WRITER & HISTORIAN
By the end of the 11th century, Muslim Europe was in retreat. In Spain, Christian kingdoms were slowly pushing south, while in Sicily over 200 years of Islamic rule had been ended by the Norman conquest of the island. One unexpected result of this intermingling of peoples was an unparalleled assimilation of Islamic knowledge and... Continue Reading →
Even when contemplating their own deaths, the two cousins inhabited different worlds. Richard II’s will, written in the spring of 1399, was largely devoted to lavish plans for his own funeral and to pursuing vengeance beyond the grave. The judgments he had recently made against his enemies, he wrote, must be defended “even to the... Continue Reading →
Three women are toiling in the field, gathering in the harvest barley. Or rather, two are bent double, scything through the stalks with short-handled sickles while behind a third pauses to stretch her back. It looks excruciating work. No doubt it was. England in the first half of the 14th century was in large part... Continue Reading →
Sometime in 1492 in Whitstable on the Kent coast a woman named Alice Breede went to visit a local soothsayer. She wanted assurance about the kind of life that her young child might expect, the kind of comfort any parent might seek, even today, never mind in an age of high infant mortality. What she... Continue Reading →
In 1693 some quarrymen working near Caerleon, outside Newport in Wales, uncovered an alabaster sculpture of a figure they did not recognise. The man wore a suit of armour, which had once been covered in gold leaf. In one hand he held a sword, in the other a pair of scales. The scales themselves held... Continue Reading →
Beowulf is a poem steeped in mystery and otherness. It survives in only one manuscript, the Nowell Codex, named for its owner in the 16th century. The manuscript itself was fortunate to survive a fire that engulfed the library that housed it in 1731. Its edges are still charred and flaky: that’s how close it... Continue Reading →
© Matthias Süßen, CC BY-SA 4.0 It has been said that Roger II, self-styled Rex Siciliae et Italiae, conceived of his kingdom as a “work of art”. Perhaps he did. But if so, contemporary reviews were mixed at best. To Bernard of Clairvaux he was “the Sicilian usurper”; to the Byzantine Theodore Prodromos he was... Continue Reading →
It began as a joke. There were grumbles of conservative discontent about the lack of ceremony at the coronation of Queen Victoria in June 1838. Where was the ceremonial banquet? they asked. Where was the Royal Champion? They called it the ‘Penny Crowning’, a cheap and tawdry shadow of the real thing. A few weeks... Continue Reading →
They must have looked odd together, the Frankish king and the courtier who later memorialised him. Charlemagne was tall for the period, around six foot three. Einhard meanwhile, his friend Walahfrid wrote, was “despicable in stature” – a “tiny manlet”, in Einhard’s own phrase. Born into a family of modest wealth, Einhard was educated at... 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 →
Sometime in 1506, the Benedictine abbot Johannes Trithemius, stopped at a tavern in the German town of Gelnhausen. There he encountered Doctor Faustus - then going by the name of Georg Sabellicus - handing out what were in essence business cards. Faustus was, the cards said, “the chief of necromancers, an astrologer, the second magus,... 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 →
“This, I must confess, seems owing to nothing but to the Fate of Things,” Daniel Defoe wrote glumly in 1724 of the decline of Dunwich. The town in Suffolk had once been the largest port on the East Anglian coast; in the 11th century its estimated population of 3,000 put it in the top fifth of... Continue Reading →
There were already several cracks in the dome of Justinian’s church of Santa Sophia, in Constantinople, and it was barely twenty years old. Two great earthquakes, in October and December 557, had done the damage. Some discerned a divine hand at work: “the shocks… had occurred through God’s benevolence”, John Malalas, a pious contemporary chronicler,... 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 →
Life in the England of AD1000 was grim. About 10 per cent of the population were slaves; in the South West 20 per cent. The punishment for a male slave accused of theft was to be stoned to death by his fellow slaves. Men would club together to buy a female slave to gang rape;... Continue Reading →
Ben Jonson called it “the poetry of steeples”. In his Bedfordshire youth, John Bunyan was seduced by, if not addicted to, its pleasures. So ubiquitous was bell ringing to England in the 17th century that at least two sources from the 1650s – a religious tract and a poem – attest to the country’s nickname,... 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 →
Mathew Lyons 