WRITER & HISTORIAN
The small coastal town of Dartmouth in Devon was long a favourite port for voyages of pilgrimage. In early 1147 it was the gathering point for the second crusade, drawing would-be crusaders from across northern Europe: from the Rhineland, and in particular Cologne, from Boulogne, Flanders and Scotland, as well as from Norfolk, Suffolk, London... Continue Reading →
Like much of her reign, the accession of Razia to the sultanate of Delhi, is shrouded in mystery. The only contemporary chronicler of her reign is the Tabakat-i-Nasiri of Minhaj Siraj Juzjani, whose career had thrived during her brief tenure, and who was full of praise for her skills. “A great sovereign,” he wrote of... Continue Reading →
Roman soldiers, garrisoned on Hadrian’s Wall in the second century AD, referred to their enemies as “Brittunculi”, or “filthy little Britons”. But the Britannia that they guarded would be but the first iteration of a nation that has long outlasted them, reinventing itself, or being reinvented, countless times ever since. In 878, arguably, “Britain” was... Continue Reading →
Ukraine has been part of European history since before the Norman Conquest. Indeed, in the middle of the 11th century, the queens of Norway, Hungary, France and Poland were all Kievan Rus’ princesses. The first three were daughters of Yaroslav, grand prince of Kyiv and Ingegerd Olofsdotter of Sweden. The fourth was Yaroslav’s sister, Maria.... 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 →
It is strange to think that after Harold was killed at Hastings the crown of England might have gone not to a man of Viking descent born in Normandy but an Anglo-Saxon born in Hungary. Edgar the Ætheling was the son of Edward, nephew of Edward the Confessor, who had fled - or been driven... Continue Reading →
The northern diaspora we call the age of the Vikings is testament to the mobility of early medieval Europe. So too is the fact that the most contemporary account we have of the viking raid on Lindisfarne of 8 June 793 comes from the court of Charlemagne in faraway Aachen. Alcuin, a Northumbrian monk and... Continue Reading →
Even at the very beginning, their affair was barely private. He joked about it in his lectures and wrote love songs about her that were sung far and wide. But they were both, in their own way, already famous. By the 1110s, Peter Abelard was in his thirties, with a fast-growing reputation as a philosopher... Continue Reading →
The first note known to have sounded on Earth was an E natural. It was produced some 165 million years ago by a katydid, a kind of cricket, rubbing its wings together – a fact deduced by scientists from the insect’s remains, preserved in amber. Consider too the love life of the mosquito. When a male... Continue Reading →
Few, if any, historians have been so high born as Anna Komnene, first daughter of the Byzantine emperor Alexios I, who came into the world in the porphyry-lined room of the Palace of Boukoleon, overlooking the harbour of Constantinople and the Sea of Marmara, on December 1 1083. Alexios had seized the imperial throne from... Continue Reading →
The British Library’s manuscript collection is built on that amassed by antiquarian Sir Robert Cotton in the early 17th century. Gifted to the nation in 1701, it was stored at Essex House on the Strand for several years before safety concerns led it to be moved somewhere “much more safe from fire” – Ashburnham House,... Continue Reading →
There are few easier ways to enrage a medievalist than to refer to the era they study as ‘the Dark Ages’. But those who think of the medieval world – and medieval Catholicism in particular – as the antithesis of reason and progress, might be surprised to learn that the great Benedictine abbey at St... Continue Reading →
The visions began when Hildegard of Bingen was young – perhaps as young as three. But unlike many mystical religious experiences, the visions did not come in dreams or ecstatic states; ecstasy, she thought, was a defect. They came like a cloud of light inside her on which forms and shadows moved while her eyes... Continue Reading →
Five of the first six archbishops of Canterbury to be consecrated were not native to this country. None came from as far afield as the seventh: Theodore, born in 602, was a Greek-speaking monk from Tarsus – the modern Turkish city of Gözlü Kule – in what was then a Byzantine province. Educated in Antioch... Continue Reading →
For those who don't feel inclined to watch the film I made for A Bit Lit on life during lockdown, here's a rough transcript. My name is Mathew Lyons, and I am a freelance writer and historian. In practice, that means I am lucky enough to mostly work from home. Sometimes I work on the... Continue Reading →
A couple of weeks ago I was invited to contribute a brief film to the A Bit Lit YouTube channel, created by Andy Kesson and others as a forum for thoughts on literature, history and culture during lockdown. So here I am, talking about freedom and confinement, about emotional and spiritual spaces, about monasticism and... Continue Reading →
MGM, at its zenith in the 1940s, used to boast that it had more stars than there are in heaven on its roster. It’s a phrase that came back to me walking round the current, jaw-droppingly good exhibition at the British Library, Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms: Art, Word, War. By the time I was half way through... Continue Reading →
In May Brighton College, an independent fee-paying school, announced its intention to make the study of history compulsory for all pupils through to 18. Whatever one’s view of the decision, the fact that it was considered unusual and innovative enough to make the national newspapers should give us – and anyone interested in the practice... Continue Reading →
The last few days has seen a rash of media coverage for an exhibition at The Vyne in Hampshire which features a Roman ring said to have led Tolkien to incorporate a ring myth into the Middle Earth of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. I wrote about this – the story of... Continue Reading →
Mathew Lyons 