A primrose at Candlemas….

  “….and grant of the said manor and lands to Sir Walter for two years from this date, rendering one primrose a year at the Purification…” You’ll find the above extract at this site. https://www.british-history.ac.uk/cal-close-rolls/ric2/vol3/pp296-298 It records an agreement between Sir Walter de Cokesseye and the more famous Sir Hugh Calveley, who was a famous…

Another interesting hypothesis

On Thursday, we published a presentation by “Useful Charts”, showing how the English throne may have descended had Henry VIII’s will been followed after 1603 as it had beforehand. Of course, the family in question may have fared differently anyway if Lady Katherine Grey, her Seymour husband, and son and Arbella Stuart, the latter’s wife,…

Of a well-connected art expert …

After a few Archbishops of Canterbury and an Archdeacon (perhaps), we now come to an expert on art – Old Masters and Jacobite art in particular. Dr. Bendor Grosvenor, as seen in this BBC2 series when he has identified portraits such as the first Villiers Duke of Buckingham, is descended from the Cheshire family that…

Another Shakespeare scene rewritten

Following our previous dialogues, here we have some alternative dialogue from Henry VIII, as used in the ITV version with Ray Winstone: HENRY VIII: Cor blimey, Cromwell me old china, that Enn Blin aint half a right pain in the Gregory, and no mistake. {By the end of the show, both “Enn Blin” and Cromwell…

What has MKJ started?

If you watched Channel Four on the first Saturday evening in January 2003, then you will probably remember Michael K. Jones and Tony Robinson discussing Edward IV‘s possible illegitimacy, followed by Britain’s Real Monarch, an investigation into the King or Queen of England if Edward had not existed or been debarred, leading through the Poles…

Four Richards, three Joans….and a dragon!

My research perambulations have brought me full circle…back to the Waldegrave family of the 14th century. When rechecking the history of parliament online I found the following sentence in a footnote:- “….Considerable confusion has arisen from the existence of four successive Sir Richard de Waldegraves, especially as the last three all had wives named Joan….” No you-know-what,…

THOMAS CROMWELL’S HOUSE IN AUSTIN FRIARS

Reblogged from A Medieval potpourri sparkypus.com Thomas Cromwell c.1532.  Minature attibuted to  Hans Holbein the Younger. Oil on panel. Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid Following on from my earlier post on Perkin Warbeck and his burial at Austin Friars where I touched upon Thomas Cromwell’s house in the Austin Friars precinct I was happy to come across this…

Baron Arundel took fifty-two new suits to sea in 1379….!

I have just read in Margaret Aston’s  excellent biography of Thomas Arundel, Archbishop of Canterbury and Lord Chancellor, that according to Walsingham (always a fount of truth, of course) that when Sir John Arundel, 1st Baron Arundel, died at sea in December 1379, among his lost belongings “were fifty-two new suits”. This, it seems, led…

The forensic genealogy that identified Richard III moves on apace

Almost six years ago now, it was confirmed that the remains identified under a car park in Leicester were those of Richard III. One of the principal components of this identification was that the remains shared the mtDNA of Michael Ibsen, a maternal line relative traced by John Ashdown-Hill, as was Wendy Duldig by the…

A holy Anglo-Saxon family

The best known Wuffing king of East Anglia was Raedwald, who is almost certainly buried at Sutton Hoo, in a transitional style that befits a convert to Christianity. Anna (male despite the name) was his nephew and eventual successor and no fewer than four of his daughters, together with his son, were canonised. Among Raedwald’s…