Florence
-
You may know or suspect from a previous post in Murrey and Blue, that Sir James Tyrrell, Richard’s henchman, was a direct descendant of Sir Walter Tyrrell, the ‘Killer Baron’, who fled during a hunting expedition with King William II (Rufus) after shooting him with an arrow. It is not known whether this was an…
-
A pastoral tale
bacon, climate, Dominic Sandbrook, East Anglia, Edward I, Florence, Geoffrey Chaucer, George Orwell, Hanseatic League, Italy, Jerusalem, Lavenham, Mediaeval Warm Period, Medici, music, Peter and the Wolf, Peter Corbet, Prokofiev, sheep, Shropshire, T.S. Eliot, timber-framed houses, William Blake, wolves, wool, WoolsackThis 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…
-
I have just completed my new novel, Richard Liveth Yet (Book II): A Foreign Country, an alternative history story in which Richard, having won at Bosworth, continues as King of England and pays a visit to Florence at the invitation of Lorenzo de’ Medici. On researching Lorenzo, I became intrigued by the number of parallels…
-
I was quite amazed to find out last week, when visiting Leicester Cathedral, that the small coat of arms that can be seen on the front part of the tomb was made by a skilled craftsman called Thomas Greenaway, who is one of only a handful of people who use the 16th Century craft of…
-
We all know that Richard’s cognizance was the white boar with gold tusks and bristles but there are several theories as to why he chose this as his personal symbol. There are also a large number of interesting associations which connect the boar to Richard. There is one theory that the white boar had already…
The New Murrey and Blue blog 