My husband Robin and I were married on 28 October 1967, and today would have been our fifty-seventh anniversary, but I lost him nine years ago. It’s still hard to be on my own. Back then we lived in a tiny cottage in Hardwicke, a few miles south of Gloucester. Our daughter Sarah was a…

Once again a medieval abbey property that has been turned into a beautiful residence is on the market, this time for a mere £2.95 million. (At least it was when I found the link and decideed to write about it.) When I see the ridiculous sums needed to acquire modest, rather indifferent properties in London,…

Um….it took me a while to latch on to what this list https://tinyurl.com/4ejwhhy5 is actually about. It concerns the kings who changed England the most rather than the greatest kings of England. Which is why poor old Richard is in there, presumably for inflicting the awful Tudors on us. But I’m sure he didn’t mean…

East Shefford is a tiny place in Berkshire, just down the road from Great Shefford. It’s not an actual village and never has been, it would seem…but it does have a very interesting church, spireless, small, untouched, looking to the visitor as if it is on private land beside a manor house. However, there is…

A blog titled Murrey and Blue is obviously (to those who understand these things) going to concern the House of York, one half of the conflict that gave rise to the Wars of the Roses. The other half of the quarrel, of course, was the House of Lancaster. (https://www.warsoftheroses.com/) Being Yorkists, we support the white…

Even south of the border we know about Robert the Bruce, and why those north of the border are proud of him. But what did he look like? Since the reconstruction of Richard III’s face after the discovery of his remains, there have been numerous other such models. Now “….To mark the 750th anniversary of…

“….More species of whale, dolphin and porpoise can be spotted in the UK than anywhere else in northern Europe and all of them, technically, belong to the Monarch….”  I knew about whales, sturgeon and the Thames swans, but hadn’t realised that since the time of Edward II dolphins and porpoises have also been royal property.…

On Wednesday, 23 October 2024 the Lord Mayor of Oxford will uphold the 645-year-old tradition of inspecting the city’s walls. The ceremony originally began on 30 June 1379 with a contract between Oxford and New College and Richard II, when the king was then only 12 years old. The contract granted land “….for the founding…

From this Ancient Origins link (https://tinyurl.com/mvanbd5z):- “….On Sunday 10th April 2016 Anne Boleyn hit the news with articles in the Sunday Times and Mail Online claiming that a copy of a lost portrait of Anne Boleyn had been found by Alison Weir….it was a listing for ‘Photo of a print: Anne Boleyn portrait from the Holbein Room at Strawberry…

Anthologies centred around Richard III are very popular, and now there is another—titled A Spirited and Most Courageous Prince—which contains contributions from two very well-known and loved Ricardian authors, Alex Marchant and Alice Mitchell. It also includes a story by the third lady in the above photograph, Bridget Beauchamp. Briefly, this article from the Keighley…