East of England

Today, we dig into Hereward the Wake, the Fenland rebel who challenged William the Conqueror.

What can the records really tell us about his revolt and its impact? Picture the flat expanse of the Fens in Eastern England, a network of marshes and peat flats that made travel as tricky as navigating a sea of reeds.

The people living there were tied to the land by a kind of rugged, agrarian community life that had survived since Saxon times, with its own traditions of local lordship and shared rights over common pasture.

Hereward the Wake rose from this milieu, not from some great court, but as a local theng who understood how to use geography against an occupying force.

Before the season finale lands in a few days, I wanted to bring you something a little different, a little extra to keep you going until it drops.

That finale takes us into the eerie landscapes of Eastern England, chasing years of strange beast sightings along a stretch of road called the A1075.

It got me thinking about cryptids more generally and how these things aren't just a British phenomena.

So tonight, I want to take you somewhere else in the world entirely, to a case a lot of you will probably already know.

Speaking of the intellectuals who occasionally impinge upon the family circle, she says, they have a horrible habit of, oh, I can't spell it, but it means pulling their minds to pieces and finding out how they are made, and they do that with their emotions too.

Nothing of the sort is to be found in this tale of Eastern England during the Restoration.

And yet, while we may accept the unusual spectacle of a modern schoolgirl writing a red-blooded adventure story and privately poking fun at psychoanalysts and their dupes, we are justified in a certain curiosity as to the genesis of such a book.

That curiosity the introduction is designed to assuage.