2 febbraio

From Candlemas to Easter 1349, Robert of Avesbury wrote, more than 200 bodies a day were buried in the new ground by Smithfield. At the other new cemetery, East Smithfield by the Tower, the dead lay in trenches; their teeth gave Bos and colleagues the Yersinia pestis genome in 2011.

The twins Hamnet and Judith were baptised on 2 February 1585. After that, apart from a family lawsuit of 1588 that names him, no record places Shakespeare anywhere until 1592, when he is already a London playwright. How he got there is guesswork: a country schoolmaster, a Lancashire household, or…

The law student John Manningham wrote in his diary on Candlemas, dating it 1601 in the old reckoning: At our feast wee had a play called Twelue night or what you will, much like the commedy of errores or Menechmi in Plautus, but most like and neere to that in Italian called Inganni What he liked…

After a bidding war with the Bank of England, the House accepted the company’s offer to pay more than £7.5 million for the right to take over the debt. England still counted the new year from 25 March, so the journals date this 2 February 1719/20.

Arguing for English over Sanskrit and Persian, Thomas Babington Macaulay wrote that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia. The government adopted his view the next month.

Germany’s summer offensive aimed at the oil of the Caucasus and reached the Volga. The Sixth Army fought for the city street by street, factory by factory, until the defenders held only a strip along the river bank. The Soviet counter-stroke turned the besiegers into the besieged.

From low on the bill of a Helen Shapiro package tour to stadiums on four continents. By 1966 the screaming was so loud that the band could not hear themselves, played the same half-hour set every night, and stopped altogether.

Opening Parliament, F. W. de Klerk lifted the bans on the ANC, the PAC, the South African Communist Party and dozens of other organisations, and said Mandela would be freed without conditions.

Opening Parliament, the state president lifted the bans on the ANC, the PAC and the South African Communist Party, lifted emergency restrictions on thirty-three other organisations, the UDF and COSATU among them, and said Nelson Mandela would be freed without conditions. “The time for negotiation…

Under the Unlawful Organisations Act both movements were outlawed. For thirty years they worked underground and in exile, the ANC’s external mission led by Oliver Tambo, for much of the time from Lusaka. Membership, or even quoting a banned person, was a crime.

Twelve years after publishing it, The Lancet fully retracted Andrew Wakefield’s 1998 paper suggesting a link between the MMR vaccine and autism. He was struck off the medical register that May. A later study of more than 650,000 Danish children found no link.