Author: Philippa Coles

I came late to early medieval England. At school, 1066 was treated like the franchise reboot: everything before it a muddle of “Angles and Saxons and maybe some Vikings”. It…

When people ask me about “post-Roman Britain travel”, they usually mean mosaics, legions and Hadrian’s Wall tea rooms. What they rarely mean is the bit afterwards – the two or…

I first got hooked on Viking life in Britain standing on a very ordinary-looking street in York. I was at the JORVIK Viking Centre, doing the thing you’re meant to…

Until my late twenties, Hadrian’s Wall lived in my head as a single line: one emperor, one big decision, a neat stone barrier keeping “Romans” on one side and “barbarians”…

My relationship with London Black Death history started, oddly enough, with a badly drawn rat. I was about ten. A primary school project, one of those sugar-paper posters with titles…

My relationship with the Domesday Book started with a bored teenage me in a draughty county record office, flicking through a modern English translation and thinking, “So this is it?…

When people ask me for “Domesday Book villages to visit”, I usually disappoint them by saying something very un-touristy: the most Domesday-ish places in England often feel oddly ordinary. No…

I didn’t care about the Domesday Book at university. It felt like admin: lists of manors, taxes, plough-teams. The sort of thing someone in a beige cardigan would get very…