HistoryExtra https://www.historyextra.com/topic/agriculture Wed, 07 Oct 2026 15:55:08 GMT en hourly 1 Vanilla: a far from ordinary history https://www.historyextra.com/membership/vanilla-far-from-ordinary-history-podcast/ Wed, 07 Oct 2026 15:55:08 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/vanilla-far-from-ordinary-history-podcast/ Eric T Jennings explains the history of vanilla, and how piracy, espionage and cut-throat capitalism have shaped its story It's now often used as an adjective for anything standard, plain, and borderline boring – but the history of vanilla is anything but. Eric T Jennings – whose book Vanilla: The History of an Extraordinary Bean is among the titles shortlisted for the 2026 Cundill History Prize – tells Matt Elton about the ways in which piracy, espionage and cut-throat capitalism have shaped its story.

]]> How grim was life as a medieval farmer? Here are 6 things you need to know https://www.historyextra.com/membership/how-grim-was-life-as-a-medieval-farmer-here-are-6-things-you-need-to-know/ Mon, 24 Aug 2026 15:00:29 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/how-grim-was-life-as-a-medieval-farmer-here-are-6-things-you-need-to-know/ Christopher Dyer offers six tips for those seeking success when running a smallholding in the 13th and 14th centuries 1. Do your apprenticeship

The best medieval farmers learn their trade on the job

To make a success of your life as a farmer, you need training. And that will come by getting your hands dirty on the family holding, or as a servant in a neighbour’s household.

With an area under crops, some hay meadow – not to mention cattle, sheep and pigs – holdings are the perfect place to hone an array of farming techniques. You’ll learn how to yoke a team of oxen to a plough, weed a field, shear a sheep, treat a lame ox, mow hay with a scythe, and drive a cart loaded with manure.

But don’t get ahead of yourself. Learning takes time – as Richard, servant of Henry Sprot, discovered to his cost in the 14th century. He displayed his lack of experience of driving a cart by running over an unfortunate pig in the Warwickshire hamlet of Blackwell.

And it’s important that you avoid such blunders. After all, farming is a serious matter. It’s the main occupation for most of the population, working on close to a million small farms over England – and most households live on produce they grow for themselves. Get it wrong, and you could go hungry.

This advice applies to women, too. Young servant women, having learnt such domestic skills as brewing, dairying and horticulture, might be able in adult life to market their own ale, cheese, fruit and garden produce.

This could be the story of Agnes Waleys, who after some years as a diligent servant for Henry and Emma Talbot at Brigstock in Northamptonshire, gained the means to live independently when they gave her a small house in 1339.

Every young person at the meal table will hear conversations about such matters as paying the rent, attending the lord’s court, and meeting with the other villagers to discuss the running of the fields. After about 10 years you will be ready to run your own holding. And, with any luck, you’ll soon be skilled enough to pass on your own training to the next generation.

• Read more | “Check your husband’s dunghill” – here’s why medieval society was obsessed with poo

2. Get your hands on some land

And if you own it yourself, all the better

It’s all very well fine-tuning your farming skills. But you’ll need somewhere to practise them. You would, no doubt, prefer to own your own land – that is, as a freeholder – but a great deal of land is rented from the lords of manors under some restrictions.

You might be in line to inherit – particularly if you are an eldest son. But in some places, especially in eastern England, land is divided among all the sons. In the absence of men to inherit, daughters might take the land. However, women often only become tenants as widows, when their husband’s land is passed on to them on his death.

An heir might have to wait while members of the older generation occupy the holding. But it is possible to speed along the process by persuading your parents to retire. That’s exactly what William le Clerk did in 1341. William took over his father, John’s, 15-acre holding at Winslow in Buckinghamshire, promising to supply him for life with wheat, barley, peas and beans.

If you’re not an heir or a widow, don’t despair. There are other alternatives available to you. You could search out a widow with land who might be in need of a husband. Or, if a holding falls vacant, you could persuade the lord that you have what it takes to become a tenant. You’ll have to pay him for the privilege but, if your funds are low, relatives could be willing to fill the gap – as happened to the fortunate Thomas Doget of Enstone in Oxfordshire. In 1362, Thomas’s father went to the lord and took land “for the use of his son”.

A relative might help in other ways: fathers sometimes give younger sons cash or some oxen as a start. You could also borrow money, as long as you are confident that you can repay eventually out of your profits.

In some parts of the country, land can be won from heathland or the edge of woods (in the North York moors or the Forest of Dean, for example), or reclaimed from fens and marshes. However, clearing or draining is hard work and you gain only a few hard-won acres. In short, without family support and a background of landholding, you’ll have to pull out all the stops to avoid a lifetime labouring in service.

3. Tie the knot

When it comes to farming, two pairs of hands are better than one

Secured a holding of land? Then your next step should be to marry. Running a holding is a work-intensive operation, and it helps if you have a family to lighten the load.

A young man should seek out a wife who has had years of preparation for the role. She will, ideally, come from a family able to provide a dowry – such as the cow, three sheep, dress and overcoat that came with Avis Maud of Belper in Derbyshire when she married John Wade in 1312.

If you’re a young woman, you too will be looking out for a capable husband – and your parents will, in all likelihood, have preferences. Women are expected to look after livestock, make bread and cheese, brew ale and tend the garden.

You can also be effective at marketing, either selling ale to other villagers, or poultry, eggs or fruit in a nearby town. You could follow the example of Elena Graise of Bishop Wilton in Yorkshire. She kept 12 geese from which she reared goslings – many more than her family needed – and sold the birds in the nearby town of Pocklington.

A woman might also be left in charge of the holding if she is widowed. This may appear daunting, but your experience of helping your husband make important decisions will set you in good stead. You can learn from the example of Alice Avice of Brigstock in Northamptonshire, who was married to Peter Avice for at least 24 years. After Peter died in 1316, Alice took charge of the holding until 1332. She was active in farming her land and participating in village life, buying land and disputing with other villagers.

Many widows will not feel able to go it alone in a male-dominated society (instead living off hand-outs or surrendering to pressure to remarry). But Alice Avice proved it could be done.

• Read more | Were medieval toilets as filthy as you think?

4. Play by the rules

If you go rogue, the entire community will suffer

For a village community to thrive, everyone has to pull in the same direction. And when it comes to farming, that means following the agreed routines of cultivation. Much of the land for growing corn lies in common fields. By a long-established custom, up to a half is planted each year; the other half is rested as fallow, without crops, but covered with grass and weeds that animals can graze.

You can grow bread corn, wheat and rye, planted in October and November. Crops planted in the spring are drink corn (barley or oats) and pottage corn (peas and beans, but also oats). Oats and peas and beans can also be fed to animals.

If this sounds as if you have to follow a set routine, remember that you can change the way the fields are managed – if you can gain the assent of your fellow villagers. This happened in 1296 at Hailes in Gloucestershire, when it was agreed to fence off (or inhok) part of the fallow field and plant crops, increasing the amount of corn for each villager. The official document tells us that the lord, Walter, abbot of Winchcombe monastery, “gave a licence to [the petitioners for reform] and their associates and neighbours to inhok a number of acres, for 2d for each acre in compensation for the common pasture”.

You also have a degree of choice in the animals you rear – though, to prevent overgrazing, their numbers are limited by village quotas. Cows and oxen are all common sights. And, if you have enough grass and hay, you should invest in sheep, because their wool can be sold, their manure benefits the crops, and mutton from older animals can be eaten. You might be able to match the 36 sheep owned by William Johan of Pinbury in Gloucestershire in 1290, yielding wool worth 18 shillings per year, enough to pay the rent. Pigs are worth keeping, too, to ensure that you have a flitch of bacon hanging by the fire.

Above all, if you want the fields to be run well, you need to persuade the lazy, incompetent or selfish to improve. That’s what the villagers of Romsley in Worcestershire did in 1334 when Simon de Fulfen failed to clean a ditch, diverted another one and flooded his neighbours’ land. De Fulfen was fined 12d (about £500 in our money), and apparently put his ditches in order.

5. Learn how to handle the lord

And remember: he can’t thrive without you

As a medieval farmer, you have a degree of autonomy. Yet such freedom has its limits. When push comes to shove, the lord or lady is in charge.

Under the customs that govern much landholding, inheritance is supervised. You pay the lord to acquire land, and subletting needs his permission. You may even be required to work on his land.

Worse still, you may be unfree – a serf – which means that the lord has special authority over you. He’ll levy a fine for giving permission for your daughters to marry, and for your sons to move away. This intrusion into your family life not only limits choices and costs money, it can also be humiliating. In 1315, when Emma le Cockes requested a marriage licence but lacked the money to pay the fine, her lords, the monks of Worcester Priory, ordered her to plant beans on their land for 15 days.

If all this makes you feel a little vulnerable in the face of the lord’s power, remember there are limits to his ability to exploit his authority. He cannot behave like a dictator, because excessive demands may leave the serfs and tenants unable to pay their rent. The lord relies on the tenants to manage the manor and its court – after all, he has no policemen, and only a small band of paid officials. In short, he must co-operate with the people he wishes to dominate.

The villagers’ strength lies in acting together, presenting a united front during negotiations and, if these break down, agreeing not to pay a rent, or withdrawing labour on the lord’s land. You could follow the example of Nicholas, son of Henry the Reever, who in 1280 led the serfs of Mickleover in Derbyshire in seeking the king’s support for a legal claim that they were free. Their lord, the abbot of Burton, won the case in the courts (he argued that the cattle and all their goods belonged to him, because as serfs “they owned nothing but their bellies”). However, the rebellion warned him against pressing his tenants too hard.

You also owe a duty to the church, especially your own parish church. Paying for the building and running costs can be expensive, but a well-maintained church makes a statement: this is a village that takes pride in itself.

• Read more | Live locally, live sustainably, live medieval

6. Expect the worst (and pray for luck)

When disaster strikes, it pays to be prepared

So you’ve learned the ropes. Acquired land. Got married. Followed the rules. And kept your lord onside. But if war, flood or famine strikes, it still might not be enough. When it comes to making a success of farming in the Middle Ages, some things are beyond your control.

In 15 of the 100 years after 1250, the weather reduced the yield of crops seriously, and there was a ‘great famine’ in 1315–17, caused by excessive rain. Your livestock are vulnerable to disease, like the scab that reduced sheep flocks in the 1280s, or the epidemic of rinderpest among cattle in the 1320s. In these years of adversity, your family might have to go hungry; more often, you will not have enough grain or wool to sell to pay the rent and taxes.

If you live in the north of England, you should beware of another potential menace. Imagine the plight of the villagers of Embsay in north Yorkshire who in 1318, having endured the great famine, then suffered “the invasion of the Scots”. Their losses of buildings and animals made it impossible for them to pay their rents to Bolton Priory, their lord, which pardoned payments of more than £7 (in our money, well in excess of £50,000) over the following two years. As for the poor peasants, they bore the expense of putting right their own barns and houses.

You may not be able to change the weather, or ward off marauding Scots, however there are a few measures you can take to mitigate against the bad luck that life throws your way. Your normal practice of planting a number of types of grain is a precaution against crop failure. If the wheat rots in a wet winter, you may get a good yield from the barley planted in the spring.

Scattering your land in parcels over the entire village might mean a lot of time spent travelling from one plot to another, but it does at least increase the chances of you growing crops in a variety of soils. You may, for example, have land in a sandy area yielding well in a wet year when your corn is struggling on heavy clay. Building a good barn will keep your corn crop dry through the winter, and there might be room to shelter sheep and cattle in bad weather.

Finally, if you do sink into poverty, you could appeal to your family or community for support. However, the bottom line is that you cannot count on their assistance – as John Bray of Cartworth in Yorkshire discovered to his cost. In 1316, Bray was brought to court for stealing a bushel of oats. And the man who reported him to the authorities? That was his father.

Christopher Dyer is emeritus professor of history at the University of Leicester. He is author of Peasants Making History (OUP, 2022)

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

]]> How did the Anglo-Saxons triumph in Britain? You can blame it on the Romans https://www.historyextra.com/membership/how-did-the-anglo-saxons-triumph-in-britain-you-can-blame-it-on-the-romans/ Wed, 01 Jul 2026 14:30:01 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/how-did-the-anglo-saxons-triumph-in-britain-you-can-blame-it-on-the-romans/ The collapse of Roman rule in Britain, followed by the emergence of kingdoms established by Germanic tribes, marks one of the most turbulent periods in Britain’s history. But what factors drove this dramatic transformation? Nick Higham chronicles the rise of the Anglo-Saxons Throughout history, many Scots have harboured a lingering mistrust of the English. Plenty in Wales felt similarly. Edward I, the ‘Hammer of the Scots’ who also conquered swathes of land west of his kingdom, must take much of the blame. But the fundamental roots of these tensions stretch back to a time centuries before that bellicose English king, to the slow, messy, turbulent collapse of Roman Britain and the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons.

A whistle-stop précis of the textbook history goes something like this: Iron Age Britain was inhabited by tribes of Celts. Then came the Romans: nearly 100 years after Julius Caesar’s exploratory forays, in AD 43 the Emperor Claudius launched an invasion. Within half a century, the southernmost two-thirds of the island was conquered, creating the Roman province Britannia. As part of the Roman empire, it was subject to externally appointed governors and protected by its army.

But in the fifth century – the pivotal year often cited is 410 – events in continental Europe drove the Roman authorities to abandon Britain. Within a few decades, Roman-style artefacts had been replaced in the archaeological record of eastern Britain by metalwork, pottery, burial styles and buildings indicative of ‘Anglo-Saxons’ – an umbrella name coined later to encompass Germanic tribes known as Angles, Saxons, Jutes and Frisians from north-west Europe. These settlers – or invaders – were those described by Bede in 731 as gens Anglorum: English people.

It’s a neat story, and one with which many readers will be familiar. However, it’s also a story that raises a number of questions. What drove the collapse of Roman rule in Britain? How did Britain differ from its neighbours on the continent in this period? What attracted Anglo-Saxons to Britain from the fifth century? And how, by the beginning of the seventh century, were they well on their way to becoming the dominant force across much of the British Isles?

To answer these questions, we must first examine the relationship between the people of Britain and the Roman administration through those centuries of imperial rule. The bonds that tied Britain to Rome – or, more to the point, the lack of them – would have an enormous impact on what happened after that relationship began to fracture.

Regional divide

During the Roman period, there were key differences between Britain’s western uplands and its less-hilly eastern areas. In the west, the dominant language remained Celtic Brittonic, evolving into Welsh. Towns, villas, manufacturing facilities, extensive field systems, mosaics and churches were lowland phenomena, leaving the westerly uplands as military spaces – particularly in the north – or areas given over to pastoralism.

• Read more | How the Kingdom of Northumbria changed Anglo-Saxon England

Yet a key point here is that, even in lowland Britain, the Brittonic language survived. Britons were barely engaged in imperial frameworks: none was made emperor before 400, nor did any Briton enter the Roman senate or attain high office. To Rome, Britain was always liminal, its inhabitants mere “savage ploughmen”, as the Gallo-Roman poet Rutilius Namatianus put it.

True, Britain’s fertile lowlands contributed taxes in cash and in kind, and sufficient profit for landowners to commission sometimes lavish Roman-style villas. But in 353, these landowners’ peace was shattered by the defeat of the usurper western Roman emperor Magnentius at the hands of his eastern rival, Constantius II. Magnentius’s defeat was followed by savage reprisals in Britain, where he had enjoyed support. The contemporary soldier-historian Ammianus Marcellinus wrote that Constantius’s notoriously cruel representative Paulus Catena (‘Paul the Chain’) “descended like a sudden torrent upon persons and estates”, whether guilty or not.

This was a critical moment in the decline of Rome’s influence in Britain. Catena’s violent intervention seems to have triggered a transfer of confiscated property to overseas magnates – which may explain why so many villas became derelict. The resulting economic haemorrhaging from the province lowered demand and stifled manufacturing, importing and service industries. Britain suffered, economically and socially.

The chaos didn’t end there. Across the final quarter of the fourth century, western Roman armies endured further defeats in civil wars, leaving them undermanned, ill-funded and politically impotent. Britain’s northern garrisons may have remained largely in post following this tumult but, crucially, Britain’s lowlands to the east were undefended, opening the door to seaborne attacks.

Britain was part of the Roman empire for perhaps 14 to 18 generations. During that time, imperial protection had invariably been reimposed following crises. This time, though, was different. Honorius (emperor from 393 to 423) is recorded as responding to a plea for aid by advising British towns in 410 that they would need to defend themselves. This would have been understood by all sides to be an interim strategy pending the return of normal Roman governance to Britain. However, barbarian intruders and internal struggles on the continent continued to prevent the Roman recovery of Britain.

Edge of empire

Post-410, then, Britain was neither properly inside nor truly outside the empire, and the likelihood of intervention by western Roman forces oscillated according to circumstances across the Channel. Even so, archaeological finds imply that members of Britain’s elite retained much of their power, adhering to Roman dress codes until the third quarter of the fifth century. They continued to increase their commitment to Christianity, by then the imperial religion, and enjoyed ongoing access to Roman-style education, evidenced in Latin works by Britons including Gildas, a learned sixth-century church deacon.

As late as 429, a bishop from Gaul took command of British soldiers confronting Saxons and Picts, indicating continued efforts to deter attacks despite the lack of military expertise locally. According to one fifth-century writer, Britain remained “a very wealthy island” that the military-minded bishop “rendered secure in every sense” – against both heretics and ‘barbarians’, as Romans termed pagan tribes who didn’t speak Latin. Despite those efforts, though, Britain’s lowlands remained vulnerable to barbarian incursions. A Gallic chronicler noted Saxon raiding in 410, and Gildas knew of Pictish and Scottish assaults.

• Read more | The Anglo-Saxons were terrified of Vikings. But were they really so different?

Meanwhile, it seems there was a shift away from agriculture towards livestock, presumably resulting in a falling tax-take, but another source of income was found. Land previously exploited on behalf of the state or overseas magnates (absentee Roman landowners) likely provided resources that could be used to pay mercenaries to replace the depleted garrisons. This measure, intended to be temporary, meant recruiting barbarians – often men from the Germanic tribes that would become known as the Anglo-Saxons – to help defend against sea-raiders. And it had far-reaching consequences.

The earliest Anglo-Saxon cemeteries in Britain date from c420, so people from northern Europe had clearly begun settling by then. From such sites, including Spong Hill in Norfolk, we can infer that incomers arrived mostly across the decades from around 420 to 460. Anglo-Saxon – and, occasionally, Irish – artefacts found farther inland can be taken as evidence that barbarians were also hired to provide internal security or as bodyguards.

The patterning of Anglo-Saxon cemeteries in, for example, Lincolnshire and Sussex is consistent with settlement initially overseen by British regional rulers. In the long term, though, employing barbarians against attacks potentially launched by their own kin was risky. Mercenaries had more to gain by increasing their own numbers and dispensing with local elites altogether.

Aggressive incomers

Our Gallic chronicler reported that, c441, “the British provinces… were reduced to the rule of the Saxons”. This seems simplistic, and was written at a considerable distance, but it does suggest that incomers had by then seized regions perhaps including Norfolk and the east Midlands.

Gildas noted that Britons sought aid from the western Roman general Flavius Aetius in defending themselves against Picts and Scots between 446 and 454, but no help arrived; Flavius’s assassination in the latter year effectively ended any prospect of Rome’s return to Britain. It was at this point in his narrative that Gildas began remarking on British kings, perhaps implying that some kind of government was emerging in a Britain independent of Rome.

One leader named by Gildas, writing the following century, was Ambrosius Aurelianus. He is described by Gildas as being Roman, with parents who had “worn the purple” – suggesting a continental family who had attained wealth and power in Britain. This war leader reportedly led a British force to victory over Saxon raiders.

The pivotal figure in these struggles, though, was apparently a man Gildas described as a “proud tyrant”. This ruler, named Vortigern by Bede, hired further Saxons from overseas and supplied them via Roman-style taxation in kind. The ninth-century Historia Brittonum (History of the Britons) provides Vortigern’s genealogy, indicating his descent from a Christian Roman family connected with Gloucester.

That location suggests that the political focus had shifted from the south-east to the still-wealthy lowlands at the heart of the western province Britannia Prima, ruled from Cirencester. Recent excavations at nearby Chedworth villa have revealed a mosaic floor laid no earlier than the second quarter of the fifth century, implying that investment in Roman material culture and social norms continued significantly later here than it did farther east.

Act of folly

To Gildas’s mind, the hiring of ‘barbarians’ to defend the eastern coast – though common Roman practice – was an act of folly, leading to their rebellion and a great raid “from sea to sea”. While victories were won by both sides, and despite British success at the siege of Mons Badonicus (Badon Hill, which some think may have been Little Solsbury Hill near Bath, or Badbury Rings in Dorset) around the turn of the sixth century, the Saxons ultimately triumphed. An unnamed treaty to end the war, referred to by Gildas, seems to have recognised Saxon control of most of lowland Britain.

Our knowledge of Anglo-Saxon population numbers, movements and interactions in this period suffers from a paucity of relevant material evidence. But, certainly in the more open, lower-lying regions of the south and east, a substantial labour force must have worked the land, implying that numerous Britons survived external takeover and remained in those areas – albeit not always toiling for their own benefit.

Gildas noted that many of his grandparents’ generation were “made slaves forever”. Tellingly, the Old English wealas – from which ‘Welsh’ derives – meant both ‘foreigners’ and ‘slaves’. Unfree agriculturalists appear in early English law documents. And when Bishop Wilfrid was granted the Selsey estate by the formerly pagan South-Saxon king in the 680s, it came with 250 slaves. Most such enslaved people were almost certainly of British ancestry.

Again, the patchy nature of Anglo-Saxon material culture in the archaeological record from this period makes it difficult to plot accurately the English presence versus enduring British populations. One hint comes from Bede who recorded a war against British adversaries won by the Anglo-Saxon king Æthelfrith of Northumbria in c600. As a result, some defeated regions were forced to pay tribute, while others were settled.

In his polemical De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae (On the Ruin and Conquest of Britain), Gildas compared events in Britain to the occupation of Judea by Assyrian forces detailed in the Old Testament. He painted the Saxons as ungodly incomers to be expelled, not assimilated.

That view contrasts with the near-contemporary willingness of Gallo-Roman bishops to baptise Franks and Burgundians. So Germanic tribes were being embraced by Christians on the continent while racial, ethnic and ideological distinctions were reinforced in Britain. Clearly, England was established through warfare. But the incomers were encouraged to invest in their inherent German-ness by the racial and ideological hostility they encountered.

• Read more | Saint killer, warmonger, tyrant: was the Anglo-Saxon king Offa as bad as history makes out?

The result was that Britain came to host the largest pool of pagans anywhere in Roman (or formerly Roman) western Europe. Frankish kings sought to spread Christianity in south-east Britain in the later sixth century, and in the 590s Pope Gregory I sent Italian monks led by Augustine to Canterbury, assuming that British clergy would assist his missionaries. They didn’t, instead clinging to their expectation that God would expel the ‘barbarians’.

In consequence, Christianity in Britain fractured. Rome’s mission dismissed the Britons as heretics, and threw its considerable ideological weight behind the new English converts. The combination of Rome’s religious authority and Anglo-Saxon secular power triggered the wholesale acculturation of Britons wherever they were vulnerable, undermining the Welsh language and British identity throughout England. People of Welsh and British ethnicity were increasingly restricted to regions subject to British lords, lands distant from both English kingship and the Anglo-Roman clergy.

Difficult relationship

That rift sealed the fate of the British – and the dominance of the English in the lowland south and east of the island. But the foundations of England and its cultural robustness have far deeper roots. The triumph of the Anglo-Saxons can ultimately be traced to Britain’s problematic relationship with the Roman empire. The Britons’ retention of a Celtic language, their absence from imperial structure, the fact that much of their island’s best agricultural lands were owned by magnates overseas, the fact that they identified primarily with Britain – all contributed to a peripheral status in the Roman world. So when the Saxon mercenaries they hired to help defend Britain against other ‘barbarians’ rebelled, Britons were isolated and vulnerable, receiving no assistance from their former imperial rulers.

The northern uplands of what is now England and south-eastern Scotland fell to Anglo-Saxons across the later sixth and seventh centuries, leaving British communities under their own kings only in the Clyde valley, alongside those in Wales and Cornwall. Here Celtic survived, along with the belief that, when God willed, the English would be forced out. The 10th-century Welsh poem Armes Prydein (The Prophecy of Britain) predicted a time when Saxons would be expelled from the stolen lands and the British people would recover all Britain. They’re still waiting.

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

]]> Why did Britain ban soft cheese during World War Two? https://www.historyextra.com/membership/why-did-britain-ban-soft-cheese-during-world-war-two/ Mon, 25 May 2026 14:30:27 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/why-did-britain-ban-soft-cheese-during-world-war-two/ To mark the annual Cooper's Hill Cheese Rolling event, Isabel King explores the fascinating – and surprising – history of cheese, from ancient cows to Wallace and Gromit Think of cheese, and your mind might wander to a lunchbox staple or a cheeseboard brought out at Christmas.

But there’s much more to this ancient food than that.

Speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast, cheesemonger Ned Palmer helped uncover the history of this well-loved food and it is more surprising and varied than you might think…

1. Cheesemaking has ancient origins – according to cow bones

With a comestible like cheese, it is difficult to determine exactly when it began being made, because physical evidence of it can be scarce. However, there is one particularly interesting way that archaeologists have been able to work out how long ago cheesemaking began: they look at cow bones.

As Palmer explains, for cheesemaking, you only need female cows, and they can produce milk for a long time. Therefore, when looking at bone distribution at different sites, “if you suddenly see bone distribution change to being lots of female animals who are much older, then you would infer that they’re making cheese." Using this technique, archaeologists have estimated that cheesemaking began around 7,000 BC in the Fertile Crescent (modern-day Iran, Iraq, Syria, Turkey, Palestine and Israel) – the birthplace of agriculture and, later, the place of the world’s first cities.

Alongside cow bones, archaeologists can also detect evidence of cheesemaking by analysing ancient shards of pottery that still carry fat residue from cheese. In Britain, this dates cheesemaking to around 4,000 BC, with evidence suggesting that while Stonehenge was being built, cheese was being made nearby.

• Read more | 12 modern trends with surprisingly ancient roots

2. Romans introduced mass production of cheese

What have the Romans done for our cheese? For a long time, it was thought that the Romans taught Britons to make cheese, but this has now been debunked.

While they didn’t teach cheesemaking, the evidence suggests that the Romans did introduce its mass production. In the Roman army, each soldier was given one ounce of ‘aged soldiers’ cheese’ that was hard and nutritious – the perfect ration for a travelling soldier to carry. With 5,000 men in each Roman legion, the amount of cheese that needed to be made on a regular basis was huge, meaning production had to be more efficient and reliable. This led to the introduction of recipes, vats and cheese-cutting knives.

“They brought the kit, and they brought a few people and taught the locals how to make cheese for them”, says Palmer. “They taught us how to make good, consistent cheese; more technological cheese in bulk”.

3. Monks used cheese to pay tax

Thinking of monasteries, we tend to picture monks in quiet prayer, leading simple and peaceful lives away from the rest of society. What we might not imagine is monks making cheese to pay their taxes.

Monks considered it a virtue to be self-sufficient, so making their own produce – including cheese – was something they prided themselves on. But beyond that, monasteries had to pay rent to their motherhouses to keep their farms going.

Through working the land and their huge flocks of animals, monks could produce cheese on a large scale, which they would then send back to their parent house as a tithe. This tithe would be considered a contribution to the Church, just like a monetary donation, allowing monasteries to stay open and commit themselves to supporting the Church and clergy.

4. The Ploughman's lunch was a marketing ploy

A hunk of bread, with some cheese and pickle has been a staple meal for centuries, but only in the recent past has it been known as the Ploughman’s lunch. This naming was all part of a marketing ploy to get people to eat more cheese.

Throughout the 1960s and 70s, the Milk Marketing Board promoted the meal in pubs as a simple, affordable lunch for workers. Due to rationing during World War Two, this meal had fallen out of favour and the campaign aimed to bring it back into popularity.

Of course, it wasn’t just for ploughmen, but the name stuck. “It would’ve been the forester’s lunch, and the canal boat driver’s lunch and the sailor’s lunch as well but why not call it a Ploughman’s?”

5. Port and Stilton is not as classic a pairing as you might think

Though cheese and wine have most likely been eaten together for thousands of years, the deliberate pairing of specific types, such as port and Stilton might actually be coincidental.

“As an accident of history, port and Stilton both became really popular around the same time”, explains Palmer. During the 17th and 18th centuries, road building was increasing and places like Stilton became a place for coach drivers to stop for a rest, leading to a rising popularity in the cheese they consumed there.

At the same time, port was devised as an alternative to the wine people were used to drinking. “[Britain was] at war with the French and couldn’t get nice French wines, so people tried to up it a bit by adding brandy and inadvertently created port”.

The rise in popularity of both port and Stilton taking place in tandem meant that they started to be paired together, and from there, the combination became a common way to enjoy them both.

• Read more | You probably eat these foods every day, so why did the ancient Romans think they were disgusting poison?

6. Blue cheese was discovered accidentally

There are two origin stories for blue cheese and they both suggest that it was a completely accidental discovery.

The first is that people in the Fertile Crescent were making simple soft cheeses, which were then made in Northern Europe as the craft spread. But the cooler, wetter climates in Europe led the cheese to develop mould spores. Then, as Palmer describes, “a frugal peasant woman who’s making cheese looks at them, tries them and thinks [the mould] is quite nice…she then figures out a way to get the temperature and humidity just about right” to recreate that same mould. And thus, blue cheese was born.

The other, more famous story (one which has many versions) is that of a young peasant boy who had a simple lunch of bread and cheese with him while tending to his flock of sheep. When some bandits appear on the horizon, he hides his lunch and runs away. On his return he notices the bread and cheese have gone mouldy, and being a starving peasant, he eats them anyway. His conclusion was that the cheese, at least, was still quite edible.

Both tales are likely apocryphal, and it’s more likely that the discovery of blue cheese occurred wherever people were experimenting with cheese production.

7. The British government banned all soft and blue cheese during the Second World War

During the Second World War, rationing was common as countries’ money and key supplies went towards the war effort, and imports were often disrupted or stopped. But in Britain, a very specific type of rationing was put in place – the government banned all soft and blue cheeses.

Facing supply chain problems and a long war, the government prioritised the production of hard, durable cheeses: only ‘Government Cheddar’ was allowed to be made. These could survive longer journeys and were more reliably consistent, unlike their softer counterparts, which could go mouldy or dry out before they could be eaten. To sustain the nation during rationing, cheesemakers were ordered to only make large, hard cheeses.

The cheese ration was just 28 grammes, and the control over production became familiar enough that the nickname ‘Government Cheddar’ was given to any cheese made from British milk throughout the war and for a while after.

• Read more | Saving food, saving lives: rationing in the Second World War

8. Wallace and Gromit helped save Wensleydale

In the 1990s, sales of Wensleydale had dropped significantly and there were concerns that its production would grind to a halt. Then came along the loveable duo Wallace and Gromit, with Wallace’s famous catchphrase, “cheese, Gromit!”. Known for his love of cheese, Wallace’s favourite was Yorkshire Wensleydale.

Allegedly chosen as the character’s favourite because it was a funny sounding word that was easy to animate, Wensleydale became closely associated with the films and led to a surge in sales; in fact, for a while, Wensleydale became Britain’s biggest export in dairy to the rest of the world.

Two stop-motion characters helped prevent a major part of the cheese industry from failing, and the people of Hawes – where the Wensleydale creamery is situated – have never forgotten that. They partnered with Aardman Animations to create a signature ‘Wallace & Gromit Wensleydale’ and, according to Palmer, “there are statues of Wallace and Gromit everywhere [at the creamery] because they’re very grateful to the two lovely cartoon characters who saved their cheese”.

9. Cheesemaking was historically women’s domain

In early cheese-making, much of the production took place in small holdings, where families lived with just a few animals. In these smaller dairies, it was women who developed their cheese-making skills through trial and error, testing out different techniques and following their instincts.

“For these small peasant cheese makers, it was mum teaching how to do it as her mum had, you didn’t need to write it down”. This instinctive pursuit led by women slowly disappeared as Enlightenment thinkers aimed to standardise cheese production and move away from the “semi-mystical secretive craft of women handing down recipes”, says Palmer.

Ned Palmer was speaking to Isabel King on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation.

]]> Want to understand modern Britain? Look towards its villages https://www.historyextra.com/membership/want-to-understand-modern-britain-look-towards-its-villages/ Fri, 03 Apr 2026 14:30:16 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/want-to-understand-modern-britain-look-towards-its-villages/ This year we celebrate 75 years of The Archers. Now, I confess I haven’t listened to the series for a while – not since the riveting plot 10 years back about coercive control, with Rob Titchener and Helen Archer. But, if any show on radio or TV is iconic, it’s The Archers, the story of an English village over time, “an everyday story of country folk”, (though now billed as “a contemporary drama in a rural setting”).

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

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

• Read more | The radio revolution: how Britain found its frequency

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

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

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

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

• Read more | Michael Wood on the struggle of memory against forgetting | "Place names are signposts to the past"

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

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

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

]]> “It was the greatest act of violence for 66 million years”: why the modern world was born of bloodshed https://www.historyextra.com/membership/it-was-the-greatest-act-of-violence-for-66-million-years-why-the-modern-world-was-born-of-bloodshed/ Wed, 25 Feb 2026 15:30:07 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/it-was-the-greatest-act-of-violence-for-66-million-years-why-the-modern-world-was-born-of-bloodshed/ In the 18th century, developments in finance, weapons and industry converged to create a modern economy born of bloodshed. Clifton Crais explores how killing powered the industrial age Imagine you’re in Nebraska, standing on North America’s Great Plains, where the broad Platte and Missouri rivers join on their way to the mighty Mississippi. It’s 1804, and in the blistering 36°C heat of summer you’re accompanying Captain Meriwether Lewis and Second Lieutenant William Clark as they head west towards the Pacific Ocean, exploring the commercial possibilities of this vast new country. Stretching away in front of you is a sea of chocolate-brown: thousands of animals, each standing as high as a man and weighing upwards of 900kg.

Now picture putrefying carcasses and heaps of bleached bones extending as far as the eye can see. “The bones were everywhere,” homesteaders complained, “as thick as cones under a big fir tree”, and so numerous that it was impossible to plough the land. That was mere decades after Lewis and Clark’s fabled expedition.

By the end of the 19th century, America’s population of bison had been reduced from tens of millions to around 350. Much of this killing unfolded over the course of just a few years – one of the most concentrated acts of ecological destruction in history.

The usual explanation for the slaughter of the American bison ties it to the government’s decision to solve its ‘Indian problem’ – kill the bison and you destroy the Indigenous peoples’ food supply. “Every buffalo dead is an Indian gone,” wrote Colonel Richard Irving Dodge, who had fought in the Civil War before heading west to subdue the Native American population. But politics didn’t kill the bison. Economics did.

General Philip Sheridan, another Civil War veteran who led the Indian Campaign across the Great Plains, knew as much. These hunters “have done more in the last two years… to settle the vexed Indian question than the entire regular army has done in the last 30 years”, he said. “Send them powder and lead, let them kill, skin and sell until the buffaloes are exterminated.”

A combination of guns, finance and industry made the near extinction of the bison possible. New advances in firearms made the act of slaughtering bison faster and achievable from a far greater distance. Banks rushed across the Mississippi, lending money to hunters and turning them into “businessmen with rifles”. Advances in chemistry transformed the animals’ body parts into saleable commodities, especially their notoriously difficult-to-process hides.

Many of these hides ended up in factories – somewhere between 2 and 6 million in England in the 1870s and 1880s alone. Skins became drive belts that were integral to the machinery of mass production in the industrial revolution. Until the advent of rubber, industrial belting was made from hides, including those of the American bison. Meanwhile, American settlers gathered millions of tonnes of bison bones. Railway companies laid down branch lines for the sole purpose of collecting the bones and shipping them east, where they were processed in places such as the Michigan Carbon Works in Detroit – that state’s largest factory before the automobile revolution. Bones were turned into fertiliser, carbon filters and inks. For a time, bison bone could be found in ‘fine bone’ china and even in mascara. Back on the Great Plains, wealth accrued by killing and bone harvesting supported the rise of farming and ranching.

• Read more | These three unsuspecting inventions won the American Wild West – but did they destroy it too?

What unfolded on the killing fields of the US was part of a global phenomenon. Industrial capitalism’s ‘big bang’ and our current age of global warming emerged out of the greatest act of violence the planet had seen since the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event 66 million years ago, when a meteor crashed into the Yucatán, killing off the dinosaurs and enabling the rise of mammals.

The development of modern finance and the mass production of guns, bullets and gunpowder made killing for capitalism possible. This also helps explain the rapid rise to global economic dominance of the UK and the US: two countries that were adept at extracting wealth from destruction. By the first decade of the 19th century, the US’s GDP per capita was on a par with the UK’s. The economic historians Peter Lindert and Jeffrey Williamson have written that the US became “one of the first, if not the first, [countries] to join the modern economic growth club” pioneered by the UK. The two would soon account for a large percentage of global wealth and until 1900 were responsible for most global industrial CO₂ emissions.

Firearms have a long history – almost 1,000 years – but in the 18th century the flintlock musket became the ubiquitous weapon of choice. A dramatic improvement on earlier guns that used matchlocks, it was versatile and cheap to produce – the Ford Fiesta of firearms. An experienced marksman could get off three shots in a minute. Workshops and factories across the western world scrambled to meet the insatiable global demand for the new weapon. England became the world leader in musket manufacture and distribution, beginning in London’s East End before spreading to Birmingham and Liverpool.

Muskets were useless without gunpowder and lead, and England had plentiful supplies of the latter. Mines in Northumberland and Derbyshire yielded thousands of tonnes of the metal each year. When it came to gunpowder, the British East India Company’s exploitation of the subcontinent’s resources proved vital, especially the principal chemical, saltpetre. The monopolistic East India Company considered its control over the saltpetre trade to be “combined and interwoven with the welfare and even with the existence of the empire in India”.

Thanks to the research of Dr Nicholas Radburn at Lancaster University, we have quite precise figures for the millions of pounds of saltpetre imported into the UK, and the overall production of British gunpowder, across the entire 18th century. Between 1698 and 1808, Britain produced more than 522 million pounds of gunpowder. Much went to its military, especially the navy, where a single shot from a 16-pound cannon used 8 pounds of powder. But more than 78 million pounds were exported to Africa, the Caribbean and what would become the United States and Canada. These are just the official numbers, though; the real totals are probably higher. In any case, that was enough powder for more than 1.25 billion musket shots – a number greater than the entire global population in 1750.

Other nations got in on the action, too, especially the French and the Dutch. Americans weren’t far behind, and by the 1820s US-made weapons were being sold far and wide, especially across the Pacific Ocean and into China, where American Colt pistols were used in the 1850–64 Taiping Rebellion – one of the most catastrophic wars in human history.

Plying the world with weapons was a volatile business – literally. Stores of gunpowder and saltpetre frequently exploded. The 1794 Ratcliffe Fire in London, sparked when a barge loaded with saltpetre caught fire, was the worst conflagration in the capital since 1666. It was described by The Times as “a striking and awful spectacle” – devastation on a scale not matched in London until the Blitz of 1940–41. On the other side of the Atlantic, throughout the 19th century there were almost yearly accidents at the huge DuPont explosives factory in Delaware, where a local cemetery was filled with the victims.

Murder and pillage are nothing new. In fact, both are as old as our species. However, with the widespread proliferation of weapons in the 18th century, killing became infinitely easier.

• Read more | Did Aztec civilisation really ‘collapse’? The reality isn’t as simple as you might think

This is where modern finance enters the picture. In the 15th and 16th centuries, the Spanish were outstanding at pillaging, producing men such as Hernán Cortés who rampaged across Mexico. The Conquistadors ransacked from the Americas the equivalent of billions of dollars in today’s money, much of it in precious metals. But Spain struggled to convert wealth produced by violence into capital for investment and production – and capital is what capitalism is all about. Instead, it spent its fortunes on religious and dynastic wars, churches, art, buildings and other forms of conspicuous consumption.

England’s financial transformation was a game changer, building on innovations pioneered by the Dutch in the 17th century. In the 18th century, there was a revolution in English banking, along with a tranche of developments including insurance, bonds, stock markets, patent law and an increasingly standardised currency. In the first quarter of the 19th century, the number of banks outside London increased 30-fold, and doubled in that city.

London became the “capital of capital”, as the economic historian Youssef Cassis termed it, led by the Bank of England, which was established in the closing years of the 17th century. “The multiplication of banking companies,” Adam Smith wrote in The Wealth of Nations (1776), was a great example of the virtues of competition and increased public confidence in the economy. Wealth – including that generated by violence – was free to become capital.

By 1820, the US had just over 300 banks. Forty years later, that number had grown to more than 1,500 – a five-fold increase, and many more than in the UK. With banking came an array of financial innovations, from insurance to stocks and bonds. Like that of its former imperial master, the US legal system protected wealth – whether it was land, money or, across the South, human beings – which meant that it was easy to transform wealth into investable capital.

This is how bison hides ended up in factories, and their bones in your ancestor’s teacup, connecting Manchester with Wyoming, halfway around the world. The connections to killing don’t stop there, though. Those factories required lighting. Sunlight alone was unacceptable to factory owners, who wanted their workers to be labouring as long as humanly (or inhumanly) possible, sometimes from five in the morning until well into the night. Until the advent of hydrocarbons such as paraffin and natural gas, it was whale oil that kept these places lit.

England was soon consuming at least 50,000 barrels of the stuff each year, generating more than 3 billion lumen-hours of illumination. By the 1830s, most of the whale oil entering England ended up in its factories for lighting and lubrication. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, anywhere between a quarter and a third of sperm-whale oil (which produced the best light) harvested by American whalers made its way into factories. Whale oil was also used for lighting in Caribbean mills, where enslaved people were forced to work continuously to process the sugar-cane juice that helped provide cheap energy for the industrial working classes.

Demand for lubrication and lighting in both factories and cities resulted in the mass slaughter of whales, from Greenland to the Indian Ocean. Though it is impossible to determine the exact scale of the killing, we do know that about 2 million whales were slaughtered between 1750 and 1900.

Whaling produced huge profits until the number of those marine mammals dwindled, and whalers were forced to spend more time at sea, often returning home with empty casks. In the case of New England’s whale industry, profits were reinvested in a variety of businesses, from cotton mills to railways and the transition to fossil fuels in the US. One of the world’s largest textile factories – the Wamsutta Mills in New Bedford, Massachusetts – was funded by the harvesting of whales. And some of the early investors in what became John D Rockefeller’s powerful and notorious Standard Oil Company amassed their capital from hunting whales.

People found many ways of turning into capital the natural resources in their surroundings. England’s land-enclosure movement was one of them, and has commonly been offered as an explanation for the development of capitalism, going back to the works of the classical political economists in the 18th and 19th centuries.

But using violence to generate capital was a global process, and an ongoing one. It proved possible to turn just about anything into profit, from whales and bison to deer, beaver and African elephants – plus another mammal: Homo sapiens. The spread of guns led to a global increase in enslavement, most infamously across Africa. Beginning in the early 16th century and continuing for over 350 years, more than 12.5 million enslaved people were trafficked from Africa’s shores – by far the largest forced migration in human history.

However, nearly 7.9 million people – 63 per cent of the total Atlantic trade in human beings – were moved in just 60 years from the mid-18th century, during the industrial revolution and just as weapons began flooding the continent. This rapid expansion of the slave trade precisely tracks the import of gunpowder into Africa, as Nicholas Radburn has demonstrated definitively. The UK alone exported more than 26 million kg of explosives to Africa in the 18th century, most of it after 1750. Weapons yielded the greatest gains. One result, as the tyrannical King Adandozan of Dahomey (reigned 1797–1818) bragged, was a kingdom where his people “cultivated not with hoes, but with guns”.

People hunting people is part of the nasty and brutish reality of enslavement. But how many people lost their lives to produce the 7.9 million people shipped across the Atlantic, where nearly 10 per cent died along the way to the Americas? I have estimated upwards of 2–3 people died to yield a single enslaved person. In other words, perhaps as many as 24 million humans perished in the flood of weapons and enslavement.

Similar ratios unfolded elsewhere in the world, where guns were used to hunt people. In the south-east US – where Indigenous people were employed to hunt and enslave other Native Americans – the hunters killed three Native Americans for every one they captured.

We know that profits from the transatlantic trade increased dramatically in this period, as work by Nobel-Prize-winning economists Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James Robinson has demonstrated. The Caribbean sugar and American cotton that made its way into workers’ cups of tea and into the English textile mills – which were releasing CO₂ and beginning to warm the Earth’s atmosphere – were tied to Africa’s killing fields. The industrial revolution and our own age of global warming are inextricably tied not just to the institution of slavery – a continuing subject of debate across the world – but also to the mass destruction of people, animals and the environment that guns and finance made possible.

• Read more | The profits of slavery: the dire impact of empire on Britain’s countryside

This is the dark reality of capitalism’s creation myth – one that historians and climate scientists are now beginning to understand. The industrial revolution and the global warming that now threatens our very existence emerged from the globalisation of killing for profit. The deaths of millions of Africans that underpinned the entire Atlantic slavery complex is only the most obvious connection. While there were other factors at play here, the wealth generated by the system of slavery “contributed causally to Britain’s industrial revolution”, according to a 2022 study. This recognition underpins many ongoing and fraught discussions, especially in the UK – most recently the February 2025 parliamentary debates on reparations, and the July 2025 University of Edinburgh report on donor links to slavery.

These conversations, however, miss something very basic. History’s horrors go deeper into the totality of destruction that made our world economy – one that entangles the deaths of Africans with the slaughter of bison and whales in addition to a vast number of other species. This is one reason why the popular term ‘Anthropocene’ may not suffice, and why I have suggested a different word to describe the epoch that created our contemporary planetary peril: the ‘Mortecene’ – the Age of Killing and Death.

Clifton Crais is a professor of history at Emory University. His new book is The Killing Age: How Violence Made the Modern World (Picador, 2026)

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

]]> Live locally, live sustainably https://www.historyextra.com/membership/live-locally-live-sustainably-life-lessons-podcast/ Tue, 23 Dec 2025 13:44:39 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/live-locally-live-sustainably-life-lessons-podcast/ Ian Mortimer suggests that we should look back to the medieval period to seek inspiration for sustainable living We know we should all be living sustainably if we can. Bestselling historian Ian Mortimer suggests that we should look back to the medieval period – an era in which people took a very local attitude to life – to seek inspiration for sustainable living.

]]> Tudor work: what jobs did people do? https://www.historyextra.com/membership/tudor-work-what-jobs-did-people-do/ Wed, 08 Oct 2025 15:12:12 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/tudor-work-what-jobs-did-people-do/ In the third episode of her HistoryExtra Academy series Tudor Life, social historian Ruth Goodman explores what people in the 16th century did for work From long hours in the fields to the bustling noise of Tudor workshops and marketplaces, we’ll discover exactly how people in the 16th century earned their keep — and what it meant to make a living in a world without modern comforts or job security

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Enjoyed this video? Ruth is hosting a live Q&A for HistoryExtra members on 19 November 2025 at 7pm (GMT). Find out more here

Want more from Ruth? Find more episodes of Tudor life here

Ruth Goodman is a historian of the social and domestic life of Britain. She has advised the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Globe Theatre and presented a number of BBC television series, including Victorian Farm

]]> Live locally, live sustainably, live medieval https://www.historyextra.com/membership/live-locally-live-sustainably-live-medieval/ Wed, 23 Jul 2025 09:30:46 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/live-locally-live-sustainably-live-medieval/ If you want to live a sustainable life today, you need to think local. For that, you can channel the experience of the Middle Ages, as Dr Ian Mortimer suggests When I have a spare moment, I dabble in making hazel hurdle fence panels. It’s gloriously therapeutic. You get yourself a fat bundle of six-foot-long straight hazel rods, ram a few of them vertically into the ground at regular intervals and then cajole the rest of your rods through them on the horizontal, weaving them in and out of the uprights. The trick is to bend the rods robustly so that you can feel the fibres creaking and twisting through your palms, but you can’t be so hard on the wood that it cracks and snaps. It’s bad if that happens.

I am a rank amateur at this, and the results of my labours are woefully rustic, but I like the process of getting there. If you’re doing it properly, you’re supposed to split the hazel rods in half, but I’ve yet to conquer that art. To see it done masterfully, there are loads of informative videos of competent, serious chaps in forests teasing the wood into beautiful hurdle panels.

People have been making hazel hurdle panels for millennia. In the Somerset Levels, archaeologists have excavated them in situ where they were laid down in the Neolithic period as trackways to help people get across the boggy ground. They survive, amazingly, because peat grew up over them and protected them.

The trickiest bit of making a hazel hurdle is procuring the rods. You have to coppice trees (ie cut them down to the base) in order to encourage the hazel to shoot up in straight stems. If you’re managing a woodland, you would crop the coppiced hazel on a regular rotation every five to seven years. It’s a very sustainable building material because the wood grows back fast and parallel, and we know that in the Middle Ages, they were definitely managing their local woodlands to supply this.

The medieval mindset

It’s just one of many examples of sustainable living that our medieval forebears were engaged in, according to the historian and author Dr Ian Mortimer. “They managed their resources in a way that they knew they could get continuing crops off – if you pollard or coppice a tree, it’ll grow back stronger. They knew about all that sort of thing.”

For Mortimer, there’s a lesson there for us – we should look back to the Middle Ages for inspiration for living sustainably today. Now I know what you’re thinking: those medieval folks weren’t living sustainably because they wanted to, but simply because they had to.

• Read more | What was life like in a medieval town? A historical A-Z

It’s certainly true, according to Mortimer, that life in 11th-century England was precarious for many. He notes there was a regular cycle of famine at the time, so much so that some parents were willing to sell their children into slavery, “because that was a child’s best chance of survival”.

There wasn’t much surplus around, and for most people, there wasn’t ready access to markets to transfer the surplus anyway, so most communities were pretty much self-sufficient and heavily dependent on their own productivity and ingenuity.

By the time we get to the 13th century, however, things are different. England was much more of a market economy and a lot of goods were moving around. Surpluses could be transferred from places with plentiful supplies to areas in need. The precariousness of a subsistence economy was thus overcome. Nevertheless, communities continued to source most of their food and raw materials from their locality. The less distance it had to travel, the less vulnerable the society.

WATCH | Dr Ian Mortimer on the medieval mindset of maximising sustainability

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“Local production combined with a market economy is a very positive way of maximising sustainability. Whether the Middle Ages had a concept of environmental protection or not, people living then certainly knew how to marshal their local resources and wider networks. And that included working together, collectively and collaboratively.”

To avoid the spectre of food shortages, medieval farmers had to manage their risks across the community, share good and bad land equitably among one another, and accept communal rules about what was gathered when, where and by whom.

“Look through the manorial customs of medieval manors, and they’ll be saying when the peasants can go take their pigs into the woods to get the beech mast from the ground, and when they’re allowed to pick up the fallen sticks for their firewood, how much timber they're allowed to take for their houses,” observes Mortimer. “When you think about an open field system, which is what we had across most of central England, you can see how they divide all the strips of land into areas where no one’s going to have all their land blighted by a frost pocket because it’s all divided up and scattered, so there’s an average sort of production level across all the fields.”

Community values

What Mortimer is describing there is a way of living communally where resources were shared in a way that was seen as equitable. It had to be managed and rules observed of course, and that’s where the customs of the manor, and the writ of the lord’s local representative, the reeve, came into play. This wasn’t some utopian land of harmony – some people didn’t conform, sometimes there were disputes and disagreements, and sometimes the lords of the manors pressed hard with their demands on the peasants. But there was a strong element of co-operation among these communities to allow for this way of living. Living sustainably was only sustainable if they worked together.

People in the Middle Ages would not have understood the concept of sustainable living – to them, it was just living. So you might take the view that this interpretation is simply historians today mirroring 21st-century concerns and projecting them onto the past. Of course, that’s true to an extent – history is always a reflection of the present. However, academics have been writing about this aspect of medieval life for quite a while.

There is an interesting paper written back in 1990 by Jules Pretty, who is now emeritus professor of environment and society at the University of Essex, and a noted voice in sustainable living. His paper, published in the Agricultural History Review, and called “Sustainable Agriculture in the Middle Ages: The English Manor”, makes the argument that the medieval peasantry valued highly the goals of stability, sustainability and equitability. Like Mortimer, Pretty stresses the importance of neighbourly cooperation:

“Villagers traded ale, cereals, hay, livestock and wood, and hired out livestock, ploughs, harrows and carts. Secondly, they provided support and mutual help for each other, particularly through crop and plough-team sharing arrangements. Peasants lent grain, livestock, tools and household utensils to needy neighbours, though these arrangements were more common between small and middle landowners. Thirdly, communal decisions were taken against individuals who had attempted to over-consume or underinvest in the communal resources – in particular those who had encroached onto the common wastes, had over-used the commons, over-gleaned the fields, or had neglected their obligations to maintain roads, ditches, hedges and gate.”

• Read more | 5 things you (probably) didn't know about... late medieval England

Waste not, want not

Of course, they were also very mindful of not wasting what they did produce. All parts of the animals they kept were eaten, and they consumed the old animals rather than the young so that they could be sure of getting all the resources (milk, wool, that sort of thing) from them in life. They made sure that they returned what they could to the land they worked as well. The use of animal, and human, excrement for manure was a major concern. And when it came to building materials, they were very happy to reuse stone and timbers from old structures wherever they could – you only have to look at the Roman bricks in the great Norman tower of St Albans Cathedral to see that.

In his forthcoming book, Mortimer’s A-Z of English History (Old Street, publication scheduled for 21 October 2025), Mortimer succinctly explains this, and he’s let me quote a few paragraphs here: “Today, few of us keep vats of urine stored around the house. But up until the 19th century it is collected and put to use in fulling wool and scouring cloth, as well as being employed in various dyeing processes. It is in demand because it’s a natural and cheap source of ammonia, which is an alkali. People also use spots of it when removing stains from clothing. It becomes more efficacious when it is old, so people really do store vats of it for long periods of time. Thus, when you imagine the smells in an ordinary medieval home, along with the smoke and the traces of rotting offal in the rushes, add the smell of stale piss.

“The point here is not to laugh at how gross life was in the past. It is rather that people in the pre-industrial age look at things that we think of as undesirable in different ways. In the 1960s the sociologist Mary Douglas famously observed that there is objectively no such thing as ‘dirt’ but rather what we call ‘dirt’ is simply ‘matter out of place’. A good example is manure: in the garden, it is definitely in the right place; in the middle of your living room carpet, it is dirt. This is why medieval people keep hold of things that neither you nor I would want lingering around the house. In a world created by God, everything has its ‘right place’.

“Usefulness is the key. Or sustainability, as we might call it today. Medieval people keep old ashes from the hearth to make potash, which is used for scouring pots and pans with handfuls of straw. They also use potash for making lye (in which you wash your hair, even though it is strongly alkaline). It is also a key ingredient of liquid soap (in which you clean your clothes). Likewise, medieval people will eat all manner of offal that we would throw away. Apples are kept carefully for a full year; if they turn rotten, they are pressed to make cider. Nothing is wasted. Bones are boiled for their marrow. Fat is stored in dripping pans. Skins from all sorts of animals, including goats, dogs and cats, are made into gloves. Fallen boughs and sticks are put aside for firewood. The heat that remains in an oven after the bread has been baked is used to make small cakes. ‘Waste not, want not’ is the motto by which everyone lives unless they are rich enough to be a ‘waster’, and even the wasters let their castoffs and rubbish be used by other people. Almost nothing is thrown away except broken pottery and the cloth used to wipe your ‘nether end’.”

The three Rs

In our interview, I didn’t chat to Mortimer about the repair culture in the Middle Ages very much, but we did run a fascinating interview on the HistoryExtra podcast a little while ago with the German medievalist Professor Annette Kehnel, author of The Green Ages: Medieval Innovations in Sustainability. Kehnel explained how the repair business was a thriving one in European medieval cities, with people making their livelihoods by repairing clothes, shoes and household goods. You can listen to that here.

So, if you think of the three Rs of sustainability – reduce, reuse, recycle – the people of the Middle Ages were absolutely living the second and third values in that list, but not so much the first. Reducing consumption wasn’t really in the gift of most people, with the limited resources available to them, though Mortimer does note that the strictures of the church in terms of not eating meat does play into that:

“ You could take the view that the restriction on eating meat across Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays in the Catholic church was not just a spiritual thing, but also about eking out protein because you don’t need to eat meat every single day. Eating fish as opposed to meat then naturally balances things out.”

• Read more | Why there’s no such thing as a typical medieval peasant

To conclude then, Mortimer’s message, drawing on his knowledge of the Middle Ages, is that, if we want to live sustainably today, “Necessities all need to be local and all need to be transported within the locality, in a way that’s reliable and energy-efficient and low cost.”

There are problems with that. It’s much more difficult to buy locally if you happen to live in a modern conurbation, and as is regularly reported, it’s often much more expensive to buy locally produced foods than it is to get imported products in a supermarket. But there are urban co-operative movements springing up across the UK that are trying to address those problems.

It’s been argued, and counter-argued, that the decline of neighbourliness occurred in the post-medieval period as the ethical code of the old village community unwound in the face of more individualistic behaviour in the 16th and 17th centuries. That debate has been going on among social historians of early modern England for decades, and it carries on still. I’m not going to get into that here, but perhaps the message is that locality, community and sustainability fit together. That certainly was the case in the Middle Ages, and maybe that’s something we should think about today. If we want to live sustainably, we need to think about how we live as local communities and cooperate harmoniously.

This article is part of HistoryExtra's new Life Lessons from History Substack newsletter. Subscribe to the newsletter for more articles and podcasts exploring the ways in which history can help us live better, happier, healthier or more productive lives.

]]> From fatal foliage to the perils of ploughing: the Tudor calendar of death https://www.historyextra.com/membership/from-fatal-foliage-to-the-perils-of-ploughing-the-tudor-calendar-of-death/ Tue, 15 Jul 2025 08:00:27 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/from-fatal-foliage-to-the-perils-of-ploughing-the-tudor-calendar-of-death/ Delving deep into reports of coroners’ inquests from Tudor England, Steven Gunn and Tomasz Gromelski show how accidental deaths reveal the rhythms of work, travel and leisure throughout the year January

Deadly cold and woodland woes

Tudor England languished in the chill grip of a ‘little ice age’, and winters were especially harsh.

Decembers were bad enough: in one 1542 blizzard, eight travellers – seven of them women and girls – died on the roads of Herefordshire and Shropshire. January was worse still.

Snowstorms in January 1541 wreaked havoc across the Midlands. In Nottinghamshire, William Johnson lost his way heading home from Burton Joyce to his house at Shelford, and perished after falling into an unseen tributary of the Trent. In Derbyshire, three members of the Crabtre family died when their house in Kinder was flattened by a “snowe dryft”.

January 1571 claimed victims in East Anglia. Peter Eade, a runaway servant just nine years old, died in snowy Rushford, Norfolk, wandering and hungry. And Robert Kyng, aged 40, fell into a snow-covered “sawyng pytt” in Holton Hall Wood at Stratford St Mary in Suffolk.

Many people had to brave such cruel weather to undertake their work, not least felling leafless trees in a season when dormant wood was less likely to crack when cut.

William Smale paid the ultimate price when tackling an oak in Bagborough Wood, Somerset in 1513. He cut through it with his axe, but it caught on an ash tree as it fell. To free the oak, Smale hacked three or four times at the ash. It shattered and sent sharp fragments flying at his head, piercing his brain. He died three days later.

February

Fatal foliage and football

February brought more trouble with trees, especially for those gathering greenery to top up dwindling winter stocks of fodder for livestock.

In 1565, the keeper of Castle Camps Park in Cambridgeshire sent John Spycer out into the cold to cut leafy branches to feed animals. As Spycer stood on “a smale or slender bowghe”, he fell to his death. In 1505, Thomas Cleygate of Westhumble, Surrey was cutting “mistell bowys” – mistletoe – from a tree to feed sheep when he plunged 9 feet.

At the same time, February offered excitement. It was a popular month for playing football, a game that was then much more violent than the modern sport, more akin to American football but without the padding and helmets. Dangers lurked everywhere: in the opposing team, the pitch, even players’ personal accessories.

Playing at Allerston, Yorkshire in 1523, John Langbern and Roger Bridkirk crashed into one another as they ran after the ball. Roger – clearly a big lad – landed on top of John, fatally crushing him. In 1564, at St Peter’s in Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, Walter Brassett was “plaing at the foteball” with neighbours in Edward Bugge’s field when he fell onto a maple tree stump, cut his leg and bled to death in half an hour.

It seems, too, that players didn’t remove knives from their belts before getting stuck in. At Bedale, Yorkshire in 1550, George Robynson tackled George Stapper, who was fatally wounded in the belly by Robynson’s blade.

• Read more | Tudors in turmoil: deciphering Hans Holbein’s masterwork The Ambassadors

March

The price of poverty, the cost of crows

As winter ebbed, so did food stocks – and perhaps charitable instincts – meaning that March was a tough month for the poor. One such unfortunate was octogenarian Elizabeth Purseglove, who fell into a ditch in Chilcote, Derbyshire while begging in 1531. Another, William Dungkyne, fell into a pit as he returned home to Cambridge from begging in Barnwell in 1538. No one even knew the name of the vagrant pauper who fell down “the side of the lower clyffe” at Church Hougham, Kent in March 1596.

Work was relatively scarce, too, though there were always tasks to tackle – scaring birds away from growing crops, for example. At Revelstoke, Devon in 1564, Andrew Wylloughby was trying to disperse crows by firing lead pellets from his “handgonne” when it misfired and burned his face; he dropped it, accidentally shooting John Kinkham in the leg.

Older technologies weren’t necessarily safer: in April 1556, Thomas Branches was using his “lether slynge” to drive crows off barley in Patching, Sussex when one stone “sudenlye slypte owte of the slynge backewarde” and felled Richard Sowton with a point-blank blow to the head.

April

Risking it all for birds and blooms

A tempting new source of food appeared in April: recently hatched rook chicks, ready for plucking from their nest and baking in a pie – if you could climb safely up and down a tree, that is. In Warwickshire in 1548, George Gybbes fell 40 feet from an elm at Hunscote. In 1564, Thomas Harmon plummeted 60 feet from an ash at Moxhull. In Suffolk, Robert Beamont came down 50 feet from an elm in the “Rookewood” at Brightwell in 1588.

At Clyst Honiton in Devon in 1518, Benedict Page managed to cling on in his oak tree when a too-slender branch snapped beneath his feet. But he dropped the pointed pole he was carrying onto Richard Kellegh, who died six days later.

Picking flowers should have been less perilous – but children were prone to collecting blooms in risky spots. Four-year-old Margaret Bockyn fell into her father’s garden pond at Rollesby in Norfolk while gathering “pryme roses” on the bank in 1579. Similarly, five-year-old Barbara Fell plunged into a pond just outside Walmgate Bar at York during a flower-picking session the following year.

Eight-year-old Robert Hudsone avoided water while collecting blooms at Stutton near Tadcaster, North Yorkshire in 1562, but wandered too close to a grey horse, which kicked him fatally in the head.

• Read more | The most common accidental way to die in Tudor England reveals surprising truths about daily life

May

When leisure turned lethal

In this prime month for recreation, revellers needed to be wary of the maypoles set up for dancing. Alice Wasse was hit in the head by one that fell in the wind at Mansfield Woodhouse in Nottinghamshire in 1578. Elsewhere, John Richardson was killed while a pole was being erected on Abbey Green, Bath in 1594, and Thomas Wylkes died while one was being taken down at Marsh Baldon in Oxfordshire in 1543, having failed to heed the workmen’s cries of “aware, aware, avoide”.

Clement weather also encouraged more permanent construction. Robert Catley died while working on a barn at Thornton-in-Craven, North Yorkshire in 1539, as did John Hodges toiling on a “wayn house” at Hope under Dinmore, Herefordshire, and James Breythweth and John Wood building a house at Worksop, Nottinghamshire in 1566.

Authorities encouraged men to practise shooting arrows rather than dancing – and May saw more archery accidents than any other month. At Horsley, Gloucestershire in 1504, John Snowe rushed to the target after taking his shot, and was hit by those firing after him. And at Dagenham, Essex in 1591, John Skoggyn was so focused on checking where his arrow had gone that he “dyd not go aside” when John Cartnayle “dyd crye” to warn him that he was about to shoot at the same mark. Skoggyn suffered an arrow in the head.

June

Drowning by numbers

Many people perished in the water in June, when early summer heat drove working men to bathe at the end of the day. They flocked to rivers and ponds in large numbers – irrespective of whether they could swim. In June 1583 alone, 11 men died by drowning in places ranging from Dorset to Northamptonshire, Somerset to Suffolk. In Maidstone, Thomas Carpenter was within sight of other young men in the millstream when he fell into a whirlpool, but they could not save him without endangering themselves. In the Thames, Martin Robinson buckled on two bladders to help him stay afloat at Paris Garden in Southwark, but the buckle broke and he perished.

Many workers died while washing sheep in preparation for shearing. This practice claimed two dozen victims – two-thirds of them in June and a quarter of them women – as panicking sheep knocked over the labourers or slipped out of their grasp and were chased into deeper water. Such deaths occurred in major rivers including the Avon, Calder, Great Ouse, Severn, Thames and Trent, but also in creeks, brooks and millstreams.

• Read more | Trade, religion and diversity: how Tudor London became a global city

July

The hidden horrors of harvests and haystacks

Harvesting the hay from meadows and marshes in high summer, workers wielded extremely sharp scythes that they swung with force. Mowers walked in staggered lines to try to avoid slicing one another, but fatal accidents were not uncommon.

At Welford in Northamptonshire in 1559, Richard Goodall safely worked his way across Widow Symes’ field for four hours. He was then caught in the leg by Ralph Billinge’s scythe.

Troubles were not at an end when the hay was carted away, because haystacks were unstable, leading to misfortunes for those working on them. William Awdeley of Botolph Claydon, Buckinghamshire, aged over 60, fell off the “heye mowe” in his barn that he had climbed to “trede his heye” in 1555. This work was more typically undertaken by young women; one such was Jane Turney, who fell off a stack at Tidburst in Aldenham, Hertfordshire, and died in 1574.

Harvest-time also saw people playing various sports – forerunners of field athletics – many of which involved throwing things. Spectators were warned, but couldn’t always take evasive action. July brought mishaps with quoits in Berkshire in 1538, a pikestaff in Yorkshire in 1526, a plough coulter (blade) in Cumberland in 1564, and a sledgehammer in Dorset in 1591.

August

Carts, crops and pitchforks

August brought the grain harvest – and more dangers in the forms of reaping and carting, especially when workers made haste in the uncertain English weather. Jumping on and off carts to pile crops and rope them down often resulted in falls, cracked heads and broken necks or backs.

Snapping ropes took the lives of John Helder at Tuddenham, Suffolk in 1553; John Edmunds at Shoddesden, Hampshire in 1551; and John Stacye at Newbury, Berkshire in 1539. William Gybbys of Woodnesborough in Kent fell in 1551 while standing on slippery sheaves of wheat. John Cowper of Rodmersham, also in Kent, was dislodged by a sudden gust of wind and fell to his death.

At Plash in Elworthy, Somerset in 1580, John Selacke faced a different kind of problem when the lower of his two cartwheels “did sodainlye sincke so depe into the grownde” that the whole cart fell over and he was fatally injured.

Vehicles often crashed en route to the barn, where more perils lurked. Carts manoeuvring in tight spaces, crops piled in towering stacks and sharp-pronged pitchforks interacted alarmingly. In August 1579, for example, Richard Taylor climbed up to the “pytch hole” in Henry Boughtone’s barn at Pattishall in Northamptonshire, where the sheaves were pitched through from the carts to the stacks inside. The unfortunate labourer slipped and landed on a pitchfork propped by the wall. Wounded between the ribs on his left side, he died just over two days later.

September

Mellow fruitfulness – and falls

Most fruit and nuts ripen in September, when pickers – who ranged in status from labourers to gentlemen and included women, boys and girls – climbed trees, frequently falling to their deaths in the process. An apple tree branch broke as Hugh Pritfoote sat on it at Dewchurch, Herefordshire in 1578. Thomas Chapman came off his ladder as he picked apples at Borden in Kent in 1520. And Jane Acton fell out of a pear tree at Stanford-on-Teme, Worcestershire in 1586.

Maturing acorns attracted pig-farmers, who climbed oaks to knock down the nuts to fatten their swine. In September 1559, Thomas Way fell in the New Forest, and in September 1540 Ralph Colley’s quest for “okehornez” at Bakewell ended with his neck broken on a stone below the tree.

October

Perils of ploughing

The agricultural cycle began each October with ploughing. Draught animals – oxen on heavy clay soils, horses for easier ground – could be hard to handle: restive during harnessing, distracted by dogs, kicking out when whipped. And if anything went wrong, being run over by the ploughshare resulted in horrible (and often fatal) injuries. At Ledbury, Herefordshire in 1539, John Bradford’s thigh was cut down to the bone by the plough’s blade. And in East Sutton, Kent in 1578, Thomas Seman was wounded in the right side with a gash three inches (about 7.5cm) long, three inches wide and four inches (10cm) deep.

This month also saw one instance of a fate all too common year round. At Bramerton, Norfolk on 16 October 1579, a 19-year-old maidservant took “a payle” from her master’s house and headed for a pit on the common to collect water. The ground there was slippery, and she fell in and drowned. One in eight accidental deaths of women and girls over five years old was the result of such work – traipsing backwards and forwards to wells, ponds, rivers and streams day after day to keep households supplied with water. The thing that made the sad case of this ill-fated young woman notable was her famous namesake: she was Anne Bulleyn.

November

High drama on rooftops and bell-ropes

An ideal time for re-roofing buildings was November, when straw was abundant after harvest. Professional thatchers and handy householders alike clambered up with thatching needles and yelms – straightened bundles of straw. The dangers were many: ladders broke, thatchers slipped off roof beams, and springles – thin, flexible sticks used for pinning down thatch – could be treacherous. In 1564, one sprang back and hit Richard Hotchkis just below the right eye as he thatched Richard Askall’s house at Atcham in Shropshire. And when John Houson fell off his ladder at Newcastle-under-Lyme, Staffordshire in 1563, he landed on a springle that pierced his left side, penetrating 5 inches deep.

During the reign of Elizabeth I, bells were rung on 17 November to celebrate the anniversary of her accession to the throne in 1558. Curiously, bells comprised the main cause of accidental death at church – and three mishaps on that pivotal day reveal the various ways death could occur.

At York Minster in 1599, Robert Grymstone got the bell-rope caught between his legs, and was lifted high before being dropped on his head. At Cobham, Kent in 1592, a bell-rope snagged the bench on which John Robinson stood, hauling it 6 feet into the air; John slid off and down onto the paved church floor. At Beaumont, Essex in 1581, William Taylor found that neither the great bell nor the middle bell had ropes, so he climbed into the steeple to ring them on the headstock. He misjudged the swing of the middle bell, though, and his head, neck and shoulders were crushed between bell and frame.

• Read more | The poet, the gardener and the witch: forgotten voices of Tudor England

December

Frosty falls and fatal festivities

Cold set in once more in December. Ice often caused accidents at watermills, where workers slipped into the millrace off frosty footbridges or fell while clearing encrusted waterwheels. It might also break under those who ventured out to hunt otters or to take short-cuts across frozen watercourses. It formed floes on rivers, too; in 1532, ice tipped over a ferry on the Wye at Bredwardine, resulting in the loss of all 10 passengers.

Christmas was, of course, a time for going to church, for celebrating, for feasting – and for accidents. Hurrying from church to the rectory in Croxton, Cambridgeshire on Christmas Day 1521, Robert Bakar fell into the parson’s pond and drowned. Jane Jenden tumbled off a table while hanging greenery in her home in 1562. And Jane Typtott stabbed herself in the leg while slaughtering her pig on Christmas Eve 1567.

Seasonal pastimes posed threats, too. Wrestling in the hall at Kneesall Rectory, Nottinghamshire in 1549, Thomas Bunting fell on Lawrence Mylner’s knife. And in Houghton, Hampshire in 1563, John Hypper crushed his testicles while “playinge Christenmas games” with his neighbours. Tudor life was rich in variety – and so was Tudor death.

Steven Gunn is professor of early modern history at Merton College, University of Oxford. Tomasz Gromelski is a researcher at Wolfson College, University of Oxford. Their new book is An Accidental History of Tudor England (John Murray)

This article was first published in the July 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine

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