At last, some acknowledged fiction from Dan Jones….

  As Ricardians, we’re not all that impressed with the work of Dan Jones and have long considered him to be an accomplished writer of fiction. Well, now he really is a writer of fiction, and the book described below, “Essex Dogs”, looks an exciting and excellent tale of a group of archers and others…

Edward V and Coldridge: the evidence so far

Thanks to this Daily Telegraph article last December, the world is now far more aware of  the distinct possibility that the former Edward V lived on as “John Evans” at Coldridge in Devon into the reign of Henry VIII, his nephew, as a parker minding deer for his half-brother Thomas Grey, Marquess of Dorset. In…

Dan Jones hits the road …

… Walking Britain’s Roman Roads, in fact. It is quite a good series, in which Jones explores some of the most important of these, together with some aspects of Romano-British Society. The first episode takes him the length of Watling Street, the first part of which is now he M2, during which he visits the…

A pleasant surprise

In recent years, Dan Jones’ posing and fanciful Crimewatch-style re-enactments, together with Starkeyesque conclusions formed before he started, has marred quite a few series on mediaeval history. Now he seems to have changed tack completely with this series, covering canal building from the middle of the eighteenth century and – yes – I rather enjoyed…

Queen Joan? Oh, no she wasn’t….!

  The illustration above is from Dan Jones’s book Summer of Blood: the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. Part of the caption is “Queen Joan, Richard II’s mother, pleading with the rebels as the Savoy burned”. Elsewhere in the same book, Joan is referred to as the queen mother. According to Merriam Webster, the first known…

Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow (3)

It would seem that, according to the Daily Mail (third feature),  a certain most humble and lovable Tudor historian, has gone ahead and had a pricey and painful hair transplant. He announced this at the ‘Bad Sex in Fiction’  Awards. (Mind-boggling but also makes me wonder- why don’t we have the ‘Bad Gaffes in Historical…

Not again: “Britain’s bloody Crown” (3)

Here at Murrey and Blue, we are not in the habit of reviewing repeats, not even when we have commented on them before. This time, it is the very fact and timing of the repeat of Channel Four’s “Who killed the Princes in the Tower?”, with the ubiquitous Dan Jones, that is at issue, together…

London: 2000 years of history (channel 5)

Who let Dan Jones out? At least, as in his last outing, he is accompanied both by a historian (Suzannah Lipscomb) and an engineer (Rob Bell), narrating and illustrating almost two millennia of the city’s past. In the first episode, we were taken through the walled city of “Londinium” being built and rebuilt after Boudicca’s…

Dig the “Tudors” at Sudeley Castle

Oh, for an opportunity to do this literally and test the theory that Harriss, Fields, Ashdown-Hill and even Dan Jones have expounded, with varying probabilities. I would quite literally dig up a “Tudor” somewhere – from quite a selection – and then Owain Tudor in Hereford for comparison, if possible. You don’t meed to ask…

Richard III And The Tudor Genealogy — RICARDIAN LOONS

It is generally acknowledged by historians that Henry Tudor, who defeated Richard III, the last Yorkist king, at Bosworth and went on to be crowned Henry VII, wasn’t the Lancastrian heir to the throne of England he claimed to be. His mother, Margaret Beaufort, was descended from John of Gaunt, the third surviving son of […]…