This Union: The Ghost Kingdoms of England

This is an excellent series on BBC4 about the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms that eventually evolved to fill the vacuum left by departure of the Roman legions. In the first episode, Ian Hislop visits East Anglia, particularly Colchester, Ipswich and Sutton Hoo, viewing some coins with Philip Wise and hearing about the Wuffingas, apparently descended from a…

Secrets of the Royal Palaces (C5)

I am rather enjoying this series, with visits to Buckingham Palace, Windsor Castle, Balmoral and others, historians such as Kate Williams, Janina Ramirez and Anna Whitelock and art specialists like Jacky Klein as well as Viscountess Hinchingbrooke and several eminent journalists. There is a lot of useful information about English and British monarchs from the…

Handmade in Bolton

This is a short BBC4 series about the Lancashire craftsman Shaun Greenhalgh’s attempts to recreate historic artefacts using modern methods. Co-presenting with Janina Ramirez, Greenhalgh seeks authentic materials, where possible and safe, trying to put them through the right processes. Not all of these work immediately, although the end result closely resembles the original. The…

This blog is brought to you …

… by a thing called the internet. The internet may only have been invented by (Sir) Tim Berners-Lee (left) during the eighties but it has a much older patron saint – the seventh century Archbishop of Seville, Isidore.   St. Isidore (right), who died in 636, was chosen because he wrote the Etymologiae, an early encyclopedia…

Review of ‘The “Princes” in the Tower’ (Channel 4)

There were many good things about this programme. Dr. Janina Ramirez joined Dr. John Ashdown-Hill and the lawyer Bertram Fields. All three have studied the late medieval period in detail and in different ways. Then there was Dr. David Starkey. He is a renowned expert on the 1509-1603 period but tends to derive his views…