HistoryExtrahttps://www.historyextra.comHome of Britain’s bestselling history magazine and award-winning podcast2026-10-19T08:05:04.000Zhourly12000-01-01T12:00+00:00Everyday life in a slave trading townhttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/everyday-life-in-a-slave-trading-town/2026-10-19T08:04:52.000ZIn 1665 the Portuguese Inquisition arrested Crispina Peres, a powerful slave trader in the west African port of Cacheu. The records of her case provide a remarkable window into everyday life in 17th-century west Africa, and form the basis of Toby Green's latest book, The Heretic of Cacheu.
In this episode he is joined by Rob Attar to explore the story of Crispina and the lost world she inhabited.
]]>Inside Venice’s Jewish ghettohttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/inside-venice-jewish-ghetto-podcast/2026-10-02T08:38:32.000ZIn the early 16th century, Venice confined its Jewish population to a restricted quarter on an island in the city. It was the first settlement to bear the name 'ghetto' – a word that would go on to shape the history of Jewish persecution and segregation.
Speaking to Emily Briffett, historian Alexander Lee explores why Venice created the ghetto, examining the uneasy tension between the city’s economic reliance on Jewish money-lenders and its deep suspicion of Jewish residents. He also reveals what life was like inside the ghetto, from its crowded buildings and religious institutions to its vibrant cultural life, intellectual debates and fragile relationship with the Venetian authorities.
]]>"In the 1640s, people searched for the devil’s followers”: hunting witches in the Civil Warhttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/in-the-1640s-people-searched-for-the-devils-followers-hunting-witches-in-the-civil-war/2026-09-14T15:20:50.000ZCharlotte Vosper: You open your book with the story of a man called Meggs who was hanged for witchcraft in 1645. Why did you choose to start with him?
Marion Gibson: I found Meggs’s name in an account by the witchfinder Matthew Hopkins, who writes, flippantly, words to the effect that: “This man Meggs, a baker, voluntarily came to be tested for witchcraft, and we hanged him for his trouble – ha ha ha!”
It’s such a horrible way to be remembered. So I set out to find the real Meggs – actually called Henry Maggs – and to tell his story with dignity and respect, to give him back his voice. Throughout the book I’ve looked for the victims of the 1640s British witch trials and tried to tell their stories as they might have wanted them to be told. I want my readers to hear from the victims themselves – for the first time, in many cases – rather than the sneering voices of witchfinders that often dominate accounts.
Can you set the scene for these mid-17th-century witch trials?
The context is pretty horrible. The Civil War was raging and Britain was tearing itself apart. Not only were there battles being fought but there was economic dislocation and there were refugees moving around, many needing immediate charity. People were anxious, miserable and frightened – and all of those emotions fed into witch trials and witch accusations. It’s also important to note that this Britain was a very religious and very magical place. People were steeped in the idea there were angels and devils in the world, and tended to think in quite a binary way: if you were not on God’s side, you must be on the devil’s. This belief system predisposed people to believe that witches might be living among them.
How did that 1640s witch-hunting epidemic start?
Witch hunting had been ongoing in Britain for quite some time, but the temperature rose in the 1640s. One of the first cases was that of a nameless water-witch who was killed on a Civil War battlefield at Newbury in Berkshire in 1643. A group of soldiers, foraging for food after a long march, spotted a woman floating on a plank on a nearby river, and thought: “She’s walking on water – she must be a witch.” They dragged her off to their commander who, after an interrogation, had her shot. After that, interest in witchcraft swept across Britain.
What sort of things were these ‘witches’ accused of having done?
Initially, claims often grew out of something simple, like a neighbourly dispute: “You did this to me, then my cow died, so I don’t like you.” But in the 1640s, authorities actively went looking for people they suspected of working with the devil by offering their soul, body or allegiance in return for some sort of power. Some ‘witches’ were accused of having a little demonic familiar, supposedly feeding it with their blood to seal their pact with the devil. This was thought to leave a ‘witch mark’ on the accused’s body, so during interrogation the accused might be strip-searched to look for physical evidence.
- Read more | Scotland's season of the witch
Many of the accused confessed. Why?
A lot of pressure was put on these people. In addition to a physical bodily search – in itself, an invasive, terrifying process – these ‘witches’ would be kept awake and told to balance on a stool for hours on end while being questioned. These sound like torture techniques, and they broke down people’s resistance.
Social context also played into procuring these confessions. Against the backdrop of war and fear, local church ministers preached that British people must have sinned to bring about such hardship, and that they must do penance and be wary of the devil.
This combination of context and interrogation prompted a lot of people to confess. Maybe some of them were users of magic – perhaps they’d practised healing rituals. Either way, these ‘witches’ were often apt to agree with the interrogating minister or magistrate and say: “Well, yes, actually I think I am a witch.”
When did the phenomenon develop into a mass witch hunt?
It really kicked off in Essex in 1645. In Manningtree, a young man called Matthew Hopkins and his slightly older friend, John Stearne, together started to suspect that there were witches in the area. In nearby Lawford, a clergyman called John Edes also began questioning women from his community, including mother and daughter Anne and Rebecca West.
Anne was a widow who had been tried for witchcraft a few years earlier, accused of killing a sow owned by Thomas and Prudence Hart, but had been acquitted and allowed back to Lawford. You can imagine the Harts’ horror: the woman they believed to be a witch was again in their village. So when Hopkins and Stearne started asking questions in Essex, the Harts again accused Anne, believing her responsible when Prudence suffered a miscarriage in the churchyard. They also turned on Anne’s daughter, Rebecca – who, according to the records, seems to have fallen out with Prudence.
Rebecca was probably about 30 years old, unmarried and, like her mother, pretty poor. Interestingly, both Anne and Rebecca seem to have been quite religious. Despite this, John Edes questioned Rebecca, and she confessed that both herself and her mother were witches who’d met with others in Manningtree. They were all rounded up, sent to the assize court and imprisoned in Colchester Castle while awaiting trial. There they were questioned further as Hopkins continued to build evidence against them.
Anne was found guilty and executed. The records about Rebecca aren’t clear, though: either she wasn’t put on trial or she was acquitted. Historians have long suspected that, because Rebecca chose to give evidence against other people, she was spared. Either way, as far as we know, she wasn’t executed.
By this time, the witch-hunting campaign reached far across Essex. Some 28 or 29 people from other villages, all of them women, were put on trial alongside Anne West; 19 of them were convicted. Soon the phenomenon spread across eastern England, with the witchfinders moving onto Suffolk, Norfolk and the Midland counties.
How did Matthew Hopkins and John Stearne come to wield such authority?
Hopkins was the son of a Suffolk vicar, but moved to Manningtree when his widowed mother married a clergyman there. He was a religious young man, and his family seems to have been afflicted by illness. His brother John died very young, probably from tuberculosis or another lung condition.
Hopkins had a burning conviction that his destiny was to be a witchfinder, and started thinking that people were meeting near his house for witches’ sabbaths with their animal familiars.
Stearne was another Suffolk man, married and with a family – in many ways a more conventional and seemingly stable figure. But he, too, seems to have been excited by the idea there were witches in his community, and he had a range of methods for testing them.
- Read more | Tudor England's witch hunts killed hundreds of women. The death toll was nearly even worse
Together, Hopkins and Stearne deprived the suspects of sleep, keeping them in constant motion and waiting for their animal familiars to come, all the time bullying, questioning and watching them. These men roped in other villagers from Manningtree and Lawford, and that’s what really kicked off the trials and got stories flowing from the suspects.
The men didn’t have official positions and weren’t recognised by the government, but were self-appointed moral police. Hopkins gave himself the rank of ‘Witchfinder General’. I suspect he was an egotistical, difficult young man.
Stearne was keen on ‘ducking’, in other words throwing suspects into water. If they floated, they were pulled out and interrogated. Essex magistrates told him not to do it but, as he moved through Suffolk, Norfolk, Northamptonshire, Cambridgeshire, Huntingdonshire and some of the Midland counties, he did use this test.
Of course, if you’d been partly tied up and thrown into water wearing very little, maybe a sort of undergarment, and everybody was standing around pointing and shouting, and you’ve been drowning in front of them, it’s likely that if you were pulled out you’d be terrified and physically under a lot of stress, so much more likely to confess.
Why were women and poor people so much more likely to be accused?
Across the history of witch trials in Europe from the 15th to the 18th century, the accused were women in about 75 per cent of known cases. That seems to be because women tended to be more associated with the devil, perhaps because, in the Bible, Eve commits the first sin.
In the 1640s, society came under tremendous strain and people reached for old beliefs. Believing Satan must be behind their problems, they searched for the devil’s followers, or witches. Of course, at that time almost everything was run by men, which made women vulnerable. In some cases, 100 per cent of the accused people in a particular town – Framlingham in Suffolk, for example – were women.
A lot of these people were also poor, not well educated or in positions of influence in their society. Imagine if a powerful man came to see you in his velvets, silks and ruff, and was writing things down, and maybe you already knew him as an important figure in your community – a magistrate or a minister, perhaps – and he said: “You know, Margery, you’re a witch,” you might well have replied: “Well, yes, sir, if you say so I must be a witch.” There was a tendency to simply say what the authorities wanted you to say.
Many ‘witches’ show up in parish charity records, too; in times of war and economic crisis, people tend to get angry with those they see as a drain on their taxes and community.
But not all ‘witches’ were female or poor, were they?
The stereotype is broadly true, but other people did get caught up. One victim from the Suffolk village of Brandeston was a clergyman, which is quite astonishing. The Reverend John Lowes seems to have been a turbulent fellow who often quarrelled with parishioners over many years, taking them to court, fighting them over land and buildings, and accusing them of moral crimes. Back in 1615, he had defended a woman accused of witchcraft, which proved to be a fatal mistake.
When the panic reached his village, Lowes was accused, thrown into water, deprived of sleep, effectively tortured – and he confessed. By the time he was in court, he had recovered and recanted his confession, but it was too late. He was convicted and hanged on 27 August 1645 at Bury St Edmunds, along with 17 other convicted people.
Similarly, Henry Maggs was quite a respectable figure in his Norfolk community – a churchwarden, chosen to be part of the religious leadership. But by the time Hopkins and Stearne arrived in Norfolk,
the idea that anybody might be a witch had become widespread, and Maggs was accused, searched for witch marks and hanged.
Were there people who were accused but acquitted, and what was life like for them afterwards?
The experience of Anne West, who was tried but not executed in the early 1640s, then accused again in 1645, suggests that the accused were not readily accepted back into their communities even if found not guilty.
The case of Ann Jefferies is also fascinating. A young woman living in Cornwall, she was 19 or in her early twenties when accused, so in that sense not a stereotypical ‘witch’. She claimed that she had started seeing fairies who gave her prophecies and healing abilities. She probably thought that she could make a living from this and that it would make her valuable in the community.
Maybe Jefferies did have visions; she certainly seems to have seen herself as a kind of religious mystic, believing that the fairies were associated with God. But in the climate of the 1640s, that was a dangerous claim. During questioning, the magistrates and clergymen said to her that the fairies were really evil spirits, and that she was a witch. However, she seems to have been acquitted at the assizes, and lived to a ripe old age.
I think that there was a higher tolerance of magical belief in the west of England than in the east where most cases were recorded. Jefferies’ age probably helped, too: some juries were reluctant to convict younger people if they could make a good case for themselves, and Jefferies was an articulate young woman. It seems that she was accepted back into her community more easily than Anne West, but I’m sure suspicions continued to dog her. Even later in life, Jefferies was very reluctant to talk about her witch trial because she assumed that people would turn on her again.
How and when did this spate of witch hunting in Britain decline?
The big witch trials of eastern England and the Midlands seem to have petered out by late 1647, for a variety of reasons. One might have been simply that people started questioning the vast numbers accused. John Stearne wrote in his account of the trials, A Confirmation and Discovery of Witchcraft, published in 1648, that he was responsible for having about 200 people executed – an astonishing figure. If you consider all those accused, questioned or charged but not executed, there were many hundreds and hundreds of people. Understandably, people who were not as convinced as Stearne and Hopkins that the world is full of witches started asking questions. Are these people really all witches? Can there possibly be so many in Britain?
Questions also arose about the motives of the witchfinders, especially Hopkins and Stearne, who charged for their services. They asked to be put up in a hotel, given money to feed their horses and themselves, and funds to pay people to search suspects for witch marks. So the costs for communities racked up – and people with an eye on their taxes started to think: maybe a witch trial is not such a good investment.
In 1647, Hopkins fell ill and died. He was still young – probably in his mid-twenties – and it seems likely that he succumbed to the same disease that killed his brother, perhaps tuberculosis. That helped to bring to a decisive end that wave of witch hunts in which he and Stearne were involved, though they continued elsewhere in Britain. There was another big campaign in Scotland in the 1650s, for example. Ripples carried on across the period of the Civil War and beyond. Hundreds more people were accused and executed, and their cases were often undocumented.
How did the legacy of these witch hunts spread beyond Europe?
Most famously, during witch trials in Salem, Massachusetts in 1692 and 1693, some 30 people were found guilty and 19 were hanged; others died under torture or in jail. So events in England and Scotland had impacts more than 3,000 miles away.
That’s because colonists in the New World – many of them Puritans seeking religious freedom – travelled from communities in Britain where witch trials had been held earlier that century. We have specific examples of people from Framlingham and Great Yarmouth carrying with them to New England the idea that the world is full of witches who need to be hunted. Witch trials were also held in Connecticut and Virginia, in colonies where settlers or their descendants recalled stories of witches they’d heard in Suffolk, Essex, Northamptonshire, Newcastle or Cornwall.
Are there any modern parallels to those 17th-century witch trials?
When people are scapegoated and blamed for problems in our communities today, there is an echo of the witch trials: it’s often poorer people and perceived outsiders who are picked upon. And, of course, we still have problems with misogyny – any woman in public life will tell you what it’s like to be on the receiving end of accusations from conspiracy theorists or others who think that women are generally a problem.
For example, the QAnon conspiracy theory holds that satanists wield power in American politics, particularly Democratic women, offering a close parallel with the witch trials of the 1640s.
There’s a legacy of suspicion and finger-pointing that isn’t justified but which is easy to whip up into hysteria, particularly in times of economic crisis and war. So I think we still live in a society where, in a sense, we hold witch trials.
Marion Gibson is emerita professor of Renaissance and magical literatures at the University of Exeter. Her previous books include Witchcraft: A History in Thirteen Trials (Simon & Schuster, 2023)
This article was first published in the September 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
]]>From Nell Gwyn to Meghan Markle: 9 romances between actors and royalshttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/nell-gwyn-meghan-markle-harry-relationships-actors-royals/2026-09-07T11:52:56.000ZOn 19 May 2018, Meghan Markle married into the British royal family when she tied the knot with Prince Harry at Windsor Castle.
The couple – now the Duke and Duchess of Sussex – have rarely been out of the headlines in the intervening years, and recently found themselves at the centre of a tabloid storm when it was revealed that they would be returning to the UK with their two children, Prince Archie and Princess Lilibet, having set up home in the United States in 2020.
Meanwhile, rumours are also circulating that the Duchess of Sussex is exploring a return to acting – a career that, to some, seemed incompatible with the traditional expectations of a royal bride. Yet Harry and Meghan’s relationship is merely the latest in a long line of romances between royals and members of the acting profession.
Below, historian Catherine Curzon examines nine other relationships, spanning the 17th century to the present day…
1. Margaret ‘Peg’ Hughes and Prince Rupert of the Rhine
Better known as Peg, Margaret Hughes (c1630–1719) holds the distinction of being one of the first recorded female actors to grace the London stage, appearing as Desdemona in Shakespeare’s Othello on 8 December 1660 at the Vere Street Theatre.
Up until this point, women had been forbidden to act on stage at all, and it wasn’t until King Charles II issued a royal warrant declaring that female roles must be played by women in 1662 that female actors became a common sight, as opposed to young men dressed up to look like them.
Peg was no young man, though, and she not only bewitched her audience but managed to steal the heart of Rupert of the Rhine, cousin to Charles II.
After Rupert’s death in 1682, Peg gambled away much of his bequest to her and sold off many valuables, including a necklace that was bought by the infamous Nell Gwyn (see below). Peg died in 1719, having never regained the lifestyle she once enjoyed.
2. Nell Gwyn and King Charles II
Perhaps the most famous of all England’s royal mistresses, Nell Gwyn (1650–87) began her career selling oranges to the patrons of a theatre on London’s Brydges Street, Charles II’s royal playhouse. By the time she was 14 years old, Nell was treading the boards as an actor and she found her niche as a leading light of Restoration comedy, soon becoming one of London’s most celebrated comedians.
George Villiers, 2nd Duke of Buckingham was unofficially appointed to arrange suitably impressive lovers for Nell. Seeing a chance to increase his own influence as well as her cachet, he attempted to install her as the king’s mistress. Though Charles was married to Catherine of Braganza, the queen had long since learned to put up with his many mistresses, recognising them as a fact of royal life.
- Read more | Was Charles II too randy to rule?
Nell was amenable to the duke’s scheme, but informed him that she expected a retainer of £500 a year for the privilege. However, the role of king’s mistress was a privileged one, filled with luxury and opulence, and Charles had plenty of willing candidates to choose from – even without paying them £500. When he heard the figure Nell was demanding, Charles rejected the idea, but when he met her in 1668, he was smitten.
Despite plenty of rivals and other mistresses snapping at her heels, Nell bore two children by the king. The actor and the monarch were a couple until his death in 1685, often sharing Nell’s silver bed, upon which the couple’s images were engraved. On his deathbed, the king begged “let not poor Nelly starve”, and she certainly didn’t. Awarded a substantial payment, she lived on for two more years before she succumbed to a stroke, possibly the result of syphilis.
3. Mary ‘Perdita’ Robinson and King George IV
Mary Robinson (1757–1800) knew all about reinvention. When her father abandoned his family in 1764, Mary’s privileged childhood ended with a bump. Married in her teens, she survived a spell in debtor’s prison thanks to her dissolute husband and took to the stage in need of cash.
Mary became known for her so-called ‘breeches roles’, in which she played men and flashed her famed legs, a part of the female anatomy that wasn’t often on display in the Georgian era. It was as Perdita in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale that she caught the eye of the young and capricious George, Prince of Wales, the future King George IV.
- Read more | 16 of the worst monarchs in history
The prince offered Mary a huge payment if she gave up the stage to become his official mistress and she accepted. However, the money was not forthcoming, and soon he had moved on to new lovers, leaving Mary high and dry. With her reputation in tatters, Mary took up her pen and began a new career as a poet and novelist, earning herself the nickname ‘the English Sappho’.
Partially paralysed by a later illness, Mary died in 1800 aged just 43.
4. Dorothea Jordan and King William IV
While Prince George was romancing Mary, his younger brother William (the future William IV) made a play for Dorothea ‘Dora’ Jordan (1761–1816), a celebrated Anglo-Irish comedian with a long list of lovers in her past. William and Dora lived together as man and wife for 20 years and had 10 children.
However, the couple never married and – with Princess Charlotte of Wales likely to remain the only child of his elder brother and his bitterly estranged wife – William found himself closer to the throne than he had ever expected to be. Perhaps more importantly, William was desperately in need of money to settle his debts and knew that an official marriage might do wonders for his allowance.
He dropped Dora with a bump and promised her an annuity and custody of their daughters on the understanding that she wouldn’t go back to the stage. Unfortunately, when her financial situation led Dora to return to the theatre, William kept his word. He took the girls from her care and slashed her allowance accordingly.
Dora died in poverty in 1816 and left a heartbroken William to rue his decision. Ironically, even when he later made an official marriage, he and his wife, Adelaide of Saxe-Meiningen, failed to produce any surviving heirs.
5. Marguerite Bellanger and Emperor Napoleon III
Marguerite Bellanger (1838–86) was born into abject poverty but thanks to a modicum of acting talent and a whole lot of charm, she wouldn’t stay there. She started her performance career as an acrobat and equestrienne and soon progressed to acting, while establishing herself as one of the most popular courtesans in Paris.
Marguerite’s most famous patron was undoubtedly Napoleon III (the nephew of Napoleon I), whom she met while sheltering from the rain in Paris’s Parc de Saint-Cloud in 1863. From that romantic beginning, the couple were together for a decade until his death and they had a son. Though Marguerite still had other lovers, Napoleon awarded her a generous pension and even a castle in which she and his son could live.
After Napoleon’s death in 1873, Marguerite moved to England and married an army officer. The couple eventually settled in France and it was there, in 1886, that she died.
6. Lillie Langtry and King Edward VII
Anglo-American music hall star Lillie Langtry (1853–1929) was a bona fide megastar of the Victorian and Edwardian eras, and she had a love life that would keep any modern tabloid in material for years. As one of many mistresses of the Prince of Wales (later King Edward VII), Lillie was even presented to his mother Queen Victoria. During their three-year relationship, Lillie was happy to share her lover with both his wife and his other mistresses, seeming to enjoy not being tied exclusively to the prince.
- Read more | A timeline of Britain in the reign of Edward VII
Though the couple separated amicably, Edward wasn’t Lillie’s last royal fling. While still in a relationship with the Prince of Wales, she fell pregnant by Prince Louis of Battenberg (1854–1921). He was the son of Prince Alexander of Hesse and had been naturalised as a Briton, eventually changing his name to Mountbatten.
Louis was a member of the Royal Navy, so when news of the pregnancy came out, the horrified Prince Alexander had his son sent to sea aboard HMS Inconstant. The Prince of Wales, meanwhile, paid for Lillie to spend her pregnancy in Paris, where she gave birth to a daughter.
Lillie died in 1929 and to this day her name remains synonymous with the glory days of the British music hall.
7. Rita Hayworth and Prince Aly Khan
In 1949, Rita Hayworth (1918–87), one of Hollywood’s most popular and celebrated actors, gave up the silver screen for life as the wife of Prince Aly Khan. The prince was the son of Sultan Mahommed Shah, Aga Khan III, the hereditary imam of the Nizari Ismailis, one of the largest Shia Muslim communities in the world.
Sadly for Rita, her new husband had a weakness for actors and two years later he was back in the very club where he and his princess first met, this time romancing Hollywood star Joan Fontaine. Rita took their daughter, Yasmin, and filed for divorce, convinced that Aly Khan would abduct the little girl if she wasn’t kept under guard.
The couple’s divorce was a tabloid favourite: as lawyers argued over whether Yasmin should be raised as a Christian or a Muslim, she played in the courtroom and even settled on the judge’s lap. Ultimately the court found in Rita’s favour, and she was awarded custody of her daughter.
8. Grace Kelly and Prince Rainier III of Monaco
As Hollywood royalty, Grace Kelly (1929–82) was beloved by cinemagoers across the world. Having earned an Academy Award for her performance in The Country Girl (1954) and starred in hits from High Noon (1952) to Rear Window (1954), it seemed the perfect fairy-tale ending when she married Prince Rainier III of Monaco in 1956.
- Read more | Historians at the movies: Grace of Monaco reviewed
In fact, Princess Grace’s life was anything but a fairy tale. Her marriage at the age of 26 marked the end of her Hollywood career. She was forced to turn down the title role in Alfred Hitchcock’s psychological thriller Marnie (1964) when the people of Monaco reacted with outrage to the idea of their princess playing a criminal. Further rumoured returns to the screen were similarly rejected as a result of Rainier’s wish for his wife to remain in professional retirement.
Instead, Grace dedicated herself to philanthropy and her three children. She also struck up a friendship with Diana, Princess of Wales. Sadly, Grace died at the age of 52 as a result of a car accident in 1982.
9. Clotilde Courau and Emanuele Filiberto of Savoy, Prince of Venice
In 2003, Vittorio Emanuele, Prince of Naples, reportedly had to swallow his pride when his son, Emanuele Filiberto, married the politically outspoken left-wing French actor Clotilde Courau (born 1969).
Courau had once been described by the Italian newspaper La Repubblica as “a militant anarcho-Communist” – making her an unconventional choice of bride for the grandson of Italy’s last reigning king, Umberto II.
Unlike many of the other stars on this list, Clotilde refused to give up her career after marrying into royalty and continued to act, while also pursuing charitable activities under her official title, Clotilde of Savoy.
The couple had two daughters together before announcing that they had begun formal divorce proceedings in April 2026.
An older version of this article was first published by HistoryExtra in May 2018
]]>Fooling around in front of royalty: the extraordinary escapades of Europe's female jestershttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/fooling-around-in-front-of-royalty-the-extraordinary-escapades-of-europes-female-jesters/2026-09-06T14:30:30.000ZThe Château de Fontainebleau is packed with courtiers awaiting the arrival of King Henry IV’s jester. But while modern onlookers might expect a man in a harlequin costume to appear, Henry’s court is different.
Instead, an Amazonian warrior bursts onto the scene, clad in battle armour and wielding a wooden sword and shield. Mathurine ‘la Folle’ was one of France’s most eccentric court jesters. Known for her quick-witted japes and outrageous costumes, Mathurine was also, perhaps surprisingly to modern audiences, a woman.
Although most jesters in medieval and early modern Europe were men, female ones like Mathurine were not uncommon. Women jesters feature prominently in some of Europe’s most famous courts, from Henry VIII’s household to the travelling court of Mary, Queen of Scots.
Many were much-loved by their monarchs and granted special favours, including gifts of land and fine clothing. As such, female jesters occupied an unusual niche within medieval and early modern society.
They were often unmarried, childless women who came from humble origins. But if they served their monarch well, these women enjoyed a life of relative luxury and privilege at the heart of the royal household.
Here we present five of the most famous female jesters who made a living entertaining royalty.
Jane Foole (fl. 1537-1558): Mary I’s most beloved natural fool
Jane Foole is the most well-known female jester from the Tudor period. While we know very little about her early life, Jane enters the historical record during the reign of King Henry VIII, when she joins the household of Princess Mary (later ‘Bloody’ Queen Mary I).
Jane was what was known at the time as a ‘natural’ fool i.e. she had mental and/or physical disabilities that resulted in her being unable to control her faculties.
As historian Beatrice Otto has noted, it is tempting to assume that natural fools were mistreated by their employers and used as objects of ridicule. However, none of the evidence from the time bears out this assumption. Indeed, Jane was a much-loved member of Mary’s royal entourage.
A lot of what we know about female jesters comes from the financial records of their benefactors. The accounts from Queen Mary’s reign recorded between 1553 and 1558 show that Mary spent a lot of money on lavish clothes for Jane. One entry reads “Item, for furring of a gowne of the same Vellat with size white hare skynnes for Jane our fool”.
Fur for costume trimming was expensive and would have cost roughly £300 in modern terms. Furthermore, Jane was gifted the same dresses as Mary’s ladies-in-waiting: the only difference being that her gowns were cut in the Dutch style and not the more fashionable French style.
Mary also ensured that Jane wasn’t short of footwear. Another entry from the royal accounts reads: “Item, for 12 peire of shewes for the said Jane.”
Even a court fool, who would regularly be employed in various stage performances, could not have worn out this many shoes in a year. Therefore the quantity of shoes gifted likely reflects Mary’s deep affection for Jane.
We also know a lot about Jane’s ailing health during the 20 years she spent in Mary’s household. From March 1543 onwards, Jane suffered from a skin infection which necessitated a monthly shaving of her hair. Records show that a barber was paid 4d (four pence) on each occasion.
We also have a striking snapshot of what Jane would have looked like at this time thanks to the 16th century painting The Family of Henry VIII. A woman, whom most experts believe to be Jane, is standing to the left of Princess Mary wearing a cap over her shaven head.
Furthermore, in 1555, Mary sent a gift to a woman healer in Bury St Edmunds for healing one of Jane’s eyes.
If there was any doubt about the high status that Jane enjoyed as a court fool, we also know that she was included in the St. Valentine’s Day lottery. This was a festival in which noble men drew lots among the ladies of the court to see who would be their partner for that evening’s dancing.
Sometime between 1554 and 1556, a Mr Herte was given “three yerdes of black satten” for being Jane’s Valentine, while a Mr Barnes was given the same quantity of satin in 1558.
All of this special attention was given to Jane, but why? In the Tudor period, people with learning disabilities were prized for their truth-telling abilities. The public believed natural fools were more child-like and, as such, they were closer to God.
Kings and queens valued fools like Jane for their perceived ability to speak divine truth, and this is why we so often see a close relationship form between a monarch and their natural fool.
Although life would have been hard for peasants who suffered from learning disabilities, those who were lucky enough to enter court life enjoyed incredible privilege.
Lucretia the Tumbler (fl. 1542 - 1543): The acrobatic ‘saltatrix’ of the Tudor court
Lucretia the Tumbler is another female jester from the same period who had a close connection to Jane Foole. We know far less about Lucretia, but some historians guess that she may have been of Italian origin, considering her Italianate first name.
Until his execution in 1540, Thomas Cromwell was responsible for vetting all of Princess Mary’s appointments while her father was king, and at some point, he approved the appointment of a ‘chamberer’ intriguingly known as Lucretia the Tumbler.
Lucretia was not a natural fool but a ‘saltatrix’, i.e. a female performer who entertained the court with acrobatic dancing, contortions and gymnastics. She was kept in Mary’s household and likely performed for both Mary and her sister, the young princess Elizabeth (and future Queen Elizabeth I), during their visits to the Manor of the More in Hertfordshire.
In the early 1540s, Lucretia appears in financial records under the name of Lucrece. She is mentioned alongside Jane the Foole regularly, and the pair often received identical items of clothing.
In December 1542, a record lists a “payr of shoes for Jane & an other for lucrece” as well as identical smocks for the two women. This may mean that the pair performed alongside each other in a double act.
Historian John Southworth has also suggested that the matching clothes indicate that Lucretia may have been Jane’s companion or ‘keeper’. Keepers were responsible for looking after natural fools, since they could not take care of themselves.
It was not unusual for jesters to perform dual roles within a royal household. Henry VIII’s tumbler Stephen Tosso combined these duties with other domestic roles. Sadly we don’t know what became of Lucretia as she disappears from the public record after 1543.
Mathurine la Folle (fl. 1589 – c1620s): The jester who dressed as an Amazonian warrior
Mathurine first appears in court annals during the reign of Henry III. She was recorded as a plaisante, the appointed title for female jesters in France at that time (the Queen of Navarre employed a plaisante called Mademoiselle Sevin). While most female jesters were attached to the Queen’s household, Mathurine bucked this trend, serving as a jester within Henry’s household.
One famous anecdote about Mathurine involves a lady-in-waiting complaining that she did not like having to be seated on the right side of a mere fool. Mathurine promptly jumped up and sat on the lady’s other side, remarking “I don’t mind it at all.”
Some sources highlight how during her lifetime, satirists would sometimes refer to themselves as a ‘Mathurine’. She also influenced a type of burlesque writing called mathurinade which was associated with her particular brand of comedy.
Furthermore, Mathurine was known for her devout Catholicism. Reformers at the time were strongly opposed to what they perceived as the extravagant practice of keeping court fools. A fiercely Catholic woman who enjoyed dressing up in full Amazonian warrior regalia would have attracted a lot of negative attention from religious dissidents during a turbulent period in France’s history.
Mathurine’s most well-known feat involves her role in detaining Henry IV’s assassin, Jean Châtel. But there is a plot twist which underscores just how unusual it was that Mathurine remained a court jester for so long.
Despite her bravery, the king initially suspected her of being part of the plot and arrested her. However, in a rare display of generosity, Mathurine was allowed to prove her innocence and was then warmly welcomed back to court, serving Henry and his son, Louis XIII.
She made a few appearances in the mid 1620s, but after that Mathurine la Folle disappears from history.
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Maria Bárbola (fl. 1651 - 1700): The court dwarf who was immortalised in a Baroque painting
Maria Bárbola was a court dwarf who served the Spanish royal family for nearly half a century from 1651 to 1700. Dwarfs were often employed as entertainers in medieval and early modern palace courts.
Madame d’Or, a ‘very graceful fool’, was a popular dwarf entertainer in the 1400s in France, while several female dwarfs served in the court of Isabella d’Este, the wife of the marquis of Mantua, Italy.
King Philip IV of Spain was a big fan, and Maria was actually one of 110 dwarfs in his entourage. Dwarfs took on a variety of roles depending on their talents. Some were tumblers or joke-tellers, while others were employed as natural fools.
While even court dwarfs suffered prejudice from others in society due to their stature, Maria was much-loved by her benefactors. Once again, we see evidence of lavish treatment towards jesters via royal financial records. However, this time it isn’t clothing that is gifted to Maria, but snow!
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In 1658, she received four pounds of snow every summer’s day in order to keep her cool. This was a regular gift for long-serving court dwarfs. In 1678, Bernada Blasco, a dwarf who served for 25 years, received four pounds of snow a day in the summer and four pounds of coal in winter.
Maria is particularly well-known due to her appearance in Diego Velázquez’ famous painting Las Meninas (‘The Maids of Honour’) from 1656. In the painting, Maria is treated with reverence by Velázquez, despite the lesser-rank of dwarfs at this time.
While dwarfs were commonly depicted in artwork as figures of ridicule, Maria stands staring boldly and confidently out at the viewer, clearly represented as a core member of the royal household thanks to her proximity to the young infanta Margaret Theresa.
Maria’s employment ended when Philip V decided to reorganise the Spanish court. He believed that court dwarfs were outdated relics and promptly ended their service. Despite living in Spain for nearly 50 years, the last we know of Maria is that she returned to her native Austria to see out the rest of her days.
Nichola La Jardinière (fl. 1560 - 1570): Faithful companion to Mary, Queen of Scots
Nichola ‘La Jardinière’ was a female fool who underscores the importance of women jesters as valued companions to a monarch (particularly a queen).
La Jardinière was a natural fool who first served in the household of Queen Mary of Guise and later joined the court of her famous daughter, Mary, Queen of Scots. When Mary returned to Scotland from France after the death of her husband, Francis II, La Jardinière left her native country to accompany her royal mistress.
We know that La Jardinière was treated well by Mary. For example, in October 1565 the queen ordered a luxurious bedding set for her faithful jester which included a bed, mattress, sheets and a lined green plaid cover.
Many fools remained long in the memory of their benefactors, even after their services were no longer required. After Mary was forced to abdicate in 1567, she ensured that La Jardinière and her keeper, Jacqueline Critoflat, both received fine clothes and money for three years while Mary was imprisoned in England.
She eventually sent the pair a sum of money, “expensis and fraucht” in 1570, so that they could return to France. Such behaviour is reminiscent of other European nobility, such as Isabella d’Este, who ensured that her dwarfs were paid 50 scudi each for the rest of their lives after retirement.
Rachel Ashcroft is a freelance journalist with a PhD in 16th century history. She specialises in arts and culture reporting
]]>Sex and the Stuarts: inside 17th-century London's most notorious brothelhttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/sex-and-the-stuarts-inside-17th-century-londons-most-notorious-brothel/2026-07-27T15:00:46.000ZThe fearful residents of Southwark must have heard the Shrove Tuesday rioters before they saw them. Charging across London Bridge on 22 February 1631, the enraged throng surged west through streets snaking along the south bank of the Thames, armed with fists and sticks and stones – no doubt terrifying people living on these thoroughfares. But on this day, they had a specific target in mind: a moated, semi-fortified manor house near the river, known as Holland’s Leaguer.
This was far from the first such attack in London, and it would certainly not be the last. These mobs were to be taken very seriously – indeed, 10 years later, one would drive Charles I from his capital altogether. And the core of the swarm comprised a volatile community.
The apprentices of Stuart London were a notoriously rowdy bunch. Perhaps it was understandable: barely paid, hardly fed, indentured to his master for the whole of his adolescence, the life of an apprentice was a repressed, restrictive one. Just about his only pleasure was riot and disorder – an activity into which he threw himself with gusto on every public holiday.
Shrove Tuesday was a particular favourite, because it provided a plausible excuse for violence. An apprentice might claim that he set upon only places that represented sources of wicked temptation during Lent – theatres, taverns and, above all, London’s brothels, from which these penniless lads must have felt themselves most cruelly excluded. In 1614, rioting apprentices had attacked and totally destroyed the Shoreditch brothel run by Joan Leake.
On Shrove Tuesday 1631, their target was Holland’s Leaguer. On this occasion, the house did not fall: the drawbridge was raised, and the apprentices were repulsed. But the seeds of its downfall had been sown. The days of perhaps the largest, most notorious and most luxurious brothel in Southwark – if not all of London – were numbered.
Inspiring iniquity
What do we know of this infamous “house of obscenitie”, as Nicholas Goodman described it? To begin with, this brothel – or, rather its destruction – inspired three ballads, an extravagant pamphlet by Goodman, and a play by Shackerley Marmion that enjoyed what was, for the times, a record-breaking London run.
We also know that Bess Holland was its bawd, or madam. We also know where Holland’s Leaguer would have stood: where the southern end of Blackfriars Station now makes landfall on the bank of the Thames – a mere flounce of the petticoats from where Holland Street runs today.
We have a good idea of what it looked like. In Hollands Leaguer: or, An Historical Discourse of the Life and Actions of Dona Britanica Hollandia, published the year after the Leaguer’s demise, Goodman tells us that Bess set up shop in an old moated manor house, complete with a drawbridge.
This pamphlet is basically a diatribe against the state of England, so one should take much of what Goodman says with a hefty pinch of salt. But it’s true that, on the 1633 version of the ‘Agas map’ of London (a section of which is shown below), a moated manor house is marked exactly where the Leaguer would have been, in Southwark’s Old Paris Gardens.
Goodman describes the house as a “Citadell… so fortified… neither the Turkes wealth, nor the Traytors wit could ever have betrayed it”. At the time, ‘leaguer’ was a term for a fortified camp. In that conflict-bedevilled age – the bloody Thirty Years’ War raged in western Europe, and civil war loomed in England – dreadful puns were popular, as was likening amorous conquest to the military kind. But if even half of the defences Goodman described surrounding the Leaguer did exist, it’s clear why the name stuck.
Before reaching the drawbridge, you had to make your way along a narrow path “betwixt two dangerous ditches”, passing through palisades and barricades and between “strong ramparts”. And on finally crossing the drawbridge, you would be met at the door by a “Ruffian… monstrous both in shape and condition”. There he is in the woodcut illustrating Goodman’s pamphlet – reproduced on the opposite page – armed with a halberd, standing beside the Leaguer’s intimidatingly fortified front door. At the window to his right, hands on hips, is a female figure – could this be Bess Holland herself?
Clearly, those enraged apprentices came up against a well-defended target, with its moat and barricades and ramparts – but is that the only reason the attack failed? Did Bess’s neighbours band together on her behalf? Southwark was then a morass of taverns and theatres, of bull- and bear-baiting arenas, as well as brothels, so there could have been a sense that an attack on one was an attack on all. Or did Bess pay the mob to leave her in peace?
A woman of her times
Much of what we know about the Leaguer’s madam comes from Goodman’s pamphlet, though other clues can be found. He states that Bess was born in the country to virtuous and respectable parents, whom she manipulated into allowing her to move to London. There she became the mistress to a wealthy man, Goodman says, describing him as “Ignatius, a Puritane Jesuite” and also using a pun that might identify him as the lawyer Alberico Gentili. Bess was no common hussy, then, but a sophisticated courtesan with “a fayre Eye, full of strong inchauntment” – though “such a wicked spirit”, and “so masculine in her disposition” (my italics) that “all goodness became to her an utter stranger.”
Bess may have been surprisingly well connected. Records reveal that she leased the house from John Carey, the 3rd Baron Hunsdon. (Intriguingly, his father, Henry Carey, 1st Baron Hunsdon, had been the patron of Shakespeare’s Lord Chamberlain’s Men.) That may be relevant because one of the frequently repeated factoids about the Leaguer is that James VI & I was among its clients, as was the Duke of Buckingham.
Peter Ackroyd wrote of London’s “strange oscillation between freedom and restraint” in this period, when decorum and decadence weren’t mutually exclusive. The Bishop of Winchester owned the land on which many of Southwark’s ‘stews’ (brothels) stood – the women working in them became known as ‘Winchester Geese’ – and the court of James VI & I had a reputation for hedonism. Bess, then, was a product of her times, clearly aware of the tastes of her more discerning potential clients. When establishing her Leaguer, Goodman tells us, she ensured that it “wanted nothing for State, nothing for Magnificence, nothing for Delight, nothing for Beauty”.
There were gardens in which to carouse. The Dona Britanica woodcut shows two couples enjoying the gardens’ delights, one of them canoodling in an arbour. Rather charmingly, such flirtatious foreplay was known as ‘embroidery’.
Inside the house lay a warren of rooms: “doors, to come in and out by undiscovered, sliding windows also, and trap-boards in floors to hide whores behind and under, with false counterfeit panes in walls, to be opened and shut like a wicket”.
That’s how Thomas Nashe described such houses in his 1593 Christs Teares Over Jerusalem, another outburst against the state of England in general and London in particular. In such a place a man might indeed “kisse… Minions w[i]thout shame”, as the pamphleteer ‘Tom Tell Troth’ wrote in 1622.
Bess had three “household Officers, a Cooke-wench… and a Girle-Scullion”. Her kitchen, says Goodman, was “ever flaming” – a comment usually taken as evidence of gourmet dining, but which might also be another pun: a woman’s ‘kitchen’ could also mean her nether regions, and a reference to heat or flames could hint at symptoms of gonorrhoea or other sexually transmitted diseases. (Bess also employed a surgeon.)
But the true art went into the entertainments. For a previous establishment near Puddle Dock in Blackfriars, Bess had, wrote Goodman, recruited “petulant, painted, and halfe guilt Mimicks [actors]” to amuse her clients. At the Leaguer, a “Tyre [attire] woman” was responsible for the “phantastical ornaments” of the sex workers, and there was a “Laundry-Lasse”, a “Sempster” (seamstress) “for Ruffes”, and a “Taylor”.
Such an emphasis on costume suggests that the entertainments laid on in her houses were as elaborate as court masques – though no doubt more erotic. If King James or Buckingham did indeed pay the Leaguer a visit, they would not have been disappointed in what they encountered.
The price of love
Goodman names four of Bess’s sex workers: “Beta Breslonia, a huge Bona-Roba [young woman seen as sexually available]… impudent above measure”; Eliza Caunce, apparently a redhead, “yong, little, but a wondrous wanton”; “Longa Maria, a wench of a good handsome carriage, not so Rampant as the rest”; and “Maria Petit, a small handfull of woman… all Motion, and Action”. You would need deep pockets to enjoy their favours: a common ‘trull’ might ask one or two shillings, but a top-class 17th-century courtesan would charge 5 guineas a night – more than two months’ wages for a skilled tradesman.
“If you on sport be eager, Go unto Holland’s Leaguer,” as one ballad, ‘The Kind Believing Hostess’, put it:
For Wenches she can get yee
And of all sorts can fit yee,
Most bravely clad,
As may be had,
If leasure but permit yee
A Girle, attir’d in Sattin,
Can speake both French and Latine;
If you have gold
You may be bold
And have a fine roome to chat in
Who were these women? Southwark hosted a sizeable community of Dutch and Flemish immigrants at that time, and a 1605 drama, The Dutch Courtesan, presents such a woman as the height of licentiousness and desirability. A link has also been suggested between Holland’s Leaguer and another famously luxurious 17th-century brothel in Brussels, the ‘Lovely Little Maiden’.
The fictional Bess, Goodman’s ‘Dona Britanica’, supposedly brought her girls to London from the country – rural girls were reputed to be more free from disease. If so, these were no country mice. Bess Holland dealt with Baron Hunsdon as a business equal, and it was from his class of men that the Leaguer’s clients would have been drawn. So the women who entertained them knew – or learned – how to present. They must have had a sense of themselves and of their value.
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Washed and scented top to toe, painted and powdered and attired in their exotic costumes, these women must have looked like every gallant’s fantasy. Once the theatres opened in late afternoon, and Southwark began to come alive, they would have tempted clients with anchovies and oysters, sugar-cakes and peaches to make the wine “go merrily down”. Perhaps they sang or played music, and must have been amusing companions. A piece of contemporary pornography, ‘The Wandering Whore’, gives a sense of just how bawdy their conversation might have been, with no entendre undoubled. (It also details ‘entertainments’ that would not be out of place in a particularly exotic modern strip club.)
Immense fortune
A bawd such as Bess might make £10 a month from each of her ‘damsels’, wrote Sir William Vaughan in a moralising tract from the early 17th century. She charged not only for entrance and food but also to access successive rooms. No wonder her fortune grew immense. “Her baggs were so many, and so massy, that she had scarce chests enowe to containe them,” Goodman tells us.
The narrator of contemporary ballad ‘The Joviall Broome Man’ – a veteran who served with everyone from Tamburlaine to Sir Francis Drake, according to that verse – comes to Holland’s Leaguer and finds that there “the service provd too hot”, leaving this unlucky soldier “naked, hungry, cold and dry” – a nod to syphilis, or to the effects of the mercury used to treat it. At this high point in its fortunes, the Leaguer was sufficiently well known for everyone to get the joke. But the curtain was already rising on its final act.
Charles I was a very different character from his father, James VI & I. Some of Charles’s earliest ordinances, issued in 1626, proscribed such “immodest lascivious and shameless women” who “both in the day and the night time sit at the doors of such houses exposing themselves”. In 1629, he began his precarious Personal Rule, and could not tolerate riot, disorder or their causes. Sometime in the winter of 1631, perhaps as a result of the apprentices’ riot, the Leaguer came to the notice of the authorities who, Goodman wrote, despatched a corporal and “a stoute band of Halberd[i]ers” to close it for good.
Though titled Holland’s Leaguer, Marmion’s play sets only one part of its comic subplot in the brothel. But in the character of the Bawd, with her defiance of “any man” and her “Pox on the Marshal!” we may glimpse some of Bess’s real character. The apprentices had underestimated her; now the soldiers did, too. Raising the Leaguer’s portcullis to lure them on, Bess waited until her persecutors had filled the drawbridge, then raised that as well. The corporal and his men plunged into the moat; to describe “how they lay plunged in mud and myre, how one to helpe another, became worse and worse incumbred… would make a Tracte double this volume”, says Goodman.
Bess and her “shee-furies” knew that defying the corporal and his men, even if only to win a little time, was worth the effort. Once in the hands of the authorities, they could expect to be carted – heads shaved and exposed to public humiliation – to Bridewell to be flogged, then brought back to Newgate and imprisoned there. Bess had been in Newgate before; in that instance, her protector had got her out, but now she had no one to rely on but herself.
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At that moment, though, a second force under a provost marshal appeared and laid siege to the Leaguer, seeking to starve out the women. Here Goodman ends his account, and Bess’s fate seems to have been sealed.
“Elizabeth Holland, a woman of ill reporte” was summoned to appear before the court of High Commission in January 1631 – 1632 in the Gregorian calendar – but didn’t attend. (A mysterious husband ordered to appear also didn’t show.) She was summoned again on 9 February, and again did not attend, despite fines that jumped up by £100 for each non-appearance.
The Leaguer’s new leaseholders, Felix Hunt and Robert Rogers, learned that the apprentices were planning another attack. So they petitioned the court to have Southwark’s streets patrolled for “Shrovetyde”. Their plea reveals that Bess had quit her house and not been seen in weeks.
What became of her? Some years later, in March 1637, one Ursula Babthorpe was accused of fraud and of having once been “a common prostitute [in] Holland Leaguer”, but of Bess herself there is no mention. Did she disappear into wealthy retirement? Did she set up elsewhere? Perhaps she suffered the same fate as another 17th-century “woman of pleasure” described in John Aubrey’s Brief Lives, who “grew common and infamous and gott the Pox, of which she died”.
Ulcerated to the bone
As for Ursula’s other co-workers, nothing is known for sure. But a 10-minute walk from the site of the Leaguer is Cross Bones Graveyard, likely the “plot of ground called the Single Woman’s churchyard” mentioned by John Stow in his 1598 Survey of London. From the late Middle Ages until its closure in 1853, this was the resting place of an estimated 15,000 paupers, including generations of women from the Southwark stews.
During the 1990s, part of the Cross Bones site was excavated during work on the London Underground, removing some 148 skeletons. In 2008, the Wellcome Collection published its analysis on the remains of a young woman aged between 18 and 25 when she was buried in this unconsecrated ground during that era of dissolution in Southwark. It revealed that she had suffered the ravages of full-blown syphilis, and was ulcerated to the bone. Was her fate representative of that of the residents of Holland’s Leaguer? We can only guess – but such might well have been the end of Bess and of any of her girls, and Cross Bones their final destination.
Jacky Colliss Harvey is a writer and editor. Her latest novel, The Wanton Road (Allen & Unwin), is out now in paperback
This article was first published in the August 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
]]>Edward Colston: life of the weekhttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/edward-colston-life-of-the-week/2026-07-14T08:36:11.000ZEdward Colston was a philanthropist and slave trader in the 17th and 18th centuries. He is infamous today for the fact that a statue of him was pulled down by a crowd of protestors in central Bristol in 2020 and dumped in the river.
Richard Stone explores his life, in conversation with David Musgrove, and considers how we should understand his complex legacy today.
If you'd like to know more about the impact of the Barbary pirates on British society, check out this fascinating article by Adam Nichols detailing a personal story of an Englishwoman who was captured by them
]]>350 years ago, drinkers were given the choice to save their homes or their pub. Their choice might shock youhttps://www.historyextra.com/period/stuart/great-fire-of-northamption-save-the-pub/2026-06-05T10:45:32.000ZWhen 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.
]]>"It was like going out naked": Which common accessory did Tudors dare not leave the house without?https://www.historyextra.com/membership/hat-wars-of-early-modern-england/2026-05-17T09:45:19.000ZToday, people are generally free to wear what they please. But in the early modern period, individual attire was closely monitored by the authorities – because a sartorial misstep could threaten the established social order.
The cost, cut and colour of your clothes signified your status in society. Dressing above your rank or income was strictly prohibited in England by a string of sumptuary laws dating back to 1463. Legislation enacted under Elizabeth I decreed that only members of royalty were permitted to wear purple silk or gold cloth. Some other colours and furs were restricted to the nobility.
These laws, which were hard to enforce and failed to keep up with changes in fashion, were repealed in 1604. But parish preachers and other influential community members continued to apply more informal constraints on the dress of ordinary people.
Though these restrictions were defied at various times in the 17th century, clothing remained an indicator of a person’s place in England’s social hierarchy.
According to new research, however, one clothing accessory frequently sparked conflict in England – especially as the country descended into civil war. It was so cherished by its wearers that many would sooner part with all their money than go without it. Surprisingly, it was also one of the most commonplace articles: the hat.
How were hats used as social and political weapons in early modern England?
In a study in The Historical Journal, historian Bernard Capp argues that hats were key components in established etiquette, the flouting of which could cause serious conflict. This was widespread but has sometimes eluded historians because it operated under unwritten rules.
Almost everybody in early modern England wore some form of headgear, from broad-brimmed hats and simple cloth caps to coifs and towering ‘steeple’ hats. The size, shape and material of a hat could draw admiration or criticism, and hats were subject to constraints along with other pieces of clothing.
But Capp, emeritus professor of history at the University of Warwick, argues it was what people did with their headwear that made the hat a potentially incendiary fashion item – and almost impossible to control.
Men were expected to doff (‘do off’) their hats when in friendly company or in the presence of a social superior. “Everybody in that period knew the significance of doffing your hat, though there was no actual law that said you had to take off your hat in respect,” Capp tells HistoryExtra. “It was instilled from childhood, and there were sanctions and pressures if you didn’t do as you were expected to do.”
As a result, keeping your hat firmly on your head became an act of defiance. A person might, for example, refuse to doff their cap in front of a constable whose authority they rejected. But the stakes could be even higher.
The rejection of ‘hat-honour’, Capp has found, took on an incendiary political meaning as England descended into civil war in the 1640s. Two leaders of the proto-communist Digger movement wore their hats proudly in 1649 as they told General Fairfax that he was “but their fellow creature”.
- Read more | 10 key battles of the Civil War
“For radical groups like the Levellers, Diggers, Fifth Monarchists and Quakers, that was a very easy way to demonstrate their defiance against political authority or the church establishment,” Capp says.
There was a moral imperative to headwear, too. To go outside without a hat was “almost like going out naked”, Capp says, and suggested that a person might be mentally ill, abjectly poor or in search of trouble. That was why, in 1659, the father of a rebellious young man chose to stop him attending Quaker meetings by confiscating his hats. Without them, the youth dared not leave his house.
One of Capp’s discoveries is that victims of highway robbery in the early 18th century sometimes prioritised their hats over much more expensive valuables to avoid the humiliation of being seen hatless. “This shame in being bareheaded is interesting,” Dr Danae Tankard, a reader in social history at the University of Chichester, tells HistoryExtra. “I think it is not something people have specifically picked up on before.”
In 1718, a gang of three thieves stole £15 from William Seabrook – but he succeeded in begging them to spare his hat. A victim whose wig and hat were taken from him by a highwayman in 1733 received an apology from the criminal in prison after complaining it was “very unusual for men of his profession to take such things”.
Read more | The extraordinary legend of highwayman Dick Turpin
These anecdotes, and a dozen similar scenarios, are among the Old Bailey records, newly uncovered by Capp, previously overlooked by historians.
Is it time to rethink the importance of the humble hat – and other ‘mundane’ items?
For Mark Stoyle, professor of history at the University of Southampton, the research suggests that the hat, and other everyday items, may need to be re-evaluated by historians. “What this article shows us is the strangeness of the past – that what might seem banal to us actually had a real significance at the time that we might completely miss,” he explains to HistoryExtra.
The study is part of a growing historical subfield studying the importance of ‘gesture’ – everyday behaviour often unnoticed by historians but which shaped early modern life – Stoyle adds.
Accessories might be affixed to a hat to declare a political view or sentiment. Though Cavaliers and Roundheads wore the same type of hat, Stoyle explains, they added partisan labels and badges – small gestures with major significance. “What might seem a trivial thing to us, actually had a huge resonance at the time,” he says.
Tankard cautions that hats still need to be understood as “merely one aspect of a much broader field of early modern fashion accessories”. Despite this, she says: “The hat is more demotic, so everybody wears one, from the very wealthy down to the very poor, which gives it a significance beyond some other accessories.”
Both historians agree that Capp’s research sheds new light on everyday life in early modern England, and on how the humble hat became a tool of political defiance and social communication.
Stoyle notes that, though historians have long known about the Quakers’ refusal to take their hats off in the presence of social superiors, the new study helps contextualise this form of protest.
“What Capp’s saying is that this is not just about the Quakers – this is going on in society as a whole. And he’s extending that discovery further back in time, and then forward in time”, concludes Stoyle. “It’s a laborious task, but I think it throws up some really interesting evidence.”
]]>The secret plot to end Scottish independencehttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/the-secret-plot-to-end-scottish-independence/2026-05-15T12:40:05.000ZHow did the union of England and Scotland come to fruition? From failed Scottish colonies to anti-independence espionage, Marc Mierowsky's book A Spy Amongst Us reveals how union wasn't inevitable, and how many Scots tried to choose their own future.
In this episode of the HistoryExtra podcast, Marc joins Isabel King to explore the complicated journey towards the Acts of Union 1707.
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