Matthew McCormack from History at UON has published a book on Georgian shoes. Shoes and the Georgian Man is published by Bloomsbury. It is a full-colour book with around 80 illustrations, including images of many of the shoes that Matthew studied during his research. The book is available in paperback, hardback and ebook formats via the publisher’s website and booksellers.

Shoes and the Georgian Man explores the history of men’s shoes during a period of change in gender relations. Over the course of the eighteenth century, historians often argue that men’s and women’s roles diverged, and shoes are an important part of this story. The book uses a wide range of primary sources, but the key sources are surviving examples of shoes themselves in museum collections. These material sources not only give us an insight into what shoes would have been like to wear, but also provide evidence of the wearer’s body in their indentations, wrinkles and scuffs.

Matthew will be talking about the book at various events over the next few months. Details will be updated as they become available, and these include:

February (TBC): launch at the University of Northampton

11 March at 6pm: in conversation with Dr Serena Dyer (DMU) as part of the Northampton-Leicester Historical Association programme (free online)

14 March at 7:30pm: Richmond Museum, North Yorkshire

26 March at 4pm: Brunel Museum, London

Please contact [email protected] for further details, or if you would like to arrange a talk.

In 1980, Terry Jones, actor, presenter, writer and Monty Python member, published what has become something of a literary event. Chaucer’s Knight: Portrait of a Medieval Mercenary is a book that had medieval historians foaming at the mouth for many a year afterwards. It generated much debate and forever altered the landscape of the knightly class and ‘chivalry’ in academic circles.

Jones proposed that Chaucer’s knight, far from being the chivalric gentleman, was in fact a ruthless careerist in pursuit of titles, land and wealth via the conventional trade of war. Ransom, kidnapping, extortion, profit and abduction was the new stock in trade, rather than saving the honour of the defenceless or fighting evil. Chaucer’s General Prologue and Canterbury Tales (c.1380s) are packed with similitudes and, like the best fiction, tell more of real life than non-fiction can.

One of the chief tasks of the medieval knight in literature was to rescue or at the very least, preserve the honour of the damsel, but in reality it was the often the knight himself who placed the damsel in distress.

One such real person I encountered during my research is Chaucer’s Knight to the life, an exact contemporary with the Canterbury Tales. In November 1375, orders were sent to William Upton to keep safely all the goods of John Sandys, a ‘fugitive’ from Cheshire, which were in his keeping; the king’s sergeant-at-arms were then commissioned to arrest all goods of John Sandys in William Upton’s keeping and bring them to London to the king for disposal.

John Sandys was charged with the abduction of the recently widowed Joan Bridges from Romsey Abbey (Hampshire), where she had been staying. It was found that he had on his person possessions worth over £120 (£100,000 today), which belonged to the lady’s previous husband. One of the Black Prince’s esquires was sent to Chester to bring the lady back to London for examination by the King’s Council. It was then discovered, however, that Sandys had already married her.

On 8th April 1376, Sandys secured a royal pardon for all homicides, rapes and felonies of which he stood indicted. He subsequently acknowledged that he owed the King a fine of £1,000 (around £900,000 today) but this sum was never paid, for it was assigned to the Black Prince, who before his death expressed a wish for it to be pardoned in full. (Sandys was fortunate; the Black Prince died in June 1376.)

It was his service with the Black Prince that was Sandys’ salvation. Sandys is first recorded in the service of the Black Prince, who was earl of Chester (Sandys’ place of origin), as well as Prince of Wales and heir to the throne of England. On 27 January 1367, before Prince Edward sailed from Gascony to Spain, he granted him a substantial annuity of £50 (£50,000 today) for life from the issues of the earldom. Sandys probably fought in the battle of Najera, thereafter remaining for some time in the prince’s company in Spain and France.

“A knight there was, a worthy man…he loved chivalry, truth and honour….”

Sir Geoffrey Luttrell (Luttrell Psalter f202v) c.1350

The later fourteenth century abounded with ‘proto-professionals’ – free-booters and mercenary leaders such as Sir John Hawkwood in Italy, Sir Robert Knolles in France or Nicholas Sabraham whose campaigning life took him from Brittany to the Black Sea. Included in these groups were opportunists and criminals, deserters, mutineers. It was a diverse, volatile world in a shifting culture and it was from this world that John Sandys emerges, his military career typical of many who served during this time.

However much Sandys military careerism may prove to be part of a developing trend in late 14^th century warrior society, his abduction of a wealthy widow is the key to his stake in local society, politics and dynastic security. Without land, he was nothing, and the widow he apparently snatched from Romsey Abbey gave him that anchor.

Joan Bridges was the widow of both Peter Bridges and of Giles Norman and brought to Sandys four Hampshire manors with the marriage. Joan, however, was worth much more. She was the cousin and eventual heir of Sir William Fifhide, on whose death she stood to inherit three manors in Sussex and five in Hampshire, something Sandys would have been aware of in 1375.

John Sandys’ marriage to Joan and his previous military career positioned him well for a busy political career in Hampshire; he was commissioner of array between 1377 and 1392 (with involvement in putting down the rebellions of the summer of 1381); coroner from 1378, sheriff 1382-3 and 1394-5, JP 1384-95 (and JP in neighbouring Wiltshire 1391-4), MP eight times between 1381 and 1393 and deputy constable of Southampton castle in 1386.

During a military campaign in Aquitaine in 1380 Sandys was knighted, and his rise in society sealed. Sandys was now a made man; he dined with Bishop Wykeham’s household. (We have the only surviving household account roll, for six months in 1393 and he is specifically mentioned as a guest on Monday 16 June. He was in good company. On 25 July, King Richard II and his wife, Queen Anne of Bohemia lunched with the bishop and 234 others.) One imagines the fugitive-soldier of fortune turned landowner, MP and sheriff silently toasting his good fortune with the son of a stonemason turned Bishop over the wine and capons supplied to the kitchen that day. Sandys obtained a preacher’s licence from the Bishop for his own chaplain in 1385.

He may not have been born with a silver spoon, but he quickly learnt how to use one. Whatever his background as soldier of fortune from Cheshire, alleged rapist and murderer, by the 1380s, we would surmise that Sandys was very the epitome of Hampshire county society, an upstanding pillar of the community – one might even say, poacher turned gamekeeper.

Would any, or all this political activity have been possible without the widow Joan and her inheritance?

Joan was a prize worth having. Her life was lived out in the unequal patriarchal society, as heiress, wife and widow. If Sandys was Chaucer’s Knight, with all the ambiguities of the ‘chivalric’ career, then Joan was Chaucer’s Wife of Bath (like her, thrice married). Joan was the person with property, not John; Joan had the gentility that Sandys needed to enter into Hampshire society, once Sandys had washed himself of the blood and sweat from his numerous campaigns.

It was the heirs of their union (and her property) who would maintain the social status in the county community. Joan retained her rights over her freehold property from before the Sandys marriage, the land that had come to her during the marriage (from the Fifhide estate) and she would recover them if she became a widow, which indeed she did. Medieval land was ‘held’, not owned; what was at stake was the ‘right’ to their land and it was this that defined their possession. Sandys was seised in of Joan’s lands in right of her. Whilst married to John, she could not dispose of the land herself without his agreement; he couldn’t sell her land without her consent, or else the conveyance could be void at a later date.

As a widow, Joan was vulnerable because she was a woman of property in her own right and heiress. As an independent widow, Joan would have to take her own legal action in court (and women did) rather than her relatives take the action on her behalf.

The Wife of Bath, from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales

 Literature includes stories of knights dressed as friars assaulting women. See Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale – “And prively he caughte hire by the queynte”, a phrase which has a modern echo in a notorious comment by Donald Trump!

There is no record of Joan taking any such action. Perhaps it was a consensual match. Sandys was clearly a powerful man with a reputation, who would protect her. Perhaps not. When Sandys died, Joan married a fourth time, to the well-known lawyer, Sir Thomas Skelton, who had no connections with Hampshire and made no intention of making any. Does this mean Joan suffered silently with Sandys or just that once again she needed protection as a widow of means whose property was at risk?

Sandys not only wanted Joan’s property, which would be his during her lifetime, but his heirs by her would have the rights over her first two husbands’ property and inherit the Fifhide manors, which they did. Clearly Joan was either childless when Sandys carried her off, or with infant children who died because it was Sir John’s son by her – Walter – who inherited the properties and during the 15^th century the family prospered (it was always harder for ‘new’ men to get established – older families often had a male heir, however distant, to take on the estate).

In 1501, at the dawn of the Tudor age, Sir Walter Sandys was 26 when he inherited eleven Hampshire manors, the bulk of them Joan Bridges’ inheritances. His younger brother Sir William went on to become Lord Sandys, 1^st Baron of the Vyne in 1523, who built a new house at Sherborne which was visited by Henry VIII in 1510 and 1531.

The Sandys dynasty was firmly established, begun by an advantageous (forced) marriage by a career soldier with powerful backing and continued by good fortunes of fertility and survival (the average survival rate of the male line was 21% amongst peerage and gentry).

But what made Sandys unusual in Hampshire at least, was that he was one of very few, if perhaps the only, man to have married into the local gentry from a background without social parity in the period c1300-c1500, whose family became a leading local family. Widows and heiresses were key to the transmission of landed estates throughout later medieval England, but most marriages were conducted between families of equal status and from the local, or regional area. Sandys was neither.

Sandys was an exception to the rule. He not only broke out of the murky world of career soldiering but managed to build a local dynasty thanks to his marriage to Joan. In a man’s world of derring-do, high politics, and foreign adventures, the most important feature of later medieval landowning – and therefore local power –  was the women – often nameless, mostly unknown – but they were crucial to the family fortunes. Real power lay with them.

Dr Toby Purser, Senior Lecturer, Faculty of Education and Humanities

When I was hired by Northampton almost five years ago as their first medieval historian, I never expected that I would end up researching very contemporary history! But one of the rewarding things about working within a small, friendly department is finding opportunities for collaboration in unexpected places. So I found myself swapping ideas with Paul Jackson and Dan Jones about the Searchlight Archive and about histories of fascism more broadly, which helped inform the development of my Medieval Chivalry and its Afterlives undergraduate module and led to the publication of an article on teaching chivalry in an age of white supremacy. Since then, I have developed a new project which I am pleased to say has been awarded funding from the University of Northampton’s Research Impact and Engagement Fund.

From the project proposal

My research assistant, Siobhan Hyland, has already begun work on data gathering, and in the early summer I’ll be running both an in person and online workshop on these themes for practitioners. I’m excited to develop this new strand of my research, and to produce work that can have meaningful social impact!

Dr Rachel Moss is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Northampton.

The University of Northampton History department is home to the Searchlight Archive, a unique archive collection of material documenting the activities of British and international fascist and racist organisations from the 1930s onwards.

It is one of the most extensive and significant resources of its type in Europe.

Daniel Jones, the Searchlight Collections Officer recommends:

Kelly, Jon, ‘Nicky Crane: The Secret Double Life of a Gay neo-Nazi’, BBC News Magazine (2013)

This BBC News Magazine piece explored the life of Nicky Crane, a neo-Nazi street fighter most closely associated with the White Power music band Skrewdriver.

Crane led a double life, providing security for LGBT+ events in London while being part of far-right organisations that targeted LGBT+ people for hate and violence. His experiences, and his eventual ostracisation from both worlds, show some of the complex intersectionalities that can exist in identities – how people can hold seemingly conflicting identities, and how each identity informs another.

At one time the poster boy of the skinhead Oi! movement, Crane is a tragic figure – rejected by his long-time friends like Skrewdrver lead singer Ian Stuart Donaldson, Crane died of AIDS related diseases in December of 1993.

He features in the 2010 book Children of the Sun by Max Schaefer as a figure of fascination for one of the main characters, James, who is exploring the gay figures with the far right.

The article is very solidly researched, and the way it depicts Crane can cause some real conflict between the oppression Crane himself suffered due to his homosexuality, and the oppression he himself created for others.

Pisces and Diagram for Friday (left) and Libra and Taurus (right) in an Astronomical Miscellany, shortly after 1464, German. Getty Museum, Ms. Ludwig XII 8 (83.MO.137), fols. 56v-57

As an (elder) Millennial, my generation loves a horoscope – while the generation that followed us, Gen Z, are markedly more sceptical about astrology. Most of my undergraduate students now are Generation Alpha, though, and if the TikToks I see promoted to me are anything to go by, this latest generation is possibly rediscovering astrology alongside plaid and side partings.

While I certainly wouldn’t base my life choices on my horoscope, astrology has a long and illustrious history. In the Middle Ages, it was considered a serious subject of study, and informed political decision making and medical treatment. There’s a good introduction to the topic on the Getty Museum website here.

This week students studying my Medieval World first year module have been looking at medieval belief systems. In class we took a quiz to find out which of the four humours governed us, and I also asked students to write me a medieval horoscope. With their permission, I am sharing a few examples here. The students did a great job capturing the breezy tone of modern horoscopes while incorporating appropriate medieval beliefs about star signs, which influenced decisions about the best time to sow crops, get married and go on journeys, as just a sample of their significance.

Virgo, the virgin: in British Library MS Harley 4940 f. 29v

Advice for a Virgo farmer: For now is time to plant and sow in preparation for autumn harvest- ensuring to nurture these well. It is also a high opportunity to achieve one’s desires, whether it be moving villages to attain the most fruitful crop or indulge in intercourse with a widow (for virgins bear too small offspring). Do not quarrel with neighbouring peasants over land or personal queries (even if they insist you bathe or fashion a new tunic).

*

Advice on a king’s birthday: After blowing out the last candles on your cake, you’ll segue from focusing on your royal duties to travelling east. With the energizing Sun, it is time for bloodletting to keep that kingly body healthy. Start all things that last a short time but avoid fighting and holding court days or anything that requires Earth to keep the country ruling supreme. You deserve it, my king!

*

Horoscope for a Knight: Aquarius: January 20th-February 18th: It will be neither be looked down upon nor praised for you to wage war with your neighbouring lords and knights, quarrelling over their four-legged possessions for yourself (farm-animals) and making a profit of them. You should not practise the art of using a bow, for no good will come out of it and your newly learnt skill will escape you like a stick flowing down a river. It is important that a suitor be found, for this time of year is ideal for marriages to take place.

All the submitted horoscopes were really fun to read and showed great engagement with the class themes.

Dr Rachel Moss
Senior Lecturer in History

On the 8 May 1968 a series of dawn raids were carried out by ‘more than 100’ Metropolitan Police detectives, led by DS Leonard ‘Nipper’ Read. The target of these raids was organized criminal gang that surrounded two East End gangsters that have passed into London folklore and garnered more column inches, True Crime books and documentaries, than almost any other ‘villains’ in the modern age.

Ronnie and Reggie Kray are the archetypal British gangsters, up there with American ‘anti-heroes’ like Al ‘Scarface’ Capone, Johnny Torrio, and ‘Lucky’ Luciano. Two blockbuster biopics have presented the ‘Twins’ as violent and troubled rogues whose criminality and ruthlessness is still tempered with some sense that were not ‘as bad’ as modern criminals are today. They only hurt ‘their own’, and they were nice to their mum (Violet Kray), so the story goes, and they didn’t deal in drugs.

Let’s start with some of the facts about Ronnie and Reggie before considering quite why it is we remain so fascinated with them 50 years after their arrest. Born in October 1933 the Twins grew up in the East End of London, going to school in Brick Lane. They were very much a product of the mixed demography of Whitechapel and Spitalfields, with English, Jewish, Irish and Romani Gypsy ancestors. The East End was somewhere you ‘survived’ more than lived in the 1930s. This was an area long associated with poverty, overcrowding, immigration, and crime.

The Twins became involved with violence and street gangs very early in their lives and even a spell of national service in 1952 did little to tame them. The bought a snooker hall in Mile End and by the end of the 1950s were well-established local gangsters with a reputation for violence. But the boys were not content to be one of several gangsters they wanted to be THE firm in London.

As the post war austerity gave way to the ‘swinging sixties’ Ronnie and Reggie became part of the London ‘scene’. Their West End nightclub attracted the stars of the day many of whom enjoyed the infamy of being pictured with the Krays. For the Twins themselves their celebrity status gave them some much needed ‘respectability’ within London society.

It is hardly surprising that Ronnie later wrote that at the time ‘me and my brother ruled London. We were f****** untouchable’.

Of course such high profile behaviour brought the Twins into the cross hairs of the police, especially when their rivalries with other London gangsters (like the Richardson brothers in the south) or their own internal and personal issues ended in murders. On 9 March 1966 Ronnie Kray shot dead a member of the Richardson gang as he sat at the bar in the Blind Beggar pub on Whitechapel High Street. George Cornell’s murder was a very public act, demonstrating Ronnie’s belief that he was ‘untouchable’. He wasn’t.

Then in October 1867 Reggie, egged on by his twin, murdered Jack ‘the hat’ Mcvitie, a member of the Kray’s criminal organization who had supposedly tried to swindle them.  From this point on the Twins were wanted men and it was only a matter of time before the police managed to arrest and charge them.

In March 1969, after a trial at the Old Bailey, Justice Stevenson famously declared that ‘society  has earned a rest from your activities’ and sent the pair to prison for life. The next time they saw the outside world was in 1982 when they attended their mother’s funeral. By that time Ronnie was in Broadmoor, having been certified ‘insane’ in 1979. Ronnie died in 1995. His twin was interned in Maidstone Prison until 1997 when he began a series of moves before his death in 2000.

Most people have heard of the Krays and have seen that iconic David Bailey photograph. They rose to prominence in the 1960s and their celebrity status has perhaps helped to mask the reality that these were two very brutal individuals. Both of the recent film biopics present the violence (and Ronnie’s mental illness) but temper it all with the prevailing notion that they were somehow ‘decent’ working class lads simply trying to survive in a harsh world. They loved their mum and they never forgot where they came from. This is a very similar narrative to the one that surrounds the rise of the Mafia firms in New York and Chicago after the First World War.

We have popular culture and the rise of the movie to thank for this. Some of the most watched films of the 1930s (Hollywood’s golden age) era featured gangsters at home and abroad, and the image of the suited criminal complete with ‘Tommy’ gun, homburg hat and the obligatory ‘dolly bird’ became synonymous with ‘cool’.

Perhaps because the early gangsters traded in ‘bootlegged’ alcohol (banned by the US government in one of the worst decisions it ever made) and then desperately tried to reinvent their operations as legitimate businesses, we don’t see them for what they really were: ruthless, murdering, criminal organizations. It was when they thumbed their noses at the authorities or their activities impacted ordinary citizens that the authorities felt they had no choice but to hunt them down.

The Krays (much more so than the Richardsons it seems) were OUR gangsters. They showed that we too could have some ‘proper’ criminals to rival the Mafiosi across the pond. In recent years the BBC have revived the memory of Birmingham’s Peaky Blindersand transformed their relatively mundane criminal careers, turning them into gangsters that were able to give the Mafia a run for their money. The ‘Blinders have become anti-heroes to be looked up to which is exactly how the Twins wanted to be seen: as respectable businessmen who only used violence when it was absolutely necessary.

Like all True Crime myths, the idea that the Krays were ‘respectable’, ‘decent’ or eschewed violence expect when it was ‘absolutely necessary’ is a fiction and it is the job of History and Criminology to keep reminding us of that.

Drew Gray, Subject Lead History, University of Northampton

The Cratchits sit down to Christmas dinner 

If, like me, you tuned in to watch the BBC’s latest adaptation of Charles Dickens’ novella A Christmas Carol, I’m sure it will have left a lasting impression.  Over three nights a star-studded cast presented a much darker version of the tale of Scrooge than we are used to. It was uncomfortable at times, rude, crude even, but funny and also very poignant and political.

I’m not an expert on Dickens and have only recently read the novella that bears limited similarity to the scripted version I watched over Christmas. This seemed to annoy some people, who took to social media to complain that students studying it at school today would have been confused by Steven Knight’s retelling of an old classic. Personally, I loved it. I found Guy Pearce’s Scrooge a more complex character than Dickens had presented him and Vinette Robinson’s Mary Cratchit was a study in controlled anger.

Most of all I think Dickens would have approved as it had a powerful message about the concerns of the day, combining as it did themes of poverty and inequality, abuse, exploitation, and the callous nature of unrestrained and immoral capitalism.

But what really seemed to upset some keyboard warriors was that the Cratchits were presented as a mixed race family. This was compounded when the BBC released a modern version of Worzel Gummidge complete with two black children as the central characters (below right). For some this was diversity gone mad, a deliberate attempt by ‘auntie’ to meddle with our cultural past and present.

I’ve been musing on this for a few days now. At the time I responded to a tweet I saw by @WhoresofYore (aka Dr Kate Lister) which had shared several images of interracial marriage to challenge the claim (by some) that the BBC’s drama presentation of the  Cratchits was ‘PC nonsense and historically inaccurate’.

I wrote:

‘Some people would like to believe Britain was entirely white before 1950. It wasn’t. It’s just that we’ve written black people out of history’.

That tweet had had over 2000 ‘likes’ and nearly 200 retweets but it also drew a few people to comment that they had never seen black people when they were growing up. ‘If a black of Asian man ever came down the street [in 1950s Birmingham]’, one wrote, ‘people ran out of their houses to look at him. They’d never seen one, except in pictures’. Another commented that ‘it largely was white’ adding, ‘now my home town has 300 languages and there are very few white school kids’.

It didn’t take much searching on twitter to find some pretty disgusting racist comments about the dramas and the BBC’s use of black faces in them. Which begs the question for me at least, why are people so unhappy about the depiction of diversity on our television screens?

After all history can tell us (should tell us) that Britain has had a very diverse population for hundreds of years. There have been people from all parts of the world in England from Roman times to the present; in medieval England, in Tudor England, in the 1700s and nineteenth century, and right through the twentieth. Moreover all of these immigrants to Britain have contributed to the success of these islands, economically, culturally and politically.

Black troops fought in the last world war, and the one before that, directly contributing to the defeat of Nazi Germany and the survival of our ‘British’ way of life. Estimates suggest also that around a third of Nelson’s crew on HMS Victory were not white. The records of the Old Bailey (London’s central criminal court) reveal the presence of Black Londoners in significant numbers throughout the 1700s and 1800s. In many cases of course contemporary prejudice and notions of racial superiority mean that Black voices have been silenced or muted, or erased completely but this does not mean they didn’t exist at all.

We know this. History has been telling us this for decades at least so why do some people have such a problem accepting it?

Sadly I think it is because Britain is a country where racism remains endemic. When the grime artist Stormzy was asked if there was racism in Britain he replied: ‘definitely. 100 percent’. Reactions to that comment and its misreporting pretty much sum up the problem we have.

Stormzy was condemned for labeling Britain as ‘100 percent racist’, which he never did. All sorts of people who should have known better leapt to the country’s defense accusing him of all sorts of outrages without stopping to read or listen to what he had actually said. There is racism in Britain, I agree with that statement completely (100%). Not everyone in Britain is a racist, and Stormzy never suggested that they were.

A day later racist abuse was directed at a black footballer, as he played for Chelsea in a local London derby at Tottenham. When I ‘liked’ a tweet from Jolyon Rubinstein, comedian and TV producer, that condemned the racism at his club and then added a comment that it needed to be challenged everywhere, a handful of comments took issue with me. There was no racism at ‘our club’ some said; please don’t condemn us all with the same brush.

It seems like this and the Stormzy incident are part of the same problem. Some people are more outraged at being called racist than they are at racism existing in our society. Some are so scared of seeing black faces on the TV screens that they feel the need to complain that the BBC is misrepresenting the nation and its history.

The reality is that actors are actors and it doesn’t matter what colour their skins is anyway. We’ve been used to white actors playing black characters, to Americans playing Germans, to able bodies actors portraying disabled people, and to all sorts of dramatic interpretations and adaptations of texts from the past.

The reason some people got their collective knickers in a twist about Stormzy, and the BBC’s A Christmas  Carol  and Worzel Gummidge is because they are either ignorant or prejudiced, or both. I’m sorry but that is self-evident.

What worries me is what we are doing to combat this. How do we educate people so that that this racism dies a death now, in the 2020s, along with all the other intolerances that continue to blight our society?

Diversity is a good thing, not something to be afraid of and we have to get that message out there from nursery, to primary and secondary school to university, though the shop floor, in all forms of the media, in sport, culture, and, most of all, in politics.

Racism has no place in our society, none whatsoever, and it is the responsibility of all of us to call it out wherever we see it.

Drew Gray, Subject Lead Humanities

Senior lecturer Mark Rothery writes about his recent interactions with the media, and what that means for historical research. Mark also discussed some of these themes on TALKRadio –select the 4:30-5:00 clip and go to three minutes in. 

On 4^th February this year the new Times Online history correspondent published an article called ‘Snowflakes are not only a Modern Phenomenon’ (I won’t give this copy by including a link). This article, and the several others that followed, were based on my research with Professor Henry French, at the University of Exeter, into the male anxieties of younger sons of the landed gentry in eighteenth and nineteenth century England published in The Historical Journal last year.

It is flattering when people outside the academy are interested in your research. This particular topic of anxiety is, of course, the focus of public attention at the moment. Lots more people are talking about it and, perhaps, suffering from it than previously. I’ve commented elsewhere on this blogspace about the subject.

The trouble with this kind of dissemination, though, is the politicisation of interpretation. If you read our article (which I hope you will) you’ll see that we never used the term ‘Snowflakes’ and we certainly do not support the use of this term in reference to our research.

‘Snowflakes’ refers to the idea that ‘this generation’ of young people (millennials) are privileged in a way that ‘previous generations’ were not. Their anxieties are merely expressions of a struggle to ‘cope with life’ or ‘cut it’, reflections of their ‘mollycoddled upbringing’ and ‘over-sensitivity’. Such perceptions of millennials belong to the right of the political spectrum, particularly in foregrounding ‘sensitivity’ to ‘identities’ such as gender and sexuality.

Wikipedia defines it better than me: ‘Snowflake is a 2010s derogatory slang term for a person, implying that they have an inflated sense of uniqueness, an unwarranted sense of entitlement, or are overly-emotional, easily offended, and unable to deal with opposing opinions. Common usages include the terms special snowflake, Generation Snowflake, and snowflake as a politicized insult.

Read on the most basic level and from a particular political perspective (the Right-Wing) our article could be interpreted as being about ‘snowflakes’. The younger sons we studied were privileged, they did have a sense of entitlement, they expected to do well out of life and some of them whinnied at the thought of working for it.

Our explanation for their mentalities and behaviour, however, was not that they were ‘snowflakes.’ We argued that they were suffering from anxiety – specifically ‘male anxieties’ generated by the risk that they might not attain the attributes necessary to be considered ‘elite men.’ In other words they were not anxious because they were ‘snowflakes’ but because of the particular ways in which ideals of hegemonic masculinity places pressure on men to be men – a gender anxiety. Their elite and privileged position was, in fact, the problem for them. Being privileged does not absent you from anxiety.

The ‘Patriarchal Dividend’ (inR. W. Connell’s words) that accrued to aristocratic men through gender and gender hierarchies produced anxieties amongst those that could not, or were at risk of not achieving, dominance. Since younger sons did not inherit the family estates and wealth they were one of those ‘at risk’ groups among the landed elite.

The media (and indeed anyone else) is free to interpret the work of historians in any way they choose to. The interpretation of the Times Online of our article was not about the historical focus of our work at all. It was based on a political and politicised view that ‘the younger generation’ are weak, their claims of anxiety are bogus and constructed, the whole issue of mental health in recent years has been exaggerated and ‘snowflaked.’ ‘Just get on with it – stiff upper lip’ you hear the article cry. History is being used for wider political purposes here.

Snowflake by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

The idea of ‘snowflakes’ really is nonsense. There is no such thing as a particular type of attitude and behaviour among generations. All the research ever conducted on anxiety (whether by scientists or social scientists or historians) confirms that it is real and always generally widespread. It would be tough to prove a ‘rise’ or ‘decline’ in it historically and I’m not sure what the point of that would be.

But we can certainly identify periods when public discourse was more anxious and when people talked more about anxiety. Discussions around state security and public safety in the wake of the 2001 terrorist attacks are one example – invasion fears in Britain during the Napoleonic Wars and the First World War are others.

Anxiety is not something made up and fabricated. It has a physiological (amygdala) as well as a psychological root, it focuses often on just the kinds of things that young people are anxious about today – status, attainment and achievement, relationships, finding a place in the world, happiness.

I and my co-author take anxiety very seriously. We see lots of it around us at University, both amongst students and academic staff. Students suffer with the extra and different pressures of the fees system in our present HE environment. They are away from home often for the first time and they are trying to find their place in the world at the same time as studying a challenging subject. They are not ‘snowflakes’, they are human beings with emotions.

What we found in our research was evidence of anxiety, not of snowflakes. The Times online correspondent found ‘snowflakes’ because he was looking for them. And herein lies the problem with ‘Historians and the Media.’ We search for and report on what we consider to be the facts – we look for truth and meaning in the past in order to understand humans and human society.

Most often the inherent value of our research is not what journalists want – they want research that supports their world view and (they assume) that of their readers/viewers/listeners and their interpretations are often, as a result, way off-target. By using terms such as ‘snowflake’ journalists exacerbate the problems they vilify and seek to eradicate. We historians hopefully make more positive contributions.

Look out for a forthcoming blog on a radio broadcast with NLive radio station on which I discuss the wider implications of History and the Media with Dr Drew Gray and Dr Paul Jackson (the show is due to be broadcast on the evening of 4^th March)

[No spoilers!]

I’m a big fan of the Alien film series. I have been hooked every since watching Alien 3 in the cinema as a teenager, and the original 1979 film is one of my all-time favourites. So I was excited to see Alien: Romulus, which is currently on general release. After several disappointing sequels and prequels (and the less said about the Alien versus Predator films the better) I was encouraged by the positive response to the new film from critics and fans alike.

I am not going to review the film here – suffice to say it’s one of the better ones – but watching the film got me thinking about the relationship between the Alien series and history.

If you have watched the films, you will know that they have created a huge and complex world, which engages with bigger questions about the nature of mankind and its place in the universe. There are 9 films and counting, with a TV series on the way, plus countless books, graphic novels and short films that flesh out the story.

This involves a very long timeline. The original Alien movie was set in 2122, and the last film in the chronology is Alien Resurrection which takes place over two centuries later. The ability to clone characters and the long distances involved in cryosleep space travel mean that the films are not limited by conventional human lifespans.

The prequels take place in the twenty-first century, as we learn about the origins of xenomorph creature and the Weyland Yutani corporation. But they also extend into prehistory, since they explore the popular theory that life on earth was seeded by an alien civilisation. All told, the Alien universe extends over millions of years.

To my mind, this journey into prehistory was a bit unnecessary. There is quite enough going on with regard to the human condition in the first four films, without trying to explain the origins of mankind. It also leans in to ‘ancient aliens’ conspiracy theories, which often give credit for complex ancient civilisations to extraterrestrial visitors, rather than to indigenous peoples themselves (with all the racism that this implies).

What interests me far more is the way that history informs the production design. The xenomorph creature and the alien craft and landscapes were famously designed by H. R. Giger, who created a nightmarish world replete with disturbing Freudian imagery, in keeping with the film’s theme of reproduction. As well as organic forms, Giger drew on gothic styles when creating cathedral-like interiors. This added to the otherworldly and spooky atmosphere of the films, and grounds the style of the alien worlds in the medieval period. (A nice nod to this is the ‘xenomorph’ gargoyle at Paisley Abbey.)

Gargoyle at Paisley Abbey: Wikimedia Commons.

This medieval aesthetic nearly came to its logical conclusion in the original designs for Alien 3, which was going to be set on a wooden planet populated by monks, before the production went in a more conventional direction.

Giger’s style was influenced by artists such as Hieronymus Bosch, and his art often involved chaotic combinations of human and inhuman bodies engaging in dreadful acts. This also informed the design of later films where he was not involved. The space station in Romulus has the painting by Michel Serre depicting the plague in Marseille in 1720. It includes horrors such as a baby suckling on a dead mother, a reference to events later in the film.

Detail from Michel Serre, View of the Hôtel de Ville of Marseille during the Plague of 1720 (1721): Wikimedia Commons.

By contrast, the design of the humans’ world is grounded in the 1970s. The spacecraft Nostromo would have looked futuristic in 1979, but was also recognisably of the present. This was not a sleek, clean vision of the future like in Star Trek, but rather a ‘polluted future’ where things are grimy and don’t work. Nostromo is a mining vessel so the look and feel is very utilitarian.

The team behind Alien: Romulus have made a conscious effort to make it look like the original film. It is set in 2142, between the action of Alien and Aliens. The tech in the film has a very 1970s feel to it, with chunky keyboards, computer disks and glowing cathode ray tubes. A key reason why the production design was so effective in the original film was because the blocky human tech contrasted with the sinewy and gothic contours of the alien and its world, and Alien: Romulus continues this tradition.

It’s another reason why the prequels were incongruous, as they were set before the original film but had much more advanced tech, including touchscreens and holograms, and sleek sterile interiors. Alien films only really work when they have a sense of history.

Matthew McCormack

The Northampton branch of the Historical Association is run by the University of Northampton, and this year we are joining forces with the Leicester branch to provide a combined programme. The joint talks will be online but we are also keen to hear from local schools who would like to host an event. All talks are free to attend and everyone is welcome.

10^th September 2024.  Dr Lubaaba Al-Azami, University of Liverpool. ‘In Conversation: Writing Travellers in the Golden Realm’.

Elizabeth Tingle talks to Lubaaba Al-Azami about writing her new book on the first English travellers to India and how the early interactions with Mughal India connected England to the wider world. The book can be obtained here: https://www.hachette.co.uk/titles/lubaaba-al-azami/travellers-in-the-golden-realm/9781529371321/

Book a free place: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/lubaaba-al-azami-in-conversation-writing-travellers-in-the-golden-realm-tickets-938918980947?aff=oddtdtcreator

8^th October 2024. Dr Tim Reinke-Williams. ‘Physical Attractiveness and the Female Life-Cycle in Seventeenth-Century England’.

This talk focuses on how women of the aristocracy, gentry and middling-sorts in seventeenth-century England conceptualised their own physical attractiveness and that of other women. Diaries, letters, autobiographies, and portraits will be used to show how women sought to present themselves, over successive stages of the lifecycle.

Book a free place: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/talk-physical-attractiveness-the-female-life-cycle-in-17th-century-tickets-948223410747?aff=oddtdtcreator

12^th November 2024. Philip Hamlyn Williams. Vehicles to Vaccines – what happened to British manufacturing since 1951.

At the time of the Festival of Britain, British manufacturers made and exported more vehicles than any other country, yet our pharmaceutical industry made little more than simple remedies. A lifetime later, the majority of vehicles made in Britain are for foreign companies, but our pharmaceutical companies vie with the best in the world.

Book a free place: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/948247934097?aff=oddtdtcreator

10^th December 2024. David Waller, University of Northampton. ‘The 2024 U.S. Presidential Election in Historical Perspective’.

This year’s American elections are taking place in a period of exceptional partisanship and geo-political risk, and the outcome is likely to be critical both for the future direction of democratic government in the USA and the resilience of the Western alliance. This talk will present an initial analysis of the results, seeking to explain who won and why, both in terms of the Presidency and the elections to the Congress.

Book a free place: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/talk-the-2024-us-presidential-election-in-historical-perspective-tickets-948256991187?aff=oddtdtcreator

11^th February 2025. Mike Curtis (Northamptonshire Archaeological Society), ‘The Maritime Archaeology of the Roman Empire’.

The maritime archaeology of the Roman Empire encompasses the study of underwater cultural heritage related to ancient Roman maritime activities, including shipwrecks, port structures, and submerged settlements. This presentation looks at key sites such as the harbours of Ostia and Portus, the shipwrecks of the Mediterranean, and other provincial harbours and coastal settlements that help in providing insight into the economic, technological, and cultural exchanges that shaped the Roman Empire.

Book a free place: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/talk-the-maritime-archaeology-of-the-roman-empire-tickets-948265025217?aff=oddtdtcreator

11^th March 2025. Nathan Amin, ‘The Early Tudors’.

Best-selling author Nathen Amin will give a talk on the early Tudors. Nathen has written numerous books on Henry VII and the context of his reign. He shares some of that research with us.

See here for details on Nathen Amin’s works. https://nathenamin.com/

Book a free place: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-early-tudors-tickets-948272176607?aff=oddtdtcreator .

13^th May 2025. Professor Elizabeth Lambourn (De Montfort University), ‘Medieval Middle East and India’, title TBC.

Professor Elizabeth Lambourn will talk about maritime travel and travellers between the Middle East and India in the Middle Ages.

Book your free place here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/talk-voyaging-in-the-indian-ocean-in-the-middle-ages-tbc-tickets-948276459417?aff=oddtdtcreator

Northampton Guildhall (source: Wikimedia Commons)

For further information about the programme or the branch, please contact the Chair Dr David Waller on [email protected] or the Secretary Prof Matthew McCormack on [email protected].