In my fourth King’s Fool Mysteries, DEVIL’S GAMBIT, Henry VIII weds his fourth wife, the German gentlewoman Anne of Cleves. It would have been an arduous journey to come to England, meet the king to see if he liked her, to be accepted…or sent back in disgrace. Instead, Henry’s court painter, Hans Holbein the Younger, … Read more
Yes, the iconic fast food of fried and battered fish served with hot chips (or what we would call French fries) served wrapped in newspaper, is a symbol of Great Britain. It excluded from rationing during WWI and WWII as it was a universal favorite and in order to keep up morale it was given … Read more
Back in the days when I was a kid in school, I was more or less the token Jew. So every year I was asked by grade school teachers to give a presentation of the meaning of Hanukkah. And I was only too glad to do it, because I was a little weary of the … Read more
In the late Victorian and early Edwardian periods, mashers (lecherous and predatory men…and yes, we still have them. Just cast your gaze towards the White House) were often defeated by the woman’s last weapon of resort; the hat pin. These pins were used to…well, pin a hat to her hair. No chin straps for these … Read more
Are we ready to choose wisely? We just can’t get away from the Holy Grail. It’s stuck in our minds in popular culture. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Monty Python and the Holy Grail/Spamalot. The Da Vinci Code. But what is it exactly? We think of it as the one thing, the cup of … Read more
You might recognize the title of this blog post from the musical “My Fair Lady” wherein linguist Henry Higgins laments that the English language was being corrupted by its many dialects. Indeed, George Bernard Shaw, who penned the original play “Pygmalion” on which “My Fair Lady” was based, was supposed to have said, “The English … Read more
The Bow Street Runners. We tend to think that there was always a police force in every country, but this just isn’t the case. Prior to this, in the Middle Ages, there would be a sheriff (a ‘shire reeve’, a man appointed by the king to serve for a year’s time, without pay, to keep … Read more
I’ve been talking about medieval myths for some time now, that is, those tired saws that many people believe about the Middle Ages. And they keep showing up, even on Bluesky. Two of my personal favorites have got to be chastity belts and iron maidens. Though they sound like something that would go together, trust … Read more
A late Victorian/early Edwardian newspaper with female reporters. “A lady journalist, it is reported, has been informing an interviewer, that she makes by her profession, and by working no more than an hour and a half everyday, the very respectable income of a thousand pounds a year…a thousand pounds a year! Hark! Do you hear? … Read more
A lot of folks don’t know about this, that it was a real railway system that ran from 1854 to 1941. Necropolis, by the way, is translated as “City of the Dead”. And indeed, this is what it was. No one in the Middle Ages could have imagined that London — the second biggest city … Read more