All Articles
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Jailing Santa Claus and Plum Pudding Riots: 17th-Century Puritans’ War on Christmas
Forget today’s faux outrage over “Happy Holidays” and Starbucks’ festive cups, England’s godliest Protestants launched a proper attack on the holiday nearly 400 years ago.
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The Dramatist Who Dared Document England’s Forgotten Plague of 1625
Forty years before the Great Plague of London, the pestilence killed tens of thousands in England’s capital city — and was documented in grisly detail by Thomas Dekker.
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How Boozy Church Ales Brought Tudor and Stuart Communities Together — Before Tearing Them Apart
Merry feasts, lavish drinking, and colourful pageants put England’s church ales on a collision course with miserable Puritans. Things came to a dramatic head in Somerset in 1607.
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Ram Alley: The London Passageway That Was a Notorious Criminal Refuge in the 1600s
An obscure legal loophole meant an inconspicuous lane on Fleet Street became a criminal sanctuary, loved by overdue debtors and feared by London’s constables.
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Claiming to Know Fairies, a Fake Fortune Teller Became Tudor England’s Most Notorious Scammer
Judith Phillips humiliated a rich farmer in Hampshire by riding him like a donkey, conned a wealthy widow out of her fortune, and became a scandalous celebrity in Elizabethan London — inspiring ballads, pamphlets, and possibly a play.
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What Was Life Like for a Pamphleteer in Elizabethan England?
Early professional writing was a poorly remunerated, creatively restricted, and generally disreputable career. How on earth did it produce some of England’s greatest minds?
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This 17th-Century Handbook Promised to Satisfy All Curiosities, From Magic Tricks to Firework Dragons
John White’s instructive 1651 pamphlet offered readers guidance for all kinds of experiments, illusions, and eccentric contraptions.
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Dressing up as the Devil Was the Strangest Lie Detection Technique in Stuart England
How do you ensure a key witness in a murder case is telling the truth in an age before polygraph tests and body language analysis? You may need the help of fancy dress.
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A Guide to Tudor England’s Criminal Underworld (And the Writers Who Invented It)
Was Elizabethan London really the site of an active, dangerous, and highly organised criminal underworld complete with its own ranks, cryptic dialect, and conventions?
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Should We Pay More Attention to Shakespeare’s Contemporaries?
More than 400 years since the publication of the First Folio, there is no English writer quite so ubiquitous as Shakespeare. But some academics and creatives are asking a scandalous question: is it time the Bard’s contemporaries got a voice of their own?
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England’s First Printed News Report Was About Its Triumph Over the Scottish at the Battle of Flodden
The earliest known news pamphlet to be published in England was an eyewitness account of the violent clash which cost James IV of Scotland his life in 1513.
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Three Tales of the Supernatural in Early Modern England, From a Ghostly Lawyer to a Flying Devil
England saw much change between the final years of Elizabeth I’s reign and the Civil War, but its bookshops remained reliably stocked with reports of black magic and ghostly goings-on.
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Why the Pickaxe Murder of a Wealthy Miller Sparked a Media Frenzy in 1614
When Edward Hall was killed by his own servants, one of England’s most prominent news publishers set to work capitalising on the public’s morbid curiosity.
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Shop Signs in Early Modern England Were Much More Interesting Than You’d Think
The crude illustrations on wooden signposts which marked out pubs and shops often came to adopt identities of their own.
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Why the Ghosts of Henry VIII and Cardinal Wolsey Haunted England’s Civil War
The Tudor monarch and Catholic statesman both appeared as restless spirits in revolutionary London, if polemical pamphlets of the time are to be believed.
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The 17th-Century ‘Flying’ Ship Which Sailed Over a Church Tower
William Bush built a pinnace in 1607 which climbed a steeple in Berkshire, rode like a tricycle across the nearby countryside, and sailed down the Thames to London — all under the command of a single man.
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Griffin Flood: The Murderous Snitch Who Terrorised Stuart London
A corrupt informer in early 17th-century England harassed, extorted, deceived, and persecuted those who stood in his way. It was only a matter of time until he took a life.
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A Crude Woodcut of a 17th Century Family and the Ballads it Accompanied Shed Light on Domestic Abuse in Stuart England
A wholesome picture of a family at the dinner table in 1638 is not all that it appears to be.
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Why the Duke of Buckingham’s 1627 Siege of Saint-Martin-de-Ré was a Stuart PR Nightmare
When George Villiers’ siege of a French island didn’t go to plan, he turned to England’s printed news to salvage his image.
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Corrupt Cooks and Troublesome Tapsters in Early Modern England
Two humorous 1641 pamphlets shed light on the deceptive practices of tapsters, cooks, butchers, and brewers.
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Anthony Nixon: 17th Century Writer, Journalist, and Plagiarist
Anthony Nixon was one of England’s first professional writers. He was also a brazen plagiarist.
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A Possible Author or Inspiration for Ralph Harford’s Widecombe-in-the-Moor Thunderstorm Pamphlets of 1638
A borrowed phrase may shed light on the origins of a fascinating series of pamphlets about a deadly thunderstorm which struck Devon in 1638.
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Widecombe-in-the-Moor’s 1638 Thunderstorm: A Case Study in 17th-Century News Reporting
When a devastating and deadly thunderstorm struck Devon in 1638, it prompted a flurry of printed news reports.
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Joseph Swetnam and (Early) Modern Misogyny
A misogynistic pamphlet lambasting women became a best-seller and sparked a literary battle in early Stuart England.
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Handguns in Early Modern England: Crime, Class, and Social Order
Firearms in Tudor and Stuart England not only posed a threat to life but also signified boundaries of class and gender.
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Tracing the Seventeenth-Century Roots of ‘Journalism’
Audiences of today turn to the internet, social media, and news outlets to get their news. Things weren’t so different 400 years ago.