Oakleigh’s Reviews > Foundation: The History of England from Its Earliest Beginnings to the Tudors > Status Update

"[Edward IV] indulged in the theatrical and spectacular aspect of kingship. In the first year of his reign the keeper of the great wardrobe spent a little over £4,784 on clothes and furs for the king's person, an extraordinary sum when the average annual wage of a labourer was approximately £6."

// Something something, rich man, camel, eye of a needle? It's so immoral and indecent you kind of have to laugh...

"The first to die was a London chaplain, William Sawtre, who had declared that the bread of the Mass remained merely bread. On 26 February 1401, he was stuffed inside a wooden barrel at Smithfield and placed upon the flames."

// I thought Game of Thrones was gratuitously violent but it turns out to have been neither violent, cruel, nor absurd enough... I am grateful for modernity.

At the time of the Roman occupation the weather was warmer than at any period in subsequent history, but this was succeeded by colder and wetter conditions by the end of the fourth century. For ten years, beginning in AD 536, there was a very low level of sunlight; this would have been a time of dearth and famine, hitherto unrecorded. // I sometimes feel I'm living in a remarkable time - but all time is remarkable.