Who put the arrow in Harold’s eye? Why did Dick Whittington have a cat? Where did the pointed arch come from? These are all questions that the curious and energetic antiquarians of the late 18th and early 19th centuries asked, and often managed to answer.
In the third episode of her series looking at the way history was transformed in the Romantic period, Rosemary Hill talks to Roey Sweet about the new breed of multi-disciplinary investigators, who, in the years after the French Revolution, studied everything from woollen threads to tombstones in their efforts to imagine the past.
Other episodes in the series:
Waterloo to the British Museum
Buy Rosemary Hill's book, Time's Witness, directly from the London Review Bookshop here.
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Music by Kieran Brunt / Produced by Anthony Wilks
