anniversaries
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It’s official, folks. Late in his reign Henry VII was “a creepy old man”! It’s true, because Factinate.com says so! Henry VIII, was “a nasty middle-aged and old man”. In my opinion anyway, and Factinate agrees, more or less. Oh, and Catherine of Aragon was quite a woman! She had some pretty bloodthirsty ideas,…
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Researching for my writing takes me all over the place … and to numerous figures from the past. This time, needing to know the attitude of medieval people to albinism, I was led to our long-revered medieval monarch and saint, Edward the Confessor. Now I’ll be the first to admit to not knowing a…
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As Ashdown-Hill found, although he was unable to locate her precisely in the genealogical research that eventually located Michael Ibsen as a mitochondrial DNA match for Richard III, Richard’s sister Margaret Duchess of Burgundy was buried in a Franciscan church in Mechelen, in her Duchy Although it was destroyed during subsequent religious conflicts, a reconstruction…
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I have taken the following information and references from this article, so I do not claim the hard work for myself! The corpse of Isabel, Duchess of Clarence (†1476) was brought to Tewkesbury Abbey in Gloucestershire.[1] A monastic chronicle describes how it arrived there on 4 January 1477 and remained in the middle of the…
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Both River Greta illustrations taken from this Mail article Well, here we are in 2021, which I hope it will prove an infinitely better experience than 2020. In the year 1399, some folk in Bedfordshire witnessed a “portent” that must have made them wonder what on earth that new year had in store for…
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560 years ago there was an important battle of the Wars of the Roses, the Battle of Wakefield, which was fought before Sandal Castle. The Lancastrians won, and Duke of York and one of his sons, Edmund, Earl of Rutland were killed. A very dark time for the House of York. But it wasn’t…
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Over the past 20 years or so, advances in archaeology have enabled us to test isotopes in human and animal teeth, showing possible places of origin and effects of diet; we can extract DNA and unlock the genome, not only finding living relatives but having a good guess at hair and eyes colour and other…
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Today in 1495 marked the death of Henry VII’s uncle, Jasper Tudor, and so seems an appropriate day for me to post the following extract, which is from The Country Gentry in the Fourteenth Century by N. Denholm-Young, published in 1969. “…It is a crying fault among English historians that they pay only lip-service to…
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Kingfinding (or consortfinding) is back, this time in France. The lady in question, however, was from Navarre and became queen to Richard I. Although he wasn’t in England much during his reign, due to his crusading activities, she did accompany him part of the way on occasion. Here is a Guardian article, located by Robert…
The New Murrey and Blue blog 