HistoryExtra
type: channel
link: https://www.historyextra.com
description: Home of Britain’s bestselling history magazine and award-winning podcast
date: 2025-08-24T21:18:04.000Z
update period: hourly
update frequency: 1
update base: 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00
items: Emma of Normandy: not just a two-time queen consort of England
items: Wanderlust: Bettany Hughes on the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World
items: The Srebrenica massacre: the worst atrocity committed on European soil since the Second World War
items: The Bayeux Tapestry is finally coming home to Britain – and you can see it next year
items: Were ancient Ireland’s ‘incestuous elites’ just a myth? A tomb older than Stonehenge has new answers
items: Why is Friday 13th unlucky?
items: The seaborne invasion: why we must remember the forgotten heroes of D-Day and the battle for Normandy
items: Who was to blame for the Irish famine?
items: The history of VE Day street parties
items: How are popes elected? Here's what happens after a pope dies

Emma of Normandy: not just a two-time queen consort of England
type: item
date: 2025-08-24T20:02:16.000Z
subject: Anglo-Saxon
subject: Early medieval
subject: Period
subject: Viking
subject: Historical people
subject: Trends-Entertainment
subject: Viking Britain
description: Emma of Normandy was queen consort to two of England’s best known pre-Conquest kings, Æthelred the Unready and Cnut the Great. But she was also a savvy political player who came into her own as queen mother, writes Dr Cat Jarman
encoded: Emma of Normandy is best-known as being queen consort to two kings – Æthelred the Unready and Cnut the Great – and the mother of two more, Harthacnut and Edward the Confessor. She was the daughter of Richard I (the Fearless) of Normandy and the Danish-descended Gunnor. She is also a pivotal character in King and Conqueror, the BBC's Norman Conquest drama, which paints Emma as a dominating force over her son King Edward – which leads to a very ahistorical demise – and in Netflix's Vikings: Valhalla, where she is portrayed as a politically-savvy queen wielding quiet power in the English court, often working to subvert the machinations of the ever-grasping Earl Godwin. Who was Emma of Normandy? Emma was one of nine children and most likely born in the AD 980s. A daughter of the Norman dukes, she was the great-granddaughter of the Viking warrior Rollo, the founder of Normandy who hailed from either Norway or Denmark. This made her of Scandinavian ancestry on both sides of the family. She was also the great-aunt of William the Conqueror. In the words of Godfrey, prior of Winchester’s cathedral monastery, writing in the 11th century: “She had kings as sons and kings as husbands; she shone forth in the glory of her progeny of kings; she excelled in virtue even the ranks of her glorious ancestors.” Emma of Normandy's first marriage: Æthelred the Unready In 1002, probably aged in her late teens or early 20s, Emma was sent to England to marry King Æthelred, as his second wife. The marriage was clearly a strategic one, aiming to strengthen an alliance between England and Normandy in light of harrowing attacks on both English and Norman shores by Scandinavian raiders. Æthelred had apparently accused Emma’s brother, Duke Richard II, of harbouring the Vikings and enabling their attacks, and the marriage was designed to ensure his allegiance. Read more | Aethelflaed: who was the warrior queen who crushed the Vikings? Their union was an unusual one, as although several English prin…

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Wanderlust: Bettany Hughes on the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World
type: item
date: 2025-08-01T12:00:07.000Z
subject: General ancient history
subject: Period
description: 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
encoded: 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 bee…

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The Srebrenica massacre: the worst atrocity committed on European soil since the Second World War
type: item
date: 2025-07-31T08:00:59.000Z
subject: 20th Century
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Historical events
description: Over the course of four days in July 1995, Bosnian-Serb forces murdered more than 8,000 men and boys – in a United Nations-protected ‘safe area’. Legally recognised as an act of genocide, the Srebrenica massacre is the worst act of mass killing committed on European soil since the Second World War. What drove the perpetrators to carry out such a terrible crime? And how did the international community allow it to happen?
encoded: Before the Bosnian War broke out, Srebrenica was just a small secluded town in eastern Bosnia-Herzegovina. Very few people outside of the Balkans had even heard of it. But all that changed over the course of a few short days in July 1995 – and for the most terrible of reasons. Srebrenica had been changing fast in the months before it became the focus of the world’s attention. By 1995, it had morphed into a large refugee camp surrounded by hostile forces. Some 40,000 people had been forced to flee there as a consequence of the violent break-up of the country of which Bosnia was part: Yugoslavia. Displaced by a vicious Serb-led ethnic cleansing campaign, those refugees largely consisted of the rural, Bosnian Muslim (or Bosniak) population of eastern Bosnia. War had come to Bosnia in late March 1992, a year or so after two other republics – Croatia, very violently, and Slovenia, much less so – had seceded from the multi-ethnic Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Shaken by the violence in Croatia between the Croat majority and Serb minority, the international community was soon even more appalled by events in Bosnia. “Almost overnight the republic broke apart,” one UN official on the ground noted. Large swathes of territory in the east, north and north-west were ethnically cleansed by Serb paramilitary forces, supported by the Serb-dominated regular Yugoslav Army. After six weeks, by late May 1992, Serb forces controlled 60 per cent of the territory of Bosnia, even though their ethnic kin made up only just over 30 per cent of the population, as against 43 per cent Bosniaks and 17 per cent Croats. Those Bosniaks unable to flee abroad found themselves crammed into a landlocked central rump. The capital, Sarajevo, was besieged. In the west, an enclave around Bihać still held out. So did several pockets in the east, centred on Goražde, Žepa and Srebrenica. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/07/2NE5810-667225d.jpg" width="1772" he…

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The Bayeux Tapestry is finally coming home to Britain – and you can see it next year
type: item
date: 2025-07-08T16:00:59.000Z
creator: Dr David Musgrove, FSA
subject: Medieval
subject: Period
subject: Discover / Apple News
description: With the loan of the Bayeux Tapestry to the UK confirmed, David Musgrove explains the historical significance of the embroidery’s potential arrival on British soil…
encoded: The Bayeux Tapestry – the near 70-metre long, 11th-century embroidery that tells the story of the Norman Conquest – looks set to be finally coming to Britain, loaned from France in exchange for a loan of the Lewis Chessmen and the treasures of Sutton Hoo. The embroidery is expected to be displayed in the British Museum between September 2026 and July 2027, and holds the promise of being one of the biggest historical exhibitions ever staged on these shores, rivalling the blockbuster Tutankhamun show at the British Museum in 1972. Many scholars are in agreement that the Tapestry was originally made in the 11th century, not too long after the Norman Conquest in 1066, in England, and likely by English seamstresses in Canterbury. It has, however, been in Bayeux since at least the 15th century. Today, the artefact is the property of the French state. The news that British and French authorities had agreed that the Tapestry would come to the UK was initially made public in January 2018, and, speaking on 5 May 2025, Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer told HistoryExtra and BBC History Magazine that civil servants were still working on the loan. "The Bayeux Tapestry is a unique treasure,” said the Prime Minister, “and a symbol of the deep ties between Britain and France." "The conservation and protection of it is obviously crucial, and I know that the Department for Culture, Media and Sport continues to work closely with their counterparts in France on the planned loan." The loan coincides with the temporary closure of the Bayeux Tapestry's permanent home in Normandy, the Bayeux Tapestry Museum, while it undergoes refurbishment. That work includes an exciting plan to add an extension to the current 17th-century seminary building in which the Tapestry has been housed since 1983, and is scheduled to be completed by autumn 2027 – in time for the millennial commemorations of the birth of William the Conqueror. Following the announcement of the loan, the director of the British Museu…

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Were ancient Ireland’s ‘incestuous elites’ just a myth? A tomb older than Stonehenge has new answers
type: item
date: 2025-06-26T11:46:40.000Z
creator: James Osborne
subject: General ancient history
subject: Period
subject: Discover / Apple News
description: In 2020, analysis of a skull fragment discovered at Newgrange, County Meath, led to sensational claims of royal incest within the region’s prehistoric ruling dynasties. But new research suggests that Neolithic Ireland may have been far more socially equal – and more complex – than originally assumed
encoded: In the Boyne Valley of eastern Ireland stands one of the world’s most fascinating prehistoric monuments: Newgrange. Centuries older than the Pyramids of Giza or Stonehenge, Newgrange is a large passage tomb, and a 5,000-year-old marvel of ancient engineering. It’s also one of the best windows that researchers have into the ancient society that constructed it: how it functioned, what it valued, and who held power. That final question has been the source of stunning theories with incredible implications. For years, many archaeologists and geneticists believed that a small, powerful elite ruled over Neolithic Ireland and commissioned monuments like Newgrange as a reflection of their social dominance. That theory gained momentum in 2020, when DNA analysis of a skull fragment discovered in the tomb revealed that the buried individual – referred to by researchers as NG10 – was the product of an incestuous union between two siblings, or a parent and child. Some experts interpreted this as compelling evidence of a dynastic elite that practised incest to preserve a sacred bloodline – not unlike royal traditions in ancient Egypt. This, in turn, painted a picture of Neolithic Ireland as a deeply hierarchical society ruled by a tightly knit, closely related few. So, did a sacred royal family, buried at Newgrange, really rule over Neolithic Ireland? Or might the evidence have been misinterpreted? That is the conclusion of new research led by scholars from the University of York and University College Dublin – ‘The ‘king’ of Newgrange? A critical analysis of a Neolithic petrous fragment from the passage tomb chamber’ – published in the journal Antiquity. Their findings cast serious doubt on these earlier assumptions and instead paint a very different picture of the society that built this monument. The cosmic history of Newgrange Newgrange is one of several monumental passage tombs built during the Neolithic period (c4000–2500 BC) across Ireland and western Britain. Located in Co…

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Why is Friday 13th unlucky?
type: item
date: 2025-06-13T09:09:00.000Z
subject: General ancient history
subject: Medieval
subject: Period
subject: Trends-Anniversary
description: Might Jesus and his 12 apostles have something to do with it? Discover the medieval history behind triskaidekaphobia – the fear of the number 13 – and why it is considered an unlucky number
encoded: Forget the Ides of March and Halloween – for some, a Friday that also happens to be the 13th of the month is scariest and unluckiest day of the year. The fear of Friday 13th is very real. It's even been given a scientific name, paraskevidekatriaphobia, from the Greek words Paraskeví, meaning Friday, and dekatreís, meaning 13. But what is it about this day and date combo that has given millions the heebie jeebies. Here's what we know of we know about Friday 13th's hazy history. When did people start believing Friday 13th was unlucky? It's believed that this superstition began in the Middle Ages. Some think it's related to the Last Supper, when 13 people were present at the meal before Jesus's crucifixion on Good Friday. Others think it's related to the Knights Templar, who were arrested for heresy on Friday 13 October 1307. But fear of 13 predates Christianity. The number 13 has been considered unlucky for millenia, and by many different cultures around the world. Why is the 13th unlucky? The ancient Romans believed that the number 13 was a bad omen, foretelling ill-fortune and death. The Vikings also hated 13, because in Norse mythology a banquet was held for 12 of the Norse gods during which the trickster god, Loki, appeared uninvited, like the wicked fairy in Sleeping Beauty, and as a result the beloved god Balder died. The Mayans thought that the 13th 'baktun' (a period equivalent to almost 400 years) would spell the end of the world – however, this came and went in 2012. For centuries, hosts avoided having 13 people seated around a dining table, convinced that the first person to leave would die within the year. Indeed, 16th-century witch-hunters often tried to claim there had been 13 people at a gathering – proof that the accused were witches in league with the devil. Why is Friday the 13th unlucky? Why Friday the 13th is considered especially unlucky isn't entirely clear. The first written record we have of the number 13 and Friday being unlucky in conjunction…

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The seaborne invasion: why we must remember the forgotten heroes of D-Day and the battle for Normandy
type: item
date: 2025-06-05T08:24:32.000Z
creator: Nick Hewitt
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Second World War
subject: Second World War battles
description: Ferrying troops to the beaches wasn’t the only contribution sailors made during the Allied invasion of Normandy. As we mark the 80th anniversary of D-Day, Nick Hewitt reveals how the Allied navies ended up fighting one of the most overlooked campaigns of the Second World War
encoded: On 30 July 1944, nearly two months into the Allied invasion of northern France, Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay reflected on his command of the naval operations so far. “It may seem to some people that it was all easy and plain sailing,” he wrote in his diary. “[But] nothing could be more wrong. It was excellent planning and execution.” Ramsay died in 1945 without leaving a full memoir, but thousands of sailors could testify that nothing about their lives was “easy and plain sailing”. As late as 8 August 1944, with Allied troops poised to smash the German army in Normandy, sailors were still fighting to protect the beachhead. On that same day, the German submarine U-667 torpedoed both the US freighter Ezra Weston and the Canadian corvette HMCS Regina, the latter attack claiming the lives of 30 men. Ramsay’s words were prophetic. Today, discussions regarding sailors during the Normandy campaign mainly focus on their actions during the first day of the invasion: 6 June 1944, or ‘D-Day’. They are often absent from the wider story, despite the exhausting and dangerous campaign they fought to seize, exploit and defend the waters around Normandy throughout the summer of 1944. Read more | The road to D-Day: the masterplan The focus of the campaign was the Baie de la Seine, or Seine Bay, the huge inlet of the English Channel stretching nearly a hundred kilometres along the coast of Normandy from Le Havre in the east to the tip of the Cotentin Peninsula at Cape Barfleur in the west. Within the bay lay the five assault areas or so-called ‘beaches’: Utah and Omaha for the Americans, and Gold, Juno and Sword for the British and Canadians. Through this highly congested and vulnerable body of water passed a constant stream of transport ships carrying supplies and reinforcements, without which the military could not hope to win the more widely recognised battle of Normandy on land. Defeat was unlikely, but any setback could have prolonged the war for months. As the Allied commander-in-…

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Who was to blame for the Irish famine?
type: item
date: 2025-05-13T08:00:20.000Z
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Historical events
description: When blight began devastating potato crops across Ireland in 1845, British officials immediately recognised the dangers. And yet, within six years, the Great Famine had caused the deaths of at least 1 million people. This is the story of how tangled Anglo-Irish relations and a profound devotion to market forces turned a crisis into a national catastrophe.
encoded: In late 1846, a magistrate called Nicholas Cummins visited Skibbereen, a small town in County Cork. The scenes he witnessed there, he would go on to write, “were such as no tongue or pen can convey the slightest idea of”. Cummins described “famished and ghastly skeletons”, nearly catatonic but shaking with fever, sheltered in unheated cottages. At the sound of footsteps, what seemed like hundreds of people emerged into the daylight, begging and screaming for food. The horrors that Cummins encountered that day were repeated with terrible regularity across the island of Ireland. From 1845–51, as potato crops failed again and again, at least 1 million people died, many in lonely, hideous and degrading conditions. At least 1.5 million more emigrated. The people of Ireland had endured periods of starvation before, but they had encountered nothing on the scale of what we remember today as the Great Famine. As the death toll soared, Ireland seemed remote, an isolated hell. And yet the Great Famine was a British, as well as an Irish, crisis. Ireland had, after all, been under sometimes notional English dominion since the Middle Ages. It had been conquered in the 17th century, invaded by Oliver Cromwell’s forces during the Civil Wars, and then, once more, by William III’s armies after the Glorious Revolution. During the 18th century, restrictions on trade subordinated Ireland’s economy to Britain’s. The Irish Catholic majority were dispossessed and barred from public life. After the rebellion of the United Irish against British rule in 1798, the 1800–01 Acts of Union combined Ireland and Britain into a new United Kingdom. Britain and Ireland were now more closely intertwined than ever. The union had one currency and an integrated economy. Ireland sent 100 MPs to Westminster. By 1845, nearly a third of the population of the UK lived in Ireland. But when famine struck, the gulf within the union seemed unbridgeable. John Russell, prime minister at the height of the crisis, impl…

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The history of VE Day street parties
type: item
date: 2025-05-07T07:30:38.000Z
creator: Emma Mason
subject: Period
subject: Second World War
subject: VE Day
subject: Wartime Britain
description: Millions of people took to the streets of Britain on 8 May 1945 to celebrate VE Day – the day when the German armed forces signed an unconditional surrender, and the Second World War in Europe finally came to an end. Hanging bunting, waving flags, drinking and dancing, the streets were crammed with joyous revellers...
encoded: At 2.41am on 7 May 1945, at a schoolhouse near Reims in northern France, General Alfred Jodl, the German chief of staff, signed the unconditional surrender of all German land, sea and air forces wherever they might be fighting. General Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces, rang General Sir ‘Pug’ Ismay, Churchill’s chief of staff. “The war is over,” he said. “But no official announcement could be made” said Juliet Gardiner, writing for BBC History Magazine in 2005. “Stalin insisted that victory should not be proclaimed until German troops on the eastern front had surrendered to the Soviet general Zukhov in Berlin and the long-awaited news could be proclaimed simultaneously in London, Moscow and Washington.” Yet rumours that the war had finally ended soon began to filter through to the British public. “The newspapers are full of rumours of surrender… feeling almost excited… everyone is speculating,” wrote Lyn Murphy, who worked for the director of an electrical manufacturer engaged in war production, in her diary for 7 May 1945. “They shouldn’t keep people hanging about waiting like this. The government needn’t be afraid of people going mad, everybody’s very sober about it,” complained a middle-aged man to a member of Mass-Observation, the organisation that compiled reports on British wartime attitudes and morale, which was out in force now that victory was in the air. On the afternoon of 8 May 1945, the British prime minister Winston Churchill made the radio announcement that the world had long been waiting for. He announced that hostilities with Germany would cease at one minute past midnight, and that “our dear Channel Islands”, the only part of British territory to have been occupied, “are to be freed today”. After nearly six long years, the war in Europe was finally over. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2020/05/GettyImages-3432929-4d9bca8-scaled-e1746607596456.jpg" width="619" height="413" alt="Prime Minister Win…

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How are popes elected? Here's what happens after a pope dies
type: item
date: 2025-04-21T09:09:01.000Z
creator: Nige Tassell
subject: General History
subject: Period
description: What comes after a pope dies? Step through the doors of Vatican into the conclave – the secretive, ritualistic and sometimes scandalous process that turns a cardinal into the next pontiff
encoded: From the death (or more rarely, resignation) of a pope to the famous white smoke drifting out of a Sistine Chapel chimney, the centuries-old process of electing a new pope is defined by ritual and ceremony, but also secrecy. Taking place behind closed doors, it falls to an assembly of cardinals – a conclave – to vote for the new head of the Catholic Church. What happens when a pope dies? The death of a pope has to be confirmed by a medic, but it is only official once a particular action is taken by the camerlengo – the cardinal who oversees the running of the Vatican’s property and revenue. The camerlengo calls out the pope’s baptismal name three times and only when he receives no response can he declare the death. Traditionally, the camerlengo have also tapped the pontiff’s head with a silver hammer. He then notifies both senior church officials and the general public. The pope’s apartment will be locked – according to a historic practice that prevented looting – and preparations are made for the symbolic destruction of the pope’s ring and seal, signalling the end of his authority. The pope must be buried between four and six days after the death, while the official period of mourning is observed for nine days. Not long after that, the cardinals gather for the conclave. How is a new pope chosen? The conclave explained A conclave is the gathering of cardinals summoned to the Vatican to elect a new pope. Not all members of the College of Cardinals, the most senior clergy of the Catholic Church below the papacy itself, are eligible to participate due to age restrictions. The word derives from the Latin for ‘with a key’, referring to how the cardinals are literally shut away from the wider world while they vote. Conclaves nearly always take place in the event of a pope’s death. Since Gregory XII in 1415, there has only been one papal resignation: Benedict XVI, who, in 2013, left the Holy See citing his advanced age. Read more | Holy smoke, antipopes and power struggles…

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