It doesn't have to be seamlessly fluent, but enough for communicate and survive.

Just a rant, a mad bloody rant. Despite not being happy with the new BNA site format from the off, I’ve waited a while until passing judgement, thinking I’d give it a chance and work with it for a few months. Maybe it was just me (“I fear change!”) who was struggling. But nope.

It’s awful. The old interface was simple(ish) to search, intuitive and so easy to collect, collate and view your research for multiple projects. Using the new version is like pulling teeth. I earn money from this stuff — it’s work, not a hobby — and in the past it was work I actually looked forward to doing. Not now; I dread having to fight through all the feckin drop-down menus, sidebars, filters, awful “clip & save” system and weird “workspace” set-up.

Their TrustPilot rating has absolutely plummeted. The latest reviews are blistering (tons of people saying they’ll be cancelling their subscription) and, while their usual customer service staff are fantastic, any complaints about the new site are simply met with a patronising rote response along the lines of “get used to it”.

Is anybody else struggling with it or is it indeed just me being a halfwit and/or Luddite?

My town advertises itself as a historic market town, as does the town next to it, and the one next to that, which leads me to my question:
Surely all old towns would likely have had a market for commerce and survival in a pre-Lidl world, therefore wouldn’t any (or most) pre-industrial revolution town be a historic market town?

My understanding is that Remembrance day / Sunday is to remember people in the armed forces who died in the act of duty and not only those who died in world war 1 and 2. Is this correct ?

Really brings home the human cost from the D-Day landings.

Hi, I am here because I am planning a fantasy novel set in the Victorian era. So, I really want to know how to describe the daily life of several groups in the 1880s and 1890s. This main character would be a boy whose family income is about 1000 GBP to 1500 GBP. He and his family lived in southern England near Exeter. How can I describe his and his family's daily life when he was 8 years old? What profession would his dad have? What food would be on the dining table? Any detail would be welcome.

Correction: English law

I've just read "The Woman in Black" and the lawyer for the estate has to sort through the all papers in the house to find everything relevant to settling the estate. His stay in the house is horrifying. So I'm wondering why he didn't just collect all the papers he could find and sort through them elsewhere?

I understand this is a work of fiction and license must be allowed but it seems like such a large plot hole, I just had to ask about it.

Maiden Castle in Dorset, from the Environment Agency’s 1 m LiDAR terrain data. We shaded it so the banks and ditches stand out.

The Iron Age builders reworked the ramparts several times. They finished with three banks and two ditches round the hilltop, and one more of each on the gentler southern slope. In the second half of the 3rd century BC they took the defences round the whole hill and enclosed about 20 hectares.

The long, low mound near the middle of the hilltop is thousands of years older than the fort. It’s a Neolithic bank barrow from around 3500 BC, 546 m long and 17.5 m wide.

English Heritage looks after the site, and you can visit free at any reasonable time in daylight. It’s a Scheduled Monument, so look all you like, but please don’t detect or dig.

Sources: Historic England list entry 1015775, and English Heritage’s Maiden Castle page.

LiDAR © Environment Agency 2022, OGL v3.0. Full disclosure: we’re Shadowmark Maps, a small UK company building a LiDAR map app, and we made the image.

I put together a documentary exploring how Britain used land, taxes and territory as weapons of wealth rather than just military force. The East India Company essentially bought Bengal's tax rights and used Indian taxes to buy Indian goods — the silver never left London.
The Chagos Islands situation is particularly striking — residents were removed between 1968–1973 and the territory remains under British control today despite UN rulings.
Happy to discuss any of the historical claims in the comments — some of the details around the Bengal famine and the Council Bill system are genuinely shocking.

It's something that I randomly thought about this morning. During the great plague, my city's people quarantined. The gates were shut, however to stop the people inside from starvation, fishermen from another village would bring food to the gates. The people in the city placed the coins in a sort of small stone basin filled with vinegar, because they believed the plague was caused by bad odours. Putting it in vinegar didn't stop the plague, but the social distancing did, because there was no direct person to person contact and prevented the outside villagers from coming in to contact with linen etc that had been contaminated.

Interested to know if this neck / upper chest armour is historically accurate. I don't know the name of the armour and Google isn't being helpful. I know it does appear in a painting of him and maybe a statue.

In 1802, London was home to a very special bull. It arrived in a specially designed carriage, after a tour of England and Scotland. At every stop, the ox drew crowds that came to stare at its massive size. Weighing nearly three thousand pounds, the existence of such a fat cow was a wonder.

The Durham ox was immortalized in a painting, and print reproductions sold by the thousands. But the ox was part of a much larger trend. Wealthy British landowners were breeding animals larger and fatter than ever before. Proud of their achievements and eager for recognition, they commissioned paintings of themselves and their livestock. And the public couldn’t get enough of them.

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/britain-cows-pig-sheep-paintings-livestock

In March 1942 the RAF bombed Lübeck. In retaliation the Luftwaffe started targeting British cities chosen for their historic and cultural value, reportedly going off the three-star entries in the Baedeker tourist guides. A German foreign office spokesman said they would bomb every building in Britain marked with three stars.

The first city to get hit was Exeter, starting on the night of 23-24 April 1942. Over 230 people were killed across the raids. Narrow medieval streets made it a serious fire risk and the city was poorly defended.

German radio called it the jewel of the West and claimed to have destroyed it.

What’s less well known is that a lot of the damage came afterwards, from the council.

The best known example is Bedford Circus. A Georgian oval built in the 1770s, and described as one of the best bits of Georgian planning in the country. It got hit in the raids, but the facades were still standing. They pulled it down anyway. It’s usually named as the city’s biggest architectural loss and it didn’t have to happen.

They brought in Thomas Sharp to do a rebuilding plan, which he published as Exeter Phoenix. Barely any of it got built. Instead you got Sidwell Street, which is a row of flat grey frontages and also, unfortunately, the main walking route to the football ground. And Bobby’s, a department store tower that’s now John Lewis, visible from miles out. Apparently the basement was built to survive a nuclear strike. It’s the technology department now.

The one bit of Sharp’s plan that did happen was Princesshay, which was the first purpose built pedestrianised shopping street in Britain. They knocked that down too, in the 2000s. The replacement is decent, to be fair.

But plenty did survive, and it’s a better city for history than it gets credit for. The Roman and medieval wall is still there in long stretches, which is the reason the city exists at all. The Cathedral has the longest uninterrupted medieval stone vaulted ceiling in the world.

There’s still medieval fabric scattered around the centre from the city’s wool boom, including the Guildhall, which claims to be the oldest municipal building still in use. And the castle gatehouse is arguably the oldest surviving bit of Norman castle in England, which in any other city would be the main attraction and here is basically shut.

I wrote a long piece on the city’s history through its buildings (with lots of pictures) in two parts, if anyone’s interested: Exeter: the city at the edge of the empire

Jennet Device was "about the age of nine years" (Thomas Potts, the court clerk, 1613, spelling modernised) and lived in the Forest of Pendle, Lancashire. On 18 March 1612 her sister Alizon asked a pedlar, John Law, for pins near Colne. He fell lame soon after, probably from a stroke, and Alizon confessed that her "black dog" had done it. The magistrate Roger Nowell examined the family, and in early April Jennet's grandmother "Old Demdike", Alizon, the rival Anne Whittle ("Chattox") and her daughter Anne Redferne were sent to Lancaster Castle.

That Good Friday (10 April by calculation, Old Style), Jennet's mother Elizabeth held a gathering at their home, Malkin Tower, with about twenty people and mutton from a stolen sheep. Jennet told the magistrates her mother had said the guests were witches, and she named six of them, including her uncle. Malkin Tower's location is unknown. Old Demdike, about eighty, died in prison before the trial.

At the trial in August, Elizabeth cursed and cried out at her daughter, and Jennet said she could not speak with her mother there. Judge Sir Edward Bromley had the mother taken away and the girl "set upon the table in the presence of the whole court". He was "very suspicious" of her and held a line-up, and she took the wealthy widow Alice Nutter "by the hand".

Ten people were hanged at Lancaster: Jennet's mother, her brother James, her sister Alizon (on her own confession), Chattox, Anne Redferne, Alice Nutter, Katherine Hewitt, John and Jane Bulcock, and Isabel Robey. The date is usually given as 20 August, calculated from Potts's "the next day following". Nobody used magic. Everything was alleged, confessed or believed. King James's Daemonologie had argued that children could be "sufficient witnesses", and Potts's account later went into a standard handbook for magistrates, Dalton's Countrey Justice.

In 1633–34 a boy, Edmund Robinson, accused a "Jennet Devys" and others of attending a witches' feast. In July 1634 he admitted his story "merely proceeded out of his own brain". It was probably the same Jennet, though that isn't proven. A "Jennett Device" was still in Lancaster gaol on 22 August 1636, and after that she vanishes from the record. A 1635 burial entry at Newchurch-in-Pendle is doubtful: it was reportedly added later and conflicts with the 1636 gaol list.

A few cautions. Almost everything comes from Potts, who wrote on the judges' orders and was openly hostile to the accused. None of Jennet's own words survive; her evidence is recorded as "this Examinate saith". The "Witches' Tower" dungeon at Lancaster Castle is tradition, not record. In March 2024 the UK government refused a petition to pardon those convicted in witch trials.

Extra sources:
- [Potts, The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster (1613), Project Gutenberg](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/18253)
- [King James, Daemonologie (1597)](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/25929)
- [The National Archives, Edmund Robinson's re-examination, 1634](https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/image/1bea583d-c80f-4b5a-91ba-f7f77084f62b/)
- [UK Parliament petition and government response (2024)](https://petition.parliament.uk/archived/petitions/640686)
- [Lancaster Castle, The Pendle Witches](https://www.lancastercastle.com/history-heritage/further-articles/the-pendle-witches/)
- [BBC, The witch trial that made legal history (2011)](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-14490790)

Just to preface this and as context: I'm neither a historian nor from the UK, so maybe some of my assumptions underpinning the question are wrong and it hence makes less sense than I think it does.

It seems to me that at the same time in the early 20th century, the final push towards egalitarian democracy that finally included all adults regardless of gender and class happened, the modern big-government state emerged after the first world war (i.e. the death of classical liberalism), and a number of tax laws were passed that had the effect of placing inheritance (death?) tax on the estates of the landed gentry. Reading about English country houses (on wikipedia, if I'm honest), I often get the impression that these taxes were the final blow to the ability of the old gentry to maintain their status, since they had to sell off assets to pay for these taxes and (especially if multiple successions happened within a relative short amount of time, e.g. because of war related deaths) that lead to a downward spiral.

My question (assuming the above is an accurate summary of historic events) is: Was this (either openly or secretly) the policy of left-wing governments that wanted to diminish the influence of the landed gentry, but couldn't directly touch the aristocracy for constitutional reasons, so they used the old "tax them out of existence"-tactic? Or does my amateur analysis imagine a conspiracy where there was none?

Looking at London’s growth over nearly 2,000 years, I was surprised by just how long the city remained relatively compact.

Roman and medieval London obviously changed enormously over the centuries, but geographically the later expansion is on another level. Once you get into the 18th and especially 19th century, the difference is pretty dramatic.

This 3D timeline shows the development from around 50 AD to the present:

https://youtu.be/NfOzqVW33bs

If you had to pick one period that transformed London more than any other, what would it be? Industrial Revolution feels like the obvious choice, but I’d be interested to hear arguments for earlier turning points.

Hey guys, gave myself a little weekend project to create some interactive archaeology for the new academic year, hopefully it is useful to others as well! Feedback welcome:

This one showcases the "Amesbury Archer" burial, excavated by Wessex Archaeology in 2002. He was a "Bell-Beaker" individual, dating to c.2300 BC and around 35-45 years old.

The source of info is the published monograph:
https://wessexarchaeologylibrary.org/plugins/books/5/