Posted on 08/23/2008 7:45:39 PM PDT by PotatoHeadMick
Get onto the B1217 – the Ferrybridge-to-Tadcaster road – just after the M1 joins the A1M, and you’ve crossed that unmapped line where the north stops being grim and begins to be bracing. Go through Saxton, past the Crooked Billet pub, and on your left you’ll see rising farmland, green corn and copses – an old landscape, untroubled by poets or painters or the hyperbole of tourist boards, but handsome, still and hushed. The road is straight; it knows where it’s going, hurrying along, averting its gaze. Through the tonsured hedge you might just notice a big old holly tree on the side of the road. It seems out of place.
Get out of the car, adjust to the hissing silence and step behind the tree. Hidden from the road you’ll find a gothic stone cross of some age. Nobody knows who put it here or where it’s from. For centuries it lay in the ditch. A date recently inscribed on its base, March 28, 1461, is wrong. It should be the next day: the 29th, Sunday. The movable feast – Palm Sunday.
(Excerpt) Read more at timesonline.co.uk ...
Whew, I couldn't believe it at first...I thought it read "corpses".
FYI!
L
WOW!!!!
GREAT article.
I’m a supporter of Richard III and would have been a Yorkist. Damn Lancstrians!!! Damn Tudors!!!!!
“Now is the winter of our discontent...”
After a bit of argy-bargy, happy slapping, black dungeon-work and a couple of on-your-toes to the Continent, we get Henry V – cocky sod and, more important, lucky sod – who wins Agincourt but unluckily is then killed by the shits while his son is still a nipper.
Sometimes I admire British writing; sometimes it cracks me up, and sometimes it just leaves me scratching my 'ead.
Right! What’s all this then!
I say! What’d you say he was killed by?
awesome
Thanks to Shakespeare's hatchet job of 1593, Richard's reputation as "Dick the Bad" has endured to this day--and has been reinforced in films such as Tower of London (1962).
Shakespear was a great artist - but a Tudor lacky - and very BAD historian.
Excellent article—about a piece of history I knew nothing about.
The slaughter that men have visited upon other men throughout the last 5,000 years makes one paue at the sheer magnitude of it, and its effects on society, on bloodlines, and on history.
In comparison, the Battle of Iwo Jima cost the lives of about 7,000 Americans and 21,000 Japanese.
Ping for a fresh start tomorrow... Looks like a fantastic read. Thanks for posting.
Thomas Costain wrote a series of books about the Plantagenets that were very popular in the ‘50s and early ‘60s.
http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/c/thomas-b-costain/
Whew, I couldn't believe it at first...I thought it read "corpses".
And when the author writes corn, he probably means wheat or perhaps oats. It's a British meaning that always trips me up when I read it.
I’m with you on that—have never heard the expression “argy-bargy” and am not sure what the writer means when he says Henry V was “killed by the shits”—unless he means dysentery or some such unfortunate disease. But I AM pretty sure what he means when he talks about Henry VI “hiding the pink sceptre”—and that line is hilarious!
Ping for later
LOL! I missed that one.
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