WRITER & HISTORIAN
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 →
The six wives of Henry VIII occupy a curious place in the public mind. We all know who they are; but how many of us know who they were? Unlike most of their contemporaries, it’s not oblivion they need rescuing from, it’s caricature. A new exhibition about them at London’s National Portrait Gallery is pointedly... 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 →
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 →
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 →
On September 8, 1549, the 11-year-old Edward VI stood on the roof of the Palace of Westminster and looked down on ten bedraggled, weary West Country men, made to stand where he might see them. A few short weeks before they had led a rebellion that exploded out of Devon and Cornwall and threatened to... Continue Reading →
As the nine-year-old Edward VI rode through London on the way to his coronation in Westminster Abbey in February 1547, he paused for a while to watch a man perform on a tightrope strung from the steeple of St Paul’s. He might have been advised to study the man who rode ahead of him too.... 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 →
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 →
What’s in a name? Antwerp, it was said, derived from the words werpen and hand, meaning ‘throwing’ and ‘hand’. In this telling, a Roman soldier named Brabo cut off the hand of a giant, Druon Antigon, who stood on the banks of the Scheldt and demanded payment of a toll. Even in its foundation myth,... Continue Reading →
A few weeks ago I had the great pleasure and privilege of talking about the Dissolution of the Monasteries to Suzannah Lipscomb for her fantastic new podcast series #NotJustTheTudors. Do have a listen! The link is here.
The spire of the church of St Lambert in Münster has three unusual adornments: cages. They were first hung on 22 January 1536 to hold the mutilated bodies of Jan Bockelson, Bernard Krechting and Bernhard Knipperdolling, surviving leaders of the Anabaptist sect which had controlled the city for sixteen months. Anabaptism had emerged in the... Continue Reading →
In Augsburg’s Staatsgalerie Altdeutsche Meister there is a three-paneled painting illustrating the life of St Paul, painted by local artist Hans Holbein the Elder in 1504. Commissioned for the city’s Dominican convent of St Katherine, it includes, in its left panel, a self-portrait of the artist with his two sons, Hans and Ambrosius – nicknamed,... Continue Reading →
Mathew Lyons 