Free Republic

A 2000-year-old ancient Roman road was unearthed in Old Inn Cottage's garden near Stirling, Scotland. The site is located a few miles away from Stirling’s city center, next to the Old Stirling Bridge.It has been described as the most important road in Scottish history, the cobbled road was built by the Roman armies of General Julius Agricola in the 1st century AD and would have connected to a ford that crossed the River Forth.The road and the crossing would have been used again by the Romans in the 2nd and 3rd centuries AD as units launched fresh invasions of Scotland...

Anne Boleyn was a beautiful woman who died for an effectively polygamous man, Henry the VIIIth. In 1532, on September the first, he made Anne the Marquess of Pembroke in her own right. Henry created this title for her. These words attributed to her suggest she was very much a woman who was ready for a man: “Seduce me. Write letters to me. And poems, I love poems. Ravish me with your words. Seduce me.” Anne married Henry but when he did not have a son by her to be heir to his throne he had her executed. She spoke...

“Queerness as an interpretative tool” seems to be no more than the blunt assertion that today’s questions are the only ones worth asking and today’s categories the only ones worth applying. Never mind that when the ship sank, the crew drowned and that these artifacts spoke of real human lives that were lost and families that were presumably devastated. It is all about today’s categories such as gender and queerness. Difference need not be respected. Perspectives unsanctioned by modern Western progressivism need not apply.

Henry VIII, who ruled England from 1509 until his death in 1547, was known for his voracious appetite. Portraits of Henry show a man almost as wide as he was tall. When he wasn't marrying, divorcing, or beheading his wives (he was on his sixth marriage when he died at age 58), this medieval ruler dined like a glutton. He enjoyed banquets so much that he extended the kitchen of Hampton Court Palace to fill 55 rooms. The 200 members of the kitchen staff provided meals of up to 14 courses for the 600 people in the king's court. Here...

On this date in 1542, Henry VIII’s fifth queen, Kathryn Howard, was beheaded in the Tower of London for high treason. She was the second of Henry’s queens to face this fate, the other being Kathryn’s first cousin Anne Boleyn. Kathryn Howard* was born sometime between 1518 and 1524 to Lord Edmund Howard (a younger brother of Thomas Howard, 3rd Duke of Norfolk) and his wife Joyce Culpepper. Joyce died while Kathryn was young and her father took a post in Calais, leaving Kathryn in the charge of her step-grandmother, Agnes Tilney the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk. The Duchess oversaw...

The find was discovered in Warwickshire, England, and was subsequently reported to the local Finds Liaison Officer from the Portable Antiquities Scheme, who in turn notified Historic England.Experts have dated the jewellery to the early 16th century AD, with a most likely date of 1521 during his marriage to Catherine (married 1509 until their annulment in 1533)...The jewellery is made from gold, with a heart-shaped pendant attached to a 75-link gold chain. The front of the pendant has been decorated with a motif depicting a red and white Tudor rose, entwined with a pomegranate bush (the symbols of Henry VIII...

On this date in 1547, the Duke of Norfolk was to have been beheaded. But thanks to the previous day’s death of the corpulent 55-year-old King Henry VIII, the duke’s death warrant was never signed, and the condemned noble died in bed … seven years later. A force in the gore-soaked arena of English politics for two generations, Thomas Howard had steered two nieces into the monarch’s bed. Both girls had gone to the scaffold,* and the disgrace of the second, Catherine Howard, brought a collapse in the whole family’s fortunes. Thomas Howard’s son Henry was not as lucky as...

Travel through time by lifting like passengers on the Titanic or swimming like the sixth U.S. presidentWhere you’re going, you don’t need a DeLorean. You’ve already got a time machine: your body. With it, you can do battle with medieval knights, walk on the decks of the Titanic, play ball on the White House lawn, or play a round of tennis with Henry VIII. This is how you really sweat to the oldies. Try these workouts from decades and centuries ago to experience what it was like to live—and move—in the past. Your heartrate will go on with the Titanic...

The crown jewel of Henry VIII’s 16th century fleet was its flagship, the venerable Mary Rose. More than 500 years after its launch, the vessel remains a precious cultural treasure. Though she ploughed the Atlantic and battled with her heavy cannons for 34 years – and laid buried beneath the turbulent English Channel for 437 more, bacteria and chemicals have begun eating away at her remnants, on display at the Mary Rose Museum in Portsmouth, England. Thankfully, the ship’s conservators have received a helping hand.A new X-ray method has allowed an international team of researchers to identify zinc-sulfide nanoparticles in...

It was catalogued as an “antique carved wooden bird” when it was auctioned for £75 in 2019. Now it has been identified as Anne Boleyn’s heraldic emblem, the 16th-century royal falcon that probably adorned her private apartments at Hampton Court Palace – only to be removed after Henry VIII ordered her execution and the eradication of all traces of her...The exquisite and richly decorated oak carving is in such extraordinary condition that it even bears its original gilding and colour scheme. In 1536, barely three years after it was made, Boleyn was beheaded on bogus adultery charges – just because...

Wolsey was much inspired by Pietro Torrigiano's gilt tomb for Henry VII at Westminster Abbey, and the Cardinal commissioned Benedetto Da Rovezzano to work on lavish tomb in the Renaissance style, of which the Wolsey Angels were to stand proudly at the four corners. As we know, the tomb was not completed during Wolsey's life time and following his fall from grace and subsequent death King Henry VIII reappropriated the elements of the tomb that Benedetto had thus far completed, discarding the effigy of Wolsey and other items which specifically pertained to the Cardinal.Henry went on to commission Benedetto to...

One of the most famous Kings in the world has to be Henry VIII of England. He is most known today for the fact he had 6 wives, and the fact he ordered the execution of 2 of these, Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard. Henry VIII's love life certainly was turbulent, and it caused chaos across the country. After being refused a divorce for his first wife Catherine of Aragon, he split from Rome becoming the Supreme Head of the Church of England. This began the English Reformation, which changed the face of religion forever.We know much about Henry's wives,...

IT'S REMARKABLE what five centuries can do for a guy's reputation. When Richard III, the last Plantaganet king of England, was killed at the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485, his corpse was stripped and hauled in disgrace through the streets of Leicester, "all besprinkled with mire and blood … a miserable spectacle," as Holinshed's Chronicle recounted. Then it was stuffed into a crude grave, naked and coffinless, while "few lamented and many rejoiced." This week, the medieval king, whose bones were found under a parking lot in 2012, will be reburied in Leicester Cathedral with full reverence and honor....

Among the finds are manuscripts possibly used to perform illegal Catholic masses, silk fragments and handwritten musicWhile most of England was on lockdown amid the COVID-19 pandemic, archaeologist Matt Champion was working solo at Oxburgh Hall, a moated Tudor mansion in Norfolk. As part of the site’s £6 million (roughly $7.8 million USD) roof restoration project, workers had lifted the floorboards in the estate’s attic for the first time in centuries. Probing the recesses beneath the boards with gloved fingertips, Champion expected to find dirt, coins, bits of newspapers and detritus that had fallen through the cracks. Instead, he discovered...

On this date in 1536, Anne Boleyn lost her head. Any queen decapitated by her king would of course rate an entry in these grim pages. But this does not quite explain Anne Boleyn‘s enduring appeal, relevance and recognizability for the most casual of modern observers, and her concomitant footprint in popular culture, even with the “Greek tragedy” quality of her life. Anne stands at the fulcrum of England’s epochal leap into modernity. Whether she was that fulcrum might depend on the reader’s sympathy for the Great Man theory of history, but little more do we injure our headless queen...

This was the execution date in 1536 of Anne Boleyn‘s co-accused, the undercard to the deposed queen’s beheading. It was the accusation of adultery that furnished Anne’s downfall; some adulterers were perforce required. These were William Brereton, Henry Norris, Sir Francis Weston, Mark Smeaton … and the ex-queen’s own brother, George Boleyn. They had just days prior been subjected to a trial whose outcome was a foregone conclusion. All pleaded their innocence save Smeaton, a commoner court musician who could not withstand torture and “admitted” fooling around with Queen Anne.*

An amateur treasure hunter struck gold — literally. Kevin Duckett was hunting for treasure with his metal detector in a field near Market Harborough, Northamptonshire, England, when he unearthed a solid gold figurine that experts believe is part of a long-lost part of the crown of Henry VIII. “At first I wondered if it was a crumpled foil dish from a 1970s Mr. Kipling product, or even a gold milk bottle top,” Duckett told the Sun. “I got a very loud positive signal from my detector and started to dig down before spotting something … It was lodged in the...

istory is the account of vast social movements and cultural changes. To be sure, individuals play their part. But they are usually understood to be products of their times. The Reformation, though, whose five-hundredth anniversary we observe this year and whose impact on not only the church but the world has been monumental, was largely precipitated by one man: Martin Luther. Yes, vast social movements and cultural changes were at work in sixteenth-century Europe. But Luther caused many of them, such as the educational explosion that would lead to universal literacy, the rise of the middle class, and eventually democratic...

For a single cell, the human body is a gargantuan maze of tissues, chemicals and capillaries, crammed full with trillions of other cells all bustling about like commuters at the world's busiest train station. In their new study, the researchers focused on a specific form of cell navigation called "self-generated" chemotaxis. It relies on a simple philosophy: cells want to move from areas of a lower concentration of attractant (in this case, an acidic solution called adenosine monophosphate) into areas with a higher concentration. To determine which branch holds the higher concentration of attractant, cells break down the molecules in...

On this date in 1510, the new king Henry VIII had his dad’s most hated tax collectors beheaded on Tower Hill. When Henry Tudor conquered Bosworth Field to emerge from the War of the Roses as King Henry VII, he brought the baggage of being the son of some Welsh squire. His shaky legitimacy exposed the newborn Tudor dynasty to existential threats from every quarter; even putative allies proved liable to turn against him. Henry consequently looked for every opportunity to centralize power away from institutions that could check or threaten him and into his own hands — nowhere more...