KING JOHN AND THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION

KING JOHN AND THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION King John was not a good man, He had his little ways. And sometimes no one spoke to him For days and days and days. And men who came across him, When walking in the town, Gave him a supercilious stare, Or passed with noses in the air, And…

Tyndale and the mumpsimuses….!

  Mumpsimus is a word that may have originated with Erasmus, but of which I had never heard. It means “adherence to or persistence in an erroneous use of language, memorization, practice, belief, etc., out of habit or obstinacy”. In William Tyndale‘s 1530 book Practice of Prelates, the word was used in the sense of…

Starkey on home territory

This BBC documentary was actually very good and it worked because Starkey spoke about a subject he knows inside out – the Reformation and Henry VIII, relating it to current affairs. From Luther’s theses, indulgences and translating the Bible, first into German then English, he moved onto Tyndale‘s efforts to smuggle it into England and…

Tyndale and More – strange bedfellows….

  This link takes you to an interesting article about the fates of two great opposites, Sir Thomas More and William Tyndale. And, once again, Henry VIII’s lust for Anne Boleyn was at the heart of it.  

Many endured Hell to bring us the Bible in English….

It’s hard for us to believe now what danger men in the past faced in order to translate the Bible into English. We take it for granted that we can read every line in our own language, but it was not always so, as will be shown in the following link: http://www.historyextra.com/article/feature/murderous-history-bible-translations?utm_source=Facebook+referral&utm_medium=Facebook.com&utm_campaign=Bitly

A little tale of mediaeval sleeping….

Isn’t it strange the little stories one comes upon while researching? I was trawling through Stow’s Survey of London when I found this, concerning an incident in the Tower:- “William Foxley slept in the tower 14 days & more without waking. “In the yeare 1546. the 27 of April, being Tuesday in Easter weeke, William Foxley,…

Of human remains and another sinister reality behind a television programme

I wonder how many listened to this programme a week or two ago? It was about the late diminutive Scottish actress Molly Weir who, between 1978 and 1984, played “Hazel McWitch” in the children’s comedy Rentaghost – you could tell it was a children’s comedy because one of the main characters died in the first few…