The Untold Battles

The House of Lords chamber at the Palace of Westminster. Image: UK Parliament (Parliamentary copyright). The House of Lords Explained: How Britain's Unelected Upper Chamber Really Works Few British institutions attract as much argument as the House of Lords. It is one of only a handful of legislatures anywhere in the world whose members are not elected, yet it has the power to force the elected government of the day to think again. In 2026 it also went through one of the biggest changes in its history, when the last hereditary peers lost their seats. So what is the Lords for, who sits there now, and how does it actually shape the laws Britain lives under? Key facts What it is: the upper house of the Parliament of the United Kingdom, sitting at the Palace of Westminster alongside the House of Commons. Size: just under 800 sitting members, making it one of the largest legislative chambers in the world. How members get there: they are appointed as life peers, nomin...

A wooden cross beside the B6318 near Hadrian's Wall at Heavenfield, marking the traditional site of the battle where Oswald of Northumbria defeated Cadwallon of Gwynedd. Photo: David Dixon / Geograph Britain and Ireland, CC BY-SA 2.0. The Battle of Heavenfield, 634: Oswald's Cross and the Fight That Restored Christian Northumbria In the early 630s, Northumbria was in ruins. King Edwin had been cut down at Hatfield Chase, his kingdom split in two, and an invader was ravaging the country with fire and sword. Into that wreckage walked a thirty-year-old exile named Oswald with a small army, a wooden cross, and almost nothing else going for him. The battle he fought on a windswept hill near Hadrian's Wall decided who would rule northern Britain, and it became one of the most famous victories in early English history. Key facts Battle: Heavenfield (Bede calls it Deniseburna, near Hefenfelth) Date: 633 or 634 (disputed; the Annales Cambriae record it as Bellum Cantsc...

The Royal Courts of Justice on the Strand, London. The government has abandoned plans to replace jury trials with judge-only hearings for less serious offences. Image: David Castor, public domain via Wikimedia Commons. Burnham Scraps Plans to Curb Jury Trials After Backlash From Lawyers and MPs The government has abandoned plans to curb the right to trial by jury in England and Wales, in a significant reversal of criminal justice policy drawn up under Sir Keir Starmer. The Ministry of Justice announced on Sunday that proposals to divert large numbers of criminal cases away from juries would be dropped, following months of sustained criticism from lawyers, senior judges and Labour backbenchers. The decision is a personal one for Andy Burnham, who became prime minister in July, to junk a flagship policy of his predecessor. Key facts The government will abandon plans for judge-only trials in the Crown Court for less serious criminal cases. Justice Secretary Alex Norris said he ha...

Illustrative map of northern Britain around AD 603. Map illustration created for The Untold Battles; kingdom boundaries are schematic and the battle site is uncertain. Battle of Degsastan, 603: The Bernician Victory That Broke Dál Riata In the year 603 the greatest army the Gaels of western Scotland had ever put into the field marched south to crush a rising English kingdom. By nightfall at a place the sources call Degsastan, that army had been almost entirely destroyed. Its king fled for his life, and no king of the Irish in Britain would willingly face the English in open battle again for more than a century. That, at least, is what Bede tells us. Degsastan was the first recorded clash between an English army and the Scots of Dál Riata, and the outcome shaped the political map of the island. Had Áedán mac Gabráin won, the Gaelic kingdom might have absorbed the northern English coast, and the Northumbria that later gave England its greatest early scholars and kings might never hav...

Portrait of Rear-Admiral Sir Horatio Nelson by Lemuel Francis Abbott (1799). Painted shortly after he lost his right arm at Tenerife, it shows the empty sleeve pinned across his coat and the decorations won at the Nile. Image: public domain. Admiral Lord Nelson: Britain's Greatest Naval Commander Few figures in British history are as instantly recognisable as Admiral Lord Nelson. Born into a Norfolk parsonage in 1758, he rose from a seasick 12-year-old volunteer to the most celebrated naval commander of his age, winning three of the most famous victories in the Royal Navy's history and dying in the hour of his greatest triumph. Two hundred years on, his column still watches over Trafalgar Square and his flagship is still in commission at Portsmouth. Key facts Born: 29 September 1758 at Burnham Thorpe, Norfolk, the sixth of eleven children of the Reverend Edmund Nelson and his wife Catherine. Joined the Navy: 1771, aged 12, as an ordinary seaman aboard HMS Raisonnable ...

Reform UK leader Nigel Farage in his official 2024 parliamentary portrait. He has been interviewed by the standards commissioner over the undeclared £5m gift he received from crypto investor Christopher Harborne. Farage Interviewed by Standards Commissioner Over £5m Gift as Reform Opens Election Campaign Nigel Farage has revealed that he has been formally interviewed by parliament's standards commissioner over the undeclared £5 million gift he received from a crypto billionaire, in what could become one of the most consequential investigations of his political career. Speaking to The Times over lunch at Doncaster racecourse, where he launched Reform UK's "100 Days to Save Britain" tour and declared that the party's general election campaign starts now, the Reform leader disclosed that the half-hour interview took place in the Palace of Westminster last month. He insisted he remains confident he has done nothing wrong. Key facts Nigel Farage has been int...

Battle of Deorham, 577: The West Saxon Victory That Split Britain in Two Illustrative map of the Deorham battlefield area and the three towns taken by the West Saxons. Map illustration created for The Untold Battles. Town positions from geocoding; river and earthwork lines are schematic. In the year 577, two West Saxon warlords met three British kings on the edge of the Cotswolds and, if the only surviving account is to be believed, killed all three in a single day of fighting. The prize was three of the greatest walled towns of Roman Britain: Gloucester, Cirencester and Bath. Generations of historians have treated the result as one of the decisive moments in the making of England, the battle that cut the Britons of Wales off from the Britons of the south-west for good. There is just one problem. The whole story rests on a single paragraph, written down some three hundred years after the event. No other account survives, the numbers on both sides are unknown, and modern scholars...