England

Unpicking a tangle of history, myth and misunderstanding reveals why, for so long, we believed King Harold was shot through the eye at the Battle of Hastings.

The discovery in Victorian London of the remains of ancient animals – and a fascination with their modern descendants – helped to transform people’s ideas of the deep past, as Chris Manias reveals.

In the 18th century, when women in scholarship were not encouraged and medieval languages were little-studied even by men, Elizabeth Elstob become a pioneer in Anglo-Saxon studies, her work even finding its way into the hands of Thomas Jefferson.

George Molyneaux explores how the realm of the English, conquered in 1066, was formed. 

R.J. White analyses the events of the “Derbyshire Insurrection” - otherwise known as the Pentrich Revolution - as an example of local history in its bearing on national history.

As forests and wild deer diminished in England, sportsmen took to the fox; Charles Chenevix Trench describes how hunting became the pastime of more varied social classes.

After a happy marriage, writes Joanna Richardson, the Heiress Apparent died, three years before her father became King George IV.

Joanna Richardson describes some French visitors to England, from Louis XVIII and Madame de Stael to Verlaine and Mallarme.

John Prest describes how the progressive Whig reformer of the 1830s became unpopular as Prime Minister after 1846.