Compared to Germany's relationship with France, Poland, Benelux etc after World War 2, it's relationship with Russian has been at least decent, even during the Cold War and there seems to be remarkably little ill-will considering the atrocities committed by both nations during World War 2.

I'm currently reading John Stubb's Reprobates, which includes an account of the Cotswald Games at Dover in 1637:

Men playing at cudgels, wrestling, leaping, pitching the bar, throwing the iron hammer, handling the pike, leaping over the heads of men kneeling, standing upon their hands &c.

While most of these are pretty self-evident, it got me thinking about competitive sports generally in England around the time of the Charles II. So I've got a few related questions:

1. Were straightforward feats of athleticism the norm, or were more codified games present as well?

2. How popular were team sports like Cornish Hurling? Were there any team sports that weren't loose analogues of football or rugby?

3. How regulated would a contact sport like 'playing at cudgels' be? Would it include safety equipment and/or partial contact? Rules and points? Right now I'm picturing two men bashing each other with sticks.

4. What the hell is handling the pyke?

Thanks in advance. Also, stealth recommendation for Stubb's book. A great collection of overlapping biographies.

What was the reason behind Pomepeys decision to escape to Egypt after the battle of Pharsalus?

Whenever I read about the civil war, the moment the battle ends and Pompey escapes it just states he ran to Egypt and then the Ptolemys decapitated him! But why did he decide to go there in the first place? Couldn't he have gone to one of his Greek clients for refuge, and tried to recruit more troops? Or even run back to Spain or Italy?

Did he have prior relationship with the Ptolemys I simply haven’t read about? Did he expect to be supplied with new forces there - while Egypt was having its own Civil war? The irony is if he had no intentions to continue the fight, he could've just surrendered to Caesar, and be almost certain his life would be spared and he'd be allowed to return to Rome! But it is very unlike him, and doesn’t fit the description of his personality at all!

It seems he was expecting to gain some strategic advantage from this move, but the fact he almost instantly gets killed, makes me wonder what was his reasoning’s to make that gamble?

Thank you for reading and for your reply :)

Vikings are generally seen as a group of people from Scandinavia/Nordic countries (i.e Denmark, Sweden, Iceland, Norway, Islands like Gotland and other coastal towns around the Baltic sea). But they must've consisted of groups in these countries, i.e Geats/Götar, Danes, Jutes/Jutar, Svear or whatever they might be.

If you see the word 'viking' as the occupation it is, what groups of people did it actually consist of, was there cultural differences between these groups and so forth?

Ah, bullying, you hear a lot about it these days and in history, but little about how it has changed over the past 100 years or so. Which got my thinking. what exactly has changed about it over the years. well, besides cyberbullying naturally being rather new.

Apparently the hallucinogens of the blue dye would make them more fearless and therefore more fierce, at least according to my Scandinavian studies TA. An example he used was Ragnar Lordbrok's company using it before attacking various settlements in current day France.

Not forgetting Edward the Martyr and Edward the Elder. I take there some kind of reset after the Norman invasion.

Was there a company that had the reach and control that the DWIC had? In terms of economics, physical trade, or government lobbying.

I understand that there was a more or less peaceful transfer of power from the Nationalists to the Communists. Why was this?

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I was reading Henry Stimson's work, and it is clear to me, despite his arguments and seasonings as explaibed, that the atomic bombing of Japan was a war crime. But what about these two other instances in the title?

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Can someone ELI5 why Eisenhower did not back his Western allies, the UK and France, over the Suez Canal? I read on the BBC it was something Eisenhower later regretted. So overall, did he do the right thing?

Were France and Britain clearly in the wrong for wanting to protect their interests?

See title.

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Not sure if this is the place for questions about computer history, but I always like knowing more about the early choices that were made in Silicon Valley which distinguished operating systems from one another on purely aesthetic levels. There always seems like there's a fun or quirky story about those, and so I wanted to know if even desktop alignment (as in, where your items default to residing on your desktop; top-right on pretty much every Mac OS I've ever run, and top-left on your typical Windows OS and Linux) has a story behind its divergence among the platforms.

I would assume that plantation owners would have a tighter grip on the slaves, due to a limited amount of them. Also, wouldn't they become much more expensive too?

Medieval monks are famous for their work in copying and preserving ancient works for transmission. I don't ever recall, though, famous female monastics being involved in this context. Do we have any accounts of these women? Why was it rare (if actually it was so) for female members of religious orders to take part in these activities—anything beyond simple chauvinism?