Social

Stephen Usherwood describes how an Asiatic flea, living as a parasite upon black rats, caused as many as 100,000 deaths during the summer and autumn of 1665.

R.W. Davies describes how the Romans were often suspicious of doctors; and contemporary satirists, including Martial, cracked many jokes at their expense. Medicine, however, was now beginning to be practised on strictly scientific lines.

Michael Paffard opens for the visitor Thomas Tusser’s books on husbandry, which expounded the practical virtues of ‘thrift’ to Tudor farmers.

Stewart Perowne describes how, in the fourteenth century ‘the last of the Roman tribunes’, but one of the first of political liberators.

Joanna Richardson describes how, during the 1830s, the world of Bohemia offered a warm and fruitful climate to artists and writers.

George Green describes the experiences of his grandfather, a typical Liverpool docker’s life of the late nineteenth century.

Anthony Bryer describes how, during the tenth and eleventh centuries, between Turks and Byzantines, Armenian kingdoms led a perilous life. 

David Green describes how, during her long life, the Duchess of Marlborough ceaselessly sought for a panacea against illness and disease.

From the fourteenth century until the building of the railways, writes D.J. Rowe, the Newcastle keelmen were indispensable and pugnacious carriers between collieries and sea-going ships.

Lionel Kochan traces the development of chess, from its origins to the end of the fifteenth century.