iWorth's Blog:

This is a great book to know Derby local history, by Joan D'Arcy. Little Chester is now a part of the City of Derby by the River Derwent. It is a Conservation Area and a buffer zone of the Derwent Valley Mills World Heritage Site. It has Roman beginnings, a Saxon cemetery, a Domesday entry, a manor and prebendal estate. It grew, through railway and other industrial development, into a Victorian community with church, chapel, school and rows of terraced houses set around a Green or Recreation Ground. About Roman Beginnings: It was in the year AD 43 that Roman Emperor Claudius launched the invasion of the British Isles. Three legions crossed the Channel and landed on the south coast. They were soon advancing north in a march of conquest and occupation. As they advanced, they fortified strategic and defensive sites. The Ninth Legion (Hispana) was given the task of subduing the Midlands and its people, a tribal group called Corieltauvi (otherwise C oritani ) . About AD 50 ...

King Henry VIII hate greens, seemed never to eat vegetables and fruits. He was tall and  handsomen with a bright red-gold cap of hair and beard in his youth,  and he was very athletic, he loved hunting and party.  But he became grossly overweight and ill in his later years,  The fat, balding and unhealthy man has been often remembered. William the Bastard, the Duke of Normandy, known as William the Conqueror was crowned on Christmas Day 1066 as the King of England.  He had become very overweight in his later life and when they tried to get his body into  his stone tomb at Caen, it burst. A foul stench leaked out into the church and into the nostrils of those who had come to pay their respects. George the Fourth  was infamous for being overweight, overdressed, and oversexed and one of the most controversial an outrageous monarchs in British.  He wore horrible greasy make-up on his face and was so fat it w...

When I read Derbyshire Villages , I noticed that in many chapters the author mentioned a book Domesday Book , sounds like "doomsday book". I just wondered what the book looks like, was that a book which recorded church building (domes of churches) by Christian monks? Of course not, the Domesday Book is a great land survey from 1086, commissioned by William the Conqueror to assess the extent of the land and resources being owned in England at the time. Well, I was not totally wrong about the book name. An observer of the survey wrote,  "there was no single hide nor a yard of land, nor indeed one ox nor one cow nor one pig which was left out", the grand and comprehensive scale of the survey and the irriversible nature of the information collected led people to compare it to the Last Judgement, or 'Doomsday', described in the Bible. This book also showed the dvastation caused by the war led by William the Conqueror as village after village appears with t...

After the English King Edward the confessor died, Harold was crowned king. No sooner did Harold fought Harald Hardrada in Stamford Bridge and killed the Viking leader, he rushed to the south to the battle in Hastings with William the Duke of Normandy. There were three bad omens for these three great warriors. Their attitude toward the bad omen is quite interesting, we can see how a man can change a disadvantage to advantage, and nuisance to encouragement. At the end of April, a couple of nights after Easter, there was a terrifying sign that disaster might be about to strike die English. A weird "long-haired star" appeared in the night sky; a star that seemed to have a tail of glowing white fire. We know it now as Halley's Cormet and it was making its usual 76-year appearance, but to the superstitious people of 1066 it was a supernatural omen; its fiery "tail was a warning of the actual fires that would follow below it, in its wake. Harold stood with members of the wi...

The fyrd had begun under Alfred the Great as a way of trying to deal with the invading Danish army. It was a kind of millitia requiring landowners to provide armed men for military service in defence of the realm; a kind of conscription of all able-bodied men between the age of 15 and 54. This was a sophisticated call-up system for the army, where the raising of men was based on how much land was held and worked because of the rule of loyalty and duty, which ran all the way from the lowest peasant to the king - and back again. Ceorls (churls) were free peasants who worked the land. A ceorl did not own much land, and the land he held, he had been granted by a thegn (thane). A thegn would hold much more land than a ceorl and with this extra wealth came extra responsibility. It was a minimum requirement of a thegn that he provide one armed man and the money to keep him for two months. The more land he owned, the more men he would have to supply, and the men of the wealthy thegn would ...

Easter was one of the biggest feast days of the year, coming after the fast of Lent. Meat would have been roasting on spits over glowing fires. There would have been no roast popatoes with all this meat, though; they would not be brought back to England for hundreds of years. The same goes for tomatoes, chocolate, tea, coffee and sugar. Honey was the only sweetener in 1066. There would have been bread - but unleavened; more like Indian nan bread or Greek pitta. This is quite interesting, just think about it, how could they live without potatoes, tomatoes, chocolate, tea, and coffee and sugar?

Normandy had been created in 911 when French King - Charlse the Simple - had given lands to a Viking called Rollo, or rolf, in the hope that he would act as a guard dog against other Viking raiders. In 1027 or 1028, William was born, the illegitimate son of the ill-tempered Robert I, Duke of Normandy who was called the Robert the Devil, and Herleve, the daughter of a tanner, so this William was called William the Bastard. There is a very famous English surname Bastard, that was exactly originated from this 11th century Viking-French descendant, William the Conqueror, the former Duke of Normandy.  William was very brave and also very cruel. During a siege of the town of Alencon, the inhabitants made the mistake of banging on sheets of leather and shouting, "Hides! Hides for the tanner!" in a goading reference to William's mother who was a tanner's daughter. Whether William was sensitive about his illegitimacy or his mother's low birth, the Alencons certainly lived ...