Pembroke didn’t pop the Weasel when it should have….!

Well, the first part of a riveting, absolutely factual series about Henry VII was warning enough. I confess to having had to read the first sentence twice, because first time around I thought Edmund Tudor was fighting against the Duke of York’s men and Edmund’s own wife, Margaret Beaufort, who was Henry’s underage mother. Shame on…

Michael Portillo’s Great Coastal Railway Journeys and Pembroke Castle

  I have enjoyed watching Michael Portillo’s Great Railway Journeys particularly the programmes that have shown him travelling along the coast of South Wales. He stopped off in places that I know well in Glamorgan, also in places that my ancestors hailed from in Carmarthenshire. However, one programme ended up in Pembroke and I must…

William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke

William Herbert, otherwise ‘Black William’ was born in 1423, the son of Sir William ap Thomas ‘the Blue Knight of Gwent’ and Gwladys ferch Dafydd Gam the ‘Star of Abergavenny’. His main claim to fame is that he was the first Welshman to become an earl in the peerage of England, except for Henry VI’s…

Another blunder in Cairo

Of late, I have read the denialists claim that Edward IV’s 1461 marriage couldn’t possibly have been valid because it doesn’t show in the parish registers anywhere in England, therefore his dozen children by Lady Grey must have been legitimate. The only problems with this are:1) Parish registers, inspired by Thomas Cromwell, only date from…

Digging up our monarchs; no, not Richard III this time….!

I’m told that even now, if you purchase a plot of ground in which to put your loved ones to rest, the chances are they’ll only lie in peace for eighty years, at which time they are removed and new occupants move in. Well, for centuries our dead haven’t always been left to enjoy their…

Kings made of glass….?

What does one call a gathering of glass men? Splinters? Shards? It seems that in the medieval period there was a sudden upsurge of people who believed they—or part of their bodies—were made of glass. Heads, buttocks, entire bodies, whatever, and the belief was so strong and irresistible that some of them resorted to shocking…

Henry VII had an uncle Owen Tudor . . . .

Well, I confess I always thought Henry VII only had one uncle on the paternal side, and that was Jasper. So just who is in the above illustration? The Tudors as being important in English history commenced with the affair between the widowed Katherine of Valois and the rather lowly Welshman Owen Tudor. They had…

The Traitor’s Arms?

In 1840 workmen carrying out repairs to St Bartholomew’s Church, Ashperton, Herefordshire were collecting stones from the ruins of a nearby manor house when they discovered a heavy stone plaque, carved with an elaborate coat of arms, among the rubble. The stone was taken to the church for safekeeping and has hung on the wall…

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…

Richard wasn’t the only monarch whose remains have been handled….

The discovery of Richard’s remains caused a furore, and rightly so, but he wasn’t the only past monarch to have his/her remains, um, pawed about by later generations. This link takes you to an interesting article about ten other kings and queens of England who’ve been gawped upon—sorry, gazed upon—in their last resting place. Not…