Mediaeval History
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Mediaeval History’
One week into a Lenten retreat with the Bishop of Hexham, a boy’s miserable life is turned right around.
Bishop John of Hexham (?-721) is better known today as St John of Beverley, as he had been Abbot of the monastery in Beverley, North Yorkshire, before being elevated to the See of Hexham. His contemporary Bede was a great admirer, and told this story of him.
Charles Dickens tells the story of King Henry II and the enchantingly beautiful Rosamund Clifford.
The story of Rosamund Clifford, mistress of a young Henry II, is one of the great romances of English literature. Disappointingly (or perhaps not, since it is a bitter tragedy) apart from the most essential facts it is a legend. The best one can do is to ask one of our great novelists, Charles Dickens, to let us down gently.
Richard I thought a veteran Crusader and conqueror of Saladin could handle a few French peasants.
Richard the ‘Lionheart’ is best remembered today as the King of England during the time of Robin Hood, an association made for us by Sir Walter Scott’s novel ‘Ivanhoe’. He was an inspiring general in the Third Crusade, courageous and ruthless, but his death was testimony to the caprices of Fortune.
Charles Dickens believed that Britain’s Saxon invaders gained power by force of arms – but not by weapons.
Whether or not the fifth-century Saxon warlords Hengist and Horsa were historical figures (St Bede and JRR Tolkien both thought so), the Saxon invasions, and General Flavius Aetius’s failure to respond to Roman Britain’s heartbreaking appeals in the late 440s, were quite real.
Henry VII must decide how to deal with a boy calling himself ‘King Edward VI’.
Ever since 1455, the Royal dynasties of Lancaster and York had been vying for the crown in the ‘Wars of the Roses’. Then in 1485, Welsh outsider Henry Tudor (Lancaster) defeated King Richard III (York) at Bosworth near Leicester, and set himself to draw a line under thirty years of strife.
Anglo-Saxon poet Cynewulf imagines the farewell between Jesus and his Apostles, forty days after his resurrection.
Cynewulf (possibly the 8th century bishop Cynewulf of Lindisfarne) imagines Christ’s last words to his Apostles, before a cloud came and took him from their sight, never to be seen again – and yet, somehow, never to leave them.