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Emma of Normandy: not just a two-time queen consort of England
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
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 princesses had been married off to French and German rulers historically, no English king had married a foreign wife for almost 150 years. Upon her arrival in England, Emma was given the name ‘Ælfgifu’. The marriage resulted in three children: two sons, Edward (later known as Edward the Confessor) and Alfred, and a daughter, Godgifu. Few sources say much about Emma’s political activity in these years, and it seems her role was mainly one of being a wife and a mother: the most common description of her at the time was as the conlaterana regis: “she who is at the King’s side”. This first decade of her career was the one in which she was the least powerful, and one source, William of Malmesbury, suggests that she and her husband were never on good terms. The England that Emma found herself at the beginning of the 11th century was one marked by ongoing trouble and threats of Scandinavian attacks. In 1013, this came to a head when the Dane Swein Forkbeard successfully invaded England. Emma and her children were sent into exile in Normandy, later followed by her husband. Swein’s rule of England was to be short as he died the following year, and a messy two years of political disputes ensued even after Æthelred was restored to the throne. Emma of Normandy's second marriage: Cnut the Great In 1016, Æthelred died. More turbulence was to follow, and later that year England fell to Swein Forkbeard’s son, the Danish King Cnut. The following year, he is reported to have asked for Emma to be fetched to be his wife. Emma became queen of England, once again, but this time also of Denmark and Norway. As with her first marriage, this was a strategic one as it cemented Cnut’s role as king of England. Taking the widow of one of his predecessors as his own wife no doubt helped mark his superiority. At the same time, the union might be seen as symbolising friendship and alliance. While it is unclear what Emma herself really thought of it at the beginning, she later stressed that not only did the marriage bring peace but it was an equal union that she entered into with her own consent. Read more | Cnut’s invasion of England: setting the scene for the Norman conquest Her ancestry may well have affected her feelings. After all, her mother was the daughter of recent Danish settlers in Normandy, and northern origins were a key part of Norman self-identity. Emma likely spoke Danish from childhood and apart from her family connections, she was clearly important to Cnut – not least because of her knowledge of English politics. It seems likely that the partnership between the two grew over time, helped by the fact that they were more or less of the same age. In a document from the New Minster in Winchester, illustrating the monastery’s loyal benefactors, the two are depicted either side of an altar as a double act. This depiction – one of several – emphasises Emma’s political importance. Their marriage lasted until Cnut’s death in 1035. Emma of Normandy's children As well as the two sons and one daughter Emma had with Æthelred, she went on to have two more children with Cnut: Harthacnut and Gunnhild. Cnut also had two sons by his first wife, Ælfgifu (confusingly, the same name that was given to Emma), Swein and Harold Harefoot. At the time of Cnut’s death, Swein had been sent to rule in Norway along with his mother, while Harthacnut was ruling in Denmark. That left Harold as the only of Cnut’s sons still in England. Emma remained at Winchester, where Cnut’s military household was based, and was left in charge of the Royal Treasury and in a position of power. Read more | Norman women: the power behind the thrones Harthacnut was the legitimate heir and should have ascended the English throne, but he could not return from Denmark to claim the crown so Harold ruled in his stead as either regent or co-ruler. Competition for the throne was to continue. Emma’s sons with Æthelred – Edward and Alfred – had been in exile in Normandy and returned to England in 1036. Alfred was soon killed, after being captured and blinded under suspicious circumstances, and Edward may have briefly joined his mother in Winchester before returning again to Normandy. Eventually, Harold was recognised as sole king in 1037. Emma was exiled to Flanders, where she stayed with a distant relative, Count Baldwin and his wife Adela. But her ambitions for herself and her sons remained. Read more | Are women at the heart of the action in the Norman Conquest? Emma of Normandy as England’s queen mother Emma’s career in England can be divided into three distinct parts: the first two relating to her marriages, and the third to this period after Cnut’s death. Now, Emma worked to manoeuvre her sons into kingship, taking an active part in the political sphere as queen mother. When Harold died in 1040, Emma returned from Flanders and Harthacnut finally took the throne. The role as queen mother was clearly an important one, and she was recognised as an authority: she is listed as mater regis in witness lists during these years. Emma may have learnt about queenship from her mother, Gunnor, who was later hailed as the matriarch of the Norman aristocracy, dubbed the ‘mother of the dynasty’ in the 12th century. Harthacnut ruled for only two years, with Emma by his side, until his death in 1042. He was succeeded by his half-brother Edward. But the new king appears to have turned against his mother, arriving in Winchester a few months after his coronation and taking away her treasures of silver and gold, as well as most of the land she owned. Emma was allowed to stay in Winchester and eventually regained her position at court, though without her former status. The precise reasons for this are unclear: Emma was later accused of having been too harsh on Edward; of offering aid to Magnus of Norway for an invasion of England; and even of having had an affair with Ælfwine, the bishop of Winchester. It seems none were true. Edward most likely wanted to reduce her political involvement back to a simple status as the widow of the former kings, leaving him to rule independently. As far as we know, she lived the rest of her life in Winchester. What was Emma of Normandy’s legacy? Our actual information about Emma’s life is sparse, Much of what we know comes from the Encomium Emmae reginae, the Praise of Queen Emma. This narrative was written down in 1041/2 by a monk from St Bertin, in what is now France, and was commissioned by Emma herself. The Encomium, however, is not a straightforward biography, but an account – modified in several later versions – of the role she played in English politics during the reign of Cnut and his successors. A famous illustration shows her seated on a throne, a kneeling character handing the book to her, with her sons Harthacnut and Edward watching from the wings. The Encomium conjures the position she was in at the height of her power, aimed at her sons and written to influence the future. Despite her remarkable political career, her best known legacy is no doubt her Norman link to William the Conqueror, enabling the events of 1066 to run their course. In the words of 12th-century historian Henry of Huntingdon, describing her marriage: “From this union… the Normans were justified according to the law of peoples, in both claiming and gaining possession of England.” How and when did Emma of Normandy die? Emma died of an unknown cause on 6 March 1052. She was buried next to Cnut and Harthacnut in Winchester Cathedral. In 2019, a team from the University of Bristol announced that among the 1,300 bones mixed up in six mortuary chests from Winchester Cathedral were the remains of a woman who matched both the date and age of death of Emma. There are no records of other women of similar status buried there at the time and DNA work is in progress in an attempt to identify the remains more definitively. 1066: The battle for England Member exclusive | The year 1066 is the most famous in English history, but there's a lot more to the story than one bloody battle at Hastings. In this four-part series, medievalist Marc Morris talks David Musgrove through the full story of the Norman Conquest. Watch all episodes now Dr Cat Jarman is an archaeologist, broadcaster and author of River Kings: A New History of the Vikings from Scandinavia to the Silk Roads (HarperCollins, 2021) King and Conqueror is streaming on BBC iPlayer now. For more content like this, check out the best historical movies of all time as chosen by historians and ranked by you, history TV shows and films to stream tonight, and our picks of the new history TV and radio released in the UK this week
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.
The Srebrenica massacre: the worst atrocity committed on European soil since the Second World War
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?
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" height="1198" alt="A man holds up his family’s last stick of corn while sheltering in Srebrenica in March 1993. A major Serb offensive towards the town the previous month triggered a humanitarian crisis (Image by Alamy)" title="A man holds up his family’s last stick of corn while sheltering in Srebrenica in March 1993. A major Serb offensive towards the town the previous month triggered a humanitarian crisis (Image by Alamy)" /> The violence in Croatia had alerted the international community to the need for intervention on behalf of the civilian population. In January 1992, a UN Protection Force had deployed to monitor a UN-negotiated ceasefire in Croatia. After the war spread to Bosnia, it extended operations to the new battleground. The countries contributing troops to the UN Protection Force were, however, extremely hesitant about getting embroiled in the war. They believed that they faced a conflict driven by “ancient ethnic hatreds” over which they would struggle, at the cost of a massive effort and high casualties, to get control. They limited themselves to attempting to deliver humanitarian aid, deter hostilities through their presence and offer their good offices to the warring parties to negotiate a peace accord. All three activities proved highly frustrating. Military weakness and a deep sense of injustice made the Bosniak government intransigent and fearful of ending up with front lines that solidified into permanent borders. The Serbs, now fighting in Bosnia under the guise of an independent Bosnian Serb Republic with a Bosnian Serb Army, felt their ethnic ‘liberation’ project was incomplete, especially with the pesky enclaves in their rear areas. Not only did Bosniak forces launch armed foraging expeditions from them, but their government rejected any and all suggestions to evacuate or trade the territory. On the sidelines hovered the revanchist Croats who also harboured ill-disguised expansionist designs on Bosnia. Read more | How the Holocaust began Lightly armed and with their governments ever fearful of getting caught up in hostilities, the cautious UN Protection Force troops had little deterrent effect. Aid delivery depended on the whims of the warring parties and was constantly sabotaged. And absent the threat of external armed intervention, successive peace plans came to nought. Bosnian Serb forces gradually whittled down the Bosniak enclaves. In February 1993, they launched a major offensive towards Srebrenica. In the middle of winter, with no food and medical supplies getting through and under daily shelling, a humanitarian disaster quickly unfolded for the tens of thousands of people who were pushed into a smaller and smaller area. Fearing eastern Bosnia was about to be ethnically cleansed, the UN Protection Force commander in Bosnia-Herzegovina, French general Philippe Morillon, made his way to Srebrenica. On 12 March, surrounded by a sea of desperate women and children, he announced from the balcony of the post office in Srebrenica: “You are now under the protection of the UN forces… I will never abandon you.” A week later he managed to get the first aid convoy to reach the town since November 1992. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/07/2NBD7XK-261f8d3.jpg" width="1772" height="1182" alt="In March 1993 the French general Philippe Morillon told the people of Srebrenica: “You are now under the protection of the UN forces. I will never abandon you" title="In March 1993 the French general Philippe Morillon told the people of Srebrenica: “You are now under the protection of the UN forces. I will never abandon you" /> Morillon’s very public commitment ratcheted up the pressure on a hesitant UN Security Council to come up with some kind of plan to protect the besieged Bosniak population. When the Serbs resumed their attack, the council declared Srebrenica a “safe area” on 16 April 1993. The UN Resolution bought Srebrenica a respite. A small unit of Canadian peacekeepers (later replaced by a Dutch battalion) now entered the enclave and, intermittently and never in sufficient quantities, humanitarian aid trickled in. The situation satisfied no one. The Serbs had let Morillon and the Canadians in because they expected the safe area to be demilitarised and eventually evacuated, helped by the appalling living conditions in the enclave (to which Serb control over the influx of humanitarian aid greatly contributed). The Bosniak government refused to contemplate either disarmament or evacuation because doing so made it complicit in the ethnic cleansing of its own people. The Dutch UN troops – undersupplied, underarmed and under-appreciated by Serbs and Bosniaks alike – were caught in the highly uncomfortable middle. An uneasy stalemate ensued. Slowly, however, the political and military balance began to change. The recalcitrant Serbs found themselves defending very long frontlines, trying to hold on against Bosniak and Croat forces that were arming with covert international (primarily US) help. After two years of deadlock, in a bid to rationalise frontlines – and with it, strengthen their negotiating position – the Serbs finally decided to clean up the map and seize the eastern enclaves. The campaign was a carefully planned undertaking. On 8 March 1995, the president of the Bosnian Serb Republic, Radovan Karadžić, signed a directive ordering his army to prepare an operation to “create an unbearable situation of total insecurity with no hope of further survival or life for the inhabitants of Srebrenica and Žepa”. In late June, they began a PR offensive to legitimise impending action. On 24 June, Karadžić’s army commander, General Ratko Mladić, complained about the failed demilitarisation and continued raiding by Bosniak forces from Srebrenica. If nothing was done, Mladić would be forced to take matters into his own hands. Three days later his spokesman took the international press, including The New York Times, to the village of Višnjica, raided the day before. No international reaction followed. Five days later, the final touches were put to the military plan of attack. On 6 July, the Bosnian Serb army opened fire on the ‘safe area’. The Serbs skilfully exploited the UN’s fear of escalation and indecision. They kept their ultimate objective in doubt for as long as possible. Initially proceeding slowly on a limited front with limited forces, they made it appear that they wanted to make a point (once again) about the failed demilitarisation and were not intending to take the whole enclave by force. The lightly armed 400-or-so Dutch troops had limited means to resist anyway. Their main heavy weapon of last resort was calling in Nato airpower support. However, this weapon was largely neutralised by political hesitation to employ it in sufficient quantity after the Serbs took a number of Dutch soldiers hostage from exposed observation points in the opening days. By the evening of 9 July, Serb forces had inched their way forward to the outskirts of Srebrenica town. They were poised to take the enclave. The next day Nato aircraft took on standby positions over the Adriatic. The Serbs paused. When the planes ran out of fuel and returned to base, they advanced. Dutch troops in their white-painted peacekeeping vehicles then tried to block them by directing small arms fire over the heads of the attacking forces. By now, the day was ending and the Serbs paused again. A night of feverish activity ensued on the UN side. The Serb objective was clear. Surely, large scale air support was warranted to save the safe area? But what about the possibility of Serb artillery opening up on the defenceless, already panicking population in the enclave in retaliation? What would happen to the Dutch UN soldiers being held hostage? Did not the whole of the UN Protection Force now risk getting embroiled in all-out war with the Serbs? Eventually a decision was taken for a show of (some) force. A substantial strike package of aircraft took to the air in the early morning, but due to hesitation and confusion in communications, they returned to base by late morning, unused. The Serbs advanced again. As Srebrenica was about to fall, a hastily scrambled pair of F-16s appeared overhead and dropped two bombs. The Serbs issued a swift ultimatum threatening to shell the population and kill the hostages. Further air attacks were called off. The ‘safe area’ had fallen. The Dutch now faced the question of what to do with the 40,000 refugees in their care. The majority fled to the main Dutch base at Potočari, several kilometres north of Srebrenica. In the high heat of summer, lacking food, water supplies and sanitation facilities, the next stage in the humanitarian tragedy unfolded. The peacekeepers let several thousand into their compound, an old battery factory, but could not really care for them properly. Many more thousands had to be kept outside the wire, unwillingly, unprotected and fearful of their fate. Overwhelmed, the Dutch commander, Lieutenant-Colonel Thom Karremans, sought help from the Serbs. In the evening of 11 July, he met twice with General Mladić. The obvious way forward was to organise an orderly evacuation of the refugees. Mladić gladly obliged. In a sign that a carefully prepared operation was getting into gear, only a few hours after Serb soldiers arrived in Potočari in the late morning on 12 July, a fleet of some 60 buses turned up to transport the Bosniak refugees out. Mladić also appeared in person (and was filmed) assuring the refugees they were safe: “Don’t be afraid, just take it easy… No one will harm you.” At three in the afternoon, the first bus left for Bosnian government held territory. Read more | Yugoslavia: why shared Slavic identity couldn’t save an idealised nation from fracture and bloodshed Worrying signs soon became noticeable, however. The Dutch who had planned to accompany the transports to ensure the safety of the deportees were largely prevented from doing so. They also noticed that relatively few men had fled to Potočari. Those who had were separated from the women and children and prevented from getting on the buses. Serb military personnel actively searched for what they claimed were ‘war criminals’, a category that seemed to comprise all men, old, young, even disabled. Dutch soldiers witnessed incidental executions of men taking place around the compound and observed larger groups of men – later estimated to have been some 1,700 in number – being transported to nearby Serb-held Bratunac. The deportation from Potočari was complete by 7pm the next day, 13 July. Some 23,000 people, virtually all women and children, arrived in Kladanj and Tuzla. There the absence of the men was also noticed. What had happened to them? <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/07/5962-BOSNIA-MAP-Battlefield-Design-13a7487.jpg" width="1759" height="1173" alt="A green, yellow, orange and pink map showing Bosnia-Herzegovina's controlled areas in 1994" title="Our map shows Bosnia-Herzegovina in summer 1994. By now, the Serbs had forced the Bosniak population into a central rump, flanked by isolated enclaves including Srebrenica (Map illustration by Paul Hewitt – Battlefield Design)" /> Fifteen thousand Bosniak men had in fact decided to flee the enclave in a desperate attempt to reach Tuzla by traversing enemy-held territory. In the night of 11 and 12 July, they began the fateful trek from the north-west corner of the enclave. The Bosnian Serbs had not expected this and it took them some hours to notice. But when they did, their action was swift. Although the territory was generally thickly forested, the Bosniaks had to cross open ground around two roads on the way to safety. During the 12th, Bosnian Serb forces started deploying at close, regular intervals along these roads. By late afternoon the next day, they thought they had already captured some 6,000 men. The exhausted, dishevelled, deadly fearful prisoners were assembled in several places, including a football pitch in Nova Kasaba, a meadow in Sandići, a warehouse in Kravica and a school in Bratunac. Some were executed there, the majority were transported to execution sites further afield. That happened once the buses that had deported their women and children became available. Since the women were driven along the same road the men had to cross, some had seen their menfolk at the collection sites. Read more | Genocide: what can we learn from history? By the 16th, almost all the captured men, some 8,000 in total, were dead and buried. Despite all the signs, the realisation that something terrible had happened was not immediate. The Bosnian Serbs had completed the deportation and massacre in double-quick time because speed was of the essence to stymie any international reaction and possible intervention. The mere absence of the missing men seemed to prove little without the physical evidence of dead bodies. Still, US intelligence analysts began to scour spy plane and satellite imagery for evidence. An intrepid Christian Science Monitor reporter, David Rohde, surreptitiously made his way in mid-August to one possible site identified in photographs: the Nova Kasaba football field. He discovered the first shallow mass grave, with documents scattered around and a decomposed leg still sticking out of the recently disturbed soil. The story began to get out. The growing realisation that a terrible fate had befallen the missing men and boys from Srebrenica finally stiffened the resolve of the international community to force a settlement to the war. At the end of August, an Anglo-French-Dutch Rapid Reaction Force broke the three-year siege of Sarajevo and Nato aircraft began to extensively bomb Bosnian-Serb targets. The intervention brought all the warring parties to the negotiating table at Dayton in the US. An accord was signed on 21 November and the fighting in Bosnia ended. To date, more than 7,000 bodies have been exhumed and identified. Most now lie buried in a specially dedicated memorial cemetery in Potočari. The search for the remaining missing and their identification goes on to this day in eastern Bosnia-Herzegovina. It is undertaken by various international organisations with support of the Bosnian government. Some 50 of the men responsible for the genocide have been convicted by the UN International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and Bosnian and Serbian courts. The most senior perpetrators, including Mladić and Karadžić, are serving life sentences. Why did the Bosnian Serbs commit so heinous a crime? The question of motive is not settled. Some think that General Mladić gave the order in a fit of pique, angry at being surprised by the Bosniak men’s attempted escape, and denied a formal surrender. Many more believe that somehow extreme violence is part and parcel of war and especially ethnic war. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/07/GettyImages-2160927551-b4536e1.jpg" width="1772" height="1181" alt="A woman dresses in a pale pink dress and headscarf sits on the grass among several stone graves. She looks upset and has her hand resting on one grave" title="A woman mourns a victim of the massacre at the Srebrenica Genocide Memorial, July 2024. Few Bosniaks have returned to their homes in the three decades since the killings (Image by Getty Images)" /> Neither theory seems completely plausible. The deliberation and organisation with which the genocide was executed suggest a high degree of design and intent. The speed and efficiency with which the Bosnian Serb forces switched to mass murder mode and the apparent absence of any principled objections by the officer corps involved further underlines this. In seeking a rationale for the genocide, in addition perhaps to a bureaucratic mindset of following orders, the better answer may be sought in an ideology, widely shared among the Serb military and politicians, that saw the world as divided between competing and antagonistic races. A supposedly naturally existing enmity was taken to justify extreme means to ‘defend’ one’s own race. In the case of Bosnia, that did not necessarily mean committing genocide in the sense of the complete physical elimination of the ethnic group seen as foreign and threatening. It did envisage, however, the group’s complete and permanent removal from the territory that the Serbs claimed as theirs, through extremely violent and systematic persecution and, if necessary, mass murder. What the Bosnian Serb leadership sought to achieve by killing the men was to make the “survival or life for the inhabitants of Srebrenica” and the rest of eastern Bosnia impossible. By killing the Muslim men they sought to assure that the deported women and children would never return. That goal was to a large extent achieved. Few surviving Bosniaks have returned to their former homesteads. Srebrenica, and most of eastern Bosnia, is now part of the Republika Srpska, the republic promulgated at the beginning of the war to unify the Serbs in Bosnia. Its borders largely follow the frontlines of late 1995. Finally, why did the international community not properly protect the ‘safe area’ and stop the genocide? A major reason is that it mostly failed to recognise the conflict for what it was. It could not fathom the extent to which war crimes, up to and including genocide, were a deliberate and calculated means in the pursuit of an extremist political agenda. In this case, that agenda was to establish an ethnically pure territorial state – and in pursuit of that agenda the people of Bosnia would pay a terrible price. Jan Willem Honig is visiting professor in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London. He is the author, together with Norbert Both, of Srebrenica: Record of a War Crime (Penguin, 1996) This article was first published in the August 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
The Bayeux Tapestry is finally coming home to Britain – and you can see it next year
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…
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 Museum, Nicholas Cullinan, added: “The Bayeux Tapestry is one of the most important and unique cultural artefacts in the world, which illustrates the deep ties between Britain and France and has fascinated people across geographies and generations. It is hard to overstate the significance of this extraordinary opportunity of displaying it at the British Museum." Three requests were made for the Bayeux Tapestry to be loaned to Britain in the 20th century: first in 1931, for an exhibition on French art at Burlington House in London, then in 1953 for Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation and finally in 1966 on the 900th anniversary of the Battle of Hastings, when both the Victoria and Albert Museum and Westminster Abbey hoped to display the Tapestry. None of the requests were granted. Unravelling The Bayeux Tapestry Member exclusive | Expert historians unpick some of the biggest questions surrounding the Bayeux Tapestry, from its creation and purpose, to the incomplete story it recounts and its modern-day legacy Listen to all episodes now
Were ancient Ireland’s ‘incestuous elites’ just a myth? A tomb older than Stonehenge has new answers
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
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 County Meath, the monument consists of a circular mound around 85 metres in diameter, ringed with standing stones and containing a narrow interior passage that aligns precisely with the rising sun on the winter solstice. Each year, on or around the winter solstice, the rising sun illuminates the chamber at the heart of the tomb for a few minutes via a precision-engineered ‘roof-box’ above the entrance. It’s an astonishing feat of prehistoric engineering that reflects both a deep understanding of astronomy, and a symbolic reverence for cosmic cycles of light and dark. Read more | “Graves are like time capsules – little microcosms of prehistoric culture”: Alice Roberts on what bones and burials can tell us about early Britain And Newgrange isn’t alone. Across Neolithic Europe, other monuments reveal similar concerns: Bryn Celli Ddu in Wales aligns with the summer solstice sunrise; Maeshowe in Orkney aligns with the winter solstice sunset; and Stonehenge captures both summer and winter solstice points. For much of the 20th century, these Neolithic feats were seen as evidence of powerful and centralised leadership: they were thought to point to a social elite that wielded enough power to be capable of coordinating complex constructions and mustering vast amounts of labour. The theory of Newgrange’s incestuous elites In 2020, the NG10 DNA discovery appeared to add even more credence to that view. The rarity of such incestuous unions in ancient and modern populations led to comparisons with the Egyptian pharaohs and Inca royalty, both of whom famously practised incest as a tool to preserve divine bloodlines. NG10’s relationship to the other occupants of the tomb seemed to support the idea of a ruling family, possibly dynastic in nature, whose status was maintained through carefully guarded lineage. It was a powerful theory, selling Newgrange as a royal tomb that served as the resting place of Ireland’s earliest sacred elites. New research at Newgrange reaches different conclusions However, the new study challenges that interpretation, arguing that it dramatically stretches what the evidence can tell us. Can we really know that a powerful, incestuous elite ruled Ireland with an iron fist? “The evidence all points to a much more collective ethos,” says Professor Penny Bickle, from the University of York’s Department of Archaeology. “There are not wide disparities in diet, houses are relatively flimsy, and they are all similar to each other. There are no large settlement systems or trade mechanisms, and we also don’t see production of craft on the scale that we see in other ancient societies such as in ancient Egypt, where incest was thought to be practised by the ruling elite.” So, according to Bickle and her colleagues, the archaeological evidence around Newgrange tells a different story. Nearby homes were modest and uniform. There is no evidence of grand residences, no wealth concentration and no consistent pattern of close-relative burials across Neolithic Ireland. This all points to a much more equal social structure than previously assumed. And, Bickle adds, it’s not necessarily certain that NG10 had specific links to Newgrange. “It is by no means clear that the monument was the first burial site of NG10 and the tomb grew in stages, so tracing who this individual was is a very difficult task indeed,” Bickle explains. “As it stands, the incestuous origins of NG10 are a one-off compared to all of the DNA data we have for Neolithic Ireland.” In other words, NG10 could be a genetic anomaly, rather than evidence of an all-powerful ruling dynasty. Prehistoric Irish burial practices If NG10 wasn’t a king, then who did get buried in monuments like Newgrange? “People were definitely being selected for burial in passage tombs – the whole community does not end up in these monuments,” says Associate Professor Jessica Smyth, of University College Dublin. “However, we don’t know the reasons behind this selection, and why they were thought to be special.” What’s also clear is that burial practices in Neolithic Ireland differed sharply from those in modern times, so applying 21st-century expectations to the past can be misleading. “Unlike today, bodies don’t tend to be buried ‘whole’ or ‘intact’ in this time period,” Smyth adds. “Before they end up in megalithic monuments, bodies are broken down, sometimes cremated and even circulated around their communities.” WATCH | Prehistoric stone circles: Everything you wanted to know View Green Video on the source website This process of disarticulation and redistribution means that the people who placed the bones into tombs like Newgrange may not have known – or even cared – about the biological identity of the individuals involved. In NG10’s case, the community may have had no knowledge of their parentage at all. A new interpretation of Newgrange and Neolithic Ireland Rather than a symbol of elite power and dynastic control, Newgrange might instead reflect the ritual and cooperative culture of a Neolithic society bound by shared beliefs, agricultural rhythms and ancestral commemoration. Its solstice alignment still speaks to an extraordinary grasp of time and the cosmos, and its scale still demands coordination. But the latest research suggests these achievements were communal, rather than commanded. “There are still many questions to solve here,” says Bickle. “But building this picture means looking at the monument together with the society that was built up around it.”
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
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 only dates to the 19th century, in a biography of Italian composer Gioachino Rossini: "He was surrounded to the last by admiring friends; and if it be true that, like so many Italians, he regarded Fridays as an unlucky day and thirteen as an unlucky number, it is remarkable that on Friday 13th of November he passed away." Friday the 13th remains one of the most prevalent historical superstitions that we carry on today (alongside that of kissing under the mistletoe). Many people still choose to stay in bed to reduce the likelihood of accidents, and it's estimated that in the US, as much as $900 million is lost in business each time as a result.
The seaborne invasion: why we must remember the forgotten heroes of D-Day and the battle for Normandy
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
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-chief, General Dwight Eisenhower, recognised in his final report: “For the successful maintenance of the armies in France… we were dependent upon the ceaseless work of the Allied navies, assisted by RAF Coastal Command.” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/05/GettyImages-3068867webready-3256be6.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="The invasion’s supreme commander, General Dwight Eisenhower (centre), with his deputy, RAF Air Marshal Arthur Tedder (left), and ground forces commander General Sir Bernard Montgomery (Photo by Keystone/Getty Images)" title="The invasion’s supreme commander, General Dwight Eisenhower (centre), with his deputy, RAF Air Marshal Arthur Tedder (left), and ground forces commander General Sir Bernard Montgomery (Photo by Keystone/Getty Images)" /> Normandy had been confirmed as the site for the Allied invasion of Nazi-occupied Europe at the Quebec Conference, codenamed ‘Quadrant’, in August 1943. Two months later, Ramsay was appointed Naval Commander-in-Chief, Expeditionary Force, with the rest of the command team appointed in December. The overall commander-in-chief was Eisenhower, and the military and air commanders were General Sir Bernard Montgomery and Air Marshal Sir Trafford Leigh-Mallory. The countdown to D-Day With the leadership structure in place, Ramsay then issued his Naval Operation Plan for Operation Neptune, the invasion’s assault phase, on 28 February 1944. While the planners worked, extraordinary efforts were made to assemble the huge fleet required for the invasion. Royal Navy officer Christopher Clitherow, for instance, commissioned a new Landing Ship (Tank), or LST, which would help transport men and vehicles across the Channel. Created using innovative mass production methods in the US, the vessels resembled welded steel shoeboxes, and offered very little in the way of comfort. “She reacts to a bump like a diving board off which one has just jumped,” Clitherow later recalled. “Every conceivable piece of the ship rattles as if its teeth were about to fall out.” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/05/ulls287509webready-438e073.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="British tanks and trucks are transferred from a Landing Ship (Tank) to a motorised raft known as a Rhino Ferry. Huge numbers of vehicles were transported across the Channel for the push inland (Photo by ullsteinbild/TopFoto)" title="British tanks and trucks are transferred from a Landing Ship (Tank) to a motorised raft known as a Rhino Ferry. Huge numbers of vehicles were transported across the Channel for the push inland (Photo by ullsteinbild/TopFoto)" /> Meanwhile, the sheer number of men required to deliver Neptune meant that most new British recruits were posted to Combined Operations, which had been founded in July 1940 to plan and carry out amphibious warfare. They were put through their paces at special centres across the UK, before joining their units and taking part in huge pre-assault exercises. Exercise Tiger, held on 26–28 April, saw the most significant setback of the training cycle, when a convoy of American LSTs making a practice landing at Slapton Sands, Devon, was attacked by German motor torpedo boats (also known as ‘E-boats’), killing 749 US servicemen and wounding more than 300 others. Yet despite this tragic turn of events, Operation Neptune officially began at 11.30pm on 25 May, when commanders opened Ramsay’s sealed orders and military camps in southern England were closed off to the outside world. D-Day itself was scheduled for Monday 5 June, but after an unseasonal summer gale, it was determined that the invasion would instead be pushed back to Tuesday 6 June. The Normandy landings in numbers 7,016 Ships and major landing craft that participated in Operation Neptune. Approximately 79 per cent of the vessels were either British or Canadian 195,701 Naval personnel involved in Operation Neptune 917 Allied ships and major landing craft lost or seriously damaged between 6 and 30 June 1944 509 German mines, of all types, swept in the Allied assault areas between 4 June and 3 July 1944 183,540 Vehicles landed in the British and US sectors by 4 July 1944 – the day after Operation Neptune officially came to an end After setting out on the 5th, the armada passed along the south coast and turned out into the Channel, with most of the ships passing Area Z, a buoyed patch of water south-east of the Isle of Wight nicknamed ‘Piccadilly Circus’. From there, the vessels then passed down the ‘Spout’ – 10 marked and mine-swept channels – into their designated assault areas. Sweeping and marking this huge stretch of sea was fraught with danger. When the US Navy minesweeper Osprey struck a mine, caught fire and sank, the five sailors and one officer who lost their lives became Neptune’s first deaths in action. Arriving off Normandy, bombarding warships subdued the German coastal defences while soldiers got ashore. Warships provided an overwhelming advantage on the battlefield, but bombardment was exhausting work – and quite different to the stop-start nature of conventional naval action. Gordon ‘Putty’ Painter, a 20-year-old gunlayer aboard the cruiser HMS Belfast, would later recall firing broadsides that rocked the ships “backwards and forwards” for hours on end. In fact, such were the demands of the operation that the only time that Painter and his comrades could leave the turret “was if nature called”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/05/2T1K4GGwebready-7d3bc56.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Men on board HMS Sirius stand alongside the casings of shells fired from the ship’s 5.25-inch guns. The light cruiser provided vital gunfire support in the Sword area (Photo by piemags/archive/military/Alamy Stock Photo)" title="Men on board HMS Sirius stand alongside the casings of shells fired from the ship’s 5.25-inch guns. The light cruiser provided vital gunfire support in the Sword area (Photo by piemags/archive/military/Alamy Stock Photo)" /> Naval bombardment would prove instrumental to ensuring D-Day’s success, particularly within the American Omaha area, where destroyers operating dangerously close inshore helped the army establish a precarious beachhead. But the fire support came at a cost: two destroyers, the Norwegian Svenner and USS Corry, were both sunk with heavy loss of life, the former by German torpedo boats and the latter by coastal defence guns. Meanwhile, more sailors carried assault troops to the shore in landing craft – and their experiences were often extraordinary. George Kirkby, for example, was the coxswain of a Landing Craft (Assault) launched from HMS Prinses Astrid, one of several converted Belgian ferries that was tasked with delivering British commandos and US Rangers. Later, he would describe a beach “strewn with dead and wounded bodies, the air thick with smoke and the water around us spraying up into the craft through concentrated mortar and machine gun fire”. After D-Day: the remarkable logistics that kept the fight going The initial follow-up forces also landed in assault craft, but from 10 June onwards, the focus of Operation Neptune switched to methodical logistics, with at least eight convoys of merchant ships sailing across the Channel every 24 hours. The process was remarkably efficient: allowing for loading and unloading, any individual ship could make a round trip from England to France in just four days. They not only brought in fuel, vehicles, ammunition and reinforcements, but they also took out wounded Allied soldiers and German prisoners of war. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/05/GettyImages-141556290webready-189a081.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="A wave of US troops lands on Omaha beach, several hours into D-Day. Sailors were responsible for guiding landing craft to the shore, often under heavy fire (Photo by Mondadori/Getty Images)" title="A wave of US troops lands on Omaha beach, several hours into D-Day. Sailors were responsible for guiding landing craft to the shore, often under heavy fire (Photo by Mondadori/Getty Images)" /> Once the ships had arrived, there were several methods of getting supplies into the beachhead itself. The first was to bring everything over the beaches or from anchorages offshore, using assault craft and barges, while the second was to make use of the small harbours captured in the landings. The third option, meanwhile, was to utilise the two huge artificial harbours known as ‘Mulberries’ that the Allies constructed off Saint-Laurent in the Omaha area and Arromanches in Gold. Assembly of the harbours began as soon as the beaches were secured, with sailors playing a leading role. Able Seaman Kenneth Bungard, for example, crossed the Channel riding on one of the prefabricated concrete caissons used to create the harbours’ walls. Crawling along on a slab-sided monster with the seakeeping qualities of a house brick was far from pleasant. “If we were hit with a torpedo, that would be the end,” he recalled. “It was all concrete [and] it would just disintegrate.” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/05/GettyImages-3287605webready-04a1a4b.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Allied troops in an amphibious truck (known as a DUKW or ‘duck’) alongside the Mulberry harbour at Arromanches. Such vehicles could reach the beachhead quickly and efficiently (Photo by Leonard McCombe/Picture Post/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)" title="Allied troops in an amphibious truck (known as a DUKW or ‘duck’) alongside the Mulberry harbour at Arromanches. Such vehicles could reach the beachhead quickly and efficiently (Photo by Leonard McCombe/Picture Post/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)" /> All this vulnerable shipping had to be protected. In the Eastern (British) Task Force area, the defence was largely static to reduce the risk of collisions and friendly fire. Defence Line A, consisting of anchored minesweepers, ran along the assault area, six miles offshore, to guard against attacks from the north, while a line of armed landing craft and Coastal Forces craft (later christened the ‘Trout Line’) ran south to the shore, watching the German naval base at Le Havre. Elsewhere, in the Western (US) Task Force area, destroyers, patrol craft and British steam gunboats patrolled the ‘Dixie Line’, which ran parallel to the coast to meet Defence Line A. Radar-equipped destroyers patrolled south of this, and more Coastal Forces craft watched the ‘Mason Line’, which ran up the Cotentin Peninsula to the northern edge of the Utah area. Timeline: how the Allied navies turned the tide in Normandy 17–24 August 1943 The Quebec Conference (codenamed ‘Quadrant’) takes place in Canada. Allied leaders decide that the liberation of Nazi-occupied Europe, Operation Overlord, will begin with an assault landing in Normandy. 25 October 1943 Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay is appointed Allied Naval Commander Expeditionary Force. 28 February 1944 Ramsay issues the Naval Operation Plan for Operation Neptune – the initial assault phase of Operation Overlord. 28 April 1944 Nearly 750 men are killed in a German E-boat attack at Slapton Sands, Devon, during Exercise Tiger – one of the final rehearsals for the seaborne invasion. 25 May 1944 Operation Neptune officially begins at 23:30. Ramsay’s sealed orders are opened and military holding camps on the south coast of England are closed off. 6 June 1944 The Allied invasion of Normandy begins. Known as D-Day, the first day of the campaign sees 132,715 British, Canadian and American soldiers coming to shore across five landing beaches, with a further 23,400 airborne troops dropping further inland. 25 June 1944 The US-led Task Force 129 bombards Cherbourg in support of a US Army assault on the city. 3 July 1944 Operation Neptune comes to an end. The last of the senior officers leading the assault are withdrawn and new headquarters are established ashore. 5/6 July 1944 Human torpedoes of the German Navy’s Kleinkampfverbände (small battle units) launch their first attack on the Allied assault area. Two minesweepers and the British frigate HMS Trollope are sunk. 12 September 1944 With much of the fighting now moving further inland, British troops finally take the German naval base at Le Havre. Three months and six days after D-Day, combat operations for the Allied navies in the Seine Bay come to an end. Despite these formidable lines of defence, enemy attacks continued apace. E-boats and other German warships frequently sortied from Le Havre and Cherbourg, trying to strike the supply ships or lay mines, while the Luftwaffe carried out bombing and torpedo attacks almost every night. On one particularly bad day, 8 June, three US warships went down to mines, while the British lost the frigate HMS Lawford to a remote-controlled glider bomb. Another Luftwaffe raider hit a huge petrol and ammunition stores dump in the Sword area. On 14 June, an increasingly concerned Admiral Ramsay asked for RAF strategic bombers to strike Le Havre, and they duly responded, sinking three of the German Navy’s large torpedo boats and 10 E-boats. Yet there was more turmoil to come. A few days later, the worst summer storm in living memory swept through the Seine Bay, halting the fighting and delivery of supplies until late on 22 June. The Mulberry harbour at Saint-Laurent was smashed beyond repair, while more than 800 vital ferry craft were left stranded. The churning water also triggered the sensitive detonators on German pressure-operated ‘oyster’ mines, which blew up unexpectedly across the assault area. The assault on Cherbourg Once the storm had passed, the US Army attacked Cherbourg on 22 June, while a naval task force bombarded the defences on the 25th in support. This time, the German gunners were ready to respond, and all but one of the seven battleships and cruisers taking part were hit. US Rear-Admiral Carleton Bryant’s flagship USS Texas came under particularly heavy fire, with one shell smashing the battleship’s bridge structure, killing the helmsman and wounding several others. “Having 11-inch shells fired at you is no fun,” Bryant later recalled. “When the salvo hits the water there is the most ungodly smack you ever heard.” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/05/BAL2945330webready-4a5c07c.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="German prisoners of war are marched out of Cherbourg in late June 1944. The US Army’s assault on the city was accompanied by a major Allied naval bombardment (Photo by Everett Collection/Bridgeman Images)" title="German prisoners of war are marched out of Cherbourg in late June 1944. The US Army’s assault on the city was accompanied by a major Allied naval bombardment (Photo by Everett Collection/Bridgeman Images)" /> Cherbourg surrendered on 26 June, but the submarine and air attacks continued, as did the minelaying, and July saw the arrival of the Kleinkampfverbände – the German Navy’s ‘small battle units’. The first weapons to turn up at Villers-sur-Mer near Le Havre were explosive motorboats and craft known as ‘human torpedoes’, ridden into action by young volunteers whose confidence was boosted by cocaine and amphetamines. Twenty-six human torpedoes attacked on the night of 5/6 July, and although 10 were lost, they succeeded in sinking two minesweepers and the frigate HMS Trollope. Two nights later, the Kleinkampfverbände returned and sank the old Polish cruiser ORP Dragon with the loss of 37 officers and men. Despite the constant pressure from sea and air, the vital supply build-up continued at an impressive rate. By 14 July, a million tons of stores and nearly 300,000 vehicles had been put to shore, and on 25 July, the US First Army was able to break out of the beachhead and race into France. The western flank of the assault area was now secure, and the fleet started to operate further west, blockading German bases in the Bay of Biscay and destroying evacuation convoys. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/05/GettyImages-webready542896213-a6e7725.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="The German Navy’s Kleinkampfverbände arrived in the Seine Bay in July 1944, using hard-to-detect craft such as human torpedoes, like this one, to attack Allied ships (Photo by ullstein bild/Getty Images)" title="The German Navy’s Kleinkampfverbände arrived in the Seine Bay in July 1944, using hard-to-detect craft such as human torpedoes, like this one, to attack Allied ships (Photo by ullstein bild/Getty Images)" /> On the eastern flank, however, Le Havre remained an enemy stronghold. On the night of 30/31 July, German E-boats struck the Allied convoy FTM53 with long-range pattern-running torpedoes, hitting five freighters. Although only one of the freighters, SS Samwake, actually sank, none of the others went to sea again. Samwake’s captain, Owen John, described his ship’s end in a melancholy report: “She dipped by the head, the stern reared up vertically and held for a few minutes, then very slowly she rolled over to starboard and disappeared at 0545 in a small fountain of water.” End of the Normandy's naval campaign Alarmingly, there were more losses to come. As well as the aforementioned HMCS Regina, further Allied casualties included the hospital ship Amsterdam, which was mined and sunk on 7 August, claiming the lives of 55 patients, 10 Royal Army Medical Corps staff, 30 members of the crew and 11 prisoners of war. Among the dead were military nurses Mollie Evershed and Dorothy Field, the only women named on the British Normandy Memorial in the village of Ver-sur-Mer. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/05/BAL490068webready6-6cc9d8a.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Le Havre lies in ruins after being bombarded and captured by the Allies on 12 September 1944. The port city had been a key German naval stronghold (Photo by Usis-Dite/Bridgeman Images)" title="Le Havre lies in ruins after being bombarded and captured by the Allies on 12 September 1944. The port city had been a key German naval stronghold (Photo by Usis-Dite/Bridgeman Images)" /> Later, the cruiser Frobisher was torpedoed and damaged on the 9th, and the valuable repair ship HMS Albatross was torpedoed on the 11th with the loss of 67 naval and military personnel. It wasn’t until 12 September, with the land fighting far away, that the British captured Le Havre and the complex infrastructure of the Seine Bay was dismantled. More than three months after D-Day, the naval campaign was finally over. Looking back at the events nearly 80 years on, the sailors who served should not be remembered as mere taxi drivers, ferrying men and supplies to the shore, but as active combatants who guarded the vital coastal waters and Allied assault areas until the very end. Whether by day or by night, they maintained a ceaseless watch against all manner of threats – and in some cases, ended up paying with their lives. Counting casualties is not an exact science for a campaign that has never been studied coherently, but nearly 3,000 Allied sailors are known to have died in the operations in and around the Seine Bay – and possibly many more. As General Sir Bernard Montgomery would write in May 1945, “any success achieved by the British Armies has been made possible only by the magnificent support given us by the Royal Navy”. This article first appeared in the June 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine
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.
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, implied that Ireland and Britain, though geographically close, were distant in time. Ireland, he told the House of Commons, suffered under “a famine of the 13th century acting upon the population of the 19th”. A nation without hope The Great Famine, however, was a modern famine, a political, ecological and economic disaster shaped by Ireland and Britain’s long history of suspicion and tense interdependence. Ireland was never a formal British colony, but its relationship to Britain was colonial. Britain extracted rent and agricultural products from Ireland. It sent Irish soldiers to fight for the empire abroad, while maintaining garrisons in Ireland to put down rebellion. ‘Paddy’, with his rundown home and dirty brood of children, his potatoes, pigs, lies and superstitions, was a stock figure in British popular culture. Many blamed the Irish for the catastrophe of the famine, drawing on these caricatures. Stone cottages, rooting pigs, potatoes stored in dirt pits, cold, acidic peatlands – the aesthetic of the Irish countryside was archaic and earthy, especially in comparison with Britain’s seething industrial cities. As Charles Trevelyan, the bureaucrat who organised famine relief, asked: “What hope is there for a nation which lives on potatoes?” The potato was not an ancient crop in Europe: it was introduced from the Americas by Iberian conquistadores in the 16th century. Yet there was a key distinction between Ireland and the rest of the continent in the way the crop was utilised. Across Europe, potatoes were embraced as a backstop against the failure of other crops. In Ireland, however, they quickly went from ‘famine food’ to staple. During the 18th century, Irish land was subdivided into smaller and smaller parcels. As rents increased, farmers who might have eaten some of their oats or other crops sold them all, and fell back on potatoes for subsistence. Between 1741 and 1779 the number of Irish acres planted with potatoes was reported to have increased twentyfold. By 1845, on the eve of the famine, Ireland exported roughly 250,000 head of cattle, 90 million eggs and enough grain to feed 2 million people in Britain each year. But the Irish poor almost never ate anything but potatoes. “They are just as much fed on flour as they are clad in jewels and embroidery,” The Times commented. Hyper-dependence on potatoes seemed to confirm British stereotypes about the Irish, as though Paddy had planted them to saunter and laze, to indulge in whiskey and blarney. But potatoes, although abundant in good years, are very vulnerable to disease. Some estimated that as much as one-fifth of the population lived on the edge of famine every season. The Irish poor relied on complex credit arrangements, borrowing against their potato crops or trading labour for land, a cycle some called ‘working for the dead horse’. The Irish economy responded to world markets. “I do not know which is worse for the poor farmer: the fall or the rise,” a Roscommon labourer wondered. “When the market tumbles, where is the rent? And when the price gets up in a hurry, where is the food?” Long before the famine, Ireland’s economy looked old but was perilously new; Ireland’s potatoes looked secure, but were precarious. And Britain was dazzled by what seemed to be the natural modernising power of the free market. The law of the market, described by the new discipline of political economy, seemed analogous to the natural laws of physics. Political economy, an Irish noble declared, was as certain as “the Newtonian philosophy”, rejected only by “the profoundly ignorant”. If economies had natural laws, it followed that the best policy was ‘laissez-faire’, to let the market “bring things as nearly as possible to this their natural state”, as an official wrote. Laissez-faire, however, was hard work. It took a lot of regulation to make markets behave ‘naturally’. And so, even before the famine, British officials hoped to apply the pressures of market forces to reform Ireland. They could not see that those very forces – the demands of the British market, shaped by conquest and colonial exploitation – were what had made Ireland vulnerable. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/05/PCL109199-986b91a.jpg" width="2539" height="1691" alt="An English labourer carries his “burden” – “the Irish old man of the mountain” – in a Punch cartoon from the mid-19th century. British stereotypes of lazy, freeloading Irishmen shaped the authorities’ reaction to the onset of famine (Image by TopFoto)" title="An English labourer carries his “burden” – “the Irish old man of the mountain” – in a Punch cartoon from the mid-19th century. British stereotypes of lazy, freeloading Irishmen shaped the authorities’ reaction to the onset of famine" /> Foul-smelling pulp By the summer of 1845, Phytophthora infestans had crossed the Atlantic, probably among a shipment of fertiliser or seed potatoes bound for Belgium. The organism, a fungus-like ‘water mould’, was native to central Mexico, where potatoes grow wild. The ‘late blight’ caused by P infestans spread unchecked from Sweden to Spain, killing potatoes in the ground and turning stored potatoes into foul-smelling pulp. In the Netherlands, potato yields for 1845 fell by 71 per cent compared to previous averages; in Belgium, 87 per cent. The London newspapers reported on food riots in the Baltic and Poland, and on emergency restrictions of grain exports in the Ottoman empire. British officials immediately recognised that the blight would be catastrophic in Ireland. But the idea that Ireland was backward, and that its backwardness was a consequence of an uncivilised indolence and comfort made possible by cheap potatoes, was too pervasive to overcome. It was crucial, by those lights, that all aid be conditional. Britain’s own Poor Law had a similar ethos. Recipients of relief in England were sent to workhouses, to deter all but the most desperate. In Ireland, this principle was stretched to absurd extremes. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/05/GettyImages-802465554cmyk-68c9c46.jpg" width="5090" height="3391" alt="A large group of people assemble outside a large workhouse" title="Starving people throng a workhouse during the Great Famine, in a c1900 illustration. The prevailing view among British political leaders was that relief should only be offered in exchange for money or labour" /> In 1845, Robert Peel’s government met the first wave of the blight by importing 44 million pounds of American maize, sold at cost by local Relief Committees. Irish labourers who were unable to find work could apply for jobs at public works projects to earn money with which to buy the ‘Indian corn’. Maize was alien to the Irish – that was why Peel preferred it. Buying maize, he reasoned, would not disrupt the trade in wheat and oats, and would head off any restriction on the export of Irish crops. Relief officers were warned never to give away food. As Trevelyan reminded his staff, “Our plan is not to give the meal away, but to sell it.” Officers were told to separate ‘normal’ hunger from hunger caused by the failure of the potato. Food riots and hunger-related disease increased. Ireland, however, had experienced potato failure before. Although 1845–46 was one of the worst subsistence crises in Ireland since the union, no one expected that the blight would return in 1846. However, by midsummer, potatoes larger than a marble could hardly be found in Irish fields. In 1846, fewer potatoes were planted, and a greater proportion were destroyed. During the winter of 1846–47 – ‘Black 47’ – Irish society all but collapsed. An estimated 400,000 people died – thousands of starvation, and hundreds of thousands of diseases associated with hunger, especially typhus. People ate seaweed, grass, roots, carrion, dirt and the eggs of wild birds. As much as 3 per cent of the Irish population emigrated. Some ship captains offered free passage for the poor, as living ballast, as they were “cheaper to ship and unship… than… lime or shingle”. Still Ireland continued to export food – a basic principle of the relief programme. According to estimates, in 1846–47, some 3.3 million acres were planted with grain, and Irish farms raised more than 2.5 million cattle, 2.2 million sheep and 600,000 pigs. Waterford alone exported more than 20,200 barrels of wheat and nearly 59,000 barrels of oats from May 1846 to February 1847. A moral hazard? Peel’s government fell in the summer of 1846. The new prime minister, the Whig nobleman Lord John Russell, continued to adhere to the principle that the moral hazard of giving relief without expecting labour or money in exchange was as insidious as starvation. Where Peel had emphasised importing food for sale, Russell emphasised offering jobs at public works to allow the Irish poor to earn wages. Although food imports did increase, even many who could find work struggled to find food to buy. Ireland – especially the countryside – had very little infrastructure for selling imported food. “The ordinary mercantile machinery,” Trevelyan worried, “even of the greatest trading nation in the world, is unequal to such a novel emergency.” Thousands of public works opened, most of them offering make-work jobs, paying wages set by law at twopence less than the average local wage (a provision meant to encourage private employment, enforced in districts that had virtually no such work on offer). To many, relief work was nothing more than “digging holes and filling them up again”. A plan premised on the natural laws of the market required nearly 12,000 clerks and officers to administer. By March 1847, more than 700,000 people had jobs on the works. Designed to save money, Russell’s public works cost more than £944,000 – about £102.4m today when adjusted for inflation. However, inflation is not always the most useful measure of the relative value of money over time. In 2022, a government project on a similar scale to the 1846–47 public works, in proportion to the gross domestic product of the present-day UK, would cost more than £3.83bn. The government’s tunnel vision, focused on checking ‘indolence’ and dependence among the desperate Irish, and on enforcing economy and austerity, proved expensive and wasteful. Meanwhile, widely reprinted reports from places like Skibbereen inspired sympathy around the world. In January 1847, Queen Victoria wrote a letter to the archbishop of Canterbury asking for a collection in aid of famine victims. The letter, printed in The Times, opened a campaign that attracted hundreds of thousands of pounds of donations. The charity was timely. Facing ballooning costs, and thrown off-balance in the spring of 1847 by a financial crisis, the Whig government quickly wound down the public works and sponsored a programme of local soup kitchens, financed directly by grants and donations. At their peak in the summer of 1847, the kitchens distributed daily rations to some 3 million people – all of whom were expected to prove that they had no other means of subsistence. The soup kept bellies full, but was not always nutritionally complete. Health officials recorded outbreaks of scurvy. “The feeding of dogs in a kennel was far more decent and orderly,” one observer wrote. The soup kitchen programme was only ever intended to be temporary. As kitchens closed in the autumn of 1847, the Russell government devolved responsibility for famine relief onto Ireland’s Poor Law Unions, which had the power to levy taxes in order to pay for the relief of the local poor. This principle, that “Irish property should support Irish poverty”, might have functioned better in normal economic conditions. However, after nearly three years of famine, many unions quickly ran out of money. To deter applications to the unions and their workhouses, relief could only be given to people occupying a quarter-acre of land or less. A month’s hard labour Evictions, always a threat in rural Ireland, increased in number. Bailiffs tore the roofs off cottages and threw the residents into the fields. Magistrates could imprison people found outside of their ‘home’ union for up to a month’s hard labour. Irish society, the commissioners of the new system declared, could only be protected from “a state of almost universal pauperisation” by these rigid rules. In the summer of 1848, a group of Irish nationalists, inspired by the revolutions sweeping continental Europe, attempted to overthrow British rule in Ireland. The ‘Young Ireland’ rebellion was swiftly crushed. Then, in autumn 1848, the blight returned. Following the rebellion, ‘laissez-faire’ turned vengeful. “The true thing to do,” Charles Wood, the chancellor of the Exchequer, told a colleague, is “to do nothing.” In the poorest Irish counties, the winter of 1848–49 was as bad or worse than 1846–47. In County Clare, for example, the death rate kept rising from 1847 until early in 1850. By July 1849, about 1 million people depended either on the workhouse or outdoor relief given by workhouse staff. Although this was one-third of the number who had relied on soup kitchens two years earlier, the demand for relief in 1849 was regional, concentrated in the poorest counties in Ireland along the western coast and in the countryside of the south-west. Across Ireland, the cost of relief increased from £1.7m in 1848 to £2.2m in 1849. Even in 1850, when the situation had stabilised, some unions were still supporting one-third or more of the population in their districts. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/05/AKG6345975cmyk-e5a0251.jpg" width="3651" height="2432" alt="An engraving shows food being handed out to victims of the famine. By the summer of 1847, soup kitchens were distributing rations to 3 million people across Ireland (Image by AKG)" title="An engraving shows food being handed out to victims of the famine. By the summer of 1847, soup kitchens were distributing rations to 3 million people across Ireland" /> By 1851, the ‘late blight’ that killed Irish potatoes had become endemic in Ireland. Irish potato crops remained susceptible to blight, but the disease spread less explosively. Meanwhile, mass death and mass emigration had – with brute force – somewhat reduced the pressure on Irish land. The Great Famine was the worst humanitarian crisis to afflict the United Kingdom in the 19th century. It is the most important event in the history of the Irish diaspora. But the Great Famine was neither the first, nor the last, cataclysmic food shortage in the Victorian British empire. The Agra famine of 1837–38 in present-day Uttar Pradesh killed 800,000 people. Unstable climactic conditions generated droughts and famines in 1876–79, 1889–91 and 1896–1902 that killed at least 15 million in British India. Crop failure was usually caused by natural phenomena – drought, heavy rains and population explosions of pests – but famine in the empire followed when imperial administrators placed their faith in the market to solve food shortages. There was almost always enough food. The obstacle was a stubborn insistence that private merchants deliver food to the hungry, and that the hungry pay for it, for their own good. The poverty of the imperial imagination made it impossible to imagine an alternative. Padraic X Scanlan is an associate professor at the University of Toronto. His latest book is Rot: A History of the Irish Famine (Robinson, March 2025) This article was first published in the May 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
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...
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 Winston Churchill makes his VE Day broadcast to the world, 8 May 1945. (Photo by Keystone/Getty Images)" title="Prime Minister Winston Churchill makes his VE Day broadcast to the world, 8 May 1945. (Photo by Keystone/Getty Images)" /> Time to party The celebrations began almost immediately. But there were no official plans for VE Day – notice of the public holiday had been so short that most weren’t sure how to celebrate. Gardiner, who later interviewed people who experienced VE Day firsthand, said: “A London window cleaner probably spoke for many when he declared ‘the holiday is the main issue… very few have any definite plans, and these almost exclusively consist of getting drunk.’” Most people had expected the church bells to be rung: “I thought they’d be clanging all day long,” reported a Surrey woman, “but there was no signal. Just hanging around… No All Clears, no bells. Nothing to start people off.” The weather looked set to be fair – though the papers forecast possible rain later. But even that was a novelty, said Gardiner. Throughout the war it had been forbidden to publish the weather forecast in the newspapers or broadcast it on the wireless, for fear of giving the Germans information that might be useful in planning bombing raids. Some people went to church to give thanks for the peace at hastily arranged services, while others strolled around their local streets admiring the flags and streamers that had been hung out. Children set to work making Union Jack flags with cardboard and crayons. Although VE Day was strictly speaking a continental European event, it was celebrated all over the world. In London, more than a million people took to the streets and huge crowds gathered outside Buckingham Palace to see Churchill standing on the balcony alongside King George VI. The king's daughters, Princess Elizabeth – the future Queen Elizabeth II (pictured far left) – and Princess Margaret, appeared alongside them. In Paris and New York, similar crowds gathered along the Champs Elysée and in Times Square. Michael Mason, 13, who had been evacuated from his home in central London to a village in Hertfordshire in 1939 and was still there on VE Day, said: “I caught the early bus… to London. I wanted to spend the day with my mum and dad. The scenes in the capital were incredible. It was one huge celebration. A tremendous wave of pent-up feelings had broken loose. The streets were crammed with joyful revellers.” The partying went on into the night: “Crowds surged back to Buckingham Palace to call for the king and queen again, lines of conga dancers wove along Piccadilly, revellers jumped into the fountains in Trafalgar Square,” wrote Gardiner. “The police were tolerant, instructed to intervene only when there was danger to life or limb, to let a war weary people go a little wild just for one night. In fact, there was remarkably little trouble or drunken behaviour – partly because most pubs had already run dry by eight o’clock.” Majorie Cantwell, who was nine in 1945 and living in Ealing, west London, thought that “VE Day was the best day of my life. All morning we had been collecting things for the bonfire (including an old piano full of woodworm!)… when darkness finally fell we lit our bonfire and placed a Hitler “guy” on the top. It was in the middle of the road so we were all able to dance around it. “Later two radios were placed side by side in the window of a nearby house and BBC dance music was relayed into the street. All the grown-ups danced and sang until they were exhausted. When the dance music went off the air, my dad entertained everyone with his banjo and people sang and danced some more. We all went to bed that night tired and happy and I felt that nothing could ever harm us again.” Look back at the 8 May 1945 celebrations in pictures… <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2020/05/GettyImages-3276265-040cd5d-scaled-e1746607806479.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Canadian troops entertain the crowds in Leicester Square while waiting for the broadcast of the King's VE Day speech, 8 May 1945. (Photo by Topical Press Agency/Getty Images)" title="Canadian troops entertain the crowds in Leicester Square while waiting for the broadcast of the King's VE Day speech, 8 May 1945. (Photo by Topical Press Agency/Getty Images)" /> <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2020/05/GettyImages-3312682-7950150-e1746608155941.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="The residents of Tilloch Street, Islington, London, who organised a tea party in the street for their children at Whitsun. (Photo by Central Press/Getty Images)" title="The residents of Tilloch Street, Islington, London, who organised a tea party in the street for their children at Whitsun. (Photo by Central Press/Getty Images)" />
How are popes elected? Here's what happens after a pope dies
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
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: a guide to popes and the papacy Why are the cardinals shut off from the world? The conclave is held in the highest secrecy, well away from public glare and with the cardinals isolated from any potential external influence. Even the two non-cardinal masters of ceremonies must leave before voting commences. For the entire duration of the conclave, the assembled cardinals must remain in a sealed-off section of the Vatican. They have no access to televisions, radios, newspapers or mobile phones, and must take – along with members of Vatican staff – an oath of secrecy, on threat of excommunication. The process was brought to life in the 2024 film Conclave, helmed by All Quiet on the Western Front director Edward Berger and starring Ralph Fiennes and Stanley Tucci, and based on the bestselling novel by Robert Harris. It follows the workings of a fictional conclave – one filled with scandal and even-deeper secrets – but still helps us to see behind the doors of this peculiar and sometimes controversial procedure. Who votes for a new pope? Not all cardinals are permitted to participate in a conclave. In November 2024, there were more than 230 members of the College of Cardinals around the world, but the maximum number of who can vote is 120. This goes back to 1975, when Paul VI changed the rules so that no cardinal over the age of 80 could be in a conclave. The College of Cardinals have held the responsibility of electing a new pope since 1059, when the process was reformed by Nicholas II. Prior to that, the pope, officially known as the Bishop of Rome, was most likely elected by local clergy and churchgoers, and often under the influence of the Roman emperors and then Holy Roman emperors. Who can be elected as pope? In theory, any baptised male Catholic can become pope. In practice, however, the College of Cardinals always makes their choice from within their own number. The last head of the Catholic Church who was not previously a cardinal was Urban VI, who was elected in 1378. Read more | Has there ever been a married pope? Where are most popes from? Of the 266 popes there have been to date, 217 were born in Italy. The remaining pontiffs have come from 14 other countries, mostly France (16). The only Englishman to head the Catholic Church was Adrian IV, who held the office from 1154-1159. How do cardinals elect a pope? Once gathered from all around the world, the cardinals enter the Sistine Chapel. This is the venue for the conclave. Nine cardinals are randomly selected for particular roles during the election: three ‘scrutineers’ count, check and announce the votes; three ‘infirmarii’ deliver the ballots of any cardinals whose ill health prevents them attending a round of voting; and three ‘revisers’ double-check the work of the scrutineers. A round of voting, or scrutiny, consists of two masters of ceremony distributing paper ballots. They and the other handful of non-cardinals permitted in the Sistine Chapel must then exit. Each cardinal writes the name of their preferred candidate on their ballot, disguising their handwriting, and folds the paper twice, before walking to the chapel’s altar, placing it on a paten (a plate used during the Mass) and sliding it into a chalice. As they do so, they declare, “I call as my witness Christ the Lord who will be my judge that my vote is given to the one before God I think should be elected”. The collated ballots are examined one by one by the scrutineers, one whom reads the name on each ballot out loud and another pierces them with a needle to attach them onto a single thread. They are counted to see if any candidate has received the required two-thirds share of the vote. If no one achieves this majority, further rounds of voting will continue until there is a new pope. After a single vote on the first day, there can be four ballots per day. It is forbidden for a cardinal to openly campaign, but discussions in between rounds can assist particular candidates in building support. Finally, the ballots from a failed scrutiny are burned, giving off black smoke to let those outside the Sistine Chapel know that the conclave continues. How long does a conclave take? A conclave will last as long as necessary to secure the election of a new pope. During the last century, the quickest came in 1939 when Pius XII was elected in the third ballot (although the fact that the College of Cardinals only consisted of 62 eligible voters presumably helped the swiftness of the process). The longest conclave in history was held in 1268; or, at least, it began in 1268. Political infighting meant there was no result for nearly three years. During that time, three cardinals died and frustrations reached such a level that the local magistrate removed the roof where the conclave was being held and limited the cardinals to bread and water to force them to agree on a decision. How is a new pope announced? Smoke emanating from the Sistine Chapel chimney is still the first way that announcements from the conclave are made. While black smoke means a failed vote, white smoke means there is a new pope. The different colours are achieved by burning certain chemical mixtures. This is followed by the ringing of the bells of St Peter’s Basilica. Meanwhile, the candidate with the two-thirds majority must formally accept the result of the election. They will then select their papal name, before preparations are made for them to appear on the St Peter’s Basilica balcony for his first blessing. When conclaves go wrong The 13th-century conclave that lasted nearly three years was far from the only time that a papal election did not go to plan. The election of 1378 was accompanied by rioting in Rome from those calling for the new pope to be Italian. They were concerned that most of the cardinals were French. Although Urban VI was elected, there was a split in the Church – the Western Schism – which saw two popes: one in Rome and the other in Avignon. Further civil discord erupted during the conclave of 1559, with protests against one of the strongest candidates after it was revealed he had fathered a son. The election took almost four months before Pius IV became the new pope. That was despite the fact that he had children of his own; he successfully kept their existence a secret.