The Legendary Ten Seconds: Sagas of the South West

A Princess of Aragon   She landed in Plymouth on a Saturday The reception plans in disarray Shaken by a channel storm Her entourage looking all forlorn   The English Autumn she would see The leaves falling from every tree A Princess of Aragon Her journey told in this song   The Spaniards fell to…

Songs about Devon

Here we have another album from the Legendary Ten Seconds, featuring songs about Richard III’s visit to Exeter and “Perkin“‘s attempt to enter the city, as well as several later events. Here are the words to King Richard’s Visit and At the Gates of Exeter, which can be played here and here.

Even more “Britain’s Most Historic Towns”

Alice Roberts has been back on our screens with a third series of the above. This time, she visited (Mediaeval) Lincoln, (Restoration) London, (Naval) Portsmouth, (Elizabethan) Plymouth, (Steam Age) Glasgow, (Georgian) Edinburgh and (Industrial Revolution) Manchester, albeit not in chronological order like the two previous series. There was a focus on Nicola de la Haye…

The Mayflower

Below is William Halsall’s 1882 portrait of the Mayflower in Plymouth Harbor. It is obviously imagined as the original ship was almost certainly broken up at Rotherhithe in 1624, a more extreme case than  the “Streatham portrait“, which post-dates it’s purported subject’s death by about forty years. From the spelling of the title, the background…

The Earl of Pembroke’s missing feet….!

Oh, I do love typos. This one is from Wikipedia :- “…Pembroke though, was much delayed; although he was in Plymouth by May, his feet could not be available until June…” What a wonderful image this conjures! 

A very busy presenter

Rob Bell seems to be on television a lot at the moment. Although he is an engineer and not quite a historian, many of his programmes go back in time as structures were built. Walking Britain’s Lost Railways, for instance, goes back under two centuries because of the subject matter, but Great British Ships (both Channel…

A new interpretation of 1580s events

We all know that Mary Stuart was beheaded at Fotheringhay on 8 February 1587 and that the Spanish Armada sailed to facilitate a Catholic invasion of England in the following year, leaving Lisbon on 28 May and fighting naval battles in late July, at Plymouth and Portland. The traditional view is that Mary Stuart’s execution…