1066 or what on middle earth was that?

Yesterday and today Channel 4 broadcast a docudrama called ’1066: the Battle for Middle Earth’. The premise of the film is an interesting one, namely to show the effects of the battles of 1066 (Fulford, Stamford Bridge and Senlac Hill) on the ordinary people. The result is  something I thought impossible – Channel 4 makes 1066 boring.

Medievalists and the media: a short post

It has been an interesting two weeks in terms of medieval stories in the media and how they have been reported. Magistra has posted on the Viking conference in Cambridge, but we have also seen an increase in Robin Hood’s appearances in the news, both with and without bad puns.

Dr Julian Luxford of St Andrews has just published a short piece in Journal of Medieval History on attitudes to Robin Hood in chronicles. St Andrews put out a press release and since then, the news item has gone somewhat viral and has been picked up all over the place by various news agencies and bloggers as indicated by the most basic of Google searches. My favourite is Another Bloody WordPress Blog with the post entitled ‘Dr Julian Luxford, whoever you are, you made my day!’ following a sudden increase in the blog’s readership. A similar thing happened to this blog when I posted about Chris Wickham, but on a much smaller scale obviously!

Ships and sewers

There is much archaeology in the news today. Archaeologists from Nottingham University think they have discovered a Viking long ship buried under a pub in Liverpool through using GPR equipment. Meanwhile, archaeologists in Jerusalem claim to have found drainage channels that were used by the Jews to escape the Romans in the first century AD.