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Not 1066 again! Should we ditch our obsession with dates?
From 1066 to 1918, our obsession with battles, elections and even voyages of discovery risks distorting a true understanding of the past
In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue. That, at least, is what the famous rhyme tells us. Memorising such dates is a common experience of being taught history – a cliché superbly lampooned by the witty 1930 book 1066 and All That. “History is not what you thought,” its preface suggested. “It is what you can remember.” Accordingly, as per its subtitle, it offered a “Memorable History of England, Comprising All the Parts You Can Remember, Including 103 Good Things, 5 Bad Kings and 2 Genuine Dates.” Conspicuously, though, “two out of the four dates originally included were eliminated at the last moment” because “they are not memorable.” Though evidently both humorists, the book’s authors – Punch writers WC Sellar and RJ Yeatman – were making a serious point. History has long been thought to be concerned with preserving the past. The 12th-century historian and Byzantine princess Anna Komnene observed how “time in its irresistible and ceaseless flow carries along on its flood all created things and drowns them in the depths of obscurity”. Her solution was the study of history, which “forms a very strong bulwark against the stream of time”. This is a powerful idea – one that perhaps moved King Charles I, moments before his execution in January 1649, to utter a last single word to William Juxon, the former bishop of London, instructing him: “Remember.” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/1066-and-all-that-later-edition-CMYKWeb-Ready-dfb5326.jpg" width="2295" height="1530" alt="The cover of a book, with the title 1066 And All That across the top, and two men standing side by side in green and pink clothing" title="The 1930 book 1066 and All That wittily parodied the conventional approach to teaching history in schools at that time (Image by Amazon)" /> But do our efforts to remember really require us to do something so trivial as memorising dates? More radically, do the historical events these dates mark even matter? The Oxford English Dictionary leaves little room for doubt. Its definition of an event is “something that happens or takes place, especially something significant or noteworthy”. History is often taught as a succinct sequence of such occurrences – those accepted as important moments, neatly knitted together to explain the present. Indeed, for many historians, especially those preoccupied with political, constitutional or military matters, the practice of history itself involves assessing the importance of events by examining their causes, contexts and consequences, considering how they represent change or continuity over time. Yet almost no archaeologist would approach the past in such terms. Nor would many of today’s social, economic or cultural historians. In the 20th century, proponents of the Annales school, named for a scholarly journal, famously considered events relatively insignificant. French historian Fernand Braudel (1902–85) argued that events were simply “surface disturbances, crests of foam that the tides of history carry on their strong backs”. Has the importance given to events been overstated? Should we, therefore, put less emphasis on learning dates? Are there better ways of understanding history? The first issue to consider is just how ‘important’ dates are selected. If we are told that some day or year is more noteworthy than another, who decided this? It would be appealing to be able to say that the established chronology has been objectively selected by balanced, skilled historians, and arrived at through years of scrupulous scholarship and vigorous debate. Yet history is a human thing, written and argued over for all kinds of reasons. Even if such matters are really decided by historians – instead of, say, politicians or poets – we are all equally flawed, prone to error and liable to misinterpret the past through a panoply of biases, conscious or not. Moreover, humans are social animals and have consequently evolved to value convention, tradition and the received wisdom of our ancestors. Most of us simply accept the established chronology. Such a shared history can indeed function as a powerful bond cementing the otherwise disparate identities of social groups. To reinforce this sense of the collective, past incidents thought worthy of remembrance were once upon a time written in stone – literally. The Parian Marble, a fragment of a stele found on the island of Paros and now displayed in the ancient Greek section of Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum, is inscribed with a neat chronology of events and their dates from 1582 BC to 299 BC in our terms. These include the fall of Troy, purportedly in 1209–1208 BC, and the rather more reliably dated battle of Marathon in 490 BC. The stele’s text, similar to the earlier ‘Sumerian King List’ housed in the nearby Mesopotamian gallery, fuses myth with history. Such objects represent early examples of a phenomenon that has become increasingly common in the past two centuries or so. With the rise of nation states, backstories have been created for their “imagined communities”, as Anglo-Irish political scientist Benedict Anderson famously dubbed nations in 1983. These stories typically rest on simple historical narratives, ideally sprinkled with a few inspirational national heroes and some key dates. In the UK, a chronology of past rulers plays a major role. Reigns became surrogates for eras, suffused with each ruler’s character. Looking back, for example, we see all those who were alive between 1837 and 1901 as ‘Victorians’. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/GettyImages-815264642cmykWeb-Ready-2ce7a55.jpg" width="3569" height="2379" alt="A 2017 re-enactment of the 1410 battle of Grunwald. Poles and Lithuanians see this victory over the German Teutonic Order as a turning point in their national stories (Image by Getty Images)" title="A 2017 re-enactment of the 1410 battle of Grunwald. Poles and Lithuanians see this victory over the German Teutonic Order as a turning point in their national stories (Image by Getty Images)" /> Battles are often key parts of national stories. Like Marathon for the ancient Greeks, the battles of Hastings in 1066 and Agincourt in 1415 are considered important to the English. For the British more generally, Trafalgar in 1805 and Waterloo in 1815 are significant. In Serbia, the notoriously bloody battle of Kosovo in 1389, in which forces led by Prince Lazar Hrebeljanović squared up to an invading Ottoman army under the command of Sultan Murad I, has been endlessly mythologised. Lithuanians and Poles still celebrate victory over the German Teutonic Order at the battle of Grunwald in 1410. But few dates and events are as significant as national narratives suggest, battles least of all. Why? Because battles, though certainly rare and dramatic moments, are seldom, if ever, decisive at ending wars so can’t be imbued with much causal importance. Even after Hastings, at which much of the English ruling class was killed, it took William the Conqueror many years to bring England truly under Norman rule, a period notorious for the so-called Harrying of the North (1069–70). Likewise, the greatly celebrated clash at Agincourt (1415), which owes much of its fame to William Shakespeare, saw the mass slaughter of French nobility – but it was not until 1420 that Henry V forced Charles VI to agree to recognise the Plantagenet claim to the French throne under the Treaty of Troyes. Read more | Do you know the correct date of Magna Carta? Here’s why you might be wrong Yet such totemic dates are repeatedly reinforced by that staple of public history and national myth-making: the commemoration of anniversaries. These appear to be good moments to reconsider the past and revive enthusiasm for historical enquiry, but there’s a built-in problem: at least outwardly, nobody involved questions the real significance of the events marked – that would defeat the exercise. It is understandable that, on occasion, people wish to memorialise the loss of their loved ones in wars or other disasters. In general, however, anniversaries reflect current concerns and as such are profoundly unhelpful when it comes to understanding what happened in the past. Admittedly, some moments appear to have been so overwhelmingly important that they demand our attention. For Europe, the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453 seems epochal. In China, the final defeat of the Song dynasty by the forces of Kublai Khan in 1279 has a similar significance. Yet these events represent the culmination of long and complex processes. Seen in this light, the events themselves were largely symbolic. Surely, you say, the arrival of Christopher Columbus in the Americas in 1492 had massive historical consequences. Well, one can quibble over whether his first voyage itself achieved much – likewise his three further transatlantic expeditions in 1493–96, 1498–1500 and 1502–04, for that matter – despite being catastrophic for the indigenous Taíno people of the Caribbean. Columbus thought – and continued to think for the rest of his life – that he was exploring east Asia. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/GettyImages-599969077cmykWeb-Ready-7d51147.jpg" width="4272" height="2848" alt="A painting of a man dressed in a white shirt with a brown cloak, and a dark hat" title="This 1519 portrait reputedly depicts Christopher Columbus. Did his first transatlantic voyage in 1492 really have such world-changing consequences? (Image by Getty Images)" /> The world indeed changed thereafter as it gradually fused into what, in 1974, the American economic historian and sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein termed the “modern world-system”, but this was not an inevitable consequence of Columbus’s first voyage. After all, Europeans had been in the Americas before. The Norseman Leif Erikson is thought to have reached North America around AD 1000, and a Norse settlement excavated at L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, Canada seems to support this. So it is of far greater historical significance that pivotal processes occurred after 1492 – but not after 1000. This is a point made in Alfred W Crosby’s groundbreaking 1972 book The Columbian Exchange, a foundational text of environmental history that charted the seismic global effects of the intercontinental transfer of plants, animals, diseases and cultures. Such developments can be shown to be genuinely transformative to people’s lives, from the food they ate to the diseases that afflicted them. By contrast, traditional chronology often neglects the experiences of a broad spectrum of people. Not everyone was present at battles or on voyages of discovery. Indeed, most humans who have ever lived were peasants who wrested their subsistence from the soil. For these people, few experiences were shared beyond a restricted locality, especially in periods when speeds of travel were slow and communication limited. Nearly all people must have been ignorant of what we now assert, after the fact, were key events. Others would have been simply indifferent. According to the historian De Lamar Jennsen, the Spanish Armada – King Philip II of Spain’s unsuccessful project to invade England in summer 1588 – was the “worst kept secret in Europe”. Yet research suggests that, far from striving to achieve victory for their country in some epic national struggle, during the Armada many English sailors and merchants were more preoccupied with selling food and other supplies to the enemy than with fighting them. Perhaps the key problem is that narrative history gives us a false sense of order, in part by playing to our innate tendency to identify and interpret patterns. It suggests that big events necessarily have big consequences. This completely fails to account for the unpredictable nature of the world through which we move. Seemingly insignificant factors can and do have a disproportionate impact on history. As the proverb has it in James Baldwin’s version: “For want of a nail the shoe was lost; for want of a shoe the horse was lost; for the want of a horse the battle was lost; for the failure of battle the kingdom was lost; and all for the want of a horseshoe nail.” Conversely, apparently important things can turn out to be irrelevant. To return to Columbus, how are we to frame the decision of Queen Isabella I of Castile and King Ferdinand II of Aragon to support him, having equivocated for years over whether to stump up the cash to fund his voyage west? Some cite the fall of Granada to Christian forces in January 1492 – marking the end of Islamic rule on the Iberian peninsula, which gave the co-ruler monarchs both confidence and the promise of more secure finances – as the key explanation for their change of heart. Assuming this were true, we could equally portray what happened as the result of the Arab Nasrid dynasty, which ruled the Emirate of Granada for more than 250 years, carelessly losing control of their territory. In the latter reading, Wallerstein’s modern world-system was in a sense created “for want of a nail”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/GettyImages-128261385cmykWeb-Ready-6731e0e.jpg" width="3941" height="2628" alt="A photograph of a courtyard under tall, intricate archways with several columns throughout" title="The Court of the Lions in the Alhambra, Granada. That city’s fall in January 1492 arguably led to the European colonisation of the Americas. But it’s an episode that can be framed in different ways, argues Robert Blackmore (Image by Getty Images)" /> As should be becoming clear, questioning the assumptions that underpin so much conventional narrative history has serious implications. This forces you, for example, to recognise that the lowliest peasant may have been as significant as an emperor or king, and that their relative impact on history was not necessarily proportionate to their immediate influence. “The ruler’s power was rarely effective,” Danish historian Patricia Crone put it, “even within such sphere of competence as he did enjoy.” Braudel hauntingly evoked a “historian who takes a seat in Philip II’s chair and reads his papers” and is transported into “a world of strong passions” but one “unconscious of the deeper realities of history, of the running waters on which our frail barks are tossed like cockleshells”. Yet such is our wish to impose order on a complex world that we have frequently reached for elaborate explanations for erratic ‘nonlinear’ outcomes, among them the capricious will of deities, the movements of celestial bodies, even conspiracy theories. In truth, because our evidence of the past is so incomplete, we are unlikely ever to pinpoint true cause and effect. Despite this, we still tend to look for what Annales school historian Marc Bloch called “the idol of origins”. Countless books claim to trace the roots of anything from states and religions to sports. Even the aforesaid Parian Marble located the birth of agriculture to 1409–08 BC when the goddess Demeter supposedly invented grain crops. In practical terms, though, nothing has any origin in history. “For most historical realities,” Bloch wrote in the early 1940s, “the very notion of a starting point remains singularly elusive.” As we have shown, we cannot even be sure that the origin of the Columbian Exchange was Columbus himself. Read more | A thousand years ago, the Vikings had a shock encounter with Native Americans that ended in disaster Indeed, trying to frame this story, we could be more radical and go back even before the time of Leif Erikson – perhaps all the way back to 14,800 years ago, when the Bering Strait Land Bridge was last rendered impassable and Asia was fully separated from the Americas. But where do you stop? Rather than there being actual origins, all things were and are constantly in the course of being made through a process of emergence. As Bloch argued, “A historical phenomenon can never be understood apart from its moment in time. This is true of every evolutionary stage, our own and all others.” So how, then, are we to approach history without straightforward narratives? There are any number of options. Some historians, such as those of the Annales school, have examined historical structures – social, political and economic – rather than events to explain change, frequently over the long term. This approach has often been fused with the so-called histoire des mentalités (history of attitudes), which endeavours to understand the perspectives of those in the past in their own terms. Meanwhile, some social and economic historians have used Marxist theory and framed conflict between social classes as explaining change. Others have put the emphasis on demography and land use. Today, in a time of climate change, many historians are interested in understanding past societies’ interactions with their environments. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/GettyImages-122317088cmykWeb-Ready-15b2d1a.jpg" width="3708" height="2472" alt="An image showing four people dressed in wool skins and carrying spears, walking across a large" title="An illustration depicts Asian hunters migrating across the Bering Strait Land Bridge. The strait becoming impassable some 15,000 years ago was a vital juncture in global history (Image by Getty Images)" /> Each new approach has inevitably attracted criticism for its own alleged oversimplification and misrepresentation of the past. British historians, in particular, were notoriously hostile to the Annales school. Geoffrey Elton of the University of Cambridge, for example, held to his focus on events, with disdain for nearly all scholarship outside the study of power politics. It is said that his colleague Maurice Cowling would privately exclaim: “Annales is balls!” Despite such intransigence, though, new ideas did spread. Going forward, future historians will doubtless find even more innovative forms of historical enquiry using formidable artificial intelligence-driven tools. Read more | Do you know all the major periods in British history? To be clear, though they make less of specific events, new approaches are not necessarily histories without dates. Peter Laslett, in his pioneering 1965 work of social history The World We Have Lost, even began with one: “In the year 1619 the bakers of London applied to the authorities for an increase in the price of bread.” Though Laslett pinpoints a moment that might seem banal when compared with a great battle, coronation or discovery, we should arguably accord such granular details equal attention for what they tell us of our ancestors’ priorities. Their world, like our own, was a practically infinite morass of events and dates whose relative importance and interrelationships were vastly more uncertain than we impulsively suppose. History is not, as one student in Alan Bennett’s 2004 play The History Boys put it, “just one f****** thing after another”. Rather, as the sixth-century historian and bishop Gregory of Tours began his Historia Francorum (History of the Franks), “A great many things keep happening.” Faced with this truth, should we not stop presenting history as neat, ordered and, as such, unrepresentative of how our forebears experienced it? Ultimately, we cannot preserve the past inside the present. Explorers such as Columbus and rulers such as Charles I or Philip II will eventually be forgotten, just as we will all one day be swept away by the stream of time. Trying to understand this process, not learning dates, is the true art of history. Kings and queens are not innately important; neither are great battles. All things are transient. As the 11–12th-century Persian poet and scientist Omar Khayyam put it, it is far better we “think, in this batter’d caravanserai [a refuge for travellers] whose doorways are alternate night and day; how sultan after sultan with his pomp, abode his hour or two, and went his way”. This article was first published in the November 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
“We analysed Hitler’s DNA – and what we discovered made us gasp”
Turi King and Alex J Kay have married genetics with history to study a sample of DNA from Adolf Hitler – and, as they reveal, their research has thrown up some extraordinary insights into the Nazi dictator’s private life
Few historical figures have been discussed and debated as much as Adolf Hitler. We have a wealth of primary source material available to us about his life, including his autobiographical manifesto Mein Kampf, personal correspondence, political directives and military orders, recordings and transcripts of his countless speeches, eyewitness accounts, photographs and film footage. Now, 80 years after his death, Hitler's DNA: Blueprint of a Dictator, a groundbreaking documentary produced by Blink Films and currently airing on Channel 4, has unlocked a new source by presenting the results of a world-first analysis of a sample of Hitler’s DNA. The DNA was taken from the blood on a small piece of fabric cut from the sofa on which Hitler died after shooting himself in his Berlin bunker on 30 April 1945 We have the privilege of being part of this documentary – both as lead investigators and in our separate roles as senior historical consultant (Alex) and the person leading the genetic analysis (Turi). The background to the documentary was a multi-stage process, each step a powerful marrying of genetics with history. It probably goes without saying that the first step was to confirm that the blood sample was actually that of Hitler. With this in mind, it’s important to remember that, as in any forensic case, DNA evidence cannot be taken in isolation. It has to be combined with other types of evidence, in this case reaching back into the past for information first about Hitler’s suicide and then about how the piece of fabric came to be available for DNA testing. The Führer’s family tree So, what does the history tell us? With the Red Army closing in, Hitler killed himself in his Berlin bunker on the afternoon of 30 April 1945. In the days following his death, the Soviets controlled access, and few people were allowed in. Among those who were permitted to enter was Lieutenant Colonel Roswell P Rosengren, public information officer for General Dwight D Eisenhower, the supreme Allied commander in Europe. While taking various souvenirs, Rosengren cut out a swatch of the fabric on the sofa on which Hitler had shot himself – and which, crucially, was stained with blood. He took it home to the United States and kept it under lock and key, before passing it down to his son. It was later acquired by the Gettysburg Museum of History in Pennsylvania, which in turn offered it for DNA analysis to anyone who was interested. Accompanying the swatch was a signed affidavit from Rosengren’s son confirming its provenance. Certainly, the fabric looked like it matched photographs of the sofa. So far so good. Next came the genetic analysis for the identification. It is standard in cases such as this to analyse the DNA from the sample and compare it either with a previous authenticated sample from the individual in question or with the DNA of a close relative. Yet there were no such close relatives available to carry this out: Hitler had no children. However, as part of a previous study, more than a decade ago, a journalist called Jean-Paul Mulders and a genealogist named Marc Vermeeren had traced distant male-line members of Hitler’s family tree living in Europe and had obtained DNA from one of them. Mulders had been particularly interested in tracing male-line members of Hitler’s family tree because there is a segment of DNA that is passed down through the male line: the Y-chromosome. Y-chromosome types differ between individuals, but male-line members of the same family tree should carry identical, or near-identical, Y-chromosome types. Analysing the Y-chromosome type from a male-line relative gives you, essentially, Hitler’s Y-chromosome type. All these years later, if the blood on the piece of fabric was from Hitler, the Y-chromosome from it should match that from the relative whose DNA had already been tested. This was a huge moment in the project. So you can imagine our relief when we established that there was a DNA match – and, what’s more, it was a rare Y-chromosome type. Still, here historical context is, again, important. What were the chances of a male-line relative having access to the bunker and, crucially, also bleeding on the sofa? Given the rarity of the Y-chromosome type and what we know about the whereabouts of Hitler’s few male-line relatives at the time, the chances of this happening were vanishingly small. The blood sample, and thus the DNA in it, belonged to Hitler. We had his DNA. Sequencing the genome The match led to another of the study’s major discoveries: an answer to the question of whether Hitler had Jewish heritage through his paternal grandfather. In view of Hitler’s virulent antisemitism and his pivotal role in the extermination of 6 million European Jews, it is understandable that this particular rumour has triggered a great deal of speculation among both scholars and the general public alike. Well, the rigorous scientific testing carried out for the documentary has now confirmed beyond doubt what serious historians had long believed: namely that there is no truth in a rumour that has circulated since the early 1920s. The DNA match firmly debunks the Jewish ancestry myth. The next step was to sequence the entire genome. Hitler now joins thousands of historical individuals – often nameless but including among their number the famous German composer Ludwig van Beethoven – whose genomes have been sequenced. We approached the task with an open mind. But given how many medical biographers have tried to diagnose Hitler from a distance, we were naturally interested in what the former German leader’s DNA could tell us about his health. But first, let us be clear about what Hitler’s DNA can tell us – and, more importantly, what it cannot. This calls for a quick genetics lesson. For some diseases and conditions, the process is straightforward. Known as monogenic in origin, the development of a given condition can be traced back to a single gene or genetic variant that affects how the gene is working or, in this case, not working. A common example of a single gene disorder is cystic fibrosis. However, for other conditions and diseases, it is a far more complex picture, because they are both polygenic and multifactorial. This means that many – often hundreds – of genetic variants are involved, each incrementally increasing or decreasing a person’s risk of developing the condition. What’s more, the risk of developing the condition is also influenced by environmental factors ranging from chemical exposure (such as smoking) to lifestyle (such as diet). A common example of one of these conditions is coronary artery disease. A shock revelation We analysed the DNA in two ways: by sending the genetic results to experts in different fields so that they could identify any medical conditions of interest; and also by running it through the standard medical pipelines for known genetic variants associated with various conditions. The results were striking. First, thanks to the work of colleagues at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, we found that Hitler had a well-known deletion in a gene that is associated with Kallmann syndrome and the elaborately named Congenital hypogonadotropic hypogonadism. While the severity can vary from person to person, this mutation can result, among other things, in an impaired testosterone production, low libido, abnormalities in the development of sexual organs, and, by extension, a disrupted reproductive function. This was a gasp moment in the study, and of particular interest to historians. The revelation that Hitler had some form of Kallmann syndrome is intriguing because of the implications for his private life. The finding suggests there could have been a causal relationship between Hitler’s genetic make-up and particular facets of his behaviour. It complements what we already knew about this part of Hitler’s biography, and it sheds light on aspects of his life that we could previously only speculate about. A physical examination of Hitler, conducted during his incarceration in Landsberg prison in 1923 following the failed Munich putsch – but only known about since the rediscovery of the medical file in 2010 – revealed that he had “right-sided cryptorchidism”. That is, an undescended testicle. (It turns out that the British satirical song ‘Hitler Has Only Got One Ball’, the origins of which remain unknown, was close to the mark after all.) “Some sense of shame” This physical abnormality might help to explain an account given by August Kubizek, Hitler’s closest (and perhaps only) friend during his adolescence. Hitler and Kubizek shared a room in Vienna from February to July 1908. Noting Hitler’s “obvious indifference to the opposite sex”, his “strict monk-like asceticism” and the fact that he “refrained from masturbation”, Kubizek observed: “My friend undoubtedly found favour with the opposite sex although, to my amazement, he never took advantage of it.” Commenting on the entirety of their friendship from the autumn of 1905, when they met at the opera in Linz, to the summer of 1908, when their time together in Vienna came to an end, Kubizek concluded: “I think I can say with certainty: Adolf never met a girl, either in Linz or Vienna, who actually gave herself to him.” Tellingly, Ernst Hanfstaengl, one of Hitler’s closest confidants during the 1920s and 1930s, later wrote: “I can never recall having seen him in a bathing costume, nor had anyone else. A story, probably authentic, was frequently told that Hitler’s old army comrades, who had seen him in the wash-house, had noted that his genital organs were almost freakishly underdeveloped, and he doubtless had some sense of shame about displaying himself. It seemed to me that this must all be part of the underlying complex in his physical relations, which was compensated for by the terrifying urge for domination expressed in the field of politics.” According to the historian Ian Kershaw, author of the definitive biography of Hitler, “Kubizek’s account, together with the language Hitler himself used in Mein Kampf, does point at the least to an acutely disturbed and repressed sexual development.” Rumours that Hitler had been infected with syphilis by a Jewish prostitute were without foundation: medical tests in 1940 showed that Hitler had not suffered from syphilis. The discovery that Hitler had Kallmann syndrome might thus be the key to explaining his seemingly “disturbed and repressed sexual development”. Looking for patterns Hitler may well have been extremely self-conscious about his body and, for this reason, reluctant to engage in relations of an intimate or sexual nature – and perhaps even uninterested in that side of life. This fact would help to explain his absolute devotion to politics to the almost complete exclusion of any kind of private life. Such devotion was exceptional among Nazi leaders. All other senior Nazis – Hermann Göring, Heinrich Himmler, Joseph Goebbels, Martin Bormann, Rudolf Hess, Albert Speer, and so on – had wives and children. Some even had extramarital affairs. Ian Kershaw also wrote: “There was no ‘private life’ for Hitler. Of course, he could enjoy his escapist films, his daily walk to the Tea-House at the Berghof, his time in his alpine idyll far from government ministries in Berlin. But these were empty routines. There was no retreat to a sphere outside the political, to a deeper existence that conditioned his public reflexes.” Read more | Did Eva Braun love Adolf Hitler? The discovery and testing of Hitler’s DNA, combined with the historical facts already available to us, may explain why. When testing the DNA sample, experts at Aarhus University in Denmark looked at more complex conditions such as neurodevelopmental and psychiatric disorders. When scientists are interested in a condition that is polygenic, they determine which genetic variants might predispose someone to the condition by looking, in a large population, at the patterns of DNA in people who have that particular condition compared to those who do not. One can then take an individual’s DNA and place them, based on the genetic variants they carry, on the bell-curve distribution to see how they compare to others in that population. Do they have a lot of the genetic variants that seem to predispose someone to the condition, or very few? This is known as a polygenic score. Hitler’s results were, again, striking. His polygenic score placed him in the top 1 per cent for schizophrenia, for autism and for bipolar disorder. However, we have to be really clear here: Hitler’s polygenic score being high is not diagnostic. We cannot, from his DNA, say that he would have been diagnosed with any of these conditions. Even people with the highest scores aren’t diagnosed with the disorder 95 per cent of the time. What makes Hitler so unusual is not the possibility that he might have had any one of these disorders on its own, but rather the fact that his placement in the top 1 per cent for the polygenic scores of all three of these conditions is exceptional: none of the other individuals in the population analysis had the same result. Still, we know that numerous environmental factors, such as adverse life events, would have had a big influence on his likelihood of developing them. What’s more, it is important not to stigmatise people with these conditions. It is rare for anyone with any of these conditions to go on to commit violent acts, let alone genocide. Indeed, they are more likely to be on the receiving end of violence. Genetics is only one part of the puzzle in determining who someone will become. Nature vs nurture No attempt to explain the man Hitler became and the extreme inhumanity he exhibited can, therefore, be reduced to a question of genetics. But it is interesting to view these scores in light of what we already knew about him. Environmental and social factors played a central role in moulding Hitler. Born in provincial Austria in 1889, he had a traumatic childhood, experiencing abuse at the hands of his father and losing four out of five siblings as well as both parents by the age of 19. He later wrote in Mein Kampf that the death of his mother, Klara, had been “a dreadful blow”. These events would have gone a long way toward shaping Hitler’s character, regardless of his genetic makeup. Similarly important for the bigger picture is the fact that Adolf Hitler was only one man. He was the undisputed dictator of Germany for 12 years. He devised and ordered the genocide of Europe’s Jews, as well as countless other atrocities. But he did not act alone. There were hundreds of thousands of perpetrators, each with their own genetic makeup and life experiences. Millions more eagerly followed him and profited from his policies. Genetics does not bring us any closer to understanding and explaining how the Holocaust could have happened. At the same time, it is undeniable that certain people have a huge and lasting impact on the course of historical events. Hitler is one of those people. Ian Kershaw once wrote of the dictator: “He is one of the few individuals of whom it can be said with absolute certainty: without him, the course of history would have been different.” Being able to analyse Hitler’s DNA thus offers us a remarkable opportunity to add another layer of information in the quest to understand more about the man regarded as “the embodiment of modern political evil” (Kershaw). However, we want to emphasise that it is not possible to see evil in someone’s DNA. A new piece of the puzzle It can be argued that only under Hitler could the Nazis have come to power, consolidated that power, waged a European war and committed the most terrible crimes in modern history. One reason for this is Hitler’s single-mindedness in the pursuit of power, which was unmatched by any other senior Nazi. That he had some form of Kallmann syndrome could well have been a factor in his renunciation of any kind of private life or intimate relationships. All available evidence suggests that he did not even have sex with his long-term companion, Eva Braun. Hitler always claimed that his life was devoted to Germany, so that there was no room in it for a wife. It seems this claim might, at least in part, have been a way of covering up his aversion to intimate relationships, and that his genes could have played a more significant role in his decision not to marry (until the day before his death) and not to have children than he was willing to admit. No single piece of evidence explains everything. We cannot take the genetic information about Hitler in isolation. It needs to be couched within our knowledge of what DNA can and cannot tell us, but crucially also within what we know about Hitler, and the time in which he lived. A rare constellation of factors – genetic, environmental and societal – all contributed to the emergence of Hitler. The discovery of his DNA – and the findings that have emerged from its analysis and are now presented in this cutting-edge documentary – provide historians with a rare and extremely significant new piece of the jigsaw puzzle in their attempts to understand and explain the most notorious figure of the 20th century. Turi King is the lead geneticist on the research into Hitler’s DNA. Alex J Kay is a historian specialising in Nazi Germany. Their groundbreaking work is covered in the two-part Channel 4 and Blink Films documentary Hitler’s DNA: Blueprint of a Dictator
9 things you might not know about Sherlock Holmes
The fictional detective Sherlock Holmes, created by Arthur Conan Doyle, has for more than 130 years been a star of stage and screen, played by actors including Benedict Cumberbatch and Ian McKellen and serialised in countless books. But how much do you know about this famous crime-buster, who made his first appearance in 1887 in Beeton's Christmas Annual? Here, author Martin Davies shares 11 lesser-known facts about Sherlock Holmes...
1. The first actor to play Sherlock Holmes was American… The first actor to take on the role of Sherlock Holmes in any official capacity was the American William Gillette. His 1899 stage play was adapted from a script by Arthur Conan Doyle himself. Opening six years after the author had attempted to kill off his creation at the Reichenbach Falls, the play was a huge success on both sides of the Atlantic: between 1899 and 1932, Gillette performed the role more than 1,000 times. Gillette is also credited with introducing the curved briar pipe that was to become synonymous with the great detective – possibly because a straight pipe obscured the actor’s face when he delivered his lines. On the podcast | Sherlock Holmes: the real history that inspired the detective stories On first meeting Sherlock Holmes’ creator, Gillette is said to have appeared in character, complete with deerstalker, and after examining Conan Doyle most minutely, to have opined: “Unquestionably an author!” 2. … who introduced a love interest Gillette was also one of the first to annoy the purists by introducing a love interest for Holmes. When he telegraphed Conan Doyle with the question “May I marry him?” the author is said to have replied: “You may marry him, or murder or do what you like with him!” It’s impossible to count the number of writers who, since then, have taken Doyle at his word. Read more | Real-life Sherlocks: the detectives of Scotland Yard and their curious cases 3. He defied death Holmes, having survived the Reichenbach Falls, refused to die with his creator. By the time of Conan Doyle’s death on 7 July 1930, Holmes was already a star of stage and screen. His film debut, Sherlock Holmes Baffled, came as early as 1900. Just a few seconds long, the film used stop-motion camerawork to show Holmes attempting to grapple with a burglar who repeatedly disappears, then reappears in a different part of the room. 4. A 1940s duo cemented Holmes and Watson's on screen personas One of the oldest surviving film adaptations of Conan Doyle’s work dates to 1916 (William Gillette again) but it was the English duo of Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce in the 1940s who for many years became identified in the public imagination as the Holmes and Watson. Rathbone and Bruce made 14 Sherlock Holmes films between 1939 and 1946 (and starred in more than 200 dramatisations for American radio), yet only the first two films were set in the Victorian period. The others had a contemporary setting, allowing Sherlock Holmes to pursue Nazi spies and to urge the purchase of war bonds. Bruce’s dim, bumbling Watson tends to infuriate Holmes purists. 5. He inspired hundreds of parodies The Adventures of ChubbLock Homes, an early comic strip, appeared in Comic Cuts magazine as early as 1893, and the urge to parody the great detective has never gone away. In 1901, while William Gillette’s official Holmes play was running in London, audiences at Terry’s Theatre were enjoying performances of the rather more frivolous Sheerluck Jones. The comic strip Sherlocko & Watso was hugely popular in the USA in the early 20th century, and silent film parodies abounded. Later in the century, Peter Cook and John Cleese both played comedy Sherlocks on film (Cleese's character was Arthur Sherlock Holmes, Sherlock’s grandson). Less well remembered, perhaps, is the 1976 TV film The Return of the World’s Greatest Detective, in which a youthful Larry Hagman (before his JR Ewing days) played a deluded motorcycle cop, Sherman Holmes. Read more | Women detectives: meet the Victorian female super sleuths 6. Tobacco, cereal and… mouthwash? Holmes has sold it all Even in his early days, Sherlock Holmes was helping manufacturers to sell their products. In the 1890s, the makers of Beecham’s Pills ran advertisements suggesting that the great detective was a devoted user. And as a smoker, Holmes was popular with the tobacco companies. Early cigarette advertisements using Holmes’ image included brands such as Lambert and Butler’s ‘Varsity’ mixture, Chesterfield, Ogden’s, Gallaher’s and Players. Since then, products as diverse as furniture cream, mouthwash, breakfast cereal and photocopiers have all benefited from association with the great man. 6. He debuted on TV to mixed reviews With the growth of television after the Second World War, the Baker Street detective was quick to adapt to the new medium. Alan Wheatley was the first actor to portray Holmes on British television – his 1951 series was broadcast live. But it seems Wheatley was not a fan of Holmes. When asked about Holmes’ character, he is said to have replied: “In my opinion he just seemed to be an insufferable prig”. 7. One actor played Holmes twice… and his brother Peter Cushing appeared as Holmes on the BBC in the 1960s. He had already played the detective in the 1959 Hammer film The Hound of the Baskervilles, alongside Christopher Lee as Sir Henry Baskerville. Lee was to play Holmes himself in a 1962 film; then, nearly 30 years later, he took up the pipe again, playing an ageing Sherlock in two TV films known together as Sherlock Holmes the Golden Years. Throw in an appearance as Mycroft Holmes in Billy Wilder’s The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, and Sir Christopher almost bagged the complete set. Alas, he never appeared on screen as Doctor Watson. 8. The most prolific Holmes For many people, the definitive portrayal of Sherlock Holmes was by Jeremy Brett, for Granada Television, in the 1980s and 1990s. Brett appeared in 41 episodes, including five feature-length productions. However, even that impressive achievement doesn’t make Brett the most prolific Holmes. That title must go to the British actor Clive Merrison, who played the detective on BBC Radio between 1989 and 1998, and who completed the full canon – dramatisations of all 60 of Conan Doyle’s Holmes stories and novels. 9. Holmes, The Avengers and Britain's most famous secret agent are forever linked on screen And so to Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock, in which Andrew Scott rose to prominence playing Moriarty. Scott has also appeared in the new James Bond film, Spectre, joining an illustrious club of actors who have performed alongside Britain’s most famous spy and Britain’s most famous detective. But only Sir Roger Moore has played both leading roles on film. Sadly his one appearance as Holmes – in the 1976 TV-film Sherlock Holmes in New York – is not, perhaps, his most memorable work. Sean Connery never played Holmes, but he did play the ultra-astute friar William of Baskerville in The Name of the Rose, so you might say that he came close. The actor playing Dr Watson to Roger Moore’s Holmes was Patrick Macnee, most famous as John Steed in The Avengers. Macnee played Watson again, 15 years later, alongside Christopher Lee’s Holmes. Then, in 1993, he donned the deerstalker himself in The Hound of London, thus becoming that very rare thing – an actor who has starred in films as both Holmes and Watson. But all these efforts to breathe new life into Sherlock Holmes might well have been greeted with bemusement by Holmes’ creator, Arthur Conan Doyle, who wrote in a letter in 1892: “Holmes is as inhuman as Babbage’s Calculating Machine.” Martin Davies is the author of Mrs Hudson and the Spirits’ Curse (Canelo, 2015)
Shakespeare didn't do the Norman Conquest, but the Bayeux Tapestry did, so where does that leave the BBC's King and Conqueror?
Shakespeare didn't do the Norman Conquest, but the Bayeux Tapestry did. So where does that leave King and Conqueror?
If you’re going to make a TV series about the Norman Conquest, you’ll need to be ready for the British public, and historians particularly, to come at you and ask what liberties you’ve taken with the story. The makers of King and Conqueror, the new BBC eight-part drama with big name actors and a decent publicity budget, seem to know that. James Norton, who plays a very handsome Harold Godwinson, and is also executive producer for the series, had this to say on the matter in a BBC interview article: “There were obviously artistic licenses that we had to take, particularly in terms of the timeline, because you often have to condense chapters with historical dramas like this. It was also about finding specificity and nuance. We know about the broad brush strokes of Stamford Bridge and the battle of Hastings, but you don't really get much about an individual from the Bayeux Tapestry and the wider historical facts.” The Tapestry is of course the contemporary embroidery that recounts the events of 1066 with stitched vivacity, <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Story-Bayeux-Tapestry-Unravelling-Conquest/dp/0500297657/ref=sr_1_3?crid=3LFH40EPMX7AP&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.nyDBbFuUpjX2742iKbfODQLnC-PkIOH9V85vXtdFV1Ud1S2yF0lkkYNsgaapOdcWfA8qkNDfmDU5nhQmP5c22Bq8qbXW2C0Til4sZNmVy-rozQdzpc9vW2eXLiydJDQsrfB_Oklrkisvyk32qQSXx8ft-Ws7gUgrujT7nHVNJzdAYsNFjR7Vtzmb6j59h7oVE4gFbbMKLjAkipNcTxu0cyuIMP93305taonO6k3lJME.JUaFrBXlyyAVzt4qxeeNwbdUwcX-Yqtecm_fxCruL_w&dib_tag=se&keywords=bayeux+tapestry&qid=1755706505&sprefix=bayeux+tapestry%2Caps%2C176&sr=8-3&tag=bbchistory045-21&ascsubtag=historyextra-288593" rel="sponsored" target="_blank">and which I’ve co-written a book about. It tells the story of the clash between King Harold of England and Duke William of Normandy, and most historians would have it that William’s half-brother Bishop Odo of Bayeux was the man who had the embroidery made. Very excitingly, it’s going to be loaned from Bayeux in Normandy to the UK this time next year, for a blockbuster show at the British Museum that will, I’m sure, break all records for historical exhibition visitors (unless a petition to France to keep it in cold storage in Normandy wins out). I think it’s unlikely that President Macron will be swayed by this dissent, and as you’ll see later in this article, James Norton has his ear anyway.3 I’d beg to differ with Norton’s take on the Tapestry; I’d argue that you can learn quite a lot about an individual from it. Or perhaps, more accurately, we can learn a lot about what people at the time wanted us to think about individuals in the Tapestry: the portrayal, for example, of Harold as a fallen hero comes through pretty clearly. There is undoubtedly a lot of specificity and nuance in the Bayeux Tapestry – we’re just 950 years too late to properly understand it because the captions are so spartan in telling us what we’re looking at. The Tapestry is professionally vague about what it is saying to the viewer. No spoilers, but there are some pretty hot takes on the history Anyway, I’ve watched the whole series and broadly I enjoyed it, but I am a sucker for historical dramas. Sit me down in front of The Last Kingdom for a Sunday afternoon and I won’t get off the sofa until bedtime, happily wallowing in the sweaty, sweary suffocation of a Saxon shieldwall and soaked in the blood of a thousand Viking extras (until my dog starts headbutting me to remind me it’s time for a walk – she cares not a jot for swords nor thrones). The pleasure in watching this stuff is seeing what’s at odds plot-wise with the story that the historical sources would have us believe. I don’t really care about anachronisms of costume, but I do like to try to spot where the narrative arc is way out of kilter. And the narrative arc in King and Conqueror is pretty wild at times. No spoilers, but the way that the mother-son bond between King Edward the Confessor and Emma of Normandy is broken is, to say the least, surprising. Aside from that, the flow of events in the run-up to 1066 is pretty jumbled up, and people tend to die in times and ways that I think could be described as imaginative (the process by which King Harold ends up with an arrow in his eye in the battle of Hastings isn’t something I’ve read about in any chronicles). If you want to compare and contrast the King and Conqueror narrative with the historical story, check out my podcast series with Norman Conquest supremo Marc Morris on the HistoryExtra YouTube channel – episode two of the four-parter is out this very week. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/08/2WJETPP-3ca135f.jpg" width="2912" height="3856" alt="Emma of Normandy, mother of King Edward the Confessor, is pictured in this illuminated 13th-century manuscript with two of her children. (Image: Alamy)" title="Emma of Normandy, mother of King Edward the Confessor, is pictured in this illuminated 13th-century manuscript with two of her children. (Image: Alamy)" /> But what I do like is the way that both King Harold and his nemesis Duke William are portrayed as good guys, at least in their own minds. According to Michael Robert Johnson, the lead writer of the TV series: “It's a bit of a knotty story because it looks very simple and it’s not, it’s very complicated. As one of our producers pointed out, even Shakespeare didn’t have a go at it! Even though the themes are massively universal, nobody cracked the way to tell it. Ed Clarke, one of the executive producers, said the way to tell it was that there’s not a good guy or bad guy. “They’re both good guys in their own stories who end up coming to face each other. That was the fascinating thing to me – I think good guys question whether they’re bad guys, because that’s how a moral compass works. But bad guys just think they’re the good guys. It’s about people trying to solve their own little selfish problems and ending up rewriting history. It’s always interesting for me to delve into that.” In that approach, I sense echoes of the Bayeux Tapestry, where Harold is a good man, a good lord, and a brave warrior, but whose fall is predicated on one very bad call (perjuring himself by going back on the crucial oath he makes to William, sacred in the eyes of the Lord and sacred to the secular authorities too). William, in his turn, is also a decent lord. He provides for his men, is charismatic in battle, and clear in his leadership. So the whole Tapestry set-up is to pitch two broadly exemplary figures against each other in a head-to-head conflict. The Harold-William bromance that we see in King and Conqueror (they even have a bath together – that definitely does not happen in the Tapestry) doesn’t feel too far away from the brothers-in-arms story that the Bayeux Tapestry gives us in the Brittany campaign, where Harold accompanies William on a siege-filled foray against the Bretons. Like the TV series, the Tapestry is a story of two good guys: they are well-matched heroes, but only one can win. Stitch-up over Shakespearean soul-searching But unlike the TV series, the Tapestry doesn’t have any truck with this Shakespearean-style soul-searching. The stitching is mute on character motivation, which is probably what James Norton was talking about in that quote I started with. Personally I’m not sure how far Harold would have dwelt on the moral case for taking the crown after Edward the Confessor died in early 1066. He acted pretty fast and maybe he didn’t think he had much choice if he wanted to retain his family’s grip on power with both William of Normandy and Norway’s King Harald Hardrada waiting menacingly in the wings. So the whole ‘heavy wears the crown’ vibe runs a bit rich for my tastes, coming at the story as a Bayeux Tapestry enthusiast. But what I do like is the way that women are given starring roles in King and Conqueror. That’s something that the Tapestry definitely falls short on: famously the number of females in the Tapestry is far outweighed by the quantity of penises. Though the Tapestry is fairly silent on how far women were actors in the 1066 drama, other documentary sources are more forthcoming, and historians have been able to write women back into the narrative recently. Check out this round-up I wrote about this for HistoryExtra a while back. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/08/528396-0eac882-e1756032375359.jpg" width="3508" height="2340" alt="Clémence Poésy plays Matilda of Flanders in King and Conqueror, which gives women starring roles, helping to write them back into history. (Image by CBS Studios)" title="Clémence Poésy plays Matilda of Flanders in King and Conqueror, which gives women starring roles, helping to write them back into history. (Image by CBS Studios)" /> Emily Beecham as Edward the Confessor’s queen Edith, Clémence Poésy as Matilda of Flanders (wife of William of Normandy), and Juliet Stevenson as Emma of Normandy, queen of two kings and mother of two more, are all on great form throughout the series. They take no prisoners (well actually, they do take prisoners, but you know what I mean), and they show themselves as wily operators. Edith and Matilda are portrayed playing a political game that the men in the piece aren’t necessarily across, because they are too busy bathing and wrestling together. You’ve heard of the mother-in-law from hell - well Emma of Normandy is the mother from hell to a very put-upon Eddie Marsan as Edward the Confessor. I don’t know whether this TV series will be judged a success. I suspect a lot of historians will find a lot to criticise about it. And I can absolutely guarantee that the colour-blind casting is going to be a big talking point for some people. But one thing that’s certain is that if it’s going to be a commercial win, it needs to be popular beyond Britain. I’m sure the hope is that having Game of Thrones’s Jaime Lannister (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) as Duke William will bring the global crowds flocking, whether they’ve heard of Hastings or not. I do wonder, though, how far the story travels. I gave a talk to a group of very engaged and sharp international students in Oxford the other day, about the Bayeux Tapestry, and I got the definite sense that the Norman Conquest wasn’t something they’d spent much time worrying about (until they’d heard my riveting review of the way the embroidery tells the story of course). One young American scholar said that it was something she had been taught in history in junior school but that she hadn’t returned to it since. The hard sell on the Norman Conquest I guess it’s the telling rather than the actual events that matters for a TV drama, but the fact that Shakespeare didn’t do the Norman Conquest has probably limited its immediate global appeal, certainly compared to other medieval stories that the playwright did tackle (I reckon Netflix had a much easier sell with Timothée Chalamet as Henry V in The King because it had the Shakespeare backstory). That perhaps explains why Harold and William are given Shakespearean-style soundbites in King and Conqueror. “Power is like a fire: unchecked it will destroy everything”, announces Earl Godwin; “Power isn’t given, power is taken”, intones Emma of Normandy; “All of Europe knows my intentions”, growls Duke William, which all sound like utterances the Bard would have penned. The other day, I was chatting to Professor Charles West from the University of Edinburgh for a forthcoming HistoryExtra podcast episode about 11th-century Europe (look out for it, and his new book Europe in the 11th century (Oxford University Press), in September). I asked him whether all of Europe did indeed know, and care, about William’s adventure in England. “They write about it. They’re generally quite impressed by William’s achievements: he becomes a great figure. They also talk about the slaughter and the loss of lives. Obviously 1066 isn’t just about England. It’s got a Scandinavian dimension too. So you can see how it draws in different European threads, but the world keeps turning. There’s a German chronicler called Lambert of Hersfeld and he writes a set of annals. He mentions Hastings, but he just gives it one line. Most of his chronicle is talking about the various squabbles between the German bishops and the emperor. So it’s just a question of keeping our sense of perspective.” Who actually cares about the Norman Conquest? From the perspective of the King and Conqueror producers today, whether people outside Britain cared about 1066 in the 11th century is less important than whether people outside Europe care about it now. For me, what’s undeniable is that the people who care most about the Battle of Hastings are here in the UK. When we at HistoryExtra asked a panel of historians to nominate key years in British history, obviously 1066 was one of the choices. This has always struck me as a touch odd, given that the English were the losers at Hastings. But I suppose it’s because the Conquest had such far-reaching impacts across Britain that makes it important to us, rather than the actual battle itself. In an act of extraordinary narcissism, I’ll quote myself in a piece I’ve written for the Radio Times this week, referencing back to that podcast series I’ve made with Marc Morris. When I asked Marc why the Conquest matters, “he pointed out that it led to the more or less wholescale replacement of the English ruling class, and the consequent introduction of the French language as well. These new rulers also radically altered the landscape by building castles all over the place. Plus the Normans ushered in a different, less Game of Thronesstyle, way of doing politics – capturing, imprisoning and ransoming your opponents became the done thing rather than blinding, mutilating or murdering them. So those are just some of the reasons why the Norman Conquest is still on our radar.” What I should have added, and which Charles West reminded me about when I spoke to him, is that the Conquest also brought something else to England: chess. It was widely played in Europe before 1066 and it was probably the Normans who gifted it across the Channel after Hastings. That’s interesting in the light of the much-anticipated loan of the Bayeux Tapestry from Normandy to England (where the embroidery was probably made in the 11th century) next year, because going the other way from the British Museum are the treasures of Sutton Hoo, and the fabulous 12th-century Lewis Chessmen. Presidential chit-chat, but no chess I don’t know whether James Norton and the French President Emmanuel Macron viewed the Lewis Chessmen when they were both at the British Museum at the event to launch the big Tapestry loan a month ago. What I do know is that while they were there, for some reason, Norton felt compelled to tell Macron that he’d done right by William the Conqueror in the TV series: “I met President Emmanuel Macron recently at the event at the British Museum where the Bayeux Tapestry is being moved to, and I was very quick to reassure him that we had told the French story, the Norman story, with as little bias as possible.” I’m not sure that you can extract the Norman story from implicit bias, and I’m not sure that the series does tell that version anyway, given that Harold is shown in quite a decent light for much of it. If you follow the Norman chronicler William of Poitiers’ view of Harold, he was insane, pernicious and a perjurer, so that doesn’t quite stack up. No, Harold is a conflicted hero in the spirit of the Bayeux Tapestry, so I would say that if anything, King and Conqueror follows to some extent the narrative line of the Tapestry. And the Tapestry is not, whatever you might expect from an embroidery celebrating a Norman victory, a Norman story – for my money, it’s a pretty balanced Anglo-Norman story, where both Harold and William’s virtues come through. Aside from its attention to female roles in the story, where King and Conqueror diverges from the Tapestry is in its narrative timekeeeping generally, and specifically in its treatment of the northern and eastern dimensions of the events running up to the Battle of Hastings. The Tapestry devotes no time whatsoever to the role of Flanders in the pre-conquest politicking, and it also pointedly ignores the battles of Fulford Gate and Stamford Bridge. In contrast, King and Conqueror lavishes character time on Baldwin of Flanders and Harald Hardrada of Norway. But where the Tapestry and the TV series come back together again is their mutual avoidance of the Anglo-Saxon elephant in the room – the man with a better claim than anyone to the throne of Edward the Confessor. Edgar Aetheling, the long-exiled grandson of Edmund Ironside (half-brother to the Confessor), was brought back to England in the 1050s by King Edward and acknowledged as throneworthy by the old monarch. He was even acclaimed king by some of the citizens of London in the immediate aftermath of the battle of Hastings, but they revised their assessment when William’s forces advanced towards the capital with clear intent. The Bayeux Tapestry utterly ignores the existence of this claimant to the throne, with good reason. Edgar’s presence is very inconvenient when you’re trying to tell a story that pitches two men head to head as martial equals. The fact that neither Harold nor William had particularly compelling claims to the crown meant that it really didn’t fit in the Tapestry narrative to have someone who did – Edgar – popping his head over the embroidery parapet. So he was written out then, and because the Tapestry has shaped our understanding of 1066 ever since, with its brilliant and long-lasting imagery, he’s been written out now. I wrote in detail, with Michael Lewis, about Edgar’s excision from history in this HistoryExtra piece here. So we can’t really blame King and Conqueror for taking artistic licence with the 1066 story. The Bayeux Tapestry provides ultimate cover for anyone playing fast and loose with the facts in a dramatisation of 1066: if it was good enough for Odo of Bayeux, it’s good enough for James Norton.
Wanderlust: Bettany Hughes on the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World
The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World were daring and dazzling constructions that have burned bright in the human imagination right up to the modern day. Bettany Hughes follows in the footsteps of the ancients to tell their remarkable stories
Crawling underneath Egypt’s Great Pyramid, 70 metres down, is an unforgettable experience. On hands and knees in the sand, as the descending tunnel gets narrower and deeper, the bedrock of the Giza Plateau presses in so close you can actually taste it. The rock is salty, because 50 million years ago this was all sea. I am not the first to have had this visceral, time-travelling experience. As well as the Greek and Roman tourists who left graffiti here, this subterranean tunnel, and the chamber which it led to, was described by the ‘father of history’ Herodotus, and some 2,300 years later was explored by the Italian tomb-raider Giovanni Battista Caviglia. Other passages in the Great Pyramid – a huge burial place for Egypt’s King Khufu – were charted by medieval Arabic scientists and desecrated by off-duty Napoleonic soldiers. Built more than 45 centuries ago, this pyramid, the oldest of the famous Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, has always been a catalyst for awe. And it is not alone. Across time, the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World – the Pyramids at Giza, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, the Statue of Zeus at Olympia, the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, the Colossus of Rhodes and the Pharos Lighthouse of Alexandria – have really mattered. They mattered so much that, in the epoch after Alexander the Great’s death, a bespoke catalogue, the Laterculi Alexandrini, was generated to group them together. Written in papyrus about 150 BC, it is our oldest extant evidence for a catalogue. We are not sure who created the list, but we do know that it was copied and shared, and that it has inspired poetry, prose and works of art for millennia. Don't miss... Bettany's new three-part docuseries Seven Wonders of the Ancient World is airing on Channel 5 from Saturday 2 August 2025 The precise entries vary a little: in some versions, the walls or an obelisk of Babylon are included; later, the Colosseum is mentioned; the Lighthouse has sometimes been left out. The Laterculi Alexandrini also lists the seven greatest rivers, the seven best mountains, the seven finest artists and the seven best lakes. The fact the Wonders deserved to be listed in a group of seven proved that not only were these exemplars of their age, projects of pioneering ambition that made extraordinary incursions into the landscape, but that they each encapsulated something special and important about the human experience. Marvellous news The word wonder (from the Old German wuntar) means ‘something marvellous’. Originally in the Greek, these attractions were described as thaumata – works that needed to be seen. Crucially, and this is a fact that is too often overlooked, all seven were connected. In some cases, the same artists worked on them. They also reference one another’s designs. Some of antiquity’s greatest names, including Alexander the Great, visited many of the sites. Ahead of writing my new book on the Seven Wonders, I set myself the task of travelling to the location where each once stood. This, I reasoned, was the best way to get a feel for what these creations meant to the women and men of antiquity who designed them, built them, worshipped in them, fought over them, wrote about them, maintained, cherished, loved and looted them, and made perilous journeys to visit and to tick them off their bucket lists. Following in their footsteps took me on a journey through both ancient and modern landscapes. 1. The Great Pyramid at Giza Egypt’s giant resurrection machine Built at least 4,500 years ago, the Great Pyramid is the oldest of all the Wonders, and yet still stands today almost intact. And it could be even older than previously thought: the 2013 discovery of 1,000 fragmented papyri documents on the Red Sea coast potentially pushes its date back a further 100 years. The pyramid was built over a span of 20–23 years as a giant resurrection machine for Khufu, the king of a united Egypt, helping to transport him to the afterlife. As such, it was conceived as a means for the ancient Egyptians to try to understand the place of humans in the cosmos and the possibilities of both mortality and immortality. Read more | Were the pyramids built by aliens? The real history that debunks the conspiracy The pyramid’s mathematical precision is astonishing (it is close to geometrically perfect – just 2cm out in some places). Constructed of 2.3 million limestone blocks, rising 146.6 metres high, it was originally cased in gleaming, polished, white Tura stone. A few slabs still remain on the Giza plateau, surveyed by bored camels waiting for their tourist burdens. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/02/BAL611268web-203f90e.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="A 20th-century drawing of the construction of the pyramid. The enormous tomb took more than 20 years to build. (Image from Bridgeman)" title="A 20th-century drawing of the construction of the pyramid. The enormous tomb took more than 20 years to build. (Image from Bridgeman)" /> As the site of the pyramid was originally lapped by the Nile for 6–8 weeks of the year during the time of inundation, we now think that ancient Egyptian builders may have used the river’s rise and fall to move the pyramid’s stone building blocks into place. Listen | Ancient Egyptian pyramids: everything you wanted to know 2. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon Botanical booty takes centre stage Created sometime between 691 and 550 BC, the Hanging Gardens are the most elusive of all the Wonders. No indisputable archaeological evidence for them exists, and we have filled this gap with our imaginations. Therefore, while the Hanging Gardens have left behind the least hard evidence in the ground, they are, ironically, the most famous, and the most commonly cited of all the ancient seven. Built either by King Nebuchadnezzar II in Babylon or by the Assyrian king Sennacherib in Nineveh, they almost certainly employed ingenious watering schemes (including palm tree trunks lined with waterproof bitumen) running up a series of staggered planting ledges, all kept hydrated by machines that were an early version of Archimedes’s screw. Exotic plants and trees were showcased here – many seized as botanical booty on campaigns of expansion by either Assyrian or Babylonian monarchs. Read more | A guide to ancient gardening A venue for hosting visiting dignitaries, for displaying wealth, and possibly a location to sit and be healed by the night-time power of the stars, the gardens seem to be the ancient world’s attempt to replicate (and control) nature itself. Exploring the story of the Hanging Gardens is important because it reminds us to privilege eastern as well as western sources for the Wonder monuments. Crucially, we learn from Babylonian and Assyrian records that both the concept of ‘wonders’ and the symbolic power of seven stretches right back to the beginnings of history itself. Seven was a potent number because it connected the four elements of the Earth (earth, air, fire and water) with the three of the heavens (the sun, the moon and the stars). So we hear of seven heavens, seven hells and seven ages of man in Middle Eastern cultures. Grouping objects or ideas into lists of seven gives us meaning because they suggest human culture has a predictable pattern. Whereas the Great Pyramid was a gargantuan imposition on the landscape by a king and his people seeking to understand their connection to the chemistry of space and the cycle of life and death, the Hanging Gardens celebrated both the beauty of nature and the possibilities of humankind’s dominion over it. 3. The Temple of Artemis at Ephesus A place of refuge... and murder This Wonder was subsidised in the sixth century BC by the famously rich King Croesus of Lydia. Yet the temple, sited near the western coast of modern-day Turkey, was accessible not just to kings but to commoners. And as well as honouring an eastern deity, Artemis – who protected animals and virgins alike – it was renowned as a place of sanctuary. Many sought refuge here, including Cleopatra’s sister Arsinoe (who was double-crossed and murdered on the temple’s steps). Recent archaeological excavations have shown the stalls where refuge-seekers slept. The temple was destroyed in the mid-fourth century BC (21 July 356BC) – before being rebuilt, in even grander form, in c340 BC (this later version would itself succumb to fire, earthquake and plunder). Gargantuan in scale, the temple’s double row of columns would become the model for Greek temples across three continents. In fact, a number of the artists employed on the later building would go on to work on other Wonders, such as the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus. And a building inspired by the Temple of Artemis would house another of the Wonders: the Statue of Zeus... 4. The Statue of Zeus at Olympia Where man met the divine The imposing ivory and gold Statue of Zeus, seated in his temple home, overlooked the stadium of the sanctuary of Olympia in southern Greece. The statue was an incarnation not just of divine, but of human potential. Built around 430 BC, at a time in the classical world when pioneers like Socrates were declaring the power of philosophy, human agency and the human mind, this bearded, muscle-bound male god was built to celebrate the potency of agnostic competition, of striving and of winning. The ancients would have experienced this ferocious artwork, whose forehead was said to glower like a thunderstorm, after arriving at the site as religious pilgrims. I travelled to Olympia along the sacred route that connected it to the city of Elis, during lockdown. Without the mechanical sounds of the modern world around, Zeus’s sanctuary was thick with birdsong and with the rustle of sacred olive trees. The statue itself is now, however, long gone – it’s believed that it was taken to Constantinople in the early centuries AD, where it was probably lost in a fire. At the time Zeus’s sanctuary was built, it would also have resounded with the hum of 50,000–100,000 visitors – Greeks summoned from everywhere from the Black Sea to Byzantium to praise the king of the Olympian Gods with displays of athletic prowess. 5. The Mausoleum of Halicarnassus A site of death and glory Standing at more than 45 metres high, this gigantic building gave its name to mausoleums all over the world and has been mimicked in the cenotaphs and tombs of everyone from Abraham Lincoln to Vladimir Lenin. The mausoleum (which was ultimately destroyed by war and earthquake) reveals much about the cosmopolitan nature of life around the Mediterranean 2,300 years ago. Built by the Karian ruler Mausolos with his wife (and sister), Artemisia, in c351 BC, its wonderful hybrid of styles included Assyrian, Egyptian, Greek and Karian. It would have exploded like a firework on the coast of what is now Bodrum. While researching the building techniques of the mausoleum, I was fortunate enough to be allowed 5 metres below ground into a grave commissioned by Mausolos for his father, Hekatomnos, in nearby Mylas. Hekatomnos’s sarcophagus demonstrates the exquisite nature of the stone-carving that would have decorated Mausolos’s own burial place. It was covered with scenes of Hekatomnos’s family, including portraits of Mausolos and Artemisia, and a lion hunt. Artemisia has become infamous through history thanks to an anecdote handed down from Roman times. According to the author Aulus Gellius, Artemisia missed her brother-husband so much that after his death she ground down his bones to drink them, together with the ash from his funeral, and then pined away. But there is a strong chance, given we know gladiators drank bone-meal for strength, that Artemisia actually sought to steal Mausolos’s power. Whatever her intentions, Artemisia completed this vast, richly painted grave after her husband’s death, and was buried in her own chamber in the mausoleum. Five centuries later, the essayist Lucian of Samosta imagined a dialogue between Diogenes the Cynic and Mausolos in the underworld. The king boasted that because he was tall, handsome and a superb warrior, he needed to be commemorated with the most splendid tomb in the world. Diogenes quietly pointed out that the ruler’s hairless, skinless, eyeless skull would now look the same as his own. In fact, Diogenes added, Mausolos would look worse, as Halicarnassus’s mausoleum was a dead weight bearing down on the king’s corpse. 6. The Colossus of Rhodes Greece’s second sun The colossus was a gargantuan celebration of a moment in history when conflict sharpened into diplomacy. Wipe from your minds the popular image of a massive, kitsch statue, legs akimbo, straddling two of Rhodes’s harbours. That would have been structurally impossible. In reality, Rhodes’s towering representation of the sun-god Helios (with a face reminiscent of Alexander the Great) was probably erected high on the island overlooking the sanctuary of Helios where the Helian games were held in the god’s honour. The colossus was built (in c302/292 BC) after a pitiless siege of Rhodes by the son of one of Alexander the Great’s generals, Demetrius the Besieger. Legend has it that much of the raw material to make the figure derived from the melted down weapons and siege engines used to break through heavy walls and gates, which were surrendered following a truce. Yet those raw materials also, it seems, came from below the ground. The author Philo of Byzantium wrote: “The artist used so much bronze for the work there was almost a shortage of metals, for all the Earth’s mines were exploited in carrying out the project... for in the world a second sun stood to face the first.” Indeed, ice cores from Greenland show pollution levels soaring in the Hellenistic and Roman ages, caused by the process of larger-than- life-size metal statues being produced to prove man’s dominion over cities and far-flung territories. All of the Seven Wonders prove the fevered possibilities of the human imagination – and the harsh demands of making our dreams flesh. By building a statue more than 30 metres tall honouring the sun, the Colossus of Rhodes’s creators set in train a history of humans plundering the Earth’s resources, and a heating of the planet, which now threatens us all. 7. The Pharos Lighthouse of Alexandria History’s greatest warning beacon? The Pharos Lighthouse of Alexandria guided sailors to safety along one of the most perilous coastlines of northern Egypt. Built in c297 BC, it also acted as a warning beacon in times of distress – and, with an articulated decoration on its summit, may have been the world’s first weathervane. It was also, clearly, beautiful. Standing at 120 metres tall (until its collapse, as a result of earthquakes, in the Middle Ages), the lighthouse played with a sequence of geometrical shapes: oblong, circular and square. It was decorated with the same pink granite that lined Khufu’s burial chamber in the Great Pyramid. Some of these blocks are still in situ, re-used as door frames and as thresholds in the fort of Qaitbey, which now swamps the lighthouse’s footprint. Lucian (one of my favourite authors of antiquity) was inspired by a hidden inscription on the Pharos Lighthouse, left by its architect, Sostratus of Knidos, as an allegory for the writing of history itself. The visible inscription praised the pharaohs who had commissioned the Pharos. But when the gypsum covering was washed away, we are told that underneath was a dedication commemorating Sostratus’s hope for the safety of sailors. As Lucian wrote: “History should be written in that spirit, with truthfulness and an eye to future expectations rather than with adulation and a view to the pleasure of present praise.” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/02/GettyImages-89164073web-93219a5.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="This block from the lighthouse would originally have been decorated in a glowing pink colour. (Photo by DEA / C. SAPPA/De Agostini via Getty Images)" title="This block from the lighthouse would originally have been decorated in a glowing pink colour. (Photo by DEA / C. SAPPA/De Agostini via Getty Images)" /> In an 1,800-year-old work of science fiction (also written by Lucian), an ancient astronaut staring down from the Moon recognises Earth, thanks to a sighting of the Lighthouse of Alexandria and the Colossus of Rhodes. Today, courtesy of satellite imagery, we really can look down on Earth from space. But even though we’d only be able to see one of the Seven Ancient Wonders standing in situ, their power to fire our intellect and capture our imaginations still burns disproportionately bright. This article was first published in the February 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine. You can listen to Bettany Hughes explore the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World in a this podcast episode. Bettany is the presenter of a new three-part docuseries Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. The first episode airs on Channel 5 at 6.30pm on 1 August 2025. The series will explore the history and significance of the ancient wonders, combining archaeological access, new research, and digital reconstructions.
What events happened on 31 July in history? We round up the events, births and deaths…
31 July 1703 Daniel Defoe spent the last of his three days in the pillory after being convicted of seditious libel. He was surrounded at the pillory by his supporters, thus sparing him the indignities normally suffered by those sentenced to such a punishment. 31 July 1932 In Germany’s federal elections, Adolf Hitler's Nazi Party wins 38 per cent of the vote and 230 seats to become the largest party in parliament for the first time. 31 July 1972 British forces launched Operation Motorman, an attempt to regain control of the ‘no-go’ areas established by Republican paramilitaries, notably in Belfast and Derry/ Londonderry. 31 July 1991 After nine years of negotiation between their two countries, US president George Bush and Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev signed the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty in the Moscow Kremlin. Browse more On this day in history Previous: 30 July Next: 1 August
What events happened on 30 July in history? We round up the events, births and deaths…
30 July 762 Abbasid Caliph Abu Jaafar Al-Mansour commissioned the construction of Baghdad as his new capital city on the Tigris. 30 July 1511 Birth in Arezzo, Tuscany of painter, architect and historian Giorgio Vasari. In 1550 he published his Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects, one of art history’s most important early texts. 30 July 1540 Three reformers (Barnes, Garrett and Jerome) were burned for heresy and three Catholics (Abel, Powell and Fetherston) were hanged, drawn and quartered for treason at Smithfield. 30 July 1756 In St Petersburg, the architect Bartolomeo Rastrelli unveils the magnificent Catherine Palace to a delighted Catherine the Great. 30 July 1863 Henry Ford, the American industrialist who founded the Ford Motor Company, was born in Wayne County, Michigan. 30 July 1975 Having arranged to meet his Mafia contacts in a car park in a Detroit suburb, the controversial American union leader Jimmy Hoffa disappears and is never seen again. Browse more On this day in history Previous: 29 July Next: 31 July
What events happened on 29 July in history? We round up the events, births and deaths…
29 July 238 After a joint reign lasting just three months, the elderly Roman emperors Pupienus and Balbinus are cornered in the imperial palace by mutinous Praetorian Guards, who drag them to their barracks before hacking them to death. 29 July 1612 Jennet Preston was hanged for witchcraft. She had met with the ‘Lancashire witches’ at Malkin Tower but as she lived in Craven in Yorkshire, Preston was taken to York for her trial and subsequent execution. 29 July 1763 Birth at Largo in Fife of future Scottish admiral Philip Charles Durham. One of the few survivors of the sinking of the Royal George off Portsmouth in 1782, Durham commanded HMS Defiance at the battle of Trafalgar. 29 July 1890 The Dutch post- impressionist painter Vincent Van Gogh died at Auvers-sur- Oise near Paris after shooting himself in the chest with a revolver two days earlier. He was 37 years old. 29 July 1921 Adolf Hitler was named leader of the National Socialist German Workers' Party. The occasion was to be the first time Hitler's title, Der Führer, was used in public. 29 July 1981: Royal nuptials lift Britain’s flagging spirits Millions celebrate as Prince Charles weds Lady Diana in a fairy-tale wedding that was to end in tears The wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer could hardly have been better timed. The summer of 1981 had been one of the grimmest in modern British history, with unemployment figures soaring, the inner cities ablaze and Margaret Thatcher’s popularity sinking to unprecedented levels. The nation was in the mood for a party. On 29 July, more than half a million people gathered on the streets of London to cheer the couple, while an estimated 750 million people worldwide watched the service on television. Not everyone, of course, enjoyed the spectacle. At City Hall, the Greater London Council leader, Ken Livingstone, ostentatiously spent some of the day working, while a small group of leftwing activists, among them the future Labour deputy leader Harriet Harman, went on a much-publicised day trip to France. From across the country, however, came reports of street parties, barbecues and village knees-ups, though on a smaller scale than during the Queen’s silver jubilee four years earlier. The ceremony itself, meanwhile, was an orgy of pageantry – not least the bride’s dress, which had a train some 25ft long. Both bride and groom were obviously nervous, and both muffed their lines: perhaps ominously, Diana even got her husband’s name wrong, calling him Philip Charles instead of Charles Philip. All in all, though, it seemed to confirm that Britain’s love affair with its monarchy was still going strong. “Here,” said the archbishop of Canterbury, “is the stuff of which fairy tales are made.” Sadly, fairy tales don’t always end well. | Written by Dominic Sandbrook Browse more On this day in history Previous: 28 July Next: 30 July
What events happened on 28 July in history? We round up the events, births and deaths…
28 July 1540: Henry VIII marries wife number five Wedding bells chime as Thomas Cromwell loses his head For Thomas Cromwell, 28 July 1540 was not a good day. More than a month earlier, he had been dragged from a meeting of Henry VIII’s council and thrown into the Tower of London. Accused of treason, the king’s disgraced chief minister begged his old master for mercy, but it was no good. At Tower Hill, he was hauled to the block, where the executioner – “a ragged and butcherly miser”, said one witness – wasted little time in carving off his head. or the young Catherine Howard, however, this was a date to remember. Even as Cromwell was being taken to the scaffold, the Duke of Norfolk’s pretty teenage niece was dressing for the most important day of her life. Only a few days earlier, the king had secured an annulment of his marriage to Anne of Cleves, and his eye had already fallen on Catherine as her replacement. It was apparently love – or lust – at first sight, at least for Henry. Did Catherine know that, even as she was repeating her marriage vows at Surrey’s Oatlands Palace, Cromwell’s freshly severed head was rotting on a spike? We will never know. What we do know, though, is that her 49-year-old husband seemed aflame with passion, since reports suggest he could barely keep his hands off her. At first, all seemed well, but as month followed month, the relationship began to turn sour. Perhaps, as the king’s attentions waned and her own eye began to wander, Catherine sometimes reflected on the fate of the man who had once been the king’s closest confidant. | Written by Dominic Sandbroook 28 July 1683 Anne Stuart, the second daughter of the future King James II and VII and herself a future queen of England, married Prince George of Denmark in the Chapel Royal at St James’s Palace. 28 July 1790 The Forth and Clyde Canal was officially opened. Designed by Yorkshire engineer John Smeaton and running from Bowling on the Clyde to Grangemouth on the Forth, the 35-mile-long waterway took 22 years to complete. 28 July 1821 Jose de San Martin declared Peru’s independence from Spain in Lima. Independence was not, however, ensured until Antonio José de Sucré’s victory over forces loyal to Spain at the battle of Ayacucho in December 1824. 28 July 1902 Philosopher Karl Popper was born in Vienna. The rise of Nazism led him to emigrate to New Zealand in 1937. From 1946 he taught at the LSE. Appointed professor of logic and scientific method at the University of London in 1949, he was knighted in 1965. Browse more On this day in history Previous: 27 July Next: 29 July
What events happened on 27 July in history? We round up the events, births and deaths…
27 July 1361 King Valdemar of Denmark defeated the Gotlanders at the battle of Visby in modern-day Sweden. Mass graves of the dead from the battle were discovered and excavated in the early 20th century. 27 July 1452 Birth inVigevano, Lombardy, of Ludovico Sforza. He was a Duke of Milan and patron of Leonardo da Vinci, commissioning da Vinci’s mural 'The Last Supper'. 27 July 1549 The Spanish Jesuit monk Francis Xavier is the first Christian missionary to reach Japan, although local suspicion forces him to wait for weeks before being allowed ashore. 27 July 1710 An allied army, including a British contingent, defeated the Spanish at Almenara in Catalonia. Humphrey Bland, a young British officer serving with a Huguenot regiment, was wounded. He commanded Cumberland’s cavalry at the battle of Culloden 35 years later. 27 July 1953 The United Nations, North Korea and China signed an armistice to bring about a ceasefire in the Korean War. However no peace treaty was ever signed. Browse more On this day in history Previous: 26 July Next: 28 July