MaryAnn Bernal's Blog, page 191

History Trivia - Romeo & Juliet's wedding day

March 11

222  Emperor Elagabalus was assassinated, along with his mother, Julia Soaemias, by the Praetorian Guard during a revolt. Their mutilated bodies were dragged through the streets of Rome before thrown into the Tiber.

1302 Romeo & Juliet's wedding day, according to Shakespeare.

1669 Mount Etna (Sicily) erupted. 990,000,000 cubic yards of lava were thrown out over four months, destroying a dozen villages. Ashes formed a double cone more than 150 ft high, now called Monti Rossi.

3,000 Skeletons Recovered at London Train Station Site

Discovery News


Archaeologists in London have begun digging up some 3,000 skeletons including those of victims of the Great Plague from a burial ground that will become a new train station, the company in charge said.
A team of 60 researchers will work in shifts six days a week over the next month at the Bedlam burial ground to remove the ancient skeletons, which will eventually be re-buried at a cemetery near London.
Crossrail, which is building a new east-west train line in London, said the dig near Liverpool Street station was being carried out on its behalf by the Museum of London's archaeology unit.
Photos: Accidental Archaeological Discoveries   Decapitated Gladiators Found in England? The lives of Roman gladiators and the wide reach of the bloody games throughout the empire is coming more into focus thanks to the discovery of a gladiator graveyard in Britain. Heather Bonney / Museum of London The company said in a statement that the bones would be tested to "shed light on migration patterns, diet, lifestyle and demography" of Londoners at the time.
"Archaeologists hope that tests on excavated plague victims will help understand the evolution of the plague bacteria strain," Crossrail said.
The Bedlam ground was used between 1569 and 1738 -- a period that spanned Shakespeare's plays, the Great Fire of London and numerous plague outbreaks.
The excavation is also expected to further uncover the remains of an ancient Roman road, where Crossrail said that several artifacts such as horseshoes and cremation urns have already been found.
The area was London's first municipal burial ground and was named after the nearby Bethlem Royal Hospital or "Bedlam" -- the world's oldest psychiatric institution, which has since relocated outside London.
The burial ground was used by Londoners who could not afford a church burial or who chose to be buried there for religious or political reasons.
Members of the Levellers, a 17th-century political grouping that advocated popular sovereignty and religious tolerance, are believed to be buried there.
Medieval Poop Found: Still Stinks
Following excavation, constructors will build a new ticket hall for Crossrail's Liverpool Street station.
"The Bedlam burial ground spans a fascinating phase of London's history, including the transition from the Tudor-period City into cosmopolitan early-modern London," said Jay Carver, Crossrail lead archaeologist.
Nick Elsden, a project manager from Museum of London Archaeology (MOLA), said: "There are up to six meters of archaeology on site in what is one of the oldest areas of the city, so we stand to learn a great deal".
Crossrail is one of Europe's biggest construction projects and the company said that more than 10,000 artifacts have been uncovered so far in multiple excavations at some 40 sites.
Preliminary excavations at Liverpool Street in 2013 and 2014 uncovered more than 400 skeletons.

Israeli spelunkers find cache of 2,300-year-old coins and other rare objects

Fox News

About a month following the discovery off the coast of Caesarea of the largest trove of gold coins in Israel, spelunkers have unearthed another treasure, this time in one of the country’s largest and well-hidden northern stalactite caves. Father and son members of the Israeli Caving Club Reuven Zakai and Hen Zakai, as well as their friend Lior Zhalony, discovered a cache of rare coins and silver and bronze objects that date back 2,300 years, according to a release from the Israel Antiquities Authority.
The Zakais and Halony were prepping for a caving club expedition to the cave, investigating the area for several hours. The younger Zakai, 21, crawled through one of the cave’s narrowest passageways when he found two silver coins that were later identified as being minted during Alexander the Great’s reign. Alongside the coins was a cloth pouch containing items of silver jewelry like bracelets and earrings.
 The three men reported the discovery to the IAA’s Unit for the Prevention of Antiquities Robbery. This past weekend, IAA officials and members of the caving club entered the cave, stumbling across other artifacts like pottery vessels. They found numerous objects, some dating back to the Chalcolithic period (6,000 years ago), the Early Bronze Age (5,000 years ago), the biblical period (3,000 years ago), and the Hellenistic period (2,300 years ago).
The combination of archaeological find and stalactite cave is unique, according to the IAA. Geologists will be able to analyze stalactite development, while archaeologists now have an easy marker to date some of the objects, given that a few of the pottery vessels bonded with limestone sediments. This gives researchers a way to trace when the stalactites formed as well as determine the artifacts’ age.
“After the gold treasure from Caesarea, this is the second time in the past month that citizens have reported significant archaeological finds and we welcome this important trend,” said Amir Ganor, director of the Unit for the Prevention of Antiquities Robbery. “Thanks to these citizens’ awareness, researchers at the Israel Antiquities Authority will be able to expand the existing archaeological knowledge about the development of society and culture in the Land of Israel in antiquity.”

History Trivia - Battle of Aegus - Roman naval victory over the Carthaginians

March 10

241 BC A crushing Roman naval victory over the Carthaginians in the Battle of Aegus ended the First Punic War.

49 BC Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon and invaded Italy.

1452 Ferdinand II of Aragon was born. The marriage of Ferdinand to Isabella of Castile eventually resulted in a united Spain.

Richard III gets a lavish send-off… at last

The GuardianElizabeth Day The skeleton of Richard III, who suffered from scoliosis of the spine. The king’s remains will be reburied at Leicester cathedral this month. Photograph: Reuters

Later this month, 530 years after he was killed at the Battle of Bosworth Field, Richard III will finally get a decent burial at Leicester Cathedral, watched by the world’s media. Elizabeth Day goes behind the scenes and meets those involved


Toby Capwell, curator of arms and armour at the Wallace Collection in London, has got used to being ahead of the curve. We are in a taxi on the way to the site of the 1485 Battle of Bosworth Field and he is talking eloquently about medieval weaponry when he confesses that, at several junctures in his life, his early enthusiasm for some overlooked area of expertise or interest has been hijacked by a later boom in its popularity.
He grew up in Seattle where, as a teenager, he remembers liking all these unknown local indie bands such as Soundgarden and Alice in Chains. Then he left to go to college, and the indie scene in his home town exploded. Before leaving Seattle, he bought an espresso machine for his college dorm. He got it at a place called Starbucks, a small coffee shop no one outside the city had ever heard of. Then Starbucks became a massive global corporation. The espresso machine broke, Capwell says regretfully, otherwise he’d probably have made a fortune selling it on eBay.
It’s the same thing all over again with Richard III. Capwell has nurtured a lifelong fascination with the Yorkist king who was killed at Bosworth by Henry Tudor’s forces during the Wars of the Roses. As a 15-year-old, he remembers reading Charles Ross’s seminal biography of the late monarch and developing a preoccupation with Richard III, whose body had lain undiscovered for centuries. No one knew exactly how the king had died – contemporary accounts relied on second-hand testimony and were mostly written by foreigners – which just added to the enigma. “When there’s a mystery, it’s galvanising,” Capwell explains. “It’s like the Kennedy assassination.”
At the time, Richard was still an unloved footnote of history, his reputation maligned by Shakespeare and the later Tudor chroniclers who depicted him as an incompetent king and a bloodthirsty hunchback, guilty of killing two young children who threatened his dynastic ambition. An obsession with Richard III wasn’t exactly mainstream for an American teenager in the 1990s. “My parents were somewhat perplexed,” Capwell admits, but, undeterred, he moved to England and became a leading scholar in the field.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Toby Capwell, curator of arms and armoury at the Wallace Collection in London, and Richard III fanatic. Photograph: Fabio De Paola And then, in August 2012, the skeleton of Richard III was found underneath a council car park in Leicester by some enterprising archaeologists from the nearby university and suddenly the whole world wanted a bit of him. Now Capwell finds himself at the centre of a growing rumpus surrounding the forthcoming reinterment of the last Plantagenet king: Richard III is due to be buried in Leicester Cathedral later this month, the first ceremonial burial of a British monarch since 1952. There was an unsuccessful high court bid to have him buried in York and rumblings of discontent over the failure to find a place for him in Westminster Abbey, but Leicester won in the end.
 Channel 4 is planning a week of exclusive live coverage, overseen by Nick Vaughan-Barratt, who has been at the helm of many key royal events in the past, including the televising of the Royal Wedding and the Queen Mother’s funeral. The Archbishop of Canterbury will be presiding over the ceremony and 58 international media organisations have already signed up to be there. The cost is £2.5m, raised through private donations by Leicester Cathedral. The city’s elected mayor, Sir Peter Soulsby, can hardly contain his glee: “It’s a wonderful opportunity for us to remind people of what a fantastic place Leicester is.”
Until now, the city’s most celebrated ex-residents were the former England striker and TV presenter Gary Lineker and a man called Daniel Lambert, who was famous for being abnormally large (almost 53 stone when he died in 1809). And Geoffrey Chaucer married his second wife there.
The skeleton in the car park has changed all that. The newly built Richard III visitor centre opposite the cathedral has attracted 40,000 people through its doors since opening in July, many of whom come to gawp at the shallow 1.6m by 30m trench where the late monarch was discovered, now safely screened by thick glass and accompanied by muted choral music. An overhead projection of the outline of his skeleton is beamed into the ditch at regular intervals, like some ghoulish Halloween spectacle.
The funeral cortege will take Richard III’s remains in a lead-lined coffin from Leicester university along a public route designed to retrace the movements of his final days, including the villages around Bosworth, before transporting him along the aptly named King Richard’s Road past such distinguished emporia as Best Price Bathrooms, the Crystal Jade Chinese takeaway and Maroniques hair and tanning salon. The coffin will then lie in state for three days at the cathedral so that the public can pay their respects. The reinterment service on 26 March will see a pre-Reformation Catholic king buried in an Anglican cathedral for the first time and tens of thousands of people are expected to line the streets to witness this historic event.
“It’s not a funeral because there is no body [in the conventional sense],” explains David Monteith, the dean of Leicester Cathedral. “In a funeral it’s very clear that the dominant motif is goodbye – hence our feelings of grief. In this, the dominant motif is much more hello.”
It is a rather startling thought. But for many involved in the rehabilitation of Richard III’s reputation, he does seem to be a living, breathing figure. Philippa Langley, a screenwriter and lifelong Ricardian who was the driving force behind making the archaeological dig happen (she raised £34,000 for the project through sheer will power), has devoted so much of her life to the cause that she has sometimes been accused of not only wanting to discover Richard III’s bones, but to jump them too. “If [people] want to make these assumptions that I’m still in love with him, that’s fine,” she says with a barely suppressed sigh. In the Richard III visitor centre, she is accosted by an excitable group of schoolchildren from South Carolina and a grey-haired, bespectacled woman who calls Langley her “hero”. Langley accepts it all with good grace.
“Do I admire him?” she continues. “I do because he lived the most extraordinary life. He fought through extraordinary circumstances. Yes, he’s a conflicted, complex and flawed individual – we all are. It’s the human condition.”
Langley points out that, during his two short years on the throne, Richard III brought in revolutionary legal principles – the presumption of innocence, the concept of blind justice, the introduction of bail – and insisted that all laws should be translated from Latin or French into English so that his subjects could understand them. He was also the first king to speak his coronation oath in English.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Richard Knox at the Bosworth battlefield heritage centre. Photograph: Fabio De Paola These achievements have been overshadowed for centuries by the myths surrounding his character. He has long been the prime suspect for the murder of the princes in the Tower (Langley gives this short shrift: she points out that Henry Tudor had much more to lose from their continued survival). The discovery of his skeleton has become a trigger point for a broader re-evaluation of his legacy.
In Leicester, the turnover of leisure businesses such as hotels and visitor attractions shot up by £482m from 2012 to 2013 and much of the increase was attributed to the “Richard effect”. At the Bosworth battlefield heritage centre’s gift shop, there are Bosworth wine gums on sale and rubber wrist bands on sale emblazoned with “Team Richard III” or “Team Henry VII” so that you can show your allegiance to either the House of York or Lancaster.
“One of my bugbears,” says Richard Knox, the delightfully titled 1485 project officer for Leicester city council, “is that the Battle of Bosworth Field is famous for being the start of the Tudor dynasty and the occasion of Richard III’s death [legend has it that Henry Tudor was crowned Henry VII on the battlefield with Richard’s crown, retrieved from a thorn bush] but about 1,000 other people died, probably 950 of whom we have no idea who they were.”
Everyone who works at the centre seems to be called Richard, although they insist it’s not obligatory. Richard Cale, who greets me at reception, says he was the third one to join, “so I’m Richard the third”.
No one seems to mind that the centre is about three miles away from the actual battlefield site. In fact, the closest you can get to the spot where Richard III lost his life is a local farm where some mischievous type has put name plaques on the outbuildings, such as “Tudor Barn”, “York Barn” and “Blackadder Barn”. We hike up a mound of mud and Capwell points out the various ridges Richard would have used to mount his charge.
The discovery of the skeleton has meant experts now have a fairly accurate picture of how he must have died. After using the latest techniques in forensic pathology, bone analysis, radiocarbon dating, genealogy and DNA research, academics at the University of Leicester claimed they were 99.999% certain that the bones in the car park were indeed those of the last Plantagenet king.
The identification process was lengthy and involved tracing an all-female line of descent from Richard III’s sister, Anne of York, so that a mitochondrial DNA sample (longer lasting and more stable than the DNA that exists within our cell nuclei) could be gleaned from a living descendent – in this case, Michael Ibsen, a cabinet-maker living in London, who has hand-carved the coffin in which Richard will be buried. His DNA matched the sample from the skeleton.
The findings also confirmed that the late king did suffer from scoliosis of the spine, meaning that his right shoulder would have been noticeably higher than the left. Although he would have been 5ft 8ins tall in the normal course of events, the scoliosis depressed his height by four inches. This, then, was a king who had to fight inherent challenges in an era when physical deformity was viewed as evidence of a twisted soul.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest A ceremonial procession around Leicestershire will precede the reinterment at Leicester Cathedral. Photograph: Fabio De Paola Analysis of Richard’s skeleton revealed two major blows to the skull and one to the pelvis. Capwell believes the most likely explanation for his death is that the king’s horse became mired in the swampy mud around Bosworth – hence the famous line in Shakespeare: “A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!” Unable to move, he would have been set upon by some of Henry Tudor’s men. He probably lost his helmet or had it forcibly removed. The back of his skull was sliced off – Capwell thinks the weapon would have been a halberd (a type of axe). Medieval battles were, he says, “nasty, horrible things”.
The skeleton also revealed several humiliation wounds, including a sword injury through the right buttock. Richard’s grave was hastily dug and he was buried without a shroud or coffin, in an area too small to lay him out with the dignity usually afforded an anointed king.
Aside from the science, the discovery of Richard’s remains was also the result of astonishing serendipity. At the outset of the archaeological dig, the chances of finding Richard’s grave were miniscule: most of the site of Greyfriars abbey had been built on over the years and the dig was only able to excavate 1% of the total area because of funding limitations. The team expected to find hundreds of unidentified skeletons, but only had clearance to exhume six.
The first ground was broken underneath a letter “R” painted onto a car-parking space to designate it “reserved”. Within five hours of the first day, two parallel human leg bones were discovered. The feet were missing, chopped off by the foundations of a Victorian building that, if it had been built a few inches to the right, would have entirely destroyed the skeleton.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Philippa Langley at the Richard III visitor centre in Leicester. Photograph: Fabio De Paola It was 22 August, the same date on which, 527 years previously, the Battle of Bosworth Field had been fought. It was, recalls Carl Vivian, a video producer at the University of Leicester who has been filming the back story (no pun intended), a bank holiday weekend, and permission to continue the exhumation had to be sought from the Ministry of Justice. It took three days for the permission to come through and the skeleton was finally removed from the ground on 25 August.
“After Richard was killed in 1485, his body was put on display for three days,” says Vivian. “Then he was buried.”
On 25 August? “Yep. Of course, there are those who point out the Gregorian and Julian calendars don’t match up, but still…” Vivian trails off.
It makes for a better story? He nods: “It does.”
Channel 4’s week of live programming for the burial of King Richard III begins on Sunday 22 March at 5.30pm with the procession, and culminates on Thursday 26 March from 10am with the live reburial, Richard III: The Burial of the King . For details click here

6 myths about Richard III

History Extra   © Heritage Image Partnership Ltd / Alamy Since the discovery of his remains underneath a Leicester car park in 2012, Richard III has rarely been out of the news. With his reburial just weeks away, historian John Ashdown-Hill explores six common myths about the last Plantagenet king…

Myth 1: Richard was a murdererShakespeare’s famous play, Richard III, summarises Richard’s alleged murder victims in the list of ghosts who prevent his sleep on the last night of his life. These comprise Edward of Westminster (putative son of King Henry VI); Henry VI himself; George, Duke of Clarence; Earl Rivers; Richard Grey and Thomas Vaughan; Lord Hastings; the ‘princes in the Tower’; the Duke of Buckingham and Queen Anne Neville.
But Clarence, Rivers, Grey, Vaughan and Buckingham were all executed (a legal process), not murdered: Clarence was executed by Edward IV (probably on the incentive of Elizabeth Woodville). Rivers, Grey and Vaughan were executed by the Earl of Northumberland, and Hastings and Buckingham were executed by Richard III because they had conspired against him. Intriguingly, similar subsequent actions by Henry VII are viewed as a sign of ‘strong kingship’!
There is no evidence that Edward of Westminster, Henry VI, the ‘princes in the Tower’ or Anne Neville were murdered by anyone. Edward of Westminster was killed at the battle of Tewkesbury, and Anne Neville almost certainly died naturally. Also, if Richard III really had been a serious killer in the interests of his own ambitions, why didn’t he kill Lord and Lady Stanley – and John Morton?
Morton had plotted with Lord Hastings in 1483, but while Hastings was executed, Morton was only imprisoned. As for the Stanleys, Lady Stanley was involved in Buckingham's rebellion. And in June 1485, when the invasion of his stepson, Henry Tudor was imminent, Lord Stanley requested leave to retire from court. His loyalty had always been somewhat doubtful. Nevertheless, Richard III simply granted Stanley's request - leading ultimately to the king's own defeat at Bosworth.

Myth 2: Richard was a usurperThe dictionary definition of ‘usurp’ is “to seize and hold (the power and rights of another, for example) by force or without legal authority”. The official website of the British Monarchy states unequivocally (but completely erroneously) that “Richard III usurped the throne from the young Edward V”.
Curiously, the monarchy website does not describe either Henry VII or Edward IV as usurpers, yet both of those kings seized power by force, in battle! On the other hand, Richard III did not seize power. He was offered the crown by the three estates of the realm (the Lords and Commons who had come to London for the opening of a prospective Parliament in 1483) on the basis of evidence presented to them by one of the bishops, to the effect that Edward IV had committed bigamy and that Edward V and his siblings were therefore bastards.
Even if that judgement was incorrect, the fact remains that it was a legal authority that invited a possibly reluctant Richard to assume the role of king. His characterisation as a ‘usurper’ is therefore simply an example of how history is rewritten by the victors (in this case, Henry VII).

Myth 3: Richard aimed to marry his nieceIt has frequently been claimed (on the basis of reports of a letter, the original of which does not survive), that in 1485 Richard III planned to marry his niece, Elizabeth of York, eldest daughter of Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville. There is no doubt that rumours to this effect were current in 1485, and we know for certain that Richard was concerned about them. That is not surprising, since his invitation to mount the throne had been based upon the conclusion that all of Edward IV’s children were bastards.
Obviously no logical monarch would have sought to marry a bastard niece. In fact, very clear evidence survives that proves beyond question that Richard did intend to remarry in 1485. However, his chosen bride was the Portuguese princess Joana. What’s more, his diplomats in Portugal were also seeking to arrange a second marriage there – between Richard’s illegitimate niece, Elizabeth, and a minor member of the Portuguese royal family!


Myth 4: Richard slept at the Boar Inn in LeicesterIn August 1485, prior to the battle of Bosworth, Richard III spent one night in Leicester. About a century later, a myth began to emerge that claimed that on this visit he had slept at a Leicester inn that featured the sign of a boar. This story is still very widely believed today.
However, there is no evidence to even show that such an inn existed in 1485. We know that previously Richard had stayed at the castle on his rare visits to Leicester. The earliest written source for the story of the Boar Inn visit is John Speede [English cartographer and historian, d1629].
Curiously, Speede also produced another myth about Richard III – that his body had been dug up at the time of the Dissolution. Many people in Leicester used to believe Speede’s story about the fate of Richard’s body. However, when the BBC commissioned me to research it in 2004, I concluded that it was false, and I was proved right by the finding of the king’s remains on the Greyfriars site in 2012. The story of staying at the Boar Inn is probably also nothing more than a later invention.

Myth 5: Richard rode a white horse at BosworthIn his famous play about the king, Shakespeare has Richard III order his attendants to ‘Saddle white Surrey [Syrie] for the field tomorrow’. On this basis it is sometimes stated as fact that Richard rode a white horse at his final battle.  But prior to Shakespeare, no one had recorded this, although an earlier 16th-century chronicler, Edward Hall, had said that Richard rode a white horse when he entered Leicester a couple of days earlier.
There is no evidence to prove either point. Nor is there any proof that Richard owned a horse called ‘White Syrie’ or ‘White Surrey’. However, we do know that his stables contained grey horses (horses with a coat of white hair).

Myth 6: Richard attended his last mass at Sutton Cheney ChurchIt was claimed in the 1920s that early on the morning of 22 August 1485, Richard III made his way from his camp to Sutton Cheney Church in order to attend mass there. No earlier source exists for this unlikely tale, which appears to have been invented in order to provide an ecclesiastical focus for modern commemorations of Richard.
A slightly different version of this story was recently circulated to justify the fact that, prior to reburial, the king’s remains will be taken to Sutton Cheney. It was said it is believed King Richard took his final mass at St James’ church on the eve of the battle.
For a priest to celebrate mass in the evening (at a time when he would have been required to fast from the previous midnight, before taking communion) would have been very unusual! Moreover, documentary evidence shows clearly that Richard’s army at Bosworth was accompanied by his own chaplains, who would normally have celebrated mass for the king in his tent.
John Ashdown-Hill is the author of The Mythology of Richard III (Amberley Publishing, April 2015). To find out more, click here.
To find out more about the author, visit www.johnashdownhill.com

History Trivia - David Riccio, advisor to Mary, Queen of Scots, murdered

March 9

1074 Reforming Pope Gregory VII excommunicated all married Roman Catholic priests.

1497 Nicolaus Copernicus 1st recorded astronomical observation. 

1566 David Riccio, secretary and advisor to Mary, Queen of Scots, was murdered in the Palace of Holyroodhouse, Edinburgh, Scotland.

Mr. Chuckles meets Thriller author, Sheffield's E.L Lindley, while stirring the Wizard's Cauldron

The Wizard Speaks

E.L Lindley, is, I am sure, familiar to many of you from her immensely supportive Twitter engagements and I met her recently through Rosie's Review Team, a popular and increasingly influential review and book blogging collective. 

For once, I didn't have to spend a fortune on phone calls as E lives just up the road from me in thriving Sheffield, the famous steel city of yore, where she writes accessible, funny and dramatic novels and short stories (of which one, linked here, is attracting rave reviews). A delight to talk to, I caught her by Wizphone as she wandered that remarkably nice new concourse just approaching Sheffield station. Here's what she had to say.Tell us about yourself, E.
Well, where to start ... Hopefully, I’m a pretty nice person who happens to love stories. I love writing them, reading them, watching them on the big or small screen and listening to them in song form. I am a sucker for a story. 

Consequently, I spend most of my time either writing, reading or at the cinema. I try to allocate a bit of time for friends and reluctantly have to fit work in there as well, to fund my otherwise loafer-esque lifestyle. By trade I am a teacher although I ‘retired’ from the job proper in 2008 and now just do enough to keep the boat afloat so to speak.
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History Trivia - Anne Stuart becomes Queen regnant of England, Scotland, and Ireland

March 8

1144 Pope Celestine III, whose pontificate lasted six months, died.

 1495 Saint John of God, patron of hospitals and the dying, was born.

1702 Anne Stuart, sister of Mary II, became Queen regnant of England, Scotland, and Ireland.

History Trivia - King Henry VIII's divorce request is denied

March 7

 322 BC The Greek philosopher Aristotle died.

 321 Emperor Constantine I decreed that the dies Solis Invicti (sun-day) was the day of rest in the Empire.

1530 King Henry VIII's divorce request was denied by the Pope, which prompted Henry to declare himself as supreme head of England's church.