This Halloween, senior lecturer Caroline Nielsen explores the sad story of a spooky storyteller…

A young woman is sitting in a chair reading a story which has made her nervous. Engraving by R. Graves after R.W. Buss. Credit: Wellcome Collection.

This is the time of year when most of us begin to think about ghost stories as we witness the annual build-up to Halloween. So, in the spirit of the season, please allow me to introduce you to one of the best-selling ghost story collections of all time and to the foremost writers on psychic phenomenon of the nineteenth century: Mrs Catherine Crowe. Crowe’s story is one both of fame and triumph over adversity, but also a tragic history of the stigma around mental health problems.

Crowe’s The Night-Side of Nature: or Ghosts and Ghost-Seers is one of the largest collections of ghost-sighting and psychic phenomenon to be published in English. It was a ground-breaking, systematic attempt to investigate the full range of haunting phenomenon, from death-bed visitations, death portents to ghostly lights. According to writer Roger Clarke, The Night-Side even helped two of Hollywood supernatural favourites gain further notoriety; the poltergeist and the doppelganger. Both had their origins in German folklore.[1]

The Night-Side was not Crowe’s first attempt to document supernatural phenomenon. In 1845, she translated and edited the short German biography, The Seeress of Prevorst, being Revelations Concerning the Inner-Life of Man, and the Inter-Diffusion of a World of Spirits in the One we Inhabit. Originally written by Justinus Kerner, the seeress ‘Mrs H.’ was reputed to be both a powerful clairvoyant and spiritual healer, who mapped the separate ‘spheres’ of the spirit worlds.

Map of the spirit world. Credit: The Wellcome Collection

Reviewers were scathing of The Seeress. Tait’s Edinburgh Review sneered ‘save as an experiment on English credulity, one can hardly imagine a motive for translating this work’, which they apparently dismissed as ‘foreign’ nonsense.[2] They claimed The Seeress was an ‘entertaining nonsense-reading’ or a guide to abnormal psychology at best.[3] They took particular aim at Crowe’s spiritualist faith, her views dismissed simply because she was a known ‘believer’ in spiritualism and clairvoyance.

But Crowe did not back down. She eloquently defended her beliefs (and the applicability of them to English audiences) by writing The Night-Side, which contained an extensive collective of cases from across the UK. The reading public also did not agree with the critics.[4] The Night-Side alone went through sixteen print editions in six years.[5]

But I have to admit that I find Crowe herself far more interesting than her spectral subjects. A successful novelist and short-story writer, Crowe was an active member of the Edinburgh and London literati, corresponding with well-known society figures like Charles Dickens and the pioneering female journalist Harriet Martineau.

According to historian Lucy Sussex, Crowe’s legacy on horror and crime writing can still be felt now. This is because Crowe produced one of the first female-led amateur detective stories, where a murder is solved by an elderly female housekeeper-turned-sleuth. Move over, Miss Marple. If that was not enough, Crowe may have simultaneously brought the legal phrase ‘circumstantial evidence’ into prominence in the same book.[6]

Crowe’s achievements were recognised in her own time, but why haven’t more people heard of her now? Why did her reputation fade so quickly?

Two factors worked together to ensure that Crowe was marginalised in her late life, and then largely forgotten after her death; her legacy only known to a few academics and specialist interest groups. These factors were her chosen topics and her health.

Crowe’s work was very eclectic, but it tended to focus on women’s lives and domestic situations. She was not afraid of discussing the harsh realities of domestic life, and of crime. Several of her stories hinge on the treatment of women trapped in abusive relationships or situations. She even reworked Harriet Beecher Stowe’s iconic anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin into children’s books, publicising the injustice of plantation slavery and racism to young readers.

Her preference for this important subject matter inadvertently helped to undermine her post-humous literary reputation. Serious literature was not supposed to be about women or written for children. Serious writers were certainly not supposed to write uncritically or sympathetically about ghosts and ghost-seers. Thus, Crowe was easily (mis-)labelled as a writer of minor fiction.

But something else happened to her which really affected her reputation: she also suffered the stigma of severe mental illness.

In 1854, six years after the first publication of The Night-Side, Crowe experienced a period of serious ill health. Accounts of exactly what happened differ, but she appears to have suffered a period of delusional behaviour. According to Charles Dickens:

‘[Crowe] has gone stark mad – and stark naked – on the spirit-rapping imposition. She was found t’other day in the street clothed only in her chastity, a pocket-hankerchief and a visiting card. She had been informed, it appeared, by the spirits, that if she went in that trim she would be invisible. She is now in a madhouse, and I fear, hopelessly insane.’ [quoted in Sussex, p. 60].

Her illness was short, but the effect of extensive public gossiping appears to have been long-lasting. Crowe tried to defend herself publicly against the accusation of delusional behaviour – which she blamed on a long-standing digestive problem – but gradually she seems to have faded from public life.[7] We do not know if she stopped writing completely or simply gave up on publishing her work. She died in 1872 aged 82.

I can’t help thinking that Crowe’s marginalisation is the real tragedy here, more tragic than any of the spectres were wrote about in The Night-Side. I hope that in writing this, I help to end some of her previous marginalisation.

If you would like to know more about Crowe and her world:

It is only very recently that Crowe and her writings have become the subject of academic interest. However, very few accounts of her work are currently available. Try the following sources:

• Joanne Wilkes, ‘Catherine Ann Crowe [nee Stevens] (1790-1872), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Online (2008).
• Lucy Sussex, Women Writers and Detectives in Nineteenth-Century Crime Fiction: The Mothers of the Mystery Genre (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), ch. 3
• Roger Clarke, A Natural History of Ghosts: 500 Years of Hunting for Proof (London: Particular Book, 2012).
• Shane McCorristine, Spectres of the Self: Thinking about Ghosts and Ghost-Seeing in England, 1750-1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

The University of Kent Special Collections houses the Catherine Crowe archive, a large research collection compiled by Geoffrey Larken in preparation for his unpublished biography.

[1] Roger Clarke, A Natural History of Ghosts: 500 Years of Hunting for Proof (London: Particular Book, 2012), 87-88, 156-8

[2] ‘The Seeress of Prevorst’, Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine 12:141 (September 1845), 586-91.

[3] ‘The Seeress’, Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, 591.

[4] The second edition was published under the title, Revelations of the Invisible World by a Somnambulist; being the life of the Seeress of Prevorst: Her Revelations Concerning the Inner-Life of Man, and the Inter-diffusion of a World of Spirits in the one we inhabit, communicated by Justinus Kerner, Chief Physician at Weinsberg (London: C. Moore, 1847); Shane McCorristine, Spectres of the Self: Thinking about Ghosts and Ghost-Seeing in England, 1750-1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 10-11.

[5] McCorristine, Spectres, 10-11.

[6] See Lucy Sussex, Women Writers and Detectives in Nineteenth-Century Crime Fiction: The Mothers of the Mystery Genre (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 45-49.

[7] Sussex, Women Writers, 60-3.

Matthew McCormack from History has co-edited a new book on new approaches to teaching the subject. Co-edited with Ruth Larsen (Derby) and Alice Marples (British Library), Innovations in Teaching History: Eighteenth-Century Studies in Higher Education is now out with University of London Press.

The book contains seven chapters, which provide case studies for how to teach the eighteenth century. These focus on the themes of digital history, history in the classroom and the use of objects in learning. Matthew’s chapter focuses on his module HIS3018 ‘Citizenship and Gender in Britain’, and explores how to engage students with the unfamiliar topic of eighteenth-century political history.

The book arose from two workshops hosted by the University of Northampton and funded by the East Midlands Centre for Teaching and Learning in History.

The book is open access so is free to read online. It is also available in paperback and hardback here.

Matthew McCormack

Dominic Cummings has been in the news lately, you may have noticed. He drove, whilst infected with COVID-19, from Islington to County Durham, with his family. He then took them on a tour of County Durham, whilst infected, and after having been discovered defended his actions, supported by the PM and the government he advises.

This has broken the trust between government and people during an existential crisis when the government is asking people to sacrifice their normal lives, abstain from seeing family outside of their households and travel as little as possible.

Cummings did this, thought he could do it, thought he had a right to do it and is being defended for doing it because he is part of the elite and people are angry: Heckling Dominic Cummings: A How To Guide

There have been lots of comments on his £1.6m house in Islington (see images of his manor above), his wife the Baronet’s daughter, his position of power at the centre of government: Cummings is Exceptional But actually elite privileges run deeper than this and so do Cummings’ privileges.

Elites – the British aristocracy for instance – have the privileges of transgression and of exceptionalism. Historically they transgressed ‘normal’ dress, manners, levels of violence, sexual habits and a host of other realms of human behaviour.

They did this because it was/is an intrinsic part of being ‘elite’. Cummings’ little trip to the north, (which has proved less popular than Steve Coogan’s and Rob Brydon’s one: The Trip), was a transgression. The rules we live by are not for him because he is not one of us, he is one of them.

Exceptionalism is also key to this. Historically the British aristocracy actually had very few legal privileges, but their position delivered them a different life to the majority of British people.

In the late nineteenth century Veblen noted that the key privilege that elites held was that of time – allowing leisure: Thorstein Veblen ‘Theory of a Leisure Class’ They didn’t ‘work for a living’ and instead indulged their passions and interests whilst others worked. Also the aristocracy travelled for pleasure a long time before any other social group could: Chard, ‘Pleasure and Guilt on the Grand Tour’

In some senses Cummings’ indulgence of his desires fits this wider entitlement to indulgence.

As a historian that has spent his career studying elites in Britain it always surprises me that people are surprised by elites and elite behaviour. It’s a strange quirk of the English class system that it has made us all believe we are equal!

Of course Cummings is part of the elite and of course he was going to do this – he did it because he is part of a governing and political elite (especially the present incumbents!!) who’ve been schooled in the rules of hierarchy, deference, privilege and power.

Cummings thinks he’s smashing the system: The System Bites Back. He said he wanted to change the Tory Party: Cummings Becomes What he Hates He dresses differently, his manners are different. He wants to bring down Whitehall and replace it with ‘weirdos and misfits’: Cummings Breaks Law with Recruitment Policy, which it turns out was just a way to recruit like-minded eugenicists: !!!

The interesting things about elites is that, at any given fixed point in time they seem unchanging, carved from stone, very unlikely to shift or budge. But they are and always have been very unstable – they don’t actually last all that long and throughout their tenure they tend to be very anxious about maintaining their grip on power and status.

The British aristocracy are a good example. The medieval nobility installed after the Norman Conquest seemed quite alien to the Lords of Saxon England. Their monopoly of violence was gradually eroded by the growth of the state so that by the sixteenth century the country houses of the new gentry became ornamental and symbolic of power rather than defensive strongholds as the houses of nobles had been previously. The power held by the oligarchs of eighteenth century aristocracy seemed a world away to the declining aristos of the late nineteenth century, surrounded on all sides by decay and new forms of ‘elite’ who, largely, despised them in the way Cummings is currently despised.

All of this is transitory and Dominic Cummings, too, will be replaced by someone who thinks wearing t-shirts to Downing Street meetings is old hat and ‘establishment’. What always remains is the idea and the ideology of an ‘elite.’ When we stop being surprised by that and start thinking about closing the spaces of privilege, transgression and exceptionalism we might make some progress towards equality. The real shock of the Cummings affair was that the illusion of equality generated by the pandemic was smashed. Elites often do this too when they let their guard down: they remind us that there is no such thing as ‘equality’.

17 October 1961

In Black History month it is worthwhile underscoring how minority histories have often tended to be overlooked, covered up, or subsumed under majority narratives and ‘official’ memory. At the time of the Bataclan terrorist attack in Paris in 2015, for instance, the press and media all lamented what they claimed was the biggest loss of life on French territory since the Second World War. This was false. What had been overlooked was the murder of hundreds of Algerians in central Paris on the night of 17 October 1961.

It was the height of the war between France and Algeria. The many Algerians living and working in mainland France were increasingly distrusted by the French government, who feared that they were acting as a ‘fifth column, supporting and collecting funds for the FLN (National Liberation Front), the insurgents leading the war for independence from French colonial rule in Algeria. Harsh domestic policing tactics were employed against Algerians living and working legitimately in France, including surveillance, stop and search, and a curfew which saw Algerians homebound between 7pm-6am.

It was a protest against this curfew which sparked the events of 17 October 1961. The Algerian community groups organising the march had emphasised that the protest would be entirely peaceful, and protesters were searched for weapons before they boarded the trains and buses which transported them from the ghettoised peripheries and shantytowns to central Paris.

In 1961, Maurice Papon was the Police Chief in charge of Paris. Papon, who had served as a senior police official for the wartime Vichy regime, and oversaw the deportation of c.1600 French jews to Nazi concentration camps. In 1956 he had also served in Constantine, in Algeria, participating in the repression and torture of Algerian nationalists. Papon’s past clearly did not dispose him to take a lenient approach with colonial subjects protesting on French national territory. However, it is still difficult for historians to establish exactly what precipitated the massacre and on whose orders, for many of the archives related to this incident, and to France’s role and actions in the Algerian war more broadly, are still under wraps.

Around 30,000 marched. By the end of the week 14,000 had been arrested. This fate was far better than many suffered. Police bludgeoned innumerable participants as they exited metro stations. Others were rounded up and taken to the police HQ at St Michel, where, according to eye-witness accounts, Papon ordered their extermination. The bodies of many Algerians were thrown in the Seine.

Evidence of these atrocities was immediately covered up by the Paris police force. Journalists and photojournalists present during these events attest to the fact that they were silenced; that they were threatened; that their copy/photographs/films were confiscated. On the night itself, televised news showed only reassuring images, and the whole incident disappeared from the media by 24 October.

The exact number of deaths is difficult to establish. Some documents and archives have been destroyed, others remain classified. Historian Jean-Luc Einaudi, who has researched the event extensively, and who also challenged Papon in a court case, has suggested that at least 200 were killed on 17 October. British historians House and MacMaster claim that 550 were reported as missing from the shantytowns. At the time, the French government, headed by de Gaulle, with Roger Frey as Interior Minister, admitted only two of the dead. A government inquiry in 1999 concluded 48 drownings on the one night and 142 similar deaths of Algerians in the weeks before and after, 110 of whom were found in the Seine. It also concluded the real toll was almost certainly higher.

The massacre has often been cited by community activists as an example of ‘confiscated memory’:  an event whose existence was denied, the memory of which has been suppressed, and which had long been eliminated from the ‘official’ history of the Franco-Algerian conflict. Activists have sought to reinsert this history into French national memory – some erecting makeshift banners along the banks of the Seine which read: ‘We drown Algerians here’.  It was in response to this sort of call for the suppressed memory to take it rightful place in the history of France and Algeria that prompted Paris Mayor Bertrand Delanoë to unveil a plaque on the Saint-Michel bridge of the Seine near to the Police HQ, to those who were ‘victims of the bloody repression of the peaceful demonstration of 17 October 1961’. It was not until 51 years after the massacre, in 2012, that then President, François Hollande, made official comment on the matter, recognising that ‘Algerians legitimately demonstrating for their right to independence were killed during a bloody repression’. The passive voice employed in both the plaque and the statement bear witness to the fact that the French state is still far from being able to acknowledge fully its own part in both the massacre and its subsequent erasure from history.

Hello, I’m Dr Rachel Moss, lecturer in medieval history at the University of Northampton. I’m also an enthusiastic cook, and today I’m bringing together my love of history and food with a little lesson in baking medieval biscuits of happiness.

The recipe for these biscuits comes from Hildegard von Bingen. You might not have heard of this German nun, which is a shame because she’s one of the most brilliant women to have ever lived. In fact, in 2012 Pope Benedict XVI named her a Doctor of the Church – a saint who has made an extraordinary contribution to the theology or doctrine of the church – because of the significance of her teaching.

Hildegard was born around 1098 and entered a convent in childhood. A medieval polymath, she had far-ranging expertise in theology, music, science and medicine. She was a talented composer and visionary theologian, but today we’re interested in her medical expertise, because that’s where the biscuits come in.

Yes, Hildegard’s recipe for spice cookies is actually intended as a healthy remedy. I am all for any kind of prescription that involves biscuits.

Her first great scientific work, Physica, details the scientific and medicinal properties of various plants, stones, fish, reptiles, and animals. Under the entry for nutmeg is the following recipe:

“Nutmeg has great heat and good moderation in its powers. If a person eats nutmeg, it will open up his heart, make his judgment free from obstruction, and give him a good disposition. Take some nutmeg and an equal weight of cinnamon and a bit of cloves, and pulverize them. Then make small cakes with this and fine whole wheat flour and water. Eat them often. It will calm all bitterness of the heart and mind, open your heart and impaired senses, and make your mind cheerful. It purifies your senses and diminishes all harmful humors in you. It gives good liquid to your blood, and makes you strong.”

This sounds like a very highly spiced cracker to me, because there is no fat or sugar. This would make a lot of sense for a recipe by a nun! It is meant to be medicinal, not a treat. You might be surprised by the quantity of spices. People often assume medieval food is bland. In fact it was entirely the opposite – highly spiced and innovative. If people could afford it, they spent huge sums of money on spices – and not, as popular culture has it, because they were hiding the taste of rotten food. Trust me, that doesn’t stop food poisoning and medieval people knew when food was bad. They just liked spicy food.

Today I’m going to make two versions – one as close as I can to the original, so we can see how it tastes to the modern palate, and then one that’s more of a cookie, because I have a five year old and I’m not going to inflict sugar-free spice crackers on her.

I decided to use spelt flour, because that’s probably what Hildegard used. Spelt is an ancient grain, but you can now buy it from health food shops because it’s packed with protein and fibre – much more than regular wheat flour. It has a slightly nutty taste, and a lower gluten content than regular wheat flour. That means it can be easier to digest, but it’s also more prone to crumbling, so this isn’t the flour to use to make robust sugar cookie-style cut out cookies. Watch the video to see how they turn out!

Rachel ready to roll (or whisk…)

And here is my basic recipe, done two ways…

The original biscuit (more of a savoury-ish cracker):

A cup of speltTwo teaspoons of cinnamonTwo teaspoons of nutmegA few pinches of ground clovesWater

Mix the spices and spelt together and gradually add water until you can form a not-too-sticky paste. Roll out to a few mm thick and cut out with a small cutter. Bake at 160C fan (add 10C if you don’t have fan assisted) for about 10 minutes. Leave to cool. You could try rolling them even thinner and that way they would probably end up more like crackers! I think these would taste nice with cheese or butter; eaten plainly they are quite austere.

[No spoilers!]

I’m late to the party with the TV show The Traitors, but my family have recently discovered it and binged the first two series on iPlayer. In the unlikely event that you haven’t heard of it, the show has been a hit on the BBC, having first appeared on Dutch TV as Der Verraders before being franchised all over the world.

It is a cross between a game show and a reality show. A group of strangers are taken to a Scottish castle, and at the outset three of them are secretly appointed ‘traitors’, who gather every night to choose which of the other contestants they want to remove from the game (or ‘murder’). The other contestants are ‘faithfuls’, who have to try to work out who the traitors are, and meet at a roundtable to work out who to ‘banish’. Gradually the numbers get whittled down, and it is in the interest of the faithfuls to catch all of the traitors before the end, otherwise they walk off with all of the money.

It is a rock-solid format, which has obvious debts to other shows. Like The Apprentice, there are daily tasks and a reckoning at a nightly boardroom. Like Big Brother, we get to know the characters as we eavesdrop on their daily interactions. Perhaps inspired by the antics of Nasty Nick in its first series of that pioneer of cruel reality TV (in which the Dutch seem to specialise), the ingredients that make The Traitors so compelling are intrigue and lying.

The Traitors also has a very particular aesthetic. It takes place in a castle, which is lit by flaming torches. The traitors wear black hoods and carry lanterns. The faithfuls try to earn ‘shields’ while performing tasks in graveyards, churches, dungeons and dilapidated cabins. The language of the show is all about treachery (or ‘traitorousness’), murder, banishment, and so on. Even the host Claudia Winkleman has a famously goth vibe.

Ardross Castle: Wikimedia Commons

Historically speaking, all of this is intended to evoke the middle ages. That said, its vision of the medieval is pretty eclectic, and owes more to later imaginings of it. There are constant suggestions of Macbeth, and at one point the traitors even have to locate a copy of the play in the library. If anything, it is more neo-gothic than actually gothic: the castle is a nineteenth-century pastiche and the set pieces include Victorian funerals and church services. There are also echoes of the Assassin’s Creed series of video games.

I haven’t watched versions of the show from other countries, but it seems that they have similarly gone with a European-medieval aesthetic, even if that wasn’t something that happened in the country in question. The quasi-historical setting is therefore not an accident. So why the historical references? And what does the huge popularity of the show say about our relationship with the (imagined) past?

Perhaps they need to have a ‘past’ setting in order to encourage the contestants to embrace behaviours that are taboo in the present. Today we aren’t supposed to lie, betray or murder – but the past is apparently a place where people did. Many of the tasks involve discomfort or gross-out, and again that is associated with ‘horrible’ history. The types of history that are marketable today often dwell on these themes.

Whether this is really what things were like in the past is doubtful, but that is rather besides the point. As well as studying the past, historians can think about how contemporary culture is informed by visions of it, and what this tells us about society today.

As Claudia would say, sleep well.

Prof Matthew McCormack

This month, a member of Northampton’s history team begins his term as president of a national scholarly society. Professor Matthew McCormack will serve as President of the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies until 2026/27.

The British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (known as BSECS) is a meeting-place for anyone who works on the global long eighteenth century, including those with interests in history, literature, music, drama, art, languages, politics, or any other subject. It holds regular conferences, publishes a journal, distributes funding, supports postgraduate and early career scholars, and advocates the subject at a national and international level. It is part of the International Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ISECS).

Matthew has been a member of the society since he was a postgraduate, and has been a member of its executive committee for over a decade, serving as Reviews General Editor, Editor of Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies and Vice President.

Matthew teaches various modules on the eighteenth century on the History BA and MA at Northampton, including ‘United States: War and Society, 1610-2020’, ‘Citizenship and Gender in Britain’ and ‘Narrating the Nation: Rethinking Modern Britain’. He also supervises dissertations and PhDs in this area.

He is currently researching the material culture of footwear and his next book, Shoes and the Georgian Man, will be published by Bloomsbury later this year.

Drew Gray and Matthew McCormack from the University of Northampton offer contrasting reactions to Ridley Scott’s new film, Napoleon.

I must declare an interest here.

As a child I was obsessed with Napoleon. The ‘little corporal’ replaced Nelson as my boyhood hero and I devoured everything I could about him. At school I played wargames and still have about 500 miniature soldiers, each lovingly painted by the adolescent me. In 1970 I badgered my parents to take me to see Dino De Laurentiis’s ‘Waterloo’, with Rod Steiger playing the emperor and Christopher Plummer his nemesis, Wellington. I’ve seen it dozens of times since. I continued my interest in Napoleon into adulthood and he, and his world, was one of the reasons I returned to study history at university as a mature student.

So, I was looking forward to Scott’s ‘Napoleon’ way before it came out. Sadly, I don’t think I’ve ever been so disappointed in a film, to the extent that I am actually angry with Scott and almost everyone involved in this travesty of cinema.

The film is a little over 2.5 hours and that’s a long film but barely enough time to cover the life of one of history’s most divisive figures. Scott focuses on Napoleon’s tempestuous relationship with Josephine, whose back story is that of someone who survived The Terror by literally charming the pants off those she needed to. Napoleon’s personal life could have made for a fascinating film, but by sprinkling it with tableaux from his life (Toulon, ‘the whiff of grapeshot’, battle of the Pyramids, Moscow in flames, forced abdication in 1814) Scott tries to tell an epic story as well, and ends up doing neither one nor the other.

And let’s be clear, he gets so much wrong! From firing at the pyramids, to leading a charge at Waterloo, this film is peppered with inaccuracies. Then there is the acting. Joaquin Phoenix bears a passing resemblance to Napoleon but he looks the same in 1793 (clambering the walls of Toulon) aged 24 as he does careering towards the British squares in 1815, at 46. Throughout he in unconvincing and while Vanessa Kirby is much better as Josephine, even she descends into bathos in their divorce scene. That scene, along with the coup d’etat of 18^th Brumaire are just ridiculous and the casting of inappropriate actors (e.g. Rupert Everett at Wellington, or Miles Jupp as Francis of Austria) do nothing to raise parts of this movie above the level of a poor French farce.

I quite liked Paul Rhys as Tallyrand but Sam Troughton was a wholly unconvincing Robespierre. And where was Marshall Ney? Where also were the chateau Hougemont and the farm of la Haye Saint at Waterloo? Waterloo, one of the most documented battles in history was an aberration. It looked more like the Western Front, with colour.

Overall, a bad film, badly cast, poorly scripted, dismissive of history, and devoid of characters one could relate to. A cartoon would have been better. But then we would have lost the cinematography and for this alone it is worth watching – Dariusz Wolski take a bow.

Drew Gray

Hippolyte Bellangé, ‘Napoleón a la carga en Waterloo’: Source, Wikimedia Commons

I have been looking forward to this film for a while. In early 2022, I saw the set at Somerset House in London where they filmed the opening scene with the guillotine. And when the teaser trailer came out, my appetite was thoroughly whetted. I work on Britain in the long eighteenth century, and some of my research has been on the military during the Napoleonic Wars. I have mostly encountered Napoleon through British representations – often hostile or fearful, occasionally admiring, and frequently satirical.

So I was very interested to see what vision of Napoleon was portrayed in Ridley Scott’s new film, and I was not disappointed. Joaquin Pheonix is known for fully inhabiting his roles, and really getting under the skin of complex characters, and Bonaparte needed a treatment like this. Here he came across as amoral, proud, charismatic but disengaged, and a bit of a brat.

I think this is a legitimate take, and possibly not that far from reality. And it may explain why the film has alienated so many people, given how widely he is admired. It has gone down badly in France where the Napoleon cult is alive and well, and many historians (who should probably know better) are prone to admire him as a military genius or civil reformer.

Scott’s film is not a hagiography, and nor is it a conventional biopic or war film. It covers a huge period of history in two and a half hours flat – something that eluded Stanley Kubrick, who planned to tackle it over a series of films but never got the project off the ground (and made the brilliant Barry Lyndon instead).

For this reason, the narrative sometimes feels compressed and key things are missed out. Set pieces like Austerlitz, Borodino and Waterloo only get a few minutes each. If I had a criticism, it is that these huge battles seemed relatively small: in order to keep the storytelling tight, Scott only focused on a single element of battles where many things were happening at once. What we do see is visually impressive – the clash of French cavalry and British squares was well done – and he certainly does not hold back in conveying the bloody ferocity of combat.

As is often the way with military history, a great deal of heat has been generated over the question of authenticity. Scott has poured fuel on the fire by asking his critics, ‘excuse me, mate, were you there?’

For me, this rather misses the point. I don’t get too hung up on accuracy in historical drama: the most important thing is whether it captures the spirit of the period it is depicting, or whether it provides an interesting interpretation of it. And in this respect, I was very satisfied. Watching Scott’s film is like viewing a Gillray cartoon of Napoleon: quirky, grotesque, but giving us a window into the soul of a dangerous man.

Matthew McCormack

My 11 year old son has got into metal detecting. Inspired by YouTube and the comedy show Detectorists, we got a cheap detector off Facebook Marketplace. Armed with the appropriate licenses and permissions, we go out to our local common to see what we can find.

He wants to find old coins but we usually turn up things like nails and bottle tops. Occasionally we find something more interesting. Last week we found this chunk of iron. It’s about 5 centimetres square, with a cylindrical section on top.

We couldn’t work out what it was. Any guesses?

I therefore asked Twitter. For years, Twitter was a fantastic resource for historians, since you could post a question and get lots of really useful suggestions from other users. Since it became “X”, it has become a lot less useful, and I don’t get much engagement on there nowadays. The reasons for this are well documented so I won’t go into that here.

This post seemed to spark people’s imaginations, though, and I got several suggestions. Was it part of a hinge, a railway spike, or just a piece of bog iron (a common false positive for detectorists)? Was it a miniature sofa? But a couple of tweeters cracked it:

The object was a ‘hitch’ for a side rail on a nineteenth-century bedstead. The rail hooks onto the cylindrical section to hold it in place – there are details about how this works on this website. Apparently they can be stiff and prone to breakage, which is possibly why this one was discarded.

Quite what a piece of bedstead was doing on a rural common that was used for agriculture is anyone’s guess. I doubt it is worth very much, and we will keep searching for that Saxon hoard. But it is an interesting piece of material culture, and also proves that social media can still be useful tool for research.

Matthew McCormack

This week the third year students studying module HIS3037, The Wars of the Roses, had the opportunity for a field trip to nearby Delapre Abbey, which as well as being a lovely stately home with pretty grounds is also very probably the site of the Battle of Northampton, a significant battle during the Wars of … Continue reading Wars of the Roses field trip