Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

In what modern war did the fewest people die? Beach has been wasting a couple of joyful hours this morning looking through the annals of battles past and some dodgy Wikipedia pages. He has built in several limits to the survey. First, he has restricted himself to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, where it is […]

It’s been a bad week in the seventeenth century. There you were, a French pilgrim, just minding your own business, lounging around on a Catalan cutter and, bang, Barbary pirates overrun the ship. Next thing you know you are being shunted on board their vessel kicking and screaming and being told that you are to be […]

                          Numbers are hobgoblins in history, especially prior to the beginning of grown-up records in the late nineteenth century. How many people lived in Roman Britain? Well, in the last forty years estimates have ranged from a couple of hundred thousand to six million. […]