Flight Hoaxes at Norwich October 7, 2017
Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern
Beach recently came across this remarkable hoax from Norwich UK from 1826. The public are respectfully informed that Signor Carlo Grain Villecrop [these sound like foreign names made up by an English writer], the celebrated Swiss Mountain-flyer, from Geneva, and Mont Blanc, is just arrived in this city, and will exhibit, with Tyrolese pole, fifty feet […]
Life in the Shadow of the Mob: Jewish Norwich July 29, 2015
Author: Beach Combing | in : Medieval
The recent post on the bodies in the well from Norwich took Beach through several books on medieval Jewish communities in England and the dominant impression on reading these accounts was the danger of being Jewish in that period. Let’s return to Norwich which included one of Britain’s bigger Jewish communities after London: one estimate has […]
Seventeen Bodies in a Well: A Norwich Mystery July 11, 2015
Author: Beach Combing | in : Medieval
The picture above is a horrific one. The bodies of seventeen individuals, eleven of them children (the youngest two years of age) who were, at some point in the Middle Ages (dating 1150-1300), thrown down a well in the East Anglian town of Norwich. The bodies were discovered in 2004 and various years of careful […]
A Romani Mystery in Eleventh-Century England March 9, 2012
Author: Beach Combing | in : Medieval
***Dedicated to Stephen D*** Our knowledge of the ancient and medieval movements of peoples depends on extraordinarily inadequate contemporary sources and the deadly (and often unsupported) prejudices of historians and archaeologists. But now, with the use of DNA sampling and other techniques, including isotope analysis, science is coming to the rescue: giving us surprising insights […]
