OK, per the request of (a small number of) my adoring fans I have done around a weeks worth of posts about technical details of Age of Sail warships and 12th century European dynastic maneuvering. This is going to be the last one for now, because although I type them out from memory, its time-consuming to look things up and make sure my memory is correct. In the late 18th and early 19th century certain forms of naval corruption had been tolerated for so long they had acquired the status of tradition. The boatswain (bosun), who looked after the rigging, was entitled to sell and retain the revenue from any damaged equipment. The definition of damaged could be stretched to considerable lengths. In order to prevent him (or a dockyard) from selling off rope, rope made for the Royal Navy had distinctive colored fibers woven into it. Navy rope was regarded as the best available, so there were always willing (illegal) buyers. Any merchant ship caught using such rope could have it confiscated and the master prosecuted; it was no different from stealing military supplies today. The colored fibers were known as rogues yarn. There were different patterns depending on what the rope was made of. ————— King Henry II of England, his wife Eleanor of Aquitaine, their son Richard the Lionheart, and their daughter-in-law Isabelle of Angoulême (King Johns queen), were all buried at the abbey in the little town of Fontevraud in France. You can see their tomb effigies to this day. It seems odd that so many important people from English history should be buried there, but it was a time when the boundaries between England and France were very fluid -- the nation-state had not yet been invented, and England had been ruled by a French-speaking nobility for over 100 years. Henry II never learned to speak English. The religious community at Fontevraud was forcibly disbanded during the French Revolution, and the abbey turned into a prison -- which it remained until 1963. The bodies of Henry, Eleanor, Richard, and Isabelle have long since disappeared... probably destroyed by the revolutionaries in anti-monarchist fervor. But their names live on in both history and legend.
Posted on: Sat, 16 Aug 2014 23:12:12 +0000
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