A Norman noblewoman, Mabel de Bellême became Countess of Shrewsbury through her marriage to Sir Roger de Montgomery. Shrewd ...

There is a statue of the warrior queen of the Iceni tribe, Boudica, on the Victoria Embankment in London. Her revolt against ...

We take single-sex public toilets for granted today. It is hard to believe that when public conveniences were first constructed, the vast majority of these toilets were just for men. Great Exhibition ...

The story of Æthelflæd, Lady of the Mercians and one of the most powerful women to have lived during the Dark Ages. We also look at the role she played in uniting England. As Æthelflæd reached her ...

On a dripping July morning in 1543, the much-married, increasingly volatile King Henry VIII married his final wife, Katharine Parr, at Hampton Court Palace. This was to be Henry’s sixth marriage and ...

In 1838 an extraordinary young woman, the daughter of a lighthouse keeper, helped to save nine people after the fatal crash of a steamship which sank off the coast of the Farne Islands. A heroine in ...

Who are the British? Do they really drink tea, eat roast beef and Yorkshire pudding and never leave home without an umbrella? Find out more about true Brits; past and present, myth and legend, fact ...

The Highland Clearances remain a controversial period in Scotland’s history and are still talked of with great bitterness, particularly by those families who were dispossessed of their land and even, ...

“There were opium dens where one could buy oblivion, dens of horror where the memory of old sins could be destroyed by the madness of sins that were new.” Oscar Wilde in his novel, ‘The Picture of ...

The term ‘hangover’ is universally understood to mean the disproportionate suffering that comes after a night of over-indulgence. But where does the term actually come from? One possible explanation ...

St Dunstan was a prominent English religious figure during the Anglo-Saxon period and became a significant advisor to many of the kings of Wessex, helping to initiate monastic reforms and influence ...