For more than 900 years, the Tower of London has occupied its place at the heart of English life. At various times a royal citadel, palace, menagerie, observatory, public records office, mint, arsenal and, even to this day, the home of the crown jewels of England, since 1100 it has famously served as a prison for notorious traitors, heretics, and even royalty. Out of the more than 8,000 unfortunate souls, many who were imprisoned in the Tower never left. Those who did, often did so without their head. For a small number, however, the supposedly impenetrable walls proved merely a minor nuisance. Author and historian Matt Lewis visits the Tower of London to tell the story of those fortunate few who succeeded in escaping one of history's most famous prisons.
Michael Hicks, former Professor of Medieval History at the University of Winchester, answers key questions about Richard III. From Richard's noble beginnings to his demise on the battlefield at Bosworth Michael sorts the fact from the fiction about the last Plantagenet king.
A story of bloodshed, tribal rivalries and a warrior class obsessed with and defined by the battlefield has emerged from the discovery of a burial site at Bamburgh Castle. What can the latest archaeological work tell us about the history of Bamburgh, of the people who lived and fought at the cast...
Professor Chris Given Wilson provides a fascinating lecture about the Mortimer Family in the late 14th and early 15th centuries, a time when the Mortimers suffered a succession of early deaths and had to rely on others to maintain the validity of their claim to the English Throne. Recorded at the...
