Two Huggin Lanes, two churches of St Michael….

  The 14th-century story of John of Gaunt enjoying dinner in a friend’s house (including oysters, I understand) in the city of London when rebels ransacked his palace of the Savoy in the hope of laying hands upon him. He escaped, but not before cracking his shin (or some such part of his anatomy) on…

ROYAL PECULIARS AND THEIR PECULIARITIES

Reblogged from A Medieval Potpourri sparkypus.com The glorious ceiling of the Chapel Royal, Hampton Court.  Photo James Brittain . Historic Royal Palaces.  The main reason, and perhaps the only reason,  why the bones in the urn in Westminster Abbey supposed to be those of the sons of Edward IV known as the “Princes” in the Tower, Edward of Westminster and…

Queen Joan? Oh, no she wasn’t….!

  The illustration above is from Dan Jones’s book Summer of Blood: the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. Part of the caption is “Queen Joan, Richard II’s mother, pleading with the rebels as the Savoy burned”. Elsewhere in the same book, Joan is referred to as the queen mother. According to Merriam Webster, the first known…

The Plantagenets were all stupid….?

Here’s something to ponder. “….He [John of Gaunt] built the large mansion called The Savoy by the bank of the Thames in London, lost in during one of the countless rebellions against Richard [II], who, with John I and Henry III, could be termed one of the unusually stupid Plantagenets, though all three had terrible…

Why I dislike John of Gaunt….

As Ricardians, we know very well now, history can be twisted to suit. The matter of those strawberries and what happened next, for instance. I mean, the different versions are legion, even to the point of whether or not Thomas, Lord Stanley was ever present at all, let alone injured in a scrap and obliged…