The aftermath. Goya's painting the 3rd of May, shows Spanish partisans being executed by French soldiers;



It seems that there were originally four paintings by Goya on this event but only two are now in existence.

Just a note to Trike to say your devoted interest in keeping this thread -and to some extent, this mb alive is appreciated. It is a pity that the many interesting topics do not have individual threadlines so that discussion could be extended; days pass quickly and then we're onto something new.

3rd May 1536 - sometime during the afternoon.

Sir Francis Weston - he of whom Anne Boleyn had said on May 2nd that "she more feared Weston" - was arrested and admitted to the Tower.

Priscilla wrote:

Just a note to Trike to say your devoted interest in keeping this thread -and to some extent, this mb alive is appreciated. It is a pity that the many interesting topics do not have individual threadlines so that discussion could be extended; days pass quickly and then we're onto something new.

Yes, I'll second that.

Thursday, May 4th 1536, 9:00am.

George Constantine recorded that it was around 9am on the morning of May 4th that he spoke with another member of the so-called Boleyn faction: William Brereton. Brereton was a Groom of the Privy Chamber and on that May morning he was apparently "resigned to his fate". He confided in Constantine that " there was no way but one with any matter." Brereton clearly knew what was coming, and his gloomy premonitions were proved correct: he was arrested just after his conversation with Constantine, and, by 2pm on May 4th, he was in the Tower. "What was laid against him," said Constantine, "I know not nor ever heard."

As David Starkey points out, "posterity is little the wiser." Was the "sexual heresy" for which Brereton and the others were to die actually - as Retha M. Warnicke has argued - homosexuality? Or was Brereton removed because he was too powerful a figure in the local administration of his native Chester and North Wales? Was he simply a member of a faction that Cromwell was determined to destroy? Or were the five men arrested during that terrible week in May actually - as Professor G.W. Bernard has recently (and quite unconvincingly) suggested - really guilty of adultery with the Queen?

Warnicke's theories have been much mocked (as well as being used and abused by Philippa Gregory), but her The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn is a serious academic study; and to me at least what she says (and the evidence she presents) is far more convincing than Bernard's rather sensational Anne Boleyn: Fatal Attractions (awful title). But I'm in the minority, I know, along with PG - and agreeing with *her* about anything is a very uncomfortable position in which to find oneself.

Incidentally, for a really wild portrayal of William Brereton we must turn to our favourite source for this period: The Tudors. In the Showtime production, Brereton was a secret Jesuit priest, commissioned by the wonderfully evil Peter O' Toole (aka Pope Paul III who was actually quite religious for a Pope) to murder Natalie Dormer (Anne Boleyn). Like the other men, Brereton was accused of having had carnal knowledge of Natalie, but unlike the others - Norris, Weston and Boleyn, who all denied the charge, and poor little Mark, who only "confessed" after torture - Showtime's Brereton was happy to tell Cromwell anything. He was bent on a glorious Catholic martyr's death - a sort of prototype John Ballard with sex. The Jesuits as a recognised organisation didn't actually exist in 1536 of course (Pope Paul didn't give Loyola and pals the go-ahead until 1540), but what the heck.

Caro wrote:

"My dear" is quite a difficult phrase, isn't it? I remember hesitating for ages once before saying "My dear" to AA (Duncan - and where is the lovely Duncan these days? - I haven't seen or heard anything from him for ages). I didn't want to sound patronising, which is sometimes can. But no, I certainly didn't anything abut some mild affection from your use of it.

Not having heard you talk, I can't comment on your accustom or lack thereof towards the spoken English language but your written English language doesn't suffer from any lack. (Though perhaps 'brooding' rather than 'breeding' was what you mean in the second paragraph.)

I suppose different languages have different nuances for some words or ideas that perhaps are less easy to show in another language and that might affect how they are understood. But most languages have ways of getting round such difficulties. My book though about the people roses were named after has a few phrases in French which they translate and even with those very short pieces the translation is not absolutely literal and something may just be lost a little in the translation. One that stood out was Pierre de Ronsard's verse:

Prends cette rose aimable comme toi, Qui sert de rose aux roses les plus belles. Which was translated as Take this rose, as lovely as you are, which make the most beautiful roses blush which is no doubt accurate but misses the double use of 'rose' in the second line and the impression that gives. (In passing a lot of French people, especially men, have given their names to roses.)

Cheers, Caro.

Caro,

excuses for not answering earlier...that busy...

Thank you very much for your kind words

I agree with you when you say: " But most languages have ways of getting round such difficulties." But you have to translate in your own native language or a language that you are very fluent in and you have to know then the foreign language that you translate very intimate, otherwise you can make big mistakes. But from my experiences on different fora and different languages most have no problems with translating the essence of the thoughts expressed. I even think that in the same! language a lot of people don't understand each other, while concepts of words used by one interlocutor are received by another interlocutor in the discussion as quite different of those intended by the first interlocutor.

Thank you also for your beautiful French tekst. I don't know why, but I prefer the French spoken language above the English one, not because one can express better feelings in one than in the other, but I think, and it can be a personal perception, that it has all to do with the sound of the vowels for instance the "a" and the "u" or even the "é", "è" and "ê" which are much clearer in French than in English. For instance pronounce once "intitulé" and "armistice" in French. For me English sounds a bit as a Flemish or a Bavarian dialect? It has again in my personal opinion still all the sounds of the nowadays Germanic "dialects", including Swedish, Danish and Norwegian?

Perhaps, Meles Meles, being fluent in English and French can be better give his opinion?

Kind regards from your friend,

Paul.

Thank you Paul for your praise about my linguistic talents, but I fear I am very far from being fluent in French, and also I now find, having now been out of the UK for over 10 years, that I am no longer completely fluent in English.

But I agree that some things do seem to work better in, say, French rather than English, and I find that there are some expressions that remain untranslateable between the two in a literal sense. But a lot of that might have to do with nation-specific vocabulary and practices: how exactly does one translate the english, 'P-45' or 'P-60', simply, into French, or the French, 'Carte Vitale', into English?

Puns are interesting. I know they are supposed to be the lowest form of wit (who said that?) but I have found that as I have progressed in French, and have assimilated more words, sounds, conjugations etc ... I find myself making more and more puns in French. This punning is often only to myself, and not actually expressed outloud since I have found that the French (huge over-simplification I know) but generally they don't seem to do puns and other similar simplistic wordplay .... or maybe they do, but at a more sophisticated level that I can muster. But either way I am chuffed that I am able to make such word-play at all ... despite being disappointed when no-one immediately gets my 'clever' joke!

EDIT:
Perhaps word play is more of a Northern French thing. I'm sure you, Paul, know Danny Boon's film: "Bienvenue chez les Ch'tis", which is of course full of French puns and other jokes based on the vagaries of French language and regional pronunciation. At the back of my mind I have a recollection of some famous Frenchman, possibly De Gaulle, pronouncing French as the most perfect language simply because every word had a fixed meaning and so was clear and intransient ... and thus punning was impossible. A foolish boast methinks as any glance at a French dictionary will confirm. Off the top of my head I can think of: bulot (whelk), boulot (work), boulot (tubby), bouleau (birch tree) ... which are all pronounced exactly the same, and so are ripe for the punster!

But my best French pun is sadly apocryphal. It supposedly appeared on a postwar French Navy recruitment poster, featuring a strapping muscular young matelot, beckoning the way to the fleet with a saucy wink and the cry: "A l'eau, c'est l'heure!" ("To the sea, now's the time!") ..... or as is sounds: "Allo sailor!"

May 7th 1824 - a chronically deaf Beethoven sits on the stage in the Theater am Kärntnertor in Vienna thinking he is directing the tempo for the house orchestra as they play his new composition. Unknown to him the conductor on the day, Michael Umlauf, who remembers a previous disaster when the ageing composer had tried to publicly conduct music that he could hear only in his imagination has told his charges to ignore directions from his colleague and follow only him as he leads them - and an extremely fortunate audience - into the first ever rendition of this ...

Meles Meles,
thank you so much for your interesting reply.
Kind regards and with esteem, Paul.

May 7th was a good day for the birth of writers/composers:

1711: David Hume

1812: Robert Browning

1833: Johannes Brahms

1861: Rabindranath Tagore

1840: Pyotr Illych Tchaikovsky

8th May 1886, and a patent medicine invented by Dr John Pemberton of Atlanta, Georgia, goes on sale at Jacob's Pharmacy for 5 cents a glass. The medicine is claimed to cure lethargy, melancholy, morphine addiction and impotence amongst other ailments;

9th May 1671, Thomas Blood steals the Crown Jewels;

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Blood

10th May 1869, the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific meet at Promontory Point, Utah to complete the transcontinental railroad. The "sea to shining sea" is now a reality.

http://www.tcrr.com/

12th May is Old May Day. You put your cattle out to pasture on this day, have a day off and seek a new job.... it was also called leaving day in some parts - and of course, plant your bean crop. The latter is widely followed advice in rural Essex for planting runner beans. I have no idea when or why May Day became May 1st; someone will here though, no doubt.

I am not aware that Mayday was ever anything other than the first of the month in Britain - even as pre-christian Bealtaine its computation from the equinoctal phase placed it more or less on the date that the Julian calendar stipulated should represent the first day of the month.

However I wonder if the discrepancy (and the name "Old May Day") you mention might have originated with the calendar reform in 1752? At the time eleven days were summarily cut from the current year in order to synchronise English dates with the Gregorian calendar. The move was by no means popular - it led to long-lasting opposition and resentment (as expressed in Hogarth's "An Election Entertainment" where an individual hoists a placard with the slogan "Give Us Back Our Eleven Days" upon it). There were riots in the south of England where the opposition was highest and it did lead to certain traditional festivals being split between two days of observance, "official" and "traditional", especially in rural communities where the writ of government in these matters enjoyed less automatic recognition than in the towns.

There's also the association with the common hawthorn, or maytree. All hawthorns in a district tend to burst into flower at the same time (nowadays about May 12th in the hedgerows of the English midlands) and so give a clear visual indication of the change in the season.

As the Encyclopedia Britannica puts it: "The custom of employing the flowering branches for decorative purposes on 1 May is of very early origin; but since the adoption of the Gregorian Calender in 1752, the tree has rarely been in full bloom in England before the second week of that month. In the Scottish Highlands the flowers may be seen as late as the middle of June."

There, I knew the info would be known and enriched here. Oi, o' corse 'ave bin a pantin' ov me beyans. Whitch is wot is done terday, 'ere.

It used to be hawthorn breakout that was noted but cup final day now takes first place.

May 13th 1543 quite coincidentally threw up two incidents, one in Germany and one in Scotland, that serve to throw a little light on the mentality of protestant reformers of the period (just in case one was labouring under the misapprehension that those at the vanguard of this reform held "tolerance" up as one of the primary virtues).

In Wittenburg an ageing and ill Martin Luther nailed to his favourite door (that in the university church, which by now thanks to Martin and his text messages must have been more holes than timber) a list of "admonishments" against the local students who he reckoned had veered from theology to studentology a little too far for his taste. In particular he was worried about their habits - not their clothes mind you, but rather those which included, amongst other vices, making regular use of the steady supply of French prostitutes then available in the town. Nearly three decades ago the church door had served as Martin's messageboard while he publicly tackled and challenged church doctrine relating to repentance, purgatory and the sacraments. Now, as an older man, his predilection for brass-tacking his thoughts up in public saw him getting down to what we must therefore in hindsight refer to as Luther's actual brass-tacks issues. Forget repentance, forgiveness and all those other wussie christian values that once had occupied him so much. The humble prostitute was what obsessed him now. "If I were a judge" he nailed up for all to see, "I would want to have such a French, poisonous whore broken on the wheel and bled!"

There is no record of any subsequent mass wheel-breaking of Gallic gigolinas in Wittenberg in the immediate aftermath, thereby probably indicating just how seriously students then, as now, took absolutely stupid bullshit from their so-called seniors. Luther, most likely in a terrible huff at not seeing young women's bones being crushed on a very cruel torture device, died by all accounts a suitably christian death a few years later.

If one could have hopped in a plane at the time one might have been able, after witnessing Luther punch holes in a door to no end in Wittenberg, to dash to the airport and catch a flight to Scotland, arriving in Perthshire just in time to see another example of reformation christianity at its finest. This time we're talking about those two great traditional christian attributes of wanton violence and theft - the two very attributes that once made the Roman mother church so great and powerful, and which now were being turned against it by "reformists", in the presumable belief that by being better at both made one a better christian.

The reformists in question were, depending on your viewpoint, either a selection of the local aristocratic families' strongest and finest examples of young manhood - or - a gang of drunken rich louts. Either way, on this particular day they decided that it was high time someone actually did something practical about the "old style" religious monasteries in their area and resolved to do the decent christian thing that very evening. All primed up and ready to kill and plunder in god's name they immediately discovered a small snag in their plan. Of the four monasteries in the district three, who had indeed amassed quite a bit of wealth, could therefore also afford armed guards to protect themselves. Our merry malcontents, for whom martyrdom obviously had not been uppermost in their original plan, however drunkenly it had been conceived, decided therefore to focus their moral malice on the fourth monastery, run by the Blackfriars and for whom a vow of poverty still pertained. Poverty meant no guards. However it also meant little else either.

Undaunted by the prospect of poorer pickings than first anticipated our resolute reformists duly did what they'd set out to do, descending on Blackfriars while the monks were at early morning prayer, and in their own words "did take away out of it chandillaris and glassis and brak their kochin durre, and tuk off the fire the kettil with their mete and careit it about the towne, and yet withhalds the kettil and pewdir disheis, ane or ma……”

They stole the monks' kettle, cups, candleholders and plates, along with their stew, in other words. Or in even other words - they stole the poor guys' breakfast.

The monks, showing remarkably christian restraint and civic responsibility, attempted to retrieve the goods through the courts and, though the magistrates (the lads' fathers) promised to see what they could do, that was the last the friars saw of their breakfast things. The event is still celebrated in certain quarters of Perthsire as a great victory against papism.

Hallelujah and pass the sick-bag ...

I cannot say how much these outbursts of yours distress and disturb me, nordmann, possibly because I know there is no argument against what you say. But then not all Christians of the time were evil, hypocritical bastards.

Little Bilney, for example, was a decent man who tried to live by Christ's teachings: he ministered "to the desperates", was "a preacher to the prisoners and comfortless", gave away his own food and went regularly among the lepers in the diocese of Ely. Hugh Latimer described Little B. as "meek and charitable, a simple, good soul, not fit for this world."

They burnt him in 1531.

Outburst? Just thought it was funny (weird, not ha-ha) to see two such telling incidents occurring on the very same day caused by bigoted people totally unaware of each other. Now, if the bonfire people had held off their incendiary lusts just a dozen years or so and despatched Wee Tom on May 13th 1543, then THAT would have been incredible! Might almost have made me believe that mobile phones were a much more ancient technology than we all assume.

However Bilney made the mistake of going back to Norwich when he renounced his apostasy. That was a bad move. Rule number one when renouncing apostasy; don't go back to the same compostasists who got you to apostasise if you're planning on de-apostasising. Especially compostasists who are also comburendists. Problem with Little Tom probably, being small and all that, was that he couldn't pronounce the rule.

It's a right bugger to say after a few pints.

May 13th 1754 - Taal volcano explodes in the Philippines. One of the largest explosions ever witnessed since records began it caused a tsunami that crossed the Indian Ocean, an earthquake felt throughout the region, and left in its wake a gigantic lake, a whole new island, and - remarkably - only 12 people known to have died.


Taal, near Luzon, lake and island clearly visible.

Taal has erupted as recently as 1965 and is due another big one. This time around a comparable explosion to the one in 1754 might account for over a million lives if it unfolds in the same manner.

14 May 1796, 8 year old Thomas Phipps in injected with cowpox by Dr Edward Jenner. He is later injected with smallpox to which he proves to be immune.

This brought about strong rumour - and newspaper claims - that people thus injected had been seen running around on all fours, mooing. Newspapers continue to spread alarm and appear to have considerable influence in determining opoinion - and undermining democracy. Mercifully in this case the good Dr's work proved itself. We might run a thread on press influence, mm?

Indeed P.

This is James Gillray's 1802 satirical print, "The Cow Pock - or - the Wonderful Effects of the New Innoculation!", with Dr Jenner himself standing aloof and unperturbed amongst all the bovine, or should that be vache-cine, or rather vaccine, fun:

15 May 1800, James Hadfield attempts to assassinate George III at the theatre;

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Hadfield

15 May 1940: Nylon stockings go on sale in the US. And everyone rejoices, men as much as women. Horrible things though - I wear them about once a year. Thank god for living in a time when women wesar trousers most of the time. (Even if my husband does say, "Ladies should always wear a skirt." Piffle! He should have married a lady, in that case. Though skirts are more fun.)

17 May 1970; Thor Heyerdal and crew set sail from Morocco aboard RAII destined for the Americas, to see if such a voyage was feasible for ancient Egyptians:

May 19th, 1536. Anne Boleyn beheaded.

The executioner from Calais charged Henry £23 6s 8d for the despatching of the queen. The headsman - who had been summoned from Calais *before* Anne's trial - was an expert in the use of the heavy continental executioner's sword, an instrument which could slice the head off a prisoner in one graceful movement. A much more elegant way to die than by the clumsy English axe which required the victim to lie down and place his or her chin on the block. And certainly an expertly wielded sword was to be preferred to what was the official method of execution for a female traitor: burning at the stake. The warrant for Anne's execution actually states that the merciful king, "moved to pity", was unwilling to commit her to the flames.

Kingston, in his report to Thomas Cromwell, recorded that Anne - in response to his own remark that the pain would be "subtle" - replied that, "I heard say that the executioner is very good, and I have a little neck." At that, the Lieutenant of the Tower continued, "she put her hands around her throat and burst out laughing."

Anne does seem to have been a very cool customer. The cruelty of people is really quite stunning, isn't it? Flames, boiling, dismembering, and it all still goes on, if not in all countries now.

Another invention I am not sure life wouldn't be just as fine without: May 18th 1830: Edwin Budding signs an agreement for the manufacture of the lawnmower.

And in 1944: Monte Cassino monastery was taken from the Germans. My father was there - I don't think he was a keen soldier. His letters talk of how he detests the shells and mortars and how they've had lucky escapes. They don't talk about any heroic actions he has been involved in, or wants to be involved in. After he was home he told people if there was another war he would take to the hills rather than be involved.

20 May 1631; Imperial forces commanded by Count Tilly storm and sack the city of Magdeburg;



the Sack of Magdeburg was the most devastating single incident of the Thirty Years War with the death of an estimated 20,000 people, Magdeburg was for the 17th century what Hiroshima became for the 20th.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sack_of_Magdeburg

22 May 1915 - Gretna Green was the scene of what remains Britain's worst ever train disaster: the Quintinshill rail crash.

The disaster occurred when a troop train travelling from Larbert, near Falkirk, to Liverpool collided with a local passenger train that had been shunted onto the main line. The two crashed trains were then hit by an express train to Glasgow which piled into the wreckage just a minute later. Gas from the lighting system of the old wooden carriages of the troop train ignited, starting a fierce fire which rapidly engulfed all three passenger trains, and also two goods trains standing on nearby passing loops.

In all about 230 people were killed and 246 injured, although the exact number of fatalities could not be ascertained as many bodies were wholly consumed by the intense fire. All the remains that were recovered were buried together in a mass grave in Edinburgh's Rosebank Cemetery.

There were also four small bodies recovered from the wreckage that were presumed to be of children but that have never been identified. Nothing found with these bodies gave any clue to their identities; they were neither listed on the troop train manifest (which was anyway destroyed in the fire) nor identifiable in any way from ticket sales or from the witness reports of surviving passengers. And no-one ever came forward to claim them. These four abandoned lonely souls are buried side by side in the Western Necropolis, Glasgow.

22 May 1967 saw another major disaster, the L'Innovation Department Store fire in Brussels in which 323 people died;

23 May 1934, armed robbers Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow are ambushed and killed by law officers in Louisiana;

29 May 1453, the City of Constantinople, final remnant of the Roman Imperium, falls to the Ottoman Empire;

29 May 1914 , the passenger liner Empress of Ireland collides with the Norwegian collier Storstad in the St Lawrence River and sinks with the loss of 1,012 lives.



one of the survivors was stoker William Clark who is believed to have survived the sinking of the Titanic as well.

30th May, 1536.

Less than a fortnight after the judicial murder of her predecessor, Jane Seymour marries Henry VIII in the Queen's Closet at York Place.

Seymour is the quiet, mystery girl. Holbein has her looking at the world with an air of pale, prim disapproval. She is Snow White to Anne Boleyn's Wicked Witch, the embodiment, as one commentator has noted, of the qualities Andrea Dworkin describes in "Women Hating". "For a woman to be good," Dworkin writes, "she must be dead, or as close to it as possible...Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Snow-White, Rapunzel - all are characterized by passivity, beauty, innocence and victimization. They are archetypal good women... They never think, act, initiate, confront, resist, challenge, feel, care or question."

It's very easy to dismiss colourless Jane Seymour as a passive nonentity, but I'm not so sure that's wise. The Seymour family were hugely ambitious, just like the Boleyns. Had "the little nun" (with help from her brothers) worked out *exactly* how to handle a man like Henry? Eustache Chapuys, the Spanish ambassador, noted: "The said Seymour is not a woman of great wit (intelligence), but she may have good understanding."

That's an interesting remark from Chapuys: understanding after all can sometimes be of far more use to a woman when dealing with a difficult man than pure intelligence. "Bound to serve and obey" (Jane took this as her personal motto) is certainly not a motto any self-respecting feminist would approve, but, given the circumstances, probably a very sensible one for a Tudor woman who happened to be married to Henry VIII to adopt. Anne Boleyn had proved to be (to borrow the words later attributed to her daughter when she spoke of Thomas Seymour), a woman of "great wit, but little judgement". AB had undoubtedly been one of the cleverest and most challenging women of her generation, but her brains and vivacity had been of little use to her in the end. Plain, rather boring little Jane, had she not died in childbed, would have been the wife who survived. (Mind you, that said, had Edward been a girl...)



Goody Two-Shoes, or very clever lady?

30 May 1967, Biafra secedes from Nigeria resulting in the Nigerian Civil War,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biafra

Sorry folks, the Sixties weren't all fun and games.

4th June, we have two battles today. The first in 1859 pitted the forces of the French Second Empire and their Piedmontese/Sardinian allies against the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the town of Magenta beside the Ticino River in Northern Italy, the aim being the expulsion of the Austo-Hungarians from Italy. It's not every battle which gets a colour named after it.



and the second in 1942, saw the US Navy inflict a serious defeat on the Japanese aircraft carrier fleet at Midway;

Why is it that it is Biafra that has lent itself to imagery of famine - I still say, no doubt quite insensitively, that a premature baby looks like Biafran refugees. Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Adichie was set in that era and it is a book I really loved.

June 6 1683: The Ashmolean, the first public museum, opened. It was one of the first we visited in Britain, and I see it has been subject to a major refurbishment so might be a good one to revisit.

June 6 1872: American feminist Susan B Anthony is fined for trying to vote in a local election. What does this mean? What law was she breaking by trying to vote. I know there are laws against attempted murder and I suppose attempted burglaries, but attempting voting? Who wrote that into the law books?

7 June 1905, the Storting in Oslo vote to dissolve the Union between Norway and Sweden. The vote is confirmed by a plebiscite on 13th August.


This is an ex flag, it is no more, it is deceased, it has gone to the great vexillology room in the sky...............

The then current Norwegian word for it was Sildesalat - herring salad - for the following reason

10 June 1829, the first Oxford - Cambridge boat race takes place( Oxford won). The race did not become an annual event until 1856.

10 June 1190 - Frederick I, Holy Roman Emperor, known to posterity as “Barbarossa” ie “red-beard”, whilst on the third crusade (along with Richard the Lionheart of England and King Phillipe of France) this day died whilst attempting to ford the river Saleph in what is now Turkey. His sudden death left the hitherto very successful, land-based thrust of the Crusade completely leaderless, and it rapidly dissolved ... although Richard I, travelling by sea, stubbornly pushed on.

With the long view of history it is not easy to say exactly what happened and indeed contemporary eye-witnesses came to different conclusions. What does seem clear is that Freddy’s troops were crossing the river by an ancient bridge, but Fred, perhaps out of frustration at being delayed, perhaps out of necessity to get to the front, perhaps out of snobbish chivalry, or perhaps out of sheer bravado … attempted to ford the river on his horse.

The river is wide and quite powerful, and so almost inevitably his horse foundered and the Emperor found himself floundering in a deep, fast-flowing river, whilst dressed in full chain-mail armour and a billowing surcoat. He drowned, although some eye-witness reports of the accident tend to suggest that the immediate cause of death was a heart attack brought on when his horse stumbled and tipped the 68 year old monarch into freezing cold water. Others have interpreted his sudden death as murder or even suicide.

Frederick's men put him in vinegar to preserve the body and although most of the army promptly high-tailed it back home to Germany, his son Frederick of Swabia, pushed on towards the Holy Land carrying his pickled father in a barrel with the intention of finally burying him in Jerusalem ... and no doubt also hoping to be elected Emperor for this show of pius, filial duty. But it was not to be, the pickle was not strong enough and Freddy rapidly started to go off under the scorching levantine sun. In short the barrelled ex-emperor stank. So in the end his flesh was interred in the Church of St Peter in Antioch, his bones in the cathedral of Tyre, and his heart and inner organs in Tarsus.

Sic transit gloria mundi.

11 June 1962, Frank Morris and brothers Clarence & John Anglin escape from the Alcatraz prison. Whether they drowned on their way across or made good their escape, no-one knows.

http://www.alcatrazhistory.com/alcesc1.htm

No book, no film, no newspaper spread - they drowned.

Thursday 12th June 1766 - ten year old Mozart found he had an hour or two to kill before a lunchtime appointment while in Paris with his father so dashed this little ditty off while he waited:

Twenty four years later to the day Mozart finds himself at the "K.K. Hoftheater nächst der Burg", Austria's National Theatre in Vienna, conducting this:

13 June 1981;

14 June 1919, John Alcock and Arthur Brown take off from St John's, Newfoundland in a Vickers Vimy for the first non-stop transatlantic flight.



only 10 years after Bleriot flew the Channel, transatlantic flight was possible.

16 June 2006 – The Russo-Japanese War formally ends after more than a hundred years when Japan and Montenegro officially declare a truce.

In 1904 the Principality of Montenegro had declared war on Japan in support of Russia, but it was not a signatory to the concluding peace in 1905 (Treaty of Portsmouth). Montenegro was a sovereign state in 1904 but merged with Serbia in 1919 and then became part of the Yugoslav Federation. It regained independence in 2006 and this was officially recognized by Japan on 16 June of that year. On the same day the two states formally declared a truce, signed a peace treaty and so finally ended the anomalous state of war that had existed between them for 102 years.

Yesterday, 15 June is the Danish National Day, in memory of the battle for Lyndanisse in Estonia in 1219, when the Dannebrog - the flag of Denmark - according to tradition, fell from the sky.
It is also the day when 1920 North-Schleswig was officialy re-united with Denmark - following a plebiscite in Schleswig - since a combined Prussian and Austro-Hungarian army beat the Danish army in 1864.