The Rhino’s Horn and Memory February 2, 2015
Author: Beach Combing | in : AncientEvery so often Beach gets a post from a reader that practically writes itself and the extent of this blogger’s work is the cut and paste button. Here is one such example that goes in the well established oral transmission tag. The correspondent and author was Indranil. Can any reader help out Indranil and his […]
Beachcombed 56 February 1, 2015
Author: Beach Combing | in : BeachcombedDear Reader, Crappy January with a long and stubborn flu, made worse by the fact that it was necessary to work through it. But it seems now almost to be over… Thanks, as always, to the multiple linkers: Amanda, Chris, Chris S, Joan, Ricardo, Wade and others. I’ve put the very best contributions below to […]
The Index Biography #15: Prize = A Good Book January 31, 2015
Author: Beach Combing | in : ModernThe Index Biography is a new form of biography pioneered by this blog and introduced in a previous post. The creator must find a biography of a famous individual from history, they must turn to the index and write down eight peripheral facts about the individual’s life. We offered up previously here Sheridan le Fanu and Joseph […]
Daily History Picture: Snail City January 30, 2015
Author: Beach Combing | in : Historical PicturesGhost at Lynton January 30, 2015
Author: Beach Combing | in : ContemporaryBeach is a sucker for these ghost stories from the Victorian, the Edwardian and immediate post Edwardian period. This particular series of horrors relates to the Ewings who lived as tenants at St Vincent’s Cottage, Lynton, 1937, ‘where a large number of bones have been found’. Here is Mrs Ewing: From the very start of our […]
Naked Christianity January 29, 2015
Author: Beach Combing | in : ModernBeach recently shared the splendours of naked fertility rituals in Missouri from Colonial times to the Great Depression. The author of that article (Vance Randolph, Nakedness in Ozark Folk Belief, The Journal of American Folklore 66, 333-339) also describes what may be spill over into local Christianity. In 1905 a preacher, Jim Sharp from Missouri, […]
Daily History Picture: Bang Goes the Hindenburg January 29, 2015
Author: Beach Combing | in : Historical PicturesDaily History Picture: Helen and Charlie January 28, 2015
Author: Beach Combing | in : Historical PicturesThe Lost Tragedy of Anne Boleyn January 28, 2015
Author: Beach Combing | in : ModernAn entry in the burning libraries catalogue… In 1536 Anne Boleyn was executed for sexual betrayal and for plotting the murder of the king, her husband Henry VIII. Beach has examined these extraordinary claims in another post, sufficient to say for now that there was almost certainly no substance to them, but that Henry VIII […]
Daily History Picture: Running for Freedom January 27, 2015
Author: Beach Combing | in : History RoundupsThe Eighteen Year Old Problem: Murder in WW2 France January 27, 2015
Author: Beach Combing | in : ContemporaryBeach had, as a historically-inclined teenager, a recurrent dream, where he was on an island in a lake and a Viking boat full of blond psychos was coming toward him (and there was nowhere to go and nowhere to hide). The extract below has something of the same terrible inevitability. Certainly, having read this a […]
Daily History Picture: French Resistance Amazon January 26, 2015
Author: Beach Combing | in : History RoundupsGreen Children of Woolpit 5: Parallels January 26, 2015
Author: Beach Combing | in : MedievalBeach must start with apologies. He promised four posts on the green children but he was not able to contain himself. Here, then, is a fifth dreamt up in the outer rings of fever in the last couple of days (flu now been ravaging for a week). Beach set himself a simple question: to what […]
Daily History Picture: Eating Fish January 25, 2015
Author: Beach Combing | in : History RoundupsGreen Children of Woolpit 4: Why Bean Stalks? January 25, 2015
Author: Beach Combing | in : MedievalThe fourth and final post on the green children of Woolpit and this time the mystery of the beans. First, William: ‘Cum ergo inedia iam paene deficerent, nec tamen aliquid ciborum, qui offerebantur, attenderent, forte ex agro contigit fabas inferri, quas illico arripientes, legumen ipsum in thyrsis quaesierunt, et nihil in concavitate thyrsorum invenientes amare […]