British History Online

Things You MUST NOT DO In Covent Garden Never hurl a parsnip.

Things You MUST NOT DO In Covent Garden

A look at the old market byelaws painted on boards at Covent Garden.

londonist.com/london/histo...

#LegalHistory #London

Bristol Radical History Festival 2026 - Bristol Radical History Group The Bristol Radical History Festival returns this Spring for its eighth edition, with history talks, panel discussions, films, history walks, performance and exhibitions. There will also be space devo...

Bristol Radical History Festival, 25th & 26th April, program announced:

www.brh.org.uk/site/event-s...

#RadicalHistory #History

Image showing the new interface for the 2003 Medieval Markets & Fairs dataset.

Medieval Markets & Fairs in England & Wales: remember the excellent dataset published back in 2003? I've given it a snazzy new interface, incorporating various updates which were made following publication.

Separately, I'm working on extending it to 1846...

ihr-digital.github.io/markets-and-...

It's more a case of implementation than purpose.
If a bot obeys robots.txt, then fine.
If not, no.

It's very difficult to differentiate malicious scrapers hiding their intentions and origins from legitimate users.

*sigh* disruptions, not siruptions.

Anne Shakespeare's Epitaph Cambridge Core - Printing and Publishing History - Anne Shakespeare's Epitaph

New from Cambridge elements, free to access until 24th March:

Anne Shakespeare's Epitaph by Katherine West Scheil

www.cambridge.org/core/element...

#Shakespeare #History

Dear everyone,

As per the post from the Bodleian librarian below, AI bots and scrapers are putting just about every website under great pressure, British History Online included.

A lot of excellent tech staff are working hard to keep everything working, but outages and siruptions are inevitable.

Screenshot of the homepage of Harris's List of Covent Garden Ladies digital archive.

I've put online a #c18th side project on Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies that uses data extraction for mapping & network analysis, exploring questions of urban history, genre and print culture, geography, and social worlds across editions:

harrisslist.prisms.digital

#HarrissList #DH #WIP

New Open Access article by Richard Huzzey and Katrina Navickas, 'From Repertoires to Recipes: Rethinking Political Organisation in the Long 19th Century' 🧐💾👇💻🙋

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/share/WKHAW9...

@richardhuzzey.bsky.social @katrinanavickas.bsky.social @parlhistjournal.bsky.social

ICYMI:

Submissions for our annual PhD Lightning Talks event closes this Friday 13 March! If you are in the first two years of your PhD, work on the field of British history in the long 18th cent (1660-1830) and are looking to share your research, get in touch!

royalhistsoc.org/calendar/ihr...

The Parliamentary Debates

#PublicDomain #Hansard vols from 1908, released by Google Books:

books.google.co.uk/books?id=7zL...
books.google.co.uk/books?id=qWJ...
books.google.co.uk/books?id=RCg...
books.google.co.uk/books?id=0UQ...
books.google.co.uk/books?id=rUQ...
books.google.co.uk/books?id=fCU...

'Author and researcher Dr Clare Sandford-Couch is part of a group of academics researching the history of women in the prison and co-wrote the book Newcastle Prison: A History, 1828-1925.'

Who was smuggling in 18th century Britain? My refreshed database for prosecutions for smuggling in England and Wales c. 1721-1732 is live with over 4,000 entries. From naval officers to farmers, smuggling was big business. #twitterstorians #earlymod #history
www.davidchansmith.net/smugglingdat...

NB - if you want to read what we published about the area (in 1912), you can find it @bho.bsky.social.

Trust us, our account of Battersea is not only the 'classic VCH' listing of manors and churches, but starts with a bracing essay on the area and its topography from 693 to the then present. 🗃️

Also worth noting for the ‘everything is online’ crowd that the numbers of archives being destroyed means that an increasing proportion cannot ever be online.

Resources for Historians The IHR offers a wide range of online resources and publications for historians. These pages introduce and provide access to these resources.

The @ihr.bsky.social has brought all its online resources - journals, @vch-home.bsky.social, OA book series, @bho.bsky.social, BBIH, @layersoflondon.bsky.social, and more - into one section of its website for easier access bit.ly/4cCrpUD.

Much of this content is free to use online #Skystorians

#20s30s

generalstrike100.com?event=15296#...

A tale of a common #C18th experience, of being detained for debt for just a few days.

#History #DebtHistory

Portrait of Jacques-Pierre Brissot (c. 1790), by François Bonneville. Musée Carnavalet, Histoire de Paris (P2608).

New blog post: "Jacque-Pierre Brissot in the Sponging House" inneskeighren.com/williammacin... #C18

Tea tray image

Enclosure Resistance in Middlesex, 1656 - 1889: A Study of Common Right Assertion A thesis submitted to Middlesex University in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

How did I get to this stage of historical research without knowing of the existence of an anti-enclosure tea tray.

I love a good tea tray.

Memorabilia from a successful resistance attempt in Bedfont, Middlesex, 1801.
Of interest to @markcrail.bsky.social ?
Ref PhD thesis by Paul Carter, 1998.

An important new article on #DigitalHistory infrastructure (and #OpenAccess too):

Show Me the Data: New Practices for Historical Sources

www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

#History

Match-box makers photographed working from home in c.1906. The photo shows a woman and girl assembling matchboxes with cut pieces of card and assembled boxes on a table in front of them. They are sitting in front of a fireplace and next to a bed which has piles of flatpack boxes, a basket and rugs on it. The bedroom includes patterned wallpaper, pictures on the wall and a large decoration in a glass dome on top of the mantlepiece.

Match-box makers, c.1906

In 1906 'sweated' (poorly paid) homeworkers were put on public display as part of a 6 week exhibition organised by the Daily News

The exhibition handbook included photos of workers (mostly women) in their usual domestic working conditions
warwick.ac.uk/services/lib...

A version of this is now up — will post expanded versions in the future. sarahbull.me/mapping-nine...

CFP: Race, Law and Empire

All the authors of the paper are on Bluesky, and all worth a follow:

@ruthahnert.bsky.social, @kmcdono.bsky.social and
@danielwilson.bsky.social

18TH CENTURY BRITISH HISTORY PHD LIGHTNING TALKS CFP

Are you at the start of your PhD? Want to tell an eager and engaged audience about it in 5 mins? We want to hear the best PGR research about 18th Britain at our #LightningTalks event 29 April 2026.

Please see the poster for further information!

Vote With Your Fingers When I was a student, I remember identifying journal articles on a paper reading list, then trundling off to the library to visit the stacks, where journals were stored on sardine shelves, that cou…

Good commentary on the article from @willpooley.bsky.social

williamgpooley.wordpress.com/2026/02/16/v...

#History

An important new article on #DigitalHistory infrastructure (and #OpenAccess too):

Show Me the Data: New Practices for Historical Sources

www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

#History

Student London Students have formed a significant part of London’s population since the foundation of its first university in 1826, and Student London centres their experiences in the city’s history. To tell the 200...

Two new #OpenAccess histories from @uclpress.bsky.social:

Student London
A new history of higher education in the capital

uclpress.co.uk/book/student...

Survey of London:
University College London, The Bloomsbury Campus

uclpress.co.uk/book/univers...

#History #LondonHistory