Shakespeare may be marvellous, BUT….!

Another version of Shakespeare’s Richard…which means the same old, same old, of course. This one is slightly different in that the lead is played by a woman, Emily Carding. She may be truly excellent, I don’t know, but the usual humpy back, evil psychopath, crawling around the stage and so on is much in evidence.  If you’re a…

Meet your real Lancastrian claimants

After Henry VI’s death in 1471, Henry IV’s legitimate line was extinct but his sister’s senior descendant was her grandson, Afonso V, King of Portugal (1432 r.1438-81). He was, therefore, the principal Lancastrian claimant to the English throne, although Edward IV had become Duke of Lancaster by then as a result of Henry IV merging…

Breaking News: Richard III Did Not Pay Off Stillington With “Land for a School”

Willow: How is it you always know this stuff? You always know what’s going on. I never know what’s going on. Giles: Well, you weren’t here from midnight until six researching it. “Angel” – Buffy the Vampire Slayer Bishop of Bath and Wells, Robert Stillington, is the man who informed Richard, Duke of Gloucester, of…

Blond or dark? The decoding of Richard’s DNA….

Was Richard blond? Or was he dark-haired? Professor Hofreiter explains in the article below. http://www.uni-potsdam.de/en/headlines-and-featured-stories/detail-latest/article/2015-09-22-der-wahre-richard-iii-wie-professor-michael-hofreiter-die-dna-des-englischen-koenigs.html

A Visit to Bury St Edmunds (Part Two)

After we left Moyse’s Hall Museum, we wanted to visit St Mary’s Church, as we knew there was a wedding going on at the Cathedral. However, when we arrived, the church was closed a s a service was going on for the WI. By this time the bells of the Cathedral were ringing indicating the…

A Visit to Bury St Edmunds (Part One)

The Mid-Anglia branch of the Richard III Society descended on Bury St Edmunds on Saturday the 12th September. We were lucky enough to have another brilliantly sunny day with no sign of rain and met up in Starbuck’s just across from our first and main objective, the Moyse’s Hall Museum. This museum is housed in…

Henry Tudor….only Bess of York’s consort….?

The link below constitutes one in the eye for Henry Tudor (guess which eye!) The demeaning whispers he always feared and hated…that he was Elizabeth of York’s consort, not she his, are still circulating all these centuries later.  Ha, suddenly this dull, wet, windy late-September morning isn’t so bad after all. It might be worth a…

Poor “old” Richard….!

Oh, dear, yet another actor well in his fifties, playing Richard, who was just in his thirties! I suppose they have to do this, so that Shakespeare’s daftness about Richard fighting in the 1st Battle of St Albans (when he was still only two) can appear more likely to the gullible! What do I think…

Now a world venue

Richard’s reburial week clearly isn’t the end of the story: http://m.leicestermercury.co.uk/Richard-III-s-tomb-Smithsonian-Institution-s-25/story-27824765-detail/story.html

House Of Rebels: Halle’s Hall in Salisbury

One of the most interesting houses is Salisbury is Halle’s Hall, which now serves as the local cinema, possibly the only cinema in the country that is over 500 years old. The Hall is a late medieval house begun by John Halle in about 1470 and completed in 1483, several years after Halle’s death, when…