A watch is stolen from the room of Mary and John Beaumont. The proceedings of the court case at the Old Bailey contain two versions of the theft. One of them has to be a fiction, but which one? Even the cat in this court case is fictional…

On 27 February 1734, the carpenter [...]

History Carnival number 22 is up at Frog in a Well! In Jonathan Dresner’s own words, a ‘reasonably clear and straightforward’ selection of history postings, that I look forward to dipping into.

The search facility of the Old Bailey Proceedings is truly addictive. A search on the keyword “Shakespeare” resulted in 58 items. These mostly concern people called Shakespeare, people living in Shakespeare-Walk, or drinking at the Shakespeare Head. But there are some interesting insights into the Shakespeare Industry of the eighteenth century to be gleaned from [...]

In the Friday cat blogging tradition, this is a post on cats. The photo is of my own criminal cat, who likes to nestle down on anything that I happen to be reading at the time. I thought I might combine the Friday cat blogging tradition with some hair-raising tales involving a cat from the [...]

I posted on early modern swimming a couple of days ago, and regretted that I had not been able to find an image from Everard Digby’s sixteenth-century treatise on swimming online. I made do with a description of his illustrations, since I did not dare to scan an image and post it on the web. [...]

Not the re-told version this time, but the good old BBC-Shakespeare productions. I only own a few of them, and they are scattered around squeeky old video tapes that threaten to break when you rewind them. The BBC Shakespeares used to be terribly expensive to buy on video tapes, but they now are all available [...]

I was reading Henry Peacham’s The Complete Gentleman (1622), and when, apart from suggesting that “leaping is an exercise very commendable and healthful for the body, especially if you use it in the morning,” he also remarked that

The skill and art of swimming is [...] very requisite in every noble and gentleman, especially if [...]