Gloucestershire
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Natural disasters were not to only thing to bring chaos to the great Benedictine abbey at beautiful Winchcombe in the Gloucestershire Cotswolds. Not just the 1091 lightning strike on the tower of the Abbey church of St Mary, which opened up “a huge crack in the walls, large enough for a man to pass through…
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Here is the opening paragraph of an intriguing article by the excellent Professor Nigel Saul:- “As increasing numbers of early copies of Magna Carta are identified in fourteenth- and early fifteenth century registers and cartularies, so we are becoming more aware of the close interest taken in the document by lawyers and political actors in…
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The picturesque little Gloucestershire town of Thornbury is not in the Cotswolds, but down in the Vale of the River Severn, between Bristol and Gloucester. Caught between the Cotswold escarpment and the Severn estuary, it is an area of rich farmland, with orchards for cider and perry, and pasture for the production of cheese. Everyone…
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ST MARY’S CHURCH, FAIRFORD: ROYAL PORTRAITS
Arthur “Tudor”, Bere Regis, Catherine of Aragon, churches, Edward of Warwick, Edward V, Elizabeth of York, Fairford, Gloucestershire, Henry VI, Henry VII, Henry VIII, John Betjeman, John Morton, John Tame, Lady Margaret Beaufort, Margaret “Tudor”, Mary “Tudor”, Nikolaus Pevsner, Queen of Sheba, Richard III, Richard of Warwick, Solomon, Thomas WolseySt Mary’s, Fairford, Gloucestershire. ‘A complete and perfect Perpendicular church’ and famous for it fine collection of medieval glass. Described in Betjeman’s Best British Churches as ‘a complete and perfect Perpendicular’ church(1) this beautiful wool church was rebuilt by John Tame, a wool merchant from Gloucester , in the late 15th Century to replace a…
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The toad in question is a well-known story of Berkeley Castle, although I had not heard it before. However, the thought of such a creature being connected to the reign of Henry VII is just too irresistible for the Ricardian in me. So here it is, as taken from Berkeley, A Town in the Marshes,…
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Shepperdine is a tiny settlement on the east shore of the Severn Estuary, SW of Berkeley, NW of Thornbury, and was once under the rule of the Berkeleys of Berkeley Castle, who hunted the now lost Horwood Forest that covered the area all the way to Bristol. This little part of England has not changed…
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This link is worth following, if only for the eerie photographs! Gloucestershire certainly has some ghosts…although how Owlpen Manor escaped inclusion I really do not know. http://owlpen.com/history/owlpen-ghosts It has the ghost of Margaret of Anjou. Mind you, that lady seems to have stayed everywhere in the county around the time of the Battle of Tewkesbury! One…
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/19HhdTGyTKSJJcRfgzmvwKM/shakespeare-in-Gloucestershire When happening upon this BBC page, I was reminded of an old friend. I worked with her yonks ago and we have remained friends, if sporadically. Her maiden name was Shakespeare, and she said her family was descended from THE Shakespeares. Now, she is an intelligent woman, and would not have said that unless…
The New Murrey and Blue blog 