Archaeologists are DNA testing some bones they've found to see if they might be the remains of Richard III. Are there any other members of the Royal Family....

[seeker]

where DNA testing might produce interesting results?

We should I love history, celtic history, saxon, dark ages. We need our own section so we can discuss all this at leisure.

I'm a bit of a bernard cornwell fan love his books, love the battle scenes. Love the guts and gore.

Must read up on Alfred the Great.

Also very interrested in the stone and bronze age, actually interrested in anything before WW1.

Yes, I basically love All The Shit from the Upper Palaeolithic to about 1500, with certain exceptions for historical pathology, social and local history, folklore history etc up to 1900. Other than that it is all boring.

I love Bernard Cornwell too. I have a bit of a thing for Uhtred, I like to imagine him played by Sean Bean too.

I annoy DH by picking holes in the Thomas of Hookton medieval ones though. We've got the audio version which has a bizarre male narrator putting on a cod-French accept and high voice for the women, it's most disconcerting.

Love the idea of a state funeral! Can I be first in the queue for a ticket, please?
Catholic? Well, he was, of course, because everyone was. But if he'd had to choose between the Pope or the King of England as head of the Church, which way would he have gone? It'd better be a concelebrated requiem. Medieval liturgy. In Latin

mad - if you like folklore you might like this blog? It's quite new but good stuff so far and lovely pictures.

myndandmist.wordpress.com/

One thing I'd love is a true image of Anne Boleyn. I secretly hope that there is a portrait of her stashed somewhere that escaped the fate that most other things connected with her met when she fell.

I always picture her as she is depicted in the Hever painting, holding a rose.

Everyone wasn't Catholic. Some people were heretics (eg. Lollards), though from their own point of view they were still Catholic I think, and half of Christian Europe (ish?) was Orthodox.

I always feel the need to say this because DH is Orthodox and it always feels peculiar when people ask if it's a really recent religion. It's the same age as Catholicism, they split in the 11th century.

I'd love it if the lost books of Livy's history of Rome turned up, buried in some fragment of an old aristocratic library that hasn't been catalogued properly for 300 years.

Things do turn up, don't they?

It's not anything like as old, but do you remember in the news a few years back when they found the Macclesfield Psalter (gorgeous illuminated prayerbook from the early fourteenth century) just lying around in the Earl of Macclesfield's uncatalogued library?

And a mate of mine found a manuscript in Wadham college library that hadn't been in the catalogues IIRC (or had been thought lost, I forget which).

Ooh yes, I do remember that. I'm quite excited by your uncatalogued "Thomas Knyvett" too (doesn't take much!)

There was that mural of Henry VIII in Somerset as well last year. Couple renovating their house (which used to belong to Thomas Cranmer).
Here

May this thread live forever!

Leonie I too remember the manor house and the buried infant. I will have a search and see what I can find as it?s far too thrilling to ignore.

There was some speculation that Henry VIII was syphilitic. However, he didn?t present standard symptoms or rather none have been recorded. It?s not to say he wasn?t syphilitic as I understand that the disease doesn?t manifest itself in everybody but it does cast it in doubt. Especially since other aspects of his health problems were recorded (his ulcerated leg, for example).

Elizabeth I made the famous quote that ?I would rather be a beggar and single than a queen and married? and there?s an apocryphal quote that she would never marry for reasons that she ?would not divulge to a twin soul?. The former quote could probably be tempered by the fact that it was spoken in ire to some ambassador, pressing the suit of some Duke or Prince in marriage. The latter, if it?s true, hints at a darker view of marriage. To be fair I don?t think we can read too much into Elizabeth?s reluctance/refusal to marry. She had her sister?s example before her to show that Queens were damned whichever route they took. Marry an English nobleman and you set up dangerous factions and incite jealousy amongst the rest of the nobility; choose a foreign husband and you manage to annoy everyone. If you didn?t marry you had the problem of succession, although in Elizabeth?s case she did have her cousin, Mary of Scotland?s son. She could be fairly confident towards the second half of her reign that the throne would pass to him with some measure of stability.

I don?t think Elizabeth had syphilis. She was unusual in an age of poor personal hygiene in that she bathed monthly (records when she travelled about court show that she took a bath with her!). There is also some quote I recall reading that mentioned that she had irregular ?courses? (It may have been the Spanish Ambassador, digging around for dirt as usual) which could hint at fertility problems. But this wouldn?t have been that unusual for the time. The only reason it is recorded about Elizabeth was because her fertility was of specific interest rather than the fact that irregular periods were stand-out unusual.

If Elizabeth I knew that half a millennia later people were discussing the regularity of her menstrual cycle she would probably raise an overplucked eyebrow.

mad - ah, sadly, I don't think it is uncatalogued, it's just not in the rather crappy catalogue I was using. A Thomas Knyvett in the sixteenth century was a known antiquarian book collector, so I would be it's him.

It never ceases to irritate me massively that more catalogues aren't available online or in updated forms - some of the old ones are useless.

But I am still excited to see it because I love the idea that someone was reading the book 200 years after it was written.

I have found genuinely uncatalogued references to owners of books before, though, and it made me very happy.

*I would guess, not 'I would be'. Oops.

Kitstwins Wasn't there also something about Francis I of France having to take the 'mercury cure' because of syphillis, but no mention at all of anything like that recorded in Henry's health records such as they are...

tickle that is awesome!

Going back to the Tudors and their offspring, I watched a tv documentary once, discussing why so many royals lost pregnancies and young children. IIRC, one theory was that Anne Boleyn was blood type Rhesus Negative. Meaning that she would carry her first child to term, but not any subsequent pregnancies! Such a simple problem! It's awful to think that her blood type lead might have lead to her death!

LDR Oh, shouting might help, although I might just return to lurking so you won't know I'm here. Not much chance of me only lurking on this thread, though, there's just so many fascinating things to discuss.
My deadline was to finish the final revision of my book by the end of September. I'm not a published writer yet, but (fingers crossed emoticon) watch this space . I've written a YA novel and have been signed by a New York agent with it. He gave it to lots of publishing houses, and they loved it, but didn't think my writing style was YA. They want me to offer it again as adult historical, which basically means another 50,000 words and a bit more meat on the bones.

The deadline is the end of September. It's self imposed, but I'm going to the Historical Novel Society conference (last weekend in Sept) and I was hoping to be able to say it was finished.
I'd love to be part of a MN Historical Society.

LRD Isn't it beautiful! There's a more recent restoration pic here - if you look at the image upside down, there's supposedly a 'hidden image' of what the artist maybe really thought of Henry...

saggy, oh, that is so sad.

It seems quite plausible. A friend of mine has recently had her baby and is O neg, and she had to come home from the country she was staying in because the medical care there is not good at all, and she could not have got the injection if she'd stayed there. So it is really scary to think this is still a reality for women in parts of the world.

happy - oh, good luck! That sounds brilliant ... I would love to read it, and the conference sounds like so much fun.

tickle - wow. That hidden image is hilarious. You'd have to have balls, though, right?!

Ahem. Or the non-gender-specific equivalent thereof.

That's interresting about anne boleyn, but what about catherine of aragon? Why did she loose so many babies? Would be a horrid coincidence if she suffered the same.

Don't know if you saw the link to the theory that Henry VIII might have been suffering from Kells fanjo
Here's the link again to save you time looking for it if not.
www.science20.com/news_articles/henry_viii_and_miscarriages_was_it_kell_antigen-76877