Peasants’ Revolt 1381 — Research & Sources
The complete research hub: labour law, John Ball, Brentwood, women in the rising, record-burning and anti-Flemish violence.
Samuel Stephen Chronicles
Research Notes
Primary sources, historical problems and the evidence behind the books.
These essays are the permanent website home for research that begins in archives, legal records, chronicles, contemporary reporting and institutional records before it becomes fiction, podcasting or longer historical work.
The aim is not to turn every source into certainty. It is to show what the record supports, where accounts conflict and where the evidence stops.
1381 & The Blank Roll
The road to revolt
The Bonfires of Paperwork
Why rebels attacked manorial rolls, rentals and charters — and what that says about documentary power.
Revolting Women
A four-part series following women through rebellion from 1381 to the political movements that followed the Restoration.
The Land Record
Land, tenure and administrative power
Domesday Book
What William’s survey recorded — and what its administrative logic left outside the frame.
Magna Carta and Land
Relief, wardship, aids and the obligations hidden inside medieval land tenure.
Otmoor Enclosure
What the 1815 enclosure reveals about the difference between legal clarity and lived access.
Early Hollywood
Studios, scandal and institutional power
The silent-film industry offers a different version of the same recurring question: how does an institution gain control over people, reputations and records?
Early Hollywood History
The permanent hub for evidence-led research on studios, celebrity, labour, censorship and the silent era.
Silent Hollywood: Scandal and Self-Regulation
Arbuckle, William Desmond Taylor, Thomas Ince, Wallace Reid and the pressure that helped produce the Hays Office.
How the Early Studio System Learned to Say Yes for You
Credit, distribution, visibility and the incremental mechanics of studio control.
Behind the books
Research that became fiction
Samuel Rosbotham: The 19-Year-Old Behind Panel 22
The documented Belfast soldier behind the novel.
Francisco de Orellana and the Amazon
The expedition, contested record and river journey behind Rio Incognitum.
The Mercian Series
Offa, Æthelflæd and Æthelstan: three approaches to making power survive its builder.
The Black Archive
Contested records
The Black Archive Research Archive
The permanent index of evidence-led investigations across historical crime, medieval cases, contested trials and public history.
Anne Boleyn and the Contradictory Indictment
A precise Tudor indictment, a conflicting surviving record and the evidential problem created by specificity.
Why These Novels Start With the Archive
The research principle connecting records, institutions and fiction.
Research should compound.
A source investigated for one project should continue working: as an article, a podcast, a book note, a public historical investigation and evidence for later work. The website is where those strands remain connected.
