Enjoy!

History writing

• I really enjoyed ‘s story about how many 18th and 19th-Century women had to disguise their writing ambitions or, at least, relegate them to brief, snatched moments when they weren’t doing something for someone else.

• A humorous and informative piece from about the rarity and popularity of pineapples in Europe from the late-15th to the mid-17th centuries and how achievements concerning the fruit were often celebrated with a painting.

• This examination of Hieronymus Bosch’s ‘The Garden of Earthly Delights’ explains how what might appear to modern eyes as playful or proto-Surrealist, was actually deeply moralising and pessimistic in its time.

• You’ve probably seen the photo; you may know that it was part of a campaign to ethnically cleanse Native Americans from the land; but do you know what happened to the bison bones next?

History

In the summer of 1955, a sunflower grew in an unlikely place: on a narrow raft in the River Thames at Limehouse, in east of the city. This area was once dominated by ports and docks, part of the heart of the capital’s international trade operations.

The above photo, taken in September of 1955, shows a Mr F Conn, who lived locally, tending to the flower. It was suggested that a seed may have been dropped by a bird and sprouted, against the odds of the industrial environment. The photographer described the sunflower as being 7-foot-tall with a 9-inch-wide flower head.

I can’t find any evidence in the British Newspaper Archive of this image ever being printed. Today it’s part of the Press Association’s archives. And as an east Londoner, a historian, and a sunflower grower, it appeals to me on multiple levels.

In case you’re interested, here’s part of my annual crop of sunflowers (planted quite late this year, so many still yet to flower). The biggest is currently 10.7ft, or 326cm, tall. (My record height is 355cm. And why yes, I did win my borough’s ‘In Bloom’ competition tallest sunflower category award that year!)

Writing

takes us through the evolution of a style of handwriting into a group of typefaces, and how they picked up some unpleasant connotations along the way. (It’ll always be ‘Old English’/newspaper masthead font to me!)

I think it’s fair to say that among the ambitions of anyone who ‘does’ history is the desire to discover something new or mysterious, but ultimately, revelatory.

We are detectives. Using the available evidence, and a little informed speculation, we piece together the puzzle of the past to retell its stories. But integral to the process is not just the discovering, but the revealing.

The Margate Shell Grotto has been thwarting the efforts of history detectives for almost two centuries. Located on an unassuming, mostly residential street (named Grotto Hill in its honour), the subterranean structure is a storied attraction in the southeast English coastal town.

What’s largely accepted is that it was ‘discovered’ in 1835. But that’s where the consensus ends. When it was built, by whom, and what for are still up for debate and open to individual interpretation.

From a purely descriptive point of view, we can say what it is:

Accessed via a chalk passage descending just less than two metres, is a pair of semicircular passages which lead to a central dome and then a passage which leads to a rectangular room called the ‘Alter Chamber’. The complex measures 30metres in length and the passage walls and ceilings, and three of the four Chamber walls, are completely covered in shells which form distinctive patterns. (The east wall of the Chamber is bare, having been rebuilt following bomb damage in World War Two.) The dome – which is about a third of the way in from the entrance – today features a skylight to the world above. There are stories that the Chamber once featured a barrel-vaulted ceiling which was also covered in shells, but today it’s flat and bare.

The shells have been numbered at “approximately 4.6million” and identified as native British, largely local species, except for two queen conches (Caribbean) and some giant clams (Indo-Pacific) in the Altar Chamber.

The Shell Grotto is Grade I listed by English Heritage, which means it is “of exceptional interest”. Of the 370,000 listed buildings in England, only 2.5% are designated Grade I.

When was it built?

It is said there’s no anecdotal evidence of it being remembered by locals before the agreed discovery date of 1835. It's absent from known local directories before 1846 and not indicated on a map of Margate from 1821 (below). The earliest reference to it is in a May 1838 Kentish Gazette article announcing its forthcoming opening to the public, where it’s described as:

“[...] an extensive grotto, completely studded with shells in curious devices, most elaborately worked up, extending an immense distance in serpentine walks, alcoves, and lanes, the whole forming one of the most curious and interesting sights that can possibly be conceived, and must have been executed by torch light.”

Who built it?

The above map shows there were no buildings, nor any estate gardens, on the Grotto site in 1821, leaving no clear indication of who owned the property it sits beneath prior to the 1830s.

Although there are variations on the discovery story, the most accepted element is that excavation works at a property called Belle Vue Cottage (now Rose Lodge) uncovered it.

There exists an 1890s interview with Frances Newlove, daughter of the cottage’s owner/tenant, who was 12 years old at the time the Grotto was unearthed. In it she remembers the Grotto being ‘in an unfinished state’ when discovered and that her father hired a bricklayer to complete it.

Might this account for traces of materials from different time periods that have been found in the Grotto? Or is that simply an expected result of years (centuries!) of maintenance?

What was it for?

You can take your pick of theories: place of worship, secret meeting place, folly, or simply a folk art-decorated former chalk mine. Each of which could variously point to its creator(s) being Romans, Druids, Knights Templar, or Georgians. Perhaps it’s none, or multiple, of these.

English Heritage describes the shell designs featured throughout as “common Egyptian, Greek, and Indian motifs”. The Grotto admits that interpretations of the designs featured on its own map – including tree of life, Bacchus, corn goddess, birth, and phallus – are “entirely subjective”.

, an engineer-turned-educator who shares his passion for Margate’s history through his newsletter, , says the fact no one really knows the story behind the Shell Grotto is “exactly why it’s so fascinating”, and shares some further local lore.

“There’s something undeniably eerie about it. Walk through those shadowy corridors, and you can’t help but feel a chill. Locals have long whispered about its darker side. Some say it was used for secret rituals, with claims of cults and witchcraft swirling for years.

“Even now, some steer clear of the Grotto altogether, saying it’s a ‘bad energy’ spot.”

It’s all so curious and intriguing – characteristics that I’m drawn to and driven by in my life and history practice. I’m also a completist. I’m a list-maker and task tick-off-er. Before I was a history writer, I started my career as a daily newspaper journalist, so reporting the truth and getting to the bottom of the story is baked into my professional being. I want to know!

But there's a school of thought that says the mystery of the Margate Shell Grotto is too good to solve.

It's an idea Bigg subscribes to: “I think the mystery is what makes it so special. It’s both enchanting and unnerving, a place where history and myth collide, and Margate wouldn’t be Margate without it."

So perhaps I need to accept the things I cannot know and park my history detective drive on this occasion, in the interest of the greater good.

Marianne North (1830-1890) was a woman who knew what she wanted and had the means and motivation to make it happen. From travelling the world to see firsthand the exotic plants that fascinated her, to designing and financing a gallery to save her art for posterity and the “pleasure of others”.

As Dr Lynne Howarth-Gladston sets out in her book, ‘Marianne North: A Victorian Painter for the 21st Century’, North was an unconventional botanical artist as well as a progressive and multi-faceted individual. Her life and work continue to resonate with contemporary themes, not just of art and science, but of feminism and environmentalism, too.

She’d developed an interest in exotic plants in her mid-20s after a visit to the Palm House at the Royal Botanic Gardens, in Kew, southwest London, in 1856. She said it made her “long to see the tropics”.

North never married. She considered it “a terrible experiment” that turned women into “a sort of upper servant”. She wasn’t interested in a man controlling her or the money she was set to inherit.

So, when her father, Frederick North, a member of the British parliament, died in 1869, the last tie binding her to home was gone and she was free to pursue her ambitions.

In 1871, aged 40, she set off on her travels – on her own – arriving in Jamaica in December. Yes, she had letters of introduction to help facilitate her passage, but she travelled without an entourage, porters, or a maid (as was typical at the time). She packed light so she could carry everything herself. And once she reached her destinations, she avoided the leisure activities of the colonial British expats. Instead, she consulted with locals and headed for the hills and forests to find the exotic plants she’d come to paint; “the flowers in their homes”, as she put it.

Over 14 years she visited 16 countries across five continents.

North’s artistic style wasn’t quite the ‘Victorian lady flower painting’ considered proper for women in this period, nor did it adhere to the specialist conventions of botanical illustration. But what North did which others did not, was to often paint both close-ups of individual plants as well as wider landscape views showing them in their natural habitats, sometimes including animals, insects, and humans.

Her artistic approach may not have been conventional, but it proved valuable for multiple audiences. In a time before colour photography, North’s intricate and vibrant paintings provided a realistic glimpse of exotic flora and fauna many people were unlikely to ever see in real life. And the quality and accuracy of her depictions helped botanists identify species previously unknown to Western science.

When I visited Kew Gardens recently, I was told how the director at the time, Joseph Hooker, sent collectors out to gather specimens of certain plants having learned of their existence from North’s paintings.

In her lifetime, several newly-described species – first identified from her artworks – were named in North’s honour, including the Bornean pitcher plant, Nepenthes northiana, and the Bornean crinum, Crinum northianum.

As recently as 2021, a botanist at Kew used one of her paintings to confirm the identity of a specimen collected a century later in 1973. The blue-berried plant from Borneo has been named Chassalia northiana.

Through her work (and it must be noted, her wealth and social status, too), North built connections with leading artists and scientists, including Charles Darwin. He is said to have told her: ‘you haven't painted all the plants of the world until you’ve been to Australia’. And so, she went there in 1880.

It is interesting to note in her diaries – published after her death in three volumes between 1892 and 1893 – North’s frustration with the introduction of non-native species by colonists. She recounts being taken to admire a plant and immediately recognising it as being from the UK, rather than indigenous. She also comments on the negative impact of capitalism on the natural environment during the 19th Century, both at home and abroad.

It was in between trips to India and Australia, in 1879, that North approached Hooker and offered her paintings to the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. She said she wanted to “leave something behind which will add to the pleasure of others”.

She would build a gallery to house the art at her own expense. This gave her complete control over exactly what it would look like, and exactly what paintings would be hung and in what order. She also wrote the guide to the gallery, drawing on notes from her extensive travel diaries. It opened to the public in 1882.

The Marianne North Gallery contains 848 paintings – oil on paper mounted on board – hung densely together, grouped in sections for the various parts of the world North visited. She intentionally mounted them in a jigsaw-like manner to prevent anyone trying to rearrange them against her wishes. Her contemporary, the poet and author Wilfrid Blunt, described the hang as like "a gigantic botanical postage-stamp album".

A volunteer at the gallery told me that the space is not only unique to Kew, but that “there’s nothing like it in any other botanic garden” either.

As Howarth-Gladstone writes in her book: "Marianne North was a significant contributor to 19th Century science and culture, not only as a botanical painter but also a global traveller, plant finder, and diarist. [...]

"North's agency as a financially independent woman in a still intensely patriarchal Victorian society [was progressive. … She] did not identify as a feminist, but is in many ways a role model for women's independence."

Enjoy!

History writing

• Only 12 copies of Edgar Allan Poe’s debut poetry collection, published in 1827, are known to survive. ‘Tamerlane and Other Poems’ is a bibliophile’s holy grail. One of the copies recently went up for auction.

• The countless hours it took to stitch the Bayeux Tapestry – described as “the ultimate example of ‘great-man’ history” – were almost certainly spent by women.

• 17th Century portrait painter Mary Beale is among the earliest people to be recognised with a Historic England blue plaque. She’s significant for succeeding in her field without financial support from a wealthy patron (unlike many of her male contemporaries), training other women in painting, and she may also be the first woman to have written an instructional text for painting in English.

• Arthur Bondar is risking his safety and freedom to build a photographic archive that acts as a counterpoint to Russia’s “comfortable” narrative of the Second World War.

• I cannot imagine what Michael Scurr, volunteer at The National Archives, must have felt when he discovered a “vanishingly rare” copy of the US Declaration of Independence!

History

The other day I was in Camden Town, in northwest London, when I spotted this old shop sign for the first time (perhaps newly revealed by the posh bakery which operates from there now?). I was intrigued enough to do some digging about its history.

Advertisements for Palmers pet shop on Park Street begin showing up in newspapers from at least October 1925. At first, they’ve got some pretty big-ticket (and slightly alarming, to modern sensibilities) items for sale – ‘Orang-outangs’ (which make the “perfect pet”) and baby chimpanzees for £100 – alongside their “various small tame monkeys” which cost just 70shillings, and talking parrots at 30s.

But perhaps those expensive animals didn’t sell well, because the following month they’re gone from the listings, and instead customers are offered red squirrels (12s 6d), singing canaries (from 15s), and “finger tame” lovebirds (8s 6d). And for an extra 10s, Palmers will include a cage with your talking parrot purchase.

By the beginning of 1927, the monkeys and the prices are getting smaller: “tiny tame monkeys, 35s” (the parrot and cage combo is also down, to 30s, and begins to be offered with three months’ warranty or trial!). From 1928, you can get Japanese fantail goldfish (3s 6d), dogs from 1929 (including pedigree and cross-breed bulldogs), and by 1939, mongooses (mongeese?) are added to the mix, at 30s each.

The last mention of Palmers I could find in the newspaper archive (which may in itself reveal the reason why) came in June 1954 via the ‘North London Press’. It published an article from the perspective of an African chimp named Booboo, titled ‘The Day I Broke Out’, which reads in part:

“I had just finished a tea of peanuts and milk when one of my cage floor-boards slipped loose.

“A few quick thumps, a rock of the cage and I was crawling out onto the floor. Freedom at last. But I’m not a selfish sort of fellow. The other chaps were screaming, yapping and cawing, so I thought I’d better let them out, too.

“First was Perce, the python, followed by the marmoset family. Next came a couple of parrots, two tanks of baby alligators and my oppos., Johnny and Dave, a couple of gibbons in the opposite cage.”

Booboo was recaptured after he apparently wore himself out swinging from bars on the shop’s ceiling (”I must be out of training, too many cigarettes or something”!). A toucan and a female marmoset were the only animals to escape the shop, but perhaps the close call was too much for Palmers’ operators to risk again…?

Writing

Love, enlightenment, and labour in the medieval monastic scriptorium.

Towards the end of the 19th Century there was a fear in certain circles that ‘old London’ was disappearing. That buildings of architectural and antiquarian value were at risk of being lost as the capital rapidly expanded and changed (the population grew from just over 1 million in 1801 to 6.5 million in 1901).

Among that circle was a man named Alfred Marks, who – spurred into action by the planned demolition of the Oxford Arms, a galleried coaching inn, to make way for an expansion of the Old Bailey criminal court – helped create The Society for Photographing the Relics of Old London.

The Society enlisted father and son photographers Alfred and John Bool to capture for posterity 120 images of 70-odd locations around the capital between 1875 and 1886. It wasn’t intended to be an exhaustive documentation, but one representative of the “quaintness” of old London.

The buildings and features they chose are an intriguing selection. There are inns of chancery and court, and inns of the drinking variety, as well as churches and hospitals. Sometimes the photos focus on specific buildings, elsewhere on wider streetscapes, and occasionally on building interiors. The Society seemed to have a particular fascination with doors and gatehouses.

The project was funded through subscriptions and produced between 6-12 photographs over 12 annual volumes, printed by Henry Dixon. Complete sets of the images are held in multiple major archives and institutions. For this newsletter, I’ve relied on the Tate’s collection. Shout-out to them for their open licencing!

Reviewing the body of work 150 years on, it turns out Alfred Marks and co were reasonably justified in their fears. By my estimation, only about 40% of the photographed buildings survive. Although I’ll defer to the expertise of the London Archives, who, at a talk on the subject, told me it was about 50%.

Recently, I set out to see how many of the original photographs I could recreate. Skipping a few shots that were alternative angles of a single location, and some locations that I couldn’t access, I visited 24 of the surviving relics of old London. (I took all my photos in landscape orientation and – where I could – less tightly cropped to show a bit more of the contemporary context.)

It was fascinating to see how different buildings and landmarks have in turns changed and stayed the same. Also, how trees have grown and grown more numerous (granted, I took my photos at a different time of the seasons).

I present the pictures below in the order in which the Society issued them, with a couple of outliers at the end that I’ll explain more about when we get there.

Lincoln’s Inn Gateway

St Bartholomew The Great

A new entrance was built in front of the tower and the windows in the left-hand side of the building altered during renovations which began in the late 1880s.

Old Houses in Holborn [Staple Inn]

Around 1886-87, work began to remove the plaster from the building’s exterior, revealing the original timbers, and a couple of its Tudor windows were reinstalled.

Canonbury Tower

Barnard’s Inn

Unfortunately, the present-day configuration of the buildings – part of Gresham College – did not allow me to get a similarly wide-angle shot as the one from 1879.

Charterhouse, General View

George Inn Yard, Southwark

The George was one of six galleried coaching inns photographed by the Society. It is the only one that survives and, in fact, is the only surviving inn of its kind in London.

Banqueting House, Whitehall

Water Gate of York House

Lincoln’s Inn Field, Lindsey House

Lincoln’s Inn Field, Newcastle House

Old Houses, Fleet Street

These buildings have changed quite a bit since 1884. However, the centre and right buildings still have the bay windows, and you can see the same crenelations and circular top of the window behind the tower of St-Dunstan-in-the-West next door, so I’m confident it’s the same location.

Doorways, Laurence Pountney Hill

College Street

Note the building on the corner of Little College Street is no more. The door with the crest above it (which has its own separate Society photo) is to Innholders’ Hall, home of the Worshipful Company of Innholders’, a guild formed in the 16th Century and on this site since at least 1613.

Doorway, College Hill

Note the almost identical decorative arch two doors down. I took a few photos of that first before I realised it was the wrong one – the central face is slightly different on each arch.

Inner Temple, Gate House

Here we have another building whose original timbers have been revealed (in 1905) since the Society photo was taken. Despite what the sign in the 1885 image says, it was never the palace of Henry VIII or Cardinal Wolsey. This version of the building above the entrance to Inner Temple was constructed in 1610 and was at that time a tavern. Today it’s known as Prince Henry’s Room, but opinions differ on whether it’s named after the son of King James I, or derived from the tavern name, The Prince’s Arms.

Inner Temple, King’s Bench Walk

Middle Temple, Gate House

Gray’s Inn, Field Court

St John’s Gate, Clerkenwell

Great St Helen’s

Queen Anne’s Gate

Outliers

My next couple of photos are of surviving relics, but they’re not exactly as they seem…

Temple Bar

The Society photo was taken when Temple Bar was in its original location, at the point where Fleet Street and the Strand meet (just west of Middle Temple gatehouse). However, in 1878, the same year the photograph was issued, Temple Bar was removed to ease the flow of traffic and make way for the construction of the Royal Courts of Justice. It was first rebuilt in a park in Hertfordshire, in the east of England, and later moved to its current location, near St Paul’s Cathedral, in 2004.

Lambeth Palace, Gate House

The 1883 photo is of the inner side of the gatehouse. Unfortunately for me, Lambeth Palace was being renovated and closed to the public when I visited, so I had to make do with a picture from the outside.

In 1784, cousins Jane and Mary Parminter set off on an almost-10-year grand tour of Europe. The pair – aged around 34 and 17 at the time – had both lost their parents when they were young and inherited substantial wealth. This afforded them a level of freedom, both from responsibility and convention. They travelled unescorted by men, and as well as visiting sites of great art, architecture, and antiquity, they did things like climb mountains. Indeed, they were the first women to ascend Mont Buet, a 3,000m peak in the French Alps which is colloquially known as ‘Parminter Peak’ and ‘Ladies’ Mont Blanc’.

But they didn’t just collect experiences and mementos on their travels, they collected ideas. After they returned to the UK, they designed A la Ronde, a unique hexadecagonal (16-sided) home with an octagonal room at its centre, likely inspired by the Byzantine Basilica de San Vitale in Italy.

In 1796 they bought a plot of land in Exmouth, southwest England, to make their vision a reality.

The exterior of the building is studded with diamond-shaped windows designed to catch the sunlight as it moves across the sky throughout the day and there are multiple internal nooks which feature fold-down seats and books. Below the roof is a 360degree gallery completely decorated in shells, which can be viewed from the central octagonal room below, which has eight rooms, behind eight identical doors, leading off it. In the evenings, when the octagon would have been lit by candlelight, looking up to the Shell Gallery created the sensation of being in an underwater world. The drawing room features 27m of featherwork frieze, and the overall design scheme includes repeating patterns, particularly of diamonds and chevrons. Where a traditional male-owned house would have a cockerel weathervane, the Parminters’ features a dove, which is mirrored inside by another dove suspended from the ceiling, with an olive branch in its mouth, symbolising peace.

A la Ronde was set in a 28acre estate, within which the Parminters also commissioned alms houses for older women and a non-conformist chapel, set up a lace-making business and a small school for girls, and planted orchards and a cottage garden.

“These were women who did things differently,” says Emma Mee, a Project Manager at the National Trust, which has been caring for A la Ronde since 1991, where she’s been based for the past two and a half years.

“They were quite dynamic, modern women. They designed a self-sufficient women-only community which also has a sense, for me, of social justice and female expression.

“How do women express themselves at a time when women’s words aren’t heard? When the female experience is limited to being the property of someone else and the only way of elevating yourself is through marriage? They did it through their deeds. They did it through craft and creativity. They deliberately chose another way of elevating themselves. And they were altruistic, they created opportunities for other women, too.

“There’s no other property like A la Ronde,” Mee says. “The typical National Trust property is a patrilineal story of men’s inherited wealth. This is a matrilineal story of women showing off their creative interests, expressing themselves through craft.”

Unfortunately, there is no evidence of the motivations behind the Parminters’ unique brand of expression. Jane’s travel diary, which was held at the Exeter Records Office for safe keeping, was destroyed by bombing in World War Two, and A la Ronde doesn’t have a significant archive.

But Mee thinks “it’s good to not have a definitive answer because it starts conversation”.

“There’s a gap in the fabric of the narrative that you can stitch with your own experience, and I think that’s why people like visiting. Because there isn’t an answer, everyone’s got an equally valid claim to what’s stitched into the middle.”

But where there is no doubt about the Parminter cousins’ intentions is what was to happen to A la Ronde, and their money, after they were gone. Mary, who lived until 1849 (Jane died in 1811), left an exacting will.

“The will is so interesting. It’s a huge document made of vellum and it’s very precise. You can hear her voice very clearly in it,” Mee says.

It stipulates that the property should not be changed in any way and that it should only be passed down to unmarried, single women. Elsewhere, in reference to financial bequests, it insists the money should be put directly in the hands of the women beneficiaries, and not controlled by their husbands.

The matrilineal succession was broken only once in over 200 years, when the woman next in line to inherit got married and her brother, Reverend Oswald Reichel, a priest attempting to escape some controversy, moved in. Incidentally, he was the only resident who made substantial changes to A la Ronde – widening rooms and installing new technology such as speaking tubes, central heating, and dumb waiters – but Mee believes we “shouldn’t villainise him” for it. Looking on the bright side, she says that if he hadn’t swapped out the thatched roof for tile, the house’s unique Shell Gallery might not have survived the harsh coastal elements of Exmouth.

And it’s the hand-crafted features of A la Ronde, such as the Shell Gallery, which both attract visitors and provide potential for further research into the Parminters, ‘women’s work’, and the social conventions (and rejection thereof) of their time. Mee says: “There’s lots of layers to this place.”

Unfortunately, its small size, and conservation considerations, means the house is not as accessible as it could be – visitors can’t actually enter the Shell Gallery, for example. The project Mee has been working on for the past two and a half years has been concerned with conservation and alternative ways of engaging the public with A la Ronde and its unique creative features. Her team has meticulously re-installed shells that have fallen off the gallery walls over the years (which themselves have been meticulously collected and stored, and their original position recorded), and cleaned and secured everything else still on the walls. They’ve also created an online virtual tour of the gallery, and commissioned artist Monica-Shanta to create a ‘homage’ to the shellwork – which visitors can get up close and hands on with – in the new Room of Discovery.

They also hosted an academic conference, The Symposium, over the summer of 2024 which focused on the Shell Gallery and the house’s featherwork.

“Elizabeth Montague, the queen of the Bluestockings, spent 10 years decorating a room with feathers,” Mee says. “Lots of women used feathers as a means of expression, but none of those works survive because they’ve been eaten by pests over many years.

“The conference was really a call out to say: ‘we’ve got some of the only surviving female featherwork, does anyone want to come and research it with us?’.”

There are other tantalising clues that warrant further investigation, too. Such as a series of watercolours in the Shell Gallery. Only one of them is signed – by Sarah Scott – but they’re all so stylistically similar that Mee suspects they may be by the same hand. Is it the same Sarah Scott who was the younger sister of Elizabeth Montague, who was a writer and social reformer, and who authored (and created artwork for) the 1762 novel, ‘Millennium Hall’, about a utopian women-only community?

Mee says: “There’s so much research that we would love to do, but resources are stretched and operational tasks are our priority.

“A la Ronde is such a curious place, with very curious features, and there’s still lots of secrets and stories left to discover.”

Enjoy!

History writing

• A writer goes in search of her great-grandmother’s ‘tharavad’, a type of house designed by and around women that was once common in matrilineal societies in India.

  • Pair with my story from last week about Victorian and Edwardian-era housing for new working women in London.

• How a historian’s time spent in archives and teaching students about primary sources affected how he dealt with his deceased father’s belongings.

• One man’s decades-long quest to capture the folk songs and stories of America in the mid-20th Century.

• David Hockney (RIP) explores how mirrors and lenses changed painting in the 15th and 16th centuries.

• How an 18th Century court record finally confirmed the identity of the artist Joshua Reynold’s black servant.

History

Do you know the story of the Cottingley fairies? In short: it was some mischievous creativity by a couple of young girls with one of their father’s cameras, the results of which were championed by the spiritualist-leaning adults in their life (including Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes), and it all got a bit out of hand. It was 65 years before Elsie finally told the truth.

Tim Harford has a good podcast on the subject if you’d like to find out more.

The original cameras they used (pictured above) and photos they took with them (see two below), are now in the collection of Bradford’s Science and Media Museum, about five miles from the site of alleged fairy sightings, in the north of England.

Writing

In the early 19th Century, a Cherokee man named Sequoyah developed a written system for his people’s Iroquoian language. Within a quarter-century, Cherokee people had achieved a higher rate of literacy than the country’s non-Native population.

And it got me thinking, was there anything like that in the UK? Not the naked dancing, but the dedicated accommodation that allowed women the independence (and safety) to pursue a career in a major city?

I was delighted to find there was.

I love exploring the ways women in the past have been able to break free of the social and cultural constraints that restricted their freedoms. The single women’s residential chambers, and later, more affordable hostels, which began opening in London in the late 1800s, were one of those ways.

Architectural historian Emily Gee, who’s written a book on the subject, says that by 1910 there were about 60 communal living residences for working women in London, and around 170 by 1925.

New employment opportunities

Towards the end of the 19th Century, the labour market was changing. Central and local governments were expanding, new legislation introduced the first state-run schools, large-scale retailing was growing, and new technologies created new opportunities. More and more women were taking up roles as secretaries, clerks, teachers, shop assistants, typists, and telephone exchange switchboard operators.

Chris Catling has written that between 1861 and 1911, the number of women in paid work (excluding domestic service) grew from 200,000 to 800,000. Similarly, Bonnie Emmet has described how the number of women in “white-collar occupations” before the 1880s was “negligible”, but by 1911 the sector was employing over 11% of all working women in England.

This shift has been described as the ‘white-blouse revolution’ and was concentrated in larger cities such as London.

But the many – predominantly young and overwhelmingly single – women who moved to the capital to take advantage of this boom in new employment opportunities also needed somewhere safe, respectable, and affordable to live.

Rooms for gentlewomen

Among the first responses* to this demand were ‘ladies residential chambers’, many of which repurposed existing buildings into dedicated accommodation for “newly professional gentlewomen”.

(*It should be noted that some – but nowhere near enough – options did exist prior to this time, such as that provided by the Young Women’s Christian Association, but the accommodation we’re discussing here was entrepreneurial rather than charitable, and underpinned by the goal of supporting women’s independence rather than by a framework of religious and moral guidance.)

Sloane Gardens House was opened in 1888 on Lower Sloane Street in southwest London. It was the first project of the Ladies’ Associated Dwellings Company and originally housed 55 women, tripling its occupancy within two years.

The accommodation was mostly single ‘bed-sitting rooms’ along with some two-room flats. The building also included communal dining and sitting rooms, a library, and music room.

Other similar residences with single and multi-room flats followed, including York Street Chambers, west London (1889) and Chenies Street Chambers, west-central London (1892), funded by the Ladies’ Residential Chambers Company Ltd.

But these places largely catered to “ladies of private means” and middle to lower-middle-class tenants. They didn’t solve the demand for housing from the much larger proportion of lower-waged women workers. Indeed, on the day the 1891 census enumerator called at Sloane Gardens House, of the 71 residents recorded (excluding staff), the occupation of 35 of them (49%) was listed as ‘living on her own means’.

More rooms, but cheaper

By the turn of the 20th Century, plans were underway for large-scale, purpose-built ‘hostels’ that offered accommodation to suit lower budgets.

The first, Brabazon House, on Moreton Street in southwest London, opened in 1902. It was funded by Lady Mary Jane Brabazon, Countess of Meath’s Brabazon House Company Limited and designed by architect Robert Stephen Ayling.

Ayling would go on to design four more hostels for working women over the next few decades, including another Brabazon residence, called Hopkinson House, which opened in 1905 just around the corner from the original. He’s credited with pioneering indoor storage for bicycles and a ‘slope’ to help get them to and from the street. Gee says: “bringing bicycles into their own storage room within the building formalised the new custom of women cycling and associated it with their independent living in London”.

Each woman’s space at the Brabazon was small – more cubicle than bedsit – but the communal dining and sitting rooms were larger than what the chambers tended to offer. A sewing machine was available for repairs, tables and inkpots for writing letters, and the ground floor was occupied by a range of shops.

Of the 66 residents (excluding staff) recorded at Brabazon House in the 1911 census, 15 of them (23%) were secretaries, 12 (18%) clerks, and 7 (11%) shorthand typists or stenographers. Only four were listed as living by their own means.

Other purpose-built hostels included St George’s House in southwest London (designed by Ayling), which was privately funded by Miss Murray Smith, daughter of the publisher John Murray; and Ada Lewis House in southeast London, funded by artist and philanthropist Lewis, who left £50,000 to build women’s hostels in London when she died in 1906.

For women, by women, with women

A significant feature of this Victorian and Edwardian housing for working women was that – rather than being charitable or municipal – the buildings where philanthropic projects often led by women and/or commercial projects invested in by women. (In 1908 ‘The Times’ reported that Sloane Gardens House had paid the full 5% dividend to its investors). Gee says: “the prevalence of women in leadership and advocacy roles is a notable theme”. Catling characterises it as “a feminist agenda: to empower women to pursue lives on their own terms, based on self-reliance and the companionship and support of other women”.

That companionship, the “camaraderie” as Gee refers to it, was another important feature.

In 1900, humanitarian and social reformer, Emily Hobhouse, surveyed 600 working women about how they ideally wanted to live. She found that over half of them were living in single rooms (often in boarding houses), paying just over 10 shillings per week in rent (about 22% of their wages), had to follow strict rules, and they were lonely. The overwhelming majority of them wanted to live in some type of “combined dwelling”; they wanted “a wholesome existence with perfect freedom”.

The communal spaces at the heart of the women’s residential chambers, and particularly women’s hostels, fostered networking and a mutual support structure. For many of the residents, this would have been their first time living outside the family home. They were in a new city, in a new job, having new and newly independent experiences. It’s not hard to imagine these young, ambitious women gathering in the communal areas and discussing not only their day-to-days, but the bigger themes affecting their lives, such as campaigns for votes for women and equal pay. Indeed, Lynn F Pearson suggests that this type of housing, and the employment opportunities it supported, was a “practical method of improving women’s position” and could be seen as “part of the women’s movement in general”.

Today, several of these chamber and hostel buildings have been given listed status by English Heritage and are protected for their significance to the capital’s architectural history. They should also be seen as a significant part of the history of women’s ambition.

Sources:

• Chris Catling, ‘Making accommodations: How 19th-century housing helped launch women’s independence’, Current Archaeology, issue 429 (2025).

• Bonnie Emmett, Housing for Single Working Women in Inter-War London, 1919-1939, Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) thesis, The Open University (2023).

• Emily Gee, ‘Where Shall She Live?’, Journal of Architectural Conservation, 15:2 (2009); Hostel, House and Chambers: Accommodating the Victorian and Edwardian Working Woman (2025).

• Lynn F Pearson, The Architectural And Social History Of Cooperative Living (1988).

Compiling such a dictionary wasn’t a task that one person, or even one professional team, could do alone. And so, in an early example of a crowd-sourced project, between 1858 and 1928 the public was invited to read books and send in examples of how words were used, written on 4x6inch pieces of paper which came to be called ‘slips’. The Oxford English Dictionary (EOD) archives still hold all 2million slips submitted by around 3,000 contributors from across the world.

What was interesting to me – as Sarah Ogilvie described in her book, ‘The Dictionary People’, and in a talk on the subject she recently gave at Gresham College – is that: “the project attracted autodidacts and amateurs rather than professionals”. She lists some of their jobs, hobbies, and crimes as factory inspector, rain collector, suffragist, naturist, vicar, and murderer (there were three of the latter!). Among the total was 487 women (16% of contributors).

Ogilvie briefly mentions that one of those women was a Miss Pearson, who, in the late 19th Century, lived in southwest London. What piqued my interest was Ogilvie’s suggestion that Pearson possibly worked as a servant.

The juxtaposition of service work and contribution to “the most prestigious scholarly project in the world” fascinated me. I wanted to know more about this Miss Pearson!

The evidence

Ogilvie was inspired to write her book by the chance discovery in 2014 of address books belonging to the late James Murray. He was the longest-serving editor of the OED, from 1879 to 1915. He’d originally hoped to finish the project in 10 years, then 16 years, then by his 80th birthday in 1916 (he died in 1915 when the project was up to words beginning with ‘Tw’). The final volume of the first edition of the EOD was published in 1928.

Pearson is recorded at two locations in Murray’s address book: 24 and 22 Westbourne Place, Eaton Square. It’s not clear whether the 24, which is crossed out, was a mistake, or if she moved two doors down the road at some point during her contribution period.

Other than her surname and address (and we can infer she was a single woman from the use of ‘Miss’ as her title), there is no other information in the OED archives about Pearson, not even her first name.

But the address book entry does reveal a little more. Murray wrote that between 1879 and 1884 Pearson submitted 2,150 slips. While this is far from the highest number of submissions (that honour goes to Thomas Austin Jr who submitted 165,061 slips), her contribution was sizable and important enough that Murray mentioned her by name in both his Presidential Address to the Philological Society in 1884 and the preface to volume 1 of the dictionary (which covered A-B), published in 1888.

What further piqued my interest was the list of books Pearson read: two histories of religion, one history of England, as well as four volumes of 'The Diary of Samuel Pepys’, covering the years 1663 and 1665-1667.

The speculation

What might Pearson, the possible servant, have made of Pepys?

On the one hand, he was a man to whom the written word was important – evidenced not only by his decade-long commitment to chronicling 17th-Century London life in his diary, but also by his library, which, for example, he treasured enough to spend £3 in 1665 (about £600 today) having all the books bound in matching covers (“much pleased I am now with my study; it being, methinks, a beautifull sight”). That’s something Pearson probably would have appreciated, as she was clearly a keen reader herself.

On the other hand, Pepys was (to put it mildly) a sex pest, who pursued not just the women – the girls! – who worked in his own home, but those in the houses of his friends and the establishments he visited.

Was Pearson ever the subject of arguments and cause of jealousies between her master and mistress, as Mary Ashwell was in the Pepys household? Did she ever worry that her master might be “too much pleased” with her beauty, as Pepys himself worried when he first met his new “pretty girl” Deb Willet? Was Pearson’s master ever too friendly with her as Pepys was with “my little girle”, Susan? Did she ever consent, only after “much ado”, to spend time with her master outside the house and then have to endure attempts by him to “[have] what pleasure almost I would with her” as Mary, Pepys’ chambermaid, did?

As Pearson read Pepys’ diaries for the OED, could she ‘separate the art from the artist’?

And might the choice of words and quotes from Pepys’ diaries that she submitted to the dictionary have been influenced by her own lived experience?

An online search of the OED reveals that Pepys is quoted from his diaries 1,941 times (around half of which come from the years Pearson read), including ‘alphabet’ and ‘bookseller’, ‘slut’ and ‘wench’. However, as an archivist that cares for the OED collection told me: “There is no easy way to trace which slips Miss Pearson contributed, as they generally don’t include the reader’s details.” Plus: “We also don’t have her handwriting to check against.”

The silent sources

Annoyingly, despite the fact we know Pearson lived on Westbourne Place in 1881, in the census of that year she’s not listed either at number 22 or number 24. Nor is there anyone else listed in either house, or anywhere else on the street, with her surname. She’s also not recorded in the 1871 census or the 1891 census (by which time the street had changed name to Cliveden Place). Rate books for her address in the period we know she lived there don’t list any Pearsons either.

But what might the census data reveal anyway?

There were 213 people living in 46 ‘households’ across 34 buildings (one of which was a pub called the Royal Clarence) on Westbourne Place on the day of the 1881 census. If we exclude the pub, of the 207 domestic residents, 67, or 32%, were employed as some kind of servant or maid. This rises to 46% of residents if we exclude those who were listed as having no occupation.

If we widen our search to a 10mile radius from Westbourne Place (further than anyone might walk, or even probably travel by horse-drawn bus, in a day, but a distance possible to travel by underground railway), we find 33 single women with the surname Pearson who were marked as a visitor at the house they were in when the census enumerator knocked on the door. Of those Miss Pearsons, 8, or 24%, are listed as service workers. This rises to 30% if we exclude children under 15 (I reason they’re a bit too young to be independently contributing to the diary project), and 40% if we also exclude those listed as having no occupation.

Even if we rely on the highest possible percentage, is 40-46% enough of a probability to conclude that the Miss Pearson who lived on Westbourne Place and contributed to the OED in the late 19th Century was a servant?

Herein lies one of the challenges of historical research: what’s a historian to do when the leads are not definitive enough, or not there at all? With only a surname and an address, the best possible source to explore is the census – which in turn can reveal a first name, birth date, birthplace, and occupation – but for me and Miss Pearson, it couldn’t help this time. And without any more clues, where am I to turn? Electoral registers can’t help when researching a woman in this period; there’s no mention of a Pearson linked to Westbourne Place in any digitised newspapers during the years she’s known to have lived there; neither is there any trace of her in the documents available to search on Find My Past, such as street and trade directories.

And so, I must accept that this story – for today, at least – ends with unresolved questions rather than a conclusion.

Sources:

• 1881 England, Wales & Scotland Census, dataset: Westbourne Place, City of Westminster, Knightsbridge ward, PRO reference RG 11/100 (via Findmypast).

• Phil Gyford, ed, The Diary of Samuel Pepys, daily entries from the 17th century London diary (pepysdiary.com).

• ‘History of the OED’, Oxford English Dictionary (OED.com).

• James AH Murray, The address book of readers (REF: OED/B/4/3/3), Oxford University Press Archives; ‘Thirteenth Address Of The President, To The Philological Society, Delivered At The Anniversary Meeting, Friday 16th Mary, 1884’, Transactions of the Philological Society, Volume 19, Issue 1 (1884); A new English dictionary on historical principles: founded mainly on the materials collected by the Philological Society, Volume 1 (1888).

• Sarah Ogilvie, The Dictionary People: The unsung heroes who created the Oxford English Dictionary (2023); ‘The Dictionary City: Londoners and the Oxford English Dictionary’, Gresham College (2026).

• Oxford English dictionary, Oxford University Press.

Enjoy!

History writing

• In the early 20th Century, “an era known as the ‘nadir’ of American race relations because of escalating anti-black violence – and when few libraries or learned societies admitted Black readers – bibliophiles met the moment by turning their private parlors into public spaces.” One such person was Arturo Schomburg, for whom “every book or portrait he acquired was one more piece of what he called ‘vindicating evidences’ of Black humanity and achievement”.

• A fascinating story by about time-keeping and distribution in 19th-Century London, particularly the women who prevailed in the business despite attacks from rivals.

• I really enjoyed this lecture about the crowd-sourced production of the Oxford English Dictionary in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which includes plenty of impressive stats and colourful people.

• A chance archival discovery is shedding light on people who survived the 14th-Century ‘Black Death’, a part of history largely unexplored because the sheer scale of death dominates most research.

• In 1998 photographer David Seidner created John Singer Sargent-style portraits featuring the descendants of the painter’s original late 19th and early 20th-Century sitters. (Click the magazine page spread to view the pictures. No need to subscribe – just click off the pop-up prompt if/when it appears.)

History

From the middle of the 17th to the end of the 19th Century it was common for women to wear their pockets attached to a strip of fabric tied around their waist, underneath their skirts or dresses. This crossed over with a period (the early 18th Century) when a type of dress called a mantua was popular at the English court. It’s characterised by an extremely wide skirt; so wide the wearer would need to pass through doorways sideways.

On a recent visit to the V&A East Storehouse (the Victoria & Albert’s new-ish publicly accessible warehouse of many of the items not able to fit in its museums) I got a glimpse of how these two fashion items worked together.

The above ‘dress’ shows not only the inner structure that supported a mantua gown, but the hole through which the wearer could access their internal tie-on pockets.

The V&A East Storehouse has made part of its mission to reflect the local community. I couldn’t fault it for the fact it had three West Ham United Football Club pieces on display when I visited (the team’s stadium is in the same Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park precinct), including this intriguing Wedgwood Jasperware ‘medallion’, thought to have been made to commemorate the club’s 1975 English Football Association (FA) Cup win.

Writing

One of the few uses of AI related to writing that I can support is using the technology to decipher ancient and/or coded languages. A recent example is the discovery that a previously incomprehensible 400-year-old, 400-odd-page manuscript is filled with thousands of bizarre treatments such as: drink several glasses of high-quality red wine or ferment a nutmeg in dough to combat dysentery.

See also: the AI-assisted transcription of 30,000 wills from the 1540s-1780s. Read the latest update from the University of Exeter-based team behind the project.

On that sunny day in July, surrounded by thousands of heavy music fans, I saw more battle jackets in a single place than ever before. Among them was the one worn by my partner. He suggested that I should make one for myself.

However, despite having worked as a music journalist for publications in Australia and the UK, organised gigs, and managed several friends’ bands over the years, I don’t think I feel passionately enough about enough bands (or certainly not enough of the same genre) to fill a cut-off denim jacket with embroidered patches.

But as I waited in the bar queue, or maybe the toilet queue (no, it must have been the bar queue, because the Black Sabbath farewell show was one of those rare gigs where there was barely any queue for the women’s toilet!), I had an idea.

Maybe I could create a women’s history battle jacket.

The more I thought about it, the more excited I became by the idea, because – and bear with me here – there are actually some significant commonalities between the development of heavy metal and its community of fans, and the development of the field of women’s history and the community of people who practise it.

Let me elaborate.

Origin story

The academic field of women’s history was born under the influence of the second wave feminist movement of the 1960s. It coincided with a broadening interest in social history, which focuses on the lives of ordinary people – such as the working class – rather than the traditional ‘great man history’ largely focused on titled elites and political and military leaders.

Around the same time, four young working-class men were turning to music as an escape from factory life in Birmingham, in the West Midlands of England. Their band would soon be known as Black Sabbath, and they are credited with creating heavy metal.

Both the history field and the style of music came to be in the same era, amid (or at least, alongside study of) the same social milieu.

The importance of community amid marginalisation

As I’ve written previously, it took a social movement, a community of women, to carry the idea and the practise of women’s history forward. But decades on from the field’s establishment, women remain under-represented in the teaching and production of history.

Similarly, while Black Sabbath invented a new style of music, it was the fans that created the genre. Battle jackets are a marker of their membership of the “metalhead” community, a group “set apart from the mainstream”. Their clothing expresses solidarity and allegiance, not only to an alternative form of music, but an alternative way of life.

The participant community was critical to the establishment of both the history field and the music genre, and heavy metal fans are seen as outsiders (albeit self-styled), just as women’s history remains marginalised.

Subverting gender stereotypes

A sign of authenticity of a battle jacket and its maker is that the patches are hand sewn. Some jackets even feature hand embroidery. Cardwell has pointed out the contrast here: that the masculine-coded world of heavy metal employs the feminine-coded skill of needlework as part of its identity fashioning.

It’s that same up-ending of gender expectations that I’m going for in my creation: using textile art to celebrate the rich field of women’s history and make the point that women’s contributions to the past go far beyond just their sewing and spinning skills and are worthy of deeper exploration.

(There’s an infuriating story relating to Bathsua Makin, a great woman scholar of the 17th Century, who, at the age of 16, presented a collection of her writings, in six different languages, to King James I. It was recorded that James responded: “but can shee spin?”. Sigh. Of course, if women did/do choose to pursue the textile arts, those skills should be celebrated, and not considered “just what ladies do […] for their own amusement”.)

A women’s history battle jacket

Battle jackets are meant to be added to. They’re an article of living cultural heritage that reflect the maker’s musical influences and inspirations; chart the artists, albums, gigs, and festivals that have had an impact on that person’s life.

My battle-for-women’s-representation-in-history jacket is still a work in progress. Its focus is on the women who have done the work – fought the battle – to uncover women’s presence and contributions in the past, to recover the women previously ‘hidden from history’. I’ve dedicated the back of my jacket to my own (still early career) experience as a historian, spotlighting those whose research I’ve most frequently cited and/or been inspired by. The front celebrates the community aspect of the field, and I invite my fellow women’s history community members to help me add to it; to tell me: who and/or what am I missing?

Who’s who

Front:

• Anon […] was often a woman’ Virginia Woolf quote button: for the women writers obscured from the historic record by the barriers of social and cultural convention.

• Head and heart pins: because for many women (myself included) doing women’s history is an intellectual as well as an emotional practice.

• Women’s Lib patch: replica of a 1970s patch – it was amid this movement that the academic field of women’s history was born.

• Resist ‘the marginalisation of women in history’ pin.

• Suffrage movement ribbons: because the first wave feminist movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries (of which women’s suffrage was a large focus) did inspire a series of women’s history works, however visibility and momentum was lost when the movement fragmented after the First World War.

• Women’s History Network patch: one of the many communities (this one UK based) that celebrates, supports, and furthers our practice today.

Back:

• Clio (central image): the ancient Greek muse of history.

• Christin De Pizan (image): one of the earliest professional writers in Europe and author of one of the earliest histories of women, the 15th Century ‘The Book of the City of Ladies’.

• Gerda Lerner: established the first post-graduate degree in women’s history in the United States at Sarah Lawrence College and was influential in pushing for a new approach to doing women’s history. She urged practitioners to go beyond ‘women worthies’ or ‘compensatory history’ (which focuses only on notable women, not the vast majority of ordinary women), beyond ‘contribution history’ (which examines women’s roles and achievements in relation to men/within male-defined society), to go beyond all existing methodologies and conceptual frameworks (none of which could “fit the complexities of the historical experience of all women”) and “explore the possibility that what we call women’s history may actually be the study of a separate women’s culture”; a culture of experiences, consciousness, and the tensions between “prescribed patriarchal assumptions and women’s efforts to attain autonomy and emancipation”.

• Natalie Zemon Davis: taught one of the first courses in North America on the history of women and gender at Toronto University, and was also a pioneer in microhistory, which is particularly well suited to exploring the ordinary and the marginalised, such as the lives of women. I took inspiration from her work (particularly 'The Return of Martin Guerre' and 'Women on the Margins') in writing my own microhistory of 17th Century Essex proprietress, Elizabeth Goever.

• June Purvis: Founding and Managing Editor of the ‘Women’s History Review’ journal. I have a particular soft spot for Purvis for her article about debate and controversy in women’s history in Britain, in which she set out a seven-point opposition to gender history as an alternative to women’s history. It included concerns about turning women into “social constructs”, de-radicalising women’s history to make it “less threatening to the male establishment”, and that gender history implicitly denied the existence of patriarchy and the existence of women as a political and subordinate class. She concluded that it was critical that women were kept centre stage to avoid “our past being pushed back into obscurity, yet again, and of being marginalized and distorted through a male lens”.

• Arlette Farge: celebrated for her ability to read sources ‘against the grain’ and use judicial and legal records to recover the voices of ordinary people, including women. She also (like me) loves an archive!

• Sheila Rowbotham: her 1973 book ‘Hidden from History: 300 Years of Women’s Oppression and the Fight Against It’ was one of the first works of women’s history published in the UK around the time the field was formalised, and was similarly inspired by Rowbotham’s involvement in the second wave feminist movement.

• ‘The Five’ by Hallie Rubenhold (cover image): the book that opened my eyes to the potential of historical non-fiction and inspired me to professionalise my own interest in history by doing a master’s degree.

• Maureen Bell: created ‘A Dictionary of Women in the London Book Trade, 1540-1730’ for her dissertation and kindly shared it with me for an essay I was writing on the subject. The ‘Dictionary’ (and other articles Bell has written about individual women) proved that, despite gendered assumptions to the contrary, it was common for women to be involved, on a day-to-day basis, at different levels within the Stationers’ Company and its associated trades, “buying and assigning copies; taking, transferring and freeing apprentices; pirating other people’s copies; being prosecuted, fined and imprisoned by the authorities; entering into partnerships and congers; and controlling stock, workers and businesses for years at a time”.

• Amy Louise Erickson: her book ‘Women & Property in Early Modern England’ has been an invaluable resource to help me understand this period, including in my study of women’s wills.

• Amy M. Froide: I’ve cited her work on single women in multiple of my own essays and stories, including her analysis of data from various 17th Century English communities which revealed that at least one third of adult women were single, and the majority of these (3:2 in Southampton, for example) were unmarried rather than widowed – challenging assumptions that all single women in this period were ‘wives in waiting’.

Sources:

• Kate Andrews, ‘Back to Black: celebrating heavy metal heritage’, The National Lottery Heritage Fund (2016).

• Maureen Bell, ‘A Dictionary of Women in the London Book Trade, 1540-1730’ (1983).

• Thomas Cardwell, ‘Battle Jackets: Wearing Metal Identity’, The Cambridge Companion to Metal Music (2023).

• Amy M. Froide, ‘Hidden Women: Rediscovering the Singlewomen of Early Modern England’, Local Population Studies (2002).

• ‘History’, BlackSabbath.com.

• Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Feminist Consciousness: From the Middle Ages to Eighteen-Seventy (1993); ‘Placing Women in History: Definitions and Challenges’, Feminist Studies, 3.1/2 (1975).

• Fiona Montgomery and Christine Collette, The European Women’s History Reader (2002).

• Lauren Alex O’Hagan, ‘“My Musical Armour”: Exploring Metalhead Identity through the Battle Jacket’, Rock Music Studies, vol. 9, no. 1 (2022).

• Carol Pal, ‘Bathsua Makin: female scholars and the reformation of learning’, Republic of Women: Rethinking the Republic of Letters in the Seventeenth Century (2012).

• June Purvis, ‘From “Women Worthies” to Poststructuralism? Debate and Controversy in Women’s History in Britain’, Women’s History: Britain, 1850-1945 : An Introduction (1995).

However, I get the sense they weren’t as highly regarded as I’d like to believe.

A painting commemorating the founding members was set in the Life Drawing Room, which women could not enter, so Moser and Kauffmann were depicted as portraits on the right-hand wall, rather than actual people in the scene. Also, they weren’t allowed any role in the RA’s governance.

It would be another 168 years before the next woman, painter Laura Knight, was elected as a full Academician in 1936. And it wasn’t until 1967 that women were invited to the RA’s annual dinner.

Amid this backdrop, it’s not surprising that art considered too feminine was excluded by the RA. In 1770 it banned “Needle-work, artificial Flowers, cut Paper, Shell-work, or any such baubles” from its exhibitions. They were considered crafts and therefore “lower arts”. Joshua Reynolds, the RA’s president at the time, described such artforms as “just what ladies do […] for their own amusement”.

Enter Mary Linwood to prove that belief wrong.

Linwood (1755-1845) was a needlework artist who expertly rendered brush strokes in stitches in her detailed embroidered versions of famous paintings. She worked with wool on linen cloth, using hundreds of colours, different thicknesses of thread, and different lengths of stitch, to create texture and depth. The technique was called ‘needle painting’. The Victoria & Albert Museum in London (V&A) describes Linwood as “the most renowned practitioner” of the art.

She began exhibiting her artworks in her twenties, and in 1786 was awarded a medal for her ‘The Head of King Lear’ embroidery (ironically, after an original painting by Joshua Reynolds!) by the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce.

In 1787 Linwood held her first solo exhibition in London. Between 1798-1901 she had a semi-permanent exhibition at Hanover Square Concert Rooms in London, which went on tour to Scotland, Ireland, and “the chief provincial towns”.

A 1798 newspaper article about the Hanover Square exhibition said: “[…] the world has never witnessed a more striking monument of genius and application, than this truly surprising and admirable collection. The astonishing effect in so many varied styles of subject, their accurate resemblance to the original paintings, and happy distribution, make [it] one of the most agreeable recreations afforded by the Metropolis.”

By 1809 Linwood had bought property on Leicester Square in London and created her own permanent exhibition space. It was the first gallery in the UK owned and run by a woman (and the first art exhibition to be illuminated by gas light).

A contemporary guidebook to London ‘exhibitions, public establishments, and remarkable objects’ described the gallery as displaying “between sixty and seventy exquisite copies, in needle-work, of the finest pictures of the English and foreign schools”. As well as the “principal room” – “a fine gallery, of excellent proportions, hung with scarlet broad cloth, and gold bullion tassels, and Greek borders” with art on one side and windows and seating on the other – Linwood’s gallery included a small room made up like “the cell of a prison” which housed her version of James Northcote’s picture of Lady Jane Grey on the eve of her execution, and another “tasteful room, or boudoir” devoted solely to her recreation of Carlo Dolci’s ‘Salvator Mundi’. Other art on display included thread paintings of works by Reynolds, Thomas Gainsborough, and Italy’s Raphael.

The guidebook author, John Feltham, said it was difficult to “single out the best pieces from among so much excellence”.

Linwood’s gallery was a hit. It was open from 10am until dusk, and visitors were charged two shillings and sixpence to enter (just over £9 in today’s money). So popular and profitable was it, that in 1813 Linwood was able to donate £155 (£9,500 today) to the infirmary in her hometown of Leicester from “the sums received from the Exhibition of [her] much admired Works”.

A newspaper article typical of the praise Linwood’s work and gallery received described her in 1840 as “the ingenious artiste whose pictorial embroidery has thrown perennial fame around the region of Leicester-square”.

The gallery remained open for over 35 years, until Linwood’s death in 1845. Obituaries for her appeared in at least 26 newspapers across the UK, describing her as “one of the most gifted and remarkable women of the age in which she lived”.

Linwood rarely chose to sell her work and only around 20 pieces by her are known to exist today.

When she died, the contents of her gallery was actioned (curiously, the sale achieved much less than the praise Linwood and her work received during her lifetime would have suggested – making only around £1,000, or £107,000 in today’s money).

But this had little impact on the legacy she left her extended family, friends, and charities. Linwood’s estate was worth over £45,000 (about £4.8million today), a fortune made largely from her art gallery ticket sales.

Sources:

• ‘A brief history of the RA’, The Royal Academy.

• Aris’s Birmingham Gazette, 26 March 1798, via The British Newspaper Archive.

• John Feltham, The picture of London, for 1810; being a correct guide to all the curiosities, amusements, exhibitions, public establishments, and remarkable objects, in and near London (1810).

• Leicester Journal, 5 February 1813, via The British Newspaper Archive.

• ‘Leicester Square, North Side, and Lisle Street Area: Leicester Estate, Leicester House and Leicester Square North Side (Nos 1-16)’, Survey of London: Volumes 33 and 34, St Anne Soho, ed. F H W Sheppard (1966), via British History Online.

• ‘Mary Linwood Art, Stitch & Life’, Leicester Museums & Galleries (2025-2026).

• ‘Miss Mary Linwood, Artist in Needlework’; 'View of Mary Linwood's gallery', Collections – Victoria and Albert Museum.

• William Cosmo Monkhouse, ‘Linwood, Mary, Dictionary of National Biography, Volume 33 (1885-1900).

• Morning Herald (London), 6 May 1840, via The British Newspaper Archive.

• The Patriot, 10 March 1845, via The British Newspaper Archive.

• ‘Now You See Us: Women Artists in Britain 1520-1920’, Tate Britain (2024).

• Amanda Vickery, ‘Hidden from history: the Royal Academy’s female founders’, RA Magazine, Summer 2016.

Enjoy!

History writing

• The on-going hunt for a rare California gold-rush-era book by the first Native American novelist, Cheesquatalawny (AKA Yellow Bird, AKA John Rollin Ridge).

• How Alice Martin turned the fragments of writing of the women in her family – stories of desire and yearning, of ambition and hidden pains; the things women have done and felt and hidden for centuries – into a novel.

• An American man has recorded 10,000 gigs – mostly rock and alternative artists – over the past 37 years. A group of volunteers is digitising and putting the music online. Explore the Aadam Jacobs collection.

• “This is [historical research] for you: after hours of looking at different kinds of sources and piecing together a narrative, you usually reach a point where you have to shrug, turn around, and walk back.”

• You may have seen the photo of the poor Victorian girl, but you probably haven’t known the story of the life of Adelaide Springett, until now.

History

In October 2012, I was lucky enough to see, in the flesh – or, the fibre, I guess – Jack Kerouac’s original ‘On The Road’ scroll.

The manuscript was written over three weeks in April 1951. It’s 120 feet long, typed on a continuous length of pages Kerouac stuck together in advance to prevent his creative flow being interrupted by having to feed individual sheets of paper into his typewriter.

The scroll is now browned with age and ragged at the edges in places. It’s typed without paragraph breaks and features multiple pencil annotations – crossings out, bracketing of passages and paragraphs, sentences circled and arrowed into different places.

Just as Dean Moriarty (Neal Cassady) marvels to Sal Paradise (Kerouac) in the book, the scroll embodies the notion of just “getting it all down without modified restraints and hang-ups on literary inhibitions and grammatical fears”.

In March 2026, Kerouac’s original scroll was sold by Christie’s in New York for over $12million (almost £9m), making it the most expensive literary manuscript to sell at auction, regardless of period or origin. It beat its own earlier record of $2.4m/£1.8m (for a 20th Century work) in 2001, and the previous overall record holder, a copy of Shakespeare’s first folio, which sold for $10m/£7.4m in 2020.

Find out more, including the history of the demand for/value of other items that Kerouac left behind.

Writing

Typos are embarrassing. I spotted one in my own story the other week (after I’d published it, of course) and I couldn’t have logged into my content management system to change it more quickly if I’d tried!

So spare a thought for – or take some comfort from – the writers and publishers featured in an exhibition at the Yale University Library all about literary mistakes.

Or do as James Joyce did and insist “These are not misprints but beauties of my style hitherto undreamt of.”

This fortnight I’m spinning off from the story of Alice Cornwallis being gifted property in her own name (which was itself a spin-off from my look at the history and significance of John Stow’s ‘A Survey of London’), into a centuries-spanning, two-act tale of women’s struggle for inheritance.

The topic jumped out to me while recently watching a documentary about Knole, a stately home in Kent, southeast England.

The women of this story – who I was aware of individually, but not connected to this place – both lived at Knole in different periods. Both left important written legacies penned during and inspired by their time there. And both – despite having titles, money, and status – could not overcome the patriarchal cultural and legal conventions that prevented them from inheriting ancestral property.

Fun fact before we get started: Knole is another one of those grand buildings – this one owned at the time by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer – where, in 1538, King Henry VIII did his ol’: “I like what you’ve done with the place, you don’t mind if I take it, do you?!” (See also: Hampton Court Palace and Whitehall Palace).

Anne Clifford (1590-1676)

Anne was the daughter of George Clifford, 3rd Earl of Cumberland, and his wife, Margaret. She had two brothers who died young, making her the family’s sole heir. Or so she thought.

When George died in 1605, rather than leaving the extensive Clifford estate (which included five castles) to Anne, he left it to his brother, Francis.

What’s interesting is that George’s will contravened family deeds (or, an ‘entail’) dating back to the 13th Century that said property should descend lineally to the eldest direct heir, regardless of their gender.

Anne was rightly angered at being denied, and with the support of her mother, launched a legal bid to claim her inheritance.

In an article for a yearbook about politics, patronage and literature in England 1558-1658, Barbara K. Lewalski described the case as the two women “setting themselves against the entire Jacobean patriarchy: male relatives, their husbands, court society, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and King James himself”.

In 1609 Anne married Richard Sackville, 3rd Earl of Dorset, and moved to Knole. They had five children together – three sons, who died young, and two daughters. Now under the legal coverture of her husband, Richard took charge of Anne’s lawsuit and pressured her to accept a pay-out. She refused.

She recorded details of the legal battle, the ups and downs of her marriage, and life at Knole, in her diary. It survives as a valuable example of women’s personal writing from the 17th Century. (Vita Sackville-West edited and published the diary with her own introduction in 1923.)

Anne left Knole in 1624 when Richard died (by this stage he had racked up huge debts, sold Knole, and was renting it back). She married again (to Philip Herbert, 4th Earl of Pembroke), and continued to fight for her inheritance.

Despite the Clifford custom that dictated Anne should have inherited the estate – backed up by evidence she provided from extensive historical and genealogical research – court rulings went against her.

She refused to accept offers of a settlement from her uncle Francis, who died in 1641, or his son Henry, whom her family’s estate then passed to. Anne’s only hope was that her cousin would die without a surviving son, in which case everything would revert to her.

Lewalski described that Anne “saw herself as a kind of female David taking on the Goliath of the patriarchal power structure to claim the rights of a daughter and preserve the interests of a female line”.

Her persistence eventually paid off. In 1643, almost 40 years after her father’s death and the start of her legal battle, Anne won by default, when Henry died heirless.

Now in her 50s (and after another few years waiting out the worst of the Civil War), Anne could finally return to her ancestral homelands in the north of England. She devoted the final three decades of her life to restoring the five castles (some of which had been left to ruin) and other buildings across her properties, and supporting the local poor. She also published ‘The Great Books of Record’, a three-volume Clifford family history based on the research she’d conducted during her legal battle.

When Anne died in 1676, her long-fought-for inheritance meant she was one of the wealthiest women in the country. She left the Clifford estate to her surviving daughter, Margaret.

Vita Sackville-West (1892-1962)

Vita (baptised Victoria Mary) was the only child of Lionel Sackville-West and his wife (who was also his first cousin) Victoria. She was born at the family’s ancestral home, Knole, which her father later inherited in 1908, making him 3rd Baron Sackville.

Vita developed a profound attachment to Knole. In her writings, she described it variously as a maternal figure and as a lover. But it was a doomed love. As a daughter – under the laws of male primogeniture – she was unable to inherit it.

But rather than challenging her denial of hereditary privilege in the courts, she explored it through writing. So too did one of her lovers, Virginia Woolf.

Vita’s novel, ‘The Edwardians’, tells the story of a brother and sister, their respective destinies of ancestral and feminine inheritance, and their questioning of the ‘natural’ order of the period and their class. It’s set at Chevron, a grand house based on Knole. In her author’s note, Vita wrote: “no character in this book is wholly fictitious”.

Woolf went even further in ‘Orlando’, a time travelling tale in which the title character, based on Vita, changes sex part way through the book. Crucially, even as a woman, Orlando keeps ownership of the ancestral home, which stands in for Knole. Vita’s son, Nigel Nicolson, said of the book: “Virginia by her genius had provided Vita with a unique consolation for having been born a girl, for her exclusion from her inheritance” and described the work as “the longest and most charming love-letter in literature”.

Vita further expressed her dedication to Knole, and explored her family’s relationship to it, in her history ‘Knole and the Sackvilles’. It traces her ancestors’ ownership of the house from the 16th Century to the death of her grandfather in the 19th Century. (It also includes a section on Anne Clifford, who Vita described as “a lady of some fame and a great deal of character” who was “the legal heiress of the North, and the North she would have”.)

In 1913, Vita had married the diplomat and writer Harold Nicolson, and together they had two surviving sons. (It was an unconventional relationship, which included each taking various same-sex lovers, eg: Virginia Woolf.) After initially moving to a house just a few miles from Knole, the pair bought the run-down Sissinghurst Castle, also in Kent, in 1930. It’s this home that I most closely associate with Vita, and it’s here that she cultivated the property’s now famous garden.

When her father died in 1928, Knole had passed to Vita’s uncle, Charles Sackville-West. It was also around this time that Vita began talks with the National Trust about taking on the property and opening it to the public, which it did from 1946. In so doing, Vita ensured that Knole became an inheritance for all of us.

Sources:

• Susan Bazargan, ‘The Uses of the Land: Vita Sackville-West’s Pastoral Writings and Virginia Woolf’s “Orlando”’, Woolf Studies Annual, Vol. 5 (1999).

• Jane De Gay, ‘Virginia Woolf’s Feminist Historiography in “Orlando”’, Critical Survey, Vol. 19, No. 1 (2007)

• T. J. Hochstrasser, ‘West, Victoria Mary [Vita] Sackville (1892–1962)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2017).

• Dr Sue Jones, ‘Single Parent History: Lady Anne Clifford – historic legal battles, philanthropy and independence’, Gingerbread (2022).

• ‘Knole’ and sub-pages, The National Trust.

• Barbara K. Lewalski, ‘Re-Writing Patriarchy and Patronage: Margaret Clifford, Anne Clifford, and Aemilia Lanyer’, The Yearbook of English Studies, Vol. 21, Politics, Patronage and Literature in England 1558-1658 (1991).

• V. Sackville-West, Knole and the Sackvilles (1922).

• ‘Women in history: Lady Anne Clifford’, English Heritage.

Something I didn’t mention then was the former property of a ‘Mistris Cornewallies’. Stow’s passage – part of his description of Aldgate Street (now Leadenhall Street) – reads in full:

“Then is there a faire house, with divers Tenements neere adjoining, sometime belonging to a late dissolved Priory, but since possessed by Mistris Cornewallies, widow, and her heires, by the gift of King Henry the eighth, in reward of fine puddings (as it was commonly said) by her made, wherewith she had presented him: such was the Princely liberality of those times.”

I have discovered that the ‘Mistris’ was called Alice and her surname is the pre-standardised spelling of Cornwallis.

Now, it’s no secret that King Henry VIII liked his food (a suit of armour made for him in 1540 puts his waistline around 138cm). But even so – and even considering “the Princely liberality of those times” – Alice Cornwallis must have made some damn fine desserts to warrant the gift of a house and land.

Could Stow’s account really be true, or was it a case of a story being embellished and/or corrupted over time? After all, Henry VIII had been dead more than 50 years when the first edition of Stow’s ‘Survey’ was published.

I’m always drawn to stories of women who had some agency, or control (eg: property ownership), in periods when they were generally under the legal, financial, and even bodily, authority of first their fathers and then their husbands. So, I was intrigued to investigate further.

And reader, hold on, because it gets more liberal yet.

But first…

Who was Alice Cornwallis and what did she do?

As I’ve written about before, the historic record is overwhelmingly silent when it comes to the details of the lives of ordinary women from the past. As such, I can’t tell you when or where Alice was born.

The earliest reference to her I’ve found is in the records of Privy Purse Expenses of Henry VIII from October 1530 for a payment “To the wife that makes the King puddings at Hampton Court, 6s. 8d.” (That’s about £250 in today’s money, according to the Bank of England’s conversion tools.)

Only six women are known to have been employed indoors in Henry VIII’s household. Alison Sim has written that this was typical of the upper classes in the Tudor period. It cost more to employ men than women, so having a house full of male staff was a status symbol. The names of just two of Henry VIII’s women staff are known to us today: Anne Harris, who worked in the Laundry, and Alice Cornwallis, who worked in the Confectionary, one of more than a dozen departments of the royal kitchen. (Others include familiar names such as the Cellar, Bakehouse, Pantry, and Larder, plus the more whimsical Spicery, Saucery, Buttery, and Wafery.)

, Chief Historian for Historic Royal Palaces, wrote in her book, ‘The Private Lives of the Tudors’, that Henry VIII “so loved [Alice’s] sweet treats”, and listed “custards, fritters, tarts, jelly, cream of almonds and a quince marmalade so thick that it could be sliced” as among his favourite of her recipes.

And excitingly for our purposes, Borman endorses Stow’s account that Henry VIII rewarded Alice for her culinary skills with property in Aldgate.

The “Princely liberality” of Henry VIII’s property gifts

Following a further sift through the letters and papers of Henry VIII and later monarchs, I found six references to Alice, her husband Edward, and properties in the City of London. They relate to two initial gifts.

I spoke to historian and author Caroline Angus to help me understand these 16th Century records. Angus has transcribed and published the letters and other writings of Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII’s ‘faithful servant and agent’, so knows about the administration of the country around this time.

The first property gift, granted in 1540, was to “Edw. Cornewallis and Alice, his wife” of “the great messuage called the ‘Principall place’ and garden adjoining […] in the parish of St Katharine Cristchurche in London, which belonged to the late monastery of Evesham, Worc” as well as “messuages, lands, &c., in the parish of St. Dunstan in the East, London, which belonged to the said monastery”. (A ‘messuage’ is a house with outbuildings and land.)

This ‘Principall place’ matches the location and description that Stow gives in his ‘Survey’. It would have been located somewhere between what is today an alley called Fenchurch Buildings and Billiter Street. A map of Tudor London c.1520, created by modern historians and archaeologists, shows ‘The Abbots of Eversham’s Inn’ (the said dissolved priory) occupying the same area.

Today the site is home to a towering steel and glass high-rise:

The second property gift, granted in 1543, was for “Nine messuages in the parish of St. Katherine Christchurch, and two in that of St. Alban, Wood street, London […] and six in St. Clement’s lane in the parishes of St. Clement within the city and St. Andrew Undreshaft, London”. And what’s interesting about this one – aside from the scale of the gift – is that in this and later references to it, Alice is explicitly named as the sole recipient, with Edward only mentioned for context (eg: “Alice Cornewalles, wife of Edw. Cornewalles”).

So, it wasn’t just one property in Aldgate that Alice was gifted, but 15, in multiple locations (including Aldgate) across the City of London. They must have been damn fine desserts, indeed!

The gifts were initially to receive the rental income from the properties during their lifetimes, but in 1544 and 1545, they were granted the freeholds to the properties and those who would’ve previously received the rental income rights back after Alice and Edward’s deaths were paid out by the Crown. There are further references in the records to Edward and Alice selling some of the properties.

At the time of her death in January 1556, Alice – by then a widow and mother to a 24-year-old son, Thomas – was still in possession of the ‘Principall place’ off Aldgate (now Leadenhall) Street.

The records I have access to don’t explicitly mention puddings or Alice’s role as Confectionary kitchen staff in relation to the property gifts. But are the dots big enough and close enough to join? Those with much closer proximity than me to the people (Stow) and the places/systems involved (Borman) certainly thought so. And does it matter that the specific property Stow mentioned as being gifted for ‘fine puddings’ appears to be the one given to Alice alongside her husband, rather than one of the 15 given exclusively to her? Probably not in the grand scheme of things (and who's to say the joint gift wasn’t also for the puddings, anyway).

What does it all mean?

Alice Cornwallis was a non-elite woman whose culinary skills shone brightly enough, even from her service-level position, to catch the palette and the attention of a king. She was rewarded with property across the City of London, which she controlled for a decade and a half, and ensured a healthy inheritance for her son.

470 years later, I’m saying her name, recounting her story, and celebrating her skill and good fortune. That’s more of a legacy than most of us can probably expect.

Sources:

• Tracy Borman, The Private Lives of the Tudors: A revelatory glimpse into the lives of Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn, Elizabeth I and more (2016).

• G S Fry, ed. (1896), ‘Abstracts of Inquisitiones Post Mortem For the City of London: Part 1’, British History Online.

• James Gairdner, ed. (1880), ‘Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, Henry VIII’, British History Online.

• C L Kingsford, ed. (1908), A Survey of London. Reprinted From the Text of 1603, British History Online.

• Alison Sim, Food and Feast in Tudor England (2005).

• John Stow, A Survey Of London / The Survey of London (1598 and 1633).

• Alison Weir, Henry VIII: King and Court (2011).

Enjoy!

History writing

• Despite the commonly believed etymology of the term, it turns out that in no stage or screen version of ‘Gaslight’ is there an exchange between husband and wife about the dimming of lights in which he tells her she’s imagining it in an attempt to drive her insane.

• 18th Century naval warfare inadvertently saved the papers, and the story, of an international woman wine trader from London.

• A fascinating insight into the practice of Tudor-era miniature portraits and the contemporary experts who decode them.

• More fascinating insights, this time into ancient prayers, charms, and folk remedies associated with pregnancy.

• Meet Wallace Kirsop, the now-92-year-old man who pioneered the study of rare books in Australia and helped establish the concept of special collections in its institutions.

History

Did you grow up with any superstitions around eggshells? From at least as early as the 1st Century AD – as described by Pliny the Elder in his ‘Naturae Historiae’ (‘Natural History’), for example – some people have associated eggshells with a fear of spells and curses, which made them “break the shells [...] immediately after eating them, or else pierce them with the spoon that they have used”.

In the 16th Century, Reginald Scot was describing in his ‘The Discoverie of Witchcraft’ how believers attributed to witches, among other nefarious traits, the ability to “saile in an egge shell […] through and under the tempestuous seas”.

By at least the early 1800s, the two themes had combined into a belief in various places across the UK that egg eaters must crush their shells to prevent witches stealing them to use as boats. In 1934, Elizabeth Fleming wrote a poem about it, called ‘Eggshells’, the first verse of which I’ve animated here:

Writing

If you could time travel, how far back do you think you could go before you stopped being able to understand English? created an experiment for you to find out.

That’s what Janelle Jenstad told me when we chatted over Zoom recently. Jenstad is a Professor in the Department of English at University of Victoria, Canada, and the Founder and Director of the Map of Early Modern London. The digital project (among many other fascinating things) uses the ‘Survey’ as a key source to annotate places on the mid-16th-Century ‘Agas’ map, as part of an effort to bring William Shakespeare’s London to life.

“I think Stow is a visionary in his conception of how to tell history,” Jenstad says. “He’s the first person who tells the story of London from London’s perspective.

“The ‘Survey’ is a fascinating text because it’s recording London as it’s growing. I sometimes wonder if he’s writing for old Londoners to remind them what London was, or if he’s writing for new Londoners to interpellate them into his idea of London.”

Who was John Stow?

Born in London in 1524 or 1525 (“depending on which calendar one uses”), John Stow was the son of a candlemaker based in Aldgate, in the east of the city. He was a member of the Merchant Taylors’ Company, but his main interests were literature and antiquarian history.

“He’s a collector of books and manuscripts and seems to make his living primarily from editing and writing,” Jenstad says. “He edited Chaucer and other authors’ works, abridged other chroniclers, wrote about England, wrote about Queen Elizabeth I, and eventually wrote about London.”

Stow’s ‘Survey’ was published across four editions: 1598, 1603, 1618, and 1633. The first two were penned by Stow himself, and the second two overseen and expanded upon after his death in 1605 by his friend and fellow antiquarian, Anthony Munday. (It was later picked up by John Strype in 1720 and further iterations published under his name.) During this time, London’s population changed from around 50,000 in 1550 to around 200,000 in 1600 and around 400,000 in 1650.

The ‘Survey’ changed across time, too: from quarto (around 30cm tall) to folio size (around 40cm tall), from 485 to 990 pages, and from a wide target audience to a more elite one.

“The first edition was quarto size, printed in black letter type, which is considered to be the more accessible font of the period. It’s a sign that Stow was imagining a common readership,” Jenstad says. By the fourth edition, it’s being printed in folio size and is “likely out of the price range of most people; it would be bought by people with money. It goes from being a book of the people in 1598 to being a book of the Corporation of London by 1633.”

Indeed, the 1633 edition features the coats of arms of the City of London and all its livery companies, and Jenstad says “we have records of livery companies paying for copies”.

What actually is the ‘Survey’?

The ‘Survey’ is organised into three sections. The first covers the walls, gates, and bridges of the city, its schools, and its customs, sports, and pastimes. The third section looks at the governance of the city. The second section is the important one, the street-by-street tour of the 25 wards of London, plus the Borough of Southwark and Bridge Ward Without. In the 1633 edition, it expanded to cover around 4miles outside the city walls (“The person who did that work – we’re not entirely sure who it is – seems to have handed in his notes really late, so they’re published at the back of the book.”).

In each ward, Stow first describes the perimeter, then documents the length of each east-to-west street, before covering the streets that branch off it to the north, and then the streets that branch off it to the south. In between are occasional observations – from past and present – about buildings and other landmarks, their etymology, and people associated with them. He starts from the wards in the east of the city, working his way across to the west.

But despite the meticulousness of the mapping, Jenstad cautions that “the content of the ‘Survey’ tends to be biased towards a fairly sanitised version of London”. For example, there’s no mention of crime or prostitution, of entertainment such as bear baiting, of overcrowding, dirt, and sewage.

What is the legacy of Stow’s ‘Survey’?

Jenstad says: “It doesn’t tell us a complete history of London, but then no history ever does. Histories are stories told from a particular perspective. But it’s a wonderful source, as long as you keep in mind what Stow didn’t write about.”

Indeed, she considers Stow’s work among her most valuable resources; so much so that she published her own transcription of the 1633 edition on the Map of Early Modern London site, and is working on a project to “put the four editions side by side and allow you to see how they evolve”.

“The 1633 text in particular should be more widely used than it is by historians. It has so much more information [than the earlier editions] and covers a really crucial period of London’s history – the whole shift to the Stuart era and the lead up to the Civil War. And the fact it says on the title page that it’s ‘now completely finished’.”

Jenstad believes historians tend to default to the 1603 edition, the last one published during Stow’s lifetime, but “I’d really like the 1633 to be the canonical text”.

It’s a fitting hope: that a man who put place before people in the works of his lifetime should not be privileged as a person over the comprehensiveness of those works released after his death.

When I spoke with Jenstad, she told me the ‘Survey’ wasn’t intended as a literal guidebook. Despite the portable size of the first three editions, she said: “I’m not actually sure that Stow imagined anybody walking around with it in their hand”. She described it instead as a guide to “travel in your mind”.

But what if we did try to use it on the ground?

The privilege of living in London is the ability to see in real life how the city has both changed from, and stayed the same as, the historic descriptions of it. And so, I set out to do just that.

I chose Stow’s local area, Aldgate Ward, and using the text of the 1633 edition, focused on following his description of its bounds – the east-to-west main roads, the north and south streets that run off them, and some of their key landmarks.

Of the 13 streets explicitly mentioned in this portion of the ‘Survey’, all but one of them can be clearly found today, albeit with sometimes changed or slight variations of the names (eg: Stow’s Sugarloafe Alley – off today’s Leadenhall Street, this section of which was formerly known as Aldgate Street – is now Fenchurch Buildings; Woodroofe Lane, leading to Tower Hill, is now Cooper’s Row; Sydon Lane is now Seething Lane; Mart Lane is now Mark Lane). The outlier is Culver Alley, off Fenchurch Street, which from a comparison of 16th and 17th-Century and modern maps, may have been somewhere near to or between today’s Fen Court and Hogarth Court, or may in fact be today’s Cullum Street. A water pump (with wolf head spout), which replaced a former well where Aldgate “divided into twaine”, still stands around the same spot.

The halls of the two livery companies Stow names – Bricklayers and Ironmongers – are gone, now in their place a corporate office building and Rolex store, respectively. And of the five places of worship mentioned, two survive, including St Andrew Undershaft, where Stow is commemorated with a statue showing him at work on his writings.

But she’s also found evidence, from at least the 7th Century, of women’s “significant and almost constant effort” to create women’s histories. The problem she found, however, was that due to social and cultural conditions of the times, rather than these women’s work building successively on each other, they “developed in a repetitive, circular pattern, with generation after generation of women repeating what others had done before them”.

Lerner said that “Women’s History couldn’t be created as an intellectual pursuit in the absence of a social movement of women”; that it required communities of women to carry the ideas forward.

It takes a community

Indeed, as Fiona Montgomery and Christine Collete have described, the academic field of women’s history was born “under the influence” of the second wave feminist movement of the 1960s* – a movement of communities of women working together to improve the rights and representation of their fellow women.

It coincided with a broadening interest in social history, which included women-related topics, such as the family, which had previously been considered “ahistorical”. The field also attracted “self-confessed feminist historians” who wanted to “study women on their own terms”.

Sheila Rowbotham directly credited “a political movement” and “discussions in women’s liberation” as the inspiration for her 1973 book ‘Hidden from History: 300 Years of Women’s Oppression and the Fight Against It’.

Small steps, big ambitions

Nicole Bourbonnais has described how early historians of women had a dual focus. First, they looked to recognise the “critical” role women had played in key events that dominated historical studies, and which until this point, were almost exclusively dominated by histories of men: politics, wars, and revolutions. This involved writing not only about “the more visible actors” such as Joan of Arc and Sylvia Pankhurst, but also women like the peasants who had led marches during the French Revolution. Second – since the social and cultural conditions throughout history had confined a large proportion of many women’s experiences to the domestic sphere – they “expanded the limits of historical enquiry”, writing histories of family, childbearing and rearing, of work and labour politics. In so doing, Bourbonnais said, “it challenged us to rethink what counted as historically significant”.

Writing of this same early period in the development of the field of women’s history, Ann D. Gordon, Mari Jo Buhle, and Nancy Schrom Dye, said that historians of women were “redefining and enlarging traditional notions of historical significance”, and that not only were they creating “a new history of women, but also a new history”.

However, even in left-leaning, social historical circles, women’s history still had “to be argued for”. Sally Alexander and Anna Davin recalled in the inaugural issue of ‘History Workshop’ journal in 1976 that “As recently as 1971, when the suggestion was made at a History Workshop session that people working on women’s issues should meet later in the day, there was a roar of laughter”.

Gerda Lerner was willing to do the arguing. She declared the idea of women being a sub-group in history as “wrong”; that while “men have defined their experience as history and left women out”, given women had always made up at least half, sometimes the majority, of the population, history up to this period was in fact “the history of a minority” and should be seen as “merely prehistory”.

She said the stages of women’s history to date – from ‘women worthies’ or ‘compensatory history’, which focused on notable women and didn’t describe “the significance of women’s activities to society as a whole” nor “the experience and history of the mass of women”, to ‘contribution history’, which situated women, their efforts, status, and oppression within “male-defined society” – were important, but unsatisfactory. Lerner believed that to write a new history, a women’s history, there must be “new questions to all of universal history”. The next stage, she said, “may be to explore the possibility that what we call women’s history may actually be the study of a separate women’s culture” which would focus not only on women’s experiences but their consciousness, and the tensions between “prescribed patriarchal assumptions and women’s efforts to attain autonomy and emancipation”.

But alongside this call to action, others within the women’s history field began questioning whether they were focused too narrowly and separately on women.

Challenges from within

Natalie Zemon Davis acknowledged the need to write about women “to rectify the deep and longlasting bias of the historical record”, but that she and many others wanted also to make “the relations between the sexes more just”. She said: “it seems to me that we should be interested in the history of both women and men, that we should not be working only on the subjected sex”.

Joan W. Scott said gender could be used as “a way of rethinking the determinants of the relationships between the sexes”, and that by seeing the word ‘gender’ as purely “a grammatical reference” it could help historians separate biology from culture and explain change as a result of history rather than social engineering. Used in this way, she said, it supported questions about how sex-based roles and functions, and the meaning of ‘man’ and ‘woman’, varied across time and place, how rights and power intersected with masculinity and femininity, and how conforming with or fighting against these things affected people’s lives, practices, and identities. And in the process, it would “bring women from the margins to the center of historical focus”.

However, many other historians of women saw this expansion of scope as a threat to the dedicated work to recover women previously hidden from history. June Hannam described an emphasis on gender-centred history as “controversial”; that an approach which saw the interests of the sexes as similar could lead to women’s specific experiences being lost from view.

June Purvis went even further, setting out a seven-point opposition to gender history, which included concerns about turning women into “social constructs”, de-radicalising women’s history to make it “less threatening to the male establishment”, and that gender history implicitly denied the existence of patriarchy, and the existence of women as a political and subordinate class. She concluded that it was “critical” that women were kept “centre stage” to avoid “our past being pushed back into obscurity, yet again, and of being marginalized and distorted through a male lens”.

The field of women’s history faced other internal challenges, too. Like the women’s liberation movement that helped inspire it, the academy and history practitioners were criticised for a lack of diversity and intersectionality.

Sonya O. Rose described the work of women of colour as “a second major assault” (gender history being the first). She explained that writing by and about women of colour challenged the version of women being reclaimed by white Western historians as, in fact, the experiences of white, often middle-class, women; that domesticity, family structures, community bonds, and women’s role in the public sphere were different for Third World women and women of colour. These writings also promoted, Rose said, the “pivotal idea” that race, gender, and class are “interlocking and interdependent” dimensions and forms of domination. For example, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham has described the “paradoxical nature” of black women’s identity, explaining they are “simultaneously black and female, black and American, and American and female” and that “to be black and female carries the dual burden of racial and sexual oppression”.

*It should be noted that – in line with Lerner’s assertion about women’s history needing a movement of women to thrive – the first wave feminist movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries did inspire a series of women’s history works (one I’ve used multiple times in my own research is Alice Clark’s 1919 ‘Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century’). However, Hannam has said that when the women’s movement fragmented after the First World War, “these pioneering histories tended to be lost from view”. In contrast, in the mid-20th Century – even when the second wave feminist movement began to lose momentum – “the expansion of higher education opened up more jobs for women academics who were able to influence the curriculum and to introduce women’s history courses”.

The work must go on

However, I’d argue that that influence hasn’t extended far enough outside the academy. Decades on from the field’s establishment, women are still significantly under-represented in, for example:

• UK secondary school history lessons – women made up just 7% of named characters in a sample of 28 history textbooks currently in use in classrooms.

• both academic and public history outputs – from a sample of 26,697 articles, books, podcasts, and newsletters published in 2004, just 1.5% focused on women-specific topics, rising to 4.7% when considering women-specific and women-related topics.

However, as my survey of history practitioners found, at least 33% of women who do history are either explicitly or implicitly influenced by this under-representation. And while, yes, they are frustrated, even angry, about the state of the field, they are also determined to drive the change they want to see. As one of my favourite responses in the survey said: “The more the patriarchy gets me down, the harder I go”.

Women may traditionally have been excluded from the history that was recorded, but that doesn’t mean they were absent from or didn’t contribute to the making of it. They were there, and they’re waiting for us to uncover and tell their stories.

Sources:

• Aitken-Burt, Laura, Initial Analysis of Characters Listed in History GCSE and A Level Specifications for AQA, Edexcel and OCR (2025), doi:10.5281/zenodo.15620013.

• Alexander, Sally and Anna Davin, ‘Feminist History’, History Workshop, 0.1 (1976).

• Bourbonnais, Nicole, ‘A Brief History of Women’s History’, London School of Economics (2016)

• Brooks Higginbotham, Evelyn, ‘Beyond The Sound of Silence: Afro-American Women in History’, Gender & History, 1.1 (1989).

• Gordon, Ann D., Mari Jo Buhle, and Nancy Schrom Dye, ‘The Problem of Women’s History’, in Liberating Women’s History: Theoretical and Critical Essays, ed. by Berenice A. Carroll (1976).

• Hannam, June, ‘Women’s History, Feminist History’, Making History, the Changing Face of the Profession in Britain, The Institute of Historical Research.

• Lerner, Gerda, The Creation of Feminist Consciousness: From the Middle Ages to Eighteen-Seventy (1993).

• Montgomery, Fiona and Christine Collette, The European Women’s History Reader (2002).

• Purvis, June, ‘From “Women Worthies” to Poststructuralism? Debate and Controversy in Women’s History in Britain’, in Women’s History: Britain, 1850-1945 : An Introduction (1995).

• Rose, Sonya O., ‘Gender History/Women’s History: Is Feminist Scholarship Losing Its Critical Edge?’, Journal of Women’s History, 5.1 (1993).

• Rowbotham, Sheila, Hidden from History: 300 Years of Women’s Oppression and the Fight against It, 3rd edition (1977).

• Scott, Joan W., ‘Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis’, The American Historical Review, 91.5 (1986); Gender and the Politics of History, revised edition (1999).

• Zemon Davis, Natalie, ‘“Women’s History” in Transition: The European Case’, Feminist Studies, 3.3/4 (1976).

Enjoy!

History writing

• It’s incredible to think that sometime in the early 1500s, a precious gold necklace and locket was dropped in a field in the West Midlands of England, and around 500 years later it was dug up intact. It’s perhaps even more precious because it’s a rare piece that shows the love once felt between Henry VIII and his first wife, Katherine of Aragon.

• 8 February, I have learned, is celebrated by some as the ‘anniversary of King Taejong falling off his horse’. For on that day in 1404, Taejong of Joseon, a Korean ruler, was, according to the contemporary ‘Veritable Records of the Joseon Dynasty’, “riding a horse with a bow and arrow, shooting a deer. The horse overturned and he fell from it, but was not injured. He looked around and said, ‘Don’t let the historians know’.” Unfortunately for him – but humorously for us – his request was ignored. (Hat tip to Sam Ottewill-Soulsby via Bluesky.)

• ’s historical crossover articles are full of fascinating tidbits, like the fact 1889 was the year the Eiffel Tower was completed, Adolf Hitler was born, and Nintendo was created. I first stumbled upon part 3, and have since gone back and read part one and part two.

• Discover the often-unrecognised women who typed manuscripts from dictation and messy handwritten drafts, freeing up [male] authors to focus on the development of their work rather than its production.

History

Banqueting House, the last remaining building from the old Whitehall Palace in London, has just reopened after two years of conservation. I was lucky enough to visit on its first public open day in February.

Originally known as York Place and owned by Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, Whitehall Palace’s transformation into a royal residence was another case (like Hampton Court Palace) of King Henry VIII going: “I like what you’ve done with the place, you don’t mind if I take it, do you?!”.

But it was actually King James I, in 1619, who commissioned architect Inigo Jones to create the Banqueting House. The result is cited as the first Palladian style building in England. However, it’s perhaps the ceiling for which Banqueting House is most famous. It features paintings by Peter Paul Rubens, commissioned by King Charles I, and installed in 1636. Charles got a final glimpse of them as he was led through the room and out a window to the scaffolding where he was executed in 1649.

A fire in 1698 destroyed everything at Whitehall Palace, except the Banqueting House. In the years since, the building has been used as a chapel and a military history museum (it once displayed the skeleton of Napoleon’s horse), but has now returned to its original use as an event space.

A humble request for the next phase of conservation/renovation: return the downstairs, used as a drinking den by King James I, to its former grotto style, complete with fountains and seashell-covered walls.

Writing

Julian Sancton (via ) shares the ‘research behind [a] banging work of narrative history’: his story about the 21st Century discovery of the sunken 18th Century Spanish galleon, San Jose. “A lot of the book has to do with the joys of archival research. It’s a bit of a challenge to try to make that exciting, but it really is so exciting for me to find treasure in those archives, and I tried to communicate that to the reader.”

Given I’ve got a couple of stories not quite ready to post yet, I thought I’d share my answer, and my motivations, here.

In short, I say: ‘public history is doing history in, with, and for the public’. But I’m conscious that’s got a bit of political slogan vibe to it.

Fellow history newsletter-er Lucy Worsley says:

“I’m a public historian, which to my mind means doing the kind of history that appeals to people who don’t even know they like history … yet.”

I agree. And that’s part of my ambition, too.

But what also appeals to me is the field’s roots (in this country, at least) in social, working class – and as such, what’s described as ‘radical’ – history.

Public history was born in the UK from historian Raphael Samuel’s History Workshop classes, which he began teaching at Ruskin, an adult-education ‘trade union college’ in Oxford, in 1967.

In contrast to traditional history practice – the professionalisation of which had been heavily influenced in the second half of the 19th Century by the strictly objective and impartial approach of Leopold von Ranke – Samuel believed that people should not just be represented in history, but should represent themselves.

Raphael Samuel (1934-1996) described History Workshop as “an alternative educational practice” that “gave a privileged place to experience” and as such, found its students – working men and women – “peculiarly well-placed to write about many facets of industrial and working class history”.

For example, in the 1970s, student David Douglass published a pamphlet, ‘Pit Life in Co. Durham’, which was an unashamedly part autobiographical, part historical attempt to explain the roots of miners’ militancy.

Samuel thought it remarkable how little of history had been written from the vantage point, and incorporating the real-life experiences, of people themselves. History Workshop was his attempt to change that.

He encouraged participants to “write their own history instead of allowing it to be lost, or learning it at second or third hand; to become producers rather than consumers; and to bring their own experience and understanding to bear upon the record of the past.” He focused particularly on themes which were “hidden from history” and “at odds with the dominant mode of historical publication”.

History Workshop was a course that became a movement, birthed a journal (which has recently released its 100th issue), and carries on its public historical work via a digital magazine.

As for my own public historical work: women (who remain as ‘hidden from history’ as ever) are a key focus. And like Samuel and his students, I too am interested in representing ordinary people like myself (what’s often described as ‘history from below’), as well as exploring the past and present of the streets and locations I encounter in my everyday life.

And when I do sometimes research and write about those from more privileged backgrounds, it’s usually because these people (these women) were radical in some way, defied the expectations and conventions of their time.

And above all, I choose topics that appeal to me, and which I think will appeal to you too, even if you don’t know it yet.

Sources:

• Cauvin, Thomas, ‘A Long History of Public History’, in Public History. A Textbook of Practice (2022); ‘New Field, Old Practices: Promises and Challenges of Public History’, magazén, vol. 2, issue 1 (2021).

• Samuel, Raphael, ‘On the Methods of History Workshop: A Reply’, History Workshop, no. 9 (1980); Village Life and Labour (1975).

• Schwarz, Bill, ‘History on the Move: Reflections on History Workshop’, Radical History Review, 1993.57 (1993).