The History Blog

The Domesday Book, the great property survey of England done at behest of William the Conqueror in 1086, records that 166 homes, over 10% of the existing town, were destroyed in the construction of Lincoln Castle. Until now, however, no material remains of the mini-ethnic cleansing have been found.

Archaeologists excavating on the castle grounds in preparation for the construction of a new Heritage Skills Center have uncovered the first remains of Saxon homes, including a fireplace, pottery and the marks of now-decayed structural timbers.

Cecily Spall, from Field Archaeology Specialists (FAS), said the discoveries, made in the north lawn area, give a glimpse of a revolution in the country.

“The Saxons would not have been able to do anything about this. The Norman Conquest remodelled Anglo Saxon England.

“New landlords were appointed and they laid waste to houses and they reassigned the ownership of property and land rights.”

Lincoln was a walled town with 1164 homes surrounding an old Roman fortress. In the volatile period after William’s victory at the Battle of Hastings in 1066, he built several castles at strategic points in the country to consolidate his control. Lincoln was one of his first. It was at the crossroads of major traveling routes so in 1068 William knocked down the Roman keep, destroyed 166 homes in the southwest corner of the upper town, within the fortification walls, and built him a castle.

I’m not sure how they know the inhabitants were Saxon, though. Lincoln had a large Viking population, so when they say Saxon, I’m wondering if that’s just a convention (Normans v. Saxons forever) or if there’s something specific in the remains that indicate Saxon ethnicity.

A group of 40 people, paid workers and volunteers, is building a 13th century-style fortress in northwest Arkansas using only medieval tools, technology and resources.

For the next 2 decades, workers in medieval peasant clothes (excepting only the OSHA-required steel-toed boots) using the traditional 13th century tools of the stonemason’s trade will build a fortress with 7 towers, 1 of which will be 70 feet tall, and 6-foot-wide, 25-foot-tall walls made of stone taken from a nearby quarry and transported to the construction site by Belgian draft horses.

The fortress is both a serious historical reenactment and an offbeat tourist attraction, allowing the public to watch and chat with workers as they chisel stone, lift blocks with a human-powered hamster-wheel crane, forge tools and chains, and make rope or tiles. Following construction plans drafted by a French architectural historian, it will take the crew 20 years to erect a fortress with five-foot-thick walls and seven towers, including one more than 70 feet high. The walls, begun before the public opening and currently standing around six feet high, will eventually reach 25 feet.

Tool-building is not the only draw. As visitors occasionally step aside for a passing donkey or for Honey, the castle’s Belgian draft horse, they follow a self-guided route past a pen of bleating sheep, a rustic textile workshop and the quarry before reaching the construction site and stations devoted to stone facing, carpentry, pottery and blacksmithing. All of the attractions (aside from the sheep) are vital to the creation of the castle. Docent-led tours ($1) offer a more in-depth look at the history of castles and life in the Middle Ages, and a stone-cutting lesson ($5) allows visitors to create their own take-home souvenir.

The Ozark Medieval Fortress project was inspired by a similar project in Burgundy, France. In 2008, Solange and Jean-Marc Mirat, a French couple living in Lead Hill, Arkansas, visited Guédelon, a medieval fortress being built in Burgundy, France, using only period materials and technology.

They decided Lead Hill would be a great place to do the same thing, so they contacted the founder of the Guédelon project, French artist and horseman Michel Guyot, and offered him part of their land in Lead Hill to build a medieval fortress there. Since the forested land was fortuitously situated near all the necessary prime building materials — water, stone, earth, sand and wood — Guyot went for it. They broke ground in June of last year, and opened the construction site to the public in May of this year.

The Ozark fortress is modeled after the castle near Paris where King Louis IX successfully held out against a siege in 1228. American and French architectural historians are on staff to ensure the castle is built to the highest possible standard of authenticity and structural strength.

A broadsword made to commemorate the incredible journey of Robert the Bruce’s embalmed heart, carried by famed knight and loyal Bruce supporter Sir James Douglas on a crusade to the Holy Land which stopped fatally short in Moorish Spain, sold at auction Wednesday for £10,800 (ca $17,000).

Sir James Douglas, known by the English as Black Douglas and used in songs to scare children, was with Robert the Bruce when he died in 1329. According to 14th century Scottish poet and chronicler John Barbour, Bruce asked Sir James to take his heart with him on a crusade against “Christ’s enemies” because Robert had always wanted to go on a crusade but was never able to. After Bruce died, his heart was cut out and put in a silver enameled casket which Douglas carried on a chain around his neck.

Heart safely contained close to his own, Douglas headed out to war, eventually joining Alfonso XI of Castile in Grenada where he was besieging the Moorish castle of Teba. Barbour says Douglas acquitted himself with great courage in the battle, but he fell nonetheless. The battle was eventually won by the Castilian-Scottish forces, so Sir James’ body and the heart casket were retrieved by Sir William Keith and sent back to Scotland.

The heart was buried in Melrose Abbey, as Robert the Bruce had requested in his will. Sir James Douglas’ remains were buried in St Bride’s chapel. From then on, the Douglas family coat of arms would bear a crowned heart in homage.

The 14th century blade is thought to have been made shortly after Sir James ill-fated trip and is engraved with Douglas family heraldry, inscriptions referring to the heart and a commemorative date of 1331. The sterling silver hilt was made in 1705 by London swordmaker Thomas Vicaridge and attached to the blade which had been in the Douglas family for 400 years by then.

It carries an Imperial crown and a crowned lion rampant between the inscription ‘Pro Rege Et Regno Anno 1331′, and on the other with a similar panel enclosing one of the devices of the Douglas family, a wild man (wodewose) with a heart on his left breast between the inscription ‘For Strength In Stier This [the heart] I Bier’ (for strength in battle this heart I bear).

The seller chose to remain anonymous, but members of the Douglas-Home family say it was sold by a relative. The buyer also chose to remain anonymous saying for the record only “It has gone to a Douglas.” Small consolation for Scots nationalists who have to accept that such a piece so interwoven with the dawn of independent Scotland and the death of its hero king will now disappear into an anonymous collection somewhere in England.

“Mummies of the World,” the largest exhibit of mummies ever assembled, premieres today at the California Science Center in Los Angeles. A hundred and fifty rarely-seen human and animal mummies and associated artifacts from Peru, Chile, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Netherlands, Switzerland and Egypt, and ranging in date from 6,000 B.C. to the 18th century, will tour the United States for the next 3 years. It’s not just an extraordinarily large and eclectic collection of mummies, but a hands-on, interactive display of the scientific tools used to study mummies today in a non-invasive, respectful manner.

“It’s a matter of understanding the big wide world of mummification and how it works,” said Heather Gill-Frerking, director of science and education for the exhibition. “People will see things that they’ve never encountered before.” [...]

Each mummy, the scientists say, has a story. And with the advent of new technology, such as CT scans and DNA analysis, these histories can be revealed without harm. CT scans in particular are considered the gold standard in mummy research, providing remarkable three-dimensional records that allow researchers to see details such as heart defects, tumors and evidence of respiratory infections like tuberculosis.

“We can essentially do a virtual unwrapping of the mummy,” said Gill-Frerking, also scientific research curator of the German Mummy Project. Unlike Victorian “unwrapping parties,” this procedure provides valuable information about the mummies’ insides without damaging them.

Other scientific tools covered are DNA analysis, X-Rays and radiocarbon dating. There are touch screen kiosks explaining all these methods of studying mummies, a high-powered microscope you can look through to examine a mummy’s tooth, and samples of what mummies feel like. They don’t use actual mummy skin, though; it’s a reproduction. Their very careful to ensure the mummies are treated with consideration and respect. In fact, the descendants of one of the mummies (Baron von Holz, an 17th century nobleman found in the castle crypt who is thought to have died in the Thirty’s Year War) were actively involved in the study and display of their ancestor.

The exhibit also explores the different ways corpses become mummified. The classic movie-style Egyptian wrapped mummy is represented, of course, but so are natural mummies created in well-ventilated, dry environments or in counter-intuitively mushy ones like peat bogs.

Mummies of the World will be at the California Science Center from today through November 28th. After that, it tours for 3 more years, but I can’t find a schedule. I’ll keep looking.

After centuries of speculation, Danish archaeologists think they have found the royal palace of 10th century king Harald Bluetooth, famed king, conqueror and Christianizer of Denmark and Norway. (Yes, the wireless technology invented by Swedish company Ericsson is named and logoed after him.)

Excavations in the Jelling complex in southern Jutland have uncovered the remains of 10th century wooden structures. Jelling is the site of several royal burial mounds and of rune-engraved monoliths, one of which is marked with an inscription from Harald dedicating it to Gormr, his father, and Thyrvé, mother. Gormr is considered the first king of Denmark.

Mads Dengsø Jessen, the archaeologist from Århus University who led the dig said four buildings from Harald’s time had been discovered at the site. The buildings are characteristic of those built at round fortresses known as Trelleborg.

‘This tells us that we have uncovered a large complex, and the strict geometrical construction is a typical example of Harald’s work,’ Jessen said.

Archaeologists have yet to identify the remains of Harald’s royal hall, but Jessen believes they can be found under the existing Jelling Church, where the remains of a large wooden building were discovered on a previous dig.

Archaeologists had speculated that the wooden building was a church but because of its location in relation to the newly uncovered longhouses, Dengsø Jessen thinks that it is almost certainly Harald Bluetooth’s royal hall.

The palisaded enclosure around these four buildings is huge. Archaeologists say that it’s six times the size of Amalienborg Palace, the 18th century royal palace complex in Copenhagen.

One of my favorite tales about the medieval Church tells of a woman who disguised herself as a man and rose through the ecclesiastical ranks to become Pope, only to be exposed when she gave birth in the middle of a public procession on the Via Sacra in Rome. How’s that for drama? In yo face, Yentl!1

The Church of course denies this ever happened and consider it Protestant Reformation slander. Although the Protestants certainly jumped all over the story with enormous gusto, the earliest source long predates them. Dominican friar Jean de Mailly first mentioned a female Pope in his 1254 Chronica Universalis Mettensis. Set in 1099, this ladyPope story didn’t have the high drama of the Via Sacra birth, just that she dropped a baby while mounting a horse and was promptly tied to said horse and dragged to her death.

It wasn’t until Martin of Opava picked up the tale and ran with it in the third iteration of his 1278 Chronicon Pontificum et Imperatorum that we get the fully flushed public labor element and the name: Pope John, known as Joan once all is revealed. He also places the story earlier in the 9th century.

John Anglicus, born at Mainz, was Pope for two years, seven months and four days, and died in Rome, after which there was a vacancy in the Papacy of one month. It is claimed that this John was a woman, who as a girl had been led to Athens dressed in the clothes of a man by a certain lover of hers . There she became proficient in a diversity of branches of knowledge, until she had no equal, and afterwards in Rome, she taught the liberal arts and had great masters among her students and audience. A high opinion of her life and learning arose in the city, and she was chosen for Pope. While Pope, however, she became pregnant by her companion. Through ignorance of the exact time when the birth was expected, she was delivered of a child while in procession from St Peter’s to the Lateran, in a lane once named Via Sacra (the sacred way) but now known as the “shunned street” between the Colisseum and St Clement’s church. After her death, it is said she was buried in that same place. The Lord Pope always turns aside from the street and it is believed by many that this is done because of abhorrence of the event. Nor is she placed on the list of the Holy Pontiffs, both because of her female sex and on account of the foulness of the matter. (Martin of Opava, Chronicon Pontificum et Imperatorum)

Such juiciness would not be denied and authors from Vatican librarians to Giovanni Boccaccio wrote about her. Once the Reformation kicked in, the story was used as a convenient symbol of Church corruption and as evidence that the papacy wasn’t really necessary at all since Christendom survived the foulness of her lady parts smeared all over the throne of Peter.

The best title in this anti-Catholic vein was from a book published in England in 1675 by an anonymous author who the preface assures us was a most impeccable insider Vatican source. It’s called A Present for a Papist: Or the Life and Death of Pope Joan, Plainly Proving Out of the Printed Copies, and Manscriptes of Popish Writers and Others, That a Woman called JOAN, Was Really POPE of ROME, and Was There Deliver’d of a Bastard Son in the Open Street as She Went in Solemn Procession.

And now, there’s a movie about her based on the biographical novel by Donna Woolfolk Cross. The Church is less than enthused about it, surprise, surprise, but it’s in the top 10 box office hits in Italy. (Italians love them a good historical Church scandal.) Pope Joan is played by Johanna Wokalek, a German actress I’m not familiar with, but John Goodman plays Pope Sergius and that just rules. Also, the cute guy who was Faramir in Lord of the Rings plays her boyfriend.

IMDB tells me it was released in October 2009, but this is the first I’ve heard of it. I swear I will hunt down the sole dingy art movie house it’s playing in, so help me Joan.

The bones found in Magdeburg Cathedral in a coffin marked with the name of Queen Eadgyth, granddaughter of Alfred the Great and wife of Holy Roman Emperor Otto I, have been confirmed as those of Queen Eadgyth herself. The bones had been moved several times over the centuries since her death in 946, so archaeologists couldn’t take the label on the 1510 coffin at face value.

Anthropological analysis of the bones confirmed that they belonged to a woman between 30 and 40 years old (Eadgyth died at 36) who was a frequent horse rider. Isotope analysis indicated a diet high in protein, including lots of fish, so clearly the lifestyle markers all pointed to a person of high status.

DNA testing wasn’t possible because the bones weren’t well-enough preserved, so the next step was to analyze the strontium and oxygen isotopes in the teeth to try to narrow down where she lived as a child.

It was possible to ‘triangulate’ the location of the first 14 years of Eadgyth’s life, which pin point the chalk regions of southern Britain.

Mark Horton, Professor in Archaeology at the University of Bristol, said: ”Eadgyth seems to have spent the first eight years of her life in southern England, but changed her domicile frequently, matching quite variable strontium ratios in her teeth.

”Only from the age of nine, the isotope values remain constant.

”Eadgyth must have moved around the kingdom following her father, king Edward the Elder during his reign.

”When her mother was divorced in 919 – Eadgyth was between nine and ten at that point – both were banished to a monastery, maybe Winchester or Wilton in Salisbury.”

The confirmation of Eadgyth’s identity is exciting not only because the latest and greatest science was able to answer questions that would have been unanswerable just a few years ago, but also because these are the oldest remains of a British royal ever found. Her brother Athelstan has a tomb in Malmesbury Abbey, Wiltshire, but the remains were lost during the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII.

The Western Prelacy of the Armenian Apostolic Church of America has filed a $105 million lawsuit against the J. Paul Getty Museum for the return of seven pages ripped out of a 13th century Bible. The church claims the pages were torn from the Armenian Orthodox Church’s Zeyt’un Gospels during the 1915 Armenian genocide and were illegally sold thereafter.

The Bible is was illustrated by T’oros Roslin, the premier Armenian manuscript illuminator of the Middle Ages, in 1256 and was considered not just sacred but magical. It was venerated by Armenian Orthodox for its powers of protection. In fact, when the dark days of the genocide dawned in 1915, the entire hierarchy of the Armenian church carried the Bible in a procession through every street of Zeyt’un to create a divine firewall of protection around the city. (It didn’t work.)

Some time after that, the Bible was given to descendants of the Armenian royal family because they had connections with the ruling Ottoman Turks that might keep them safe from deportation, or at least, you know, alive. They loaned it to a family friend but were suddenly deported, and thereafter the Bible moved around for the rest of World War I and in the immediate post-war period. Finally it surfaced again in 1928 and was returned to the Patriarchate of the Armenian Church. They asked the family friend who had held it for years to authenticate it in 1948, and upon its return the missing 7 pages were discovered.

To this day nobody knows who stole the pages. All we know is they turned up on display at the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York City in a 1994 exhibit called “Treasures in Heaven: Armenian Illuminated Manuscripts”, on loan from an anonymous private collector. That’s when they came to the Getty’s attention. The Getty bought the pages from the still-anonymous collector and have had the pages ever since. I like how vague they are about the pages’ bloody history on their website: “These canon tables were separated from the manuscript at some point in the past and eventually acquired by the Getty Museum….”

Separated from the manuscript. Like they got a divorce or lost at the mall or something. Getty representatives don’t mince quite so many words in their response to the suit, though.

“The Getty is confident that it has legal ownership of these pages, known as Canon Tables, which have been widely published, studied and exhibited,” the museum’s spokeswoman, Julie Jaskol, said in a statement. [...]

“At no time in the 90 or so years that the Canon Tables have been in the United States has anyone questioned their ownership,” Jaskol said in the statement. “The Getty believes the lawsuit is groundless and should be dismissed.”

The plaintiff’s lead attorney, Vartkes Yeghiayan — who often represents victims of the Armenian Genocide — was researching the atrocity when in 2007 he discovered the Getty Museum was housing the pages, said Michael Bazyler, a Chapman University law professor speaking on behalf of the attorney.

“We have asked the Getty to give it back to the church, but they declined to do so,” he said.

The rest of the Bible is in the Mesrop Mashtots Institute of Ancient Manuscripts in Yerevan, Armenia, where it has been kept since 1948. The plaintiffs want the 7 stolen pages returned to Armenia so they can be restored, or at least kept together with the Bible itself.

The Getty’s rationale — that the pages were published extensively from 1994 on and nobody questioned the legal title so therefore their sale was legal — is something you see a lot when museums justify shady acquisitions. Something hides in a private collection for a few years/decades, then is loaned to a famous institution where it gets published thereby establishing provenance. It’s a looted antiquities laundering system, basically.

The shadiness is old enough, however, that it most likely falls before the 1970 cut-off of the UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Cultural Property. We’ll see what the courts say.

TMZ, oddly enough, has a pdf of the entire complaint. It’s an interesting read, with lots of details about the history of the Bible during the genocide.

A team of forensic anthropologists have reconstructed the battle-scarred face of a 14th century knight unearthed at Stirling Castle in Scotland. You can clearly see the dent in his head from that axe wound to the skull he survived, and his not-so-great teeth.

The knight was found in 1997 along with other skeletons buried under the floor of the lost chapel of James IV, the oldest known building in the castle dating back to the early 1100s. It’s only recently that technology has been able to provide us with the goods on him.

Forensic analysis of his bones indicates he was raised in southern England and was in his mid-20s when he died. The team also found out that the sword blow that sliced through his nose and jaw wasn’t the most likely cause of death. Instead it was probably a Scottish arrow shot during an attack on the castle that killed him.

The most surprising find, however, is documentation that strongly points to his actual identity. Earlier speculation was that he might have been Robert Morley, killed in tournament at Stirling Castle in 1388. The fatal arrow wound doesn’t really fit the tournament death scenario, though, and the skeleton of a woman found next to him with her skull smashed in by a mace also suggests full-on ruthless assault rather than war games.

Documents uncovered by the team showed that Sir John, a Buckinghamshire lord, was a senior member of the garrison. He died on 10 October 1341 and his family line has since died out.

Prof Black said piecing together the potential identity of the knight was “absolutely unexpected”.

“When you start with something that was less than optimal, the chances of getting it back to even a possible name is much better that we could even have expected.”

However the identity of the woman buried next to him will probably never be known as women were not deemed important enough for their deaths to be recorded.

The research will go on permanent display at Stirling Castle next year. Historic Scotland, the organization that curates the castle, is also commissioning further study on the 10 skeletons found along with Sir John.

I know what you’re thinking: when is finding gold and silver jewelry not lucky? Hear me out.

Construction workers leveling a site for a volleyball court at Anurag Engineering College outside of Hyderabad uncovered a pot filled with gold and silver jewelry from the Kakatiya dynasty, between 1083 and 1323 A.D.

It contained 75 gold ornaments including ear tops, mangalsutrams, beads and armlets weighing 189 grams and silver ornaments consisting of 18 anklets weighing 550 grams.

“It is a rare occurrence to discover gold and silver caches on the eve of Akshaya Tritiya,” said Prof. P. Chenna Reddy.

“These rare jewellery [sic] including beads made of semi-precious stones will be kept on display at the Dr Y.S. Rajasekhar Reddy AP State Museum on Monday to coincide with the International Museums Day celebrations,” he said.

Ashaya Tritiya is a Hindu and Jain holy day considered to bring good luck and prosperity. It’s an auspicious day to begin any business venture and any gifts you give on Ashaya Tritiya will bring many happy returns to giver and receiver, so it has become customary recently for people to give gifts of gold jewelry and gold coins in particular. This find, therefore, is crazy great luck for the college and the Department of Archaeology and Museums.

Also, the jewelry is really beautiful, lots of intricate gold work. You check out the shiny on this slideshow. Some of it looks really heavy. I’m not sure I’d wear these in my ears, for instance: