New answers tagged england
18
It does seem a coincidence that they all died in November, but this coincidence has been made into something of a joke.
In the first place the reverend gentleman himself died on November 1st which is the feast of All Saints. This was felt worth noting on the tomb, perhaps in part because All Saints Day is the festival of the Christian dead. There was no need ...
6
He didn't, Wikipedia's word choice is bad.
Generally, "ceded" means a cession of territory between legally equal entities. That is not the case here.
What happened in 1664, was that Charles II granted James a colonial charter for New York as a proprietary colony. This was a feudalistic arrangement Charles used to reward his supporters, but also to ...
4
It looks like there has been an incorrect answer (Richard II) to this question up for years and missing the mark by centuries. The last king of England (of Great Britain, actually, of which England was a part) who spoke French as his first language was George II.
According to Andrew Thompson's George II: King and Elector, p. 16, referring to George II, &...
2
Here's my suggestion for numbering the Anglo-Saxon kings Edward in future writing. Edward the Elder could be called "Edward the First or the Minus Second", Edward the Martyr could be called "Edward the Second or the Minus oneth", and edward the Cnfessor could be called "Edward the Third or the Zeroth". And there numerals can ...
3
Here's something that might serve as a reference...
Survey of inns, taverns and alehouses in England and Wales in 1577:
National Archives SP 12/115-19. London, Bristol and Norwich are
excluded and some other returns are patchy. R. Flenley (ed.), A
Calendar of the Register of the Queen's Majesty's Council in the
Dominion and the Principality of Wales ... ...
3
Yes, the kings of England are traditionally numbered post-conquest. Additionally, monarchs who held England and another country in personal union are often given both numbers, like James VI/I, James II/VII, less commonly Henry VI/II, and (more controversially, as he didn't hold both kingdoms at the same time) Louis I/VIII. Order of the numbers is primarily ...
-2
The pound was a unit of account in Anglo-Saxon England, equal to 240 silver pennies and equivalent to one pound weight of silver. So, 300 pounds, was 300 pounds (136kg) in silver
-4
Weights were not scientifically plausible until 600 years later. (Quote from www.precisa.co.uk/the-history-of-the-weighing-scales) Even Leonardo da Vinci failed to invent a reliable weights system. If scales were 99% accurate, on the third instance of weighing after the Royal standard, the error could be as much as 3%.
Ancient pounds appear to be around 330 ...
-1
(Disclaimer: I am using very, very round numbers for my estimates.)
The description of hundreds of pounds (ranging from 100 to 800) seems to come from some of the earliest surviving Robin Hood tales, printed in the early 1500s but probably based on earlier works. So the writer was probably not thinking of paper money but may have been more familiar with some ...
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