Once I was a clever boy learning the arts of Oxford... is a quotation from the verses written by Bishop Richard Fleming (c.1385-1431) for his tomb in Lincoln Cathedral. Fleming, the founder of Lincoln College in Oxford, is the subject of my research for a D. Phil., and, like me, a son of the West Riding. I have remarked in the past that I have a deeply meaningful on-going relationship with a dead fifteenth century bishop... it was Fleming who, in effect, enabled me to come to Oxford and to learn its arts, and for that I am immensely grateful.


Thursday 29 September 2022

A soldier’s savings from the Wars of the Roses


The BBC News website has a report about the sale of a small collection of coins and a gold ring from the time of the Wars of the Roses. They were found by a metal detector near Harrogate. The face value of the coins is 2s 3d and even by the values of the fifteenth century no great fortune. Indeed reading the story one was struck by the smallness of what is presumed to be a soldier’s savings. There is pathos in this story of an anonymous soldier secreting, or perhaps losing, his little hoard and never recovering it.


To my thinking it seems a pity that this very human collection is being dispersed rather than being acquired and kept together in a public collection, such as The Yorkshire Museum. The small scale of the hoard is a window into one life, but also so many in those years.

 
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