MacCullogh on Cromwell

Last Monday, BBC repeated Sir Diarmaid MacCullogh‘s excellent documentary Henry VIII’s Enforcer: The Rise and Fall of Thomas Cromwell, from 2013. Please watch it soon as you can it is only available until mid-January. Actually, excellent is rather an understatement as it is better than others you may see. In telling Cromwell‘s story from “the…

Another “Mary Rose” is found….

  I well remember all the excitement when Henry VIII’s Mary Rose was found and brought to the surface for the first time since his reign. The event was broadcast live and we watched as she reappeared inch by slow inch. Yes, it was quite a story. But then, Henry VIII (love him or hate…

Digging for Treasure

There are several interesting archaeology series on television and Channel Five has now joined in with an ensemble programme, headed by two familiar personalities (Dan Walker and Michaela Strachan) and a similarly ubiquitous chief archaeologist (Raksha Dave), but with more of an emphasis on metal detecting for the British Museum’s Portable Antiquities Scheme, including Roman…

Did a volcanic eruption somewhere in the world affect England in 1391….?

  Huge volcanic eruptions have always affected parts of the world that are often far, far away from the centre of the event. A famous (to me) example of this was in 1815 with Mount Tambora (in what is now Indonesia) which created such clouds and darkness that it made 1816 “the Year Without a…

A Norfolk mystery solved

This BBC article explains how a Californian follower on Twitter solved the case of an inscription on a mediaeval silver seal matrix. The wording on the rim is almost certainly Declina a Malo et fac bonum (“decline from evil and do good”) from Psalm 36:27 (ie 37 nowadays).

Fit or fat? Knights with waspy waists….

  We all know that ladies of the Victorian era often fainted because their corsets were too tightly laced. A tiny waist was highly desirable. Well, it still is, of course, but not to such a ridiculous extent. This tortuous lacing would have been difficult enough for young women to endure, but Heaven alone knows…

Where is Anne Boleyn’s heart….?

According to this article Anne Boleyn’s heart was not buried with her, but somewhere else, as yet unknown/unconfirmed. I confess to being startled, because I hadn’t heard of this before, but it seems two places in England vie for being the heart’s resting place. They are the Church of St Mary in Ewarton, Suffolk, and…

Bromholm Priory & the Pastons

  Recently Bacton Priory, destroyed in the Reformation, has recently been recreated as a 3D model to show how it may have appeared in the late Middle Ages. This is part of a project on the Paston family, who wrote over 1000 letters during the Wars of the Roses period, helping to give historians greater…

A discovery in the attic at Oxburgh Hall….

Ah, how we all love to hope that one day some vital documents pertaining to Richard III will turn up…in an old, old chest in a long-forgotten corner of an undercroft…or at the top of an ivy-covered tower with a spiral staircase so dangerous it’s dodgy to even breathe near it! Or, as in this…

So wrong he may be right (2) – William Cowper

Here we have the poet and hymnwright William Cowper (left), who we referred to in our previous article but couldn’t find the evidence for the Essex anniversary in February. The usual sources have been a little troublesome but we know from Lord David Cecil’s The Stricken Deer that he was the great-nephew of an Earl…