Monk wars

Clonmacnoise

Thanks to BBC radio series A short history of Ireland (in 240 episodes) I now know that in 760,  the abbot of the monastery at Clonmacnoise led his monks against those at Birr, and 200 died in the ensuing battle. They were at it again in 764. More here.

History xls: the history of the world in a spreadsheet

Digging for gold

 Samuel Pepys has been making some interesting posts lately on his twitter account. In October 1667 Pepys was coming back to London from Brampton with his life savings. Following Michiel de Ruyter's devastating raid on the English navy in Chatham dock in June of that year, Pepys felt London might be next. Being a high-up naval man himself, might have had more knowledge of the situation than many.

So it was he sent his wife up to Brampton in Cambridgeshire, where his uncle Robert lived, and there she buried their stock of gold coins in his garden. This was a bit of a theme in the Pepys family: Samuel had buried a particularly expensive cheese in the garden of his London house to protect it from the Great Fire of the previous year. In October of 1667, once the Treaty of Breda looked like it had put an end to the Anglo-Dutch War, the Pepys family returned to Brampton to retrieve it. It wasn't an unmitigated success, for the bags had rotted, and their attempt to root out the individual pieces left them 30 short. They worked by candlelight and in hushed tones in case the neighbours worked out what was going on, Pepys exasperated to find out they had buried the gold only 6 inches under the ground and in full view of the neighbours.

On the carriage trip back to London, the still-jumpy Pepys was afraid that the bottom of the baggage compartment might give way with the weight of the coins, so he had it transferred to the hand luggage. As far as we know, the missing 30 pieces of gold are still somewhere in Brampton. Happy hunting!

History xls: the history of the world in a spreadsheet