Quotes About History

The Orkney islands and the Shetlands were in fact not surrendered to Scotland until the latter half of the sixteenth century, and Norwegian was still being spoken in the Shetlands at the end of the eighteenth century; the island accent is still much closer to Norwegian than to Scots or English.

Slavery was in fact a legal punishment inflicted on those, for example, who could not pay their fines.

the writing of history is often another way of defining chaos. There is in fact a case for saying that human history, as it is generally described and understood, is the sum total of accident and unintended consequence.

History is about longing and belonging. It is about the need for permanence and the perception of continuity. It concerns the atavistic desire to find deep sources of identity.

The English were indeed noted for their superstitious credulity as well as their piety;

At the beginning of the twelfth century, the rabbit was introduced to England.

50 per cent of the people died before the age of thirty, and 90 per cent before the age of fifty.

But 'if ' is not a word to use in history.

The Normans also gave to the English the concept of the inherited surname that came to define a unified family and its property.

That concept is more properly known as 'caesaro-papism'; the king was now both Caesar and pope.

When the first sarsen stone was raised in the circle of Stonehenge, the land we

The visitors then turned their attention to the universities, where it was decided that the learning of the scholastics and the medieval doctors should be abandoned in favour of the humanist learning approved by Erasmus and other reformers.

The Cistercian monks were known for their practice of eviction.

The government's response to the Irish potato blight of the 1840s, which caused around 1 million Irish people to die of starvation or disease and another million to emigrate, was incompetent and indifferent when it was not cruel.

The England of Edward I was more populous than that of Elizabeth I or of George II.

Although their populations ranged only from 20 to 200 people, we may see in them the beginnings of urban life in England. The author believes that London was once just such a hill fort, but the evidence for it is now buried beneath the megalopolis it has become.

Anti-Semitism was part of the Christian condition throughout Europe.

name for Manchester was Mamucio, after the

Many of the roads loosely known as 'Roman roads' are much more ancient; the Romans simply made use of the prehistoric paths. Modern roads have been built along the routes of these ancient lines, so that we still move in the footsteps of our ancestors.

One Irishman, Melaghin McCabb, boasted that he had dispatched eighty Spaniards with his gallowglass axe.

Peter Ackroyd

The paintings were a history of his inward life, and he did not particularly care how they fared in the exterior world of change and decay.

It may be noted, in parenthesis, that in this period the coach was introduced to England

Parliamentary prisoners were often sent to Coventry under armed guard; hence the familiar expression.