Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

More in our nineteenth-century swindlers series. Confess: X writes to hundreds of bank clerks across the country saying that he was in receipt of tens of thousands of dollars left by a banker to help bank clerks who had embezzled money. Many bank clerks replied admitting that they had done so at which point X blackmailed […]

A witch on a French cathedral door? Note the goat and a hare (?) being whirled around. Perhaps better a hag (a non-human supernatural witch)

Beach has recently been reading the descriptions of Johann Weyer (obit 1588) who published in 1563 On the Illusions of the Demons and on Spells and Poisons. Weyer’s position was essentially this: the supernatural certainly existed (there was no question for example that the Devil abused and tempted humanity); but the witch craze, which he […]

Burnt out Soviet tanks in the streets of Budapest: 1956.  

Here are some lovely London swindles from the nineteenth-century. Bet Swindle: Victim in railway carriage joined by man x and man y (travelling separately), man x loquacious and obnoxious American who bets victim that Henry VIII had six not seven wives. The two agree to wager five pounds that they give to y. Y turns […]

Dead British pilot giving full military service in Germany in 1941.

You are reading through a medieval or early modern English record and you come across the name Vitalis or alternatively Creature, as you will from time to time. Two random examples. Vitalis, son of Richard Engaine, and Sara his wife, released his manor of Dagworth in 1217 to Margery de Cressi. 1550, Nov 5. Buried […]

Peter Marsden, Your Noblest Shippe: Anatomy of a Tudor Warship (31 Jul 2015, The Mary Rose Trust) This volume is concerned primarily with a detailed description of the Mary Rose and how she operated as a functional warship. Commencing with a discussion of the place of the Mary Rose in the development of warships; her […]

Can bells drive away thunder and lightning? Well, d’oh, obviously not. But most of us know that for centuries that western Christians believed that bells did have this power. What Beach had not understood until today was that there was an early modern attempt to explain the science behind bells and thunder: that is the notion that […]

One of Britain’s most lovely cathedrals, Coventry, bombed out in Nov 14 1940.    

Beach has recently been searching for nineteenth-century urban legends, a real challenge because the category did not exist as an idea, though of course incredible ‘true’ stories circulated. Perhaps this is one of them. The pickpocket who is so clever that he or she puts the wallet back once everything is stolen. Folkestone is filling […]

Black policeman protects a Klan member. 1970s? 19 Sept 2015: Bruce T writes ‘It’s been awhile, but I believe that photo is from the Skokie Protests in suburban Chicago, circa 1979. The Klan and Neo-Nazi’s tried several times to march in the suburb of Skokie, home to a large Jewish population, and the highest number […]

Imagine a single story that manages to combine three favourite Beachombian tags: crime, fairies, and practical jokes. Enjoy. And similarly, as people in a certain parish in the diocese of Besançon [north-east France] believed in parallel things, some jokers dressed up as women and, appearing in this way, they entered the house of a rich peasant […]

It happens to us all

This account dates to southern England and 1873, but to judge from some dating clues in the texts the old man who wrote this extract was probably a boy in the early part of the nineteenth century when he heard the story: perhaps in the 1810s or 1820s? It sounds, meanwhile, as if James Carter, […]