The Queen’s Tudor Beasts….!

I’m afraid these new coins aren’t to my liking. OK, maybe the Tudors pinched the greyhound of Edward III as one of their badges, but for any loyal Yorkist, these coins are Tudor twaddle. Sorry, but I can’t be polite. But at the stroke of midnight tonight, I can and will wish you all a…

The preservation and rescue of Sandal Castle….

  560 years ago there was an important battle of the Wars of the Roses, the Battle of Wakefield, which was fought before Sandal Castle. The Lancastrians won, and Duke of York and one of his sons, Edmund, Earl of Rutland were killed. A very dark time for the House of York. But it wasn’t…

The Evidence in the Ice

Over the past 20 years or so, advances in archaeology have enabled us to test isotopes in human and animal teeth, showing possible places of origin and effects of diet; we can extract DNA and unlock the genome, not only finding living relatives but having a good guess at hair and eyes colour and other…

Did our medieval vessels have the Viking sunstone for navigation….?

  I have just watched an episode (series 1, episode 5) of the Mysteries of the Missing documentary series. Half of this one dealt with the mysterious sunstones of the Vikings, by which they are believed to have navigated the Atlantic. They also used wooden sundials (hand-held) that worked when the sun was out, but…

The Franchise Affair

Josephine Tey is renowned for writing contemporary novels that refer to older mysteries. The Daughter of Time was unquestionably about an injured police Inspector learning about Richard III and the “Princes” – a device borrowed by Colin Dexter. Brat Farrar was about a missing boy who seems to reappear but whose identity is doubted, for…

The Tudors were a “typically Welsh family”….!

 Today in 1495 marked the death of Henry VII’s uncle, Jasper Tudor, and so seems an appropriate day for me to post the following extract, which is from The Country Gentry in the Fourteenth Century by N. Denholm-Young, published in 1969. “…It is a crying fault among English historians that they pay only lip-service to…

A royal Christmas invitation for Matthew Paris of St Albans….

“ . . . . Christmas with the King [ Henry III ] doesn’t immediately sound like the social engagement you would expect for a Benedictine monk, but wind the clock back to the early 13th century and for one particularly colourful religious figure, a royal invitation was nothing out of the norm . .…

Useful Shakespearean Insults for every Occasion….

Reblogged from A Medieval Potpourri sparkypus.com William Shakespeare @Abdul Rahim One, or two,  of these  may come in useful the next time you find yourself lost for words……. “Villain, I have done thy mother” (Really rude and should only be used in the event you don’t mind your lights being punched out..) Titus Andronicus (Act 4,…

Berengaria of Navarre

Kingfinding (or consortfinding) is back, this time in France. The lady in question, however, was from Navarre and became queen to Richard I. Although he wasn’t in England much during his reign, due to his crusading activities, she did accompany him part of the way on occasion. Here is a Guardian article, located by Robert…

Stonehenge had something to say for itself….! (But not at Christmas, of course.)

  A year or so ago I watched a TV documentary about the theory of Stonehenge having once been used as much for its acoustics as anything else. The name of the programme escapes me now, but the presenters were allowed among the stones to set up all sorts of experiments and they did indeed…