Medieval

Was King Harold slain by a Norman arrow that pierced his eye? Charles H. Gibbs-Smith adduces a powerful argument for correcting the traditional story. 

The year 1265 marked the climax in the fortunes of Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester. Having defeated the forces of King Henry III during the previous summer, and captured his son and heir, Prince Edward, the Earl was the effective master of baronial England. But his dominance did not endure for long. In May, Prince Edward escaped from his guards and, on August 4th, he overwhelmed Montfort's army at the Battle of Evesham; the Earl himself was killed in the engagement. For six months of this period, the Montfort household rolls have survived. Originally compiled for his wife, the Princess Eleanor, sister of Henry III, they present a remarkably intimate picture of domestic and social life in a powerful thirteenth-century nobleman's family, writes Margaret Wade Labarge.

C.R. Boxer writes that, taken in conjunction, the Portuguese and Spanish voyages of discovery in the fifteenth century form one of the watersheds of history, comparable to the twentieth-century conquest of space.

Alex R. Myers introduces the conciliatory and resourceful, hard-working and generousthe brother of Henry V, who was both an able soldier and a gifted Regent of France. Even his treatment of St. Joan by contemporary standards seems neither harsh nor dishonourable.

Given the immense time, labour and costs involved in constructing defensive works, it is surprising that decisive action occurred so rarely around or about them. T.H. McGuffe looks at how the appeal of military fortifications faded with time.

Completed in 1209, finally demolished in 1832, this famous construction was for more than five hundred years—until the opening of a new bridge at Westminster in 1750—London’s only thoroughfare across the Thames. By R.B. Oram.

When the rapacious warriors of the Fourth Crusade seized Constantinople at the beginning of the thirteenth century, two Byzantine princes set up an empire-in-exile stretching from Georgia along the Black Sea coast. This new empire outlived the parent city. Until 1461, writes Anthony Bryer, it remained an unconquered outpost of Greek-Christian civilization.

For seven-and-a-half centuries, Rome's Santo Spirito has remained an “oasis of security and peace." Its foundation on the site of an Anglo-Saxon hospice, Iris Origo writes, was inspired by the dream that visited an early thirteenth-century pontiff.

In August, 1373, a large and slow-moving English army set out to march across the heart of France. Their expedition lasted for five months and covered nearly a thousand miles, much of it through hostile and almost unknown country. Alfred Burne explains why it was considered a resounding feat of arms, even by the French themselves.

On August 2nd, 1100, the harsh, violent, cynical ruler, who was the second Norman King of England, mysteriously met his death while hunting in the New Forest. W.L. Warren asks: was it by accident or conspiratorial design, or was he the victim of a pagan fertility cult?