A birth and a death on a hot August afternoon

I am happy to report that Holly is finally in the homestretch and the finish line is in sight. The vet saw her again today and was very pleased with her progress; the ulcerated eye seems healed. So her only lingering symptom from her ordeal is that her ears are still green; for reasons no one can explain, they turned green after being held captive in her cone of shame. We assume eventually they’ll grow out; if not, she’ll always be ready to party on St Patrick’s Day. I want to offer my thanks again to all of you who sympathized with Holly during her ordeal and related stories of your own dogs’ bouts with peripheral vestibular disease.
I am working very hard on the edited manuscript of The Land Beyond the Sea, with side visits to my orthopedist and chiropractor; I see those guys so often that I really should be getting my mail there. But I hope to be able to start making more frequent drop-ins on my Facebook page and who knows, I might even be able to brush all the cyberspace cobwebs off my website and post a new blog. Meanwhile, here is a post about what happened yesterday in the Middle Ages.
Something happened on August 17, 1153 that no novelist would dare to invent, for readers tend to be rather skeptical of coincidences in novels. On this day King Stephen’s eldest son and heir, Eustace, died suddenly at Ipswich, apparently choking after eating eels. Eustace had spent the summer raiding and pillaging Cambridgeshire and had been cursed by Abbot Ording of St Edmundsbury (today’s Bury St Edmunds) for attacking their abbey, so people were quite quick to conclude that Eustace’s death was divine retribution for such spectacular sins. This was a major blow to Stephen, both as a king and as a parent, and indeed it would soon lead to a negotiated peace with the other claimant for the English throne, the young Duke of Normandy, Henry Fitz Empress. And as if Eustace’s death were not proof enough to medievals that God was on Henry’s side, any doubts of that were erased when word spread that on the very day Eustace had breathed his last, Henry’s new wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine, had given birth to a healthy son, William. In fifteen years of wedlock to the French king Louis, Eleanor had presented him with just two daughters, and now she’d given Henry his firstborn son and heir just fifteen months after they’d been wed at Poitiers. I don’t imagine that Louis sent them a christening gift.
Also on August 17, this time in 1473, Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville’s second son was born, named Richard, probably after his grandfather but possibly after his uncle. He would, of course, become better known to history as one of the Little Princes in the Tower. His birth was an occasion for rejoicing, as Edward now had his heir and a spare. But in retrospect, it is a sad day, knowing what lay ahead for this unfortunate youngster.