Weird and wonderful history

Machines produce the final statistics for a census, c1931. From 1841, censuses helped the government calculate everything from the size and distribution of the population to the contrasting death rate in each of the hundreds of occupations. (Photo by Fox Photos/Getty Images)

Bulldog burners and dungboys: classifying occupations in British censuses (1841-1911)

Premium

Weird and Wonderful banners2

Quiz Weird and wonderful history . This is a premium piece of content available to subscribed users.

Premium

Dan Jones shares a ghost story from the Middle Ages and explains what it might tell us about medieval attitudes to the afterlife

Medieval ghost stories . This is a premium piece of content available to subscribed users.

Clog-Fight-8402dd5

Q&A What was clog fighting?

7 weird and wonderful Georgian beauty treatments. (Getty Images)

7 weird and wonderful Georgian beauty treatments

(Illustration: Clair Rossiter for BBC History Magazine)

Beans, ale & ‘windy meats’: surprising 17th-century aphrodisiacs

Premium

Alanbrooke Hall has long since been demolished, but memories of the alleged poltergeist activity on the sixth floor still trouble Ken, a former resident. (Image by Getty Images)

Danny Robins' paranormal cold cases Alanbrooke Hall, Belfast . This is a premium piece of content available to subscribed users.

A kelpie, from British folklore. (Image by Getty Images)

Supernatural stories: 9 unusual British folktales

A scene from the German film 'Ways to Strength and Beauty', 1925. (Ullstein Bild via Getty Images)

Second World War

Germany’s naked truth: the 19th-century nudism movements co-opted by the Nazis

Suffragettes photographed in a dispute with the police

Jujitsu suffragettes: how women fought for the vote with an ancient martial art

A depiction of folk figure Dick Whittington

Dick Whittington, the Loch Ness Monster and a talking mongoose: 8 mythical figures of British history

A homemade Ouija board helped two World War I prisoners of war escape

A homemade ouija board, a treasure hunt and fake madness: the great escape of World War I

Dinosaur dung became a valuable commodity in 19th century Cambridgeshire. (Universal History Archive/UIG via Getty Images)

Dinosaur dung billionaires: the Victorian ‘gold rush’ for fossilised faeces

The fabled ‘Vegetable Lamb of Tartary’ was a plant said to grow sheep as its fruit.

Q&A What was the Vegetable Lamb of Tartary?

A woodcut showing the interior of a kitchen in Elizabethan England. (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Hold your noses: the smells, sounds and sights of Elizabethan England