Henry VII…er…Henry of Windsor, and his badges….

The following excerpt, concerning royal badges, is from here: “. . .Richard I, John, and Henry III. are all said to have used the device of the crescent and star (Fig. 680). Henry VII. is best known by his two badges of the crowned portcullis and the “sun-burst” (Fig. 681). The suggested origin of the…

Royal genealogy before it happens (3)

(as published in the Setember 2018 Bulletin) Seven years ago, before this blog officially began, a letter was published in the Ricardian Bulletin about the common Edward III descent of the Duke and Duchess, as she soon became, of Cambridge through the Gascoigne-Fairfax line. This, about the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s mutual ancestry, followed…

CLATTERN BRIDGE -A MEDIEVAL BRIDGE – KINGSTON UPON THAMES

An updated version of this post can be found at sparkypus.com A Medieval Potpourri Clattern Bridge, Kingston upon Thames, was built prior to 1293 and is still in use today.  It was known as Clateryngbrugge in medieval times maybe because of the sound horses made crossing it. Unfortunately I can find no trace of King…

Royal burials at St George’s Chapel….

This article is quite interesting, although Richard only gets a brief mention, for moving Henry VI from Chertsey to Windsor. Edward IV is in there, of course, and Henry VII’s endeavours too, although he’s not buried there, of course. Wasn’t it grand enough for him? Whatever, he built himself an extravagant but truly beautiful resting place…

The beauty of royal barges….

Searching for snippets of information takes me (and everyone else!) all over the internet, and often to forgotten sites. My search this time was for information about the length of time a medieval rowed barge would take to go from Westminster to Windsor, and then back again. I still have no idea, but the Thames…

TREASON 3 – The Long Parliament 1649

Introduction “ The scaffold was hung round with black, and the floor covered with black, and the axe and block (were) laid in the middle of the scaffold. There were divers companies of Foot and Horse on every side of the scaffold, and the multitude of people that came to be spectators were very great.”[1]…

An interesting comparison

We have posted before about the lives of noblewomen and how they were almost never executed before the “Tudor” era began – including how King Lear, featuring the death of Cordelia, reflected this changed reality. Here is as near as we can manage to a counter-example from 1003, after the St. Brice’s Day Massacre of…

THE SEVEN PRINCES IN THE TOWER

The title sounds like a fairy tale, doesn’t it? Well, I’m once again going to address the matter of those pesky princes in the Tower as I found myself recently debating with several folks who still want to hang on to a certain rather improbable fairy story about them—the one created by our ‘favourite’ saint,…

12 surprising facts about the Wars of the Roses

Thanks to Matt Lewis: http://www.historyextra.com/article/military-history/12-facts-wars-roses?utm_source=Facebook+referral&utm_medium=Facebook.com&utm_campaign=Bitly

Examining an alternative theory

For several centuries, some historians and other writers have connected Sir Thomas More’s narrative of the murder of Edward IV’s sons to the bones found in 1674 and declared them to prove his case, even to the point of deluding Tanner and Wright in 1933 into calling the bones “Edward” and “Richard” before they even…