Places, people or events associated with the Medieval period in Britain, also known as the Middle Ages.
Threave Castle was the stronghold of the Black Douglases and built by the 3rd Earl, Archibald the Grim. If that isn’t romantic enough for you, it stands on an island in the middle of the River Dee and, unless you think you can navigate your way safely across an ancient underwater causeway, the only way […]
Great events fall upon people and places, sometimes without warning. But time takes everything out of focus until there’s nothing obvious to show that anything ever happened there, and no trace of the people who took part. For example, take the peaceful, and fairly nondescript, farmland south of the little Yorkshire village of Towton: here,
This is a story about bravery and love. It covers just one chapter in the long history of the village of Eyam (pronounced ‘Eeem’ *), tucked away in Derbyshire’s Peak District just north of Bakewell. Casual travellers between Chesterfield and Chapel-en-le-Frith would pass it by without comment – unless they knew: in that case, they
Every now and again, you come across a reference to ‘The London Stone’. Not ‘a London stone’; The London Stone. Use of the definite article tells you right away that this is Something Quite Important. Never heard of it? Tut-tut. To be honest, I worked in and around London for years and was completely unaware
Something was wrong with the English monarchy; the only answer seemed to be war English history in the second half of the 15th century is scarred by civil war – the Wars of the Roses – a label which became popular in Victorian times based on the red and white roses of the rival houses
A violent royal soap opera Read More »
History
The only defence was to run away – if you could The ‘Black Death’ or ‘Great Pestilence’ swept through Europe between around 1346–1353, where it eventually killed between 30-60% of the population – maybe 25 million people, though some historians estimate twice that figure. The disease originated ‘somewhere in the east’ and arrived in southern
When death walked the land Read More »
History
Problems with close neighbours You may have noticed that France isn’t part of Britain. But at one time the Kings of England ruled enormous chunks of what is now France. The French Connection all began when Duke William of Normandy became King William I of England in 1066. Under his great-grandson, Henry II (1133-1189), the
Why France isn’t part of Britain Read More »
History
Wales is conquered and becomes an English colony Wales, like Scotland, was not a unified political entity in the early Middle Ages. It consisted of a number of kingdoms, the largest of which were Gwynedd in the north west, Deheubarth in the south west and Powys in between the two. It was ruled by kings
Whatever happened to Wales? Read More »
History Wales
Scotland manages to create itself – with a little help from the King of England In the 9th century, Kenneth MacAlpin (Cionnaith mac Ailpin) merged Dalriada or Dál Riata, the Kingdom of the Scoti, with the Kingdom of the Picts. The new kingdom, known as Alba, would eventually become Scotland and Kenneth MacAlpin is traditionally
How Scotland was born Read More »
History Scotland
The medieval roots of modern British government Most people know that the ancient Greeks invented democracy (demos – ‘the people’ and kratia – ‘power’). But we Brits like to imagine it was us – Westminster is “the mother of parliaments”, and all that. In fact, Iceland’s Althing and Sweden’s Jamtamot date back to the 10th
Brits invent parliamentary democracy Read More »
HistoryI wonder how many pints of ale have been supped here? Let me see: if just twenty people drank a modest 4 pints every night, that would be, er, 29,200 pints a year – 2,920,000 for every century. But the revenue generated by that amount of beer would not be enough to make the place
The George Inn at Borough Read More »
London