From soft cushions to the tetchiness of the Black Prince….

I’m still quite bemused by the things Amazon turns up on what seems (to me) to be a fairly straightforward search.

On this occasion I entered “Continuatio Eulogii Given Wilson” Well, the book DID turn up first, as you can see above, but immediately after it there was a fun cushion! Huh? Clearly they want me to be comfortable when I start reading the book. Well, if I were to actually buy the book, but at £85 it’s yet another too-expensive sacrifice for my emaciated piggybank.

So looked elsewhere to find out what led up to Edward of Woodstock calling the Archbishop of Canterbury an ass! (It was this snippet that sent me chasing after the Continuatio. There was one briefish entry about Archbishop Whittlesey at this site but it didn’t say much and only made me more curious by saying that other “incredible events” happened on the same occasion.

So I kept looking and at last found this site which contains an interesting an quite detailed account of the Black Prince’s life in general, and explains why he became so incensed with the poor old archbishop, who was actually dying at the time. Whittlesey wasn’t the most dynamic and effective of prelates, and seems to have been almost slipped into office on the quiet! All in all, he appears to have been something of a non-event, and certainly got on the nerves of the tetchy prince, who was ill himself and seldom in the best of moods.

Anyway, it’s an interesting story, although the geneanet.org link isn’t the easiest to read…small print and paragraphs that are very thin on the ground.