In the Shadow of the Poor Law
Britain has been a high inequality, high poverty nation for most of the last 200 years.
Social
Take me to the Church
The medieval parish church was the meeting point of many different things, both sacred and secular.
Baby Boom or Bust?
The Covid pandemic seems to have caused a birth dearth. Historically, how have countries responded to falling birthrates?
Meeting an Urgent Need
The First World War threw widows and their brothers-in-law together, but their marriages were considered incestuous.
Pigeon Racing: A Miner’s World?
Men who spent their working lives underground found a new world of freedom in racing birds.
All By Myself
Solitude was treated with suspicion in the Middle Ages. For most people it has only been a possibility in recent times.
Abbots Ascendant
William Chester Jordan’s study of one of medieval Europe’s great monastic rivalries suggests that social mobility may have been more common in the Middle Ages than historians previously thought.
Hard Work
The British government’s universal credit scheme seeks solutions to problems that have frustrated politicians for centuries.
Hooligans in History
From Garotters to Peaky Blinders: is youth ‘not what it used to be’?
Inside the Ancient Bull Cult
King Minos and the Minotaur remain shrouded in mystery and mythology, yet evidence of a Bronze Age ‘Bull Cult’ at the Minoan palaces abounds. Were bulls merely for entertainment or did they have a deeper significance?