1st December

If you're a fan, like me, of Sellar and Yeatman's masterly 1066 And All That, you'll know that Henry I of England died of a surfeit of lampreys. A what? I hear you cry, dear reader. Well, a lamprey is an eel and a surfeit is too many. All this happened today in 1135 which is long before they had sell-by dates etc. I can't help thinking that as the bloke was 66 (which was ancient in the 12th century) it was probably time he shuffled off this mortal coil anyway.

What did he leave behind? A squabble between potential rulers Matilda and Stephen and a series of excellent novels by Ellis Peters.

In other news ...

The Cross Channel diggers met in the middle today in 1990, nearly completing a multi-million pound project linking Britain to France. There was a great deal more earth movement when everybody from Harold Godwinson (d 1066) on turned in their graves.

23rd August

Napoleon wrote to his adopted son Eugene de Beauharnais today in 1810, saying 'My principle is: France before everything.'
Well, everything except grabbing everybody else's country, selling his own troops down the river, Creole women and, as the great Sellar and Yeatman put it in 1066 And All That, 'standing like that.'

In other news ...

Alaric and his Visigoths destroyed Rome today in 410, ending seven centuries of culture and civilization. Actually, that's not quite true. There was a great deal of culture and civilization outside the Roman Empire and in terms of their cruelty and rapacious greed for territory, the Romans were the Nazis of the ancient world.