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?

I am doing it right now.

Ah, not even a lot of digging needed. Here: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duke_of_Rutland

So, the platagenets had the title first, then it was re-created for Thomas Manners, whose mother was Richard Plantagenet's granddaughter.

mad - that could well be, couldn't it?! Yes.

I've just remembered another good historical novel that's mostly about normal people but with a context to do with this stuff - A Load of Unicorn by Cynthia Harnett. I love her work. It's beautifully written, because it observes very early on that it is set just after the Wars of the Roses 'ended', and everything was peaceful ... although, there was a young Lancastrian prince, Henry Tudor, over in Brittany, nobody thought that mattered ...

I love it because I imagine that is how people would indeed have thought - and as she logically points out, people must have been plotted in undercover ways for Henry's invasion to be so successful, with people thinking it was all peaceful.

Sorry if this has already been linked to (and i've definitely linked to it before on other tudor threads!) but I think this ring perhaps shows how elizabeth really felt about her mother.

I heart Anne Boleyn

Eleanor Butler. It would be neat, wouldn't it?

I've got Hicks' biography of Clarence here, he reckons there's no evidence Clarence knew the precontract story, and what he was actually accused of at his trial was disseminating the story that Edward himself was illegitimate (a story that went back to at least 1464) not that his children were.

On the other hand, Hicks points out that Robert Stillington, the baby-eating Bishop of Bath and Wells who supposedly married Edward and Eleanor was pardoned just after Clarence's trial "for utterances prejudicial to the king". No sign that Stillington and Clarence were in contact though. Tantalising.

Eleanor Butler, I think, LaQ. Though whether that marriage existed is very murky, and I don't buy the Sharon Penman line that when Richard discovered it he simply had to proclaim himself king. He could just as well have let it lie and continued to support Edward V.

Delighted to see references to Cynthia Harnett and the even better Barbara Willard, whose novel The Sprig of Broom is based on genuine contemporary reports of an illegitimate son of Richard III.

I love it when someone else knows of Cynthia Harnett. I only wish she'd written more. The 'historical notes' and notes about the illustrations she does at the back are amazing.

I read her description of St. Giles' fair in Oxford (which is a very minor bit of the book) and then in the notes she says you can still go, so as a child I was very excited. Then when I moved here, I was married in St Giles and I go to the fair every year. I love the continuity of it, that it still happens.

Whoops, that's quite identifying (though a lot of this is).

May I say, if you are reading this and know me, could you let me know quietly by PM?!

I don't know you LRD but any friend of Cynthia Harnett is a friend of mine! The other one of hers I really love is Ring Out Bow Bells, about Dick Whittington and the mediaeval trade guilds. It includes some great writing and research about early 15th century London.

Well, y'know, it wasn't unprecedented for a Plantagenet who was never expected to become king to dispose of his nephew (probably).
John is widely believed to have conveniently misplaced his nephew, Arthur- Duke of Brittany. Arthur was the son of Geoffrey, brother to Richard I and John. Geoffrey was older than John and therefore his son had a good claim to accede upon Richard's death.
John captured Geoffrey when he was laying siege to Mirebeau Castle, holding his grandmother (and John's mother) Eleanor of Aquitaine hostage. John locked him up to Corfe Castle for a while before transferring him to Rouen in the charge of William de Braose (husband of afore mentioned Maud who met the horrible death, also at John's hands). Like the Princes, William was never seen again. He was sixteen.

Oh, I love Ring Out Bow Bells! I love so much the way she always weaves in a famous person, but does it very naturally, and keeps the perspective of the main (fictional) character so real and vivid.

I think my favourite has to be The Wool Pack. I think Cecily is probably the reason I got interested in women in history and whether or not they were really as obedient as all that. It also taught me the Latin for thistle is 'carduus' and that's where the word 'carding' comes from ... which is the most random bit of knowledge but stick in my brain. If only I could read everything in the form of historical novels for children, I'd remember everything!

happy - ooh, I did not know that!

I re-read Cynthia Harnett's The Wool Pack recently (when I got my spinning wheel and got briefly very interested in the history of wool). All her books are good but the ones where she did the illustrations too are the best.

Should probably have mentioned that Geoffrey died before Richard became king.

x-post!

LRD, the exact reason I went back to The Wool Pack was because I had an image in my head of one of the illustrations, Cicely spinning with a wheel, and I couldn't make sense of it because it was a little wheel and the wheels at that time were Great Wheels so I thought maybe she'd got it wrong. When I actually re-read that bit, it turns out she is spot-on right and it's not a spinning wheel at all, Nicholas thinks it is at first but it's actually a wool-winder. My visual memory was right but my memory of the caption was wrong - and it just goes to show how good Harnett's research was.
Of course she drew a lot of the objects from real life in museums. I don't know any other historical novels that are illustrated that way, with objects from the stories as well as scenes with people in them, but it works so well.

Did she not do illustrations for all of them? Or are there more I've not read?! (Exciting thought)

There's:

Ring Out Bow Bells
[The one with Duke Humfrey's books and witchcraft, which I should remember the title of but don't]
Stars of Fortune
The Wool Pack
The Load of Unicorn
The Great House

Any more?

Cross posted ... tunip, I love that, the visual memory and finding she was right! She was amazingly detailed. I love also the way it's so plausible, Nicholas would be confused then understand.

I absolutely adore the bit in Wool Pack where Bendy has a printed primer.

In fact, I got through my Masters palaeography class largely on the strength of that book and what it says about watermarks, since I struggled otherwise. I never let on I got it from a seventy-year-old childrens' book and my teacher thought I was very well up on current research.

Anya Seton is another one like that, her work is very ahead of its time, but not noticed because she was writing fiction.

The Writing On The Hearth is the one you're thinking of. My Puffin edition of that is Gareth Floyd.
I haven't got The Load of Unicorn and I thought that was him too but perhaps not?

I only discovered Stars of Fortune after I'd done living history events at Sulgrave Manor, where it's set. That was pretty cool, especially since some of the objects are still in the house.
(There's a birthing chair there like the one discussed earlier. At one event I did there, one of the women was heavily pregnant and two of the other people taking part happened to be midwives and there was much talk about how great it would be to give the chair a go!)

She definitely did The Load of Unicorn with her own drawings - I have a copy, and she explains how she drew all the buildings from seeing them, except Malory's house, since it's been rebuilt so many times she felt free to imagine it how she liked. She also says she had a great time going over London looking at where the buildings were, since she was writing in the 50s when lots of the bomb sites hadn't yet been re-built, and actually it was easier to see the medieval shape of things.

I will check my edition of Writing on the Hearth.

Stars of Fortune made me a bit sad. I thought the mother was going to die in it, and then in the postscript she talks about the church gate the father had made in her memory, so she did die before him. She was portrayed as so worn out with being pregnant.

I must go to Sulgrave Manor now, that would be fun!

I love the 'Aunt Spencer' bits, too, I can't help picturing her as Camilla for some reason, presumably the Diana connection.

I'd better get a copy of that then!
She talks at the end of Ring Out Bow Bells about the old London streetplan being visible beneath the bombed streets, too - doesn't she use John Stow's map of London?

I would love to say you could borrow mine, tunip, but no, you'd have to prise it out of my cold dead hands.

She does use Stow IIRC, but I think she also did more wandering around London for this one. Perhaps it depended on exactly where she was writing about.

leonie - oh, no! But you can get that relatively easily now. It was out of print for years but there was a new print run of it and Load of Unicorn a few years ago. Blackwells often has them, FWIW.

The Duke of Clarence might not have been drowned in a butt of malmsey. Apparently alcohol was sometimes used to preserve a body if it had to be transported over a long distance. He was buried in Tewkesbury Abbey in Gloucester, which would have taken some time to get to. So he could have been executed first, and then preserved.

Of course, that doesn't disprove the drowning hypothesis.