an example of the royal (taxing) authority they rejected, seized him, and forced a red-hot iron crown onto his head.


Anonymous priest, in southern France, c. 1384

Pintoin isn’t done describing the atrocities committed by the Tuchins, and he’s also not done explaining why diplomatic immunity is a very good invention:

On another day, they stopped a priest on his way to the papal curia in Rome, and out of hatred and distrust for his ecclesiastical dignity, they cut off the ends of his fingers, peeled the skin from his body with shears, and then burnt him alive.

Dancers at the Bal des Ardents, 1393

A proper medieval feast had more to do with the pageant than the food, and the wedding reception the Queen of France threw for one of her ladies-in-waitingScotland's Independence Referendum Obsession

What started as a once-in-a-generation event has quickly turned into a cliche

November 5, 2015

November 5th is Guy Fawkes Night in the United Kingdom. It's marked by bonfires up and down the expanse of the Commonwealth, commemorating the occasion in 1605 when Guy Fawkes, a disgruntled Roman Catholic chafing under Protestant rule, tried to blow up the House of Lords with 36 barrels of gunpowder. He failed, caught before he could light the fuse.

We'll never know what would have happened if he had set the barrels aflame, and in this way the legacy of the Gunpowder Plot is one of ambivalence. Sometimes a challenge to a nation's coherence is serious. Sometimes it isn't. And often there's a fine line between the two.

Take the vote for Scottish