The castle at Aberystwyth

The Welsh seaside town of Aberystwyth is somewhere I’ve had cause to visit a few times recently. As well as a university and a funicular railway (which goes up the cliffs to the north of the town; there’s a park and a camera obscura at the top), Aber (as it’s known locally) has its own castle which dates back to the late thirteenth century.

It’s a ruin now, but unlike a lot of castles it has the advantage of being free to access at any time of day. It dates back to reign of Edward I as part of his campaign to conquer Wales; like the better-known castles to the north at Caernarvon and Harlech, it was the work of one James of Saint George, one of the greatest castle-builders ever to have lived (he’s also known as Jacques de Saint-Georges d’Esperanche; until the mid-twentieth century, historians had assumed that James et Jacques were different men from the same place – a village in south-eastern France – who both happened to be castle-builders, but it’s now accepted that they were the same person).

In the early 1400s, the famous Welsh rebel leader Owain Glyndwr (whose name is sometimes anglicised as Owen Glendower) captured Aberystwyth Castle and made it his headquarters, which probably explains why this castle was the first to have cannons fired against it when Henry IV attacked it in 1408. Over two centuries later, the castle was briefly a Royal Mint during the reign of Charles I but, like many a British castle, it was slighted (rendered unusable as a military installation) on the orders of Oliver Cromwell during the Civil War.

By the second half of the eighteenth century, going to the seaside was becoming popular with those who could afford to do so; the previous fashion had been for spa towns like Bath, Cheltenham and Royal Tunbridge Wells, but after it became known that George III preferred sea-bathing the trend shifted towards seaside towns. This was also a time when, thanks to various wars with France, rich Britons who would previously have travelled to Europe for the Grand Tour looked to domestic destinations instead. Aberystwyth proclaimed itself to be the ‘Brighton of Wales’, and the castle became a popular picturesque ruin with those who visited the town. The late eighteenth century was very much the age of the picturesque, thanks mainly to the Rev. William Gilpin and his 1770 trip along the Wye; he defined ‘picturesque’ as ‘that kind of beauty which is agreeable in a picture’, and this had a great impact not just on late eighteenth century tourism but on the Romantic movement that was to follow.

A picturesque ruin is very much what Aberystwyth Castle is today. I rather like walking over the wooden bridge from the war memorial to the old D-shaped tower with the gateway in it, and then either passing through or around it (there being not much left by way of walls) and then wandering among the ruins. I clamber up onto some parts as, quite a few other people do. You can, if you’re confident, make it up to the circular tower on the northern side; the views from there are pretty good. I’ve even spotted students having an evening barbecue up there! To the east, the ruins of another tower with plenty of jutting-out bricks could present more of a challenge; perhaps the casual would-be climber-of-ruins should give this one a miss.

Amid the ruins, there’s something you don’t see in many, or even in any other, castles – a stone circle. A puzzle, but not for long (there are plenty of information boards around, even a series of mosaics about the castle’s history down by the road that skirts around it down on the seaward side). It isn’t anywhere near as old as the castle, and it wasn’t added to make the place more picturesque back in the eighteenth century. The stones were in fact put there in 1916, to celebrate the Eisteddfod (Welsh literature and music festival) that took place in Aber in that year – the symbolism is that there are 13 stones, one for each of the 13 historic counties of Wales.

A visit to a ruined manor house in the Cotswolds

In the Cotswolds, the ruins of a medieval manor house can be found by the banks of the Windrush, a tributary of the Thames. Minster Lovell Hall is located behind St Kenhelm’s church in the Oxfordshire village of Minster Lovell (located between Burford and Witney) and it’s a pleasant place to visit and wander among the ruins if the weather’s nice. The place was built in or around 1440 and was used as a manor house until the mid-eighteenth century, after which is was partly dismantled and abandoned. The ruins are listed and administered by English Heritage, but there’s no charge to visit.

The original owners, after whom the hall and the village are named, were the Lovell family. The most interesting member of this noble family is the last of them, Francis Lovell, the ninth Baron Lovell who lived at the time of the Wars of the Roses. He was a friend of Richard, Duke of Gloucester – to whom he was also linked by marriage, their respective wives being cousins. Richard had him knighted in 1481, and when he seized power and became King Richard III two years later he upgraded the Lovell peerage; it was as the first Viscount Lovell that Francis held the Sword of State at his friend’s coronation. Lovell’s closeness to the King resulted in him being mentioned in a famous piece of doggerel which was posted on the door of St Paul’s Cathedral by a Lancastrian supporter in 1484:

“The Catte, the Ratte and Lovell our dogge rulyth all Englande under a hogge.”

To explain: the ‘hogge’ refers to Richard himself, his personal badge being a white boar. Lovell is of course ‘Lovell our dogge’, his coat-of-arms having included a silver wolf. The ‘catte’ and the ‘ratte’ were two of Richard III’s other principal supporters, Sir William Catesby and Sir Robert Ratcliffe.

Naturally, the fates of the King’s main followers were intertwined with his own. Richard III, as is well known, was killed at the battle of Bosworth Field in Leicestershire on 22^nd August 1485 – the last King of England to die in battle; what happened to his body afterwards would remain a mystery until 2012, when his remains were found underneath a Leicester car park. Ratcliffe died on the battlefield with his king, while Catesby survived, only to be captured and subsequent executed by the victorious Lancastrians (a notable descendant of his was Robert Catesby, one of the leaders of the Gunpowder Plot).

Lovell also fought at Bosworth, following which he was able to evade capture. He went on to become a leading figure in the Yorkist revolts that plagued the early part of Henry VII’s reign. He’s reckoned to have been behind an attempt to have Henry murdered at York in 1486, and a year later he played a leading role in the attempt to put the pretender Lambert Simnel on the throne – an attempt that came to an end at the battle of Stoke Field in June of that year. Lovell survived that battle too, but after that he disappears from the pages of history.

Some said that he lived in hiding for many years afterwards – and it is at this point that the history of Minster Lovell Hall crosses into legend. In 1708, the skeleton of a man was found in a secret chamber at Minster Lovell Hall, and it was assumed that that was the skeleton of Francis himself – who, so the story goes, hid out at his ancestral home with only one faithful servant who knew that he was there; the plan was that Lovell would be kept under lock and key with the servant bringing him food. Unfortunately for him, the servant died without letting slip about his master and so Lovell, locked in and with no-one left to bring him food, starved to death. It’s an interesting tale but it does seem unlikely, as Francis Lovell’s estates were forfeit after Bosworth, with the hall being given to Henry VII’s uncle, Jasper Tudor. Hardly somewhere for a Yorkist fugitive to go into hiding.

I was also interested in the place because the hall also has a literary association, playing a key role in John Buchan’s 1931 historical adventure The Blanket of the Dark which is set in the Cotswolds during the reign of Henry VII’s son, Henry VIII. This story, not one of Buchan’s better-known works but still highly readable if you like historical fiction and can get hold of a second-hand copy (I got an old Penguin one, original retail price 2s 6d), concerns a young Oxford scholar by the name of Peter Pentecost who is told that he is in fact the son of the Duke of Buckingham (Edward Stafford, who in real life was executed for treason in 1521). Buchan was always a master of describing the countryside in which his stories were set, and with The Blanket of the Dark he showed that he was as at home in rural Oxfordshire (for many years he lived in Elsfield, about three miles north of Oxford; his ashes are buried in the churchyard there) as he was in his native Scottish Lowlands. The ordinary people who appear in the novel – beggars, small farmers, foresters and suchlike – are treated with a high degree of empathy and, as is the case with Katrine in Witch Wood, there’s an intriguing but ultimately elusive love interest (as they usually are in Buchan’s novels; in this case, she’s called Sabine and one contemporary of Buchan’s was moved to comment that the one quibble he had with The Blanket of the Dark was that Buchan didn’t spice things up a bit with Peter and Sabine, but one can hardly have expected the son of a Free Church of Scotland minister to have done that).

Like many a fictional character before and since, Peter gets caught up in events that he cannot hope to control; at the time of the Pilgrimage of Grace, he becomes the subject of an ill-fated plot to put him on the throne which climaxes when king and pretender meet face-to-face at an abandoned Minster Lovell Hall after the latter has rescued the former from an over-flowing Windrush. Henry is portrayed in less-than-flattering fashion, with Buchan adding some compelling descriptions of him: “the face was vast and red as a new ham, a sheer mountain of a face ... this vast being had the greatness of some elemental force ... power of Mammon, power of Antichrist, power of the Devil, maybe, but someone born to work mightily in the world.” The Blanket of the Dark is a really good, perhaps even great, work of fiction that, although Henry VIII does make an appearance, focuses more on the ordinary people of rural England (the Cotswolds, specifically) than on high intrigue even though there is something of that; this is at heart a story of what Buchan succinctly called “a world of which there has never been a chronicle; the heaths and forests of old England”, and it’s the better for it.

The Bayeux Tapestry

So, the Bayeux Tapestry is to be displayed in this country for the first time? Well I for one am delighted to hear this. There’s a personal reason, for it’s the Bayeux Tapestry that first got me interested in history when I went on a family holiday in Normandy in 1987 (we visited Bayeux, among other places, and a few months later there was a school trip down to Kent and Sussex which included a visit to Battle Abbey – and that, as they say, was that).

The most famous depiction of the events of 1066 – the most famous date in English history, for that was a year of three Kings and two invasions – the Bayeux Tapestry was probably made in the 1070s under the orders of Bishop Odo, the half-brother of William the Conqueror. It is actually an embroidered cloth rather than a tapestry (although ‘Bayeux Embroidered Cloth’ just sounds wrong) and measures 230 feet by 20 inches. An alternative theory is that it was made at the orders of (or even by) William’s wife, Queen Matilda, which is why it’s sometimes known in French as La Tapisserie de la Reine Mathilde. The Odo theory is more likely, though, and not just because the man himself makes an appearance. He is seen fighting at the battle of Hastings, albeit armed with a club rather than a sword (perhaps symbolic of his clerical status, although it’s worth noting that William himself is shown carrying a club into battle too, so maybe it was a sign of seniority). 

Odo was the Bishop of Bayeux, and after the Conquest he also became the Earl of Kent which supports the theory that the Tapestry was actually made in England. The earliest known reference to the Tapestry dates back to 1476, when it was mentioned in an inventory of Bayeux Cathedral which it had probably been made to adorn. Bayeux was where William made Harold promise that he would support his (William’s) claim to the English throne, although the cathedral itself wasn’t consecrated until 1077.

Although obviously intended to tell the story of the Norman Conquest from the Normans’ perspective – to the extend that King Harold’s victory over the King of Norway at Stamford Bridge and subsequent twelve-day march from York to Sussex in order to fight William doesn’t get a look-in – it’s not all one-sided propaganda. William did not recognise Harold as the rightful King of England after Edward the Confessor’s death in early 1066 (indeed, as far as he was concerned Harold had promised to support him), but Harold is nevertheless shown on the Tapestry with the regalia of kingship and explicitly named as England’s King (the text reads Harold Rex Anglorum – Harold, King of the English – the first King of England to be crowned at Westminster Abbey, in fact). It’s a funny way of depicting someone who, according to the brother of the man who had the Tapestry made, had no right to be King. Maybe the English seamstresses who stitched the Tapestry were being a bit subversive.

In Harold’s death scene, the famous arrow-in-the-eye could well be more propaganda than fact, because perjurers were commonly punished in Medieval times by way of having weapons poked through their eyes. William’s claim to the throne would be upheld by depicting Harold as an oath-breaker, which this is evidently an attempt at doing (whether Harold was coerced into promising support for William is, of course, another matter although it does seem likely). Other historical sources state that the King was hacked to death by some Norman knights, and indeed the very next scene shows a man, who may well also be Harold, being slain by way of a sword.

There is also a depiction of some Norman brutality towards the English – they’re shown as burning down someone’s house, although given the brutal and ruthless way in which William would later deal with any English resistance to his rule, perhaps that is to be expected.

The Tapestry is also unfinished, or rather incomplete – for the end is missing. When it was first made, it would doubtless have brought the story of the Norman Conquest to a conclusion by showing the (remaining) English nobles surrendering to William at Berkhamstead, and William’s subsequent coronation on Christmas Day, 1066, although for as long as people have been studying the Tapestry that part has not been there. There have been attempts in modern times to make the final part, though, as witness the 2013 effort by over 400 people on Alderney. As it is, the last (remaining) scene on the Tapestry shows the English fleeing from the battlefield.

The Tapestry did not become widely known until the eighteenth century. After the 1476 inventory, the next reference we have to the Tapestry is in 1724. The first detailed account of it in English was written in the 1730s but not published until the 1760s, although William Stukeley, the antiquarian who has cropped up on this blog before in relation to Avebury, mentioned it in a 1743 book of his. During the French Revolution it narrowly avoided being used as covering for wagons, and after Napoleon Bonaparte came to power it was displayed in Paris for the purposes of propaganda – this was, after all, a depiction of a successful invasion of England. It remained in Paris, and by the Second World War it was on display in the Louvre – the SS tried to have it shipped to Berlin when the liberation was imminent, but fortunately they were not successful. After the war, it was moved back to Bayeux. It’s been there, in its own museum near the cathedral, ever since. Previous attempts to have the Tapestry moved to England on a temporary basis – for the Coronation in 1953, and later for the 900^th anniversary of the battle of Hastings in 1966 – have not been unsuccessful, and tests will need to be done on it to make sure that it can be safely moved. The question of where it will be displayed is also one that will need to be addressed.

Getting back to the tapestry itself, some of the detail is fascinating – we see people hunting and ploughing the fields while the political/military stuff is going on above them, and Westminster Abbey makes an appearance, as God blesses it (yes, He’s there too) in time for the funeral of Edward the Confessor, the man who built it. This, weirdly, is shown before Edward’s death scene. 

Halley’s Comet appears in the sky. 

Then there are the oddities which are part of what makes the Bayeux Tapestry such a fascinating piece or artwork. Why, for example, is Edward the Confessor shown dying after his funeral? And, on a more trivial matter, are the invading Normans really eating kebabs? It looks like they are.

And, of course, what’s with the naked people in the, ahem, bottom section? There’s a man doing what appears to be a carpentry job in the buff, while his friend looks like he’s doing some exercises!

When a full-size replica was made in the 1880s, the naked people were given underpants; that version is on display in Reading, while there are other replicas of the Tapestry in North America and Denmark.

Historical English crime: Smuggling on Romney Marsh (part 1)

My travels have recently taken me to Romney Marsh, a fascinating part of the world down on the south coast. Low-lying and sparsely populated, it covers around 100 square miles, mostly in Kent but stretching over into Sussex as well.

Romney Marsh – “where the roads wind like streams through pasture and the sky is always three-quarters of the landscape” (according to John Betjeman, and who am I to disagree with him?) – is a large, flat, low-lying and almost empty area with several isolated churches (indicating abandoned or ‘lost’ villages) which was long regarded as both a potential weak point in the event of an invasion from continental Europe – of which more in later posts – and a paradise for smugglers.

Smuggling began in the Middle Ages, and it began with wool, a commodity that formed the backbone of the medieval English economy; it was said that in Europe, the best quality wool came from England. English wool was therefore highly prized by weavers on the continent, and during the reign of Edward I exports of wool were therefore taxed – which is where the smugglers got started, for it was the customs system as introduced in the late thirteenth century that created smuggling. Wool was smuggled out of England via small harbours and beaches, especially on the south-eastern coast which is the closest part of England to mainland Europe. On Romney Marsh – prime sheep-grazing country to the extent that there is still a breed of sheep called the Romney – the smugglers flourished. They became known as ‘owlers’ due to the owl-like noises they used to communicate at night, which was when most of their activities took place, and so the smuggling of wool became known as ‘owling’.

During the reign of Elizabeth I, high export duties and a somewhat ineffective system of control meant that the owlers went more or less unchallenged. A century later, the smuggling of wool out of England was declared to be punishable by death – but did not deter the smugglers, who if anything acquired a more ruthless character, arming themselves to prevent arrest. The customs or revenue men, known as riding officers, were both too few and too poorly-equipped to stop them, though, and Romney Marsh and the various Cinque Ports, along with their accompanying ‘limbs’, got a reputation for lawlessness as a result. This can be seen in the events of 1669, when a man called William Carter, who had set himself up as a smuggler-catcher and managed to get a warrant from Charles II to that effect, arrested the captain of a ship for wool-smuggling and got the magistrate in Folkestone to commit him for trial. However, on arriving in Folkestone with his prisoner, Carter was pelted with stones by the women of the town, who’d been encouraged by the captain’s wife; in the face of such an onslaught, the smuggler-catcher had little option but to let his prisoner go.

Even corrupt officials got involved. This is illustrated by an event that took place in Hythe (one of the five original Cinque Ports) in 1692, when riding officers seized 16 bags of wool in a barn belonging to Julius Deeds, the Mayor of Hythe. Deeds sent his servant, Thomas Birch (who was also a parish constable), to retrieve the wool. He got arrested, and at the subsequent trial the defence tried to argue that the riding officers had acted illegally on the grounds that they had not been accompanied by a parish constable. The prosecution replied that the constable who should have been accompanying them was – you’ve guessed it – Birch himself! Despite overwhelming evidence of his guilt, the jury accepted the defence’s argument that the wool had been due to be sent to another part of England rather than abroad, and acquitted him. Such instances were not uncommon.

By 1698, the government had resorted to forbidding anyone who lived within 15 miles of the sea in Kent or Sussex from buying wool. In addition to that, all sheep-farmers living within ten miles of the sea in said counties had to account for all of their fleeces for up to three days after shearing. Riding officers were appointed in greater numbers and could call on armed cavalry – dragoons – to help them against the smugglers. Owling persisted, but by the 1720s it was in decline.

But that did not mean an end to smuggling on Romney Marsh.

To be continued…

Dunwich

To Suffolk, and a chance to take a look at a town that no longer exists.

Well, sort of. Today, Dunwich is a small coastal village with a quiet shingle beach from which you can see Southwold – key landmarks being St Edmund’s church and the lighthouse – to the north and the dome of the Sizewell power station to the south.

There are low cliffs at the back of the beach. It’s part of an AONB (Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty – to all intents and purposes, one level down from a National Park) and has a couple of nature reserves in the vicinity, most notably the birding heaven that is the RSPB’s Minsmere reserve just to the south. The sort of place where a P.D. James murder mystery might take place. As you drive into the village, though, the ruins of a Medieval monastery give an indication that at some point, Dunwich was much bigger than it is today.

Back in the Middle Ages, Dunwich was a thriving port town – one of the most important on the east coast of England. In the Dark Ages it was known as Dummoc and was the capital of the Kingdom of the East Angles. It was considered important enough for the Knights Templar to build one of their churches there (similar in structure to London’s Temple Church, apparently), and several monastic orders had priories there. Recent archaeological discoveries have shown that ship-building was a major local industry.

So what happened? Dunwich has often been described as a town that was lost to the sea, which is partly true as much of the old town now lies beneath the waves as a result of centuries of coastal erosion. Storms also played a part too, though, for much of the damage was done by six big storms – one in 1286 and two more the following year, then another in 1328, another in 1347 and the last in 1362 – which between them destroyed much of the town. Subsequently, it was largely abandoned and as a result sea defences were not maintained – which meant that over time the cliffs were eroded over time, causing the ruins atop them to fall into the sea as the cliffs receded. The last of the Medieval town’s eight churches, All Saints, was abandoned in the eighteenth century and gradually fell into the sea in the early twentieth.

Local legend has it that the bells of the vanished churches can still be heard from the sea on calm nights!

In recent years, Dunwich has attracted much attention from marine archaeologists who have used sonar and acoustic imaging cameras to map the seafloor all around what used to be the town. Ruins were identified, which were subsequently examined by divers. This has made Dunwich the largest underwater medieval site in Europe, while back on land it has also featured on Time Team.

The monastic ruins that survive today do so on account of the fact that Dunwich’s Franciscan priory was built to the west of the town. The ruins of the Greyfriars (so called because the Franciscans wore grey robes) are the last of what remains of Medieval Dunwich.

The priory was closed down in 1538 during the Dissolution of the Monasteries; it was later rebuilt during the eighteenth century but then demolished in the nineteenth, leaving the monastic ruins that we see today. There’s a very nice short circular walk in Dunwich that takes you from the entrance to the car park at the beach, along the top of the cliffs, past the Last Grave (all that’s left of the churchyard of All Saints) and then right past the Greyfriars before you head back to the beach.

Definitely worth a visit if you’re in the area!

St George of England

Today is St George’s Day, which usually passes with a re-heated article in at least one newspaper lamenting on why the English don’t celebrate being English much, and with another (equally reheated) one about the fact that St George was not, in fact, English.

Both are, in their own way, onto something. Celebrations of English identity have not really been the done thing, which might explain why some people to this day confuse being English with being British (there is a big difference!), and I think we all know by now that St George existed before England did, and he wasn’t even widely known about in England until several centuries after he’d died.

He was a Roman soldier, born in the province of Syria Palaestina (the city of his birth, Lydda, is now called Lod and is located about nine miles south-east of Tel Aviv), who was born a Christian and refused to renounce his faith when the Emperor Diocletian embarked on the Roman Empire’s last and most severe persecution of Christians in the year 303 AD; he was beheaded on 23^rd April 303 in Nicodemia (modern-day Izmit in Turkey).

He was venerated as a saint in the Eastern Roman Empire, and his reputation spread to England as a result of the Crusades (the English soldiers who went to fight for Christianity in the Holy Land being inspired by stories about an old Christian soldier). Although use of his emblem – a red cross on a white background – has been attributed to Richard the Lionheart, the first properly documented use of this particular heraldic device by an English ruler is usually credited to Edward I. St George’s Day was declared to be a feast day in England in 1222, and in 1348 Edward III put the (then new) Order of the Garter under George’s banner.

It’s been theorised that his rise to prominence in England was helped by the fact that, unlike this country’s home-grown saints (Alban, Cuthbert, etc), he wasn’t closely identified with a single location or region within England – that and the fact that St George’s Day somehow survived the curtailment of saints’ days that came with the Reformation. In any case, his symbol was so identified with England that when a combined Anglo-Scottish flag was created in 1606, three years after James VI of Scotland became James I of England (but still just over a century before the Act of Union), the Cross of St George formed the English part of the original Union Jack.

Looking further afield, St George is perhaps the most international of saints; as well as England, he is also the patron saint of Ethiopia (jointly, with local man St Frumentius), Georgia (obviously), Greece, Malta (jointly, with St Paul), Moldova, Palestine and Portugal (one of several, admittedly) – as well as the cities of Beirut, Genoa, Ljubljana, Moscow, Reggio di Calabria and at least two major international organisation (the Scouts and the Girl Guides), alongside agricultural workers, archers, butchers, saddlers, shepherds and just about anyone who rides horses.

Anyway, happy St George’s Day!

Half-a-dozen kings and queens we never had

These days, the succession to the throne is a fairly straightforward business. It wasn’t always the case, however, and English history is littered with those who, had events taken a slightly different term, could have got to wear the crown but never did. They are the might-have-beens of our history, and here are six of the best-known…

William Adelin (1103-1120) – would have been an alternative King William III

The youngest son of William the Conqueror, King Henry I had acted quickly to grab the throne for himself when his brother, William Rufus, was murdered in the New Forest in 1100. Henry fathered many sons, but only one of them was by his wife, Matilda of Scotland. It was in this 12^th century Prince William that the hopes of England’s Norman dynasty lay. Referred to as ‘Adelin’ (a corruption of ‘Aetheling’, the Anglo-Saxon term for the heir to the King) and rex designatus (king-designate), William was proclaimed Duke of Normandy but held the title in name only, although after his mother’s death in 1118 William acted as regent during his father’s absences from England. However, he died – along with at least two of his illegitimate half-siblings and much of the Anglo-Norman nobility – in the White Ship sinking of 1120. A direct consequence of this tragedy was a succession crisis which plagued the rest of Henry’s reign, resulting in the Anarchy, a 19-year civil war in which William’s sister Matilda and their cousin Stephen – who was meant to have travelled on the White Ship but did not due to illness – fought for control of England.

Empress Matilda, Lady of the English (1102-1167) – would have been Queen Matilda I

The daughter of Henry I, Matilda (also known as Maud) had been married off to the Holy Roman Emperor Henry V but was a widow by the time she was 23. After her brother’s death (see above), she was proclaimed as the heir to the throne but this was unpopular with the Anglo-Norman nobility (those that had not travelled on the White Ship); when her father died in 1135 her cousin was crowned as King Stephen. Backed by her (second) husband Geoffrey of Anjou and her illegitimate half-brother Robert of Gloucester, Matilda tried to take the throne for herself in that long period of civil war known to history as the Anarchy. The closest she got was in 1141 when her forces captured Stephen; she entered London but was not crowned because of bitter opposition from the local populace. She then had to free Stephen in exchange for Robert (who had also been captured), and by the following winter Stephen had her trapped in Oxford Castle; she escaped over the frozen River Isis. Subsequently, a stalemate ensued with Matilda’s forces in control of the south-west of England while Stephen controlled the south-east and the midlands, although much of the country was in the hands of local barons who were happy to take whatever advantage they could get. Eventually, Matilda’s son Henry took over the fighting and by 1153 had negotiated a peace deal with Stephen; when the latter died, the former succeeded to the throne as King Henry II.

Louis of France (1187-1226) – would have been King Louis (or perhaps Lewis) I

The son of King Philip II of France, Louis fought against King John (his uncle on his mother’s side) in the latter’s unsuccessful attempt to recapture Normandy in 1214. When John tried to renege on the Magna Carta, the English barons offered Louis the throne; in May 1216 he landed in Kent, entered London with little resistance and was proclaimed (but not crowned) as King. He soon had control of over half of England, but when John died in October most of the barons deserted Louis in favour of John’s nine-year-old son, Henry III. Louis was defeated by Henry’s regent, William Marshal, at the battle of Lincoln in May 1217, and he was subsequently forced to make peace, a condition being that he had to agree that he had never been the legitimate King of England. In 1223, though, he did become King Louis VIII of France.

Edward of Woodstock, Prince of Wales (1330-1376) – would have been an alternative King Edward IV

Known to history as the Black Prince, the eldest son of Edward III was an exceptional military leader in an age when prowess on the battlefield went hand-in-hand with effective kingship. It was he who defeated the French as the battles of Crecy and Poitiers, key English victories in what would become known as the Hundred Years War. He was also the first Prince of Wales to have used an emblem consisting of three white ostrich feathers; this heraldic device, which he is believed to have inherited from his mother’s family, was used as his ‘shield for peace’ – the one he used for jousting. He died one year before his father; the throne passed to his son Richard who was just nine years old at the time and who would eventually be overthrown by his cousin, Henry Bolingbroke, who became King Henry IV. Somewhat ironically, the Black Prince and Henry are buried yards from each other in Canterbury Cathedral.

James Scott, Duke of Monmouth (1649-1685) – would have been James III of England and James VIII of Scotland

The oldest of Charles II’s illegitimate sons, Monmouth claimed that his father had actually been married to his mother, Lucy Walter – a claim that Charles always denied. This claim, though, made Monmouth a factor in various schemes to have Charles’s brother, the Duke of York, excluded from the line of succession for being a Catholic; as a result of this, Charles had Monmouth exiled. When his uncle became King James II in 1685, Monmouth – Protestant, popular and an experienced military commander – landed in Dorset in an attempt to capture the throne. His makeshift force was no match for the regular army, though, and he was defeated at the battle of Sedgemoor by John Churchill (the future Duke of Marlborough). Subsequently, Monmouth was captured in Hampshire and executed on Tower Hill; it is said that the executioner, Jack Ketch, botched the deed to the extent that the Duke was still alive after two or three chops with the axe, and the job eventually had to be finished with a knife. It is also said that, following this, someone realised that no-one had done an official portrait of the Duke, so his head was sewn back onto his body. Curiously, many years later a descendant of his claimed to have found documentary proof that Charles II and Lucy Walter had been married; apparently he presented this to Queen Victoria, who burned it.

Sophia, Electress of Hanover (1630-1714) – would have been Queen Sophia I

In 1700, the only surviving son of Princess Anne, sister-in-law and heir of William III, died. With William a widower who was unlikely to remarry and Anne having recently miscarried for the twelfth time, an undoing of the Glorious Revolution loomed, prompting Parliament to pass the Act of Settlement which ensured that the crown could not pass to a Catholic. The closest Protestant relative, and therefore the presumptive heir, was Sophia, a grand-daughter of James I; she was the daughter of Elizabeth of Bohemia (the ‘Winter Queen’) and had married the Elector of Hanover. She was a 71 year-old widow at the time of the Act of Settlement but she did have five living children and three legitimate grandchildren, so the question of the survival of the royal line wasn’t an issue. Thus was it decreed that after the deaths of William and Anne, the crown would pass to Sophia and her descendants. Although much older than Anne (who became Queen in 1702), Sophia enjoyed considerably better health; she was keen to move to London but Anne – acting out of suspicion, jealousy or both – opposed this. In the event, Sophia died in Hanover in 1714 after collapsing while running to take shelter from the rain. Anne herself died a month later, and the crown passed to Sophia’s son George, the first of the Hanoverians.

The model bridge

To the City, specifically to the Church of St Magnus-the-Martyr on Lower Thames Street (not far from the Monument). Reckoned to be one of the finest of London’s Wren churches, it has appeared in a few literary works – Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist, T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land – and was so close to London Bridge – the old, Medieval one – that the churchyard formed part of the approach road.

It was the Old London Bridge that drew me to St Magnus-the-Martyr, which is Church of England even though the interior looks decidedly Catholic (which is in a sense appropriate, as it is the only C of E church where the vicar goes by the title of Cardinal Rector). Inside the church is a scale model of said bridge as it would have looked circa. 1400, complete with shops, houses and even a church along its length.

Located a few yards downstream from its modern version, Old London Bridge (not to be confused with its nineteenth-century replacement which was sold to an American entrepreneur in the late Sixties and rebuilt in Arizona) tends to linger in London’s folk-memory. For centuries it was the only bridge across the Thames. People actually lived on it (I can repeat that all I want, but I still can’t get my head around the idea of living in a house on a bridge). It was from there that pilgrims began their journeys to Canterbury (the church – actually a chapel – was dedicated to Thomas Becket). And, of course, it was on the bridge’s southern gatehouse that the severed heads of traitors were impaled on pikes.

The detail on the model is superb, with the tiny figures giving the viewer a good idea of how congested the bridge was. The street itself, crammed in between those houses, was just 12 feet wide and it was said that during busy times, crossing it took an hour. There was an alternative, but anyone tempted to use a waterman to cross the river in the vicinity of the bridge had to bear in mind that this was fraught with danger as the bridge’s narrow arches and wide pier bases – faithfully represented on the model – could produce fearsome rapids depending on the state of the tide, and it was said that only fools would try to pass under it.

This is well worth a visit – a chance to get a glimpse, however fleeting, at what one of London’s most famous landmarks would have looked like in its heyday. There’s even a deliberate anachronism, for the man who made the bridge back in 1987 (a Liveryman of the Worshipful Company of Plumbers) used to be a copper and so couldn’t resist adding the figure of a modern policeman to his Medieval model. I say ‘apparently’ because, alas, I couldn’t spot it.

The London Stone

Opposite the entrance to Cannon Street Station in the City – itself built on the site of a medieval church that was destroyed in the Great Fire – there stood until earlier this year one of London’s oldest landmarks, a largely forgotten chunk of masonry (limestone, to be exact) that is said to be of great significance although its surroundings were somewhat modest. Set into the wall behind an iron grille in front of a branch of W.H. Smith’s on busy Cannon Street was the London Stone.

Some say that it is of Roman origin, and that it may have been an object of religious veneration in pre-Christian times. Could it have something to do King Arthur? Or was it a milestone? There’s even a legend in a similar vein to that concerning the ravens at the Tower, although this one ties in with either of the City’s mythical founders (take your pick between Brutus of Troy and King Lud) to the effect that London will fall if it (the stone) is destroyed. The fifteenth-century rebel leader Jack Cade is said to have struck it with his sword, an apparently ancient way of declaring himself to be in charge, although there’s not much evidence for this other than the relevant scene in Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part 2.

All we know for sure is that there are references to the London Stone dating back to the late eleventh century, and it was sufficiently well-known in medieval times for its name to have been given to the surrounding area (the first Lord Mayor was called Henry Fitz-Ailwin de Londonestone). After the Great Fire of 1666, Sir Christopher Wren (who reckoned that it was of Roman origin) built it into the south wall of one of his churches, St Swithin London Stone. This was badly damaged in the Blitz and the remains were demolished in 1962, following which the London Stone was put into its current setting in front of a shop which was built on the site of the church. Occasional development of this site resulted in rumours that the Stone would be removed; perhaps wary of the old legend, the developers left it in its place.

Last year, I went to have a look while going for a stroll in the City, and was assured to note that I wasn’t the only one who was taking a close look as a couple of tourists were interested too; conversely, people from all over the world have come to see it (and have been invariably taken aback by its less-than-auspicious setting), while others just walked past it every day without giving it a glance (for them, it was probably just something on the way to work; historically significant things in London can be like that for Londoners, sometimes). Sadly there was a fair amount of rubbish in the grille but at least the Stone was visible, and the back of it could be seen from the inside of the newsagent’s. A very modest setting for an ancient monument that had survived plagues, rebellions, fires, bombing raids and even the attentions of post-war property developers and (according to a BBC report from 2006) twenty-first century cowboy builders.

That changed earlier this year, when the prospect of  yet further development led to the London Stone's removal from its site. It can now be seen in the Museum of London, presumably getting more attention in a glass case rather than behind a litter-strewn grille, although when the building work is complete on Cannon Street it will return there, to be displayed on a plinth; once again, no doubt, it will attract the attention of some while being ignored by others.

Of palaces and castles

What with being the capital city, London has a lot of palaces and castles but there is more to them than present-day Royal residences (although admittedly that does factor in quite a bit); there are also long-gone medieval fortifications and Tudor palaces, a Georgian folly and even a pub (of London’s many pubs and former pubs with the word ‘castle’ in their names, one made it onto the list). But how did they get their names? I looked into this for Londonist, and found that the answers are varied; as well as English place-names, London’s various castles and palaces owe their names to a Danish princess, French and Scottish nobility, an Indian fortress, the Latin language, a rebel leader and even one of the Disciples. Here’s the link:

http://londonist.com/2016/07/how-london-s-castles-and-palaces-got-their-names

The big charter

In many ways, it is a document that made history. In June 1215 in a muddy field by the Thames just outside Windsor, King John affixed his seal to an agreement known by its Latin name, Magna Carta (literally, 'big charter').

At the time, it was essentially a peace treaty; John was widely discredited by 1215, having lost Normandy eleven years earlier and subsequently levied excessive taxes to fund his unsuccessful attempts to get it back. His barons were in open revolt, and faced with the prospect of a French invasion John had little option but to agree to their demands. The charter that he sealed (not signed) regulated the administration of justice and established the principle of due legal process. 

John, of course, was not one of England's more reliable kings and he went back on his word as soon as he could. What saved Magna Carta was his death a year later; after that, a revised version was issued to win support for the new King, Henry III, who was just nine years old. Subsequent reissues in 1217 and 1225 ensured that Magna Carta was imprinted on the consciousness of the nation; among its key points were the right to a fair trial - which is still on the statute books to this day: 

"No free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions, or outlawed or exiled, or deprived of his standing in any other way, nor will we proceed with force against him, or send others to do so, except by the lawful judgement of his equals or by the law of the land."

This was one of the first steps taken in England towards the establishment of parliamentary democracy. Over time, it was used by those wishing to restrain royal power (those who drew up the Petition of Right and the Grand Remonstrance in the run-up to the Civil War were inspired by it, and it was cited at Charles I's trial), and it greatly influenced the American colonists' Declaration of Independence in 1776. In the twentieth century it inspired the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Its influence has been truly widespread, to the extent that it is said to compete with the English language as this country's greatest export.

To celebrate the 800th anniversary of the Magna Carta, there is an exhibition at the British Library which includes the four original surviving copies and looks it its long legacy. It's definitely worth going to see, although it closes at the end of the month. Go now, while you still have the chance.

Rewriting history?

Poor old Tony Robinson. For almost two decades, he’s fronted a TV show which has seen him and a handful of archaeologists unearthing various old coins and bits of pottery in trenches dug in a variety of fields throughout the United Kingdom. Then, as soon as said show gets cancelled, a woman with a fixation about Richard III has a premonition about a car park in Leicester and is able to get sufficient funding from some equally-fixated friends to arrange for the University of Leicester to conduct an archaeological dig in said car park. On the first day of the dig, they find human bones which turn out to be the bones of the man they’re looking for. That never happened on Time Team.

Last Monday, the bones were officially confirmed to be the earthly remains of Richard III, the last of the Plantagenet dynasty, the last King of England to be killed in battle and, it’s safe to say, one of this country’s most controversial rulers. For all of the talk about history being about more than the study of famous dead men, there’s nothing like the discovery of the bones of a famous dead man to get people to pay attention. And in the evening, we had a lengthy documentary on Channel Four called Richard III: The King in the Car Park which told the full story behind the dig and the identification process.

The emphasis varied between the serious stuff outlined above, clips of Laurence Olivier with a false nose and a cushion stuffed up the back of his doublet reciting lines from Shakespeare’s Richard III, and the woman who’d had the premonition. In fact, her fixation with Richard III turned out to be a full-blown obsession with clearing his name (such people, it seems, are called ‘Ricardians’).

Although mildly interesting, this did detract from the more serious business of identifying the remains; carbon-dating put them in the right time period, analysis of the skull proved that this was someone who’d met with a violent end and a modern-day descendant who could provide a DNA match was found. Such is modern technology that the experts were even able to identify which wounds had been inflicted posthumously as ‘humiliation wounds’, which goes to show while battlefield technology has undoubtedly changed over the past 500 years, some attitudes have not.

This was presented by a comedian/actor I’d never heard of who tried to liven things up with the occasional attempt at a Shakespearean quote – not a smart move when the viewers have just seen a clip of Olivier doing it properly – and a few choice quotes of his own (‘if that isn’t Richard III, that is one unlucky monk!’). I cannot help thinking that Tony Robinson would’ve done a better job – if only because he’s had plenty of experience of explaining archaeology to the viewers and he has form on this particular time period, what with the first series of Blackadder having a Wars of the Roses setting and his having made a pretty good fist of questioning the legitimacy of Edward IV for a Channel Four documentary back in 2004. Maybe the people at Channel Four didn’t think that filming an archaeological dig in a city-centre car park which was happening thanks to an enthusiastic and eccentric amateur was sufficient reason to wheel him out. I guess they didn’t anticipate that they’d find the actual bones – which just goes to show that you never can tell.

Does this, as has been claimed, change or rewrite history? Not really. It ties up a couple of loose ends – we now know what happened to Richard’s body after the battle, and we know that the Tudor-era propaganda about his physical appearance had some (but not much) basis in fact. It will no doubt re-ignite the historical debate about Richard (probably along the ‘good king or bad king’ lines which mark out the debate on, say, King John), but it doesn’t change what happened.

For example, it does not change the fact that Richard III is still the most likely suspect in the mystery over the disappearance of his two nephews (the Princes in the Tower) in 1483; of the various people who have been suggested as being behind their murder, he definitely had the motive, the means and the opportunity to have them killed.

It doesn’t change the fact that after a reign of just two years, Richard lost his kingdom to a man who would go on to found his own dynasty, and who is (via a daughter who was married off to Scottish royalty) the ancestor of today’s Royal Family. The notion of history being written by the winners is certainly true of the posthumous treatment of Richard (Shakespeare’s play was based on a book by Thomas More), although what the Ricardians do not appear to have realised is that, without Shakespeare, few people would’ve heard of Richard III.

Trying to counter the Shakespearean image of Richard III with a whitewash won’t help. Medieval history wasn’t my particular area of expertise but what I can say is that no historical figure can really be seen in such black-or-white terms – eulogise or demonise if you like, but if you do you’ll never get to see the full person. There are only ever varying shades of grey.