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Very interesting also that Edward owed his victory over de Montfort partly to spies, one of whom is described by a chronicler as a woman ‘cross-dressing’ as a man and using the name Margoth. Something very Shakespearean about this.

Absolutely hilarious (for me but surely not for any of those involved) that whenever the king or his forces defeated an enemy and cut off his head, rumours about said enemy’s grave granting miracles started literally the next day. In this case Simon de Montfort’s, defeated and humiliated by the future Edward I.

Fun facts! Fun for me, that is:
a) Henry III and Richard II were similar: both were crowned as children, both had powerful rivals within their families & both became obsessed with Edward the Confessor as a metaphor for the divinity of kingship
b) Henry III was the originator^ and brought the name Edward back into fashion
c) medieval Europeans were very credulous, buying all sorts of fake ‘holy relics’

I was thinking how quiet it was now that all the worlds in my head had come to a stop. And how flat real life was, devoid of those extra dimensions of the imagination, how narrow (…). I felt stifled too by the straitjacket of a single personality. When one has been many people for a long time (…), the torture of re-inhabiting one’s own personality at a fixed point in time resembles being shut up in a small box.

“When you’re a writer at work, there is no time, only eternity, because writing’s for ever. Even if you tear up everything you ever do, every word you’ve ever written will still go towards making you a better writer and the better you become the more powerful the magic at your disposal, the magic which can triumph over time.”

Absolutely obsessed with the footnote 146 on page 325, according to which astrology girlie Richard went to a soothsayer to get a prediction about the outcome of the duel between his cousin Henry and Mowbray. He was apparently told Mowbray was going to win.

As we know he ended up stopping the duel before the opponents could even touch each other. Makes you wonder if he did to try and preserve Henry’s life.