Wax figure of Kathryn Howard at Madame Tussauds London. Photo May 1998.

* From The Telegraph:
Rags to riches as tapestry masterpiece is restored to its former glory

A tapestry that has survived against the odds since the fifteenth century is to go on display for the first time in 20 years, following five years of restoration returning the masterpiece to its former glory.

* From The Guardian:
David Starkey on Henry VIII: Famous for 500 years

In this podcast, David Starkey asks why Henry continues to fascinate us in the 21st century, and how did a boy with such a conventional upbringing become such an unconventional king?

* From The BBC:
The map that changed the world

Almost exactly 500 years ago, in 1507, Martin Waldseemuller and Matthias Ringmann, two obscure Germanic scholars based in the mountains of eastern France, made one of the boldest leaps in the history of geographical thought – and indeed in the larger history of ideas.

Near the end of an otherwise plodding treatise titled Introduction to Cosmography, they announced to their readers the astonishing news that the world did not just consist of Asia, Africa, and Europe, the three parts of the world known since antiquity. A previously unknown fourth part of the world had recently been discovered, they declared, by the Italian merchant Amerigo Vespucci, and in his honour they had decided to give it a name: America.

Five centuries of searching for one of Britain’s most significant battlefields has finally ended with the discovery of “extraordinary and unexpected” pieces of artillery in a Leicestershire field.

The finds near Market Bosworth at last pin down the notoriously “wandering site” of the battle that overthrew Richard III – the last English king to die at the head of an army – and established the Tudor dynasty and the modern state.

Surrounded by school parties still studying at least four wrong locations, a bevy of archaeologists unveiled 22 primitive pistol bullets and cannonballs, alongside soil surveys and data from metal detection over 2.7 square miles.

The revelations arise from an overlooked trough of rolling countryside two miles from the previously most widely accepted battlefield, below Ambion Hill.

The scale of the ammunition haul transforms the battle of Bosworth’s significance from a national landmark (it is usually ranked with Hastings, Naseby and the Battle of Britain) to international importance.

Glenn Foard, who led the £1m three-year survey for the Battlefields Trust, said: “We are seeing here the origins of firepower which led to an empire spanning the globe. Now this needs to be explored on every battlefield of the period in Europe.”

Pictures of stalwart yeomen with bows and arrows have been instantly outdated by the find, which shows how the battle, in 1485, was a change from previous encounters in the Wars of the Roses.

Full article

More articles:

BBC: New battle over Bosworth’s site

The Daily Mail Online: 500 years of history missed Bosworth Field by two miles

And 3 articles from Times Online:
Battle of Bosworth moves two miles, thanks to archaeologist Glenn Foard
Battle of Bosworth Field… located in the wrong field
Why the Battle of Bosworth Field is difficult to reconstruct

Update:
Here’s a video report from the BBC
and I’m also moving the link Kathy posted in the comments up here:
From the Bosworth Field Official Site: New Archaeological Find

Wax figure of Anne of Cleves at Madame Tussauds London. Photo May 1998.

I think this is my favorite of the group.

The usual Amazon pre-order links below:

In the meantime, here’s a screen shot of my Wordpress dashboard for this blog from last week showing that, for this blog at least, 99% of the comments are spam. Thank you Akismet for making it manageable!

Wax figure of Jane Seymour at Madame Tussauds London. Photo May 1998.

From the link above:

The English reformers of the 1530s, with Thomas Cromwell at their head, continued to have a strong belief in kingly rule and authority, despite their radical approach to the power of the Pope and the Roman Catholic Church. Resisting the king was tantamount to resisting God in their eyes, and even on a matter of conscience the will of the king should prevail. Yet just over 100 years later, Charles I was called the ‘man of blood’, and Oliver Cromwell famously declared that ‘we will cut off his head with the crown on it’. But how did we get from the one to the other? How did the deferential Reformation become a redical revolution? Following on from his biography of Thomas Cromwell, John Schofield examines how the English character and the way it perceived royal rule changed between the time of Thomas Cromwell and that of his great-great-grandnephew Oliver.

And here is an info sheet about the book (PDF) which includes a discount offer.

And finally, the standard Amazon affiliate links below: