What's a life well-lived? Researchers looked at 38 MILLION obituaries over 30 years to study virtue. Among the fascinating results, this one is chilling: After the pandemic, benevolence dropped in popularity and never recovered. In its place, tradition as a virtue experienced a popularity surge.🧪

With the launch of UK govt's "Foreign Influence Registration Scheme" we can see that there are two British firms registered as lobbying on behalf of Bosnian clients, which in each case are actually the Russian-backed Serb secessionist regime in Banja Luka. Presumably focused on lifting UK sanctions.

Who did what in early modern England? New #OpenAccess book, 'The Experience of Work in Early Modern England' by @jwhittle.bsky.social, @markhailwood.bsky.social, @hkrobb.bsky.social & @aucointaylor.bsky.social, based on thousands of #EarlyModern court depositions 🗃️ Read it: doi.org/10.1017/9781...

A door with unusual ironwork this #ADoorAbleThursday: from the medieval hospital of Bijloke in Ghent, a broad inserted post-med doorway in the cloister wall with L-plan straps and iron harrs (hinges) sitting in cuttings in the threshold and lintel. Only seen harr-hung doors in 🇬🇧 before, nice find!

I'm hugely honoured and very excited to be giving this year's Historical Research #Lecture at @ihr.bsky.social, on 'Can popular #history be radical? Historical research and writing for the #public'. Tuesday 4 November, all welcome. More info in AltText. Book here: www.sas.ac.uk/news-events/...

Just finished listening to the first episode of #AHistoryOfEnglandIn25Poems. Did they play me out with Elgar's Nimrod? Of course they did! Broadcast every day this week at 11.45 (repeated at half past midnight) + on BBC Sounds: www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/brand...

Appel à contribution – The Sale of Governance in Pre-Modern Europe and the Mediterranean (1100-1600) rmblf.be/2025/09/27/a...

Ok. They’ve pissed me off. I’m back to tell you 3 things about ID cards: 1. Migrants ALREADY HAVE biometric ID cards & govts have been trying to digitise them for years w repeated fuckups & failures causing complete chaos - they don’t work, you do not want that system for you.

One of the unexpected things I've learned from my advocacy for trans people is how malignant parts of the State can be, how it can misuse data for positively evil purposes. It's taught me people can't be safe with a digital ID card and so I've signed this. petition.parliament.uk/petitions/73...

We can not stress the importance of resisting this. Share and sign this petition: petition.parliament.uk/petitions/73...

Possible pre-Conquest portal pertaining to Portchester Castle this #ADoorAbleThursday.

No pintle parsimony here: here’s an in-situ post-med pintle, much weathered and tired, at the doorway to the basement kitchen of Newark Castle in the East Neuk of Fife. Observe the stone has been cut back on the reveal behind the ironwork, probably at installation rather than robbing.

I’ve said it once, I’ll say it again. Ignore the haters, London is the 🐐

Offre d’emploi – Research Associate – MOWLIT: The Medieval March of Wales rmblf.be/2025/09/23/o...

There are only 4 more days to submit an abstract for our #IMC2026 panel on practice-based/experiential research in medieval studies. We would love for this session to facilitate some interdisciplinary conversations, so please do get in touch with your ideas. #Medievalsky

On my perpetual hunt for medieval pintles, this must be the meagrest evidence yet, but still useful: the sole surviving evidence of door ironwork at the entire site of Deer Abbey in Buchan, NE Scotland. Still lots to tease out, and a hat-tip to the mason who wrought a jamb from the local granite.

“Harvard geneticist David Reich said … increasingly sophisticated analysis of genetic material made possible by technological advances shows that virtually everyone came from somewhere else, and everyone’s genetic background shows a mix from different waves of migration that washed over the globe.”

<No limb> of mine is without a god. (BDQ)

Who could’ve predicted this, other than every single critical data studies scholar, who’ve been highlighting data bias issues for years and years? Given this previous knowledge, it’s criminal that this technology has been deployed at scale. A triumph of willful ignorance and wishful thinking.

This lecture was excellent, so many great ideas came to mind over course of Prof Smith’s talk. First heard of the Centre’s next big project, which centres the lives of the enslaved who are recorded in ‘Inventories’ from the early C19. www.ucl.ac.uk/social-histo...

From the city museum in Ghent, a model of the Counts’ Castle’s great hall. Very cool way of expressing a building’s form and details, while also filling up a space, but leaving (quite literally) blanks as representing some degree of unknown.

If you're interested in my new project on medievalism & the extreme right, you can read the first update on our blog here: www.northampton.ac.uk/research-blo... As the project progresses, @siobhanhyland.bsky.social and I will write updates to share info & upcoming events. @errnetwork.bsky.social 🗃️

For folk unfamiliar w Scottish castle studies, Finlaggan is a very big deal: a site w analogies to conventional Norman castles (massive keep) alongside a tradition of islands-centered lordship hubs (crannogs) common to Scotland N of Forth, and Ireland. Much more besides but in this way, important.

Finlaggan is a fascinating site, pleased the excellent excav reports have been brought together.

Our medieval curator Alison Ray introduces Rawlinson Bodleian Library MS. Rawl. D. 252...a 15th Century necromancer's journal. This manuscript contains spells written in Latin and Middle English, and would have served as a reference for a professional sorcerer. #MedievalMonday

Call for applications: Endangered Archives Programme eap.bl.uk/applicants

Sorry to ask this, but is there anyone with Institutional login chops, who could please source me something from Cambridge University Press archives?

If you want to dress well this fall, imagine yourself as Big Jim Collie, a Scottish crofter in the 1970s who lived alone in a bothy and rode a rickety old bicycle through the Lairig Ghru, the highest mountain pass in the highest mountain range in Britain, while sustaining himself on a bit of dram.

Identity, patriotism, symbolism @domsball.bsky.social placing flags in context @theconversation.com theconversation.com/ive-research...

Something from across the Channel: door of Grand Mosque of Paris. #ADoorAbleThursday

🔥BREAKING NEWS: Shoreditch Fire Station (1959-65) in Old Street has just been controversially rejected for listing by DCMS, ignoring the recommendation of Historic England and C20 to designate the building at Grade II The issuing of a COI now paves the way for potential redevelopment or demolition.

Have just read on the BBC that "the UK's first 'super-university', stretching across an entire region" is to be creaed by merging the universities of Kent and Greenwich, and I'm thinking it's a shame they've never heard of the University of the Highlands and Islands.

A mere 5 days to go! Send in your proposals!

They are very much not like us.

Every picture tells a story. From Gravensteen in Gent.

“Many workhouses & colonial plantations were fundamentally interlinked. The research focuses on one of Britain’s 1st workhouses, established in the slaving port of Bristol in 1696. Its ‘success’ was due to ‘substantial’ financial support from prominent slavers.” www.theguardian.com/world/2025/s...

Sharing this CfP for @imc-leeds.bsky.social 2026 - send us your ideas on castles and temporalities, we’d love to hear them!

My new book #Heiresses: Marriage, Inheritance and Caribbean Slavery is published today by @oneworldbooks.bsky.social! Available now from all good bookshops: uk.bookshop.org/p/books/heir... (& Amazon: amzn.eu/d/a7dQQYJ) #skystorians #historyteacher #18c #history #academicsky #newbooks #slavery #c18

Reform's stormtroopers in action

Up next on CBeebies it’s Monster Time with Antonio Gramsci

Probs best bit of the Counts’ Castle is the chapel of the gatehouse. Extremely odd/cool openings in walls and floors overlooking the passage which passes beneath, plus some odd doorways. Big contrast w the basement of adjacent building, featuring modern ‘replicas’ of torture devices. Tiresome stuff!

Fascinated that In Our Time is one of the BBC’s most popular podcasts among under 35s. The young people demand three academics and a peer discussing Demosthenes, apparently. And they’re right to do so.

In Ghent and it’s amazing. Wasn’t too fussed about the Gravensteen (was v excited beforehand): clearly an incredible castle but v little info available around the site, bar an eccentric audio guide narrated by a comedian.

I've just resigned from the EAA. Sad to leave an organisation I have been part of for decades, but collaboration with genocide is unthinkable. #stopthegenocide #stopapartheid @archagainstaparth.bsky.social

Colloque – Fortifier les Alpes : Origines, implantation et morphologie des sites castraux de montagne (Alpes, Jura et Massif Central) rmblf.be/2025/09/02/c...

Send us your abstracts for castles papers at next year’s IMC! It’s going to be a great time! 🏰 🕰️

The main issue facing any UK government isn't actually the number of people seeking asylum, in the grand scheme, proportionally, we aren't talking about huge figures, especially when compared per capita to countries such as France, but the constant images we see in the media. 1/

Huh. Today I learned that English Heritage gives free admission to people who have been granted refugee status. What an excellent policy.

I want to explain a few things and then it might be clearer why UK trans people are upset. In 2001 I married my wife, Sylvia. In 2005 I started medical transition. (1/13)