of bronze, though Homer lived in the Iron Age; Ajax’s tower shield comes from the middle Bronze Age, Odysseus’s “silver studded sword” is of the late Bronze Age. Conversely, you could argue that the story of the wooden horse comes not from the likely time of the Trojan War (just after 1300 BC?) but from the eighth century BC, when the new technology of siege warfare included wheeled engines shaped like a giant bull, inside which men worked a battering ram. Was this a brilliant invention by the poet, introducing a piece of modern technology as a plot device and a metaphor? It all emphasises how the poem came at the end of a long process of invention and performance.

Another aspect of Homer that has come to the fore in the last few years is his debt to near eastern storytelling, borrowing stories and motifs from the Epic of Gilgamesh and other myths from Mesopotamia. These came from versions in Hurrian, Ugaritic and Hittite, transmitted by travelling bards and minstrels at local courts, religious fairs and festivals.

That’s where Homer comes in. It is now thought Homer was a single person, an itinerant bard composing and singing his stories towards 700 BC, perhaps as tradition said, in Smyrna, or on the nearby island of Chios. Whether blind or not in old age, he must have seen some of the local scenes he so minutely describes, like the flocks of geese and cranes, and long-necked swans “rising and circling noisily, rejoicing in their wings by the streams of the Cayster in the meadow of Asia”.

The text we have was first written down a century or so after his death, perhaps towards 600 BC, and from then on it was performed annually at festivals in Athens. In the tones and accents, it retained the tell-tale signs of the generations of sung oral performance that lay behind it. Homer’s text reached the form in which we know it in around 200 BC, though marginal notes in later manuscripts preserve alternative readings, some of which, like shards of memory, pass down no-longer-understood words of Bronze Age origin, or reflect ancient variants in the long storytelling tradition.

That, of course, continues, giving birth to countless new tellings, in books, poems, films and video games, as the tale continues to spread and multiply across the world. And now, like tree-ring dating, we have another window on the first work of European literature.

This article was first published in the January 2026 issue of HistoryExtra magazine

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