WRITER & HISTORIAN
‘Piagnoni’, they were sometimes called: the ‘weepers’. They were gangs of teenage boys and young men – mostly middle class – who patrolled the streets of Florence in the 1490s, hurling abuse at the impious – drunks, gamblers, women – and hurling stones too. They were called ‘pinzocheroni’, too: bigots. They, like the city, were... Continue Reading →
It wasn’t exactly a motto, but they liked it nonetheless. “The sword is our Pope,” the Livonian Knights said, “and it is a Pope that is never far from you.” Formerly known the Sword Brothers, the Livonian Knights were a military monastic order akin to the Knights Templar. They were founded around 1202 to bring... Continue Reading →
Why you? It was a good question. Brother Masseo repeated it three times. What do you mean, Francis of Assisi asked him. “You aren’t a handsome man in body,” Masseo explained. “You aren’t someone of great learning, you’re not noble; so why does the whole world come after you?” Because, Francis said, there is no-one... Continue Reading →
“‘Deep breath,’ says the doctor. I take one and hold it.” Thus begins the fourth chapter in Ann Wroe’s new book, Lifescapes. It is apt, because this is a book about the breath of life itself. It is good advice for the reader too: Wroe’s writing is intense and visionary, bordering on the ecstatic. But... Continue Reading →
In 1700 a mathematician submitted a paper to the Royal Society in which he attempted to calculate, among other things, the rate at which oral testimony – that is, memory – decayed over long periods of time. It’s a quixotic idea, to be sure. But that such a thing might even be attempted speaks not... Continue Reading →
In April 1550, Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor and king of Spain, halted Spanish conquests in the Americas. He needed to know if such conquests were lawful. He had scruples; could they be overcome? A panel of over a dozen theologians, officials and administrators gathered in the Colegio de San Gregorio in Valladolid to hear... Continue Reading →
When the Jesuits first arrived in Ethiopia in 1557 they encountered a Christian society whose roots rivalled Rome for antiquity. The region had converted in the fourth century; its royal family claimed descent from the bibilical king Menilek and the queen of Sheba. But, from the point of view of western Christendom, it had been... Continue Reading →
In the summer of 1992, Gloria Davey discovered an old ruined church near Swaffham in Norfolk. It had no roof, no windows, no door. Satanists were using it for their rites: inverted crosses daubed the walls, a pentagram the floor. A grave had been opened, giving up its bones. Gloria’s husband Bob, who before retirement... Continue Reading →
Walkelin, the Norman bishop of Winchester, had a problem. He needed more wood for his new cathedral, being built on unpromisingly marshy ground a little way from the city’s two existing Saxon minsters. He went to the man who had appointed him, William the Conqueror. William offered him as many trees from a nearby royal... Continue Reading →
It was the evening of October 13 1761, shortly after 9:30pm, that Pierre Calas discovered the body of his older brother, 29-year-old Marc-Antoine, hanging in a downstairs doorway of the family home in Toulouse. Their father, Jean, a cloth merchant, had his premises on the ground floor. The family had been dining in an upstairs... Continue Reading →
She was born in Domrémy in north-eastern France, where she was known as Jeannette. When she signed her name, she wrote Jehanne. But she called herself Jeanne La Pucelle, Joan the Maid. Even to call her ‘Joan of Arc’ – after her father’s name – is to deny something of her identity. Saint Michael’s had... Continue Reading →
Thomas Tallis, one of the first and greatest composers of English protestant church music, began his career in monastic service. Born around 1505, the first record of him is as an organist at the small Benedictine priory in Dover. Presumably he stayed until its suppression in 1535. He is next seen in the choir at... Continue Reading →
Just before Whitsunday in the summer of 1549, a fight broke out in the playground of a school in Bodmin. When the dust had settled and questions were asked, the authorities discovered that the children had divided into two gangs, or rather “two factions, the one whereof they called the old religion, the other the... Continue Reading →
The defenestration of three Catholics from the high windows of the castle in Prague in May 1618 helped precipitate the Thirty Years War. But it wasn’t the first time the people of Bohemia had resorted to this distinctive method of extra-judicial killing. On the first occasion, two centuries earlier, the proximate causes were the same:... Continue Reading →
“Many historians begin their chronicles by praising history, but these praises always sell the matter short,” wrote Damião de Góis, a Portuguese royal archivist, in his account of the reign of Manuel I, published in 1566-7. “History is infinite,” de Góis reckoned, “and cannot be confined within any limits.” It is an unusual manifesto for... Continue Reading →
As daylight faded on the rainy afternoon of Thursday 17 October 1678, three men discovered a body face-down in a ditch at the foot of Primrose Hill, then beyond the northern limit of London. The body was that of Sir Edmund Godfrey, a magistrate who had been missing since the previous weekend. His hat and... Continue Reading →
“There is nothing that doth more advance and sour a man’s misery”, the eulogist said at the funeral of Sir Marmaduke Rawdon in April 1646, “than this one thought and apprehension: that he was once happy.” Before the outbreak of the English civil war, Rawdon had been a highly successful merchant in London; his unofficial... Continue Reading →
On 4 August 1540, Thomas Epsam, a former monk of the Benedictine Abbey at Westminster, was brought from Newgate and made to stand before the justices. He had been a prisoner for three years, but still “he wold not aske the kynges pardon nor be sworne to be true to him”, the chronicler Edward Hall... Continue Reading →
Sometime around 1340 Ludolph of Sudheim, a German priest travelling around the Holy Land, encountered two elderly men, one from Burgundy, the other from Toulouse, in the mountains by the Dead Sea. They told him they were Knights Templar, taken prisoner by the Mamluks after the fall of Acre in May 1291 – the last,... Continue Reading →
If you stand outside the former Augustinian priory of St Bartholomew the Great in the City of London before evensong, twice a month, you can hear the sound of late medieval London. It is the only active church in the country to have a ring of five bells cast before the Reformation – in this... Continue Reading →
Mathew Lyons 