HistoryExtra
type: channel
link: https://www.historyextra.com
description: Home of Britain’s bestselling history magazine and award-winning podcast
date: 2026-04-03T14:31:04.000Z
update period: hourly
update frequency: 1
update base: 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00
items: Want to understand modern Britain? Look towards its villages
items: "It was the greatest act of violence for 66 million years": why the modern world was born of bloodshed
items: Live locally, live sustainably
items: Tudor work: what jobs did people do?
items: Live locally, live sustainably, live medieval
items: From fatal foliage to the perils of ploughing: the Tudor calendar of death
items: Flower power: how plants transformed the lives of 17th-century women
items: Why we should remember peasants
items: My history hero: Adam Henson chooses Robert Bakewell (1725–95)
items: A brief guide to the British Iron Age

Want to understand modern Britain? Look towards its villages
type: item
date: 2026-04-03T14:30:16.000Z
creator: Michael Wood
subject: General History
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Second World War
subject: Column
encoded: This year we celebrate 75 years of The Archers. Now, I confess I haven’t listened to the series for a while – not since the riveting plot 10 years back about coercive control, with Rob Titchener and Helen Archer. But, if any show on radio or TV is iconic, it’s The Archers, the story of an English village over time, “an everyday story of country folk”, (though now billed as “a contemporary drama in a rural setting”). The characters – the Grundys, the Archers, the Pargetters – and the places – Grey Gables, Brookfield Farm, the Bull, St Stephen’s church – have become so real that in 1981 their history was published in Ambridge: An English Village Through the Ages, with photos, maps, court rolls, Tudor wills, even an Æthelstan charter! All fiction, of course, but perfectly realised. The world’s longest-running radio serial was born out of the Second World War. Its first pilot episodes were broadcast in May 1950 and the series started properly on New Year’s Day 1951, in a snowbound world of austerity and rationing. It was originally created by a veteran of the wartime Ministry of Information, Godfrey Baseley. Based on Cutnall Green and Inkberrow in Worcestershire, the series was driven by the Reithian ideal of ‘inform, educate and entertain’. But it was also designed to reflect reality, conceived as a means of disseminating information to farmers and smallholders to help increase productivity in the era of rationing and food shortages. Originally produced with collaborative input from the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, it has had a farming consultant ever since. Read more | The radio revolution: how Britain found its frequency It was an instant hit. Its regular 9 million listeners peaked in 1955 at 20 million, when Grace Archer died in a barn fire. At its heart was a simple idea: that the village is the quintessential microcosm of English life, the imagined community to which we all dream of belonging. England is a village! We’ve had villages since the Roma…

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"It was the greatest act of violence for 66 million years": why the modern world was born of bloodshed
type: item
date: 2026-02-25T15:30:07.000Z
subject: Industrial revolution
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Death
subject: Georgian
subject: Historical events
subject: Murder
subject: Slavery
description: In the 18th century, developments in finance, weapons and industry converged to create a modern economy born of bloodshed. Clifton Crais explores how killing powered the industrial age
encoded: Imagine you’re in Nebraska, standing on North America’s Great Plains, where the broad Platte and Missouri rivers join on their way to the mighty Mississippi. It’s 1804, and in the blistering 36°C heat of summer you’re accompanying Captain Meriwether Lewis and Second Lieutenant William Clark as they head west towards the Pacific Ocean, exploring the commercial possibilities of this vast new country. Stretching away in front of you is a sea of chocolate-brown: thousands of animals, each standing as high as a man and weighing upwards of 900kg. Now picture putrefying carcasses and heaps of bleached bones extending as far as the eye can see. “The bones were everywhere,” homesteaders complained, “as thick as cones under a big fir tree”, and so numerous that it was impossible to plough the land. That was mere decades after Lewis and Clark’s fabled expedition. By the end of the 19th century, America’s population of bison had been reduced from tens of millions to around 350. Much of this killing unfolded over the course of just a few years – one of the most concentrated acts of ecological destruction in history. The usual explanation for the slaughter of the American bison ties it to the government’s decision to solve its ‘Indian problem’ – kill the bison and you destroy the Indigenous peoples’ food supply. “Every buffalo dead is an Indian gone,” wrote Colonel Richard Irving Dodge, who had fought in the Civil War before heading west to subdue the Native American population. But politics didn’t kill the bison. Economics did. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/GettyImages-515301392webready-0494d00-e1771951017974.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white photograph showing large piles of bison hides piled up after many animals have been killed for their skins" title="Thousands of bison hides lie in huge piles in Dodge City, Kansas, 1878. Advances in chemistry enabled hides to be processed and used in belts in industrial mac…

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Live locally, live sustainably
type: item
date: 2025-12-23T13:44:39.000Z
creator: Dr David Musgrove, FSA
subject: Medieval
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Climate
description: Ian Mortimer suggests that we should look back to the medieval period to seek inspiration for sustainable living
encoded: We know we should all be living sustainably if we can. Bestselling historian Ian Mortimer suggests that we should look back to the medieval period – an era in which people took a very local attitude to life – to seek inspiration for sustainable living.

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Tudor work: what jobs did people do?
type: item
date: 2025-10-08T15:12:12.000Z
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Tudor
subject: HistoryExtra Academy
description: In the third episode of her HistoryExtra Academy series Tudor Life, social historian Ruth Goodman explores what people in the 16th century did for work
encoded: From long hours in the fields to the bustling noise of Tudor workshops and marketplaces, we’ll discover exactly how people in the 16th century earned their keep — and what it meant to make a living in a world without modern comforts or job security View Green Video on the source website Enjoyed this video? Ruth is hosting a live Q&A for HistoryExtra members on 19 November 2025 at 7pm (GMT). Find out more here Want more from Ruth? Find more episodes of Tudor life here Ruth Goodman is a historian of the social and domestic life of Britain. She has advised the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Globe Theatre and presented a number of BBC television series, including Victorian Farm

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Live locally, live sustainably, live medieval
type: item
date: 2025-07-23T09:30:46.000Z
creator: Dr David Musgrove, FSA
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Medieval life
description: If you want to live a sustainable life today, you need to think local. For that, you can channel the experience of the Middle Ages, as Dr Ian Mortimer suggests
encoded: When I have a spare moment, I dabble in making hazel hurdle fence panels. It’s gloriously therapeutic. You get yourself a fat bundle of six-foot-long straight hazel rods, ram a few of them vertically into the ground at regular intervals and then cajole the rest of your rods through them on the horizontal, weaving them in and out of the uprights. The trick is to bend the rods robustly so that you can feel the fibres creaking and twisting through your palms, but you can’t be so hard on the wood that it cracks and snaps. It’s bad if that happens. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/07/Hurdles-panels-f647815.jpeg" width="1006" height="774" alt="A fence made of light brown hazel rods, weaved together. In the background, there is a wall covered in ivy and a wooden structure with fairy lights on it" title="“My shabby efforts at making hazel hurdle panels,” explains Dr David Musgrove. “Note the amateur broken ends of the rods.”" /> I am a rank amateur at this, and the results of my labours are woefully rustic, but I like the process of getting there. If you’re doing it properly, you’re supposed to split the hazel rods in half, but I’ve yet to conquer that art. To see it done masterfully, there are loads of informative videos of competent, serious chaps in forests teasing the wood into beautiful hurdle panels. People have been making hazel hurdle panels for millennia. In the Somerset Levels, archaeologists have excavated them in situ where they were laid down in the Neolithic period as trackways to help people get across the boggy ground. They survive, amazingly, because peat grew up over them and protected them. The trickiest bit of making a hazel hurdle is procuring the rods. You have to coppice trees (ie cut them down to the base) in order to encourage the hazel to shoot up in straight stems. If you’re managing a woodland, you would crop the coppiced hazel on a regular rotation every five to seven years. It’s a very sustainable buildi…

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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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Flower power: how plants transformed the lives of 17th-century women
type: item
date: 2025-06-19T08:00:34.000Z
subject: Membership
subject: Period
description: Few 17th-century women could travel the world. But the world could visit them in their gardens. Susannah Lyon-Whaley reveals how exotic plants – from Chinese rhubarb to South American passionfruit – opened new horizons in fashion, food and science
encoded: Anna Buckett had never seen a pineapple. Undeterred, on 12 July 1656, she took the bold move of stitching one. While the fine stitches on her sampler show dexterity, the result is more artistic than realistic. The red pineapple looks a little like a monstrous jelly with beetle legs. Amid Anna’s stitched pinks, pansies and honeysuckles, the pineapple – a native of countries like Brazil and Suriname that would not grow successfully in English gardens until the 1700s – was out of place. She had never seen a pineapple, but Anna may have seen pictures. The first printed depiction of a pineapple in Europe was in black and white in Gonzalo de Oviedo’s Historia General de las Indias (1535). Another herbal text (1641) claimed that the fruit tasted “as if wine, rosewater and sugar were mixed together”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/06/2HHR700cmyk-ce191d2.jpg" width="1545" height="1030" alt="A detailed and colourful piece of needlework shows a scene with two people, a lion and a horse at the top, with several plants, leaves and red pineapples across the bottom" title="A needlework sampler stitched by Anna Buckett in 1656, including her depiction of a red pineapple, resembling a “monstrous jelly with beetle legs” (Image by Alamy)" /> Anna may have been the Anne Buckett baptised in May 1643 in Middlesex, or the Ann Becket baptised in December 1644 in Surrey, though neither is certain. Like other daughters of merchants or gentlemen learning the gentler arts, she stitched both gardens she saw and those she imagined. Needlework creations of the time swarmed with peacocks, parrots, lions, leopards and sunflowers from foreign lands. In the 17th century, voyages to new colonies in North America, the Caribbean, Africa and India turned plants like tobacco and sugarcane into profits. They also sent waves of plants rippling back across the sea. For women at home, gardens made the wider world a material reality. Dainties for a queen In 1629, John…

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Why we should remember peasants
type: item
date: 2024-11-05T15:52:16.000Z
subject: General History
subject: Membership
subject: Period
description: Historian Patrick Joyce explores the history of peasants, from their role in society to why their way of life offers critical lessons for our modern world
encoded: What is a peasant? This is not an easy question to answer. Certain men have even died for trying to answer it, not least the influential Soviet economist Alexander Vasilyevich Chayanov, a theorist on peasants who was murdered on the orders of Joseph Stalin for his views. I will attempt some clarifications of the term ‘peasant’ in this article – albeit in less overtly murderous times. The peasant is usually seen as an individual primarily focused on securing the subsistence needs of the family unit. Peasants seek not to maximise income or profit. They do not produce a surplus, at least in the sense of the accumulation of capital to make more capital. They minimise risks rather than maximise gains. They are thus, and of necessity, conservative. Their aim is to ensure that all family members are adequately fed and employed. What they have to tell us concerns how the Earth and the heavens can be lived in a different way from our own. It would be better to say quasi-subsistence than subsistence however, for few peasants led solely subsistence lives, needing access to markets of various sorts for their incomings and outgoings. Peasants are not necessarily anti-capitalist; they are more indifferent to capitalism as it is simply not part of their mental universe. The essential point is that land – whether it is self-owned, rented, and so on – is understood to be a social rather than economic entity to a peasant. Read more | Why there’s no such thing as a typical medieval peasant While the stereotypical view might be that peasants are generally low income, throughout history there is usually some differentiation, with some being richer, and others poorer. Overall, the communal – the village itself – is what mattered the most to peasants, and unity against ‘outsiders’ – who were always seen as a threat – in difficult times. And then there are broader, less analytic, definitions of ‘peasant’, which concern how the word has been used over time. Under this view, peasants have be…

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My history hero: Adam Henson chooses Robert Bakewell (1725–95)
type: item
date: 2022-09-27T09:35:46.000Z
creator: York Membery
subject: Georgian
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: History hero
description: Countryfile presenter, farmer and author Adam Henson chooses Robert Bakewell as a history hero
encoded: Robert Bakewell: in profile Robert Bakewell was an English agriculturalist who pioneered the systematic selective breeding of sheep, cattle and horses. Born in Leicestershire, he is best known for his breeding of sheep with superior wool, such as the Lincoln Longwool, which led to the creation of many modern breeds. When did you first hear about Robert Bakewell? My father was a farmer, like me. He was interested in the history of animal breeding. To showcase rare breeds he opened the Cotswold Farm Park in 1971 and would tell me about this man who did so much to shape British agriculture. Dad set out the Farm Park livestock displays so they suited periods of history, from the Iron Age to the modern day. To help represent the agricultural revolution paddock, we had a 20ft Foamex board cut-out of Bakewell sat on a horse, so I’ve been aware of him for years. What kind of person was he? He was a real trailblazer when it came to improving livestock. He was also one of the first people to start selective breeding, coupling the best rams with the best ewes, and the best bulls with the best cows. He was quite a large man, so he didn’t just understand the importance of the quality of food, he obviously ate well too! Read more | Dig for Victory: Britain's WW2 war on hunger What made Bakewell a hero? The vital role he played in the development of British farm breeds and, in particular, regional breeds. Bakewell played a key part in the development of early breed selection, which has helped give so many areas of the country an identity – be it Hereford or Angus, which are famous for their cattle, or the Cotswolds, which is famous for its sheep. These regional breeds are part of what makes Britain what it is today – and they have been taken all over the world by those who settled in places like Canada, Australia and New Zealand. What was Bakewell’s finest hour? In my view, it was the creation of the Leicester Longwool Sheep, with its long, lustrous fleece, which was created by ma…

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A brief guide to the British Iron Age
type: item
date: 2021-02-09T14:00:22.000Z
subject: General prehistory
subject: Iron Age
subject: Period
description: During the period between c800 BC and the Roman invasion of AD 43, Europeans brought knowledge of iron-working technology to the British Isles. BBC History Revealed brings you a quick guide to the British Iron Age
encoded: When was the British Iron Age? The Iron Age of the British Isles is usually dated to the period between c800 BC and the Roman invasion of AD 43, during which time knowledge of iron-working technology was brought to Britain by Europeans, later referred to as Celts. By 500–400 BC, use of iron artefacts had been adopted across the British Isles, gradually replacing the use of bronze. How did people live? Perhaps surprisingly, Iron Age people were closer to the men and women of today than we might think. Settlements consisting of individual stone houses with garden plots sited along a street have been found in Cornwall, while in Wessex, remains of large thatched roundhouses have been unearthed, which would have been a hub for domestic life. Explore 8 little-known prehistoric sites in Britain An open-hearth fire in the centre of the house would have provided warmth, light, and a means of cooking food. The Iron Age diet itself was not unlike ours, consisting of bread, grains, a type of porridge, and meat, as well as honey and dairy products – and even beer! Iron Age Britain was primarily agricultural, with crops and livestock providing the means of survival, as well as commodities that could be exchanged with neighbouring farms. There was even time for leisure. Glass gaming pieces discovered in Iron Age burials indicate the presence of rudimentary board games, while the use of large, upright weaving looms meant that fashion, too, played a part in daily life. Textiles were dyed bright colours, and decorative accessories, such as brooches and pins, have also been discovered. Read more about what life was like during the Iron Age What do we know of their beliefs? With farming at the heart of Iron Age society, religious festivals probably followed the agricultural year. Two celebrations we know of are Beltane, on 1 May, which welcomed the warm season and the moving of cattle to open fields, and Lughnasadh, on 1 August, which marked the ripening of crops. One festival still ma…

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