History Today

Robert Woodall describes the state of early parliamentary reporting, during a period when it was disapproved by Members .

A secret ballot at general elections had been a reformers’ demand since the seventeenth century. It was achieved two hundred years later, writes Robert Woodall, after much experience of bribery.

Alan Wharham describes how the tithing system, by which the Anglican Church took a regular share of the hard-working farmer’s produce, was not finally abolished until 1936.

In housing management and the preservation of the countryside, writes Alan S. Watts, Octavia Hill was a Victorian pioneer.

As forests and wild deer diminished in England, sportsmen took to the fox; Charles Chenevix Trench describes how hunting became the pastime of more varied social classes.

Near London Bridge, writes W.A. Speck, the Doric column to commemorate the Great Fire of 1666 was designed by Wren and made of Portland Stone.

Eynon Smart traces the career of ‘that famous Cheat’, Mary Carleton, known to the Restoration world as ‘the German Princess’.

Eynon Smart describes how, during the second half of the nineteenth century, few politicians had a wider range of personal accomplishments than John Lubbock, the author of the Bank Holidays Bill.

‘The present folly’, wrote Horace Walpole in 1777, ‘is late hours.’ To arrive late at a party in the Georgian era, writes John Riely, was a sign of fashionable distinction.