History Today

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.

Queen Victoria’s uncle and immediate predecessor was a good-humoured, simple-minded sovereign, whose bustling amiability much endeared him to his subjects, writes Joanna Richardson.

Britain’s contribution to the First World War was not merely confined to the trenches. How did the Royal Navy experience Christmas 1914?