A Horse, A Horse. . .

Well, today campers, we visited the city of Leicester about an hour's train ride from here to the west and south. It is famous for several things, but most importantly for being the final resting place of wicked King Richard III, he of the hunchback and the little Princes in the Tower--yes, yes, I know, all Tudor propaganda designed to clear Henry VII of murdering the little darlings. Not buying it. Richard put the princes in the Tower, his own nephews no less, and nobody ever heard of them again. Both of them had precedence over Richard for the throne so he needed them dead. Not that Henry would have balked at a little murder if he'd found them still alive in the Tower when he got to London, and from the same motive as Richard, but that is stretching it methinks.

Anyway, just a month ago, a team from the university was excavating three trenches in the area around the cathedral where the Greyfriars Abbey used to stand and made a stunning discovery, a skeleton of an adult male with spinal curvature, evidence of a very nasty knock on the head, and an arrowhead in his back. Richard is known to have been buried in the Greyfriars Abbey after he was killed at the battle of Bosworth in August 1485, losing to Henry Tudor who then became Henry VII and was the father of Henry VIII, he of the six wives and the Henrician Reformation fame. This is a pic of the trench--in a parking lot no less--one of three dug by the team, with a couple of actors being filmed in it last month.

Now it looks like this again!

Anyway, exciting work being done on the remains including DNA analysis. Time will tell. The trench is literally just across the street from St. Mark's church, the core of which dates from the Conquest, and which was elevated to cathedral status in 1926 when Leicester was made a diocese--gotta have some place for "The Bish" to hang his mitre--but it is one of the smallest in England.

Walked to the cathedral gate that said "Entrance," went through and tried to open the door only to crash a ceremony underway in the nave elevating some new members of the clergy. So, thought I'd take in the Guildhall next door which dates from the early 15th century only to crash a wedding there, well not quite. The hall was closed but I only had to wait about ten minutes before the wedding was over and the place was open to visitors again. The first pic is of the outside of the building and the second is of the hall inside.

 

 

Not as grand as Commencement (where your blogster was wed), but not a bad setting for nuptials.

The highlight of the day, however, came at the Jewry Wall Museum a few hundred yards away. If you guessed that this may have had something to do with the town's Jewish population prior to the expulsion of all Jews from the kingdom by Edward I, Hammer of the Scots (and the Welsh), in 1290, you would be WRONG. Has no connection to anything Jewish apparently. Instead it is the site of the Roman bathes in the city which were dedicated to Juno (or Janus) and the Jewry spelling only dates from Victorian era. The "cester" in Leicester marks it as a Roman town (see earlier posts), but even before the Romans, there was a Celtic town there, as well as an Anglo-Saxon settlement later, and it became one of the five "county" capitals of the Danelaw in the 10th century. The baths were unearthed in the 19th century as were a number of villas with elaborate mosaic tile floors and fresco walls. Couldn't take any pics of the villa interiors in the museum (an excellent one by the way), but you can see the layout of the baths in this picture with the entrance in the back, preparatory rooms in the middle, and three "hot" baths in the foreground where the father and his daughter are reading one of the plaques.

After all this, a well deserved pint and sandwich and then back to Harlaxton for a relaxing evening.