culture
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The general belief is that the dreaded sweating sickness arrived in England along with Henry Tudor and his French army. Maybe it did. Certainly it became rife after Bosworth and he entered London. It was a fearsome disease, worse even than the Black Death, for you could be hale and hearty at breakfast and dead…
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I love the little incidents that I come across in my research ramblings. While trying to find a particular 1377/8 date in Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror, I found myself reading about a banquet held in France by ‘a certain Vidame de Chartres’—a vidame being a noble rank, I understand. This was quite some banquet, and…
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Reblogged from A Medieval Potpourri @ sparkypus.com Illustration from Livre de chasse c.1387-1389. Gaston Phébus, Count de Foix It’s obvious from the amount of depictions of dogs from the medieval period they were highly prized by our ancestors, both for work and play. They are everywhere! Their delightful little figures pop up on tombs, heraldry and manuscripts regularly.…
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Further Royal ancestry – twice over this time
Alexander Armstrong, BBC1, Bear Grylls, bigamy, Bruce Forsyth, Canada, cellists, Chris Ramsey, Chris van Tulleken, Claire Foy, Clare Balding, composers, Danny Dyer, Dev Griffin, Emily Atack, Henry III, honours, Josh Widdicombe, Julian Lloyd Webber, katherine Willoughby, Kevin Clifton, Lancastrians, Lesley Manville, Lloyd Webber, musicians, Netherlands, Richard Bertie, royal descent, Scotland, Scouts, Sir Matthew Pinsent, Sir Peregrine Maitland, USA, Waterloo, Who do you think you are?, Xand van TullekenWho do you think you are, the celebrity genealogy show with some surprising results, has returned to BBC1 on Thursday evenings. The twentieth series, of nine episodes, began with Andrew, Lord Lloyd Webber, whose parents, cellist brother Julian and late son Nick were also known to be musically talented, but makes some uncannily similar connections…
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If you go to this article from the Washington Examiner, you’ll see why yet again the brilliance and erudition of university professors leaves me speechless. Not a Leicester University archaeologist this time, but a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology and Managing Faculty Director for the Center for Civil Rights and Racial Justice in…
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I’m afraid that I’m not a lover of Shakespeare’s works. I think the blame for this can be laid squarely at the feet of ‘O’ English Literature. I was bored rigid. But when it came to the much earlier Geoffrey Chaucer, which I didn’t read until after leaving school, I loved every word. Maybe if…
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Well, if you follow this link—https://maxmymoney.org/the-difference-between-insane-and-genius-10-bad-guys-who-werent-actually-bad-but-misunderstood/#:~:text=%E2%80%9CThe%20Difference%20Between%20Insane%20And%20Genius%E2%80%9D%2010%20%E2%80%98Bad,Richard%20III%3A%20Victim%20of%20Propaganda%20…%20More%20items *— you have to scroll down to Number 8 to read this: “….Richard III, the much-maligned figure in Tudor history, may have been unfairly demonized, according to one historian. The Tudors’ portrayal of Richard III was influenced by their political agendas and physical deformity, making it difficult to discern…
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My very first memory of Dogger was as a child hearing it mentioned on the BBC shipping forecast. (There’s a sample here – ah, memories.) Back then I had no idea what/where Dogger was, except that ships sailed there. Since then I’ve heard it spoken of as Doggerland when it comes to the land bridge…
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There have been previous posts on Murrey & Blue about fairy tales, nursery rhymes and so on, from their original meaning to when they first emerged. Some of them are much younger than I’d always thought, so when, in the course of my writing, I wished to allude to The Sleeping Beauty, or at least…
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Richard II was certainly the royal connoisseur of food. His famous book of recipes (well, he didn’t actually write it!) the Forme of Cury, is constantly resorted to as a record of just how well our 14th-century ancestors were provided for when they sat down to eat. How often are we told that they…
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