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?

Tickle
Wow! What a find! The upside down image looks like spiderman to me.

She miscarried quite a lot and lost a lot of babies just after birth, so I think it presumably wasn't the same, or she herself would have died too, after giving birth to them all?

A lot of small babies just did die. The woman I mentioned further up this thread, who lived nearly a century later, had 18 children of whom 9 survived.

Maybe Catherine was just terribly unlucky.

Hehe happy I'm torn between a devil spitting him out, and a uterus...

But perhaps he was the original friendly neighbourhood Spiderman in his spare time...!

Oh - and it doesn't help that you're meant to have a child baptised on the third day, and when you think of draughty, unheated houses and cold, unheated churches (often with dead bodies lying around rather ineffectively buried), I think it's maybe not surprising babies died. They wouldn't have known all sorts of things we know.

There's a brilliant niche comic somewhere in that: 'Henry VII: Spiderman!!"

Great thread. I too hope it gets moved somewhere more permanent.

Just to add - I know it was ages ago, but someone asked about a book about Matilda, Henry II's mother. There's a biography by Marjorie Chibnall.

details here

LRD If only I could draw, that would be such a fun idea for a project

I remember reading that Katherine of Aragon had some gynaecological issues - but that probably resulted from the near-constant childbearing and miscarriage more than being the cause of it :( Poor lady. I am a big Anne Boleyn fan, but I have just as much respect for KoA. Such a strong woman, with an awesome mother!

Thanks happybirthdayhiggs will have a look at that when I get in from work.

Wish this was my job, to sit and chat a bout history on mumsnet.

I have been fascinated with this thread and the wealth of knowledge out there. We never learned any of this at school, and I'm wondering if the knowledgable ones on here have History degrees or learned this at school. I hope too that the thread is moved to more permanent location.

No degrees here morethan Not even an A level.
Just a voracious reading habit and then research for my own writing.

No history degree, though I did do A Level.

I just love reading about it all and I can hear my old history teacher's voice in my head - she told us lots of anecdotes, it was history in that very traditional 'now here is a story about King so-and-so' style.

I am technically doing a history/literature/art history mix in my degree now as its official title is medieval studies.

I absolutely love historical novels for info though - I find it so much easier to make things stick in my mind when I've read them in a narrative or seen the real places or objects they're about.

A degree in journalism and contemporary history here - with a focus on American history.

My Tudor interest is just for fun (but I'm much more passionate about that than I ever was about anything that was in my degree syllabus...) sadly, there wasn't a journalism and 16th century history joint honours course :(

DS1 is doing a history degree now though.

MadBusLady Fri 14-Sep-12 10:45:19
Yes, I basically love All The Shit from the Upper Palaeolithic

Yep, that's my time period.

Another vote for classics.

This thread is great. I love history just wish I knew more than the basics

Oh, Lord!
I'm loath to do this for fear of starting a breastfeeding row on our lovely thread, but there were a million and one reasons why far fewer babies survived infancy in times past. I seriously doubt not getting specifically their own mothers milk was one of the major risks. Wet nurses were the norm for millennia and not just for the royal family.

Oh, I was just starting to wonder if it might explain some things, happy ... I mean, wouldn't colestrum be much more important in the times before modern medicine?

I do think wet-nursing would historically have been massively the safer option than anything other than the mother breastfeeding.

Though you do later on (eighteenth century IIRC) get those horrible stories about wet nurses who were paid by charities to take on orphaned or abandoned babies in huge numbers, and the mortality rate was grim. There's a lovely children's book about it called Coram Boy.

Yes but human colostrum is human colostrum, it's valued for passing on antibodies etc. etc. against illnesses common to all folk of the time. Come to think about it, wouldn't a wetnurse be likely to have better, stronger antibodies than a cossetted high born woman? They're hardly likely to select a syphalitic, pox ridden whore to feed the heir to the throne, are they?
(I have no expert knowledge here you understand, just thinking outloud.)

But - forgive me, not a mum - isn't colostrum the bit that's only produced early on? So she's right that a wet nurse with, say, a one-year-old of her own would not be producing it?

I think there are differences in the antibodies in different women's milk, too, but I may be wrong.

Someone on MN a while back mentioned some research that was being done into the components of breastmilk, and apparently there are all sorts of things in it we didn't know about before, but I forget the details.

Btw, I'm absolutely not arguing this from a modern BF/FF debate point of view as I honestly couldn't give a toss, so please don't feel I'm commenting on anyone's current choices.

There are lots of bits of advice out there about how to select a suitable wet nurse - you're right they were selected carefully.
However I do remember reading some statistics in Lawrence Stone that suggested wetnursed children were likely to do worse than children nursed by their own mothers.

LRD - the Jacqueline Wilson book about a Victorian orphan at the Foundling Hospital, Hetty Feather, is great. It's dd's favourite book and I took her to the Foundling Museum in the summer.

Oh, sorry, I see what you're saying now. I just assumed the wet nurse would be a new mother too, but then again, they wouldn't have known that it even existed would they.