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Bizarre Laws & Curious Customs of the UK: Volume 1
- Narrated by: Monty Lord, Fabian Lord
- Length: 8 hrs and 56 mins
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Publisher's summary
"An endlessly fascinating journey through the extraordinary laws that have shaped every aspect of British society from Anglo-Saxon times to the present day. Impeccably researched and engagingly, often humorously written, it delivers so many jaw-dropping moments that I found it impossible to put down. A truly remarkable book." (Tracy Borman - Chief Curator for HM Historic Royal Palaces, Author, historian & broadcaster)
In the UK, we have some bizarre laws that have littered the statute books of our sceptred isle throughout history. Not all of them have been repealed over the centuries. Some of them made perfect sense at the time they were introduced but seen through modern eyes, now appear archaic and draconian. Despite the great efforts of the Law Commission in England and Wales to review and recommend reforms for many of these outdated laws, there are centuries of law that must be painstakingly gone through.
As well as some bizarre laws, the UK also has its fair share of curious customs and time-honoured traditions that have been observed for centuries. On the surface, many appear to be nothing more than theatrical pomp and pageantry. However, they are all born from strong rationale.
The UK parliament seems to have had a particular penchant for passing laws related to fish and animals, indecency and passing sentences with some humiliating public punishments.
This book is a highly entertaining listen for anyone who enjoys learning about the more bizarre applications of UK law throughout the centuries, along with some rather macabre consequences along the way.
Have you ever heard a bizarre law and thought, that can’t possibly be true? Is it genuine? Was it ever in existence or just an urban myth that became so embellished over time? There are surprisingly, a great many laws still in existence on the statute books today, that would make your jaw drop. Whilst bizarre as these laws may now seem to us, it begs the question, are we in fact, unknowingly breaking these laws on a regular basis?
For example…
- Is it illegal to cause a nuclear explosion?
- Are you required to talk to the police?
- Is Knock and Run illegal?
- Was it illegal to grow a beard?
- Do all swans belong to The King?
All these questions and more will be answered in this Volume 1 of a 3 volume series by Monty Lord.
Listening to this book, you may be inclined to laugh heartily, let out a sorrowful cry or recoil in abject horror at some of the more gruesome sentences passed for breaking these weird laws.
With over 130 bizarre but nevertheless true, laws and customs, you can use this book to satisfy your curiosity about what our ancestors had to contend with over the years, or perhaps as a reference guide for trivia quizzes.
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Story
Based on the rare and until now overlooked journal of a Renaissance-era executioner, the noted historian Joel F. Harrington's The Faithful Executioner takes us deep inside the alien world and thinking of Meister Frantz Schmidt of Nuremberg, who, during 45 years as a professional executioner, personally put to death 394 individuals and tortured, flogged, or disfigured many hundreds more. But the picture that emerges of Schmidt from his personal papers is not that of a monster. Could a man who routinely practiced such cruelty also be insightful?
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Excellent
- By James on 03-30-18
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The Best New True Crime Stories: Small Towns
- By: Mitzi Szereto - editor
- Narrated by: Holly Palance, Phil Thron
- Length: 8 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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Whether in Truman Capote’s detailed murder of the Clutter family or Ted Bundy’s small-town charm, criminals have always roamed rural America and towns worldwide. Featuring murder stories, criminal case studies, and more, The Best New True Crime Stories: Small Towns contains all-new accounts from writers of true crime, crime journalism, and crime fiction. And these entries are not based on a true story - they are true stories. Edited by acclaimed author and anthologist Mitzi Szereto, the stories in this volume span the globe.
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Crime in other countries is not my cup of tea.
- By Brenda on 01-03-21
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London in the Nineteenth Century
- By: Jerry White
- Narrated by: Neil Gardner
- Length: 21 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Jerry White's London in the Nineteenth Century is the richest and most absorbing account of the city's greatest century by its leading expert. London in the nineteenth century was the greatest city mankind had ever seen. Its growth was stupendous. Its wealth was dazzling. Its horrors shocked the world. This was the London of Blake, Thackeray and Mayhew, of Nash, Faraday and Disraeli. Most of all it was the London of Dickens. As William Blake put it, London was 'a Human awful wonder of God'.
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SO DETAILED..SO VERY VERY DETAILED.
- By Count B on 06-16-19
By: Jerry White
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The Italians
- By: John Hooper
- Narrated by: Gareth Armstrong
- Length: 9 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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John Hooper's marvelously entertaining and perceptive new book is ideal for anyone seeking to understand contemporary Italy and the unique character of the Italians. Looking at the facts that lie behind and often belie the stereotypes, his revealing book sheds new light on many aspects of Italian life: football and Freemasonry, sex, symbolism, and the reason Italian has twelve words for a coat hanger yet none for a hangover.
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Mi piace molto!
- By Adeliese Baumann on 12-30-16
By: John Hooper
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By Hands Now Known
- Jim Crow's Legal Executioners
- By: Margaret A. Burnham
- Narrated by: Diana Blue
- Length: 10 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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Margaret A. Burnham challenges our understanding of the Jim Crow era by exploring the relationship between formal law and background legal norms in harrowing cases between 1920 and 1960. From rendition, the legal process by which states make claims to other states for the return of their citizens, to battles over state and federal jurisdiction and the outsize role of local sheriffs in enforcing racial hierarchy, Burnham maps the criminal legal system of the mid-twentieth-century South, and traces the line from slavery to the legal structures of this period—and through to today.
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Heartbreaking
- By sharon on 11-24-22
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Covered with Night
- A Story of Murder and Indigenous Justice in Early America
- By: Nicole Eustace
- Narrated by: Laural Merlington
- Length: 14 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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On the eve of a major treaty conference between Iroquois leaders and European colonists in the distant summer of 1722, two White fur traders attacked an Indigenous hunter and left him for dead near Conestoga, Pennsylvania. This act of brutality set into motion a remarkable series of criminal investigations and cross-cultural negotiations that challenged the definition of justice in early America. Leading historian Nicole Eustace reconstructs the crime and its aftermath, bringing us into the overlapping worlds of white colonists and Indigenous peoples in this formative period.
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YES! I GET IT! I've read history before - JUST STOP!!!!! British settlers were arrogant jerks!! Aaaaaaaargh
- By Anonymous From MA on 06-02-22
By: Nicole Eustace
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A Storm of Witchcraft
- The Salem Trials and the American Experience
- By: Emerson W. Baker
- Narrated by: Marc Vietor
- Length: 12 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Beginning in January 1692, Salem Village in colonial Massachusetts witnessed the largest and most lethal outbreak of witchcraft in early America. Villagers - mainly young women - suffered from unseen torments that caused them to writhe, shriek, and contort their bodies, complaining of pins stuck into their flesh and of being haunted by specters. Believing that they suffered from assaults by an invisible spirit, the community began a hunt to track down those responsible for the demonic work.
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Wow....riveting and tragic
- By TeamDowager on 10-23-15
By: Emerson W. Baker
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John Adams Under Fire
- The Founding Father's Fight for Justice in the Boston Massacre Murder Trial
- By: Dan Abrams, David Fisher
- Narrated by: Dan Abrams, Roger Wayne
- Length: 9 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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History remembers John Adams as a Founding Father and our country’s second president. But in the tense years before the American Revolution, he was still just a lawyer, fighting for justice in one of the most explosive murder trials of the era. On the night of March 5, 1770, shots were fired by British soldiers on the streets of Boston, killing five civilians. The Boston Massacre has often been called the first shots of the American Revolution.
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Fascinating
- By Jean on 04-23-20
By: Dan Abrams, and others
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Last Woman Hanged
- The Terrible True Story of Louisa Collins
- By: Caroline Overington
- Narrated by: Jennifer Vuletic
- Length: 9 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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In January 1889, Louisa Collins, a 41-year-old mother of 10 children, became the first woman hanged at Darlinghurst Gaol and the last woman hanged in New South Wales. Both of Louisa's husbands had died suddenly and the Crown, convinced that Louisa poisoned them with arsenic, put her on trial an extraordinary four times in order to get a conviction, to the horror of many in the legal community. Louisa protested her innocence until the end.
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Enlightening, entertaining and exceptionally done
- By Karol Heim on 02-09-24
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The Grouchy Historian
- An Old-Time Lefty Defends Our Constitution Against Right-Wing Hypocrites and Nutjobs
- By: Ed Asner, Ed. Weinberger
- Narrated by: Ed Asner
- Length: 8 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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In The Grouchy Historian, Ed Asner leads the charge for liberals to reclaim the Constitution from the right-wingers who use it as their justification for doing whatever terrible thing they want to do, which is usually to comfort the comfortable and afflict the afflicted. It's about time someone gave them hell and explained that Progressives can read, too.
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Nice Into into American History
- By Katie Luck on 03-20-18
By: Ed Asner, and others
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Southern Horrors & The Red Record (AmazonClassics Edition)
- By: Ida B. Wells-Barnett
- Narrated by: Kristyl Dawn Tift
- Length: 4 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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In the United States at the turn of the nineteenth century, crusading African American journalist Ida B. Wells-Barnett bravely reported on the scourge of white supremacist violence that had personally impacted her own life and work. Her reporting exposed and riled the South, enlightened uninformed Northerners, and captured international attention. Southern Horrors and The Red Record offer extensive accounts of the lynching, cruelty, and hate that African Americans faced in the early years of the Jim Crow South.
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So Courageous
- By eric lewis on 09-29-23
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The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England
- A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century
- By: Ian Mortimer
- Narrated by: Jonathan Keeble
- Length: 11 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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Imagine you could travel back to the 14th century. What would you see? What would you smell? More to the point, where are you going to stay? And what are you going to eat? Ian Mortimer shows us that the past is not just something to be studied; it is also something to be lived. He sets out to explain what life was like in the most immediate way, through taking you to the Middle Ages. The result is the most astonishing social history book you are ever likely to read: evolutionary in its concept, informative and entertaining in its detail.
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Detailed, Interesting and Entertaining
- By Marc-Andr? on 05-13-10
By: Ian Mortimer
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God's Jury
- The Inquisition and the Making of the Modern World
- By: Cullen Murphy
- Narrated by: Robertson Dean
- Length: 9 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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The Inquisition conducted its last execution in 1826-the victim was a Spanish schoolmaster convicted of heresy. But as Cullen Murphy shows in this provocative new work, not only did its offices survive into the twentieth century, in the modern world its spirit is more influential than ever.
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A balanced review based on new material
- By Sean on 05-15-12
By: Cullen Murphy
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Queen of Thieves
- The True Story of "Marm" Mandelbaum and Her Gangs of New York
- By: J. North Conway
- Narrated by: Suzanne Toren
- Length: 7 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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Queen of Thieves is the gritty, fast-paced story of Fredericka "Marm" Mandelbaum, a poor Jewish woman who rose to the top of her profession in organized crime during the Gilded Age in New York City. During her more than twenty-five-year reign as the country’s top receiver of stolen goods, she accumulated great wealth and power inconceivable for women engaged in business, legitimate or otherwise.
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a bit repetitive
- By Andy on 09-19-14
By: J. North Conway