Showing results by narrator "Gavin Muir" in All Categories

Eight dramatised documentaries of landmark trials that changed the law What do you do when a judge sentences your child to be beaten? If someone who has been stabbed dies after refusing a blood transfusion, is it a straight case of murder? How did a murder case end up changing the law for...

1730. Driven by a wild romantic impulse, Francis Herries uproots his family from Doncaster to the lakeland valley of Borrowdale. Accompanied by his housekeeper/mistress, Alice, they settle in his tumbledown ancestral home, Herries, in the shadow of the Cumberland fells. Proud, stubborn and temperamental, Francis cuts himself off from his brother, spurns his long-suffering wife and becomes embroiled in drink and debauchery. When he sells Alice at Keswick Fair, his reputation is ruined, and the locals dub him 'Rogue' Herries.

On 25th October 1799—his 18th wedding anniversary—cantankerous Somerset parson William Holland begins his diary, chronicling events at the vicarage and in the small farming community of Over Stowey. He would keep it for the next 19 years, candidly recording the small trials of day-to-day life—from chaotic church services and unruly locals to lazy servants and irksome in-laws.