Beautiful Collyweston….

The ten best villages in England are listed here and Collyweston in Northamptonshire makes the grade. I can only say that it does so entirely on its own merit and in spite of having once been the lair of Margaret Beaufort, mother of Henry VII.

In its true colours – Mysteries of the Bayeux Tapestry

This enthralling BBC Four documentary describes the story of the artwork that is actually a seventy metre embroidery on a woollen surface. It was mostly filmed at the Bayeux Museum, where the artwork is displayed in temperature and humidity controlled conditions. The presenters pointed out that the “Tapestry”, obviously dedicated to Odo Bishop of Bayeux,…

St Andrew’s Church, Wingfield and the Tombs of the de la Poles

Reblogged from A Medieval Potpourri sparkypus.com St Andrew’s Church, Wingfield, Suffolk.  Mausoleum of the de la Poles.   You know when the great Sir Nikolaus Pevsner was ‘impressed’ with a church then it must indeed be rather special (1).   And St Andrew’s with its soaring clerestories, nave roof with  arched braces resting on figures of winged…

Edward I and nursery rhymes go together….um, no, they don’t….!

  Well, I associate Edward I with many things, but not children’s nursery rhymes. I can imagine him being used to frighten them witless, but not to sing and chant with humour. Anyway, according to this site two of our oldest rhymes are due to old Longshanks. I find it hard to believe the Dr…

The Staple

In early medieval times, ‘the staple’ meant England’s staple export: wool. But it was inconvenient and inefficient for the king’s men to collect the customs duties that were payable on the exported wool from every one of the hundreds of little English ports all around the country. London, Bristol, Ipswich and Sandwich were major ports…

A corkscrew made from bits of Old London Bridge….

In 2014, a broken Victorian corkscrew made from pieces of old London Bridge was bought for £40,000 at an auction in Essex, over 100 times its asking price. See this article/, from which the following is taken:- “The corkscrew, the components of which are thought to be up to 800 years old, was bought by…

A pastoral tale

This article investigates why, as the Mediaeval Warm Period drew to a close, Britain (and particularly England) developed differently to many nations of Southern Europe. Sandbrook mentions two major cultural factors: the tradition of salting bacon because ham could not be dry-cured and the evolution of the wool trade through the systematic elimination of the…