History

The Leftie King

21 February 2025
Edoardo
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Categories: History

Sue Brunning, curator of European Early Medieval Collections at the British Museum, noticed something else about the Sutton Hoo sword. One side of the pommel was subtly more elaborate and ornate than the other. Brunning realised that the more ornate side faced outwards when the sword rested in its scabbard.

The most common way to wear a sword then was for it to hang at rest quite high up the trunk, with the pommel just below the heart, alongside the torso. As such, the pommel made an ideal hand rest.

With this high position for the sword, the natural way to draw the sword was with the opposite hand, drawing it across the body.

So, a right-handed swordsman would carry the sword on his left. But the Sutton Hoo sword had the richer side of its pommel design on the wrong side if it was worn on the left: sitting there, the less elaborate side of its design would have been on display. The wear patterns on the pommel were also wrong if it had been worn on the left.

Brunning realised that the only sensible explanation was that the wearer of the Sutton Hoo sword had been left-handed.

It’s not often that we can learn such an intimate detail about a person who lived 1,500 years ago and whose name we do not even know for certain. If the sword’s wielder was Rædwald, king of the East Angles, history has left us no tale of him being Rædwald Left-Hand. Only the sword tells us that.

El Cid in All About History

21 February 2025
Edoardo
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Categories: History

The new issue of All About History is on sale, in shops and online, and I’m proud to say that I wrote the cover feature on the great Spanish hero, El Cid. My interest in Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar was sparked by watching the great Charlton Heston/Sophia Loren film, El Cid, when I was a child: the real man was, if anything, even more extraordinary than the Hollywood version. Get issue 153 of All About History and learn about the knight who never lost a battle.

The Sutton Hoo Sword

20 February 2025
Edoardo
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The original Sutton Hoo sword and a modern replica

There’s a secret hidden in plain sight on the Sutton Hoo sword. The pommel was on display at the British Museum for 70 years before Sue Brunning, the curator of European Early Medieval Collections at the museum, noticed something interesting about it.

There is a string of wound gold wire running around the pommel. Looking carefully at the wound wire, Brunning noticed that, at one end of the pommel, the wire was worn, the clear ridges of the rest of the wire smoothed down to little more than undulations.

Gold is a soft metal. A hand resting upon one side of a pommel will wear gold wound wire smooth.

Brunning realised that the pommel of the Sutton Hoo sword had the wear it displayed because the man who had worn and wielded the sword in life had habitually rested his hand upon its pommel when the sword rested in its scabbard.

It was one of those details that suddenly draws back the veil of years and brings us face to face with the real, living man who had worn the sword.

Cursed Gold

20 February 2025
Edoardo
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Categories: History
Photo by Jon Callas from San Jose, USA

An Anglo-Saxon king was caught in a cleft stick of expectation and necessity: to attract warriors to his warband, he had to distribute gold and gifts to his men. As the Staffordshire Hoard demonstrates, one of the main ways of acquiring this gold was by defeating enemies in battle.

But the constant need to acquire treasure led to further conflicts with more kings, inciting blood feuds and the sort of reckless hatred that must have fuelled the assassin King Cwichelm sent to kill Edwin: the unnamed assassin knew that, even if he succeeded, he was embarked on a suicide mission. That he was willing to die to kill Edwin suggests the assassin had reasons of personal vengeance to accept the commission of King Cwichelm.

The legends of cursed gold suggest an uneasy understanding on the part of the king’s bards and the warriors themselves of the price in hatred they paid for taking blood-wet treasure – and the likely consequence for themselves in taking it.

Very few of the kings of the sixth and seventh centuries died of natural causes. Even those who rose to the greatest power – Æthelfrith, Edwin, Oswald, Penda – were brought down by the turning of fortune or the alliance of enemies united by their hatred for the high king. In the warrior culture of the time, there was little way to disentangle gold lust and power politics, for the two were intertwined. The legends of cursed gold hint at the consequences of this fateful linkage.

Blood-red Garnets That Glitter

16 February 2025
Edoardo
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Categories: History

In firelight, garnets glitter. You need to see garnets in the shifting light of a fire to appreciate the life such light gives to garnets.

Anglo-Saxon goldsmiths mounted garnets to accentuate this facet of garnets. They mounted the garnet on a thin gold backing into which little pyramids had been pressed. The base of the garnet was filed into shape to fit the gold pyramid and then mounted on it. Light, passing through the garnet, hit the base pyramid of gold and then was reflected back out of the garnet, giving it a sort of double glow.

Looking at some of the intricate cloisonné work of Anglo-Saxon goldsmiths, such as the shoulder clasps excavated at Sutton Hoo, one can only marvel at the detail of the work that went into making them.

The Staffordshire Hoard

16 February 2025
Edoardo
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Categories: History
Photo by David Rowan, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery

The Staffordshire Hoard has transformed our understanding of the 6th and 7th centuries. Before Terry Herbert’s metal detector went beep, we had found 13 gold pommels in the British Isles of contemporary date. The hoard has 74.

While the burial at Sutton Hoo had an exceptional sword interred with the body, the norm for warrior burials across Europe was much simpler swords, with their furniture made of base metals. Working with these findings, archaeologists had assumed that swords such as the Sutton Hoo sword were truly swords fit for a king, exceptional blades fitted out exceptionally.

However, the hoard demonstrates conclusively that, at least for the period between 570 and 650, swords fitted with the richest of hilts were the weapons of the warrior aristocracy of Anglo-Saxon Britain and not just their ruling kings.

Student Power

10 February 2025
Edoardo
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Categories: History

Bologna University is the oldest university in the world, first established in 1088. But if professors struggle with bumptious students today, these first professors had an even more difficult time of it: the students ran the university, voting through their representatives on who to hire as teachers, how much to pay the professors and the content of the courses.

There was even a committee, called the ‘Denouncers of Professors’, to which students could report teachers who did not keep time or who failed to teach all their classes during a term. Students at Bologna, and indeed at all the later medieval universities, began their education by studying the seven liberal arts: grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music.

The Trials of Anne, Duchess of Brittany

10 February 2025
Edoardo
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Anne of Brittany (1477 – 1514)

While medieval royal women were accorded high status, when it came to the task of producing heirs to the throne, they were sometimes subject to the most humiliating examinations.

One example is what Anne of Brittany had to endure. Charles VIII, king of France, had besiedged her in her city of Rennes to persuade her to marry him. Anne was the Duchess of Brittany and marriage meant that Charles would bring the previously obstinately independent Bretons under his control. When Anne realised that none of her allies would break the siege, she agreed to negotiate terms.

The terms were clear. Charles wanted to marry her. But before Charles would enter into marriage with Anne – and remember she was only 14 at the time – the French required that she prove that she was able to produce children for the king. To that end, Anne had to parade naked before the king’s commissioners: Anne, Charles’s elder sister, and two male advisers.

Having inspected the naked duchess as one would inspect a brood mare, the commissioners wrote a report that noted Anne had a congenital limp but concluded that she would be capable of bearing children.

The marriage duly agreed, the ceremony was fixed for 6 December 1491. Making her views about her future husband very clear, Anne arrived for the marriage celebration with two beds.

Anne and Charles were married for seven years – until Charles, a famously short man, contrived to hit his head on a door lintel and died shortly afterwards.

Charles VIII and the End of the Middle Ages

10 February 2025
Edoardo
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Categories: History

Charles VIII, King of France, didn’t mean to end the Middle Ages. He just wanted the kingdom of Naples and to be taken seriously.

Charles was short, ugly and rumoured to be stupid. The first two were true. But when he took control of France from his regent, his elder sister, he was determined to prove his mettle.

In 1494, with his army pulling its mobile cannon, he invaded Italy, intent on getting to Naples. Everyone expected his advance to be halted by the many fortresses in the way but the French cannon smashed down the walls.

To the shock of all, Charles and his army rolled down through Italy and conquered Naples in a matter of months.

The Middle Ages were over. The modern world was born in rolling clouds of cannon smoke.

The Trial of the Pyx

3 February 2025
Edoardo
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Categories: History
Credit Richard Lea Hair

The oldest judicial procedure in England, dating to the 12th century, is the annual Trial of the Pyx. This is a formal legal procedure during which the Assay Office tests over 50,000 coins taken at random to check that their metallic content is within the boundaries set by law.

The testing begins in February each year and lasts for two or three months. When the testing has been completed, the Trial of the Pyx is held, wherein the verdict as to the content of the coins is announced before a jury including members of the Goldsmiths’ Company and the Queen’s Remembrancer (who is also the senior judge of the Royal Courts of Justice).

The Chancellor of the Exchequer attends the trial for, as chancellor and custodian of the royal exchequer, the chancellor has responsibility for the purity of the coinage of the realm. Strictly speaking, should any coins fail at assay, then the chancellor would be liable to execution but luckily for recent chancellors the coinage has proved true.