23 mars

Thomas Cromwell’s commissioners closed the smaller houses first, then all the rest: some 800 monasteries, nunneries and friaries, whose lands passed to the Crown and were largely sold on. The last, Waltham Abbey, surrendered on 23 March 1540, a date English clerks still wrote “1539”.

Handel billed it only as “A New Sacred Oratorio”, since some clergy objected to scripture in a playhouse. The tale that George II stood for the Hallelujah chorus has no witness from the time; it first appears in a letter of 1780. London papers dated the night 23 March 1742, the English year then…

Alcubierre moved to a hill locals called “la Civita”, where pumice was shallow and digging easy. He thought it was Stabiae; only in 1763 did an inscription naming the res publica Pompeianorum show whose town it was.

Patrick Henry’s speech to the Virginia Convention was not written down at the time. The words we have come from his biographer William Wirt, in 1817, pieced together from the memories of men who were there, more than forty years later.

In Symphony No. 94 a quiet theme in the slow movement ends on a sudden fortissimo chord with drums. Haydn told Griesinger he had wanted to surprise the public with something new, not, as the story went, to wake the ladies dozing in the audience.

Against the spring flood, then overland on horses bought along the river. Food was short and thefts and quarrels with the river villages grew; east of the Cascades the party traded medicine and buttons for horses and roots.

A log stockade named for the Clatsop, whose land it stood on. It rained on all but twelve days. The men hunted elk, the captains wrote up their natural history, and everyone traded with the Clatsop and Chinook, shrewd dealers who had bargained with ships’ captains for years.

Between Guam and Palau the sounding line ran out to 4,475 fathoms (8,184 m), so much deeper than expected that the crew sounded a second time to be sure. It was the deepest water yet measured; the trench floor lay still 2.7 km lower, a little to the west.

Infant vaccination had been compulsory in England since 1853, and thousands of Leicester parents had been fined or jailed for refusing it. A mass demonstration put the town on another path: the “Leicester method” of isolating the sick and quarantining their contacts. An Act of 1898 let parents…

A funeral procession of hundreds of thousands carried 184 coffins to a common grave on the Field of Mars. No priests took part: it was the revolution’s own ceremony.

A German gun in the forest near Crépy shelled Paris from about 120 kilometres away, so far that Parisians first thought the shells were bombs. On Good Friday one hit the church of Saint-Gervais during a service and killed more than 80 people.

The young revolutionary, convicted for the killing of a British police officer, was hanged at Lahore with Rajguru and Sukhdev. “Inquilab Zindabad”, long live revolution, became his slogan.

The Muslim League under Muhammad Ali Jinnah demanded that the Muslim-majority areas of the north-west and east form “independent states”. It became known as the Pakistan Resolution.

A trainee cosmonaut, 24, tossed an alcohol-soaked swab onto a hot plate inside an oxygen-rich test chamber, and the fire engulfed him. He died in hospital hours later, three weeks before Gagarin flew. His death was kept secret until 1986.

Ten crewed flights in 20 months to learn everything Apollo would need: rendezvous, docking, spacewalks and two weeks in orbit. By the end the United States had caught up.

“Lose Yourself”, from 8 Mile, became the first rap song to win Best Original Song. Eminem was not in the theatre; he had not expected to win.

For six days one of the largest ships afloat lay wedged across the canal, and hundreds of ships queued at both ends. Times here are UTC; Egypt was two hours ahead.

In a sandstorm and high wind, the 20,000-TEU ship veered out of the channel northbound and drove her bow into the east bank, her stern against the west.

On the first day of the school year girls arrived for classes and were sent home within hours: the Ministry of Education announced that their schools would stay shut “until further notice”.