religion
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Dunstan was born around 910 in Somerset, and, as a boy, studied under Irish monks at Glastonbury. He showed early promise in terms of both scholarship and handicrafts, and at a young age became a priest. Over a long career – he died in Canterbury in 988 in his late 70s – Dunstan served as…
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Here is the second part of our interview with Dominic Smee, continuing from yesterday’s post. JL: How did your experience change your outlook on your scoliosis? After the documentary, has your life changed and in what ways? DS: These days, I have learnt to embrace my scoliosis as part of who I am instead of…
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This year, 2025, it was the ten-year anniversary of the reinterment of Richard III in Leicester Cathedral. My friend and I went to Leicester to experience some of the festivities and took the opportunity to visit Fotheringhay, about an hour’s drive from Leicester. This, of course, was the birthplace of Richard as well as the…
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St Ninian was ‘a most holy man’ according to the Venerable Bede. He was born around 360AD, near Hadrian’s Wall. He is first heard of in the 8th century as being an early missionary among the Pictish peoples of what is now Scotland from his monastery in Whithorn, Galloway. For this reason he is known…
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In 1577 Leonberg, Katharina Guldenmann took her small son “to a high place” for an advantageous view of a comet passing over what is now southwestern Germany. Three years later, the then eight-year-old boy’s father brought him out on a bitterly cold winter night to witness a lunar eclipse. Though in later years this boy…
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If the witchcraft trials at North Berwick in the 1590s and later in England, of which Pendle in 1610 is an example, happened because James VI/I fervently believed in witchcraft, as shown by the three characters in Macbeth, it can be argued that the subsequent decline in such cases came because judges and Charles I…
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Lancashire, in the early 17th Century, was one of the poorest and least populated counties of England, where even many gentry families had an income of less than £100 a year. The Forest of Pendle, which lies between Burnley, Colne, Clitheroe and Whalley in a remote corner of the county close to the Yorkshire border,…
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Above are the Venerable Bede and King Cnut, who are concerned in the following extract from Medieval Man by Frederick Harrison:- “…Only Bede wrote about such subjects as astronomy and geography; and his knowledge of these was conditioned by the teaching of the Church. As time went on, as much reliance was placed on charms as…
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I quote” “This controversial study argues that although Richard was indeed guilty of, or implicated in, most, if not all of the crimes of which he has been accused, this ruthless, inscrutable man was also very religious, an austere practitioner of a chivalrous code of ethics, a public benefactor and protector of the Church, a…
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