Category: Featured

59 – The Halloween Special

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As you might imagine since I’m doing an episode on it, Halloween has a lot of British influence upon it. In fact, the name itself comes from Scotland, where All Saint’s Eve (also known as All Hallow’s Eve) was shortened in the 16th century to Halloween. And the name stuck. But as you have probably gathered, originally the day was simply the day before All Saint’s Day (also known as All Hallows or Hallowmas). And this might come as a shock to you, but All Saint’s Day was the day in which early Christians commemorated all their saints… and it is still practiced today.

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57 – A Tale of Three Cities (sort of)

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Ok, we’ve been getting pretty deep into the weeds and have been getting farther and farther from a coherent story. On the one hand, the culture is the story, but on the other hand it’s hard to get attached to a story if you forget who we are talking about and the people involved. So I thought that now would be a good time to tell a story about a community that was living in the early post-Roman era. After all, I’ve been spending a lot of time telling you how things weren’t as bad as you imagine so I might have given you the impression things were fine. They weren’t. Especially in the early parts, people were sickly, their lives were bleak, and it was a scary and violent time to be alive. That isn’t to say that people in the Roman era, especially the poor, were healthy and happy… it looks like they were also in pretty dire straights when compared to their Iron Age kin. But I think it’s important to put some of this stuff into context and remember that, while things weren’t necessarily as awful and culturally devoid as people might imagine, things were still pretty rough. Especially in the early parts.

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56 – Telling the Full Story (a Bonus Episode)

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So I’m doing a short midweek episode because something’s been irking me. I’ve heard repeatedly from a variety of people that history is a guy thing. And that’s f#*king stupid. I mean, you could say that just on sheer mathematics, 51% of history is a female thing. But that’s not the truth of it. The truth is that history is a human thing. These are everyone’s stories and while there were a ridiculous number of biased primary sources who focused on almost exclusively on men, it is our job to rise above those sources because if you are ignoring over half of the population you are ignoring the majority of our shared history. But unfortunately, many historians and narrators don’t rise above it. The easy path is to just speak about the men of society because the great man approach has been a historical trope since at least the Roman era. But it’s incomplete.

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55 – Anglo Saxon Construction

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OK, So I had requests for an episode on construction. I actually had a surprising number of requests for it, actually. So we’re going to do a single episode on how things were built, and since we’ve been talking about feasts, we’ll talk about… of course… feasting halls.

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53 – Producing the BHP Full Time, a Proposal

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Ok, so right now I’m in a situation where I might need to make some hard choices on where my time goes. The thing is that this has been one of the best experiences of my life, but for financial reasons I might need to go back to law full time. The problem there being that law is one of those jobs that doesn’t leave room for much else.

Obviously, I would prefer to continue telling you stories. I think I have a knack for it, and I feel like discussing our shared history is important. And there’s a bunch of fun stuff that I have been working on and would love to do. Such as getting more interviews with experts, new side stories (similar to what I’ve been doing with St. Patrick) and I’ve even been looking into putting together tours. But for me to give this project the attention it deserves I need to do it full time, rather than as a hobby I squeeze in between cases.

So I thought I’d apply for the job of entertaining you. By my math, I need 150 new members in order to be able to afford to do this full time. After all, I’m not looking to get rich. I just want to be able to dedicate all my time to doing this podcast.

So if you like what I’m doing here, and you’d like me to do this full time, please consider becoming a member over at www.thebritishhistorypodcast.com. For around the price of a latte each month my day job could be telling you stories, hunting down new things to share with you, and bringing you interviews with experts on the material we have all come to know.

To pique your interest, I’ve got several incentives that I have listed over on the website which include a future series analyzing the tale of King Arthur, a special on Stonehenge, and even a trip to the UK with get togethers and perhaps even a group outing to the British Museum or something along those lines.

The truth of it is that I love this project. And I would really like to work for you full time. So I hope you’ll consider hiring me.

Besides, does the world really need another lawyer?

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50 – The Denbighshire Hill Forts

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Today we have something pretty exciting. Listener Simon put me in contact with Erin Robinson and Fiona Gale, who are currently working on archaeological sites in Denbighshire north Wales, and they were kind enough to agree to speak to me via Skype. So today we are taking a break from our middle ages cultural discussion, and instead we have an interview on the Heather and Hillforts project… a project which focuses on a number of iron age hill forts.

I can’t tell you how fortunate we are to be able to talk with Erin and Fiona regarding their project in Denbighshire. The hillforts they’re working on are still somewhat mysterious and unknown. We are still learning a great deal about them and, with luck, we will be learning even more over the coming years. This is really a great opportunity for us.

If you’d like to learn more, or you like to find how to get involved, you can go to the websites I’ve listed below:

http://www.heatherandhillforts.co.uk/

https://www.facebook.com/heatherandhillforts

https://twitter.com/HeatherHillfort

And if you are in North Wales and see someone off-roading over one of these historic sites, please report them to the police.  These are tremendously important sites and we need to do all we can to preserve them.  After all, the damage these vehicles are doing can never be undone.

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