Anglo-Saxon Era

A shy and unmusical stable-hand suddenly began to sing wise and moving hymns.

In 657, a monastery was founded in Whitby, in the Kingdom of Northumbria. It gave employment to several labourers, including an elderly stable-hand named Caedmon who would do anything to avoid singing.

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St Dwynwen was a 5th century princess regarded by some as Wales’s answer to St Valentine.

St Dwynwen was 5th century royalty from the County of Brecon in Wales, who by thinking of others rather than herself won the grace of interceding for star-crossed lovers. Her feast day is January 25.

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St Adamnán worked tirelessly to secure protection, rights and dignity for the women of Ireland.

St Adamnán was Abbot of Iona, an island on the west coast of Scotland, in the 7th century. The traditional culture of what was still in many places a pagan land had treated women as disposable property.

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How hard-pressed Christians on the Welsh border won a battle without bloodshed.

In the 5th century, the spread of Christianity was a growing threat to the pagans’ hold of fear and ignorance over ordinary people. The pagans’ answer was (as always) violence.

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King Harold died at the Battle of Hastings in 1066. Or did he?

Harold Godwinson was killed at the Battle of Hastings on England’s south coast in 1066, pierced through the eye by an arrow. But that wasn’t the tale they told up north in the city of Chester...

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A King and Queen gentler than the times in which they lived.

The powerful Earl Godwin, a rough Saxon and an ambitious man, gave his support to King Edward the Confessor on condition that he marry Godwin’s daughter Edith.

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