History Today

C.R. Boxer profiles the learned and pious Duchess of Aveiro, a proud and forceful member of the Iberian aristocracy, who devoted her wealth to the propagation of the Gospel overseas.

C.R. Boxer describes how the cultivated Viceroy of Portuguese India, on his way home from Goa, had a costly misadventure in the Indian Ocean.

During the fifteenth century the Medici banking house in Florence ‘almost passed belief’ in power and influence.

Robert E. Zegger describes the alarming dip in Anglo-French relations, half way through the reign of Napoleon III.

Robert Woodall describes the state of early parliamentary reporting, during a period when it was disapproved by Members .

A secret ballot at general elections had been a reformers’ demand since the seventeenth century. It was achieved two hundred years later, writes Robert Woodall, after much experience of bribery.

Alan Wharham describes how the tithing system, by which the Anglican Church took a regular share of the hard-working farmer’s produce, was not finally abolished until 1936.

In housing management and the preservation of the countryside, writes Alan S. Watts, Octavia Hill was a Victorian pioneer.

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.