The Early Modern Commons

Some people count sheep to help them get to sleep – John Rickman counted people, over and over again. He was the driving force behind the country’s first census, in 1801, but also oversaw the following three censuses, in 1811, 1821 and 1831....

Having chosen a George Cruikshank  illustration in my last blog, here is another one, dating from 1819 and entitled ‘Landing the Treasures, or Results of the Polar Expedition!!!’  The background to it was the fact that in the 19th...

This is the concluding part of my various blogs re-visiting some of my Irish-themed posts – a repeat of a post made seven years ago when I paid a visit to the Guinness Storehouse in Dublin: As a young boy at boarding school (yes, thanks for reminding...

Today I visited Lyme Regis and Charmouth to do a spot of fossil-hunting on Dorset’s Jurassic Coast. It reminded me of the post I did a few years back on the remarkable Mary Anning, so I have dusted it off and here it is again: Today the spotlight...

One of my all-time favourite Gillray caricatures is the excoriating image of the Prince Regent, bearing the title of ‘A voluptuary under the horrors of Digestion’. It is, in every sense of the word, gross, with its portrayal of the bloated...

One of the interesting characters I came across doing the research for my forthcoming talk to the Early Dance Centre was one particular Master of Ceremonies at the Upper Rooms in Bath. Captain William Wade had stepped into the breach after a contested...

One of the problems in writing about my ancestor Richard Hall is that I do not have his Faith – Richard was a devout Baptist. I am not, and understanding what being a Baptist meant to Richard is clearly important. By the age of 16 he was attending...

As part of my trawl through the backwaters of the 18th Century, looking for overlooked heroes to include in my forthcoming book** with Pen and Sword on ‘forgotten’ Georgian Greats, I came across the name of Thomas Boulsover. “Who he?”...

(c) Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery. I love the way that so many inventors in the Georgian era came up with what were basically fakes – and I will be featuring some of them in my next-book-but-two*. Imitation  stone (Eleanor Coade) imitation...

Elizabeth Cane was born July 11, 1750. Few will recognize the name but she was to become one of the most fascinating and notorious women of the century. Little is known about her early years but it is likely that she came to London when about sixteen,...

I see that there is an auction next week under the umbrella of the Sotheby’s series “Of Royal and Nobel Descent” – and with a whole host of Nelson memorabilia on offer it is bound to be of interest. The highlight, picked up in...

Of all the pirates in the so-called ‘Golden Age’ none typified the image of the swash-buckling buccaneer better than Edward Teach – the man known to history as ‘Blackbeard’.  Much of what we know about his exploits comes...

Philip Thicknesse – a miniature by  Nathaniel Hone, 1757 In yesterday’s post I looked at the earlier part of the life of Philip Thicknesse – today I wanted to show how his notoriety as a quarrelsome bully was reflected in contemporary...

Philip Thicknesse painted by Thomas Gainsborough I can think of two good reasons to blog about Philip Thicknesse: the first was that he was a seventh son and I haven’t blogged about one of them since doing a piece on Alexander Selkirk. So, it gives...

Had you been around in London this day in 1724 there is a one in four chance that you would have been in the procession (some two hundred thousand strong) wending its way in a carnival atmosphere towards Tyburn Hill, where the empty gallows were being...

John Peel, Cumberland farmer and keen huntsman.         Prudence suggests I preface my words with a confession: I am not here to express an opinion one way or another about hunting. I have never hunted, but have never sought to sabotage...

Apart from a vague memory that he had ‘something to do with lighthouses’ I knew nothing about Smeaton, and yet he really was a remarkable engineer, with incredibly diverse interests and achievements. He cut his teeth on wind mills and water...

203 years ago today, the death occurred in Paris of one of the greatest showmen of his Age – indeed of any Age. His name: Philip Astley. Forget Barnum, forget Bailey – a hundred years earlier than these giants of the...

I rather hope that the good citizens of the Devon village of  Hittisleigh will be out celebrating today – their most famous son,  Samuel Bellamy, went to meet his maker exactly three centuries ago, in a storm thousands of miles away. One...

  Today’s blog first appeared five years ago – long before I started writing “Petticoat Pioneers – the Story of Women in the 18th Century who succeeded in a Man’s World” * but in practice I never used her...