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Yesterday, I picked up my first payslip for many years.  It’s one of the reasons that the blog has been so quiet over the last few months.  I started teaching a few hours a week at Liverpool Hope University at the end of January and now I’m into the swing of it, I’m really enjoying…

Over the last few weeks I’ve been investigating the publication of ballads in mid-Tudor England, looking at the Stationers’ Registers  in detail. It’s been really interesting to look at which publishers specialised in ballads. It’s also shown that there were some printers who only printed occasionally, and when they did, they printed ballads.  I went…

News has just reached me via Twitter of a fascinating project hosted by the IHR: http://londonist.com/2016/01/layers-of-london-londons-new-mapping-project

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2015 annual report for this blog. Here’s an excerpt: A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 1,000 times in 2015. If it were a cable car, it would take about 17 trips to carry that many people. Click here to see the…

  Over the summer I was very pleased to be contacted by a researcher from the BBC who asked if I could suggest some ballads to use in The Great History Quiz: the Tudors.  I was happy to help out by suggesting lyrics and period tunes.  It will be interesting to see how it’s turned…

In a quick post this afternoon, I just wanted to draw your attention to a new blog by my friend Christopher Henstock: Early Modern Spanish Texts in Context.  Chris and I met at Manchester University, and we share an interest in the woman that one of my friends referred to as ‘that mad Spanish nun’,…

We don’t go much on Halloween in our house, but I thought I’d share with you a few photos of Longridge over this Halloween weekend.  There has been an outbreak of knitted pumpkins and woolly cobwebs on the high street.  This is just one of the reasons I love living here. This evening I’m off…

Sometimes, life gets a bit bonkers.  This week is my children’s half term.  This time last year we were in Scotland having a few days away.  No such luck this year.  I’ve got too many things to do, and it’s not so much ‘not enough time to do them’ as trouble prioritising.  I have a…

At the beginning of October I took up a position as Honorary Researcher in History at Lancaster University.  It’s great, because it means I’ve got an institutional affiliation again, and with it access to databases and a library.  It’s also nice to feel part of an academic community again. The only down side is that…