William the Conqueror
Originally published 07/19/2013
Jim Cullen: Review of Marc Morris's "The Norman Conquest: The Battle of Hastings and the Fall of Anglo-Saxon England" (Pegasus, 2013)
The Norman Conquest is a highly readable and substantial account of one of the most pivotal events in British history. It is a distinguished contribution to the annals of 1066 and deserves to have a long history of its own.
Originally published 07/08/2013
William the Conqueror has been deposed, along with Edward III and Henry V, and Elizabeth I has kept her head but lost her horse, but the survivors of one of the oldest tourist attractions in the world, suited and booted in shining armour, their horses pawing the ground and tossing their wooden manes, are almost ready to ride out again.On Wednesday visitors to the White Tower, the oldest part of the Tower of London, will see the latest version of a display almost 400 years old, extolled in countless guide books, maps, journals and letters. In 1652 a Dutch diplomat, Lodewijck Huygens, wrote that he had been to see "wooden horses with armed men on them" – and the tall tales were also already in place, since he was shown not only the genuine armour of Henry VIII, but that of John of Gaunt, "a renowned warrior of a few hundred years ago"."It was the one sight any visitor to London worth his salt had to see," said Thom Richardson, curator of armour at the Royal Armouries, which runs the White Tower within the Historic Royal Palaces Tower of London site....
Originally published 01/16/2013
It is the most famous battle in British history, fought, as every schoolboy knows, in 1066 at a site now marked by Battle Abbey, near the town of Hastings.But while the date of the Battle of Hastings might still be universally accepted, the location has been called into question, with two experts proposing not one but two different sites for where the fighting actually took place.They believe that for almost a 1,000 years, the battle has been commemorated at the wrong spot, with one historian claiming the fighting actually occurred a mile to the north, on Caldbec Hill, and another stating it was two miles away, to the south, at a place called Crowhurst....
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