p. 18 But however alarming the demons of fornication may have been, the most fearsome demons of all were to be found, teeming like flies on a corpse, around the traditional gods of the empire. Jupiter, Aphrodite, Bacchus and |Isis, all of them in the eyes of these Christian writers, were demonic. In sermon after sermon, tract after tract, Christian preachers and writers reminded the faithful in violently disapproving language that the ‘error’ of the pagan religions was demonically inspired. … As Augustine thundered: ‘All the pagans were under the power of demons. Temples were built to demons, altars were set up to demons, priests ordained for the service of demons, sacrifices offered to demons, and ecstatic ravers were brought in as prophets for demons. The demons’ motivations in all of this was simple: if they had human followers, then they would have sacrifices, and these sacrifices were their food. To this end, Christian writers explained, demons had created the entire Greco-Roman religious system so that ‘they may procure for themselves a proper diet of fumes and blood offered to their statues and images’.”

p. 19 Christian preachers began to exhibit a new, almost hysterical, desire for purity … one had to avoid all contact with the blood, smoke, water and even the smell of other people’s sacrifices. .. At the close of the 4^th century, a fitful Christian wrote an anxious letter to Augustine. May a Christian use baths which are used by pagans on a feast day, he asked, either while the pagans are there or after they have left. May a Christian sit in a sedan chair if a pagan has sat in that same chair during the feast day celebrations of an ‘idol’? If a thirst Christian comes across a well in a deserted temple, may they drink from it? If a Christian is starving, and on the point of death, and they see food in an idol’s temple, may they eat it?

p.44 “There was a strong strain of scepticism in Greek and Roman thought. As Pliny the Elder put it: “I deem it a mark of human stupidity to seek to discover the shape and form of God. Whoever God is – provided there is a God … he consists wholly of sense, sight and hearing, wholly of soul, wholly of mind, wholly of himself.” Pliny suggested that what divinity there was, was to be found in humanity itself: “God,” he wrote, “is one mortal helping another.” Rome was not an empire of atheists, emperors were even deified after their death and their ‘genius’ (divine spirit) then worshipped. Nevertheless, even the emperors themselves didn’t always take this too seriously. The emperor Vespasian is said to have announced the severity of his final illness by declaring: ‘Gah, I think I’m turning into a god.’ But Romans were not all cynics… it was a commonly held belief that Rome’s great success depended on the goodwill of the gods. As a character in a Roman history observed: “All went well so long as we obeyed the gods, and ill when we spurned them… Religious they may have been: dogmatic and unbending they were not. Like the Roman Empire, the Roman pantheon could happily expand. Rome was not a paragon of religious pluralism. It had no scruples about banning or suppressing practices – whether Druidic or Bacchic or Manichean – that seemed for any reason pernicious. But equally it could admit foreign gods – though as with so much else in Rome a bureaucratic process had first to be observed. To ignore this process and worship a foreign god that had not been accepted was a socially unacceptable act; it risked upsetting the contract with the incumbent gods and spreading disaster and pestilience.”

p. 68 Pliny (governor in Bithnyia under Trajan) letter 10.96 is nothing less than the very first record of the Christians by a Roman writer… Pliny’s problem with all of this is not religious. He is not upset because Jupiter has been neglected, or Hera has been slighted: he is upset because the citizens of his province are becoming disgruntled by the Christian’s behaviour. Anonymous pamphlets, containing the names of local Christians, have started to appear. Whoever it is who has been writing these, Pliny is now obliged to react. Not because he is fervently religious – he is not – but because it is his job as governor to keep the province calm .. Discontented locals had to be taken seriously; if they were not listened to, a situation might develop where riots could break out – for which Pliny would be held responsible. Pontius Pilate might have been the first official to be reluctantly pressed into action against Christians by local agitators – but he was certainly not the last. Even the locals who were forcing Pliny’s hand might not have been complaining about Christians for religious reasons. It has been speculated …Local tradesmen were angry because this surge in Christian sentiment had led to a drop in the sales of sacrificial meat and their profits were suffering: anti-Christian sentiment caused less by Satan than by a slow trade in sausage meat.”

p. 70 “all over the empire, Romans were frustratingly unwilling to play their role as bloodthirsty martyr-makers. Many even refuse to execute Christians when they arrive in front of them. Arrius Antonius was a Roman governor of Asia who in the late second century had executed a number of Christians in his province. He was perhaps unprepared for what came next. Instead of fleeing, local Christians suddenly turned up and , in one large mob, presented themselves before him. Antonius did indeed dutifully kill a few (presumably there is only so much temptation a Roman can stand) but rather than despatching the rest of pleasure, he turned to them with what, even with the passage of almost two millllennia, sounds unmistakeably like exasperation: ‘Oh you ghastly people,’ he said. ‘If you want to die you have cliffs you can jump off and nooses to hand yourself with….

Other Christians who were deprived of execution turned instead to suicide. In 4^th-century North Africa, locals watched in horror as faithful and ‘deranged men, … because they love the name martyr and because they desire human praise more than divine charity, they kill themselves’. The methods of suicide varied but drowning, setting oneself on fire and jumping off cliffs were among the most popular. Whatever the method, the aim was always the same: martyrdom,l eternal glory in heaven and eternal fame on earth – or so it was hoped.”

p. 74 “When a young girl called Eulalia presents herself before a governor he struggles to dissuade her. Think of your future marriage, he begs. ‘Think of the great joys you are cutting off … The family you are bereaving follows you with tears .. you are dying in the bloom of youth…your rash conduct is breaking their hearts.’ Eulalia…ignores him. … Realizing that Christians found full meat sacrifices repellent, officials also tried to tempt them with smaller acts of obedience. Just put out your fingers, Eulalia’s judge begs her, and just touch a little of that incense, and you will escape cruel suffering.”

p. 76 “Maximus, having offered that bribe to the soldier and soon-to-be martyr Julies and been rebuffed… comes up with an almost Jesuitical solution to the problem. ‘If you think [sacrifice] is a sin,’ he suggests, then ‘let me take the blame. I am the one who is forcing you, so that you may hot give the impression of having consented voluntarily. Afterwards you can go home in peace, you will pick up your ten-year bonus and no one will ever trouble you again.”

p. 119 “At the end of the 4^th century, the orator Libanius looked out and described in despair what he observed. He and other worshippers of the old gods saw, he said, their temples ‘in ruins, their ritual banned, their altars overturned, their sacrifices suppressed, their priests sent packing, and their property divided up between a crew of rascals.. It is thought that when Constantine had come to the throne, 10 per cent of the empire, at most, were Christian… by the end of that first, tumultuous century of Christian rule, estimates suggest that this figure had been reversed: now between 70 and 90 per cent of the empire were now Christian. One law from around that time declared, entirely untruthfully, that there were no more ‘pagans’. None. The aggression of the claim is remarkable. Christians were writing the wicked ‘pagans; out of existence…. If some of these millions were converting not out of love of Christ but out of fear of his enforcers? No matter, argued Christian preachers. Better to be scared in this life than burn in the next.”

p. 142 “it was felt that Greek and Roman authors should be ignored when they talked about their gods ‘and especially when they represent them as bring many’ – which was basically all of the time… Better, Basil wrote, to avoid dangerous works altogether. “Just as in culling roses we avoid the thorns, from such writings as these we will gather everything useful, and guard against the noxious’. As Basil explained, such ecclesiastical censorship was not illiberal; it was loving. Just as Augustine advocated the beating of heretics with rods out of fatherly care, so Basil advocated the removal of great tracts of the classical canon as an act of ‘great care’ to ensure the soul was safely guarded.”.. Later generations would present Basil as a liberal intellectual.. That is nonsense. Supremacy was precisely what Basil wanted – and he got it.”

p. 146 “This was a new literary world and a newly serious one… The power of this Christian talk was produced by many things, among them a remorseless horatory pedagogy, a hectoring moralising of the individual, and a ceaseless management of the minutiae of everyday life. Above all, it was a form of speech marked by an absence of humour. It was a morose and a deadly serious word.

p. 147 “For many hardline Christian clerics, the entire edifice of academic learning was considered dubious. In some ways there was a novel egalitarianism in this: with Christianity, the humblest fisherman could touch the face of God without having his hand stayed by quibbling scholars. But there was a more aggressive and sins=ter side to it, too. St Paul had succinectly and influently said that ‘the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God’.”

p. 148 “Heretics were intellectual therefore intellectuals were, if not heretical, then certainly suspect.”

p. 152 In the third century their had been 28 public libraries in Rome and many private ones. By the end of the 4^th they were, as the historian Ammianus Marcellinus observed with sorrow, “like tombs, permanently shut”. Was Christianity’s rise cause or mere correlation in this? Christian emperors would later struggle to increase literacy to ensure that the state even had enough literate functionaries. Certain fields of enquiry start to become not only off-limits but illegal. As a law of AD388 announced: “There shall be no opportunity for any man to go out to the public and to argue about religion or to discuss it or to give any counsel’… Philosophers who wished their works and careers to survive in this Christian world had to curb their teachings… Any theories that stated that the world was eternal – for that contradicted the idea o Creation – were, as the academic Dirk Rohmann has pointed out, also suppressed. The stated aim of historians also started to change too. … the last of the pagan historians, Ammianus Marcellinus.. posterity ought to be an “impartial judge of the past”. Christian historians took a different view. As the influential Christian writer Eusebius – the ‘father of Church history’ – wrote, the job of the historian was not to record everything but instead only those things that would do a Christian good to read.”

p. 153 “the shocking death of Hypatia ought to have merited a goo deal of attention in the histories of the period. Instead, it is treated lightly and obliquely, if at all. In history, as in life, no one in Alexandria was punished for her murder… Some writers were highly critical – even to fervent Christian eyes this was an appalling act. But not all: as one Christian bishop later recorded with admiration, once the satanic woman had been destroyed, then all the people surrounded Cyril in acclamation for he had ‘destroyed the last remains of idolatory in the city’.”

p. 162 One of the most infamous assaults on books and thinkers tool place in Antioch. Here, at the end of the 4^th century, an accusation of treasonous divination led to a full-scale purge that targeted the city’s intellectuals… As Ammianus describes it [he was there], “the racks were set up, and leaden weights, cords and scourges put in readiness. The air was filled with the appalling yells of savage voices mixed with the clanking of chains, .. A noble of ‘remarkable literary attainments was one of the first to be arrested and tortured; he was followed by a clutch of philosophers who were variously tortured, burned alive and beheaded… the burning of books on bonfires of volumes were used as post-hoc justification for the slaughter .. they were treated as forbidden texts to allay the indignation caused by the executions, though most of them were treatises on various liberal arts and on jurisprudence. Many intelllectuals started to pre-empt the persecutors and set light to their own books.”

p. 127 Hypatia .. always dressed in the austere and concealing uniform of a philospher’s cloak. .. It is said one of her students fell in love with her and ‘not being able to control his passion, confessed his feelings’. Hypatia responded briskly ‘ She brought him some of her sanitary towels and threw them before him, and said. ‘You love this, young man, and there is nothing beautiful about it.

By the early 5^th century AD, Hypatia had become something of a local celebrity. Alexandria was a city that had, for hundreds of years, been in thrall to its intellectuals…. ..

p. 129 Library … the number of scrolls that it held is contested, .. there were perhaps as many as 500,000 scrolls…. Even the major monastic libraries of the 12^th century contained no more than 500 or so… by 1338, the library of the Sorbonne in Paris, the richest in the Christian world, offered a theoretical 1,728 works for loan – 300 of which as its registered noted, it had already managed to lose.  t wasn’t only books that Alexandria collected but intellectuals. Scholars here were treated with reverence and to some marvellous facilities. .. the Great Library and the Musaeum provided them with a charming existence: there were covered walkways to stroll through, gardens in which to rest and a hall to lecture in. .. academics were also given a stipend from public funds, board and lodging, and meals in an elegant, domed-roofed dining hall. There may also have been, somewhat incongruously, a zoo.”

p. 131 y Hypatia’s time the library had gone, the last of it with the Christian destruction of the great temple of Serapis. “Whenever anyone new and notable visited Alexandria, one of the first things they did was to pay Hypatia a visit. Orestes, the aristocratic governor of Alexandria, and on eo fthe most important men in the city, had become a confidant, friend and a powerful ally – and, as it would turn out, a dangerous one. In a world that was becoming increasingly riven along sectarian lines, Hypatia was determinedly non-partisan in her behaviour, treating non-Christian and Christian with meticulous equality.

p. 132 “In the spring of the year 415, relations between Christians and non-Christians in Alexandria were tense. … the city had a new bishop, Cyril. After the zealot Theophilus, many Alexandrians must have hoped that their next cleric would be more conciliatory … he was, after all, Theophilus’s nephew. And true to family form, her was a thug…

p. 134 “the numbers of Cyril’s militia swelled. Around 500 monks descended from their shacks and caves in the nearby hills, determined to fight for their bishop. Unwashed, uneducated, unbending in their faith, they were, as even the Christian writer Socrates admits, men of a very fiery disposition.” Confrontation between them and the governor…

p. 135 “And then the whispering began. It was Hypatia’s fault, said the Christians, that the governor was being so stubborn… Fanned by the parablani, the remours started to catch and flame. Hypatia was not merely a difficult woman, they said. Hadn’t everyone seen her use symbols in her work, and astrolabes? The illiterate parabalani (‘bestial men, truly abdominable’ as one philosopher would later call them) knew what these instruments were. They were not the tools of philosophy and mathematics, no: they were the work of the Devil. Hypatia was not a philosopher: she was a creature of Hell.. She was ‘atheizing’ Alexandria. One day in March AD 435, Hypatia set out from her home to go for her daily ride through the city. Suddenly, she found her way blocked by a ‘multitude of believers in God’. They ordered her to get down from her chariot … the parabalani, under the guidance of a Church magistrate called Peter – a ‘perfect believer in all respects in Jesus Christ’ surged round and seized ‘the pagan woman’. They then dragged Alexandria’s greatest living mathematician through the streets to a church. Once inside, they ripped the cloths from her body then, using broken pieces of pottery as blades, flayed her skin from her flesh. Some say, that, while she still gasped for breath, they gouged out her eyes. Once she was dead, they tore her body into pieces and threw what was left of the ‘luminous child of reason’ onto a pyre and burned her.

p. 92 “one winder could keep half a dozen weavers busy. Yet there seems to have been something rather distinctive about the women in the winding room. It was generally considered that they formed a select group (although their wages were usually lower than those of women weavers) because their winding room was far quieter than the weaving shed, and they did not have to resort to lip reading. Selina Cooper worked in one of the winding rooms at Tunstall’s mill in Brierfield and impressed this point on her daughter: …’Used to talk, used to chat all the time they were working”…the list of winders who went on to become active suffragists is impressively long… Selina Cooper and Ethel Derbyshire were two of the most outstanding. Others include Violet Grundy, Secretary of the Ancoat Winders’ Union formed with the help of Eva Gore-Booth and Sarah Dickenson in the 1900s and Annie Heaton, a winder from Burnley, active in the Women’s Trade Union League from 1893 and one of Esther Roper’s earliest suffrage organisers.”

p 93 “Women weavers comprised by far the largest group in the mill, nearly a third of all employees and two thirds of all women workers. In all they totalled over 150,000 strong. The typical Lancashire mill girls were weavers, in shawls, clogs and ‘laps’ pieces of cloth from cut ends to protect clothing from loom friction, oil and grease, while from their leather belts hung the tools of their craft, scissors, comb and reed-hook… Alice Foley… “At first I was highly terrified by the noise and the proximity of clashing machinery… It was .. stifling, deafening and incredibly dirty.’ It was dangerous as well. A weaver would be in charge of two to four looms, and each minute of the working day the shuttle would be thrown by the picking-stick across each loom no fewer than 200 times a minute. Accidents – including scalpings and amputations – often happened, and were reported in the local newspapers. One typical report about the death of a 15-year-old girl in Oldham read: ‘Whilst doing something at her loom her hair was caught in the working and her neck dislocated. She was not missed until the works had been closed, and when seach was made about 7 o’clock her dead body was found under the loom.”

p. 85 |”In 1884 the local grouping of weavers, escpecially strong in Blackburn and Burnley, joined together to form one united union, the Northern Counties Amalgamated Association of Cotton Weavers. .. the Association grew at a great rate. Within four years there were 40,000 members, representing one in four weavers. Three years later, in 1891, this had grown to 65,000, of whom two out of three were women… no other trade union anywhere had anything like its massive number of organised women workers.

p. 96 “completely equal pay in the weaving sheds was a myth. Nevertheless, women could earn far more by weaving than they could for any other job open to working class women, and the men and women weavers were paid at much nearer equal rates than in any other trade.

p. 99 “The Lancashire cotton unions, however, were still run by men who were neither socialist agitators nor idealistic visionaries. They were hard-headed men whose skills were of rapid calculations to fractions of a penny to assess a member’s earnings … They were not overtly political, and, along with the miners, tended to drag their feed over the cause of independent labour representation in parliament… In 1901 the only cotton union affiliated to the Labour Representation Committee was the tiny Colne Weavers’ Association, already well known for its unusual socialist tendencies.”

p. 104 “the National Union of Teachers, heavily dominated by the minority of men, had little interest in the particular grievances of its women members. It saw no reason to campaign against the differentials between men’s and women’s wages (men earned about 30% more) .. the union only finally accepted the principle of equal pay in 1919, and even then the women were accused of rushing the issue through while men teachers were in the forces”.) Women teachers acted timidly over the question of the vote: although some teachers did eventually form their own Franchise Union, individual branches of the NUT were usually opposed… In the Wigan branch, for instance, a resolution on women’s suffrage was debated, but ‘despite the fact that three fourths of the members present were ladies, not a single supporter of the resolution was to be found.

p/ 137 “To Guild members … it seemed vital for women to take up their opportunities to stand for local elections, both in their own right and as valuable political experience. If women could prove themselves capable of sitting on local School and Poor Law Boards, surely it strengthened their claims to the parliamentary franchise.

At first women met with prejudice and some hostility. ‘Men bitterly resented this advent of women in their special preserves,’ one Lancashire Guildswoman and Poor Law Guardian remembered. When Sarah Reddish came top of the defeated candidates in the Bolton School Board elections in 1897, it was expected that she would be co-opted on to it, as was usually the case. But because she was a woman, the Board refused to consider her. Happily, the Bolton electorate voted her in at the next election.”

p. 138 “Such women had considerable effect in humanizing the administration of the harsh Poor Laws, particularly in working class areas where previously few women had been eligible. Mrs Bury found that ‘before women sat on our Board all girls with sad histories had to come alone before a large body of men. Now, after I had pleaded with the Board and got a resolution passed, the women Guardians and matrons dealt with the cases in a separate room. Mrs Pankhurst, who was elected to the Chorlton Board of Guardians in 1894, found equally intolerable conditions: the girls working in the workhouse were not provided with nightdresses or underwear because the matron had not liked to mention such indelicate matters in front of the men on the Board.”

p. 144 “a petition to be signed exclusively by women working in the Lancashire cotton mills. This would show the rest of the country how powerful the demand for the vote really was among industrial women. It was a radically new tactic for a regional suffrage society to adopt… the petition was unequivocal: … ‘in the opinion of your petitioners the continued denial of the franchise to women is unjust and inexpedient. In the home, their position is lowered by such an exclusion from the responsibilities of national life. In the factory, their unrepresented condition places the regulation of their work in the hands of men who are often their rivals as well as their fellow workers…’

The petition was launched with maximum impact on 1 May 1900 with an open air meeting in Blackburn… seemed the obvious place: with no fewer than 16,00 women working in its weaving mills, it had a stronger tradition of women’s work than anywhere else in Lancashire. The earliest weavers’ unions had been established there, and women members had early acquired a reputation for militancy after the part they played in the 1878 strike.”

p; 146 “The summer of 1900, reported the Englishwoman’s Review, was ‘quite an experience’… ‘Canvassers in 50 places … were soon at work … going to the homes of the workers in the evening, after factory hours.. Some employers allowed petition sheets in the mills, and others allowed canvassers to stand in the mill yards with sheets spread on tables so that signatures could be got as the women were leaving or returning to work”.

p/ 205 “On 23 October 1906 Mrs Pankhurst led a demonstration to the opening of Parliament in protest against the omission of women’s suffrage from the Government’s programme. Scuffles broke out and 10 women were arrested and imprisoned. .. Working class suffragists recoiled from such behaviours. They felt that they had nothing in common with people who could donate £100 to WSPU funds or whose response to a crisis was to write to The Times. .. The radical suffragists wrote to Mrs Fawcett to make this point: although they had supported the interruption of a Liberal meeting in the interest of free speech, militancy for its own sake merely alienated all the support they had so carefully built up among the textile workers. .. Their letter is phrased a little primly, but it does reveal the dramatic class differences that now existed between the suffragettes and the radical suffragists: “Our members … it is not the fact of demonstrations or even violence that is offensive to them. It is being mixed up and held accountable as a class for educated and upper class women who kick, shriek, bite and spit. … It is not the rioting but the kind of rioting.”

p/ 222 “In 1911, it decided to show the strength of its support outside the maelstrom of London politics by organizing a massive pilgrimage that would converge on the capital from all corners of Britain an present a petition signed by 80,000 women demanding the vote. To thousands of members in the mushrooming suffrage societies the pilgrimage entailed considerable personal commitment and physical stamina. Few Lancashire women could spafre the time to walk the 200 miles … the only woman from her suffrage society who walked the whole distance was Emily Murgatroyd. ‘It took her about a fortnight. And they got hospitality …’ Mary Cooper explained. ‘and blisters on their feet. She was a real character, and very active physically. Emily’s weaver wages – then about 23s – were badly needed at home… ‘I had to save up money to leave with my mother,’ she said ‘because she couldn’t manage to get along without it. When I went away on suffrage work I always left a pound at home.’ Married women coming back from demonstrations or pilgrimages knew that the weekly wash waited for them. ‘Working housewives,’ commented Hannah Mitchell, ‘faced with this accumulation of tasks, often resolved never to leave home again.”

p. 9 “It is suggested that the Brigantines were recognised as Roman allies not long after the invasion of southern England in 43, and certainly by 47 when the Roman province appears to have extended to the southern border of Brigantia. The strength of the alliance appears to have been such that the governor, Osrorius Scapula, felt his northern flank secure enough to commit to campaigning in North Wales … the Brigantian ruler Queen Cartimandua certainly proved to be a loyal ally in 51 when she handed over Caratacus, the leader of anti-Roman resistance initially in southern England and later in Wales. Not that Brigantia was entirely quiescent – Tacitus records a revolt in Brigantia in 47 and eventually Cartimandua and her consort Venutius, who had ‘long been loyal’ to Rome fell out … became the leader of an anti-Roman faction…. requiring Roman intervention to rescue the queen. [probably] 69, with Ventius taking advantage of the chaos of the year of the Four Emperors.”

P 15 “the incumbent governor of the province was Bolanus, an appointee of the Emperor Vitellius. Tacitus shows little enthusiasm for Bolanus… yet not only did Bolanus survive Vitellius, but he was retained in post by the victorious Verspasian until 71, when he was succeeded by the new emperor’s relative, Quintus Petillius Cerialus. On his return to Rome, Bolanus was rewarded with elecation to the inner core of the aristocracy, the patriciate, and evidently continued to enjoy the favour of the Flavian regime. .. The Flavian poet, Papinius Statius … credits Bolanus with some apparently striking achievemnts in Caledonia … constructed forts and watch towers, and stripped a British king of his armour.”

p. 17 “.. lacked the long aristocratic lineage that had been shared by all of his predecessors. To the Roman way of thinking – no matter how unrealistic this hope may have been – such lineage was regarded as carrying with it the accumulated wisdom and experience of past generations. The son of a tax-collector and a first generation senator, a provincial governor appointed in Nero’s last years, when the Emperor appeared to be deliberately bypassing those candidates who were ‘best qualified in terms of their birth for such posts, Vespasian was not, for some in the Senate, the stuff of which emperors were made; he lacked prestige (auctoritas) and needed to devise a means of acquiring it… the uncertain military situation in Britain … surely provided a field in which military glory, and, with it, auctoritas, could be sought and won…. The circumstances were now right, therefore, for the unveiling of a ‘British Project’ – nothing less than the completion of the conquest of mainland Britain, and probably, Ireland too.”

p 18 but “even by the close of Vespasian’s own reign, the ambitious project was being scaled down: the ‘Elliptical Building’ in the fortress at Chester did not, at this stage at least, progress beyond the laying of its foundations… the two campaigns which took place in Titus’s reign appear to have been more consolidatory in character… Titus’ reign saw the withdrawal of detachments from the British legions – presumably in response to growing uncertainties elsewhere. .. Tacitus’ reference to the invasion of Ireland in the context of Agricola’s fifth campaign in southwest Scotland has the tone of a piece of wistful nostalgia – for an exciting and achievable project the opportunity for which, however, had passed.”