My Life in the Past

There are establishments in Georgian London dedicated entirely to the consumption of jelly. Their customers are army officers and merchants and the occasional respectable woman, and they go there in the mornings the way we might go to a coffee shop now. They sit, they eat their jelly, they leave. None of this, in the daytime, is remarkable. But at night, things change. It’s the summer sale at MY LIFE IN THE PAST! Click here for 25% off annual subscriptions.

When I’m lying on my death bed, deciding which events of my life I enjoyed the most, pretty high on the list will be the night I burned down a house with my Suffragette sisters. We did it for a television programme, and it was all perfectly legal and carefully managed. But the feeling of doing it, just for a few minutes, was not. It was a feeling of wild joy that we were doing something completely outrageous, something I’d been told, my whole life, that women simply don’t do.

One of the advantages of working at Historic Royal Palaces is that most of the people there love history — not just the ones, like the curators, whose actual job it is. Some of the most enthusiastic historians I’ve known were the Historic Royal Palaces Security Advisor, the Head of Health and Safety, and the Head of Internal Audit. We meet here for history once a week! Join us? I got to know the latter after an audit of collections management.

I’ve spent a lot of time in courts. Not as a defendant (at least, not yet!) but as a historian who keeps ending up in the sort of places where women’s lives were picked apart in public. Courtrooms are where society decides what sort of woman it approves of. Or doesn’t. Which is why I became so fascinated by Caroline Norton. Caroline’s is the first case featured in the new series from the Lady Killers team: Lady on Trial. Listen on Tuesday at 3 on Radio Four, or on BBC Sounds.

What does your hair say about you? Throughout history, a head of hair has often revealed its owner’s view of the world. Here are ten of my favourite examples: 1. Dirty is good. The twelfth-century monk who wrote An Apology for Beards argued that matted, greasy hair signals ‘interior cleanness’ and ‘divine virtue.’ The flagellant strain in Christianity found genuine virtue in suffering. So, an itchy, hairy, Mr-Twit-style beard was praiseworthy. Hm. 2. Know your place.

‘You’re at just the wrong level of fame,’ said my cameraman. ‘Some people recognise you, but you’re not properly-famous, with bodyguards.’ We’d had to break off filming for the third time that afternoon. Someone needed an urgent history question answered, and apparently I know more than Google. Shall we meet again next week? Let’s do it! Hang on, isn’t that the History Person? My colleague wasn’t wrong. I queue at Tesco Metro with everybody else.

One hundred and twenty-four women, five rules and one conclusion. I have been doing some research into what it takes for a woman to be considered great. Not by herself, not by her friends, not even by history, but by the specific and rather demanding standards of The Times newspaper obituary desk. Never did I feel ‘greater’ than when channelling Elizabeth I.

Last week our king did some good work in America, reminding everyone in his speech at the White House that without its relationship with Britain, Americans would now be speaking French. ‘Now then, Mr Trump, about the Stamp Act … ‘ He was re-hashing an argument from the 1760s about how much tax Britain’s North American colonists should pay.

I’m often asked how I ended up being a history TV presenter. If time is short, I sometimes give the two-word answer: by accident. But that’s not quite true. The longer version involves Latin, and a failure to learn it. At my comprehensive secondary school in Nottingham, not many people wanted to learn Latin. I did, though, and I loved it. Thanks for reading! Lovely to have you here. We were a tiny class, taught by Mrs Mills, who made our brains hurt in a good way.

I’ve spent my career inside other people’s palaces, places like Hampton Court, Kensington Palace, Hardwick Hall and Audley End. As a curator and historian, I’ve devoted decades to understanding how the powerful and the wealthy arranged their lives: what they slept on, who they let into their bedrooms, why they built their windows quite so large, and what it all tells us about life in the past. So people are always slightly thrown when I tell them where I actually live.