Sublime

In 1598 Alice was sent to Mr Brooke, along with another woman, Barbara Allen, who earned thirty shillings from the encounter. The bawd took half, but that still left Barbara with more money than some maidservants earned in a year (although they did get board and lodgings as well as the cash). Mr Brooke was a rich and powerful man, brother to Lord C

Henry VIII started keeping four professional actors and their boy apprentice as part of his household just as the townsmen’s mystery plays were beginning to fade away under the eye of the Reformed Church.

when she was employed recently on the BBC production of Wolf Hall to be the hand double and weave some finger-loop braid,

cholera: in her notebook, ‘Quarry for Middlemarch’, George Eliot noted the appearance of cholera in England in 1831–2.

Well, in truth he was very unlikely to be prosecuted. A few people were: Richard Bett, for example, a tailor from Essex, was convicted in 1565 for the size of his hose; and in the same year Richard Walweyn, who worked as a servant in London, was arrested for wearing ‘a very monstrous and outraygeous great payre of hose’, a charge that closely follo

In April 1534, every man in the country had been required to swear the Oath of Succession, in which they promised ‘to be true to Queen Anne [Boleyn], and to believe and take her for the lawful wife of the King and rightful Queen of England, and utterly to think the Lady Mary daughter to the King by Queen Katherine, but as a bastard, and thus to do