Sublime

some small plump brownish person of firm but quiet carriage, who looks about her, but does not suppose that anybody is looking at her. If she has a broad face and square brow, well-marked eyebrows and curly dark hair, a certain expression of amusement in her glance which her mouth keeps the secret of, and for the rest features entirely insignifican

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

The Virgin Mary was fourteen when Joseph the Carpenter was already forty. He was a Sugar Daddy.'

To my eternal delight, the wreck of the Mary Rose, Henry VIII’s flagship, preserved its firewood deep in its hull for the marine archaeologists to find and bring to the surface in the late 1970s. What was found matched almost exactly the wish list of a Tudor cook and the regulations governing the sale of firewood. Over 600 logs were found, comprisi

He was feeling sure that he should have no chance of speaking to Mary, when Mr Farebrother said – ‘Fred, help me to carry these drawers back into my study – you have never seen my fine new study. Pray come too, Miss Garth. I want you to see a stupendous spider I found this morning.’

In his will of 1588, William Lane of Chadwell, Essex, listed two lockram shirts (coarse, heavyweight), one ‘holland’ shirt (fine weight and bleached white) and his ‘marrying shirt’, which presumably was of the best quality and loaded with sentimental significance.

They were both tall, and their eyes were on a level; but imagine Rosamond’s infantine blondness and wondrous crown of hair-plaits, with her pale-blue dress of a fit and fashion so perfect that no dressmaker could look at it without emotion, a large embroidered collar which it was to be hoped all beholders would know the price of, her small hands du

When she was twenty Brontë received a letter from poet laureate Robert Southey saying ‘literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life & it ought not to be.’