Endnotes

1.     The White Hart remains the most popular today, being the symbol of Richard II, who passed the law forcing pubs to adopt names.

2.     Another Scotsman, the philosopher David Hume, used the term ‘The War Between the Two Roses’ in his 1762 History of England. Nineteenth century writer Lady Maria Callcott is also attributed with the phrase the War of the Roses.

3.     Dan Jones, The Hollow Crown.

4.     If you ever visit England, you’ll probably see this Tudor Rose at some point, it being the symbol of the English tourism board.

5.     John Gillingham, The War of the Roses.

6.     Desmond Seward, A Brief History of the War of the Roses.

7.     Gillingham, War.

8.     Richard II, Act II, Scene I.

9.     The fact that the club, until 2017, played at White Hart Lane is just coincidence.

10.   Strictly speaking, these were just wartime ordinances rather than actual Parliamentary laws. However, just to be sure, in 2012, Mr. Henry Shrimp wrote to York council asking whether it was still okay to kill Scotsmen after dark. They replied: ‘After an extensive search of our records I can confirm that there are no records of any Scotsmen being legally shot with a bow and arrow in the last ten years. There is however a vague recollection of an alleged occurrence several centuries ago which involved a group of men from the Nottingham area, dressed in green, who were enjoying a stag night in York.’ http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-35376020.

11.   In medieval England, all cities had curfews, being absurdly dangerous, the bell of St. Mary-le-bow in Cheapside signaling London’s; therefore, anyone who was born within earshot was said to be a true ‘Cockney,’ a word that derived in the medieval period for Londoners. Highgate is rather outside earshot, although pantos don’t tend to be strictly accurate.

12.   Martyn Whittock, A Brief History of the Life in the Middle Ages.

13.   Terry Jones, Medieval Lives.

14.   http://www.historyextra.com/article/military-history/10-facts-henry-v-and-battle-agincourt.

15.   http://www.historyextra.com/feature/henry-v-cruel-king.

16.   Seward, War of the Roses.

17.   Robert Tombs, The English and Their History.

18.   Any such reports involving high-powered women must be taken with a bit of salt, but the accounts of the Queen’s debauchery are quite common.

19.   Barbara Tuchman, A Distant Mirror.

20.   Edouard Perroy, the twentieth-century French historian.

21.   http://www.historyextra.com/feature/henry-v-cruel-king.

22.   Tombs, English.

23.   Desmond Seward, A Brief History of the Hundred Years War.

24.   Gillingham, War.

25.   Seward, Hundred Years War.

26.   Tuchman, A Distant Mirror. This, however, is disputed; she certainly disinherited him, although whether that is the same thing is another question.

27.   Helen Castor, Joan of Arc.

28.   It became known as the French disease in Italy and Germany, although the French called it the Italian disease, the Dutch called it the Spanish disease, the Russians the Polish disease, and the Turks the Christian disease.

29.   Castor, Arc.

30.   The Earl of Salisbury, before half his head was blown off.

31.   Castor, Arc.

32.   Stephen Clarke, 1000 Years of Annoying the French.

33.   Edouard Perroy, the famous French medieval historian.

34.   Castor, Arc.

35.   Tombs, English.

36.   Christopher Hibbert, The English: A Social History.

37.   Hibbert, The English.

38.   Paul Murray Kendall. ‘And in the growing desire for privacy which the lords and his family found in privy chambers and solars, retreating from the hurly burly of communal life in the great hall.’

39.   Robin Neillands, The Hundred Years War.

40.   John Blacman wrote of him that ‘he also customarily wore a long gown with a rolled hood like a townsman, and a full coat reaching below his knees, with shoes, boots and foot-gear wholly black, rejecting expressly all curious fashion of clothing.’

41.   Gillingham, War.

42.   Seward, War of the Roses.

43.   Paul Murray Kendall, Richard the Third.

44.   Seward, Hundred Years War.

45.   https://nevillfeast.wordpress.com/2010/05/19/.

46.   Lady Day was the origin of Mothering Sunday, or as it’s called in the United States, Mother’s Day, although Americans celebrate it in May. The English version falls nine months before Christmas Day.

47.   In the 1990s, Julie Kirkbride, herself an MP, was married to Andrew Mackay MP, having been previously engaged to another Conservative MP, Stephen Milligan, who died in 1994 from autoerotic asphyxiation. Google it, I’d rather not explain.

48.   This account was recorded in Robert O’Flanagan’s 1870 biography of Edmund, and may be suspect. Numerous accounts in history, including Shakespeare’s Henry VI and Our Island Story, portray Rutland as a mere boy, but at seventeen he would have already been a soldier and legitimate target in war.

49.   Some historians suggest that there weren’t actually any Scottish soldiers and this was all propaganda.

50.   Seward, Hundred Years War.

51.   He was the ancestor of the British Liberal party leader Jeremy Thorpe, who resigned in the 1970s following a typically British scandal that involved repressed homosexual love and dogs.

52.   ‘One battle took place in the snow; one in a thick early morning mist; another in a rain-storm.’ Gillingham, The War of the Roses.

53.   An English blizzard, that is, which by the standards of North Dakota would barely register.

54.   George Goodwin, Fatal Colours.

55.   D. R. Cook, Lancastrians and Yorkists.

56.   Kendall, Richard.

57.   http://www.british-history.ac.uk/camden-record-soc/vol17/pp210-239.

58.   Simon Jenkins, A Short History of England.

59.   This is admittedly a colorful version of events. What really took place, to paraphrase comedian Stewart Lee, was probably not quite as romantic.

60.   Henry I’s wife had been half-English but born in Scotland, and Henry IV’s first wife had been English, but she died before he took the crown.

61.   Seward, War of the Roses.

62.   Alison Weir, Lancaster and York.

63.   A contemporary, quoted in Paul Murray Kendall.

64.   There is a minor character in Shakespeare’s Henry VI based on a mixture of Tiptoft and another historical figure.

65.   John Warkworth, writing in the fifteenth century.

66.   Admittedly, it was Thomas More who first wrote this, and he was not exactly an impartial observer of Richard III; however, Gloucester was in charge of the Tower at the time, so it’s not implausible.

67.   Caxton’s first edition of Chaucer recently sold for £4.6m in 1998, although as recently as May 2017, two pages of an ‘incredibly rare’ early Caxton manuscript were found in a library at Reading, and valued at £100,000. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-39846929.

68.   Chris Skidmore, Bosworth: The Birth of the Tudors.

69.   Desmond Seward, The Demon’s Brood.

70.   From The Great Chronicle of London.

71.   Possibly. The records are unclear.

72.   According to their family tradition.

73.   Skidmore, Bosworth.

74.   Skidmore, Bosworth.

75.   From Bosworth. As the author Chris Skidmore states, this story may be a bit colorful to be true.

76.   In fact, the Percy family still raised their own army as late as the Napoleonic War, although their home is famous for its landscaped garden; in the eighteenth century, the grounds of Alnwick were sculpted by Capability Brown.

77.   The pub was demolished in 1836, although a ‘Richard III theme pub’ of the same name is planned for Leicester city center.

78.   Some hapless eastern European immigrants found themselves in trouble a few years back for killing what they presumed was a wild bird without being aware of this quaint English law. They became public enemies and were all over the tabloids.

79.   Although recent DNA analyses suggests that they aren’t in fact, and that along the way one of their number was cuckolded.

80.   https://www.thesun.co.uk/archives/news/1156904/the-kings-power-did-the-digging-up-of-richard-iii-lead-leicester-to-the-premier-league-title/.