HistoryExtra https://www.historyextra.com/topic/culture Wed, 21 Oct 2026 12:17:16 GMT en hourly 1 Bollocks, bastards and broad arses: the filthy medieval names that expose the real story of 1066 https://www.historyextra.com/membership/1066-bayeux-tapestry-names-of-norman-conquest/ Wed, 21 Oct 2026 12:17:16 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/1066-bayeux-tapestry-names-of-norman-conquest/ The names of people involved in the events around the battle of Hastings tell us far more than simply who was who, says James Chetwood – they reveal how cultures overlapped, how colonisation impacted lives, and how people viewed one another The Bayeux Tapestry (at the time of writing wowing visitors to the British Museum) is thronged with characters – warriors, of course, but also monarchs, dukes and bishops, plus countless unnamed figures. This famous embroidery helps us think about the people caught up in the events depicted – and examining their names opens a window onto a world in which English, Scandinavian and Norman cultures met, melded and clashed, how conquest and colonisation influenced lives, and how colourful nicknames can preserve glimpses of the way medieval people saw one another at all levels of society.
Ælfgif... who?
The Bayeux Tapestry features only 15 names – and, typically for this period of history, those of women are largely excluded. Curiously, the only woman actually named in the embroidery can’t be identified – a mysterious figure labelled ÆLFGYVA, or Ælfgifu. She is pictured in an interaction with “a certain cleric”, an encounter that may have been innocent – though the depiction of a naked man in the border below her suggests that it may not have been, and could be a reference to a scandalous liaison of some kind.
The fact that we don’t know who this Ælfgifu was can be explained partly by the fact that hers was such a common name in 11th-century England. There had already been three queens named Ælfgifu by the turn of that century, the consorts of Edmund I (ruled 939–46), Eadwig ‘All-Fair’ (r955–59) and Æthelred the Unready (r978–1013 & 1014–16). When Æthelred married the illustrious Emma of Normandy, the great-aunt of William the Conqueror, she was given a new English name. You’ve guessed it: Ælfgifu.
After Æthelred’s death, Emma (or Ælfgifu) effortlessly switched sides, marrying England’s new Danish king Cnut in 1017. In doing so, she replaced Cnut’s previous wife, another Ælfgifu. To add to the general sense of confusion, the Anglo-Saxon Earl Harold Godwinson had a sister called Ælfgifu. Any of these women could be the ÆLFGYVA named in the Bayeux Tapestry – the chances are that we’ll never know for certain – but the use of her name suggests that the story surrounding her was common knowledge at the time, even if it’s no longer familiar to us today.
The mystery of Edith Swanneck
Another question mark lingers over Harold’s ‘unofficial’ wife, Edith Swanneshals (‘Swanneck’) who, we are told, identified the dead English king’s body on the battlefield at Hastings. However, her identity is still disputed. She is often assumed to be the woman recorded in Domesday Book as Edeva Pulchra (‘The Fair’), partly based on the assumption that this epithet, like ‘swan-neck’, referred to beauty, as well as the fact that the woman in William’s survey was listed as being incredibly rich. But this identification is by no means certain.
Again, the confusion is partly down to the prevalence and ambiguity of monikers. By the 11th century, a number of distinct names had come to sound similar: Eadgyth (Edith), Eadgifu (Edeva), Ealdgyth (Aldith) and Ealdgifu (Aldeva). Even then, some of these might well have caused confusion, particularly amongst Norman scribes recording unfamiliar English names. And later writers have tended to merge all of these into one modern name, ‘Edith’.
This similarity still causes problems today. In the 2025 BBC drama King and Conqueror, three Ediths were renamed to avoid confusing viewers. Edith Swanneck kept her forename but Harold’s sister, Edith of Wessex, was renamed Gunhild, and his official wife, Edith of Mercia, became Margaret. The irony is that not all three of these shared that name in the first place: Edith Swanneck was probably Eadgifu (Edeva), while Edith of Mercia was called Ealdgyth (Aldith). Edith of Wessex was definitely known as Eadgyth (Edith), but even she may have been known by a different name – Gytha – before she married Edward the Confessor.
A tale of two Harolds
Hastings was the last of three major battles that decided the fate of England in 1066. While William was readying his troops to cross the Channel, England was already under attack from the Norwegian king, Harald Hardrada (‘Hard Ruler’). The fact that two rival kings bore essentially the same name tells us a lot.
The Viking raids that began in the eighth century may have been dramatic, but it was the long-term influence of interaction and intermarriage of English natives and Scandinavian settlers that had the greatest impact on the land, its language and its names. Scandinavian names became widely used across England ¬– not only by Viking newcomers but also by English people.
This only increased after Cnut conquered England in 1016. His right-hand man here was Earl Godwine, father of the man who became King Harold II (who was quite literally ‘Godwin’s son’), whose family is a great example of Anglo-Scandinavian integration. Godwine and his Danish wife, Gytha, gave their children a mix of Scandinavian names – including Harold, Sweyn, Gunhild and Tostig – and English, including Wulfnoth, Ælfgar and Eadgifu.
In practice, many of these names may not have been considered ‘Scandinavian’ by the people who used them – they were deemed just as English as any other. But one thing we do know is that 1066 marked an abrupt shift in the political and cultural world that England inhabited, as its influences shifted from the North Sea to the English Channel.
Tostig no more
This is epitomised by the fate of the name of another of Godwine’s sons, Tostig. Harold’s brother infamously betrayed Harold by supporting Harald Hardrada in 1066, so played a key role in the end of Anglo-Scandinavian England. His name seems to have been one of those Scandinavian names that had become popular in the 11th century – perhaps partly because of his own fame.
After the conquest, once-popular Anglo-Scandinavian names were quickly discarded in favour of those brought to England by its new Norman overlords. We have a first-hand account of this process in action through the story of a boy named Tostig in the early 12th century. We are told that his childhood friends teased him so remorselessly that he took it upon himself to change his unfashionable name, insisting on being called William instead.
Most people didn’t change their own names, but the speed of the shift more widely was dramatic, with parents swapping English names for Norman ones. William became rapidly popular, thanks to the influence of the hundreds of Williams who came to England after the Conquest. There were almost as many Richards and Roberts, as well as a large number of Walters and Ralphs (and a surprising scattering of Wazos and Bosos).
William the Bastard
The most famous of the new Williams was, of course, the one we know as ‘the Conqueror’, duke of Normandy and king of England. But William wasn’t known by this byname during his lifetime, as far as we can tell. Rather, he was dubbed by contemporaries as William ‘the Bastard’ (through the Latin terms bastardus and nothus).
This wasn’t a judgement on his character but reflected his illegitimacy. Although many noblemen had unofficial partners before taking an official bride, the fact that William was illegitimate clearly mattered, judging by the wide use of this nickname and the fact that his mother, Herleva, was never named as such until after his death.
By the time of the Conquest, the practice of using additional bynames to add detail to the lives and identities of individuals was becoming more common on both sides of the Channel. As William’s nickname shows, these were usually not chosen by the bearers themselves but instead offer us a glimpse into the judgment of other people.
Black beards, barrel cats and broad arses
Bynames were often merely bland descriptors referring to visual characteristics – Burewold Crul (‘Curly’) and Brunstan Blachebiert (‘Blackbeard’), for example. Or they might refer to the occupation of the bearer, such as those of Bernard Faber (‘the Smith’) and William Bruwere (‘the Brewer’). But there were a lot of names that were much more evocative, some of which were mildly insulting – perhaps partly humorous descriptions of someone’s physical appearance, social status or personality traits.
- Read more | The Anglo-Saxons’ last stand
The meanings of some of these names were obvious, but for others we have to read between the lines. Alestan Braders (‘Broad Arse’), Willelm Pinguis (‘the Fat’) and the man just known as Porcel (‘Little Pig’), are likely to have been overweight. Alric Penipurs (‘Pennypurse’) was almost certainly tight with his money. Lewin Gulee (‘Big Mouthful’) probably had a foul mouth. And we can assume that Lefstan Bittecat (‘Barrel Cat’) liked a drink. But how Edwin Wridel came to be known as ‘the Wriggler’ remains a mystery.
A load of Ballocs
The creation and use of derogatory nicknames might have been done in good humour, or could have served a community-building function. However, some of the names from 11th-century England sound downright offensive to modern ears.
In Winchester around 1050, we know of at least three men whose names referred to testicles. There was an Alfred Taddeballoc (‘Toad-bollock’), a Lefwin Balloe (‘Bollock’), and one man known simply by the name Balloc (‘Bollock’). Even if the sexually explicit nature of these names was not as taboo in medieval England as it is today, the use of these names must have still been unpleasant for the people who had to live with them.
This must certainly have been true in the case of Godwinus Clawcunte (‘Scratch-c*nt’), whose name conjures up an image of a man with some sort of unfortunate groin-related ailment.
An artificial divide
The names of English people in the 11th century can tell us a huge amount about their world and how it was changing. Some of this was, undoubtedly, a result of the Norman conquest, but other aspects of its transformation likely reflected longer-term shifts within English society. In fact, names might be linked to the apparent divide evident between the world that came before 1066 and the one that came after.
Names that were popular in England a century after the Conquest could equally be plucked from any census over the past 900 years: William and Richard, Alice and Matilda. They are recognisably English, recognisably modern. In contrast, the Æthelwulfs and Ælfgifus of pre-Conquest England seem alien and unfamiliar. They create an air of fantastical detachment – more like characters from Game of Thrones than the direct ancestors of modern Englishmen and women. And they can create a false sense that the people of England in 1066 were far more different from those that followed them than they really were.
For more detail on the Bayeux Tapestry, you access our HistoryExtra Academy series on the subject: a six-part video lecture series, in which the majesty and mystery of the Tapestry is explored in full.
]]> This Iron Age woman had her brain scooped out. Why? https://www.historyextra.com/period/iron-age/scotland-brain-removal-research/ Tue, 13 Oct 2026 19:15:57 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/period/iron-age/scotland-brain-removal-research/ Why would our Iron Age forebears smash craniums and sharpen bones? A forensic archaeological study suggests these were acts of respect Iron Age people living in Scotland removed the brains of their dead and turned human bones into tools, research published in the journal Antiquity has found, providing evidence of complex and previously unknown funeral traditions thousands of years ago.
The findings became apparent after bones were uncovered at a site next to a loch in the far north-west of Scotland. They give a fascinating glimpse not just into how Iron Age people appeared to treat the dead with respect, but also how people migrated around the region. One expert has called it “a wonderful story of a cold-case piece of forensic archaeology” that could help change our understanding of the British Iron Age, roughly between 800BC and 43AD.
The research was carried out on two skeletons, one an adult female and the other a young male, discovered in a stone cairn near Loch Borralie. The area, with its sandy ground and relatively few streams, perfectly preserves bones like these and ensures they are not easily eroded.
A skull with a story to tell
When lead researcher Laura Castells Navarro, from the University of York, opened the box that stored the skeletons, she knew she was looking at something unusual. Firstly, the cranium on the female skeleton appeared to have been fractured after death in a deliberate manner. And if that was not strange enough, once Castells Navarro looked inside the front of the skull, there were clear markings – also apparently man-made. “Those markings, they just made absolutely no sense,” she says. “They’re just way too parallel, too sharp, way too evenly spaced – that just does not look like a natural process.”
After the researchers ruled out other causes for the markings, such as rodents, there could be only one conclusion: not long after the woman had died, her cranium had been smashed and her brain scraped out. But that was not all. Unusually, her long bones – the humerus, ulna and femur – appeared to taper off towards the end. Osteological examination found that this had been done on purpose: the bones had been whittled into sharp points, most probably very soon after her death.
But this was not done out of disrespect. In fact, perhaps the opposite.
An act of care
“One of the theories that we have been trying to really counteract when you find partial remains or have manipulated remains is that these people are the enemy, these are people that were not loved, that these are people outside of the society,” Castells Navarro says. “Sometimes, the level of burial is such that they have been just thrown into pits, basically. But in this case, they had been put into the grave with care, with a lot of knowledge and with a lot of sensitivity. It’s not an act of disrespect; it’s a careful act.”
Such care suggests that the woman commanded a level of respect and reverence within her society, Castells Navarro adds.
A previous study from 2016, focusing on the Danebury hill fort in Hampshire, found that Iron Age Britons had three distinct rites for the dead. One involved burying bodies and exhuming them years later to remove bones, perhaps as relics. Another would see bodies buried in deep pits, then body parts removed and deposited elsewhere. And a third would see bodies left exposed to the elements.
But the suggestion of rituals of respect involving manipulating the body, as in Loch Borralie, is new.
Family ties across ancient Scotland
Another key finding at the site came from DNA and isotope analysis of the skeletons, which involves measuring the prevalence of certain chemicals within the body.
The analysis concluded that the two people were closely related to each other – most probably maternal second cousins – suggesting they had travelled together. It also indicated that they had grown up about 80km south-east of Loch Borralie, and that they had genetic connections with people from Orkney, the islands some 175km north-east of the site, and Applecross, about 225km south-west.
This all paints a picture of a people who were not simply confined to their communities, but were instead highly mobile, intrepid and carried their cultural traditions with them over distances.
- Read more | Living with the dead? You need to know these 7 gruesome facts about the history of human burial
“This research challenges notions that everyone had ‘settled down’ in the Iron Age, and were born, brought up and died locally,” says Dr Melanie Giles, a professor of European history at the University of Manchester, who was not involved in the research. “Whatever prompted their move, they must have been bold, and no doubt they brought new stories and ideas with them, clearly settling in amongst local families.”
Castells Navarro says the discoveries are “absolutely fascinating” in the way they shed light on people who would have looked very much like us, but whose practices, and relationship with the dead, were very different. “It does give you this kind of tiny glimpse into something that is very close and at the same time is just very, very far,” she says.
“This is a wonderful story of a cold-case piece of forensic archaeology,” says Giles. “It’s a level of intimate detail relating to relationships and mobility we are only beginning to explore. It might shock us today but these Iron Age death-workers were the equivalent of our own funeral practitioners, taking care of the messy but necessary care for the body.”
]]> Are these the world’s oldest cities? Inside the megasites that Soviet authorities didn’t want you to see https://www.historyextra.com/membership/are-these-the-worlds-oldest-cities-inside-the-megasites-that-soviet-authorities-didnt-want-you-to-see/ Sun, 11 Oct 2026 15:00:04 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/are-these-the-worlds-oldest-cities-inside-the-megasites-that-soviet-authorities-didnt-want-you-to-see/ Hilary Mitchell introduces the Cucuteni-Trypillia, archaeological megasites that rival Uruk and Çatalhöyük for the accolade of ‘world’s oldest city’, knowledge of which was suppressed by the Soviet Union for decades. But why? If you were taking a quiz and were asked what the ‘world’s oldest city’ is, you’d probably get a point for answering Uruk, the ancient metropolis in what is now Iraq. It’s thought that this famous site, renowned for its monumental architecture, administrative sophistication and early use of writing, may have had an impressive 40,000 residents by its final phase in 3100 BC.
At that time, Uruk was home to people who didn’t have to sully their noble hands by farming. They were true urbanites who obtained their food from the surrounding hinterland – one of the features that many archaeologists consider to be an essential characteristic of a city.
Another site, Çatalhöyük in modern-day Turkey, also has a claim to the title of ‘world’s oldest city’, though it would appear quite strange to modern eyes: a streetless mass of houses clustered back-to-back with roof access into the buildings. Founded in around 7100 BC and abandoned in 5700 BC, it was certainly a significant and long-lasting settlement, as was Jericho in Palestine.
Archaeologists have unearthed the remains of more than 20 successive settlements in Jericho, the first of which dates back 11,000 years to 9000 BC. By 7370 BC, Jericho was a well-established town of small, round mud brick houses surrounded by a 12-foot-high stone wall with a defensive tower. UNESCO describes Jericho as the “oldest fortified city in the world.”
The existence of these famous and extremely well-documented sites gave rise to the belief that the first cities emerged in Mesopotamia, and that the area was, essentially, the cradle of urban civilisation.
However, recent research has challenged that long-held assumption.
Are these really the world’s oldest cities?
Around 6,500 years ago, an enigmatic society flourished across the forest-steppe expanse of present-day Ukraine, Moldova and Romania.
Known as the Cucuteni-Trypillia culture, or – more poetically – as “the last great Chalcolithic civilization of Europe,” (Mantu et al., 1997) its people constructed vast settlements that more than rival – in both size and organisation – the other proto-cities mentioned above.
The largest Cucuteni-Trypillia megasite is Talianki in Ukraine, which covered an area of around 450 hectares and is thought to have housed up to 21,000 inhabitants. Other significant megasites include Maidanetske (250 hectares/17,500 inhabitants), Dobrovody (250 hectares/16,200 inhabitants) and Nebelivka (275 hectares/15,000 inhabitants).
Megasites like Talianki weren’t just a random agglomeration of buildings: they appear to have been as meticulously planned out as any mass-produced postwar British suburb, with rows of houses radiating in concentric circles around a central open area, which may have been a space for community gatherings, perhaps fulfilling a similar purpose to a Roman forum.
The discovery of the Cucuteni-Trypillia megasites
In the 1960s, Russian military topographer Konstantin Shishkin was examining some aerial photographs of Ukraine when he noticed unusual shadows materialising on the ground in the vicinity of Kyiv. He saw ghostly rings in the soil, caused by differences in plant growth due to buried archaeological remains. In total, Shishkin identified what looked to be more than 250 examples of these strange shadows – all of them eerie traces of long-vanished structures.
Subsequent excavations and research confirmed that these communities represented some of the earliest examples of large-scale, low-density urban planning. And while Mesopotamian cities such as Uruk were celebrated for their temples and palaces, these sites tell a different story.
For more than 2,000 years, the Cucuteni-Trypillia culture made pots, hunted and gathered, farmed, and lived in huge settlements where all the houses were almost exactly the same size.
There were no signs of palaces, monumental tombs, or, in fact, graves of any kind. No one knows what these people did with their dead, which makes it harder to construct a clear picture of their religious beliefs or rituals.
But the lack of grave goods for most of the culture’s history may itself shed some light on the society’s world view. Instead of being buried with their owners, metal objects may have – more practically – been melted down and reused.
All houses were roughly five metres wide and up to 14 metres long. Constructed of wood and clay and resembling modern half-timbered buildings, they showed a striking degree of standardisation. “The architecture is reminiscent of Lego,” observed archaeologist Johannes Müller of Kiel University in Germany, who has studied the sites extensively since 2011.
This equality and uniformity piqued the interest of Soviet authorities at the time, who saw in these sites an almost perfect example of an idealised past: a truly classless society in line with Marxist ideology. Speaking to the BBC in 2021, Mykhailo Videiko, an archaeologist at Borys Grinchenko Kyiv Metropolitan University in Ukraine, explained why the authorities later went out of their way to suppress further scientific research and cover up the discovery.
It was thought that “Trypillia was a wonderful illustration of a pre-class, classless society or primitive communism,” said Videiko.
“As archaeologists are digging more, they start discovering megasites of Trypillia civilisation. They start finding all these huge buildings. And the question arises: Could this all be done by a classless society?” he added. Some interpreted the large structures, some over 700 square metres in size, as temples. Others thought they were more likely to be storehouses for grain.
Whatever they were, they didn’t align with the authorities’ vision of an ancient, social hierarchy-free Marxist utopia, so they cracked down on the project. Some archaeologists were convicted as being members of a terrorist spy organisation; others fled the country.
Books that furthered the study of Trypillia were published elsewhere but, Videiko explained: “Those books never reached Ukraine. They were researching something but almost no one here knew about it. Those who knew, remained silent.”
The renaissance of Cucuteni-Trypillia research
In the mid-1990s, archaeologist Roland Fletcher drew global attention to an overlooked prehistoric phenomenon: vast Neolithic-Chalcolithic settlements in Eastern Europe that appeared to defy the usual constraints of early agricultural communities.
His 1995 book The Limits of Settlement Growth describes the Cucuteni-Trypillia megasites as the sole known exception to his global model for the way in which all early settlements were limited in size and complexity.
Fletcher’s analysis highlighted a critical point: the enormous scale of these sites, some covering hundreds of hectares, would have made it virtually impossible for all inhabitants to remain in regular, face-to-face contact. This suggested either a sophisticated level of internal organisation, perhaps with designated areas, or possibly an early form of writing that aided communication.
A major step forward came in 2009, when a collaborative research team from Frankfurt and Kiel universities launched a comprehensive study of several key Cucuteni-Trypillia sites. These included Nebelivka, Talianki, Maidanetske and Dobrovody, among the most prominent mega-settlements, as well as the smaller site of Apolianka.
This ambitious project, detailed in a 2014 issue of the European Journal of Archaeology, employed cutting-edge geophysical methods to investigate the sites more thoroughly than ever before using more advanced magnetic gradiometry.
The Frankfurt-Kiel team were able to confirm that these settlements were laid out in concentric circles, suggesting an impressive degree of organisation. This suggests that all of the structures were carefully planned out before any construction began, strengthening the case that Talianki and similar megasites deserve to be called the oldest cities in history.
University of Kiel archaeologist Johannes Müller has put his cards on the table and confirmed that he considers them to be cities, saying: “When I started researching the Tripillia sites in 2012, I never thought I would call them ‘cities’.” Müller continued that now “that is beyond question for me. A city requires a concept. And here, planning is evident from the very beginning.”
“The decisive factor for me is not that they are huge settlements, but that you no longer know the people who live 1.5 kilometers away in the same settlement,” he added.
Why did the Cucuteni-Trypillia culture burn their houses?
The Frankfurt-Kiel team’s research also confirmed a particularly baffling element of the megasite mystery: the fate of the ‘Lego’ houses themselves. Many appear to have been deliberately burned, often every 60 to 80 years, leaving behind squares of ash containing magnetic oxides.
Some researchers suggest the burnings had a symbolic or ritual motive, perhaps linked to death or rebirth. Others think they served a more pragmatic purpose: perhaps hardening clay walls or clearing land for rebuilding.
Mirjana Stevanovic, an archaeologist from Serbia, has argued that the structures inside the burned house horizon “were destroyed by deliberate burning and most likely for reasons of a symbolic nature.” A Trypillia scholar, Vikentiy Khvoyka, believes that the houses were burned down when their inhabitants passed away, turning them from dwellings of the living into what he called “homes of the dead.”
However, Russian archaeologist Evgeniy Yuryevich Krichevski had a different take on the practice. He thought that the inhabitants weren’t destroying their homes, just reinforcing them. He believed that the heat of the flames would have hardened the clay walls into a ceramic surface, while the smoke would have fumigated the living space.
In 2018, a team of Ukrainian and British archaeologists decided to put this theory to the test.
They recreated two Cucuteni-Trypillia type houses, building them from scratch from the same clay and wood materials used thousands of years ago. Although wooden elements such as the roof were destroyed, the team found that the walls of both buildings were left intact, along with various clay items and ritual items the researchers had placed inside.
What artefacts are associated with the Cucuteni-Trypillia people?
Wherever Cucuteni-Trypillia people lived, archaeologists have found stylised, small female figurines, with distinctive geometric designs on their curvy bodies.
In the 1970s, Lithuanian archaeologist Marija Gimbutas, working at UCLA, California, published several influential books suggesting that the female figures were goddesses, and that the Cucuteni-Trypillia people, along with other early societies of ‘Old Europe’, were led by women – though these days, Gimbutas’s work is considered to be highly speculative.
However, whether it points to a wide-reaching, goddess-worshipping matriarchal culture or not, the material legacy of the Cucuteni-Trypillia culture is deeply compelling. Cucuteni–Trypillia pottery in particular – yellow-hued and decorated in stunning swirling patterns and vibrant colours – speaks of a deeply sophisticated artistic tradition.
Archaeologist Mykhailo Videiko has explained that the people of Trypillia “managed to implement almost all technological innovations of their time,” using kilns that were very advanced for that period.
In an attempt to raise awareness about the extraordinary craftsmanship of her ancestors, in 2021, Ukrainian fashion designer Svitlana Bevza created a line of Trypillia-influenced clothing and jewellery as a way of celebrating this – as the Frankfurt-Kiel team put it – “persistently overlooked” ancient civilisation.
Bevza told the BBC she found it unjust that “this great culture is not that well-known in the world, as Egyptian, for instance. There was no voice to the world who could talk about this culture.”
In the five years since she created her evocative collection, more light has been shed on these extraordinary settlements, and they are finally beginning to get the recognition they deserve.
In a field where terminology is often debated and definitions evolve, one thing is becoming clearer: the Cucuteni-Trypillia culture – once viewed as peripheral to early urban development – is now rightfully taking centre stage in our understanding of how cities first emerged.
]]> What is ‘Europe’, anyway? https://www.historyextra.com/period/20th-century/europe-podcast-roderick-beaton/ Tue, 15 Sep 2026 07:30:17 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/period/20th-century/europe-podcast-roderick-beaton/ Historian Roderick Beaton explores what defines Europe What defines Europe – is it geography, politics, a shared culture, or perhaps a mix of all three? In this episode, historian Roderick Beaton tells Emily Briffett about the ways in which it has been defined, and redefined, as an idea by its people over the centuries.
]]> She was hunted by the FBI and transformed British culture – so why haven't you heard of this black activist? https://www.historyextra.com/membership/she-was-hunted-by-the-fbi-and-transformed-british-culture-so-why-havent-you-heard-of-this-black-activist/ Tue, 01 Sep 2026 13:00:20 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/she-was-hunted-by-the-fbi-and-transformed-british-culture-so-why-havent-you-heard-of-this-black-activist/ Yvonne Singh introduces the fearless woman who strove to restore pride to London’s battered Caribbean community through a groundbreaking new newspaper and Britain’s first Carnival event At the end of August 1958, the streets of Notting Hill in west London became an acrid, smoke-fogged battleground. For months tensions had been building between the white population and migrants from the Caribbean. That evening, hundred-strong white mobs armed with improvised weapons – cudgels, iron bars, butchers’ knives and leather belts studded with nuts and bolts – marched through the streets, chanting: “Keep Britain white!” PC Richard Bedford, on duty that night, recalled hearing shouts of: “We will kill all black bastards!”
The violence, which was indiscriminate and shocking, continued until 5 September. Terrified residents of colour barricaded themselves in their homes as milk bottles and rocks were hurled at their doors, and young black men similarly armed themselves with makeshift weapons.
After those turbulent days of rioting, 108 people were charged, 72 of them white and 36 described as “coloured”. Even after the violence petered out, residents of colour reported a lingering sense of racial hatred and prejudice – “an atmosphere you could slice like a knife”.
Voice of a community
Five months before the Notting Hill race riots, Trinidad-born journalist Claudia Jones had launched a publication for her community in London. “There are at least 80,000 good reasons why we believe a West Indian newspaper is necessary,” she proclaimed in her first editorial for the West Indian Gazette and Afro-Asian Caribbean News in March 1958. “They are the 80,000 West Indians now resident here… we form a community with its own wants and problems.”
A decade earlier, the ‘open-door’ policy of the 1948 British Nationality Act had augured the arrival of HMT Empire Windrush and a wave of migration from Britain’s Caribbean colonies. As numbers arriving from the West Indies grew, the rhetoric turned hostile: some of the media described a flood of migrants living in slum housing, spreading disease and undercutting wages. The situation was exploited by Oswald Mosley’s far-right Union Movement, which agitated in areas such as Notting Hill where Caribbean communities were established.
In this fractious atmosphere, Jones’s Gazette spoke out. “People without a voice were lambs to the slaughter,” Jones declared following the riots. Inevitably, it attracted foes. The Daily Worker’s front page of 28 August 1958 carried a report that the Ku Klux Klan of Britain had trashed the Gazette’s offices, smashing equipment and daubing graffiti on walls. That month, racist correspondence sent to the Gazette by the KKK addressed the editor as “Mr B. Ape”, and far-right movements targeted the paper.
- Read more | The forgotten history of Windrush
Jones wasn’t deterred, having already worked for many years to improve conditions and rights for black people in the US. Born in Port of Spain on 21 February 1915, she’d moved to the US in 1924 with her parents, emigrating in search of the American dream. This “dream was soon disabused”, recalled Jones: the family were forced to reside in overcrowded and unsanitary living conditions, and her mother died of spinal meningitis when the young Claudia was only 13. She stated in a later speech that, whenever injustice came to mind, “I would think of my mother”.
At the age of 21, Jones joined the Communist Party USA, impressed by its commitment to the rights of workers, women and people of colour. A distinguished career in US newspapers followed. Friends recalled her electrifying presence and flair for poetry. “She could command a rapt audience,” recalled one who had seen her speak at New York’s Madison Square Garden.
Jones’s charisma and star quality made her a target for J Edgar Hoover during the Cold War ‘Red Scare’. Having already served time in prison, and been threatened with deportation, in 1955 she began a year-long sentence at Alderson Women’s Penitentiary in West Virginia. After her release later that year, the 40-year-old Jones found herself on a ship sailing to the UK – a country where she had few friends or family.
- Read more | Are black histories still being overlooked?
Through party contacts, Jones managed to find rented accommodation in London, but poverty bedevilled her time in the capital. The damp, smoggy climate exacerbated her health conditions; she had never fully recovered from tuberculosis contracted as a child, and she’d also been diagnosed with hypertensive cardio-vascular disease.
In London, she became active in the many labour organisations supporting the expanding Caribbean community. A newspaper was mooted, and Jones, with her distinguished career in black American newspapers, was chosen as launch editor. This humble “one-leaf flyer”, as she initially described it, evolved to became a monthly paper with a substantial newsstand presence, and the likes of Malcolm X, WEB Du Bois and Norman Manley, the first premier of Jamaica, graced its offices above Theo’s Record Store in Brixton.
Those offices were also the first port of call for many people who faced racial discrimination, and Jones mobilised her contacts in local government, social services and the police to help them. “What they needed was a godmother,” recalled Gazette reporter Donald Hinds. “That was the role Claudia Jones played best.” Within its tabloid-format pages, the Gazette – cover price sixpence – carried news and analysis, arts reviews and sport, with a focus on the black community. It was run by a team of volunteers: Hinds also worked as a full-time bus conductor, while Jones’s sometime partner Abhimanyu Manchanda (‘Manu’) was managing editor and dealt with advertising, and Theo Campbell, who ran the record store below the offices, contributed the sports section.
The paper thrived in the months following the riots, its circulation reaching 30,000 during the winter of 1958. “As we went into 1959, politicians from what was referred to as the British Caribbean were seen going up those stairs to talk to Claudia,” said Hinds. “The British media also sought Claudia’s opinions… [she] was the one with the finger on the pulse of British society.”
The Gazette served as an information repository for the black world at a critical juncture, following closely the horrors of South Africa’s apartheid regime and keeping readers abreast of decolonisation movements. “I don’t think I really grasped the true fact that I was in the presence of history,” Hinds said later.
Restoring pride
Jones’s greatest legacy was the establishment of Carnival in the UK, restoring the pride in West Indian culture that had been battered by the events of August 1958 when “everyone wanted to run away and leave”, as Jones’s friend Pearl Connor said.
In November 1958, the Gazette established a Caribbean Carnival committee, and the first event was held in London’s St Pancras Town Hall on 30 January 1959. Timed to coincide with the festivities in Trinidad, it was televised by the BBC and featured ‘mas’ (short for ‘masquerade’) bands and artists such as jazz singer Cleo Laine and calypsonian Mighty Terror. A huge success, it became an annual event sponsored by the Gazette.
The Gazette, though, was unable to turn a profit. Circulation flatlined by late 1959, and advertisers often paid late. “Looking back, it seems preposterous that the only coherent voice from the black community in Britain was a monthly paper that was so strapped for cash, it often could not find the £100 to pay the printers,” noted Hinds.
Though the stress affected Jones’s health, she refused to slow down. Then, on Christmas Eve 1964, she suffered a fatal heart attack at the age of just 49. “When Claudia died, a great hole was ripped in the fabric of our society,” said Hinds. “The black community was widowed.”
Grief-stricken after Jones’s death, Manu couldn’t continue with the Gazette, and the April–May 1965 issue was its last. By then, it had proved to be a rich incubator of talent. Civil rights, black power and decolonisation movements gained traction, and Gazette writers were among the founders of the influential Caribbean Artists Movement. Even today, the revolutionary spirit Jones kindled in the offices above a Brixton record store continues to inspire an extraordinary and enduring legacy.
Yvonne Singh is the author of INK! From the Age of Empire to Black Power, the Journalists who Transformed Britain (The History Press, 2025)
This article was first published in the September 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
]]> The ancient Mesopotamians were freakishly ahead of their time – and here are 8 reasons why https://www.historyextra.com/membership/the-ancient-mesopotamians-were-freakishly-ahead-of-their-time-and-here-are-8-reasons-why/ Fri, 21 Aug 2026 15:00:31 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/the-ancient-mesopotamians-were-freakishly-ahead-of-their-time-and-here-are-8-reasons-why/ Ideas developed by ancient peoples in the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers still shape our lives today. Selena Wisnom explains why we should celebrate the pivotal roles they played in the development of beer, writing, AI, horoscopes – and even credit cards 1. Writing
They gave us the means to pen novels – and official records
The ancient peoples of the so-called ‘cradle of civilisation’ – the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers – grew up fast. In the five or so millennia BC, four major civilisations emerged in the region known as Mesopotamia – and the advances they made would leave an indelible imprint on history.
From around 4000 BC, Sumerians built the first city-states in the region’s south. The next great power was the Akkadian empire, founded about 2334 BC. In the early 19th century BC, the Babylonians became the dominant force in southern Mesopotamia. Meanwhile, to the north, from the 21st century BC, the Assyrians conquered much of west Asia.
Mesopotamia was a place of rich soils and access to plentiful water for irrigating crops. Unsurprisingly, it’s believed to be where settled farming emerged. Its inhabitants grew rich, with elites enjoying time to think and to develop ways of preserving their best ideas – most notably writing.
Around 3500 BC, Sumerian accountants in the city of Uruk devised a method for keeping track of the rations they gave to their workers – and developed the most advanced bureaucracy the world had yet seen. Writing started here as a system of pictures, known today as proto-cuneiform, which could record any commodity going in or out. Delivered three jars of oil to the temple? Just draw a jar of oil three times.
Proper writing, which can record abstract ideas and the sounds of speech, evolved by about 3100 BC. At this point, pictures were used to spell out the sounds of the objects for which they stood; to provide an analogy in English, drawing a bee and a leaf might spell the word ‘belief’. This writing system, known as cuneiform (from the Latin for ‘wedge’), involved pressing a reed stylus into soft clay tablets, combining multiple wedge-shaped marks to create pictures. Over time, these became more abstract and less like things they originally depicted. So by the first millennium BC, you’d never guess that the sign ‘ni’ was originally supposed to be a jar of oil.
Cuneiform was still being written on clay tablets in the Middle East in the first century AD, some 3,100 years after the system was first devised – a period spanning well over half of recorded human history.
Such tablets don’t decay in the ground, and they’re not destroyed by fire, so around half a million of them survive today, with more surfacing in excavations all the time. As a result, Mesopotamia is one of the best-documented parts of the ancient world, helping us learn about its extraordinary innovations.
2. Banking
They invented spreadsheets, credit and interest payments
Alongside those early accounting systems, the Mesopotamians developed the world’s first spreadsheets, as well as sophisticated banking systems. They also invented the concept of credit – and, with it, interest-bearing loans.
As early as the third millennium BC, grid-like tablets recorded loans of grain from the palace to the temple, enabling lenders to keep tabs on how much was repaid and what was still owed. A series of surviving tablets detail how the royal granaries of Lagash – a city-state sited between the sites of modern Baghdad and Basra – supplied the White Temple, which failed to repay the full amount of grain the following year, necessitating the recording of a deficit on the loan.
Temples functioned as banks, lending silver and barley at discounted rates in times of need. They also financed commercial ventures, charging annual interest at 33 per cent on barley.
The private sector took off in the early second millennium BC, with fully fledged private enterprises in which people could invest. Assyrian merchants organised trading partnerships to finance their trips to Anatolia, where they sold textiles made by their wives at home. Traders were keen to invest their profits and not let their silver lie idle. Precious metals sitting in the money bag rather than being put to work increasing their value were described as ‘getting hungry’.
The Babylonian word for interest, which translates as ‘increase’, originally referred to herds of animals. Just as the flocks would reproduce and multiply over time, money and debt could also burgeon. Given the huge interest rates levied by lenders, profits could grow quickly. But so could debts – and ordinary people who found themselves unable to repay their creditors were sometimes enslaved. In the second millennium BC, Babylonian kings frequently had to proclaim debt amnesties to provide relief.
National deficits also caused problems. The first documented war in history, between the Sumerian cities of Lagash and Umma, a little to the north-west, flared up over a refusal to repay a loan. The conflict, which dragged on for 150 years (c2500–2350 BC), was a convoluted tale of claim, counterclaim, and battles won and lost – all over a dispute over a loan agreement based on a rich strip of fertile territory, the Gu’edena or ‘edge of the plain’.
So you can thank the Mesopotamians for your credit card – and also be grateful that interest rates have, by and large, fallen in the past 4,000 years.
- Read more | He tried to conquer knowledge itself – instead this ancient Mesopotamian king resorted to rule with terror
3. Pubs
They adored beer, and created venues to drink it
People have probably been quaffing beer for at least 12,000 years, but the earliest-known written evidence for brewing comes from Mesopotamia. Indeed, some of the very first surviving examples of writing were made by temple accountants working out how much grain they needed to make enough beer for festivals.
The Sumerians adored beer. One list, albeit compiled later as a lexical teaching aid, records 38 different types including dark, light, red and “triple beer”, plus beer with and without foam – and the enigmatic “beer in the middle of the sea”. That’s enough varieties to make any modern craft brewery proud.
Drinking beer was a highly social activity. People gathered around a communal vat and sipped through reed straws. Such a scene is depicted on cylinder seals belonging to Queen Puabi of Ur in the 26th century BC, who was later buried with a gold and lapis lazuli drinking straw. Straws were perhaps used to penetrate a floating layer of residue, or simply to enhance the fun of sharing a drink with others.
Mesopotamians built the first pubs, too. One tavern in Lagash, established c2700 BC, had a kitchen, an outdoor seating area and 150 serving dishes as well as the all-important beer.
It’s often assumed that early beer was low in alcohol, mainly because it was given to children. But there is plenty of evidence that Sumerian beer was highly intoxicating. One myth tells of Inanna, goddess of war, love and sex, getting the god Enki (or Ea) drunk so that she can steal from him the powers of civilisation.
Later medical recipes contain cures for hangovers and even alcoholism. And one of the texts that gives us our most detailed information about brewing – the Sumerian hymn to the goddess Ninkasi – might have been taught to school children in the second millennium BC, along with a drinking song that has become famous via YouTube: As I spin around the lake of beer, while feeling wonderful, feeling wonderful, while drinking beer, in a blissful mood, while drinking alcohol and feeling exhilarated, with joy in the heart and a contented liver – my heart is a heart filled with joy!
4. Maths
They had plenty of time for numbers and calculations
Whenever you check a clock to tell the time, you are using a Mesopotamian system of counting – sexagesimal. Our modern decimal system uses the number 10 as the base, but the Mesopotamians used base 60 – which is why we have 60 minutes in an hour and 60 seconds in a minute. It was also the Mesopotamians who decided that a circle should be divided into 360°; that’s neatly divisible by 60, and explains why it makes sense for clocks to have circular faces (though ancient Mesopotamians used water clocks).
Unlike us, they counted lots of other things in 60s, a fact reflected in the Mesopotamian system of writing numbers. One vertical wedge could stand for 1, 60 or even 360 (6x60). You can tell which number is indicated only from the context which does make Mesopotamian maths a bit of a headache.
And these people were extremely good at maths. Babylonian schoolchildren were learning a version of Pythagoras’ theorem more than 1,000 years before the Greek polymath triangulated his thinking in the sixth century BC. As early as the 18th century BC, they also knew the square root of two, needed to find the diagonal of a square.
Babylonian students were taught methods of calculating areas of land so that they could be taxed efficiently. However – and seemingly just for the fun of it – teachers used some huge numbers when setting exercises. Later, the Babylonians came up with sophisticated maths that was key to the development of data science.
- Read more | Long before the Bible, an ancient Mesopotamian civilisation predicted one of its most famous stories
5. Poetry
They gave us gloomy introverts who ponder life
It wasn’t all admin in Mesopotamia. The region produced the world’s first literature, too, in all sorts of genres. The earliest named author in Mesopotamia – and, therefore, the first known writer in history – was Enheduanna, a priestess of the moon god in the city of Ur, who lived around 2300 BC.
Known as “the Sumerian Shakespeare”, Enheduanna wrote wonderful poems about a turbulent world governed by capricious gods – classics that were still being studied in schools five centuries after she died.
A snippet from Exaltation of Inanna gives a flavour of her verse:
I approached the light but it burned me
I approached the shade but was covered by a storm
My honeyed mouth turned to spittle
My talent for lifting spirits has turned to dust
The Mesopotamians were also great storytellers. The Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh – dating back to at least the 18th century BC – charts the fate of a king on a quest for eternal life. It’s the earliest known example of the ‘hero’s journey’ that underpins so many of today’s Hollywood films. Babylonian stories about struggles between gods and heroes influenced the Homeric epics, Greek mythology and even the Bible: does a flood wiping out humanity and an ark that boards animals two by two sound familiar?
But it wasn’t all serious. The Sumerians wrote the first rap battles – debate poems between entities such as Summer and Winter, Bird and Fish, and Date Palm and Tamarisk, arguing over who deserves the crown.
Similar slanging matches also took place between people. A recently discovered text from c1740 BC describes a cat fight between two women from the city of Nippur. They accuse each other of being bad at baking and of buying ready-made food, hurling insults – “Your butt sticks out” – and accusations: “You can’t even operate a spindle.”
Poems about the goddess Inanna describe the first instance of teenage rebellion, recounting how she sneaked out to meet her boyfriend without telling her parents. And some of the earliest jokes are written in Sumerian. One starts: “A dog walks into a bar and says ‘I can’t see a thing – I’ll open this one’!” The punchline, we can only assume, has been lost in translation.
6. Astrology
They read the stars and created zodiacal archetypes
Whether you’re a feisty Leo or a cool-headed Capricorn – indeed, whatever your star sign – you can thank the Babylonians for inventing it. Astrology was practised in Mesopotamia by at least the third millennium BC, when the stars and planets were thought to carry messages from the gods to the king. An eclipse usually meant that a king would soon die, whereas the rising and setting of Venus could portend a good harvest, reconciliation of kings, or even war.
None of these outcomes was inevitable, though. Rituals could be performed to ask the gods to change their minds, or for help interpreting these astral signs: if a king will die, which king will it be? One surviving prayer to the moon god worries over “the evil of a lunar eclipse” and “portents and omens, unpleasant and unfavourable” as it pleads for intercession and the hope of a more “favourable” path.
In the fifth century BC, Babylonian priests divided the sky into 12 equal chunks that we now call the zodiac. The Persians who ruled Babylon at that time had no interest in taking advice from the Babylonian gods, so astrologers started taking private clients – and invented horoscopes. These forecast the future based on a person’s date of birth and the exact positions of the planets, making predictions such as: “His days will be long” and “He will have sons”.
The names of most modern star signs are direct translations into Latin of the Babylon constellations: Libra is a pair of scales, Cancer is a crab and Taurus is the Babylonian bull of heaven who, in the Epic of Gilgamesh, comes down from the sky to trample the land. Others took their classical names from Babylonian images – Aquarius the water carrier is depicted in the same way as the water god Ea (or Enki), often shown with water pouring from his shoulders. Meanwhile, Virgo the maiden was named after a Babylonian picture of a woman holding an ear of wheat (this constellation was ‘the Furrow’ in Babylonian).
- Read more | Behold his nightmarish nether regions: this ancient Mesopotamian demon was secretly a divine hero
7. Data science
They laid the foundations for modern machine learning
Without the Babylonians, we would have no artificial intelligence – because they invented the algorithm. The roots of data science lie in astrology: the original purpose of the zodiac was to measure the sky more accurately. Babylonian astronomers measured the position of a star or planet by holding up hands to the sky: 12 fingers corresponded to an angle of 1°. They studied the heavens each night, recording observations in diaries maintained for at least 600 years – arguably the longest scientific project in history.
With such a huge amount of data, they quickly spotted patterns. For instance, Venus moves in an eight-year cycle, so they could work out that planet’s position on a future date by simply checking their records to see where it had been recorded eight years before then. Eventually, astronomers developed mathematical formulae to calculate the positions of celestial bodies without having to consult past records – and the algorithm was born.
The Greeks picked up these data and calculations along with the zodiac, and they became part of Greek science. The Greek astronomer Ptolemy used Babylonian eclipse records dating back to 747 BC. Modern mathematical astronomy, directly descended from that Greek work, exists only because of astrology – ancient scholars carefully observing the sky for messages from the angry gods. So the algorithm, along with the idea that trends can be extrapolated from data, comes from a core principle of Mesopotamian religion – the idea that the gods write messages in the heavens for humans to interpret.
8. Medicine
They performed surgery and introduced the system of striking off dodgy doctors
The Egyptians usually get the credit for producing the earliest known medical texts – but the Mesopotamians were first. The oldest medical recipe, for making a salve to heal a bite wound, dates from the third millennium BC in Ebla, Syria.
The code of Hammurabi, which covered 282 legal scenarios – including disputes – attests that the Babylonians were performing eye surgery in the 18th century BC. These laws, which survive on a stele topped with a relief image of Hammurabi with Shamash – who worked double time as the sun god and the god of justice – mandated harsh penalties for medical malpractice. If an operation went wrong and the patient was blinded, the physician’s hand should be cut off – a hand for an eye, as it were. It was also stated that doctors should charge rates on a sliding scale based on the social class of the patient. Ordinary people paid half as much as the wealthy.
Mesopotamian medicine was fundamentally holistic. A physician would give you drugs to treat symptoms, but an exorcist would also be called to fix the root problem, understood to have involved angering the gods. Incantations at the bedside would reassure a patient that the gods would soon calm down, while omens could tell the exorcist whether the patient would live or die even before that spirit-expeller arrived at the sufferer’s house. If, for example, he saw a potsherd standing up in the street, a patient was clearly too dangerously ill to go near.
In the seventh century BC, Assyrian king Ashurbanipal commissioned an encyclopaedia to collect and standardise the vast numbers of medical texts and traditions that were circulating by then. These included treatments for everything from minor ailments, such as headaches and digestive problems, to serious problems such as mental illness and epilepsy – known to the Babylonians as ‘fallen from the sky’.
To treat a headache, you should mix a selection of seeds then “boil down [the mixture] in vinegar, sprinkle parched grain flour [and] emmer flour on it, and smear [the mixture] onto a piece of leather. Shave his head [and] put it on as a bandage; he will get better.”
Hippocrates is usually credited with inventing the concept of diagnosis based on observation, but the Mesopotamians pioneered this approach hundreds of years earlier, considering five grades of temperature variation, among many other factors. Their knowledge was then incorporated into Hippocratic writings, Roman treatises on eye disease and, later, Arabic medicine.
Mesopotamian advances travelled widely thanks to the cosmopolitan nature of the ancient world. To the east, Sumerians had been trading goods and ideas with the Indus Valley and Afghanistan as early as the third millennium BC, while in the other direction Alexander the Great united lands from Babylon to Greece under one rule. Whether via commerce or conquest, people moved – and took their cultures with them. And Mesopotamian expertise survived and spread because successive cultures found it to be practical, useful and effective.
Selena Wisnom is lecturer in the heritage of the Middle East at the University of Leicester. She is the author of The Library of Ancient Wisdom: Mesopotamia and the Making of History (Allen Lane, 2025)
This article was first published in the September 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
]]> Are there still fascists in the 21st century? Six experts weigh up the evidence https://www.historyextra.com/membership/are-there-still-fascists-in-the-21st-century-six-experts-weigh-up-the-evidence/ Mon, 17 Aug 2026 15:00:13 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/are-there-still-fascists-in-the-21st-century-six-experts-weigh-up-the-evidence/ Fascism is a word thrown around increasingly frequently in today’s politics, but how do contemporary far-right movements compare to the original fascism of the 20th century? Six historians consider the global parallels “Post-fascism wishes to destroy democracy from within, not from outside”
Democracy took different forms throughout history; why not fascism? Its contemporary expression is undoubtedly dissimilar from its ancestors between the two world wars, but some basic features are easily detectable: a project of national ‘regeneration’, considering nation as a closed, homogeneous ethnic community; a radical nationalism taking a pronounced xenophobic and racist taste; and authoritarian tendencies that put into question democracy.
Classical fascism was neither conservative nor merely reactionary: instead of looking to the past, it aimed to build a new world. Its charismatic leaders were demagogues, and it fused anti-Enlightenment culture with modernity and new forms of inequality (Social Darwinism, biological racism, imperialism).
Today, a new wave of authoritarian, far-right movements and governments is rising globally. Its leaders have abandoned any reference to fascism, but maybe we are facing a kind of ‘post-fascism’, a concept that refers to both a historical distance from classical fascism and a significant change to its ideological and political features. Unlike its ancestors, post-fascism accepts the institutional framework of liberal democracy; it wishes to destroy democracy from within, not from outside.
Other differences are significant. Except for a few elitist billionaires and technocrats, post-fascism does not possess any utopian vision. It defends many conservative values – traditions, family, national sovereignties – and wishes to restore a past golden age of greatness and prosperity. It does not pursue the myth of a ‘total state’ but claims the dismantlement of the state itself. Today, Islamophobia has replaced antisemitism as the dominant focus, and some far-right voices are enthusiastic supporters of Israel. What remains is demagoguery: the search for a scapegoat that depicts immigrants and refugees as intruders and a threat.
Democracy is not merely a procedural norm but a hard-won historical achievement, and antifascism is essential to preserving an emancipatory horizon in the century ahead. A ‘non-anti-fascist’ democracy would be fragile and vulnerable.
Enzo Traverso is the Susan and Barton Winokur professor in the Humanities at Cornell University
“Men today are vulnerable to the rhetoric and aesthetics of fascism”
Violent masculinity is making a global comeback. Some of the distorted ideas about manhood that underpinned 20th-century fascism are finding new expressions today, fuelled by the global polycrisis and rapid technological change.
Classical fascism promoted a version of manhood characterised by dominance, aggression and discipline. From Mussolini’s Italy to Hitler’s Germany, 20th-century fascism saw the glorification of the ‘strong man’ leader who built cults of personality, bolstered by a wider societal celebration of physical toughness. In the First World War’s aftermath, trauma, uncertainty and social change contributed to what many scholars described as a crisis of masculinity across Europe. Fascist leaders told their followers they had been mistreated and promised to restore their strength and pride.
There is a striking parallel with the victimhood narratives deployed by contemporary demagogues. Men today are similarly vulnerable to the rhetoric and aesthetics of fascism. What paramilitary and physical conditioning drills were for the Hitler Youth in the 1930s, hypermasculine fitness and combat subcultures have become for some of today’s extremist movements.
The resurgence of centuries-old masculinity myths extends far beyond extremist circles. A new generation of boys and young men is drawn to the cult-like atmosphere of the Manosphere. We also witness a global return of political ‘strong man’ leaders who project violent ideals of masculinity and seek to reverse women’s rights.
Boys and men are again being told that they must be strong, wealthy and dominant to succeed in a zero-sum competition for status and recognition. Likewise, ‘looksmaxxing’ may be a new term, but its underlying philosophy is not: the belief that there is a single ideal male form.
One of the lessons from the 20th century is that the political theatre of ‘strong man’ leaders only works when there is a receptive audience. This is where the day-to-day youth trends in schools and online subcultures connect with geopolitics today.
Julia Ebner is leader of the Violent Extremism Lab at the University of Oxford and a postdoctoral researcher at Magdalen College
“Radical rightwing populists are worse than contemporary fascists”
In 1944 George Orwell wrote an article despairing of the way fascism had degenerated into a nebulous label. Eighty years on it is even more difficult to apply the word meaningfully. It is only since the 1990s that a working definition has gained scholarly consensus, not as a true definition but the most heuristically useful one to date.
This sees fascism as a radically anti-democratic and revolutionary force bent on bringing about the rebirth of the nation from perceived decadence through the mass mobilisation of all ‘true’ members of the regenerated national community. The shorthand for this theory of fascism as a revolutionary form of extreme illiberal nationalism is taken from one influential version of it, which I first published in 1991, namely that it is a ‘palingenetic’ form of populist ultranationalism. ‘Palingenetic’ means it is striving for rebirth; ‘nationalism’ locates it within secularising western states; the ‘ultra’ implies it strives to replace liberal democratic nationalism with a totalitarian new order; and ‘populist’ highlights the fact that a fascist state is different from a purely Orwellian one based on repression.
Applied today, this definition suggests there is no fascist regime anywhere in the world: Putin’s state is a repressive autocracy which demobilises the people; Xi Jinping’s China is de facto ultranationalist but theoretically a communist state which also demobilises its subjects; the Ayatollah state is a theocracy; Modi, Trump and Netanyahu are sowing social conflict, and have been accused of crimes against humanity, but are doing so as democratically elected leaders.
They thus pose existential threats to liberal democracy, but they do so as embodiments of radical rightwing populism (RRWP) who are actively de-liberalising their democracies from within. They are not fascists, but worse. They may not sound as dangerous to humanity as ‘fascists’, but their state forms of RRWP represent a far greater threat today to both humanity and the ecosystem than contemporary fascism, which is now a toxic trickle compared with the raging torrent of the 1930s.
Roger Griffin is professor emeritus at Oxford Brookes University and author of The Nature of Fascism (The Pinter Press, 1991)
“Some female leaders present feminism as a threat to the nation”
The Sección Femenina, the Women’s Section of the Falange, shows that women’s political participation has not always been tied to emancipatory projects. Founded in 1934 as part of the Spanish fascist party, it became responsible for teaching women what it regarded as appropriate to their sex: to be wives, mothers, housewives and servants of the nation.
The distinctive feature of the Women’s Section was that this mission was carried out by a public, disciplined and politically influential female elite, whose lives did not conform to the domestic ideal they prescribed for other women. They held office, travelled, spoke in public and negotiated spaces of power within the regime. To make such authority acceptable, they looked to historical figures. The 15th and 16th-century Spanish queen Isabella I of Castile was the most effective of these, as she could be presented as Catholic, a wife and mother, and bound to the destiny of the nation.
The comparison with Spain’s far right today needs to be made carefully. Vox, the leading far-right party, operates in a democracy and has no organisation comparable to the Sección Femenina. Yet comparison raises the question of what happens when women give public authority to anti-feminist arguments? In Vox, some female leaders and spokeswomen present feminism as a threat to women, the family, men and the nation. It is no coincidence that the party has recently returned to Isabella I of Castile as a female model.
This combination of Spanish nationalism and maternalist language also appears in the discourse of some women on the contemporary far right, who present women as guardians of society against currents they describe as harmful or alien to the nation, including feminism, socialism and non-Christian faiths. Women’s public presence in the far right has helped, and continues to help, present anti-feminism as a defence of women, rather than as a reaction against them. As both historical fascism and the contemporary far right show, the projects most hostile to feminism need women capable of giving them authority, respectability and legitimacy.
Begoña Barrera López is a professor in contemporary history at the University of Seville
“In interwar Estonia, the radical right approached the ‘race’ question with caution”
Thinking through a racial lens appealed to the ultranationalist sensibility. Racial theories could justify beliefs in the nation’s superiority or distinctiveness as a biological reality. This could be protected, improved or regenerated through eugenic interventions such as bans on racial mixing.
In interwar Estonia, however, the radical right approached the ‘race’ question with ambivalence and caution. Historically, Estonians occupied a lower rank on a racial hierarchy, and western racial theorists categorised Finno-Ugric speakers, such as Finns and Estonians, as ‘Asiatic’ races.
Aware of the disadvantages, the Estonian radical right criticised German claims of racial purity and superiority, while its dominant force, the Vaps movement, dismissed race as irrelevant. Instead, it argued that the spirit of the War of Independence (1918–20) was what really unified the nation, accepted Baltic German veterans of the War of Independence into their ranks and actively courted ethnic Russian voters.
Meanwhile, elitist radical right fringe groups explored ways to change the Estonian narratives of race. Intellectuals emphasised historical ties with Scandinavia and highlighted what were considered signs of the Nordic racial elements in Estonians. Eugenicists warned against mixed marriages to protect Estonian biological distinctiveness.
Unlike their northern neighbour, the far right in interwar Latvia experienced fewer constraints rooted in assumptions of racial inferiority; western racial theorists often classified Latvians as ‘Nordic’ or near-Nordic. In the 1930s, the ultranationalist Thunder Cross readily associated ancient Baltic tribes with Aryan racial imagery.
Nowadays, the Estonian far right rally support by anti-immigration rhetoric that portrays non-white populations as threats to Europe. The Russian minority, formerly considered exclusively as threats, is now being approached as a potential electorate with shared conservative values and a white racial identity. The interwar Estonian radical right’s ambivalence about race was based on what is now a historical curiosity no longer relevant for the contemporary far right or their transnational allies.
Paris Pin-Yu Chen is a research fellow at the University of Birmingham
“Hindu nationalism was and is no copycat fascism. Its ideology is homegrown”
Indian critics have long considered Hindu nationalism to be ‘fascist’, though scholars of the traditional varieties of fascism may not agree. In the Indian case as elsewhere, the ‘f-word’ is used for its polemical punch, but the charge also carries a deeper historical weight. Hindu nationalists and European fascists were keenly aware of each other’s projects in the interwar years, exchanging ideas and seeking ties. Nevertheless, Hindu nationalism was and is no copycat fascism; its ideology, and the immense violence it produces, are homegrown, even as they are deeply contextualised in the global fascist moment of the interwar period and its echoes in our own time.
Hindutva, as Hindu nationalism’s core ideology is called, was first formulated by Vinayak Savarkar in 1923, then updated by Deendayal Upadhyaya, chief ideologue of the BJS, the precursor of India’s current ruling party, the BJP. Its distinguishing feature is its brand of violence, which functions through absorption. Savarkar sought to eradicate Muslims through the reproductive incorporation of Muslim women into the Hindu ‘race’. He produced, from what other racisms called ‘miscegenation’, a robust ideology of race in India.
Under Upadhyaya’s aegis, in 1965, Hindutva was reformulated as Integral Humanism and absorption elevated to a theology. India’s essence was declared to be integrality, or monism, dismissing difference as illusion and rendering the existence of the other as separate from the Hindu self theologically impossible. No future for Muslims in India other than complete erasure can be imagined here.
We know about the exclusion of ‘the other’. Yet violence that functions through the inclusion – as absorption – of ‘the other’ can be just as catastrophic. Hindutva is widely held to be a form of fascism – one that transcends the mere adaptation of European ideas and teaches us about fascism elsewhere. Racism built on miscegenation might at first appear to be different from Nazi racism, yet it resonates with Nazi Germanisation in the occupied east and whitening campaigns in settler colonial contexts. In this way, Indian thought holds universal lessons.
Luna Sabastian is author of Fascism in India: Race, Caste, and Hindutva (Harvard, 2025)
]]> Does history really repeat itself? Why we should be careful in drawing parallels with the past https://www.historyextra.com/membership/does-history-really-repeat-itself-why-we-should-be-careful-in-drawing-parallels-with-the-past/ Mon, 03 Aug 2026 15:00:16 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/does-history-really-repeat-itself-why-we-should-be-careful-in-drawing-parallels-with-the-past/ It’s human nature to believe that history repeats itself. But attempts to draw parallels with the past can be misguided – even dangerous Across the early months of 1990, Margaret Thatcher’s controversial Community Charge, nicknamed the Poll Tax, triggered an explosion of opposition – one with echoes of the past.
“Re-enacting 1381 revolt,” reported the Kentish Gazette in March that year. “Anti-poll tax protesters going on a three-day march to London later this month.”
For the paper, and many other commentators besides, the protests were a direct repeat of the Peasants’ Revolt – itself in part the result of unpopular poll taxes – more than 600 years earlier. Both expressions of public rage brought violence to the capital. The implication was clear: that the English then, and British now, would never stand for an unfair tax; and that, as philosopher George Santayana wrote in 1905: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
The question of whether history repeats itself has generated countless pithy observations like Santayana’s. The novelist and wit Mark Twain is often misquoted as saying: “History may not repeat itself, but sometimes it rhymes.” A great many have offered instead: “But historians repeat each other.” Yet, for some, perhaps, “it’s all just a little bit of history repeating”, as Shirley Bassey sang in her 1997 collaboration with electronic music duo Propellerheads.
The Australian historian of ideas GW Trompf argued in 1979 that the concept of historical recurrence was instrumental in the development of how history was written in the west. This repetition, Trompf noted, “includes such notions as retribution, rebirth, reenactment, and even imitation”. There have been many – from practitioners of ancient religions to modern social scientists – who have seen systemic cycles as key structures to understand our world. Meanwhile, a preoccupation with repetition persists today both within popular history, to make historical subjects appear relevant, and in academic history, where timeliness is necessary to secure research funding.
Why, then, does it appear to us that history repeats? What does this tell us about what history is, and what it is for? Can understanding this phenomenon help us better inform our view of the past? After all, it is not simply a matter of whether it is useful or entertaining to compare across the ages. This concerns our very relationship with continuity and change. For, if history repeats, as the biblical author of Ecclesiastes put it: “What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun.”
- Read more | Three thousand years ago, the ancient Greeks turned an even older civilisation into a monster
The course of political history is presented as particularly replete with repetition in the formation, organisation and decay of states. It is worth offering a few examples. Trompf highlighted the anacyclosis, or cycling of governments, popularised by second-century BC Greek historian Polybius as the archetypal historical recurrence. This posits that states rotate through six stages: monarchy, tyranny, aristocracy, oligarchy, democracy, and ochlocracy or mob-rule. We still sometimes think in similar terms and use such terminology today.
Cycles are also an essential part of Chinese historical tradition. In the ‘dynastic cycle’ each successive imperial dynasty would unite China after a period of disorder, their rule legitimised by a ‘Mandate of Heaven’. After a period of peace and prosperity, each would become increasingly ineffectual and corrupt while beset by wars and natural disasters until the state disintegrated into another period of turmoil.
Mesoamerican civilisations, meanwhile, such as the Olmec and Maya, famously developed intricate calendars based on astronomical cycles. “This is obviously cyclical time,” American historian Calvin Martin observed in 1992, “connoting cyclical history.” The message of the cycle, he added, “was always of doom”.
In Europe and North America today there is a borderline obsession with the rise and fall of the Roman empire. Similarities to its beginnings among the ruins of the Roman Republic in the first century BC are seen to have recurred again and again, from Napoleon Bonaparte’s supplanting of the first French Republic in 1799 with the Coup of 18 Brumaire, to Adolf Hitler’s dismantling of the Weimar Republic in 1933–34. Advocates of liberal democracies frequently express fears that a latter-day Julius Caesar – equivalent to the Roman populist dictator – will emerge in their midst.
Parallels with the Roman empire’s ‘fall’ in the west in the fifth century AD are likewise used everywhere, especially by critics of the European Union. In 2021, Boris Johnson, then British prime minister, claimed that the empire fell “largely as a result of uncontrolled immigration”, and “Europe went into a dark ages that lasted a very long time. The point is that it can happen again.” This is a problematic comparison and – considering that, in 1984, the German historian Alexander Demandt collated no fewer than 210 different explanations for the fall of Rome – incredibly simplistic. Besides, everything will fall apart if you wait long enough.
Such evaluations are undoubtedly made for political reasons and are clearly used – in the George Santayana fashion – to warn against repeating mistakes. In other words, the need for lessons is reason enough to seek comparisons.
A similar approach could work when considering individuals. In his Parallel Lives, the ancient Greek biographer Plutarch deliberately set out key figures from history in pairs, one Greek and one Roman, to reveal their common virtues and behaviours. Plutarch’s approach offers us one possible explanation for why history appears to repeat itself: that it is inseparable from the very practice of historical writing.
That “historians repeat each other” is indisputable. One need only scan a bookshop’s shelves or any work’s bibliographic references to sense the great tangled web of duplication that scholarship weaves. This has a long history. Ancient writers would frequently mimic the structure, themes and narratives from previous works they admired, or even incorporate whole passages. Medieval chroniclers would likewise often re-use, sometimes almost verbatim, episodes from ancient histories. The 11th-century Norman chronicler William of Poitiers even lifted Julius Caesar’s famous saying “veni, vidi, vici” (“I came, I saw, I conquered”) from the work of Roman historian Suetonius, and had his patron, William the Conqueror, say it instead.
Just as writers imitate and emulate, it is evidently normal for us to seek patterns in the past, to pick out ideas, concepts and behaviours that seem familiar to us. This seems to be how our minds work. To make a personal connection across time is an act of empathy, and that is a very human trait.
Yet some would argue that history repeats itself precisely because humans have not changed much for thousands of years, and so are liable to organise themselves and behave in similar ways. People were born, they lived and died, built settlements, fought wars, experienced famines and disease. Add to this what we might term the historical constants – geography, the environment; that is to say, the physical constraints on our actions in the world – and we see a narrowing of the number of ways that history can play out.
In this vein, there have been some worthwhile attempts to describe seemingly recurrent models of societies across time. Patricia Crone’s excellent 2003 book, Pre-Industrial Societies: Anatomy of the Pre-Modern World, is one example. She saw that past “conditions impose certain constraints on what can be done and tried out, so that there are striking uniformities behind the otherwise bewildering variety”.
A general description of history – as we experience it – would, therefore, be that some things change, other things stay the same. There is a sense in this that change occurs at different rates, that certain periods of history are calm, when continuity rules. But then, suddenly, something shifts, and the proverbial ground beneath us becomes treacherous. Then, to make sense of our situation and, hopefully, reassure us, we turn to that vast repository of human experience: history.
Yet one could argue that even assumed constants also invariably alter. A view of perpetual transformation was offered by the Roman poet Ovid around AD 8 in his Metamorphoses. As he presented the philosophy of the ancient Greek Pythagoras, Ovid wrote: “Nothing in all the world remains unchanged. All things are in a state of flux, all shapes receive a changing nature.” In our historical terms, technologies are developed, geography is overcome, the climate changes and human institutions evolve.
We may not fully possess the language to capture this reality. To borrow a concept from linguistics, that of ‘false friends’, we frequently assume familiar words always describe the same thing, when in fact they conceal radically different meanings. Take one powerful example: the word ‘slavery’. It is used with respect to all chattel bondage across time, everywhere from Shang dynasty China (1766–1122 BC) to slavery in the 21st century. Yet this one word disguises the huge variations in such institutions of bonded labour, one that has – in certain cases – encouraged apologists.
It allowed proponents of slavery in European empires and the United States in the 18th and 19th centuries to liken themselves to ancient Romans or Greeks. They saw them as their noble forebears who likewise saw it as a ‘natural’ state. Pro-slavery advocates in antebellum America, political scientist S. Sara Monoson explained in 2011, would “treat Greece as an exemplar of what an ‘unmitigated’ slave society can accomplish”. But the plantation slavery of more recent times had little in common with slavery in the ancient world. We now understand plantations as more capitalist – essentially brutal factories for the mass production of commodities like sugar or cotton.
Even where terms appear specific and historically contextualised, we encounter problems. According to the modern Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis, feudalism – the supposed social, economic and political system of medieval Europe – has been reborn in the 21st century as techno-feudalism. He sees the huge, rich and influential tech companies as holding power equivalent to the ‘feudal’ lords of the past. Yet a good number of historians – most famously Elizabeth AR Brown in the 1970s and Susan Reynolds in the 1990s – have felt feudalism to be a misleading anachronistic construct which implies a unified social and political system that never existed in the Middle Ages. The dilemma is that, without such abstract historical concepts – once seen as robust, now as misleading – it is increasingly difficult to make comparisons.
“No moment is ever exactly the same as any other,” American historian Marci Shore observed in 2020, “just like no human being is exactly the same as any other.” Shore, however, did allow that, “nevertheless, there are essences we can distil, things we learn from the past”. There is something distinctly modern about all this. Age-old sentiments like “there is nothing new under the sun” were couched in the certainties of a fixed, ordered, universe, governed by strong traditions and powerful deities. By contrast, our efforts to learn take place in a time of “everlasting uncertainty and agitation” that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels described in their Communist Manifesto (1848), in which “all that is solid melts into air”.
If one analyses the relative frequency of words and phrases (such as by using Google Books Ngram Viewer tool), we find “history repeats” rarely appeared in print until the 1860s, after which it rapidly gained in popularity, first peaking in 1900. There was another rise in use during and after the First World War and then, surprisingly, it almost vanished at the end of the Second World War. Put simply, it seems as though our concern with history repeating – in the English-speaking world at least – occurs during periods of extreme existential crisis, when the future appears uncertain. Alarmingly, its use is now rising again.
Many have drawn parallels between the Russo-Ukrainian war (2014/2022–present) and the First World War, mainly for their trench warfare, frontal attacks by waves of soldiers on fortified positions and artillery duels. Innovative drone warfare appears a distinctive feature of the more recent conflict, as air warfare was for the Great War, so both have been noted for their rapid technological advances.
Unsurprisingly, man-made climate change is a major preoccupation today, and so the study of environmental history has expanded. The knowledge gained about our vulnerabilities within our own degraded ecosystems has made us more cognisant of how past societies might have been likewise unsustainable. The story of the Polynesian Easter Island civilisation, the Rapa Nui, was long thought a case in point: a microcosm of our own situation. The story went that overpopulation and deforestation led to their near complete collapse before their first encounter with Dutch explorers in 1722. This story was always too neat a comparison. In reality, the decline of the Rapa Nui had more to do with the introduction of European slave raids and diseases.
On which note, the Covid pandemic that hit the world from 2020 immediately prompted comparisons – some implicit, some explicit – with the Black Death (1346–c52). I myself was guilty of this. But the differences were, in fact, stark. The latter was spectacularly more deadly. We now think mortality from plague impacted between a third and a half of the population, perhaps even more. Some might point to the near absence of a modern scientific culture in the Middle Ages and compare this to the misinformation and pseudo-science that circulated during Covid, but this is not a fair assessment. Medieval societies framed their suffering in their own terms; we should not expect them to have done otherwise.
There has been much talk of the impact of artificial intelligence on our economy and society over the coming decades. Sir Patrick Vallance, Britain’s former chief scientist, said in 2023: “There will be a big impact on jobs and that impact could be as big as the industrial revolution was.” There are optimistic comparisons to be made with the epochal period of change that began in Britain in the 18th century and spread through Europe and the world in the 19th. Then as now, new technology may be disruptive but ultimately the economy would reconfigure into a state of greater efficiency, bringing ever more prosperity.
Yet we must never underestimate the broader changes brought about by such revolutions in the past. They transformed not only how we worked, but also how we lived and thought. What a future might look like when machines do our thinking for us is vastly more uncertain. Without white-collar jobs, we could revert to a society without a prominent middle class and with an economy driven by elite consumption. Such a society might indeed superficially resemble those of the past. In reality, whatever is to come – however familiar – is likely to be a different and distinct civilisation.
Twain never said history sometimes rhymes. The first attribution of this to him was, by all accounts, as recent as 1970, six decades after his death. However, Twain did write (with his co-author, Charles Dudley Warner, in The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today) that: “History never repeats itself, but the kaleidoscopic combinations of the pictured present often seem to be constructed out of the broken fragments of antique legends.” While less succinct, this seems to be an altogether better assessment. Many aspects of today offer muddled reflections of times gone by. Yet, ultimately, the times themselves, as Ovid would say, “nova sunt semper”. That is, they “are always new”.
Dr Robert Blackmore is a historian and a visiting academic at the University of Southampton
This article was first published in the August 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
]]> Was Shakespeare a secret political radical? One play's hidden symbols reveal the truth https://www.historyextra.com/membership/was-shakespeare-a-secret-political-radical/ Thu, 09 Jul 2026 12:01:46 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/was-shakespeare-a-secret-political-radical/ The playwright smuggled a radical political message supporting the controversial Earl of Essex into one of his most famous plays, according to new research When the budding playwright William Shakespeare arrived in London around 1590, he was stepping into a theatrical world which was exciting, experimental – and incredibly dangerous.
The Tudor authorities operated a brutal regime of censorship designed to stamp out political disobedience, supported by spies, violent interrogation and torture.
Queen Elizabeth I – a monarch who employed her own spymasters – was particularly anxious about the potential power of plays, which drew thousands of spectators to the city’s playhouses and could influence ambitious courtiers during performances at the royal court. Many went on to become printed bestsellers.
- Read more | Elizabeth I’s shadowy spy network was tasked with uncovering secret conspiracies. Here’s what it found
She ordered that all dramatic performances be approved by the Master of the Revels before they could be staged. Any material questioning the Crown’s political authority or its religious agenda would be strongly repressed. This did not prevent political ideas from reaching the stage, but it forced playwrights to communicate indirectly, through historical parallels, allegory and double entendre.
Playwrights who flouted this censorship were arrested, interrogated, fined and sometimes imprisoned. Ben Jonson, for example, was locked up in 1597 and all copies of his “slanderous” play The Isle of Dogs were destroyed, while co-writer Thomas Nashe had his home raided.
Scholars have long believed that Shakespeare disguised his criticisms of the Elizabethan court by setting many of his plays in foreign countries, where he was free to critique courtiers and even monarchs.
But new research argues that the Bard was a daring political rebel who used one of his most famous plays to express support for a radical court faction shortly before it mounted a rebellion against the Queen.
Shakespeare’s As You Like It and the Essex Rebellion
Shakespeare experts Dr Chris Laoutaris and Dr Yasmin Arshad have uncovered cryptic ties between a mysterious portrait, Shakespeare’s comedy As You Like It and Robert Devereux, the Earl of Essex – a disgraced nobleman who led an unsuccessful rebellion against Elizabeth in 1601 and was subsequently beheaded.
These connections suggest not only that the playwright may have been sympathetic to the Earl, but that Essex’s supporters saw Shakespeare and his acting company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, as allies who could help them launch a popular revolt against the Crown.
In one scene in Shakespeare’s As You Like It, written in 1599, the sight of a wounded stag – languishing and “weeping” at the edge of a stream – greatly upsets a character.
The arrow-struck animal is described as “innocent” and a herd of deer that refuse to help it are criticised as “greasy citizens”.
On its own, the episode can be read as a broader satire on human selfishness. Laoutaris and Arshad argue, however, that contemporary audiences may also have recognised a more specific political reference. They suggest this expression of pity for a mistreated animal was a coded message of support for the Earl of Essex, who would go on to lead his doomed uprising only two years later.
This could also explain why As You Like It was temporarily banned from being printed in 1600, an act of censorship which historians have long puzzled over.
And it would suggest Shakespeare held dangerous political allegiances for which others had been imprisoned or even lost their heads.
The key clue is a portrait known as the Persian Lady, painted in the 1590s by Tudor court artist Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger. It depicts a woman dressed in opulent, oriental clothing, who is crowning a teary-eyed stag with a garland of pansies.
A riddling sonnet below laments the sitter’s “restless mind”, musing that “With pensive thoughts my weeping stag I crown/whose melancholy tears my cares express”.
Laoutaris and Arshad have pinpointed Lady Penelope Rich as the glamorous woman, whose identity has baffled art historians for centuries.
The poetic verses, they say, allude to another Penelope: Odysseus’ wife from The Odyssey, whose mind is also presented as restless – and to whom the beautiful Lady Rich was often compared by the many poets, artists and musicians she inspired. The Earl of Essex was Lady Rich’s brother. A dashing courtier, he was once a cherished favourite of the aging Elizabeth.
In their new study, published in the Times Literary Supplement, the researchers point out that Essex’s coat of arms featured a stag, meaning he may be the weeping deer Lady Rich is comforting in the portrait.
The portrait and the play emerged as Essex’s relationship with the Queen was deteriorating, although the full rebellion still lay ahead. At the time of the portrait’s composition, Essex was disgraced and under arrest for agreeing an unauthorised truce with rebels in Ireland, whose uprising he had been unable to put down by force, before illegally returning to England. This caused a rift between the leading courtly factions.
To support their cause, Essex’s supporters had circulated scandalous libels accusing his enemies at court of corruption, which the researchers say also alluded to the image of a stag.
Is everything we thought we knew about Shakespeare’s politics wrong?
If this research is correct that Shakespeare’s “weeping” stag was a message of support for the controversial Earl, it could upend academics’ view of the Bard’s willingness to publicly take political sides.
“The stag in As You Like It could only have been regarded with suspicion by the Elizabethan censors,” explains Laoutaris of the University of Birmingham’s Shakespeare Institute, who says it accompanied “an avalanche of libels from Essex’s supporters, as well as from Essex and Lady Rich themselves”.
The description of Shakespeare’s deer as a “poor and broken bankrupt” reflected Essex’s precarious finances. Even after being liberated in August 1600, he was stripped of his public offices and never regained his lucrative sweet wine monopoly.
Laoutaris adds that the animal is described as “sequestered”, which could be a reference to Essex’s arrest, and was also the term for the legal process by which someone’s “land and property were forcibly confiscated after engaging in illegal or subversive activity”.
The argument becomes more consequential when the play is considered alongside a better-known encounter between Essex’s followers and Shakespeare’s company, with the findings shedding new light on the Essex faction’s decision to commission a performance of Shakespeare’s Richard II at the Globe by the Chamberlain’s Men on 7 February 1601 – just a day before the Earl assembled about 300 supporters and marched into London.
In the play, King Richard II is deposed as England’s monarch. It’s usually thought that Shakespeare’s troupe was in the wrong place at the wrong time and had nothing to do with the short-lived coup, which lasted a single day.
The new research may suggest that Essex’s men turned to the players because they knew Shakespeare was sympathetic to their cause – and hoped a rousing performance could encourage London’s public to rise up in support of the Earl.
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Arshad says: “Shakespeare uses language and imagery that is provocative, tipping humour over into satire, and that would have been deemed potentially libellous by the authorities.”
As You Like It was among three Shakespeare plays to be temporarily restricted from publication in August 1600, she notes. Another was Henry V, which includes a chorus “praising Essex to the skies” for his military action in Ireland, written before he had fallen out of favour.
Arshad explains: “All the plays that were ‘staied’ were published shortly afterwards, except As You Like It, which wasn’t issued until after Shakespeare’s death, in the First Folio of 1623. Henry V was published initially without the chorus that championed the Earl of Essex.”
This new research suggests this delay in publication may be related to the politically radical message Shakespeare had smuggled into the play – offering sympathetic support for a spurned former favourite of Elizabeth’s only a couple of years before he mounted an ambitious, if unsuccessful, rebellion.
]]> Who was the real Agnes Shakespeare? The true story behind Hamnet's leading lady https://www.historyextra.com/period/tudor/real-agnes-shakespeare-anne-hathaway-hamnet/ Tue, 07 Jul 2026 17:43:37 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/period/tudor/real-agnes-shakespeare-anne-hathaway-hamnet/ Hamnet may take its name from Shakespeare’s doomed son, but director Chloé Zhao’s film belongs to Agnes Shakespeare, the woman better known to history as Anne Hathaway. Blending sparse historical fact with rich fiction, the drama reimagines her as a healer, mother and wife – and the emotional force behind Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy Being entitled Hamnet, you might expect Chloé Zhao’s movie to focus squarely on the life of the young Shakespeare boy. Or perhaps, you’d expect that it’d be the boy’s father who takes centre stage. You’d be wrong.
No, it’s Agnes Shakespeare, played by Jessie Buckley in an Academy Award-winning performance, who is the beating heart of this Elizabethan period drama.
But just how accurately does Hamnet portray Agnes and what is the story behind the historical figure who inspired Buckley’s character?
Who was the real Agnes Shakespeare?
While the name Agnes Shakespeare is used in historical records, such as her father’s will, and in various works of literature (and films such as Hamnet), the wife of William Shakespeare is more commonly known as Anne Hathaway.
Very little is truly known about Agnes, with most documentation about her life largely relating to her marriage to William Shakespeare. But we do know that she most likely grew up in her family’s farmhouse in Shottery, a village not far away from Stratford-upon-Avon.
She was born in 1556 and died on August 6, 1623, surviving her husband by seven years. They had three children together, including Hamnet, the boy who inspired Maggie O’Farrell’s novel and the subsequent movie.
How accurate is Hamnet’s portrayal of Agnes?
Much like the real history behind Hamnet as a whole, the premise of the film (and the book) is built on the few facts we know about Agnes Shakespeare, with the many gaps filled in by imagination and speculation.
There are few records of Agnes, and in particular there is little or nothing relating to her general routines and ways of life. That’s where fiction comes into play, with O’Farrell inventing certain character traits, and even going as far as to depict Agnes as a healer who practised rituals rooted in folklore and had prophetic abilities.
In a less fantastical sense, the fact that Agnes is shown to read and write in Hamnet is also highly likely to be inaccurate. As the daughter of a farmer, there is little chance that someone such as Agnes would have been taught any kind of literary skills in Elizabethan England – unless she learned them from her playwright husband. Indeed, the only aspects of Agnes’ life that we know Hamnet gets right for certain are the timeline of the major events in her life, and the broad strokes of her family life and marriage with William Shakespeare.
Why is Anne Hathaway called Agnes in Hamnet?
Historically, most of the records pertaining to William Shakespeare’s wife refer to her as Anne Hathaway (using her maiden name) or Anne Shakespeare after their marriage in 1582.
However, when her father, Richard Hathaway, died in 1581, he listed her as Agnes Hathaway. In 16th-century England, the names Agnes and Anne were interchangeable, and it would appear her father preferred to use Agnes rather than the more commonly used Anne.
- Read more | The most common accidental way to die in Tudor England reveals surprising truths about daily life
The name Anne was used in her marriage certificate and other legal documents, so it’s fair to assume that she leaned more towards Anne in her everyday life.
Was Anne Hathaway really a healer?
There is no evidence that Anne Hathaway was a healer or that she dabbled in herbalism or mysticism. This concept is entirely rooted in Maggie O’Farrell’s descriptions of the character in her 2020 novel.
Still, the ideas of herbalist treatments and being highly attuned to nature are not exactly outrageous nor uncommon, particularly at that time in history, when more natural medicines were a primary source of healthcare for most people.
Everyday citizens in Elizabethan England would often rely on local knowledge and botanical remedies. It was usually the wives and mothers in a household who would be responsible for growing various herbs and using these to form treatments as and when needed.
So, while there is no proof that Anne Hathaway was a healer, spiritual or otherwise, it is not inconceivable that she would be aware of these kinds of medical processes and would quite likely have used herbal treatments in her lifetime.
What was Anne Hathaway and Shakespeare’s marriage like?
In the film, the first meeting between Agnes and William is purely by chance. Agnes is seen wandering in woodland and William catches sight of her from the window of the building where he is tutoring children. Drawn to the mysterious woman, William leaves his class and speaks to Agnes, and they almost immediately strike up an intense relationship.
In reality, we do not know exactly how the pair met. However, we do know that they lived about a mile apart during that time, with Anne/Agnes residing in Shottery and William living in Stratford-upon-Avon. Their fathers – John Shakespeare a glover and Richard Hathaway a farmer – would more than likely have done business with one another. Indeed, it appears that John paid some debts for Richard, suggesting they knew each other well and might have even been friends. So, it’s probable that Anne and William would have crossed paths quite naturally.
- Read more | What happened to Shakespeare's daughters? A guide to the playwright's family life and descendants
Another element of real life that the film aligns with effectively is the nature of the couple’s marriage. Based on records of their marriage and the birth of their first child, Susanna, we know that Anne was roughly three months pregnant when she and William tied the knot. The idea of a “shotgun wedding”, and one that her family would have been disapproving of, is likely to be true to history.
William and Anne were married in November 1582 under a special license. The age gap between the couple – William was just 18 years old, while Anne was 26 – was quite uncommon, with William considered a young groom for the period.
They had two more children, twins Hamnet and Judith, born in 1585. As we know, Hamnet would die at the age of 11 in 1596, causing heartbreak within the family.
- Read more | What happened to Shakespeare's daughters? A guide to the playwright's family life and descendants
In Hamnet, the strain of William living and working in London amplifies the pain suffered by Agnes back at home in Stratford-upon-Avon. This plays into the idea that they shared an intense and difficult marriage after Hamnet’s passing.
For a long time, historians believed much the same, too. However, more recently, the idea that William abandoned his family in their time of crisis has been questioned, with evidence suggesting William and Anne actually lived together in London between 1600 and 1610. In addition, love letters addressed to “good Mrs. Shakespeare” suggest a far more affectionate and happy marriage than initially thought.
When William retired in 1613, he moved back to Stratford-upon-Avon to be with Anne in their home at New Place. He died in 1616.
What did Shakespeare leave Anne Hathaway in his will?
After he famously left Anne the “second best bed” in their house, William Shakespeare’s will drove the narrative of a marriage that took a turn for the worst, which many believed was a slight against his wife.
The truth is, traditionally, the “best bed” in the house would have been reserved for guests, with the “second best bed” being the marital bed. In light of this, historians and literary experts now perceive William’s gesture to be a more sentimental and loving bequest.
As we mentioned earlier, Anne (or Agnes) was also a benefactor in her father, Richard Hathaway’s will. From him, she received the sum of ten marks, which would equate to around £6, 13 shillings and fourpence. That money was to be paid “at the day of her marriage”, which happened to be just over a year after the death of her father in September 1581.
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