by nick@nickgriffiths.co.uk | Aug 25, 2024 | Pepys & 17th
I’m rapid-publishing the first three Pepys Mysteries over the course of the next three months, in the hope of establishing the series, so they’re all written and ready to go. Thus, I can zip forward in time and post from Book 2: The Plague Doctor Murders... 
by nick@nickgriffiths.co.uk | Aug 24, 2024 | Pepys & 17th
Another research post from The Brampton Witch Murders today, concerning the Witchfinder General himself, Matthew Hopkins (or, as Hopkins titles himself in his own book, the ‘Witch Finder Generall’). Since I was writing about witch-hunting in the 17th... 
by nick@nickgriffiths.co.uk | Aug 23, 2024 | Pepys & 17th
In The Brampton Witch Murders, Mr Pepys’s personal inquisitors are off to Brampton in Huntingdonshire in September 1666, where his sister has been accused of witchcraft. They take a hackney coach to Cripplegate, following London’s old Roman wall, to catch... 
by nick@nickgriffiths.co.uk | Aug 22, 2024 | Pepys & 17th
Pepys’s diary itself – I prefer “diaries”, since he ended up with six leather-bound volumes over the course of ten years – was, as you can see, written in shorthand. Bar the names, that is – spot ‘Axe-yard’, where Pepys... 
by nick@nickgriffiths.co.uk | Aug 20, 2024 | Pepys & 17th
This is the iconic portrait of Pepys, which he commissioned from John Hayls in 1666, and which he sat for during March of that year. Pepys recalls one such sitting in his diary: “I sit to have it full of shadows and so almost break my neck looking over my...