Category: History

If you type “Alfred the Great historical sites” into a search engine, you mostly get a neat heroic tour: the wise king of Wessex, the cakes, the burnt fingers, the…

If you drive long enough in Britain with a half-decent OS map on the passenger seat, you eventually notice a pattern. Every so often a road will stop behaving like…

I first went looking for Merlin in a gift shop. That’s how a lot of people meet him now. My parents took me to Tintagel when I was about ten.…

I went to Agincourt assuming I already knew the story. Like most people who grew up in England, I met it first through Shakespeare: muddy but glorious, Henry V giving…

I first came across the phrase “Peasants’ Revolt travel route” in a rather dry local guide from the 1980s, which made it sound like a sort of medieval coach tour…

If you grew up on the sort of history that treats the Knights Templar as a minor footnote before zipping off to the Black Death, the phrase “Templar sites in…

Medieval village life in England is usually described as if it were a diagram from a GCSE textbook: a neat row of peasant strips fanning out from a compact village,…

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…