The Black Archive

King Arthur — What the Sources Actually Say The earliest surviving account of post-Roman Britain is a sermon. It was written around 540 AD by a cleric named Gildas. It describes the Saxon invasions, the British resistance, and the battle of Badon Hill. It names the leader who turned the tide. That name is not Arthur. This episode traces the documentary record from Gildas in 540 to Geoffrey of Monm...

Primary sources referenced in this episode include KB 8/9 (the Baga de Secretis indictment), the Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, Henry VIII, the dispatches of Eustace Chapuys, the correspondence of Thomas Cromwell, and the letters of Sir William Kingston. The episode examines the contradiction between the Kent indictment’s placement of Anne Boleyn at East Greenwich on 13 May 1535 and Ann...

On the morning of Wednesday the 26th of April, 1871, a police constable walking a lane in south-east London found a seventeen-year-old girl on her hands and knees in the dark. She was alive. She would not be alive for much longer. Her name was Jane Maria Clouson. She was a domestic servant from Deptford. She was motherless. She had been in service with a stationer’s family in Greenwich for nearly...

The killing of Julia Martha Thomas. Richmond, 1879. Kate Webster murdered her employer, dismembered and boiled the body, and spent twenty-seven days impersonating her. The victim's skull was missing for 131 years. This episode reconstructs the case from the Old Bailey trial record, the 1879 inquest, Webster's multiple confessions, and the 2011 forensic inquest that formally closed the Barnes Myste...

The Black Archive is a documentary series examining crimes from British history, reconstructed from contemporary sources and inquest records. Each episode presents a structured account of events alongside the evidential gaps that remain unresolved. Get full access to The Black Archive at theblackarchiveuk.substack.com/subscribe