England

Guns, Gales & God: Elizabeth I’s ‘Merchant Navy’

Ian Friel argues that popular ideas of the nature of Elizabethan seapower are distorted by concentration on big names and major events. Elizabethan England’s emergence on to the world stage owed much more to merchant ships and common seamen than we might think.

The Peasants’ Revolt, 1381

In 1381 England witnessed a ‘summer of blood’ as the lower orders flexed their muscle. Dan Jones tells the story of one of medieval England’s most dramatic yet curiously neglected events.

John Evelyn and London Air

The air of London in the seventeenth century was polluted by clouds of sea-coal smoke against which Evelyn proposed some drastic remedies. By Steven R. Smith