HistoryExtra https://www.historyextra.com/author/serafinakenny Sat, 27 Jun 2026 10:05:04 GMT en hourly 1 Instead of marrying their lovers, these men adopted them. Can you guess why? https://www.historyextra.com/period/georgian/adult-adoption-attitudes-toward-sexuality/ Sat, 27 Jun 2026 10:05:01 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/period/georgian/adult-adoption-attitudes-toward-sexuality/ In the Georgian period, when same-sex couples could not marry, some queer men may have used adult adoption to create legal bonds, secure inheritances and protect chosen partners The terms ‘gay’ and ‘queer,’ and the identity categories that have sprung up around them, are quite modern. But people who were what we would now call gay, queer, and gender non-conforming have existed forever – even in the Georgian period, more than 200 years before homosexual acts were decriminalised in the UK in 1967.
“We are told that so much of our history as queer people is new, or that Oscar Wilde happened and then we were all gay. But this isn’t the case – we have always been here,” Anthony Delaney, an honorary fellow at the University of Exeter and author of the new book Queer Georgians: A hidden history of lovers, lawbreakers and homemakers, told the HistoryExtra podcast.
“Queer people have always had to be quite fluid in the ways in which they interact with the law and with legalities. They had to circumvent things that appeared in their way, by using mechanisms that were available to them at the time in order to get what they wanted,” Delaney says.
One of these mechanisms used by queer people was adult adoption.
Gay men adopted each other in the 1980s and the 1780s
Today, perhaps the best-known examples of adult adoption between gay men were during the AIDS crisis in the 1980s and 90s.
“If you look at that time period, you'll often find gay men adopting their younger partner, because this would then allow them to be at their bedside when they were dying, for instance, or to inherit everything that they wanted to leave them after they died,” Delaney says.
- Learn more | The world of the Georgians with Alice Loxton
But this wasn’t the first time in history that gay men had adopted each other to legally link themselves outside of an official marriage.
“There are these hints in the archive that what we saw happening in the 80s and in the early 90s was not necessarily a new thing,” Delaney says. “There's a suggestion that this was happening as far back as the 1780s.”
During the Georgian period – 1714 to 1837 – it wasn’t legal for two people of the same sex to marry. But gay men still wanted a way to legally link themselves together to pass on property and titles.
It wasn’t about a younger man becoming the legal ‘son’ of his partner but rather becoming his legal heir.
“It wasn’t necessarily that unusual, because adult adoption was happening in the 18th century anyway in order to secure inheritances and to pass on property. What makes it more unusual is this queer element,” Delaney says.
There are some "important caveats to bear in mind” about the strategy of adoption, though, he says. It wasn’t always possible and would have been much easier for elite men to have gone through with it than anyone else.
The ‘Chuthheads’ were an example of this
One couple who Delaney thinks used adult adoption were John Chute and Francis Whitehead.
Chute was born in 1701 and inherited The Vyne, his family’s country house in Hampshire, after the deaths of his two older brothers. He had spent most of his youth touring Europe and was known for his taste in decor and fashion. He was very good friends with noted politician Horace Walpole, whose sexuality has been the subject of speculation.
Chute never married, but “surrounded himself with younger men” according to art historian Maurice Howard. One of these men was his cousin, Francis Whitehead, who was 18 years younger than him.
Chute accompanied Whitehead on his ‘grand tour’ – a long trip, filled with culture, politics, and languages that elite young men would often take around Europe as a rite of passage – between 1740 and 1746.
They lived together in Florence for a while, where they were collectively known as the ‘Chuthheads’ to their friends. Chute made Whitehead his heir, but he died at The Vyne in 1751 at the age of 31. Chute died, childless, in 1776, and his estate passed to another cousin.
Same-sex couples have existed in various guises throughout history
Some same-sex couples tried to cheat the law to legally marry each other, like Marcela Gracia Ibeas and Elisa Sánchez Loriga, who had the first same-sex marriage in Spain in 1901.
To achieve this, Elisa put her name on the marriage certificate as Mario Sanchez and dressed masculine for the ceremony. But soon after the marriage, their neighbours exposed them to the press. They lost their jobs, were excommunicated by the Catholic Church, and had arrest warrants put out for them.
We know that they managed to board a ship bound for South America, and that’s the last that is known about them. Their marriage was never annulled, so they officially had Spain’s first same-sex marriage.
Other same-sex couples have managed to confirm their relationships within the law or social customs.
In Eastern Christianity, from the 14th to the 20th century, there was a ceremony which bound two people of the same sex together under the eyes of the church called adelphopoiesis, or ‘brother-making.’ Historians disagree on the nature of the relationships formed through adelphopoiesis, with some claiming that it was akin to a sibling relationship and others that it was a marriage-like union. It is no longer practised because, according to the Pedalion, a book of Orthodox canon law, “it is the cause of many evils… and merely affords matter for some persons to fulfil their carnal desires and to enjoy sensual pleasures.”
Meanwhile, before the 1860s in Japan, same-sex relations were a key part of samurai culture. The principles of nanshoku (meaning male love) and shudo (meaning ‘the way of the youth’) led to pairings of older, more experienced samurais entering into ‘brotherhood contracts’ with younger men apprenticed to them to learn martial arts.
As part of these contracts, a life-long loyalty was created between the two. Before the younger wakashū came of age, he was expected to submit to the older nenja’s sexual attention as part of this loyalty.
Anthony Delaney was speaking to Isabel King on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation.
]]> Friends or lovers? Either way, the Ladies of Llangollen fascinated Georgian society https://www.historyextra.com/period/georgian/ladies-of-llangollen-caroline-of-brunswick-reaction/ Wed, 24 Jun 2026 13:47:31 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/period/georgian/ladies-of-llangollen-caroline-of-brunswick-reaction/ The Ladies of Llangollen built a life together in 18th century Wales, becoming famous for their shared home, joint identity and devoted companionship. When Caroline of Brunswick heard about their marriage-like union, her reaction was unexpectedly accepting When we think about queer love in the past, we might assume that it was necessarily secretive and short-term. But the Ladies of Llangollen show that this wasn’t always the case.
“Love and homemaking are not necessarily words that people associate with same-sex attraction in the 18th century. They don't necessarily have an idea of what intimacy was happening between same-sex attracted people in the 18th century, what expressions of love were occurring, what homes they were making together,” Anthony Delaney, an honorary fellow at the University of Exeter and author of the new book Queer Georgians: A hidden history of lovers, lawbreakers and homemakers, told the HistoryExtra podcast.
And people in the past also reacted to same-sex couples in a more progressive way than we’d perhaps expect – for example, the reaction of Caroline of Brunswick to two unmarried, high-born Irish women who lived together, known as the Ladies of Llangollen.
Caroline of Brunswick was married to King George IV and was briefly, nominally the Queen of the United Kingdom from 1820 to her death in 1821. In the early 19th century, Delaney says, she expressed a surprisingly modern attitude towards the Ladies of Llangollen.
Who were the Ladies of Llangollen?
Lady Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby were upper-class Irish women who grew up near each other in Kilkenny, Ireland. They met in 1768, when Butler was in her late 20s and Ponsonby a young teenager.
They built up a relationship based on shared interests in reading, history, philosophy, and walking, and planned to escape Ireland together to avoid having to get married. Against the wishes and best efforts of their families, they did so in 1778, when Butler was 39 and Ponsonby was 23.
They settled in north Wales, at first in a village called Llangollen, where they were known by locals as ‘the ladies.’ As upper-class women, they had no means of earning an income, so had to rely on small amounts of money from friends and reluctant relatives.
- Learn more | The world of the Georgians with Alice Loxton
“Their stipends were much lower than they would have been if they'd married men,” Delaney says. “They never got to return to their hometown of Kilkenny, because they were told that they could go, but they must never come back.”
Word spread that two ladies were living together, and their reputation grew, leading to lots of notable people coming to visit them, including Lord Byron, the Duke of Wellington, and Charles Darwin. Eventually, King George III granted them a pension.
Some historians have argued that Butler and Ponsonby were not romantically or sexually involved. They cite the fact that the pair looked into suing a magazine that implied they were in a sexual relationship in 1791, and that there was no evidence of one in their letters and diaries.
But on the other hand, they had both of their initials engraved on their glassware, signed letters jointly, were buried together, and called their dogs ‘Sappho.’ Noted diarist Anne Lister, best known for being the “first modern lesbian”, also wrote to her partner that it was unlikely that the Ladies’ relationship was platonic.
A surprising reaction
According to Delaney, Caroline of Brunswick also heard about the Ladies of Llangollen.
“She says, ‘I could never marry a female friend because they're too overbearing – if you think men are controlling, try being a woman married to another woman,” Delaney says. “She also says, ‘I can't imagine this for myself, but each to their own taste.’”
This is an unusual opinion for such a high-born aristocrat to have.
“Princess Caroline, somebody who's in the elite part of society, making no bones about the fact that a marriage-like union has been formed between two women in the early 19th century, is radical,” Delaney says.
We can’t say for sure why Caroline was so open-minded about this, but perhaps her own unusual love life helped her to sympathise with others living outside of the normative structures of marriage.
Her marriage to King George IV had very quickly broken down after their wedding, and they had lived separately since the birth of their only child, Princess Charlotte. But this wasn’t a respectful distance – the pair showed obvious disdain for each other and had very public conflicts over Caroline’s income and behaviour.
Many felt that King George mistreated her, since he excluded her from royal business; restricted and then took away her access to her daughter; and conducted a humiliating investigation into whether a child she adopted was actually her biological son. Later, he pursued very public smear campaigns designed to expose her for adultery after she left England and allegedly found love with an Italian man.
Maybe we can understand if she, like the Ladies of Llangollen, wasn’t keen on the idea of marriage to a man.
Caroline’s acceptance of the Ladies of Llangollen reveals Georgian attitudes to gender and sexuality
Although the Ladies of Llangollen weren’t legally married, Caroline used the language of marriage when describing them, Delaney says.
This is “an acknowledgement of their companionship and of their union,” he says, which suggests that some Georgians may have understood the Ladies’ relationship “in spousal or marital terms” even in the absence of a legal piece of paper.
“Marriage and the language of marriage was definitely being used in the 18th century to acknowledge the companionship that was happening between same-sex attracted or gender non-conforming people,” he says.
While these relationships were relatively unusual, and there was obviously homophobia present in society and the law, the Georgians had an understanding of gender and sexuality that wasn’t totally anti-queerness.
When it came to same-sex relationships, “Georgians were not necessarily talking about sex, they were talking about gender identity,” Delaney says. “So often you'll find in Georgian archival material that sex and gender identity are very closely conflated.”
There was the concept of a third sex in Georgian times, Delaney says, which usually referred to “somebody that is gender non-conforming, or who is not applying themselves to the norms” of gender and sexuality that most people conformed to.
“The Georgians were incredibly curious about these types of things. They were asking a lot of the same questions that we are asking today about gender particularly,” he says. “They were certainly intrigued by [people who weren’t] fitting in. Then the Victorians came along and tried to control it – and I think we're still sadly trying to control it today to a certain extent.”
Anthony Delaney was speaking to Isabel King on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation.
]]> Why were the Tudors obsessed with kissing each other, and what made them stop? https://www.historyextra.com/period/tudor/obsessed-with-kissing/ Sat, 20 Jun 2026 10:15:45 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/period/tudor/obsessed-with-kissing/ England today has a reputation for reserve, but in the late Middle Ages and Tudor period foreign visitors were often struck by how freely the English kissed in greeting. So when, and why, did that habit fade? Compared with parts of southern Europe, England now tends to be seen as a relatively restrained culture, less comfortable with public displays of affection and far less given to greeting friends or acquaintances with a kiss. But this modern image of English reserve would have surprised some foreign visitors to late medieval and Tudor England.
In the 15th and 16th centuries, travellers from the continent repeatedly remarked on how openly affectionate the English seemed to be.
As historian Ian Mortimer noted, speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast, that sits awkwardly with modern assumptions. “We’re not known for being particularly amorous in our approach to strangers,” he says. But the historical evidence suggests that English attitudes to kissing were once rather less squeamish.
Kissing in Tudor England
By the 16th century, London was attracting increasing numbers of foreign visitors, especially wealthy young European men travelling for education, diplomacy or curiosity. They toured famous sites such as St Paul’s Cathedral and the Tower of London, and many recorded their impressions in travel journals.
One of them was Alessandro Magno, a Venetian visitor who wrote about England in 1562. He was surprised, he wrote, to see English men and women kissing “in the middle of the street as at home”.
- Read more | The most common accidental way to die in Tudor England reveals surprising truths about daily life
Magno also described a rough-and-ready game played between young men and women who did not necessarily know each other, in which the women were thrown to the ground and only allowed to rise after they had been kissed. “Here they kiss each other a great deal,” he observed.
What startled him even more was that this custom extended into domestic hospitality. “If a stranger enters a house and does not first of all kiss the mistress on the lips,” he wrote, “they think him badly brought up.”
This was not a new Tudor habit. There is evidence that such customs had deeper roots in Britain.
Before he became Pope Pius II, Enea Silvio Piccolomini travelled widely through Europe, including Scotland in the 1430s. In his autobiography, he also commented on local kissing customs. The exact nuance depends on the translation, but the general point is clear: he found the relative ease and informality of kissing striking enough to mention.
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One modern translation renders his observation as meaning that in Scotland “a woman’s kiss means less than a handshake does in Italy”. In other words, kissing did not necessarily carry the emotional or erotic charge that later societies would assume. It could instead function as a routine social gesture.
Another well-known testimony of British kissing culture comes from Erasmus, the great Dutch humanist scholar, who visited England around the turn of the 16th century.
He was enchanted by the English habit of greeting with kisses. In one oft-quoted letter, he described the country as a place where kisses greeted arrivals, departures and chance encounters alike. According to a 1901 translation of his epistles, he wrote that wherever one went in England, one was welcomed and dismissed with kisses, and that “wherever a meeting takes place there is kissing in abundance”.
Erasmus was so delighted by the custom that he urged his friend, the poet Faustus Andrelinus, to travel to England and experience it for himself.
Kissing and the plague
At times, however, the custom came under pressure.
In 1439, King Henry VI permitted his subjects to omit one particularly significant act of ceremonial kissing: kissing the royal hand. This was no trivial matter. Such a kiss was a visible expression of allegiance, and there were concerns that omitting it might cast doubt on a subject’s loyalty.
The reason for relaxing the custom was the return of plague. England suffered repeated outbreaks of the Black Death and related epidemics across the 14th and 15th centuries, and in 1439 contemporaries regarded the disease as especially severe.
- Read more | Love and marriage in medieval England
Although people did not understand germs in the modern sense, they were not oblivious to contagion. As the historian Dr Hannes Kleineke has argued, there was at least a practical awareness that physical closeness could help spread disease. Suspending the kiss of allegiance, then, shows that even in a society accustomed to kissing, public health emergencies could temporarily alter accepted behaviour.
But though the plague interrupted the practice, it did not end it.
A German visitor to London in the 1460s reported that among the English “to offer a kiss is the same as to hold out the right hand, for they do not shake hands”. That comparison suggests that kissing occupied the social role that a handshake would later fill: a conventional, everyday gesture of greeting.
Why kissing fell out of fashion
So what changed?
One important factor was religion. As England turned towards Protestantism in the 16th century, certain traditional forms of physical greeting began to attract suspicion. Kissing could be associated with the Catholic “kiss of peace” exchanged during the mass, as well as with the greeting customs of Catholic countries such as France and Italy.
At the same time, broader moral and social changes altered how kissing was understood. As English culture absorbed more puritanical values, kissing increasingly came to be seen as an intimate act.
That shift had consequences for relations between both men and women, and men with one another. As ideas about sexuality hardened, and as same-sex desire became more explicitly named and legislated against, forms of physical closeness that had once been socially permissible became more suspect.
Later examples show that non-romantic kissing did not vanish from English life altogether. Lord Nelson is famously said to have asked Captain Sir Thomas Hardy to kiss him as he lay dying after the battle of Trafalgar, though historians continue to debate exactly what was said and what it meant.
Even so, by then the world described by Erasmus and Magno had largely receded. The easy, customary kissing of strangers, guests and acquaintances was no longer a normal feature of English social behaviour.
Ian Mortimer was speaking to Spencer Mizen on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation.
]]> Did the ancient Romans of Pompeii know they were destined for doom? https://www.historyextra.com/period/roman/did-the-ancient-romans-of-pompeii-know-they-were-doomed/ Fri, 19 Jun 2026 12:06:52 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/period/roman/did-the-ancient-romans-of-pompeii-know-they-were-doomed/ Without modern volcanology, seismic monitoring or any clear understanding of eruption warning signs, the people living in the shadow of Vesuvius in AD 79 had little reason to think that catastrophe was imminent – even if they knew there was something unusual about the landscape around them When Mount Vesuvius erupted in AD 79, burying Pompeii, Herculaneum and surrounding settlements beneath ash, pumice and volcanic debris, many of those caught in the disaster seem to have been taken by surprise – according to the historical record. The people living around Vesuvius had no equivalent of modern seismology, no Richter scale, no concept of tectonic pressure, and no scientific model that could reliably connect earthquakes, gas emissions and subterranean rumblings to an approaching volcanic catastrophe.
As Dr Jess Venner, ancient historian and archaeologist at the University of Oxford, has argued, the inhabitants of Pompeii did not know they were in immediate and catastrophic danger. They lived in a landscape that could seem strange and unstable, but not one that clearly announced apocalypse.
This does not mean the Romans were oblivious to the peculiarities of the region around Vesuvius. On the contrary, there were clues that the area was unusual.
Speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast, Venner points out that the wider region was associated with the Phlegraean Fields – a name meaning “burning” or “fiery” – suggesting that people retained some memory of volcanic activity in the landscape. Ancient writers also compared the area to Mount Etna in Sicily, long known as a volcano, even though Etna itself had not erupted for centuries.
Writers such as the geographer Strabo described features that, in retrospect, seem suggestive. According to Venner, Strabo refers to rocks around the volcano that looked as though they had been “eaten by fire”. Since Strabo died roughly 30 years before the eruption, such observations indicate that traces of earlier volcanic activity were visible well before AD 79.
There was also a broader sense that the land itself was hollow or unstable. Strabo wrote of the region between Cumae and Sicily as being full of subterranean chambers and passages. In antiquity, people often imagined the earth beneath Campania as riddled with tunnels and cavities.
From such details, Venner suggests, there may have been occasional murmurs of concern. But even if some people suspected the area was strange, that did not mean they understood what danger it posed.
Why people stayed in Pompeii
If Vesuvius had a threatening past, it also offered enormous advantages in the present.
The land around Pompeii was famously fertile. Venner describes it as “verdant”, and Vesuvius itself appears in Roman frescoes covered in vines. The agricultural wealth of Campania was one of the region’s great attractions.
“They would get three to four harvests a year in this area, so there was a very good reason to be there,” Venner says.
The irony, of course, is that this fertility was itself linked to volcanic activity. Over time, volcanic ash enriches soil with nutrients, creating highly productive farmland. In the long term, the volcano helped sustain the prosperity of the communities that lived beside it.
There was also a social divide in who possessed what knowledge. Much of the written discussion of the landscape came from elite authors – geographers, natural philosophers and historians – whose works circulated among educated aristocratic circles rather than the wider population.
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“You’ve got to think about who’s reading these things. It’s not the everyday person,” Venner notes.
Even if those clues had been more widely known they would still have been difficult to interpret. Ancient Romans lacked a developed scientific understanding of volcanoes. Strikingly, Pliny the Elder – who wrote the vast Natural History, one of antiquity’s great encyclopaedic works – never explicitly identified Vesuvius as a volcano, despite living close enough to see it regularly.
If even one of the Roman world’s most learned men did not recognise Vesuvius for what it was, it is hardly surprising that ordinary inhabitants of Pompeii did not think they were living beneath a ticking geological time bomb.
The warning signs they could not read
Today, earthquakes, gas emissions and changes in the ground can all be recognised as potential warning signs of volcanic unrest. In Roman Campania, such phenomena were not necessarily alarming.
“Pliny the Younger tells us later on that the people of Campania weren’t concerned because earthquakes were just so common for them,” Venner says.
That is crucial. Earthquakes formed part of the ordinary background of life in the region. Repeated tremors would not automatically have suggested that a major eruption was imminent. What seems extraordinary to us may have seemed familiar to them.
The same was true of toxic gases. Venner points to the poem Etna, attributed in antiquity to Virgil though probably written by an unknown author, which describes the area between Naples and Cumae as a place where sulphur continuously emerged from the soil. But this was not read as a sign of immediate catastrophe.
There had also been a major earthquake some 16 or 17 years before the eruption, usually dated to AD 62 or 63. Ancient writers including Seneca describe widespread destruction.
- Read more | “Christianity didn’t invent itself as an empire from nothing: it adapted existing Roman structures”
“Seneca tells us that an earthquake flattened Pompeii, there were great ruins in Herculaneum, and it caused minor damage in Nuceria and Naples,” Venner says. “They also say that a flock of 600 sheep was killed – we think by toxic gases.”
But even this did not prompt mass flight from the area. Instead, people rebuilt. Archaeological evidence suggests that repair work continued right up to the eruption of AD 79. Venner has also noted signs that more wells may have been opened in the aftermath of the earlier quake.
“It’s almost like they were trying to relieve the pressure they think is happening under the earth,” she says, “by letting out the air from underground passages through wells.”
Gods, giants and the subterranean world
Some Roman thinkers, including Seneca the Younger, came surprisingly close to linking earthquakes, hollow ground and volcanic activity together. But such ideas existed alongside (and were often overshadowed by) religious and mythic explanations of the natural world.
One tradition associated volcanic fire with Vulcan, the Roman god of fire and metalworking, whose subterranean forge was thought to lie beneath mountains such as Etna. Another held that volcanoes were connected to imprisoned giants, buried beneath the earth after their defeat by the gods.
The poet Silius Italicus, for example, wrote that the giants crushed beneath the ground shook the earth and scorched the fields with their burning breath as they struggled to escape.
As Venner notes, there were even whispers during the eruption itself that giant figures could be seen in the smoke.
Such stories indicate how people understood dangerous landscapes. Romans didn't divide myth and science as sharply as modern societies do. Natural phenomena were still often interpreted through the actions of gods and legendary beings, rather than through a modern geological model.
Jess Venner was speaking to Kev Lochun on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation.
]]> 350 years ago, drinkers were given the choice to save their homes or their pub. Their choice might shock you https://www.historyextra.com/period/stuart/great-fire-of-northamption-save-the-pub/ Fri, 05 Jun 2026 10:45:32 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/period/stuart/great-fire-of-northamption-save-the-pub/ When the Great Fire of Northampton tore through the town in 1675, almost every pub inside the walls was destroyed – except one. According to a remarkable contemporary account, locals saved it by hauling barrels onto the roof and fighting the flames with beer When a huge fire broke out in Northampton in September 1675, drinkers in a local pub were faced with a choice – they could either save their homes or the pub. They chose to save the pub, while more than 80 per cent of the rest of the town burned down.
The Great Fire of Northampton ripped through the town in a similar fashion to the more famous Great Fire of London of 1666.
In 1675, Northampton was a market town specialising in leather tanning and shoemaking. Most of its buildings were constructed with wood, plaster, and straw, and packed tightly together. 1675 had been a particularly dry year thanks to a drought, so when an open fire was left unattended on St Mary’s Street, flames quickly engulfed the town.
The townspeople fled to the market square, with some bringing their possessions to try to save them – but the square was narrow and the stacked objects helped the fire spread.
The blaze took out around 700 of Northampton’s 850 buildings, including all of the pubs inside the town walls – apart from one, says Ian Mortimer, author of Mortimer’s A to Zs of English History, speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast.
Residents poured beer on a pub to save it from fire
“The Great Fire of Northampton took out all the pubs bar one, right in the middle. It was a pub called, appropriately, The Last,” Mortimer says. The ‘last’ referred to the foot-shaped piece of wood used to shape shoes, which would have been a common sight in Northampton due to its long history of shoemaking.
This story comes from the journals of Thomas Baskerville, a topographer who travelled around England and recorded his observations on the towns and places he visited.
Baskerville wrote that the “straingeness [sic] of this preservation” of a single pub led him to ask the landlord how the building was still standing while “all the other houses for a good distance round about it burnt down.”
“The landlord said that when the fire broke out, all the drinkers in there decided whether they were going to go home and rescue their own homes, or stay and collectively try to preserve the pub. Being good drinkers, they decided to preserve their pub,” Mortimer says.
In the 1670s, pubs were important multifunctional spaces for eating, drinking, political meetings, and socialising. They were often the centres of community in towns, so it’s no wonder that the locals thought it so crucial to save.
“They hauled all the barrels of beer up onto the roof of the building and slowly poured it down the outside of the building to keep it cool throughout the fire,” Mortimer says.
In Baskerville’s account, he doesn’t specify that the people who saved the pub were patrons – he writes that it was the innkeeper’s “friends” who “hoist[ed] some hogsheads of beer out of his sellar [sic].”
But either way, Mortimer says, “It was a huge risk, and probably a moment in the annals of British firefighting that people decided to fight fire with beer and won.”
Rebuilding the town
The town’s Recorder, James Compton, the 3rd Earl of Northampton, held an emergency meeting the next morning to organise relief efforts, and got an Act quickly passed through Parliament to ensure the rebuilding of the town.
The townspeople benefitted from the lessons learned from the Great Fire of London nine years previously, because while a similar Act had taken six months to be passed in the capital, it only took six weeks in Northampton.
Local people, businesses, and universities donated a total of around £25,000 to help Northampton recover, one-tenth of which was pledged for the rebuilding of the main church.
King Charles II also donated more than 1,000 tonnes of timber to be used to reconstruct the church and reduced taxes on the town for seven years after the fire. A statue of him, dressed in a Roman toga, was erected on the new portico of the church.
The order in which the reconstruction efforts were conducted reveals people’s priorities at the time. Some of the first buildings to be tackled were Sessions House, the centre of justice and administration for the town, and All Saints Church. Sessions House would have dealt with law, order, and the administration of the local economy, while the church was a source of strength and community, showing how bureaucracy worked and how important religion was to the people at the time.
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The town was improved after the fire
Although the fire caused 11 deaths and made hundreds homeless, there was an upside. When Northampton was rebuilt, it was modernised in terms of its look, functioning, and urban planning.
The Act decreed that all new buildings be covered with lead, slate, or tiles to prevent fires, and new buildings were mostly made from far-less-flammable stone or brick. It also banned any “perilous trade” that involved fire in the main parts of the town, and ordered the streets and main square be widened, which would slow any future fires but also improve the layout of the town.
Visitors to Northampton saw the new buildings as a big upgrade. In Baskerville’s diaries from 1681, he wrote that the town had, “Phoenix like, risen out of her ashes in a far more noble and beauteous form, the houses of the streets being now built in very good order with excellent freestone and 'bellconies', and some of the inns are such gallant and stately structures the like is scarcely elsewhere to be seen.”
Baskerville even wrote that York “must have a purgation by fyre if ever it arise in beauty like Northampton or London.”
Ian Mortimer was speaking to Spencer Mizen on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation.
]]> He was the Tudor who created Utopia – but his insults were shockingly filthy https://www.historyextra.com/period/tudor/who-created-utopia-thomas-more-insults/ Tue, 02 Jun 2026 10:05:12 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/period/tudor/who-created-utopia-thomas-more-insults/ Thomas More is remembered as the author of Utopia and one of Tudor England’s great minds, but his attacks on Henry VIII’s critics could be startlingly crude. In the battle over the Reformation, he used expletives, insults and scatological imagery to defend the king and the Catholic faith King Henry VIII and Thomas More, his Lord Chancellor and right-hand man from 1529 to 1532, forged a close, tumultuous, and ultimately fatal relationship. As well as being responsible for the administration of justice in England as part of his duties, More did something rather less sophisticated on behalf of the king: he wrote expletive-filled responses to people attacking him.
More was known for his rhetorical skills but wasn’t above swearing and referencing poo in order to defend Henry VIII’s honour.
Speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast, Dr Joanne Paul, a historian specialising in Tudor, Renaissance, and Early Modern history, says that “More could be quite scatological,” and that he “really knew when to rein it in and when to dish it out.”
This was especially the case in More’s response to Martin Luther in the early 1520s.
Martin Luther had criticised Henry VIII’s religious writings – and More was the only one who could defend him
In 1520, Martin Luther, a German priest who became a key figure in the Protestant Reformation, published three works criticising the Catholic Church and setting out his own proposed doctrines, including the idea that there should only be two sacraments. The next year, Henry VIII, who was incredibly pious and loyal to the Pope at the time, published his own work called Defence of the Seven Sacraments (probably with More’s help).
Luther then responded to this in 1523, calling Henry a “pig, dolt, and liar.” He also “used very violent language, talking about how the king should have his tongue and his hand cut off and be burned at the stake and so on,” Paul says.
But as a monarch, Henry VIII couldn’t reply in the same uncouth way.
“Someone has to stoop to Luther's level, and the king couldn't do that,” Paul says. So, More agreed to respond instead.
In general, More tried to exclude himself from any political actions that involved religion, because he didn’t share the same opinions as the king. “He hadn't wanted to get involved in the debates over the Reformation. He said he was just too busy to occupy himself with it,” Paul says.
In fact, later on, his refusal to go along with Henry VIII’s religious reforms would be his downfall and would lead to his beheading.
But in 1523, one of his most important roles at court was to support the king and make him look good. Also, as Lord Chancellor, “he was keeper of the soul of the realm – essentially the king's conscience – and that meant the pursuit of heresy,” Paul says.
So, he wrote Responsio ad Lutherum, or Response to Luther in defence of Henry and of Catholicism against Protestant ‘heresy.’
Some of the language More used is quite shocking
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More matched Luther’s tone in his response, which meant using a lot of vulgar language and richly inappropriate imagery.
He was posthumously beatified in 1886 and canonised in 1935, but in Response to Luther “he engages in language that we might not consider to be particularly saintly,” Paul says.
He writes this of Luther, for example: “the beshitted tongue of this practitioner of posterioristics most fit to lick with his anterior the very posterior of a pissing she-mule.”
Not only does this suggest that Luther’s words are disgusting and low-quality, but More alludes to Luther engaging in some taboo sexual practices here, too. Mentioning a female donkey would have had the same implications of bestiality then as it does today, but More accusing him of “posterioristics” would have been much more cutting in the 1520s. More invented the word, referring to Luther licking the backside of the donkey.
More wasn’t known for being potty-mouthed, but circumstances called for it
“More perhaps used more of these expletives and this visual language than others. But Luther had engaged in this sort of talk in his attack on the king and used very violent language as well,” Paul says. “And so More is trying to engage with him on that rhetorical level.”
In Response to Luther, More includes an apology to the reader for his language. He writes: “In your sense of fairness, honest reader, you will forgive me that the utterly filthy words of this scoundrel have forced me to answer such things,” acknowledging that he is only matching Luther’s tone.
He also wrote under a pseudonym, Gulielmus Rosseus, and presented the work as from the perspective of a character who was scandalised by Luther’s words to add an extra layer of removal between his words and his reputation.
More could be violently snarky
Response to Luther wasn’t the only instance of More using his rhetorical mastery to attack his enemies.
He engaged in a lengthy debate with William Tyndale, a Biblical scholar and translator, about his English translation of the New Testament, which got quite nasty – although nowhere near as vulgar as his attack on Luther.
Tyndale mocked More’s friendship with the famous scholar Erasmus, referring to him as “your darling Erasmus” in one exchange. So More turned this back on Tyndale, writing: “I find in Erasmus my darling that he detests and abhors the errors and heresies that Tyndale plainly teaches and abides by and therefore Erasmus my darling shall be my dear darling still… while he holds such heresies still I cannot take for my darling him that the devil takes for his darling.”
He parrots Tyndale’s use of the phrase “my darling” to insinuate that Tyndale is jealous of More’s affection for Erasmus, and also invokes the devil – something that would have been offensive no matter what side of the Catholic versus Protestant debates one fell on.
Joanne Paul was speaking to Kev Lochun on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation.
]]> A peasant with an axe haunted her dreams. Then Rasputin arrived https://www.historyextra.com/period/victorian/rasputin-haunted-dreams-prophecy/ Sun, 31 May 2026 09:45:46 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/period/victorian/rasputin-haunted-dreams-prophecy/ Rasputin’s rise at the Russian royal court seemed to fulfil a nightmare that had haunted Tsar Nicholas II’s mother for decades. As his influence over the imperial family deepened, fears about prophecy, scandal and political danger helped fuel opposition from within the Romanov dynasty. Aside from being the rumoured “lover of the Russian queen” featured in Boney M’s song, Rasputin was an incredibly influential and controversial figure at the Russian royal court until his death in 1916. Although he had the favour of Tsar Nicholas II and his wife, Empress Alexandra, Rasputin also had many detractors at court – notably Tsar Nicholas’s mother, the Empress Dowager Maria.
Maria was “dead against Rasputin, but there was a reason for that which goes back quite a long way,” Anthony Beevor, author of Rasputin: And the Downfall of the Romanovs, says, speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast.
“Apparently when Nicholas II's mother was pregnant with him, she had this terrifying dream that she and her husband, Alexander III, were walking up a mountain, and suddenly this baby appeared in her arms,” Beevor says.
The baby was her future son, according to a diary purported to be Rasputin’s in the Russian archives. Beevor says most of the content of the diary is fake, but some of it has been supported by other sources, like the story of the Dowager Empress’s dream. “The baby then jumps out of her arms and scrabbles up the mountain ahead of them, towards the summit where there is a peasant in a blazing red shirt with an axe, who chops off the baby's head,” he says.
Understandably thrown by this dream, the Dowager Empress turned to “an old woman who was a wet nurse of the imperial family, who is able to interpret dreams,” Beevor says. She interpreted the dream “in a fairly obvious way,” leading the Dowager Empress to believe that a peasant would kill her son.
- Read more | Did Rasputin really bring down the Tsars? The truth behind the dark legend of the Russian mystic
“So, when, 38 years later, she hears that her son and daughter-in-law have become completely besotted with this peasant from Siberia, she is simply horrified,” Beevor says.
The arrival of Rasputin
The peasant from Siberia was Rasputin. He had had a religious experience in 1897 and subsequently became a strannik, or wandering pilgrim, leaving behind his wife and children.
This wasn't unusual at the time. “There were probably around a million Russians wandering the roads, dressed in rags and carrying chains. It was a form of mortification of the flesh,” Beevor says. “They walked from monastery to monastery where they would pray and they would then work a little bit along the way which would give them enough food to carry on to the next place.”
Rasputin acquired a small circle of followers and a reputation for his wisdom and advice, and by 1903/4, had captivated religious leaders in Saint Petersburg. Through a princess who was married to the Tsar’s cousin, he was introduced to the Emperor and his wife in November 1905.
The Tsar and Tsaritsa were reeling from humiliation from defeat in the Russo-Japanese war and vulnerable to Rasputin’s influence because, Beevor says, they were "looking for a simple man of the people with whom they could commune.”
Rasputin wasn’t the first mystical stranger they’d been taken in by – “a few years earlier, there'd been another charlatan, called Monsieur Philippe, who had wormed his way into their presence and had convinced them that he had huge supernatural powers,” Beevor says. “When he left, he said, ‘Another will come,’” almost prophesying the arrival of Rasputin.
Why was Rasputin dangerous?
Rasputin’s influence at court grew rapidly, both because of his well-noted effect on women and because of his apparent religious wisdom and healing powers.
“He had an extraordinary ability to convince women that he was the only person who understood them,” Beevor says, which led to some of the noble women, many of whom “had been basically ignored by their grand husbands,” “throwing themselves at his feet.”
The Tsar and Tsaritsa came to rely on Rasputin for his healing powers. Their eldest son and heir to the throne, Alexei Nikolaevich, had haemophilia, a genetically inherited blood-clotting disorder. Rasputin appeared to be able to relieve his pain and suffering, even seemingly preventing his death via telegram after a particularly close call when Alexei developed a haemorrhage in his thigh in 1912.
Whether this was a coincidence or Rasputin’s words calming the family and causing a psychosomatic healing, this occurrence solidified Rasputin’s powers and therefore his position in the royal couple’s favour.
“Rasputin didn't have any outright power, but he had contacts and influence,” Beevor says. He would send out notes to people at court telling them to do things, and while some people ignored them, others were scared that “if they didn’t do as he asked, he would denounce them to the Tsaritsa and they would lose their post,” he says.
Maria’s attempts to get rid of Rasputin
As well as believing he was the peasant in her dream, and therefore a danger to her son, Dowager Empress Maria thought Rasputin was a charlatan and was aware of how dangerous a figure he was at court because of the Tsaritsa’s devotion to him.
Plus, there were lots of rumours of Rasputin’s immoral sexual behaviours which Maria thought damaged the royal family’s reputation.
“She is the one who realises that this could be appallingly dangerous right from the start, and she leads the opposition to Rasputin within the imperial family,” Beevor says.
- Read more | Did a British agent murder Rasputin?
She tried multiple times to convince the Tsar and Tsarina to have Rasputin sent away, but “the Tsaritsa would not accept any criticism of Rasputin whatsoever, and nor would the Tsar,” Beevor says.
In 1916, Maria even allegedly planned a coup with the goal of getting the Tsar to abdicate so that his son could take the throne, in order to reduce the power that the Tsaritsa and Rasputin had over her son. The coup was to be triggered after she gave an ultimatum to Tsar Nicholas – either he sent Rasputin away or she would leave the capital if he chose Rasputin over her.
However, the Tsaritsa found out about the plan and convinced the Tsar to send his mother away instead of Rasputin. The Dowager Empress was forced to leave Saint Petersburg, and soon after, the royal couple broke all contact with her.
In the end, it wasn’t Rasputin who would be the end of Tsar Nicholas. Rasputin was murdered that same year, before the Tsar and his whole family were executed in 1918 by Bolshevik revolutionaries.
Anthony Beevor was speaking to Danny Bird on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation.
]]> Meet the forgotten medieval muslims who transformed European culture https://www.historyextra.com/period/medieval/al-andalus-muslim-spain-influence-on-european-culture/ Fri, 29 May 2026 09:45:12 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/period/medieval/al-andalus-muslim-spain-influence-on-european-culture/ Medieval Europe’s Muslim societies helped transform science, medicine, music, fashion and dining. In Al-Andalus, centuries of cultural exchange produced innovations that left a lasting mark on European life When you think about the religious history of medieval Europe, you might think about the Christian crusades. Or the Viking conversion to Christianity. You might not immediately think about Islam.
But cultural exchange with Islam was deeply entrenched within Europe. Many parts Spain were ruled by Muslim caliphates and empires for almost 800 years, during which it was known as Al-Andalus and experienced immense innovations in culture, medicine, and etiquette.
“We are talking about a period of real scientific, philosophical, and cultural brilliance in a way that had never been witnessed in Europe,” Tharik Hussain, author of Muslim Europe: A Journey in Search a Fourteen Hundred Year History, says, speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast. “And it's not just the Muslims that benefit from all of these wonderful advances in medicine. These advances continue to impact Europe for long after the caliphate culture disintegrates.”
Europe’s Muslim past
The Caliphate of Córdoba, also known as the Umayyad state of Córdoba, which lasted from 756 to 1031, was the longest standing dynasty in Al-Andalus during the 800 years of Muslim control.
But because “the winners write history,” Hussain says, much of the legacy of Muslim rule in Europe is left out of the history books thanks to anti-Muslim sentiment through the centuries – from anti-Muslim narratives arising from the crusades and enduring into “what was slowly becoming a united Christendom,” to anti-Ottoman narratives much later on.
This has led to the Muslim rule of Al-Andalus being consistently referred to as an ‘invasion’ (even though it lasted longer than Europeans have lived in America) and its lasting legacies on the culture and medicine of Europe have been overlooked, Hussain says.
“This very, very enlightened culture offers the seeds of the Renaissance. And that's really the biggest legacy,” Hussain says. “Because it's from the Renaissance that we then get the Enlightenment – but when you start to really unpick it, you can see the line going straight back to this period.”
The Cordovan Caliphate allowed impactful cultural exchange between the Islamic world and Europe
The Umayyad in Al-Andalus – modern-day Spain – and the Baghdadi caliphates in modern-day Iraq were “two historically rival factions running in tandem during this period,” Hussain says. But because of the distance between them, they didn’t see each other as much of a threat.
“There is a degree of stability that means scholars are able to move across this Muslim commonwealth, which plays a huge part in the exchange of knowledge,” he says.
A quote from historian of medicine Victor Robinson, writing in 1931, sums up the cultural supremacy of the Caliphate of Córdoba well, Hussain says. Robinson writes:
“Europe was darkened at sunset, Cordova shone with public lamps; Europe was dirty, Cordova built a thousand baths; Europe was covered with vermin, Cordova changed its undergarments daily; Europe lay in mud, Cordova's streets were paved; Europe's palaces had smoke holes in the ceiling, Cordova's arabesques were exquisite; Europe's nobility could not sign its name, Cordova's children went to school; Europe's monks could not read the baptismal service, Cordova's teachers created a library of Alexandrian dimensions.”
One man was particularly impactful
A key player in this cultural exchange was Abu al-Hasan 'Ali Ibn Nafi' – better known as Ziryab. He was a musician, teacher, and polymath from Baghdad who arrived in Córdoba in 822 “like a rock star,” Hussain says, bringing with him norms and customs from “the great caliphate culture in Baghdad.”
Ziryab was a huge influence on the music of Al-Andalus. He introduced new musical philosophies, established a training school for musicians, and brought over his knowledge of ten thousand songs, which historian Carl Davila writes “formed the basis for music in Cordova for generations.” Many of his ten children became musicians themselves, and he redesigned the lute.
He also brought over other cultural innovations from the Islamic world, particularly around fine dining.
Before Ziryab, people in Al-Andalus served food on plain tables and brought out all the dishes at once. But he is credited with introducing the idea of place-setting, serving dinner on tablecloths made from leather (which looked better and could be wiped clean) and pioneered the use of glass or crystal drinking glasses instead of metal goblets. He also brought over the idea of the three-course meal, consisting of a soup, main course of fish or meat, and a sweet dessert, to Al-Andalus – which is still the way we tend to eat fancy meals in Europe.
It wasn’t just how people ate that Ziryab changed, but what they ate, too. He is credited with having introduced asparagus into local cuisine, and popularised recipes such as taqliyat Ziryab, which is meatballs and dough fried in coriander oil.
On top of revolutionising courtly meals, Ziryab also impacted the way people dressed. He introduced the idea of wearing different colours in different seasons, such as brighter coloured silks in the autumn and spring.
Multiple fashions and innovations in hair and grooming are attributed to him, too. For example, men started to go clean-shaven instead of wearing beards, and the long, centre-parted hairstyles that had been popular before were replaced by haircuts which exposed the neck and ears. According to contemporary reports, the entire court cut their hair to match Ziryab’s, with eyebrow-length fringes cut straight across their foreheads and the rest of their hair pulled back behind the ears – save for ‘lovelocks’ left loose at the temples.
He also may have been a big influence on helping people in Al-Andalus smell better. He pioneered the use of deodorant made from lead which wouldn’t stain clothes, popularised wearing fragrances as well as the practice of washing clothes with a salt solution instead of rosewater, and even brought over a type of toothpaste made from herbs.
Tharik Hussain was speaking to Danny Bird on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation.
]]> Archaeologists and historians still haven't solved Pompeii's biggest mystery. Here's why https://www.historyextra.com/period/roman/pompeiis-biggest-mystery-when-did-vesuvius-erupt/ Tue, 26 May 2026 10:15:47 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/period/roman/pompeiis-biggest-mystery-when-did-vesuvius-erupt/ The destruction of Pompeii is one of antiquity’s most famous disasters, but its exact date remains fiercely debated. From pomegranates and warm clothing to Roman coins and charcoal graffiti, the evidence points to a mystery still buried in the ash The eruption of Mount Vesuvius in Pompeii is one of the most well-known events in ancient Roman history – so you’d think that we would know all there is to know about it by now. But in the almost 2000 years since the disaster, historians still haven’t agreed on one key detail: when it actually happened.
“The traditional date that we've all been told is 24 August, AD 79,” Dr Jess Venner, an ancient historian and archaeologist at the University of Oxford, speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast, says. “But I don't think that it was then. And there's a lot of people that don't think it was then, for very good reason.”
Most of the information we have about the explosion comes from a firsthand account by Pliny the Younger that he recorded in his letters to Tacitus, a famous historian. He was watching the eruption from across the bay in Misenum, and gives a very detailed account of what happened and how people reacted in his letters.
His letters say that the eruption happened on 24 August – but historians have questioned this since the 17th century.
“The reason for this is because these letters from Pliny aren't the original letters. They've been transcribed many, many times by monks who were exhausted,” Venner says. “They would sit there and do this for hours and hours and hours, so mistakes could happen."
- Read more | How were Pompeii and Herculaneum discovered?
Plus, Pliny wrote the letters over 20 years after the eruption. Whether – after those decades – he retained the right date or not is a reasonable question to ask.
There are three different dates mentioned in different versions of the letter manuscripts: the 24 August, 1 November, and 24 October (all in AD 79).
Venner thinks that the 24 October is most likely.
The pomegranate and grape problems
Venner is an archeobotanist, so specialises in the archaeology of plants. She noticed that the fruits and produce found in excavations of villas carbonised by the eruption don’t match up to the ones she’d have expected to be around in late August.
“There are many, many, many pomegranates found carbonised in fancy villas in Oplontis. They would have been harvested from late September to November in the area,” she says, which doesn’t fit with the 24 August hypothesis.
Grapes similarly pose a problem for this date.
There was a wine harvest festival celebrated on the 19th of August, in which grapes were harvested, pressed, put into dolia (big terracotta jars), and sealed away.
“We've got sealed dolia in the villas outside of Pompeii, so this had all already happened” by the time of the eruption, Venner says. If the eruption happened on 14 August, “that's a quick turnaround,” she says.
Warm clothing and heating equipment
The way people were dressed and the way they were heating or cooling their homes when they were preserved also gives us a clue to the date of the eruption. Venner says that in archaeological digs, they found that people had heating equipment out and were wearing thick clothes.
“If you've ever been to Italy in August, you [know you] are not getting your heating systems out. Whereas in October, it's chilly in the evening, it's warm in the day, so it would make more sense” to have heating equipment available, Venner says.
The clothing is less definitive. “I’m not so convinced about the thick clothes because it was raining with ash, so they were going to want to cover themselves up. And also, they were escaping, so they were going to put stuff on to take it away,” Venner says.
A coin released to celebrate an event in September
“In the 1970s, there was a hoard found in the House of the Golden Bracelet, a very beautiful, wealthy house that overlooked the sea. There's two coins in there that give us a little clue,” Venner says.
These coins picture the face of Emperor Titus and read ‘IMP XV.’ They were minted in celebration of Titus’ 15th acclamation, an event in which the senate would chant praise for the Emperor.
According to a military diploma given to a Roman soldier retiring in Egypt, Titus was still using his title that included his 14th acclamation in early September AD 79.
“So, this means that his 15th one hadn't happened in August. It must have happened after 7 September, so this tells us again that [the eruption] cannot have been in August,” Venner says.
Some historians dispute this, such as Richard Abdy, who argues that the coins could have been produced a few months earlier because it is possible that they read IMP XIV – because of wear over time or the way that the coin was originally minted, the numbers are unclear and up for debate.
Pomepii's graffiti
Graffiti is a useful archaeological tool because it can reveal people’s political opinions and interpersonal gossip. In the case of dating the eruption of Vesuvius, it’s more useful to look at when it may have been written rather than what it says.
Some charcoal graffiti found in a room that was undergoing renovations at the time provides a clue to the date of the eruption. Translated, it reads: “the 16th day before the calends of November, he indulged in food in an immoderate way,” Venner says.
The 16th day before the calends of November is 17 October, which Venner thinks evidences the idea that the eruption happened on 24 October.
“Some people have argued that it could have been from the previous year, but having studied the architecture of Pompeii I don't personally think that they would have left this room unused and undergoing renovations for over a year,” she says. “It was written in charcoal, which obviously doesn't last very well.”
Jess Venner was speaking to Kev Lochun on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation.
]]> The Victorians looted these precious treasures. What happens next is still uncertain https://www.historyextra.com/period/victorian/the-victorians-looted-asante-treasure-museums/ Fri, 22 May 2026 09:30:01 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/period/victorian/the-victorians-looted-asante-treasure-museums/ British museums still hold hundreds of precious Asante treasures looted during 19th century colonial wars. Historian Barnaby Phillips explains how these objects were taken, why their return remains contested, and what recent loans to Ghana mean for the future of restitution The legacy of colonialism echoes across many different facets of modern life, but there’s one aspect in which it’s particularly obvious: in museums. When the British Empire colonised West Africa, British people took many precious objects with them as loot, and the question of what to do with these stolen treasures is still a huge debate today.
Hundreds of objects looted from the Asante Empire by British colonisers in the 19th century ended up in British museums. Some have recently been returned to a museum in modern-day Ghana – but it took a lot of negotiation to get them there.
Speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast, Barnaby Phillips, a historian, conservationist, and author of The African Kingdom of Gold, tells the story of these objects.
Asante objects were looted by British colonialists
The Asante (sometimes spelled Ashanti) empire of west Africa was powerful – its initial strength came from the gold trade, and it raided neighbouring kingdoms, selling the captives and gold to Europeans on the coast. The empire, which broadly flourished rom 1701 to 1901, initially interacted with European colonisers via intermediaries and even signed a treaty of friendship with the British African Company of Merchants that recognised their sovereignty over the area.
But, Phillips says, “the relationship deteriorated throughout the 19th century because Britain's commercial interests got broader.”
There were multiple Anglo-Ashanti wars, driven by Britain’s commercial drive and sense of racial superiority, but also because the British had switched to being anti-slave trade while the Asante still wanted to engage in it.
In 1874, army commander Sir Garnet Wolseley led a huge loot of an Asante palace in Kumasi.
“He appointed a group of senior officers, and they went through the palace in Kumasi by candlelight while the Royal Engineers were waiting to blow it up. They took everything of value that they could grab,” Phillips says.
Most of what they took was made from or covered with gold – including bracelets, badges, headdresses, sandals, and neck rings, as well as specific objects like Akrafena (swords of state used in ceremonies), an Abua (a gold pipe used at court), and an Anadwosekan (translated as ‘night knife’).
Gold is used to show wealth in many parts of the world, but it also “has multiple meanings to the Asante people,” Phillips says. It is used by the Asante king, or Asantehene, “to dazzle, to impress” as well as having a “spiritual dimension that shows the Asantehene’s connection to the gods.”
The British were impressed by the gold for a different reason, though.
Many of the objects were made with a “very sophisticated, lost method of wax casting,” Phillips says, or an “extraordinary method known as repoussé which involves pressing patterns on sheet gold.”
They were valued as trophies or souvenirs by the British because of the skilled craftsmanship it took to make them, even though they "challenged Victorian assumptions about Africa being a place of barbarity without skill or history.”
Many objects ended up in British museums
While some objects plundered by Wolseley were surrendered back to the Asante, hundreds of items were taken back to London.
Some were given to Queen Victoria, but “most of it was auctioned in London in a place called Garrard & Co, the Crown Jewellers in the spring of 1874,” Phillips says. “All of London society – aristocrats, wealthy businessmen, royalty – turn up and buy up what they can.”
Many of these people donated their collections to museums when they died, which explains how there is Asante gold in museums like the British Museum, the V&A Museum, and the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle.
Sir Richard Wallace, an "enormously wealthy Victorian aristocrat,” bought up quite a lot of the objects, and his belongings form what is now the Wallace Collection house museum in London – including a ‘trophy head’ which Phillips says is “the single most expensive item from the 1874 loot and perhaps the largest single item of worked gold to have come out of Africa, with the exception of Egypt.”
However, many of the objects remain in private collections.
“There's an incredible golden ram's head which was taken by officers of the Royal Artillery from the palace,” Phillips says. “That head is kept very privately today by the Royal Artillery in their officer's mess in a place called Larkhill in Wiltshire. They refused me permission to see it, but we know it's there.”
Debates about the return of the objects have been going on for decades
Arguments about returning looted goods have been going on for decades. There were requests for British officials to return “key bits of sacred regalia” in the 1920s and 30s, Phillips says, which weren’t addressed.
Then there was a “concerted appeal in the 1970s at the centenary of Sir Garnet Wolseley’s sacking of the palace,” after which the Foreign Office and British Museum almost came to a deal before it all fell apart. And as a “sort of consolation prize,” there were big exhibitions of Asante gold regalia in London and New York which did have a “big cultural impact at the beginning of the 1980s and raised the Asante’s profile across the world,” Phillips says.
But there were no actual objects returned until the French president, Emmanuel Macron, made a speech in 2017 saying that it was unacceptable that so much African heritage was in European museums.
Some of the looted objects have been returned – but not without controversy
- Read more | Politics and the Bayeux Tapestry: the inside story of the blockbuster loan to the British Museum
The Sarr-Savoy Report was published after Macron’s speech, which prompted museums across Europe to consider returning items.
In the light of this, the current Asantehene, Otumfuo Osei Tutu II, has negotiated the return of many objects from the British Museum via a loan to Manhyia Palace Museum in Kumasi.
Laws prevent them from being permanently given back. While many Ghanaians have advocated to ignore the terms of the agreement and just keep the objects, the king’s envoy wants to show they are “a serious people who can be trusted internationally and will do what [they] signed up to do,” Phillips says.
The terms of the loan mean keeping the artefacts in air-conditioned glass boxes as museum objects. Phillips says this is controversial because it suggests that “they've accepted that their spiritual meaning has, if not gone, been greatly reduced.”
On the other hand, the Fowler Museum in Los Angeles has returned seven objects unconditionally, meaning that the Asante people can choose for themselves whether to put them in museums or return them to use as spiritual objects – “so there are different solutions that can work in different ways,” Phillips says.
Barnaby Phillips was speaking to Spencer Mizen on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation.
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