I discovered this shocking little tidbit in the Barlings chronicle, and backed up by William le Breton: While William de Longespee, earl of Salisbury, the illegitimate son of Henry II and hence a half-brother of King John, was imprisoned after the Battle of Bouvines, that his brother John seduced his wife. The wife in question would've been Ela, ( Read more... )

On GoogleBooks preview, it's possible to read the whole of an interesting article: Brenda M Bolton, "A Matter of Great Confusion: King Richard I and Syria's Vetus de Monte", from Diplomatics in the Eastern Mediterranean 1000-1500: Aspects of Cross-Cultural Communication, ed. Alexander D Beihammer, Maria G Parani & Christopher D Schabel (Leiden, ( Read more... )

Okay, so tests have been run on samples of DNA taken from handkerchiefs dipped in the blood of King Louis XVI of France (a direct male-line descendant of Hugh Capet, among many other kings of France) to determine his mtDNA (mother's mother's mother, etc. line) and y-chromosome (father's father's father, etc. line) results. And the results are in ( Read more... )

Eleanor was born in 1184, the daughter of Geoffrey, himself the son of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine, by his wife Constance of Brittany. She had two siblings: a sister Matilda, who died young, and a brother, Arthur, born posthumously in 1187. The children seem to have remained with their mother ( Read more... )

Sex sells, and sex has been sold just about as long as there've been people willing to pay for it and money to buy it with. Ruth Mazo Karras, a professor of history at the University of Minnesota, wrote an interesting book called Common Women: Prostitution and Sexuality in Medieval England (1998) which discusses the status of prostitutes in ( Read more... )

Hello again all ( Read more... )

Hello - first time poster here ( Read more... )

I found this fun heritage site about Aveiro in Portugal, where the tomb of Princess Joana is in the former convent which is now the local museum. Joana is herself of Plantagenet descent, via Philippa of Lancaster. (Indeed, some of the Dukes of Aveiro were using the name "Lencastre" into the 18C, judging by some of the tombs illustrated.) The site ( Read more... )

I picked up Hicks's The Prince in the Tower in Oxfam today. While marketing it as a biography of Edward V still seems a bit odd to me, instead of a study of the dynasty, without Weir's influence as an editor, he seems a bit more 'steady' than with his Anne Neville book. However, there were still some oddities ( Read more... )

Just a heads-up: yesterday the regular Radio 4 programme "Open Country" was devoted to the recent location of the Bosworth battlefield. No stunning revelations but interesting; includes interviews with the farmers who own the site and the researchers who found it (and Robert Hardy giving the "My kingdom for a horse!" speech). Anyone with access to ( Read more... )