HistoryExtra
type: channel
link: https://www.historyextra.com
description: The official website for BBC History Magazine
date: 2025-12-01T14:38:05.000Z
update period: hourly
update frequency: 1
update base: 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00
items: Think you know everything about ancient Rome? These 25 facts will prove otherwise
items: From tragic Tudor queens to restless Roman soldiers: Britain's 8 most haunted houses
items: The assassins' reign of terror: how these 12th-century killers spread fear in the Middle East
items: After Hiroshima: the atomic plague
items: Senkichi Awaya: the lost mayor of Hiroshima
items: Why we should be better about talking about death, with Dr Helen Gittos
items: The most common accidental way to die in Tudor England reveals surprising truths about daily life
items: From fatal foliage to the perils of ploughing: the Tudor calendar of death
items: Caesar's funeral drama: anger and revenge after death
items: The St Brice’s Day Massacre: what really happened?

Think you know everything about ancient Rome? These 25 facts will prove otherwise
type: item
date: 2025-11-28T13:02:32.000Z
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Roman
subject: Death
subject: Gladiators
subject: Life in ancient Rome
subject: Roman rulers
description: Edward J Watts, author of The Romans: A 2,000-Year History, shares 25 things you need to know about one of the greatest civilisations of the ancient world – from their incredible feats of engineering to their sporting spectacles
encoded: 1. The Romans lived in an independent state for more than 2,200 years According to tradition, Rome was founded in 753 BC, shortly after the beginning of the Italian Iron Age. Its inhabitants were Latin-speaking pagans who lived along the river Tiber in what is now central Italy. The empire of Trebizond, the last independent Roman kingdom descended from that state, was captured in 1461 by an Ottoman army equipped with gunpowder weapons. The people living in Trebizond also called themselves ‘Roman’, but they were Christians who lived in a city on the Black Sea coast of modern Turkey and spoke a language they called Romeika (which translates as 'Roman', but which we now call Greek). 2. The Roman empire once included all, or part of, nearly 50 countries At the empire’s greatest extent in AD 117, Roman territory stretched from what is now the Atlantic coast of Portugal to the Persian Gulf beaches in Kuwait, from southern Egypt near the current Sudanese border to northern England, and from just south of Casablanca in Morocco to the Caspian Sea shores of Azerbaijan. The land area of the Roman empire was smaller than Australia, but if one included the territorial waters controlled by Rome (as is customary with modern states) the empire would rank as the fifth-largest country on earth if it existed today. 3. As much as one-third of the world’s population lived under Roman control Late during the reign of the emperor Trajan (ruled AD 98–117), it is thought that the Roman empire reached a population of 80 million, out of a total world population of around 230 million. In modern terms, Rome’s share of the world population at that moment would be nearly equivalent to a country with the combined populations of India and China. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/2GettyImages-1369193411-fa1bfb0-e1764241964618.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A yellow, blue and red map showing the Roman empire" title="The Roman empire reached its maximum…

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From tragic Tudor queens to restless Roman soldiers: Britain's 8 most haunted houses
type: item
date: 2025-10-30T15:00:03.000Z
subject: General History
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: British queens
subject: Castles
subject: Death
subject: Henry VIII's wives
description: From tragic Tudor queens to restless Roman soldiers, Caitlin Blackwell Baines introduces us to the terrifying cast of phantoms said to dwell within the nation’s spookiest homes
encoded: 1. Stirling Castle, Scotland From elusive sea monsters to shrieking banshees, Scotland is home to a host of supernatural beings – including, of course, ghosts. One of their best-known spectral celebrities is the ill-fated Mary, Queen of Scots, who is said to haunt a staggering 10 properties, making her, perhaps, the best-travelled ghost in the nation. Among her main haunts is Stirling Castle, her childhood home in central Scotland. Perched atop a volcanic crag, surrounded by cliffs overlooking the River Forth, Stirling Castle was constructed in the early 12th century, originally as a military stronghold, acting as a strategic line of defence during the Wars of Scottish Independence (1296–1357). However, almost from the very beginning, Stirling was also a favourite royal residence. By the time a young Mary Stuart lived there in the 1540s, it was as much a palace as it was a fortress: her father, James V, had transformed it into one of the most opulent homes in Renaissance Britain. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/10/Stirling-Castle-Bannockburn-1-8d83973.jpg" width="1200" height="960" alt="A large brown castle stands on a tree-covered hill, against a dark grey cloudy sky" title="Stirling Castle is one of several historic buildings said to be haunted by the ghost of Mary, Queen of Scots – the ill-fated monarch who was imprisoned – and executed – upon the orders of her cousin, Elizabeth I (Image by SpookyScotland.net)" /> Whatever happy childhood memories Mary may have had of Stirling would be tainted by the events of 21 April 1567. It was here on this day that the embattled queen would see her infant son (the future King James VI & I) for the last time. Soon after, she was forced to abdicate, flee the country, and eventually, in 1587, she was executed for treason under the orders of her cousin, Elizabeth I. Perhaps it is for this reason that the melancholy monarch returns to the castle, perpetually searching for her long-lost ch…

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The assassins' reign of terror: how these 12th-century killers spread fear in the Middle East
type: item
date: 2025-10-22T08:00:38.000Z
creator: Steve Tibble
subject: Medieval
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Death
subject: Historical people
subject: Medieval battles
description: In the 12th century, a sect of killers spread fear across the Middle East, executing a series of high-profile political murders. Steve Tibble introduces the original Assassins
encoded: There were 13 men: unlucky for someone. They were dressed to kill – but so was everyone else. In what was essentially an army camp, crammed with armed men, the assailants blended right in. Moving casually but intently through the bustling camp outside Aleppo in Syria, past stalls and shopkeepers, beggars and soldiers, they headed towards their target. Suddenly their progress was checked by a shout from behind: “What are you doing here?” Cover blown, their response was shocking: an explosion of violence, weapons flashing, blood splashing. The team of Assassins erupted into the tent where their victim sat unawares, surrounded by generals, lackeys and bodyguards. The attackers’ daggers and swords struck once more. The target that day in January 1175 was a Kurdish general, Salah al-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub – better known to us as Saladin. He had displaced the Fatimid dynasty to rule as sultan of Egypt, and was now muscling in on Syria. That vicious attack on his life failed – for now. But who were these men? And why had they launched such a murderous and seemingly suicidal assault? Power through murder Those brutal killers were Assassins. The upper case seems pedantic, but it is important. In the true medieval sense, that term was used for members of the Nizari Ismailis, a Shia Muslim sect who sought to defend themselves and to project power through political murder. The word ‘Assassin’ (or hashishin) was used as a pejorative by those on the receiving end of their remorseless hit squads in the 12th and 13th centuries. And the name stuck, becoming synonymous for premeditated murderers or contract killers – even though most of the broader Nizari Ismaili community were in fact peaceful peasants, scholars and merchants. The origins of this sect lay in the chaos of the Middle East in the late 11th century. Turkic tribes from the Eurasian steppes had stormed into the region and seized power from local Arab rulers, before starting to jockey among themselves for control of these new…

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After Hiroshima: the atomic plague
type: item
date: 2025-09-08T08:00:06.000Z
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Second World War
subject: A big day in history
subject: Death
subject: Hiroshima
description: In the wake of the nuclear attacks on Japan, the official Allied line was that radiation sickness was not a danger. Yet, as Steve O’Hagan reveals, the first western journalist to witness the effects on the people of Hiroshima told a very different story
encoded: At 6am on 2 September 1945, Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett boarded a crowded train heading south-west from the wreckage of war-ravaged Tokyo. He was disobeying strict orders that no westerners should venture outside the Japanese capital – and, though he did not yet realise it, he was undertaking the most momentous journey of his life. The Second World War had ended. However, Japan had not formally surrendered, and American occupation was still to come. Japan’s cities lay in ruins, and Burchett couldn’t even be sure that the train line to his destination, over 400 miles away, was intact. He was also alone and in great danger – hence the Colt .45 pistol in his suitcase. Resentment towards the Allies ran high. Crammed around Burchett in his carriage were Japanese Army officers bearing samurai swords. Although he spoke almost no Japanese, Burchett could feel the animosity in the soldiers’ venomous stares. Also among the passengers was an American priest, who nervously warned Burchett that one wrong move could cost them their lives. Should they smile or shake hands, it could be taken by the Japanese officers as a sign of gloating over the Japanese surrender to the Allies that was being formalised later that day. Burchett later recalled glancing nervously at the soldiers: their hands seemed to toy with the hilts of their swords. As the train plunged in and out of long, dark tunnels, he was convinced that he could hear the sound of steel being unsheathed from scabbards. Thankfully, the assault he feared never came. But even as the train reached its destination some 20 hours after setting out, his tension did not abate. He was arriving in Hiroshima – the city that, four weeks earlier, had been nigh obliterated by the world’s first ever nuclear bomb attack. In one of the 20th century’s most remarkable feats of investigative reporting, Burchett was about to become the first western journalist to bear witness to the aftermath of a nuclear explosion. A scramble to contr…

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Senkichi Awaya: the lost mayor of Hiroshima
type: item
date: 2025-09-06T08:00:29.000Z
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Second World War
subject: Death
subject: Historical events
description: The world’s first nuclear attack brought to an end a turbulent half century in Japanese history – one that Senkichi Awaya witnessed first-hand. Iain MacGregor reveals how one man’s fate mirrored the rise and fall of a nation
encoded: Senkichi Awaya was sitting in his dining room at the mayor’s residence in Hiroshima as the clocked ticked round to 8.15am on 6 August 1945. His teenage son Shinobu, and granddaughter Ayako, refugees from a devastated Tokyo, had joined him for breakfast. His wife, Sachiyo, had walked across the courtyard to the rear of the residence to retrieve some fruit from the store next to the shrine where the family prayed daily. It was then, as the first of only two atomic weapons ever to be used in wartime detonated, that a blinding flash of brilliant light filled the room. A fireball struck the city and the front of the Awayas’ home, situated around a kilometre from Ground Zero, was swept away in a crescendo of violence and heat. Senkichi, Shinobu and Ayako were among the 70,000 people who died instantly when ‘Little Boy’ – dropped from the B-29 bomber Enola Gay – exploded above Hiroshima. Over the days that followed, the death toll rose towards 120,000 as those who had been severely wounded died without medical care. In a city where 26 of the 29 hospitals had either been flattened or rendered useless, there was simply nowhere for the casualties to go and, because nine out of ten of all the city’s doctors and nurses had died, nobody to treat them anyway. The city of Hiroshima became a dystopian nightmare. Even those emergency workers who survived inevitably struggled to care for themselves, let alone offer support to others. Tens of thousands of survivors made their way out of the city and into the surrounding mountains seeking shelter. But it was days before officials began a concerted rescue operation. In the meantime, survivors started to collapse with mysterious symptoms of vomiting, diarrhoea and internal bleeding. The city’s people were experiencing the horrors of radiation poisoning. Within this wider story, Senkichi Awaya is a man curiously absent, seemingly lost to history. You will not find his name among the myriad of books relating to the Pacific conflict, or the…

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Why we should be better about talking about death, with Dr Helen Gittos
type: item
date: 2025-09-05T08:00:56.000Z
creator: Dr David Musgrove
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Burial
subject: Death
description: For our ancestors, death was part of daily life. We can learn from their open conversations about this taboo topic, says Dr Helen Gittos, and create modern rituals to help us cope
encoded: We don’t know how to talk about death. It’s a modern taboo. Search the topic online and you’ll quickly find people who deal in end-of-life matters arguing that we need more transparent, more honest conversations about an event that is, after all, going to come to us all. Charities like Hospice UK definitely want us to be better about talking about it. It wasn’t always this way. In fact, it’s only really in the 20th century that we’ve actively disassociated ourselves from death. The process has been institutionalised and medicalised. The palliative care physician and author Kathryn Mannix wrote about it in a Guardian article a few years ago. In the 19th century, according to the historian Judith Flanders, discussing Victorian death and mourning on a recent episode of the HistoryExtra podcast, “ it was part of daily life. It wasn’t tucked away neatly in hospitals where you go in and visit for an hour, but you don’t see all the day-to-day stuff, you don’t see people die”. She continues: “Many people go happily through their whole lives without ever seeing a dead person, which is simply not possible in the 19th century. Then, hospitals were very limited in the kind of diseases or illnesses they cared for. They were very specifically for certain things only. If you could afford it, you were looked after at home. Hospitals were a place of last resort for people who were too poor, too desperate, so everybody saw death.” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/09/GettyImages-464472069-ccb7e8d.jpg" width="5204" height="3383" alt="A bracelet with two gold edged picture frames on it. In each, there is a photo of a girl with brown ringlets and wearing a purple dress" title="This Victorian bracelet has a band of woven hair and may have been a piece of mourning jewellery, which was in fashion during that era (Image by Getty Images)" /> Past and present rituals I went to a funeral the other day. It was of a dear friend who had died far too young, …

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The most common accidental way to die in Tudor England reveals surprising truths about daily life
type: item
date: 2025-08-12T13:01:06.000Z
creator: James Osborne
subject: Period
subject: Tudor
subject: Death
subject: Discover / Apple News
description: Historian Steven Gunn uncovers what thousands of fatal accidents can tell us about everyday existence in 16th-century England – from water fetching to post-work swims
encoded: Tudor history is so dominated by tales of towering tyrannical monarchs and European politics that you’d be forgiven for thinking the most common way to die in 16th-century England was to be beheaded at the command of Henry VIII, or to perish at sea as a victim of the Spanish Armada. But for most ordinary people, the whims of kings and the disputes of continental royalty were distant concerns. The real dangers lay much closer to home – and could be far more mundane. According to historian Professor Steven Gunn, drowning in England’s waterways was the single most common cause of accidental death recorded in the period. Based on thousands of coroners’ inquests, Gunn and co-author Dr Tomasz Gromelski have traced how Tudor people died – and, in doing so, revealed fascinating details about the rhythms of daily life for the average citizen. “The most striking accidental cause of death is drowning,” Gunn explains on the HistoryExtra podcast. “About 40 per cent of all accidental deaths recorded in coroners’ inquests in the 16th century are drownings.” These cases were far removed from nobles or monarchs. They involved farmers, labourers, servants and children – people whose lives rarely make it into formal chronicles. And in their deaths, they left behind a detailed record of the routines and risks of everyday life. A deadly way to cool off Some drowning cases are unsurprising: children falling into ponds, or people swept away by flooding. But others reflect a pattern of work, habit and physical exhaustion in Tudor England. “Working men get very hot working in the fields, working on building sites … at the end of the day they strip off and jump in the nearest pond or river to get clean,” Gunn explains. But there was a significant problem with that. “Many of them can’t swim … and so lots and lots of people end up drowning in those circumstances.” Read more | From fatal foliage to the perils of ploughing: the Tudor calendar of death These deaths were most common in June and Ju…

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From fatal foliage to the perils of ploughing: the Tudor calendar of death
type: item
date: 2025-07-15T08:00:27.000Z
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Tudor
subject: Death
subject: Historical people
subject: Tudor life
description: Delving deep into reports of coroners’ inquests from Tudor England, Steven Gunn and Tomasz Gromelski show how accidental deaths reveal the rhythms of work, travel and leisure throughout the year
encoded: January Deadly cold and woodland woes Tudor England languished in the chill grip of a ‘little ice age’, and winters were especially harsh. Decembers were bad enough: in one 1542 blizzard, eight travellers – seven of them women and girls – died on the roads of Herefordshire and Shropshire. January was worse still. Snowstorms in January 1541 wreaked havoc across the Midlands. In Nottinghamshire, William Johnson lost his way heading home from Burton Joyce to his house at Shelford, and perished after falling into an unseen tributary of the Trent. In Derbyshire, three members of the Crabtre family died when their house in Kinder was flattened by a “snowe dryft”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/07/BAL3294700cmyk-53b87bf.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="A man dressed in a green smock and red tights is in the middle of cutting logs with an axe. Around him are other people, including a woman in a blue dress with a baby and another woman bent down on the floor to pick up more logs" title="A man wields an axe in an early 16th-century illustration. Chopping wood in icy conditions was fraught with danger (Image by Bridgeman Images)" /> January 1571 claimed victims in East Anglia. Peter Eade, a runaway servant just nine years old, died in snowy Rushford, Norfolk, wandering and hungry. And Robert Kyng, aged 40, fell into a snow-covered “sawyng pytt” in Holton Hall Wood at Stratford St Mary in Suffolk. Many people had to brave such cruel weather to undertake their work, not least felling leafless trees in a season when dormant wood was less likely to crack when cut. William Smale paid the ultimate price when tackling an oak in Bagborough Wood, Somerset in 1513. He cut through it with his axe, but it caught on an ash tree as it fell. To free the oak, Smale hacked three or four times at the ash. It shattered and sent sharp fragments flying at his head, piercing his brain. He died three days later. February Fatal foliage and football Februar…

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Caesar's funeral drama: anger and revenge after death
type: item
date: 2025-07-10T08:00:53.000Z
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Roman
subject: Death
subject: Roman rulers
description: The assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 BC drove tensions sky-high in ancient Rome. As Jessica Clarke reveals, plays staged at his funeral were carefully chosen to inflame anger and incite revenge on his killers
encoded: On 20 March 44 BC, a violent death in Rome was about to send assembled masses into uproar – sparking pandemonium that threatened to engulf the city. The incident described by the ancient biographer Suetonius wasn’t a real murder but, rather, the climax of a theatre show. If we reconstruct the performance, using both Suetonius’s writing and fragments of the scripts that survive from the time, we can picture the leading actor standing in the centre of the stage before a packed auditorium. He would have raised his sword over his head and declaimed boldly, his voice ringing out across the stands: “What, did I save these men so that they might murder me?” With these words, he would have plunged the blade into his chest. Falling forward onto the stage, he would then ‘die’ slowly and dramatically in front of his enthralled audience. Cries of sorrow broke out from the audience, Suetonius tells us, and shouts of indignation were raised against the characters who had instigated his suicide. Like so many other theatre shows at the time, which are recorded for us by the ancient writer, orator and politician Marcus Tullius Cicero, this performance – staged in the last years of the collapsing Roman Republic – caused a volcanic reaction among the crowd. The performance was part of the funeral of Gaius Julius Caesar. Five days earlier, the Roman general and dictator had been stabbed to death at a senate meeting by a group of conspirators. The city had gone into mourning, and a huge celebration had been organised to commemorate Caesar’s military and political achievements. It would include the usual eulogy and burning of the funeral pyre – but the centrepiece of the event would comprise two magnificent theatre shows. Incendiary shows First came the Contest for the Arms of Achilles, set during the legendary Trojan War. In it, Greek heroes Ajax and Odysseus argue over who should keep the sword and shield of their deceased comrade. Odysseus wins the debate and is proclaimed the victor.…

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The St Brice’s Day Massacre: what really happened?
type: item
date: 2025-03-25T06:00:35.000Z
creator: Dr David Musgrove
subject: Anglo-Saxon
subject: Period
subject: Viking
subject: Death
subject: Viking Britain
description: David Musgrove talks to Dr Ben Savill about the violence of 13 November 1002, when Danes in England were attacked, known as the St Brice's Day Massacre
encoded: The 11th century of English history features more than its fair share of bloodshed in battles, but right at the start of the new millennium, before 1066, one event that has always seemed to especially stand out for the brutality of its violence: the St Brice’s Day Massacre of 13 November 1002. “It continues to exercise a curious allure over successive generations of undergraduate essay-writers and their lecturers, whose own occasionally lurid interest follows a historiographical tradition going back almost a millennium, beginning with the Norman observers who sought to depict the event as one of the great, gory English national sins justifying the conquest of 1066.” That’s a quote from Dr Benjamin Savill, of Trinity College, Dublin, in his article Remembering St Brictius: Conspiracy, Violence and Liturgical Time in the Danish Massacre of 1002, published in the Journal of Ecclesiastical History - and it hints at a much broader story. What was the St Brice's Day Massacre? The massacre is a striking incident, but one for which we have only limited evidence (in common with most of the events of the period). There is a reference to it in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which notes that “in this year the king ordered to be slain all the Danish men who were in England”, and a further more detailed comment in a diploma of King Æthelred the Unready (the reigning monarch at the time) for the monastery of St Frideswide, Oxford, of 1004. That diploma describes how the Danes in that city sought sanctuary in a church, which was set upon and burnt down by “all the people in pursuit”. Archaeological evidence has recently supplemented those sources, with discovery and excavation of mass graves in Oxford and Dorset. Both excavations, but particularly the Oxford one, have been linked to the events of November 1002 as possible mass execution sites. How many were killed in the St Brice's Day Massacre? With that limited dataset, the question of how widespread the violence was, and whether it …

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