What connects "Bad" King John, Charles Dickens' first novel and a wolf skulking under a hedgerow? All of them are woven into the history of the Suffolk town of Bury St Edmunds. Its sloping streets reflect its storied past: grand Georgian houses jostle against whitewashed, wood-beamed buildings, while at the bottom of the hill stands a ruined Norman abbey surrounded by glorious gardens.
The town first gained importance during the Middle Ages as the resting place of Saint Edmund. Following a Viking raid, this ninth-century East Anglian king was reputedly shot with arrows then beheaded after he refused to renounce his Christianity. According to legend, his followers found his head under a hedgerow, guarded by a wolf; after they retrieved the head and brought it back to his bloodied body, it was miraculously reattached - the first of many wonders attributed to Edmund's corpse.
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Denne historien er fra December 2022-utgaven av BBC History UK.
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"People have achieved all kinds of crazy things at the age of 18″
ALICE LOXTON talks to Danny Bird about her book on 18 individuals who left an indelible mark on British history before they were out of their teens
Parthian chicken
ELEANOR BARNETT recreates an ancient Roman dish that borrowed flavours from a rival neighbouring empire in the Middle East
"We need a meaningful story for the new generation - our composite union"
WHAT A SUMMER IT’S BEEN SO FAR, WITH AN astonishing election result.
A Pole apart
ROGER MOORHOUSE is absorbed by a little-known but politically significant Polish princess whose life encompassed the major events of the later 18th and 19th centuries
Medieval England's p olitical miracle
From Magna Carta to parliament, taxation to the law courts, the 13th and 14th centuries laid the foundations for the modern British state
EASTERN PROMISES
Lured by rich trading prospects, from the 17th to the 19th centuries Britain attempted to cultivate relations with China sometimes successfully, but often disastrously. Kerry Brown explores the troubled but ultimately vital links between two ambitious realms
THE GENIUS IN THE SHADOWS
Æthelstan is one of the greatest of all Anglo-Saxon monarchs. So why, asks Michael Wood, does the first king of the English remain so fiendishly elusive?
The king they couldn't kill
Want to know why Henry VII is remembered as an intensely suspicious king, wracked by paranoia? The answer, writes Nathen Amin, lies in his death-defying rise to power
THE SPY WHO HOODWINKED HITLER
Dummy tanks at El Alamein. Bogus generals in Algiers. Sham armies on D-Day. All were ruses masterminded by Dudley Clarke. Robert Hutton tells the story of the British soldier who made an art form of duping the Nazis
The long road back The election was tough for the Conservatives - but the past holds clues on how parties can return from the brink
It’s election night 1997, and Jeremy Paxman is grilling Tory grandee Cecil Parkinson.
