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"It was the greatest act of violence for 66 million years": why the modern world was born of bloodshed
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
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 machinery (Image by Getty Images)" /> General Philip Sheridan, another Civil War veteran who led the Indian Campaign across the Great Plains, knew as much. These hunters “have done more in the last two years… to settle the vexed Indian question than the entire regular army has done in the last 30 years”, he said. “Send them powder and lead, let them kill, skin and sell until the buffaloes are exterminated.” A combination of guns, finance and industry made the near extinction of the bison possible. New advances in firearms made the act of slaughtering bison faster and achievable from a far greater distance. Banks rushed across the Mississippi, lending money to hunters and turning them into “businessmen with rifles”. Advances in chemistry transformed the animals’ body parts into saleable commodities, especially their notoriously difficult-to-process hides. Many of these hides ended up in factories – somewhere between 2 and 6 million in England in the 1870s and 1880s alone. Skins became drive belts that were integral to the machinery of mass production in the industrial revolution. Until the advent of rubber, industrial belting was made from hides, including those of the American bison. Meanwhile, American settlers gathered millions of tonnes of bison bones. Railway companies laid down branch lines for the sole purpose of collecting the bones and shipping them east, where they were processed in places such as the Michigan Carbon Works in Detroit – that state’s largest factory before the automobile revolution. Bones were turned into fertiliser, carbon filters and inks. For a time, bison bone could be found in ‘fine bone’ china and even in mascara. Back on the Great Plains, wealth accrued by killing and bone harvesting supported the rise of farming and ranching. Read more | These three unsuspecting inventions won the American Wild West – but did they destroy it too? What unfolded on the killing fields of the US was part of a global phenomenon. Industrial capitalism’s ‘big bang’ and our current age of global warming emerged out of the greatest act of violence the planet had seen since the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event 66 million years ago, when a meteor crashed into the Yucatán, killing off the dinosaurs and enabling the rise of mammals. The development of modern finance and the mass production of guns, bullets and gunpowder made killing for capitalism possible. This also helps explain the rapid rise to global economic dominance of the UK and the US: two countries that were adept at extracting wealth from destruction. By the first decade of the 19th century, the US’s GDP per capita was on a par with the UK’s. The economic historians Peter Lindert and Jeffrey Williamson have written that the US became “one of the first, if not the first, [countries] to join the modern economic growth club” pioneered by the UK. The two would soon account for a large percentage of global wealth and until 1900 were responsible for most global industrial CO₂ emissions. Firearms have a long history – almost 1,000 years – but in the 18th century the flintlock musket became the ubiquitous weapon of choice. A dramatic improvement on earlier guns that used matchlocks, it was versatile and cheap to produce – the Ford Fiesta of firearms. An experienced marksman could get off three shots in a minute. Workshops and factories across the western world scrambled to meet the insatiable global demand for the new weapon. England became the world leader in musket manufacture and distribution, beginning in London’s East End before spreading to Birmingham and Liverpool. Muskets were useless without gunpowder and lead, and England had plentiful supplies of the latter. Mines in Northumberland and Derbyshire yielded thousands of tonnes of the metal each year. When it came to gunpowder, the British East India Company’s exploitation of the subcontinent’s resources proved vital, especially the principal chemical, saltpetre. The monopolistic East India Company considered its control over the saltpetre trade to be “combined and interwoven with the welfare and even with the existence of the empire in India”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/BAL44583webready-ef1bf1a-e1771951145854.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Workers inside a brick‑walled workshop tend large heated pans built into furnaces while others handle tall conical molds set over containers, with steam rising from the equipment. Metal vessels filled with processed gunpowder materials are scattered across the floor, showing multiple stages of early gunpowder production." title="Gunpowder is made at the Woolwich Arsenal, c1750. Controlling large reserves of Indian saltpetre, an ingredient of gunpowder, Britain became a major player in arms manufacture (Image by Bridgeman Images)" /> Thanks to the research of Dr Nicholas Radburn at Lancaster University, we have quite precise figures for the millions of pounds of saltpetre imported into the UK, and the overall production of British gunpowder, across the entire 18th century. Between 1698 and 1808, Britain produced more than 522 million pounds of gunpowder. Much went to its military, especially the navy, where a single shot from a 16-pound cannon used 8 pounds of powder. But more than 78 million pounds were exported to Africa, the Caribbean and what would become the United States and Canada. These are just the official numbers, though; the real totals are probably higher. In any case, that was enough powder for more than 1.25 billion musket shots – a number greater than the entire global population in 1750. Other nations got in on the action, too, especially the French and the Dutch. Americans weren’t far behind, and by the 1820s US-made weapons were being sold far and wide, especially across the Pacific Ocean and into China, where American Colt pistols were used in the 1850–64 Taiping Rebellion – one of the most catastrophic wars in human history. Plying the world with weapons was a volatile business – literally. Stores of gunpowder and saltpetre frequently exploded. The 1794 Ratcliffe Fire in London, sparked when a barge loaded with saltpetre caught fire, was the worst conflagration in the capital since 1666. It was described by The Times as “a striking and awful spectacle” – devastation on a scale not matched in London until the Blitz of 1940–41. On the other side of the Atlantic, throughout the 19th century there were almost yearly accidents at the huge DuPont explosives factory in Delaware, where a local cemetery was filled with the victims. Murder and pillage are nothing new. In fact, both are as old as our species. However, with the widespread proliferation of weapons in the 18th century, killing became infinitely easier. Read more | Did Aztec civilisation really ‘collapse’? The reality isn’t as simple as you might think This is where modern finance enters the picture. In the 15th and 16th centuries, the Spanish were outstanding at pillaging, producing men such as Hernán Cortés who rampaged across Mexico. The Conquistadors ransacked from the Americas the equivalent of billions of dollars in today’s money, much of it in precious metals. But Spain struggled to convert wealth produced by violence into capital for investment and production – and capital is what capitalism is all about. Instead, it spent its fortunes on religious and dynastic wars, churches, art, buildings and other forms of conspicuous consumption. England’s financial transformation was a game changer, building on innovations pioneered by the Dutch in the 17th century. In the 18th century, there was a revolution in English banking, along with a tranche of developments including insurance, bonds, stock markets, patent law and an increasingly standardised currency. In the first quarter of the 19th century, the number of banks outside London increased 30-fold, and doubled in that city. London became the “capital of capital”, as the economic historian Youssef Cassis termed it, led by the Bank of England, which was established in the closing years of the 17th century. “The multiplication of banking companies,” Adam Smith wrote in The Wealth of Nations (1776), was a great example of the virtues of competition and increased public confidence in the economy. Wealth – including that generated by violence – was free to become capital. By 1820, the US had just over 300 banks. Forty years later, that number had grown to more than 1,500 – a five-fold increase, and many more than in the UK. With banking came an array of financial innovations, from insurance to stocks and bonds. Like that of its former imperial master, the US legal system protected wealth – whether it was land, money or, across the South, human beings – which meant that it was easy to transform wealth into investable capital. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/BAL87937webready-7efb6df-e1771951291786.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A busy 19th‑century city street where a crowd of men in top hats gathers in animated discussion, while two barefoot newsboys hold up papers in the foreground. Behind them, tall commercial buildings with large signs and a horse‑drawn streetcar marked “Broadway” frame the bustling urban setting." title="Crowds throng Wall Street, New York City’s banking hub, during a financial panic in 1857. The United States’ rise as an economic heavyweight was boosted by its ability to convert the wealth it accrued from the killing of bison, beaver and whales into capital for investment (Image by Bridgeman Images)" /> This is how bison hides ended up in factories, and their bones in your ancestor’s teacup, connecting Manchester with Wyoming, halfway around the world. The connections to killing don’t stop there, though. Those factories required lighting. Sunlight alone was unacceptable to factory owners, who wanted their workers to be labouring as long as humanly (or inhumanly) possible, sometimes from five in the morning until well into the night. Until the advent of hydrocarbons such as paraffin and natural gas, it was whale oil that kept these places lit. England was soon consuming at least 50,000 barrels of the stuff each year, generating more than 3 billion lumen-hours of illumination. By the 1830s, most of the whale oil entering England ended up in its factories for lighting and lubrication. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, anywhere between a quarter and a third of sperm-whale oil (which produced the best light) harvested by American whalers made its way into factories. Whale oil was also used for lighting in Caribbean mills, where enslaved people were forced to work continuously to process the sugar-cane juice that helped provide cheap energy for the industrial working classes. Demand for lubrication and lighting in both factories and cities resulted in the mass slaughter of whales, from Greenland to the Indian Ocean. Though it is impossible to determine the exact scale of the killing, we do know that about 2 million whales were slaughtered between 1750 and 1900. Whaling produced huge profits until the number of those marine mammals dwindled, and whalers were forced to spend more time at sea, often returning home with empty casks. In the case of New England’s whale industry, profits were reinvested in a variety of businesses, from cotton mills to railways and the transition to fossil fuels in the US. One of the world’s largest textile factories – the Wamsutta Mills in New Bedford, Massachusetts – was funded by the harvesting of whales. And some of the early investors in what became John D Rockefeller’s powerful and notorious Standard Oil Company amassed their capital from hunting whales. People found many ways of turning into capital the natural resources in their surroundings. England’s land-enclosure movement was one of them, and has commonly been offered as an explanation for the development of capitalism, going back to the works of the classical political economists in the 18th and 19th centuries. But using violence to generate capital was a global process, and an ongoing one. It proved possible to turn just about anything into profit, from whales and bison to deer, beaver and African elephants – plus another mammal: Homo sapiens. The spread of guns led to a global increase in enslavement, most infamously across Africa. Beginning in the early 16th century and continuing for over 350 years, more than 12.5 million enslaved people were trafficked from Africa’s shores – by far the largest forced migration in human history. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/GettyImages-517213402webready-820476d-e1771951455442.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A painting depicting a slave auction. A man in a blue suit and grey top hat stands on top of a large box, talking to a crowd of gentleman, pointing towards a group of people of colour sitting on the floor, looking sad" title="Enslaved African people are sold at auction in the US, c1852. Vast numbers perished as a result of the transatlantic slave trade (Image by Getty Images)" /> However, nearly 7.9 million people – 63 per cent of the total Atlantic trade in human beings – were moved in just 60 years from the mid-18th century, during the industrial revolution and just as weapons began flooding the continent. This rapid expansion of the slave trade precisely tracks the import of gunpowder into Africa, as Nicholas Radburn has demonstrated definitively. The UK alone exported more than 26 million kg of explosives to Africa in the 18th century, most of it after 1750. Weapons yielded the greatest gains. One result, as the tyrannical King Adandozan of Dahomey (reigned 1797–1818) bragged, was a kingdom where his people “cultivated not with hoes, but with guns”. People hunting people is part of the nasty and brutish reality of enslavement. But how many people lost their lives to produce the 7.9 million people shipped across the Atlantic, where nearly 10 per cent died along the way to the Americas? I have estimated upwards of 2–3 people died to yield a single enslaved person. In other words, perhaps as many as 24 million humans perished in the flood of weapons and enslavement. Similar ratios unfolded elsewhere in the world, where guns were used to hunt people. In the south-east US – where Indigenous people were employed to hunt and enslave other Native Americans – the hunters killed three Native Americans for every one they captured. We know that profits from the transatlantic trade increased dramatically in this period, as work by Nobel-Prize-winning economists Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James Robinson has demonstrated. The Caribbean sugar and American cotton that made its way into workers’ cups of tea and into the English textile mills – which were releasing CO₂ and beginning to warm the Earth’s atmosphere – were tied to Africa’s killing fields. The industrial revolution and our own age of global warming are inextricably tied not just to the institution of slavery – a continuing subject of debate across the world – but also to the mass destruction of people, animals and the environment that guns and finance made possible. Read more | The profits of slavery: the dire impact of empire on Britain's countryside This is the dark reality of capitalism’s creation myth – one that historians and climate scientists are now beginning to understand. The industrial revolution and the global warming that now threatens our very existence emerged from the globalisation of killing for profit. The deaths of millions of Africans that underpinned the entire Atlantic slavery complex is only the most obvious connection. While there were other factors at play here, the wealth generated by the system of slavery “contributed causally to Britain’s industrial revolution”, according to a 2022 study. This recognition underpins many ongoing and fraught discussions, especially in the UK – most recently the February 2025 parliamentary debates on reparations, and the July 2025 University of Edinburgh report on donor links to slavery. These conversations, however, miss something very basic. History’s horrors go deeper into the totality of destruction that made our world economy – one that entangles the deaths of Africans with the slaughter of bison and whales in addition to a vast number of other species. This is one reason why the popular term ‘Anthropocene’ may not suffice, and why I have suggested a different word to describe the epoch that created our contemporary planetary peril: the ‘Mortecene’ – the Age of Killing and Death. Clifton Crais is a professor of history at Emory University. His new book is The Killing Age: How Violence Made the Modern World (Picador, 2026) This article was first published in the February 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
From krakens to serpents: 5 fearsome sea monsters from history
Sea monsters have haunted human imaginations for millennia. From the kraken to killer serpents, Prema Arasu explores what five mythical creatures reveal about our deepest fears
1. Armed and dangerous The writhing tentacles of the kraken inspired horror and disgust Sea monsters have fired our imaginations – and chilled our blood – for as long as humanity has sailed the seas. The Babylonian epic Enūma Eliš, which dates back to at least 1200 BC, describes the creation of the world from two fearsome primordial beings: Apsû, the embodiment of subterranean fresh water, and Tiamat, the sea. Like the many mythical aquatic creatures that have occupied our dreams and our nightmares, Apsû and Tiamat reveal much about how the Babylonians saw the world, acting as projections through which their anxieties about nature could be expressed, examined and, perhaps, mastered. Fast forward more than a thousand years and, in Naturalis Historia (c77 AD), the earliest extant work of natural history, the Roman author Pliny the Elder argued that the largest animals found in the sea “exceed in size any of the terrestrial animals” because of the “superabundance of moisture with which they are supplied”. One such giant creature is the kraken, its origins lying in Nordic mythology and folklore. In his 1752–53 proto-scientific work The Natural History of Norway, Danish bishop Erik Pontoppidan described the “Kraken, Kraxen, or, as some world name it, Krabben” as an island-sized creature, “round, flat, and full of arms, or branches”. Alfred, Lord Tennyson was so energised by reports of this monster of the deep that, in 1830, he wrote a poem in its honour, describing an ancient, giant-armed creature slumbering “Below the thunders of the upper deep; Far, far beneath in the abysmal sea.” British naturalist Henry Lee offered a more rational perspective. In Sea Monsters Unmasked (1883), he stated that kraken sightings by sailors were most likely exaggerated reports of giant squid (Architeuthis dux), described a quarter of a century earlier by the Danish biologist Japetus Steenstrup. Even after that, though, kraken and other squid-like monsters proliferated in literature. Herman Melville dedicated a chapter of Moby-Dick (1851) to the giant squid. Ishmael, Moby-Dick’s narrator, references The Natural History of Norway in his description of the creature, offering up the possibility that the kraken might not be a mythological beast but a taxonomically recognised species. Myth and reality continued to amalgamate in the science-fiction genre. Jules Verne’s battle with a giant squid in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1869–70) was based on reports of an encounter between a French corvette, Alecton, and a squid in 1861. As Verne puts it: “Before my eyes was a horrible monster worthy to figure in the legends of the marvellous. It was an immense cuttlefish, being eight yards long… Its eight arms… were twice as long as its body, and were twisted like the furies’ hair.” The uncanny undulations of kraken continue to fascinate. Roger Luckhurst, a scholar of the field of horror, links this to our innate “response to things that overwhelm our senses, stick too close, ooze across borders, or refuse to keep a stable shape”. Read more | Water gods and sea goddesses: 17 water deities from world history 2. A feminine fantasy Aquatic half-humans enchanted men and attracted women seeking new freedoms Sirens, tritons, nereids, merfolk, nymphs… part-fish, part-human creatures have gone by many names over the millennia. These alluring beings have glided gracefully into cultural traditions across the world for thousands of years – particularly those with strong histories of seafaring. And, unlike many of the aquatic beings on these pages, they haven’t always done so with malign intentions. In Naturalis Historia, Pliny described “tritons and nereids” as creatures in which “the portion of the body that resembles the human figure is still rough all over with scales”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/AKG342658webready-934ba2a-e1767351773509.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A stone relief showing a ship full of men sailing towards three women lined up on the left" title="A fourth-century BC urn shows Odysseus sailing towards the sirens, who, he reported, “sit and sing most beautifully in a field of flowers” (Image by AKG)" /> Sirens had appeared in Homer’s poem the Odyssey nine centuries earlier. But in the case of this ancient Greek epic, they were never physically described. Rather, we’re told that they “sit and sing most beautifully in a field of flowers”. Interestingly, they tempt sailors with knowledge, rather than – as other, later, depictions would have it – luring them to their doom. “When we had got within earshot of the land, and the ship was going at a good rate,” the fictional Odysseus recalls, “the sirens saw that we were getting in shore and began with their singing: ‘No one ever sailed past us without staying to hear the enchanting sweetness of our song – and he who listens will go on his way not only charmed, but wiser’.” In medieval art, Homer’s sirens are interpreted as both aquatic and non-aquatic creatures. In contrast, the nereids of Greek myth were explicitly spirits or embodiments of the sea, albeit often visually depicted as human women. In the Romantic and Victorian imagination, they became synonymous with mermaids, frequently depicted with tails. Gothic writer Ann Radcliffe conjured a fish-tailed ingénue in her 1794 poem The Sea-Nymph, as did Hans Christian Andersen in The Little Mermaid four decades later. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/gr0031911Hwebready-444c4de-e1767352384901.jpg" width="1500" height="1001" alt="A drawing showing a mermaid with a black, orange and yellow tail and long blonde hair, laying on her front on a rock, with a sea plant in the background" title="A 1930s depiction of Hans Christian Andersen’s Little Mermaid, which did so much to popularise the fish-tailed ingénue (Image by TopFoto)" /> Radcliffe’s poem marked a turn to the mermaid as a feminine fantasy: an aspirational symbol for young women who might otherwise feel confined by the gendered expectations of public life. This manifests today in the enduring visibility of the mermaid in popular culture and in the burgeoning pastime of mermaiding – cosplaying by swimming with a decorative monofin. 3. Terror in the deep For millennia, giant, ravenous sea serpents have played on humanity’s primal terrors It didn’t pay to get on the wrong side of the gods in ancient mythology. Just ask Laocoön, a Trojan priest who offended the deity Minerva – and didn’t live to tell the tale. As the Roman poet Virgil relates it in the Aeneid – his epic first-century BC poem telling the story of the foundation of Rome – Laocoön committed the cardinal sin of throwing a spear into the Greeks’ wooden horse to show that it was hollow. It was an act that so enraged Minerva that she unleashed two giant sea serpents to eat him. “Taking swift course; their necks were lifted high,” Virgil writes of the ravenous creatures. “Their gory dragon-crests o’ertopped the waves; all else, half seen, trailed low along the sea; while with loud cleavage of the foaming brine, their monstrous backs wound forward fold on fold.” Poor Laocoön didn’t stand a chance. As the priest’s grisly fate proves, the sea serpent had established itself as a terror of the deep by the time the Greeks and Romans dominated the Mediterranean. But they weren’t the first to live in fear of this creature. In fact, the ancient Greeks’ diverse bestiary of monsters likely derived from earlier prototypes. Sea serpents recur in the folklore traditions of a range of coastal and lake cultures, from the black, hairy Nile-dwelling monster Aman Doger of ancient Nubia to the rainbow snake of Australian Aboriginal Dreamtime myth. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/GettyImages-1288491221webready-92f8e54-e1767351878133.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="An engraving showing a naked man with curly hair and a beard, with a large snake wrapped around his body, holding him down, alongside his two sons" title="Laocoön and his two sons are attacked by serpents, as shown in a 16th‑century engraving. Could megalophobia – the fear of large objects – be a factor in humanity’s obsession with sea monsters? (Image by Getty Images)" /> For the Victorian naturalist Henry Lee, tales of colossal sea serpents were a case of mistaken identity, likely originating in sightings of other marine phenomena – perhaps large pods of porpoises or whales. “I believe that… the supposed coils or protuberances of the serpent’s body, were only so many porpoises swimming in line in accordance with their habit before mentioned,” he wrote. Read more | Liquor, loot and death on the high seas: 5 things you (probably) didn't know about the history of pirates The anthropologist David D Gilmore has offered an alternative interpretation of our sea serpent obsession. He has suggested that the recurrence of such creatures in literature down the ages points to three primal human fears: of the sea; of what might lurk in the unknown; and of large objects, otherwise known as megalophobia. 4. The theory of de-evolution Early Christians feared that the Leviathan would propel the human race back to its watery past To some, it has been a benign presence. To others, a terror-inducing harbinger of doom. Ever since the Leviathan emerged from the depths of the oceans and floated into the human consciousness, it has meant different things to different people. Jews and early Christians were certainly fearful. In the Hebrew Bible – where it appears in the Old Testament books of Psalms, Job and Isaiah – the Leviathan is a female sea serpent who will bring about the apocalypse together with her male counterpart, the desert monster Behemoth. Such ancient beasts played on the enduring fear of regression, reminding us of our uncomfortable origins in the oceans. David D Gilmore suggests that the water that so often drips from primal monsters as they emerge from the deep “symbolises not only the amniotic fluids of the womb, but also the primal element from which all life emerged”. These creatures threaten us with the possibilities of de-evolution – a stripping of what modern science has decided makes us human. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/GettyImages-534969411webready-723169d-e1767352029623.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A drawing depicting a large black whale being held under a boat, while several people and other sea creatures surround it in the water" title="An illustration from a 14th-century manuscript shows Alexander the Great being lowered into the sea to explore the ocean bed – a place populated by aquatic humans, dogs and a huge whale (Image by Getty Images)" /> For Renaissance cartographers, the Leviathan meant something different. Medieval maps of the world abound with monstrous-looking whales, depicted in ornate detail. According to historian Chet van Duzer, these illustrations served two purposes: to warn sailors of dangers that awaited them at sea, and as decorative elements designed to show off the artist’s talents. By the time the American writer Celia Thaxter penned her poem Leviathan in 1876, the creature had shape-shifted again. For Thaxter, it was a largely peaceful presence, who triumphed against the rage of nature: “For her worst fury he nor stayed nor turned. ‘Twas joy to think in such tremendous play, Through the sea’s cruelty, all unconcerned. Leviathan pursued his placid way!” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/CPA0030665webready-7c5c3eb-e1767352254831.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="An illustration showing a large grey and orange fish with a man laying next to it, covered in flowers" title="A 14th-century depiction of Jonah with the giant fish that spat him out. Huge sea creatures make numerous appearances in biblical texts (Image by TopFoto)" /> 5. Visions of Atlantis Tales of an aquatic city populated by hyper-intelligent Atlanteans enchanted authors from Plato to HG Wells “A strange vertebrated animal.” That’s how Elstead, the narrator of HG Wells’s 1897 short story In the Abyss, describes the lifeform he encounters on a journey into a deep ocean trench. “Two large and protruding eyes projected from sockets in chameleon fashion, and it had a broad reptilian mouth with horny lips beneath its little nostrils,” reported the intrepid submariner. “The vertical pitch of its face gave it a most extraordinary resemblance to a human being.” In introducing Elstead to this strange creature, HG Wells was joining a long list of writers to conjure the inhabitants of a mysterious underwater civilisation into fictional life. In fact, the possibility of an intelligent, almost godlike race of aquatic beings living on the ocean bed has captured the imagination for centuries. Mentions of the submerged island Atlantis date back to Plato’s fourth-century BC dialogues Timaeus and Critias, in which the Greek philosopher described a land sunken by a devastating earthquake. Renaissance scholars such as Francis Bacon linked Atlantis to the Americas, a notion he further explored in his utopian novel The New Atlantis (1624). In 1931, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution scientists Henry Bryant and Columbus Iselin embarked upon a research cruise in search of the lost continent around the Azores. It was unsuccessful. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/the-shape-of-water9lp0tuwebready-2ed216e-e1767352125833.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A photo of a woman with her hands pressed up against a glass tank, looking into the eyes of a large green sea creature behind the glass" title="2017 dark fantasy film The Shape of Water, which traces the relationship between a mute woman and a captured humanoid amphibian (Image by MovieStills)" /> Tales of Atlantis made a resurgence in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1929 novel The Maracot Deep features a team of scientists who descend into the ocean, become trapped in a deep-sea trench and are saved from disaster by descendants of Atlantis. Other underseas peoples in popular fiction aren’t quite so benign. American horror writer HP Lovecraft described an undersea race of creatures called Deep Ones who worship the deities Dagon and Cthulhu. In The Shadow Over Innsmouth Lovecraft projects his own prejudices about racial purity and miscegenation (sexual relationships between people of different ethnic groups) onto a fictional coastal town. Here the residents interbreed with marine beings and become corrupted in form and character. Read more | Tails from the deep: separating the real folklore of mermaids from Disney stories The denizens of cities under the sea continue to capture our imaginations today. Guillermo del Toro’s Oscar-winning 2017 film The Shape of Water tells how a mute cleaner working in a high-security government laboratory falls in a love with a green-skinned humanoid amphibian. This enduring interest in aquatic beings speaks to a wider fascination with how great civilisations might fall. This is an intriguing and alarming prospect. After all, if a creature is to knock us off our self-appointed perch at the top of the evolutionary ladder, then surely that creature could come from the same primordial soup as we once did? Prema Arasu is an adjunct research fellow at the University of Western Australia, and author of The Book of Sea Monsters: Leviathans of Literature (Adlard Coles, 2025) This article was first published in the Christmas 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
The REAL history behind 'All Creatures Great and Small'
Discover the vet who inspired a legacy that is still enjoyed today by fans of PBS America and Channel 5's All Creatures Great and Small
HistoryExtra's Lauren Good explores the life and career of James 'Alf' Wight, and what led him to write about his experiences as a veterinarian in the Yorkshire Dales. From his early years to his struggles with mental illness, this video shines a light on the man who wrote a series of books that would capture the public imagination and go on to sell in their millions. View Green Video on the source website
Who was the real James Herriot? The true story behind All Creatures Great and Small
The anecdotal works of the veterinarian James ‘Alf’ Wight have captivated readers for decades, been turned into a popular television series and even a must-see tourist attraction. Lauren Good explores the life and career of the man behind James Herriot, from his life in Thirsk, Yorkshire, to going AWOL during the Second World War and a struggle with mental illness
Since his book If Only They Could Talk was published in 1970, James Herriot – the pen name of James Alfred ‘Alf’ Wight – has delighted generations with endearing stories of his life as a veterinarian in North Yorkshire from the 1930s-50s. The charm of a country vet going about his rounds has since brought Wight global fame, from his first appearance in If Only They Could Talk (1970) to films (All Creatures Great and Small (1975) and It Shouldn’t Happen to a Vet (1976)) and television adaptations (the original from 1978-1990, and the Channel 5 series 2020-present). Yet, in his heart, he always favoured the quiet life in Yorkshire over the glare of the spotlight. Where was James Herriot born? Wight was born on 3 October 1916 at his mother Hannah Wight’s family home in Sunderland in the north of England. Having visited Sunderland to give birth, Hannah returned to Glasgow when Wight was just three weeks old, which is where he spent his early years – and explains the lilting Scottish accent that many associate with his literary alter-ego, James Herriot. An only child, Wight attended Yoker Primary School and Hillhead High School, before taking a place at veterinary college at the age of 17. James Herriot’s career as a vet Since he was a young boy, Wight had always loved animals and spent much of his time walking with his dog, an Irish Setter. His interest blossomed into a desire to be a vet – so that he could care for all kinds of creatures – when he read an article in Meccano Magazine about veterinary surgeons. Two years later, when a vet visited his school to give a lecture, his mind was made up; that was what he wanted to do with his life. Wight joined Glasgow Veterinary College and graduated just over six years later, in 1939 at the age of 23. It should have taken him five years, but he suffered from gastrointestinal problems and had to miss lectures, causing him to fail many of his modules on the first attempt. Still, Wight’s progress at the college was impressively swift when compared to some of his contemporaries. There were students who took 14 years to finish the five-year course; for many, training as a vet meant little work and lots of play. Following graduation, Wight’s professional career got underway – in Sunderland and not Thirsk, as is often assumed due to the setting of the James Herriot books. His mother’s family were still based in Sunderland, so he happily made use of the free accommodation. Though, it wasn’t long before he felt the pull of a rural life and headed to the Yorkshire countryside, where he joined Donald Sinclair’s veterinary practice at 23 Kirkgate, Thirsk. This would become the famous Skeldale House in the books and television adaptations, with Sinclair immortalised as the eccentric Siegfried Farnon. Who did James Herriot marry in real life? In his books, Wight’s alas James Herriot marries a farmer’s daughter named Helen Alderson, but her real-life counterpart was a secretary, Joan Danbury. Wight and Danbury married on 5 November 1941 at St Mary’s Church in Thirsk. Sadly, his parents didn’t approve of the match as they hoped he would marry someone of higher status. Their absence from the wedding haunted Wight throughout his life. Read more | The history of York: a northern powerhouse of many names Unable to afford any time away from work, the newlyweds could not enjoy a traditional honeymoon, but instead spent it in the village of Carperby. Wight tested cattle for tuberculosis while his wife took notes. The couple then settled into married life in the attic of 23 Kirkgate. “It would have been spartan,” their daughter, Rosie, told PBS America. “They had hardly any furniture. When we lived in that house, as we did until I was six, that bit at the top was never seen as anything but the attic. We kept a pig down the garden [and] they used to hang the hams on hooks up in that same attic!” How many children did James Herriot have? Wight and his wife Joan had two children: James (better known as Jim) and Rosemary (Rosie). Jim would replace his father as a partner in the veterinary practice upon Wight’s death, while Rosie became a GP. As a child, however, she had wanted to follow in her father’s footsteps. “He encouraged Jim, but not me,” she told PBS America. “I think predominantly because in those days vets were mostly men, particularly country vets. And I don’t think dad wanted his little girl lying in cow byres in the middle of the night, flat on her face. He kept saying, ‘No, you’d rather be a doctor, wouldn’t you?’ “And I have to say, I don’t regret it. I was happy being a doctor. I don’t think either of us thought of anything else to do apart from doctors and vets.” What did James Herriot do in the war? Although his profession exempted him from military service, Wight joined the Royal Air Force in November 1942 and trained to be a pilot. Proving his skills in the air, as well as on the farms of Yorkshire, he was one of the first in his unit to fly solo and would achieve the rank of leading aircraftman. Yet Wight wasn’t an exemplary RAF pilot, and did break the rules. On two occasions, he went absent without leave (AWOL), the first time while Joan was pregnant with Jim and the second when she was due to give birth. Luckily, he was never caught. How long did James Herriot go to war for? Wight’s RAF career was cut short by health issues, specifically surgery for an anal fistula that left him unfit for combat missions. The condition had plagued him since his days at veterinary college. After just a year of service, he was discharged in November 1943. Are the characters in All Creatures Great and Small based on real people? Many of the beloved characters in Wight's stories were inspired by real people in his life, although he used pseudonyms to protect their identities. Herriot’s wife Helen Alderson was based on Joan Danbury. And while it is true that she was engaged to another man before marrying Wight, the real Joan ended this relationship before walking to the altar – unlike Helen in the television series. Siegfried Farnon – who owns the Skeldale House veterinary practice – and his brother Tristan are the fictional counterparts of the Sinclair brothers, Donald and Brian. The real brothers shared a complex relationship, with Donald often exasperated by his younger brother’s laid-back approach to life: Brian took a decade to complete his course at the Royal Veterinary College in Edinburgh, and at Donald’s expense. A character who plays a prominent role in the most recent All Creatures Great and Small series is Mrs Hall, the housekeeper who keeps Skeldale House running. She represents various women who assisted Wight and the Sinclairs with domestic tasks at the practice. Then there is Mrs Pumphrey and her Pekingese, Tricki Woo, who were inspired by socialite Marjorie Warner and her dog Bambi. Like in the stories, she did indeed send luxury hampers to the practice as tokens of thanks. What was James Herriot’s relationship like with Siegfried and Tristan Farnon in real life? Much like in the books and television adaptations, Wight had close relationships with both Donald (the real-life Siegfried) and Brian (Tristan). The brothers were affectionately known as ‘uncle’ to his children, and when Brian left Thirsk to work at the Ministry of Agriculture in Leeds, Wight and his wife Joan visited him regularly. However, while Brian was said to have been fond of his portrayal in Wight’s books, Donald disliked his fictional counterpart, believing himself to be dissimilar to the inconsistent and sometimes explosive Siegfried. He even told Wight that his debut novel was “a test of our friendship”. That said, Donald was always eager to welcome avid fans of Wight's work on a tour around the surgery at 23 Kirkgate whenever they showed up, according to Wight’s son Jim. When did James Herriot start writing? It was only in his fifties that Wight began writing seriously, thanks to encouragement from Joan. It might be a surprise that his earlier works were not about his career as a vet, but about sport. He hoped that his love of football might make the writing process easier; in fact, his famous pen name of James Herriot was inspired by a Scottish goalkeeper. Wight’s first book If Only They Could Talk, took 18 months to write, and would be turned down by all the publishers he sent it to. A key moment came when he received a piece of advice from a reader at a publishing firm to write his anecdotal stories in first person rather than third, leading Wight to revise his manuscript. Read more | Pet cemeteries: where have beloved animals been laid to rest through the centuries? He then found a publisher and If Only They Could Talk was released, first as a serial in the London Evening Standard before full publication in April 1970. A total of 3,000 copies were distributed around the UK. This was followed by It Shouldn’t Happen to a Vet in 1972, the same year that both books were compiled and published under the title All Creatures Great and Small in the US. These proved a great success, quickly outstripping the initial run of 3,000. According to Macmillan Publishers, more than 80 million copies of Wight’s books have since been sold worldwide – and they have never been out of print. In what order were James Herriot’s books published? If Only They Could Talk (1970, UK) It Shouldn’t Happen to a Vet (1972, UK) All Creatures Great and Small (1972, US compilation) Let Sleeping Vets Lie (1973, UK) Vet in Harness (1974, UK) All Things Bright and Beautiful (1974, US compilation) Vets Might Fly (1976, UK) Vet in a Spin (1977, UK) All Things Wise and Wonderful (1977, US compilation) James Herriot’s Yorkshire (1979, UK, non-fiction) The Lord God Made Them All (1981, UK) Every Living Thing (1992, UK) How did James Herriot feel about his fame? Wight was astonished by his success, telling the Daily Mail in 1981: “I was dumbfounded by the reaction to that first book, absolutely dumbfounded. The most I had hoped for was that someone would publish it and a few people quite enjoy reading it.” Despite his growing notoriety, he changed little in his life and rarely spoke about his literary achievements, according to his family. The financial success of his books meant he no longer had to work, yet he continued to practise veterinary medicine in some capacity for pretty much the rest of his life. Wight insisted that the farmers in the Dales didn’t treat him any differently either, once famously exclaiming: “If a farmer calls me with a sick animal, he couldn’t care less if I were George Bernard Shaw.” Of course, another star of the books was 23 Kirkgate, which became something of a tourist hotspot for fans. By the late 1970s, with James Herriot a household name, hordes of people would queue outside the practice to have books signed by Wight. He agreed in return for donations to a dog sanctuary, later claiming that this brought in around £100 each time. Today, 23 Kirkgate houses the popular museum, The World of James Herriot. James Herriot’s struggles with mental illness Wight struggled with depression for much of his life, beginning during his time at Glasgow Veterinary College. He once wrote in his diary: “I have been getting intermittent fits of the blues of late, but I don’t know what’s up.” His mental health issues carried on into later life. Jim said in a 2010 interview with the Daily Mail that his father would describe his depressive episodes as a feeling of “overwhelming melancholy”. Wight had a nervous breakdown in 1960, which plagued him for two years. He even resorted to electroconvulsive therapy. How did James Herriot die? Diagnosed with prostate cancer in 1991, Wight died at his home on 23 February 1995, aged 78. He left behind an estate valued at more than £5 million and his share of the practice passed to Jim, according to his will. The name James Herriot has lived on, as new generations of fans come to Wight’s books and watch the highly popular Channel 5 series All Creatures Great and Small.
Medieval warhorses: 5 moments horsepower changed the course of history
From William the Conqueror’s battle-winning cavalry to Richard III’s fatal final charge, Oliver H Creighton and Robert Liddiard explore five moments when horsepower changed the course of medieval history
1. 1066 and all that Horses were involved in King Harold’s defeat at Hastings – but also in the demise of his Norman conqueror It’s one of the most famous of all medieval images. Harold II stands upon the battlefield at Hastings, desperately grasping at an arrow lodged in his eye. This incident – depicted in the Bayeux Tapestry – is credited with ending the English king’s life and extinguishing centuries of Anglo-Saxon rule. Yet look to the right of Harold and you’ll find an image that arguably goes even further in explaining his defeat: it depicts a sword-wielding warrior mounted upon a horse. The Norman conquest of England in 1066 was an era-defining event – and its centrepiece was the battle of Hastings. That clash is graphically represented on the Bayeux Tapestry, most memorably in the image of mounted Norman knights charging the line of Anglo-Saxon warriors on foot. It’s a powerful rendition of horses making history – and for William, Duke of Normandy, those animals proved critical in securing his victory. William began the day of the pivotal action, 14 October, by ordering reconnaissance missions, receiving intelligence from returning mounted scouts on the whereabouts of Harold’s forces. When the two armies later closed in to do battle, the Bayeux Tapestry shows us, the duke mounted his warhorse and exhorted his knights to “prepare themselves manfully and wisely” as they cantered towards the forthcoming engagement. During the nine-hour struggle, William was in the thick of the fighting – and two, or possibly three, of his horses were killed beneath him. The crucial part of the battle came when a rumour spread among the Normans that their commander had been killed. The duke hurriedly rode among his now-fleeing troops, his helmet raised to prove that he was alive, so preventing a rout. At this key moment it was the mobility provided by his mount that allowed William to be in the right place at the right time, averting disaster (for him). Despite the oft-repeated tale of the ‘arrow in the eye’, Harold’s death probably came after a group of mounted Norman knights broke through his bodyguard and cut him down. On this most dramatic of days, it was the horse that was William’s enabler – for intelligence-gathering, command and control, helping save his army from defeat by allowing him to visibly lead from the front. Yet though the horse helped cement the success of the Conqueror’s military career, it also played a part in its end. In 1087, the now-overweight William was characteristically urging on his troops as they set fire to the town of Mantes in France when his horse jumped a ditch – and “his stomach projected over the forward part of the saddle”, resulting in the rupture of the king’s internal organs. He died of his injuries some weeks later, his otherwise anonymous horse an unwitting participant in the death of one of England’s greatest warrior kings. 2. The Bruce's canny cavalry gambit Faced with a mighty English mounted army, the Scottish king used both horsemanship and cunning strategy to rout the invaders Robert the Bruce’s famous victory at the battle of Bannockburn, fought over two bloody days on 23–24 June 1314, was a landmark in the history of the British Isles, paving the way for Scottish independence from English rule. That outcome hinged on the inability of the English to effectively use their heavy cavalry in the face of tactics masterminded by the Scottish king. Edward II had invaded Scotland with a vast army, aiming to raise the siege of the strategically vital castle of Stirling. The core of his army comprised men at arms – professional soldiers, knights and nobles – on warhorses that were the embodiment of English military power. Heavily armoured and emblazoned with arms, these were elite steeds, expensively bred and trained in a royal stud network. The English army of around 13,000 substantially outnumbered Robert’s force of perhaps 6,000. A prelude to the battle known to every Scottish schoolchild proved an ill omen for the English. In a scene echoing the age-old clash of military champions in single combat, on the first day of action the English knight Sir Henry de Bohun spotted Robert the Bruce in front of his troops, and aimed to strike a decisive early blow by charging at the Scottish leader on his warhorse, lance in hand. Mounted on a smaller and more nimble mount, Robert skilfully manoeuvred to dodge his opponent and, standing up in his stirrups, in the words of the epic medieval poem The Brus, “Struck him such a great blow, That neither hat or helmet could stop”, cleaving Sir Henry’s “head to the brains” and smashing his battleaxe in the process. In preparation for the main action the following day, the Scots devised tactics to negate English cavalry strength. They chose for the battlefield a site where heavy horsemen could not operate easily – the area was marshy and intersected by a network of streams – and pockmarked the landscape with a minefield-like network of covered pits or ‘pots’ designed to trap horses. Fighting in compact formations known as schiltrons, the Bruce’s pike-armed foot soldiers were able to resist the disordered attacks of the English cavalry, which eventually disintegrated and broke. As King Edward was led away from the field towards the security of Stirling, Scottish soldiers were able to get close enough to grab at the caparison (cloth covering) of his horse, which was wounded beneath him, forcing the king to remount in his humiliating flight. 3. Under his dead body English rule in France was brought to a violent end when a renowned commander became trapped beneath the corpse of his own horse In the summer of 1453, with the tide of the Hundred Years’ War having turned in France’s favour, the veteran English commander Sir John Talbot, 1st Earl of Shrewsbury, found himself at the head of an army attempting to relieve the beleaguered garrison at Castillon in Aquitaine. His target was the besieging French army’s fortified encampment outside the town and, encouraged by dust clouds from what he believed were retreating soldiers, he ordered his own troops to attack. Talbot was the only Englishman to remain mounted – on a white riding horse – and went into battle without armour, honouring a vow he had made to the French king while a prisoner some years earlier. It soon transpired, though, that the French were not retreating – in fact, the dust had simply been raised by horses leaving the camp – and that Talbot’s men were facing the whole French army, dug in behind their fortifications and ready to fire more than 200 guns. Talbot, against the advice of some of his subordinates, pressed on with the assault, possibly because he believed that “his name alone would cause the enemy to flee”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/08/2AYGJ83-eae7084.jpg" width="1772" height="1181" alt="A brightly coloured image depicting a war scene. Many men, all dressed in armour and carrying spears and guns are attacking each other in a large group. One man is trapped under a white horse that has fallen down" title="A 15th-century illustration depicts the death of English commander John Talbot (bottom left), trapped under a stricken horse at the 1453 battle of Castillon (Image by Alamy)" /> What followed was a disaster for his forces: they were cut down by swathes of cannon fire, with every shot from the French artillery taking out up to six English soldiers. After two hours of fighting, the English army was attacked in the flank by a group of Bretons – and, as Talbot sought to deal with the threat, the whole French army sallied out from their camp to complete the rout. While attempting to steady his retreating forces, Talbot’s horse was struck by a cannonball. As the earl lay powerless beneath his steed, a French soldier dispatched him with an axe blow. Talbot’s smashed body was identified by his herald the following day, the telltale feature being a missing tooth in his lower jaw. An examination of his skeleton in the 19th century found evidence of a 7 x 1.6cm hole in his skull, confirming the violent manner of his death. Though described by his adversaries at the time as France’s “dread and terror”, the old earl was held in such respect by the French commanders that they founded a chapel on the spot where he had been killed – a fitting tribute to a veteran campaigner of the chivalric age. His horse received no such monument, though it had played a vital part in the first battle in which artillery proved to be the decisive weapon – and which was also the clash that ultimately led to the end of English rule in France. 4. Did a lost horse doom a dynasty? As the battle of Bosworth raged, Richard III launched a cavalry charge at Henry Tudor but ended up losing the throne – and his life “A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!” Richard III’s final words before his death at the battle of Bosworth, as imagined by Shakespeare, have a special place in English memory. Tudor propaganda has, famously, coloured popular views of that king’s character and reign, but we have a good understanding of the demise of England’s last Yorkist king – and it was an event in which horses played a central role, if not quite as portrayed by Shakespeare. On 22 August 1485, Richard’s army clashed with the forces of Henry Tudor in the Leicestershire countryside in what’s often considered to have been the final battle in the Wars of the Roses. Following an infantry engagement between the vanguards of the opposing forces, Richard – spotting that his rival was protected by only a small lifeguard – mounted a heavy cavalry charge at Henry. This was not necessarily the desperate act of a doomed monarch, as has been argued; it could have been a carefully calculated attempted decapitation of the rebel leader that would end the battle there and then. In the words of the prime Tudor source for the battle, Polydore Vergil, the king “strick his horse with the spurres” and charged, accompanied by a small body of capable and loyal knights. The gambit almost succeeded: Henry’s standard bearer was killed in the melee, but the charge was stopped and driven towards a marshy area. Richard’s actions were all the more remarkable given that previous battles in the Wars of the Roses had seen little in the way of cavalry action; most of the clashes had been brutal slugfests in which leaders as well as soldiers fought mainly on foot. The king’s attack ultimately proved to be a brief last hurrah for the fabled heavy cavalry charge by medieval knights. The grim reality of exactly how Richard met his end has become clearer since his remains, discovered beneath a Leicester car park in 2012, were subjected to scientific analysis. The concentration of multiple wounds on his head shows that he wasn’t wearing a helmet, and must have been dismounted when he suffered these blows. This accords with the account of Molinet, the only contemporary source detailing Richard’s final moments, who said that the king was killed by a Welsh halberdier after his horse became stuck in marshy ground. In a final indignity, Richard’s dead, naked body was hung over a horse to be taken back to Leicester for burial. A wound through the buttocks, revealed by analysis of the skeleton, suggests this was when a “humiliation injury” was inflicted on the royal corpse. What might have happened had Richard’s cavalry charge broken through and killed Henry Tudor? This is one of the great ‘what ifs’ of English history. In the event, that failure of horse-powered warfare proved the turning point of the battle that heralded the end of the Middle Ages – and tipped England into a new Tudor future. 5. How the mighty have fallen When Henry VIII took a tumble during a joust, he suffered an injury that may have transformed the Tudor dynasty Bosworth may have witnessed the last hurrah for the mounted knight charging across the battlefield, but the knightly tournament lost none of its importance. It remained the pre-eminent vehicle for displays of aristocratic masculinity well into the 16th century. Henry VIII took particular enjoyment in jousting, and constructed a series of purpose-built tiltyards at his lavish homes. It was at his palace and equestrian centre at Greenwich on 24 January 1536 that the 44-year-old Henry suffered a famous accident while jousting with his courtier and friend Sir Henry Norris. During a tilt, Henry’s lance hit Norris’s saddle – and the force of the impact toppled the king from his own saddle, with his horse landing on top of him. Some accounts detailing the severity of Henry’s injuries state that he was knocked unconscious for two hours. Others glossed over the episode, but there seems little doubt that the incident was serious. At the very least, the fall seems to have opened up an older leg injury that plagued the king for the rest of his life, and which also curtailed his ability to take part in hunting. Certainly, Henry never jousted again, and historians have speculated that this accident sparked a turning point in his reign and character. Over the years that followed, the once-athletic king became an increasingly unhealthy, unpredictable and despotic tyrant. While the horse in question may not have been wholly responsible for a sea change in the personality of the king, it may unwittingly have had a hand in the royal succession. Not long after Henry’s fall, Anne Boleyn miscarried his unborn son – a misfortune that, the queen and others believed, had been brought on by worry following the king’s accident. The exact cause of that tragic episode remains unknowable, of course – but if the pregnancy had gone to full term, and if Anne had given birth to a male heir, then the history of the Tudor dynasty could have been very different. Oliver H Creighton is professor of archaeology at the University of Exeter. Robert Liddiard is professor of history at the University of East Anglia. They are co-editors of Medieval Warhorse: Equestrian Landscapes, Material Culture and Zooarchaeology in Britain, AD 800–1550 (Liverpool University Press, 2025) This article was first published in the August 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
"Dog poo was valuable": 5 things you (probably) didn't know about dogs
Chris Pearson reveals surprising facts about humanity’s evolving relationship with its canine companions over the centuries
1. Dogs were treated as workers, not pets Today, most dogs – certainly in western societies – are pets, providing companionship in return for food, strokes and a comfy bed (or sofa). But pet-keeping is a relatively recent phenomenon. In the Middle Ages, pets were largely the preserve of wealthy women and scholars. Most dogs were expected to work outdoors as guard dogs, herders and hunters. From the 18th century, though, urbanisation, industrialisation and the rise of middle-class consumer cultures fuelled a boom in pet dogs that led increasingly leisurely lives. Working dogs became less common, and some types disappeared altogether. Take the turnspit dog, forced to run around in a wheel to turn meat cooked in front of kitchen fires. These small, sturdy dogs with long bodies, short legs and stumpy tails worked for hours on end in sweltering conditions. Possibly the last recorded uses of turnspit dogs was at St Briavel’s Castle, Gloucestershire in 1844. They were replaced by coal-fuelled smoke jacks. Listen | How dogs shaped city life 2. Rabies changed how we live with dogs Rabies is a rare but horrific viral disease that attacks the nervous system. It has ancient origins: the Marduk Prophecy, an Assyrian text dating from between 713 and 612 BC, listed rabies as one of the plagues that would afflict Babylon should the deity Marduk leave the city to its fate: “Dogs will become rabid and bite people. All the persons whom they bite will not survive but will die.” The symptoms of rabies are terrifying – including, most notoriously, a fear of water – and, once they have developed, death is almost inevitable. Historical treatments for rabies, including the hair of the dog – placing a hair from the rabid animal on a bite wound – were ineffective. Unsurprisingly, then, outbreaks of public hysteria about rabid dogs erupted sporadically, often whipped up by the press, which gleefully reported stories of ‘mad dogs’. Such anxieties led to changes in how humans and dogs lived together. In the 19th century, countless street dogs were rounded up, killed or muzzled, and dog movements became more tightly controlled. These measures continued even after the introduction of Louis Pasteur’s much-heralded vaccination in 1885, and after it spread across Europe and around the globe. Although indigenous canine rabies was eradicated from Britain in 1902, the legacy of fear of the disease is evident in the absence of street dogs and widespread leashing in the UK. Read more | The race for a cure: how we found vaccines for 4 of history's most dangerous diseases 3. Dog poo was a valuable resource Today, dog faeces is a disgusting nuisance on many streets, and a frequent cause of complaints – but it wasn’t always so. In the 19th century, some poor Parisians collected and sold this ordure to mégissiers (tannery workers), who turned sheepskins into leather: 10kg of dog faeces could treat 12,000 skins. Henry Mayhew, the famous social investigator, wrote about “pure finders” in his book London Labour and the London Poor (1851). ‘Pure’ was the term for dog poo used to scour and purify goat and calf skins in the Bermondsey tanyards, removing moisture from the tissue and improving the smell of leather destined for book covers and other uses. Mayhew found that pure finders were better educated than the bone grubbers and other labourers within London’s blood-and-guts economy: many were former tradespeople, mechanics or semi- skilled labourers who had fallen on hard times. As streets became paved and cleaner, authorities began to introduce anti-fouling rules and measures, which were tightened up further during the 19th century. The former use of dog excrement as a valuable resource was forgotten, and it became merely another smelly problem to solve. 4. Dog breeds were invented in Victorian Britain In the UK and other western countries, we understand dogs primarily through the prism of breed, which is often seen as reflecting the personality of an owner. Crufts and other shows reinforce the notion that dogs are supposed to look and behave a certain way. But this system of categorising dogs is relatively new. Before the 19th century, dogs were defined by what they did rather than how they looked. Then, during the Victorian era, an assortment of aristocratic British breeders and working-class dog fanciers (men who bred animals, often terriers, for fighting and display) founded breed lineages, stud books and dog shows. Read more | The surprising history of Victorian dog shows The Kennel Club, founded in 1873, was emulated across the world as breeders invented lineages and standards, classifying doggy diversity into defined breeds. Mongrels and dogs of no fixed breed survived, but the system had become firmly established as the dominant way to understand and value dogs. 5. Dogs have a colonial history Today, debate rages about the merits, faults and legacy of the British empire, but it may come as a surprise to learn that dogs were part of this story. British workers and administrators took dogs with them to the colonies, expressing concerns about how their pets would adapt to the Indian climate or life in the west African bush. They also exported the trappings of Victorian dog culture – in India, their foxhounds chased jackals instead of the russet species hunted in Britain – along with distinctly imperialist attitudes. There was an imperialist belief that European pedigree dogs were more civilised than African and Asian canines, which they labelled ‘pariah’ after the oppressed Paraiyar caste group of southern India. Meanwhile, kennel clubs and dog shows were established, along with animal protection societies that often castigated local people’s cruelty towards animals. Imperial authorities also used dogs to police enslaved people in the Caribbean and colonised communities in Palestine, Kenya and Rhodesia, and launched campaigns to cull street dogs. At times, these measures were resisted: in 1832, a large-scale protest was launched to oppose culling in Bombay. At others, local elites colluded, even participating in dog shows. Listen | Dog history: everything you wanted to know Chris Pearson is professor of environmental history at the University of Liverpool. His latest book is Collared: How We Made the Modern Dog (Profile, 2024)
Why is a mythical catfish to blame for earthquakes in Japan?
According to Japanese mythology, the thrashing of a giant subterranean catfish causes the earthquakes that wreak havoc on the country. Far from being a feared or hated monster, however, this catfish can also be a force for good
Japan is no stranger to earthquakes. Located on the Ring of Fire, a seismically active area around the edge of the Pacific Basin, the country experiences around 2,000 quakes every year and around 20 per cent of all the world’s seismic events over a magnitude of six on the Richter Scale. Long before scientific explanations, Japanese folk myth came up with its own reasons to explain why the ground could suddenly and violently shake. At first, the blame was placed on dragons or serpents; then in the 17th century, it shifted to a creature called Namazu. Who is Namazu, the Earthshaker? Namazu is a giant catfish believed to live in underground rivers and seas beneath Japan and caused earthquakes by rubbing its body against the rocks or thrashing its mighty tail. In Japanese myth, the thunder god Takemikazuchi did manage to subdue and restrain the creature by pinning the head down with a stone (though in some versions, he thrust a sword through the catfish’s head.) The stone, kaname-ishi, is so large that its uppermost tip can supposedly be seen on the earth’s surface, sticking out of the ground at the Kashima Jingu shrine in Japan’s Kanto region. When Takemikazuchi becomes distracted, however, or is called away to an annual gathering of the gods, Namazu is able to wriggle around. That’s enough to bring about an earthquake. Read more | Dragons: from mythological beasts of history to the fire breathers of fantasy Images of symbolic catfish in Japan date back to the 15th century, and the animal may have been chosen as the mythical harbinger of destruction as the result of a widely held belief among Japanese fishermen. Apparently, they would observe catfish acting strangely right before a seismic event. Today, the catfish is used as the logo for early earthquake warnings sent out by the Japan Meteorological Agency, and also appears on the road signs to let drivers know which highways will be shut in the event of a quake. Which earthquakes have been blamed on Namazu? It was after a series of major earthquakes between 1854 and 1860, the so-called Great Ansei Earthquakes, that the Namazu myth truly became embedded in Japanese popular imagination. In particular, the 1855 quake that hit Edo (Tokyo), which resulted in as many as 10,000 deaths, was blamed firmly on the catfish. In the aftermath, hundreds of woodblock prints, namazu-e, were produced showing the catfish wreaking havoc or being weighed down by the stone-wielding god. Read more | The Great Kantō earthquake: a 1923 disaster that left Tokyo in ruins Namazu was also a force for good Namazu was not depicted solely as a destructive force, but a purifying one. At a time of cosmic imbalance – caused by a corrupt government or social ills, say – Namazu can be a force for good by bringing about yonaoshi (world renewal). Therefore, Namazu equally represented good fortune and the redistribution of wealth. After all, the 1855 quake hit the affluent parts of the city the hardest, as well as the government district, which meant that there was suddenly a lot of work, and money, for poor labourers and builders. In some of the namazu-e prints, the catfish was shown showering gold on the people (in others, rich people are seen firing out coins from their behinds) or, in a half-human form, celebrating with the workers in the entertainment districts of Edo.
How pigs caused a stink in medieval England
Dolly Jørgensen explores medieval England's love-hate relationship with the urban pig
They attacked children. They exhumed dead bodies. They were even thought to be in league with the devil. And yet, despite this long list of misdemeanours, pigs were an indispensable part of urban life in the Middle Ages. Speaking to Spencer Mizen, Dolly Jørgensen reveals why medieval city-dwellers were so dependent on swine – and explains what city authorities did to prevent rogue pigs from running riot. Dolly Jørgensen is the author of The Medieval Pig (Boydell Press, 2024) Buy now on Bookshop.org Buy now on Amazon Buy now on Waterstones
Dolly Jørgensen considers why the pig was so vital to urban life in the Middle Ages
They killed children, exhumed dead bodies and caused an almighty stink. So why, asks this Long Read written by Dolly Jørgensen, were our medieval ancestors so dependent on the urban pig? HistoryExtra Long Reads brings you the best articles from BBC History Magazine, direct to your ears. Today’s feature originally appeared in the October 2024 issue, and has been voiced in partnership with the RNIB.
Victorian zoos: animal attraction in the 19th century
If the Surrey Zoological Garden was anything to go by, a zoo in the Georgian and Victorian eras was so much more than a place to see animals from around the world. Joanne Cormac reveals how the entertainments put on – which included pyrotechnic re-enactments of the Great Fire of London – reflected Britons’ growing taste for the exotic in the 19th century
One fine day in late spring 1835, veteran aeronaut Charles Green climbed into a hot air balloon from a raft floating on a lake, and soared into the sky. Flight was nothing new for Green – this was his 198th ascent – but today he was joined by an unusual passenger: Jacopo the monkey, a resident of the Surrey Zoological Gardens. As this unlikely duo floated above Walworth, then just south of London, Jacopo, wearing a smart red jacket, descended “with great velocity” in a specially made parachute, to the delight of the watching crowds. Jacopo was physically unharmed, though newspaper reports of the event noted that he “seemed not much to relish the ride”. A label was attached to the poor primate, promising a small fee – and free admission to the gardens – for anyone who found him. Evidently, Jacopo was brought back safely; two years later he returned to the skies, this time with Margaret Graham, the first British woman to make a solo balloon flight. The hot air balloon ride was one of many attractions at Surrey Zoological Gardens, which had opened on 13 August 1831 in the grounds of Walworth Manor House, Kennington. At the time, zoos were rare novelties but, as the public clamour for encounters with exotic animals swelled, they began popping up across Great Britain and Ireland. Read more | Where was England's first zoo? Many of them no longer exist. Surrey Zoo was one of the casualties, yet in its heyday it was an enormous hit with the public. It is the quintessential example of the menagerie-style zoo that struck such a chord with Britons in the 19th century. In its day Surrey’s zoo was the main rival of London Zoo at Regent’s Park. These were, however, very different establishments. Like most early zoos (including those in Dublin, Bristol and Manchester), London’s had lofty ambitions and was aimed at educated society seeking enlightenment. Surrey Zoo, on the other hand, offered exoticism, imperial display and commercial entertainment for its fashionable clientele – all typically Victorian phenomena. A look at its popularity, as well as the activities visitors enjoyed, provides us today with intriguing insights into Victorian ideals and leisure pursuits. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2023/01/GettyImages-90763997-6837239.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Illustration of a rhinoceros and its calf from a Dutch work on the natural history of Indonesia, published between 1839 and 1844 (Photo by SSPL/Getty Images)" title="Illustration of a rhinoceros and its calf from a Dutch work on the natural history of Indonesia, published between 1839 and 1844 (Photo by SSPL/Getty Images)" /> Avid collector The driving force behind the Surrey Zoological Gardens was animal dealer Edward Cross. He had bought a small menagerie in 1814, which he exhibited at the Exeter Exchange, a building on the north side of the Strand in central London. His collection, which attracted such famous figures as William Wordsworth and Lord Byron, included lions, tigers, leopards, monkeys, hyenas, an emu, an Andean condor and a male Asiatic elephant named Chunee. The animals were kept in small cages in conditions that were troubling even at the time. Chunee was confined to a small wooden enclosure, and was frequently aggressive. Cross, fearing he might escape, decided to have him put down – a feat that took 152 musket shots to complete. Press reports of the episode created considerable adverse publicity for Cross. By the late 1820s, he was considering the future of the menagerie. Cross wanted to join forces with the new Zoological Society of London (ZSL) that had formed in 1826, establishing London Zoo in 1828. His offer to sell his collection – on the condition that he also be taken on as manager of the zoo – was refused three times. ZSL was keen to move away from the idea of a menagerie as spectacle and entertainment. Instead, they were interested in the nascent science of zoology. True, there were educational aspects to Cross’s menagerie: some of these animals had never been seen before – or only rarely – in England. However, his was primarily a commercial venture; he bought and displayed animals for the entertainment of the public and his own profit. By contrast, London Zoo was an innovator in the scientific study of animal life, taxonomy, conservation and captive animal husbandry. Its habitat designs, including the world’s first aquarium, provided exemplars to other zoos. And its staff members became leading authorities on the animals in their care, spreading their growing knowledge of thousands of species through regular publications. Edward Cross was just not their sort of person. Forced to find an alternative, Cross decided to sell his menagerie to another fledgling society: the Surrey Zoological and Botanical Institution (which he had co-founded in 1831). It accepted the collection, and Cross became superintendent of the new Surrey Zoological Gardens. Read more | A brief history of London tourism since 1800 Establishing a zoo was a risky venture. New exotic animals had to be sourced and transported to Surrey to populate the larger premises, and the arrival of such creatures was big news in the 1830s. London newspapers regularly reported on acquisitions made by the Surrey Zoological Gardens, naming each ship transporting the animals, and its captain. Excited members of the public waited at the dock to catch a glimpse of a tail or a flash of teeth and claws. Sometimes the animals were unloaded at night to evade the crowds. The papers eagerly printed exquisite drawings of the animals, alongside descriptions of their habitats in exotic locales – and daring stories of their violent capture. Sadly, many animals did not survive the journey to Britain; others died soon after the ship docked. A couple of weeks after the zoo opened, papers reported that a rhinoceros had died during the crossing from the Cape Colony (now part of South Africa). <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2023/01/AKG4894759-859538c.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Edward Cross’s menagerie at the Exeter Exchange, c1820. Animals here, such as lions, elephants and monkeys, were confined to small cages and kept in poor conditions (Photo by Heritage-Images / Oxford Science Archive / akg-images)" title="Edward Cross’s menagerie at the Exeter Exchange, c1820. Animals here, such as lions, elephants and monkeys, were confined to small cages and kept in poor conditions (Photo by Heritage-Images / Oxford Science Archive / akg-images)" /> A pack of hounds In the 19th century, the British empire encompassed colonies in Africa, India, the Americas and Australia, providing rich pickings for British collectors and zoologists. Cross was one of those tapping into the empire’s networks of trade and exploitation to source new animals. Soon after the loss of that unfortunate African rhinoceros, the zoo successfully sourced an Asian rhino from Calcutta (now Kolkata), reportedly owned previously by one of the “Rajahs” of India who had traded it for a “full pack of English hounds”. Wealthy collectors returning from their travels would sometimes donate animals to the zoo. In 1832, former naval officer and colonist Captain William Langdon returned from Australia and the Falkland Islands with kangaroos, possums and geese, which he presented to the zoo. Sometimes the animals’ keepers travelled with them. The zoo proudly advertised its “Giraffes attended by Nubian keepers”, who themselves became part of the exotic displays. Read more | Life with the lions: the Tower of London menagerie Even when animals arrived safely, further challenges often arose. Many died simply because the keepers were not knowledgeable enough to care for them. Others escaped. A black swan was reported missing in September 1833, when a “handsome” finder’s fee was offered. There were also human fatalities. In August 1833, one of Cross’s employees, George Chard, was gored to death by a wildebeest he’d whipped in an effort to force it to perform for spectators. Such was the enthusiasm for exotic creatures in the Regency era that some animals became celebrities. One of the oldest inmates at the zoo – one that had been among Cross’s original collection at the Exeter Exchange – was a mandrill named Happy Jerry. He had been brought to England on a slave ship captured off the Gold Coast (now Ghana) in 1815, reports claimed. He had, according to those same reports, been taught to sit in a chair, smoke and drink liquor, and was fed from Cross’s table “as a parlour guest”. Jerry became so famous that George IV invited him to dine at Windsor Castle, where the king was said to have been delighted by watching the mandrill eat specially prepared venison. Read more | The surprising history of Victorian dog shows On its opening, the Surrey Zoological and Botanical Institution emphasised its contribution to the new science of zoology. By the 1840s, though, the animals began to be overshadowed by other attractions – firework displays, historical tableaux comprising 20-metre-high painted sets and trapeze acts. In June 1844, the zoo advertised a “Terrific Representation of the Great Fire of London in 1666” as viewed from the Thames. It would include “new and extraordinary effects” and would be the “crowning triumph of the pyrotechnic art”. During an “Eruption of Vesuvius” in June 1846, crowds gasped as smoke and red and green flames issued from the “volcano”. Rumbling noises built up to a huge explosion after which lava gushed “in an overwhelming torrent” over models of Herculaneum and Pompeii. Of course, such tumult would surely have had a traumatising effect on the nervous animals. National and imperial values underpinned many of the tableaux. In the summer of 1847, visitors enjoyed a recreation of the siege of Gibraltar, advertised as featuring “the blowing up of the battering ships!” and a demonstration of “the invincible prowess of British Arms!” Other displays celebrated the vast reach of the empire – one example being a recreation of the “Temples of Elora from Hindoo Mythology”, at a time when Britain was increasing its control of India. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2023/01/GettyImages-464782739-f814ad7.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="A representation of the eruption of Vesuvius at the Surrey Zoological Gardens (Photo by Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)" title="A representation of the eruption of Vesuvius at the Surrey Zoological Gardens (Photo by Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)" /> Adding some music Music was increasingly introduced to indulge the Victorian taste for variety entertainments. During the late 1830s and early 1840s, the zoo hosted concerts by a Russian horn band, a quadrille band and a concertina soloist. In 1844, it invested in a house act: Mr Godfrey and his wind band. Alongside the regular polkas, quadrilles, national songs and waltzes that were so popular with audiences, in August 1844 Godfrey conducted a full performance of Beethoven’s Sixth (Pastoral) Symphony, arranged for wind instruments. Seeing the huge popularity of Godfrey’s concerts, the zoo’s directors invested yet more heavily in musical entertainment. In 1845, they hired charismatic French conductor Louis Jullien, a celebrity skilled in self-promotion. He encouraged fantastical stories circulating in the press claiming that he had moved to London to escape Parisian creditors, having been injured in a duel, reported dead and forced to hide in a farmhouse. Jullien was handsome, it was said, sporting a shock of curly hair and a neat moustache, and was always fashionably dressed, wearing white gloves. In June 1845, he gave his first “Concert Monstre” at the zoo, conducting an orchestra of 300 musicians on a huge covered platform to an audience of 12,000 people. Jullien continued Godfrey’s model of promenade concerts but on a larger scale, recruiting musicians from all over Europe. He was a real showman, adding extra effects including fireworks and dioramas, weaving the music directly into a story. During the “storm” section of the Pastoral he rattled a box of dried peas to evoke the sound of falling hailstones, and added “Military Effects” to his performance of Beethoven’s Battle Symphony. He himself was theatrical and energetic; indeed, he was often accused of “over-conducting” – visibly acting out the music. Surrey Zoological Gardens was now far more than a place to admire or learn about exotic animals. Its various performances, sights and experiences constantly evolved to appeal to the fashionable public’s desire for novelty. Jullien’s arrival coincided with the peak of the zoo’s popularity, but it began to struggle in the 1850s. Stiff competition had emerged from other zoos and pleasure gardens, and from the Great Exhibition at Crystal Palace, with its wide variety of exhibits including music and exotica. The gardens became run down and no longer as fashionable as they had seemed in their 1840s heyday. Finally, in 1855, the animals were auctioned off, and Surrey Music Hall was built on the site (though that was itself destroyed by fire only a few years later, in 1861). The gardens closed the following year and in 1877 were sold for housing development. Today, a small part of what was Surrey Zoological Gardens – now named Pasley Park – is open to visitors. An information board and two ostrich sculptures are the only reminders of the exotic animals, the monster concerts and the magnificent firework displays that drew such crowds in the 1840s. The simian aeronaut Jacopo is long forgotten. Joanne Cormac is a research fellow at the University of Nottingham This article was first published in the January 2023 issue of BBC History Magazine Explore more learning from our course on Victorian Britain HistoryExtra Academy video lecture with Ruth Goodman | Victorian leisure Week two quiz: leisure in Victorian Britain Cricket, cocaine and cocoa houses: pastimes in Victorian Britain Victorian zoos: animal attraction in the 19th century The surprising history of Victorian dog shows Frozen Charlotte dolls: the Victorian Barbie Discover the whole course here