Creative History

  May Day, the 1st day of May, was typically  a day of feasting, festivity and celebration in early modern England.  Ordinarily, in London May Day was a day off from work for the laboring masses and a day to gather in the warm Spring sunshine for dancing and sport in the city’s narrow streets.  But, in London on the 1st of May during the fateful year of 1517, a day of celebration and revelry took on a much more sinister tone and became forever known to history as “Evil May Day”. On the night of May 1, 1517 a violent and drunken mob which numbered perhaps in the thousands took control of old London’s densely packed, muddy and narrow late-medieval city streets.  Fired by years of simmering rage over low wages and lack of meaningful employment, the angry mob sought to assault and in some instances even attempt to murder every member of London’s ever growing foreign born immigrant population that they could find. At that time in Tudor England during the reign of...

  December 29, 1170 Canterbury Cathedral. Four heavily armed and armored knights dismount their horses outside the large oak and iron reinforced doors that lead into the heart of the church. They burst inside with swords drawn and shout, “Where is Thomas Becket, traitor to King and country?” The man named Thomas Becket who the four knights are so zealously seeking is the Archbishop of Canterbury Cathedral.  He is just over fifty years of age and he is a devout and holy monk whose piety and patriotism, up until that very moment at least, have always been without question.  In the years immediately following his death, Pope Alexander III will canonize Thomas Becket Archbishop of Canterbury Cathedral and make him a Saint and a Martyr.  He will go on to be one of the most widely revered and adored Saints in all of Europe during the High Middle Ages--but all of that remains, for the time being anyway, in the not too distant future. For now, four heavily armed knights are ...

  It is Christmas Eve 1801 and a most unusual sight, something never before seen in all of human history, is witnessed that afternoon in the small city of Camborne located in Cornwall County in the southwest corner of England. Lumbering down Fore Street and then continuing up Camborne Hill to the neighboring village of Beacon, in the cold pouring rain is a cast iron, wheeled contraption that is belching acrid black smoke straight up into the earth’s atmosphere by means of a large vertical pipe. This is the Puffing Devil: so named by its most remarkable inventor Richard Trevithick.  The Puffing Devil is the first ever man made self-propelled wheeled vehicle in the history of the world.  It is the precursor to all of today’s cars, trucks and wheeled gas and electric powered vehicles. It is carrying six passengers, one of whom is Richard Trevithick himself, along with his cousin Andrew Vivian, who is standing just aft the enormous smokestack and steering the devil by m...