The Cotswolds and the Wars of the Roses….

“What role did the Cotswolds play in the 30-year Wars of the Roses?” A good question. There wasn’t a specific War of the Cotswolds, but there was (still is) a connection to the Wars of the Roses, as you’ll see in this article . For instance, there’s the wonderful Church of St John the Baptist…

Mythmaking: BONES IN THE RIVER

Night. The late Middle Ages. An angry mob rips open the sealed tomb of a man and carries his fleshless skeleton through the town streets, jeering. Reaching a field of execution, the bones are hurled on a pyre and burnt, then crushed to small fragments. This indignity not being enough, the desecrated remains are then…

Thomas More, John Morton and Richard III

(by Annette Carson) On the matter of sources that are usually cited for the origin of Richard III’s blackened reputation, it occurs to me that I’ve done quite a lot of reading lately around Thomas More’s influential Richard III, which means I have been delving more deeply into the analyses published in the Appendix to…

Some musings on murder

Unlike some people – who from their certainty were not only alive at the time, but high in King Richard’s confidence – I honestly do not know what became of the two boys we call for convenience ‘The Princes’. I have read all sorts of theories about what happened to them and none entirely convinces…