I'm writing a book. Assume a shortage of food. Would the law compel them to accept all Chinese citizens who showed up?

William the Conqueror (previously William the Bastard) famously conquered England following the Battle of Hastings in 1066. He justified his invasion by stating that Edward the Confessor promised him the throne 1051.

This claim seems... ridiculous. Why would Edward promise the country to a foreigner, and then proceed to tell no one in England for the next 15 years of his life. If this was his intent, why would he not sign documents to this effect?

This claim is also troubled as the succession of the English throne was neither hereditary or decided by the monarch (though it was certainly influenced by him), but rather by the Witan - the King's council of leading nobles and religious figures.

Both William and Edward must have known this, and that the Witan would never sanction William as King - indeed, following Edward's death they chose Harold Godwinson to be the next King of England.

William's motives for making this claim seems clear - to justify his invasion. But why has it since been so widely believed, even in recent history?

Say the crime is theft, or maybe even murder. And there's good evidence that the owner made this demand of his slave. If the slave were to go to jail, how would that be any different or worse than his previous life as a slave? Could the owner go to jail for the order? What outcome could the slave owner expect? If he went to jail, what would happen to his remaining slaves? Could a slave legally refuse an illegal demand by the slave owner? Or maybe even report it without penalty?

In The fantastic tv show Cadfael, there is a ceremony when the brothers of Shrewsbury abbey are disintering the bones of a saint. the Prior, who is overseeing the disinterment, turns to 2 men behind him and nods for them to begin.

One man is holding a wooden pole with a sort of flat piece attached with a chain or string that he swings around over his head while it emits a sound.

Another begins turning a cartwheel atop a pole that has effigies hanging from it.

What was the significance of both of these activites?

Bonus question: in the very next episode, during a funeral procession, there is a man holding a mask on a stick. He is walking along the proession route thrusting the mask into people's faces. Some sort of theatrical mourning perhaps?

Thanks for any/all answers in advance!

I was reading the other day how most of the new testament was written in Greek rather than Aramaic due to the fact that at the time Greek had become the universal language the different people from the eastern part of the roman empire used to communicate amongst themselves. That left me thinking, why didn't the Romans try to force Latin to be the main lingua franca rather than Greek? Wouldn't this have made it easier for administration purposes and created a stronger sense of unity with the rest of the empire? I imagine that greek had already taken this role before the Romans had arrived but couldn't they have tried to change things up?

Hi historians,

I have a tuberculosis question. I know for countless, it was a death sentence.

I'm writing a Southern Gothic illness piece set in 1913 Louisiana, in which a young man (based on a real person whose grave I've always visited) slowly dies in his home during a local consumption outbreak surrounded by his mother and sisters. It ends with, as is historically accurate as per local newspapers, his body wrapped in a sheet in the driveway outside the house to be collected.

• What sorts of everyday precautions would a family take at this time? What would the everyday have looked like? Were there home remedies?

EDIT: I suppose the question should read "how tuberculosis was managed," as opposed to how it was treated -- as historically, in the case of my main figure, it wasn't.

Hey guys! So for context, I've been working on writing a story for a comic book for quite a while, and I’ve been tossing around this idea of having a character who fought for Germany during World War II. However, he was unaware of the true breadth of the atrocities committed by the Nazi regime at large until it was too late, and then had to carry that guilt with him for the rest of his life. My question, though, is - would this actually be plausible? I’ve heard rumors that a lot of soldiers who fought for Germany in World War II didn’t actually know how bad Hitler and the high-ranking Nazis actually were, but I don’t know if there’s any truth to these claims. So I was going to ask: Did the German soldiers know what was really going on throughout the war, or were they kept in the dark about it? Obviously groups like the SS had to have known because they were the ones who did a lot of the actual persecution of Jews and other people in the Concentration Camps, but just for a run-of-the-mill marine or air force or navy member, how much did they actually know about what was going on?

It seems in my limited understanding of the subject that the most important classical Greek texts preserved in the present day were written by Athenian authors. Athenian playwrights, Athenian generals like Xenophon and Thucydides, Athenian philosophers like Socrates and Plato. Wouldn't make much sense for the other Greek polities to not be as prolific in producing literature. Why were most of their texts lost?

Today people have lots of misconceptions about the ancient world. I'm curious what sort of errors or misconceptions people during the Renaissance (1400-1600) held about Ancient Greece and Rome.

I'm currently doing a course on the British Isles, around 300-1100, and I've noticed that aside from some really important individuals like King Alfred alongside Bede and Gildas (two main primary/secondary sources), there really isn't a big focus on 'great men' and it's very thematic and focused on broad trends of Christianization etc.

However, I've noticed if you do 19th and 20th century history you're much more likely to focus on the big players and leaders. Why is that?

I just watched Lee Daniels' The Butler on Netflix. There is a scene in the movie that shows a water fountain that had a "colored" side and a "white" side. That got me thinking.

Which side would Indians (native American or East), Arabs, Asians, and any other non whites I am forgetting, drink from? Was segregation strictly a black and white thing or did it apply to all non whites?

I'm sorry if this has been asked before. I'm not too good with the reddit search engine. I did try though.

Looking for any info or source material on pre-Roman British belief systems, history, religion, mythology etc. I know that there were different factions of people living in those lands, did they generally believe in similar deities or was it all under the proto-Indio European lense? I have a very base knowledge of this stuff and would like to dive deeper into it. Thank you!

I am familiar with the decline of the city of Rome during the 3rd-century crisis and the late Roman empire in favor of cities like Ravenna and Constantinople, as well as the 410 CE sack of Rome ad the city's constant changing of hands during wars between the Byzantines and Ostrogoths.

However, as far as I am aware, besides it's cultural and religious significance, Rome was one of the smaller and weaker cities on the Italian peninsula, compared those in the north like Florence, Venice, and Milan, throughout the middle ages and early modern era. Correct me if I am wrong but didn't the city only begin to grow to its current size after Italian unification when Rome was made the capital.

If Rome was able to become a relatively large and powerful regional city by the time of the Punic Wars and then one of the biggest in the world by the height of the empire, why did was Rome not able to bounce back substantially during the ~14 centuries between its heavy depopulation and it being made the capital of the kingdom of Italy?

Hello! I’m trying to find English translations of the documents I keep seeing referenced in books I’ve read about this subject. I’d like to know what the original texts themselves say, particularly any of the templar confessions and the papal bulls Clement V issued about the order. Is there anywhere I could read them in full? Does such a thing even exist?

I've always heard that the Catholic Church suppressed generations of scientific knowledge due to the information being counter to their faith-based world view. However, I also know that the church historically funded many pursuits in astronomy, physics, mathematics, and engineering and had a pretty passive view of evolution.

I tried to dig up some information online and mainly find Catholic sources who claim the suppression claim or "conflict model" to be blatantly untrue or secular sources that more or less state the suppression as fact without providing much supporting evidence.

What do people who actually know what they're talking about say about this topic?

I remember reading, a long time ago, a piece that put forth the idea that 'the monster in the woods' served a number of social functions. One of these as I recall was to offer families with too many mouths to feed a narrative to explain the abandonment of their children when times were hard - stories such as changelings, faeries, witches (Hansel and Gretel, for instance), bogeymen, wendigos, Baba Yaga and Qallupilluit. My understanding is that although everyone in the community will have had a sense of what actually happened, stories such as these served as a socially acceptable obfuscation of the painful truth.

I'm currently thinking of writing a reflective piece within my own field on how the medicalisation of distress can serve a similar function in modernity, but I'm mindful that a patchy memory of an article I read once won't make much of a literature review.

Could one of you brilliant people let me know if the claims above have any serious scholarship attached to them? I'm a great lover of folklore and its role in societies across time and place, so would love to read your thoughts and any kind of analysis.