Armoured knights and head injuries….

    With all the recent publicity and very real worry over the head injuries that are part and parcel of physical sports such as boxing, football and rugby, I’ve been prompted to consider similar injuries that must have happened in earlier periods of our history, when activities such as tourneying were very much the…

A joust involving two Scottish lords who don’t seem to have existed….

Excerpt from The Brut or The Chronicles of England, ed. Friedrich W.D. Brie (London, 1906), pp. 343-4, 348. “….[1393]….And in the seventeenth year of his [Richard II‘s] reign, certain lords of Scotland came to England to win renown through deeds of arms.   And these are the persons:  The Earl of Mar, who challenged the Earl Marshal of…

The Ancestry of Sir Richard Pole.

Richard Pole is perhaps most famous for being the husband of Margaret Plantagenet, later Countess of Salisbury. But who was he? His maternal ancestry is relatively straightforward. He was the son of Edith St. John, who was the half-sister of Margaret Beaufort. So that makes him the (half-blood) first cousin of Henry VII. Edith St.…

Philippa Mortimer, Countess of Pembroke and Arundel – a short, interesting and little-known life

Philippa was the younger of the two daughters of Edmund Earl of March and Philippa of Clarence,and second youngest of their four children, being born in November 1375. Philippa lost both her parents at a very young age, but her future was provided for (eventually) by her marriage to John Hastings, Earl of Pembroke after…

OLD LONDON BRIDGE – A MEDIEVAL WONDER!

REBLOGGED FROM sparkypus.com A Medieval Potpourri  London from Southwark, c.1630. Old London Bridge is in the right foreground and Old St Paul’s Cathedral on the skyline to the left.  Old London Bridge Antiquated, in a run down state, and at 600 years old, the old bridge had reached its self by date and was demolished in…

Leslau, Holbein, More and Clement

Before I begin, I have two words of warning. The first is that a huge spoiler for my novels Loyalty and the sequel Honour unavoidably follows. Just so that you know! Secondly, the following is my telling of the theory researched and expounded by Jack Leslau, an amateur art enthusiast who believed that he stumbled…

“Bone Detectives” come to Ipswich …

… and other venues, with Tori Herridge and Raksha Dave. This Channel Four series, which consists of five episodes, begins at Stoke Quay on the town’s Waterfront where a long-forgotten (St. Augustine’s) burial ground was fully explored before some new buildings were constructed. Three bodies in particular were examined: 1) A wealthy man buried in…

Get it right about medieval horses….!

We definitely do have set beliefs about medieval horses, mostly incorrect. Just because we see illustrations of medieval lords riding what look like ponies too small for them, we think it must be the fault of the illustrator. But no, for journeys they really did have small trotting horses that could keep going on and…

The Last Knight: The Art, Armor, and Ambition of Maximilian I

Originally posted on RICARDIAN LOONS:
Portrait of Maximilian I, from the workshop or a follower of Albrecht Dürer. Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I (1459-1519) is one of those larger-than-life historical figures. Straddling the medieval and Renaissance eras, he worked tirelessly and spent a vast fortune to establish the Habsburgs as one of Europe’s dominant ruling…

What really happened in 1385, when the Earl of Stafford’s son and heir was killed on a Yorkshire road…?

On Sunday, 16th July 1385 (maybe 18th) there was an incident at Bustardthorpe, which is south of York on the road to Bishopthorpe, where King Richard II was staying at the (arch)bishop’s palace. A large portion of his army and nobles were encamped close by because the English were en route for Scotland, intending to…