Recent purchase at a second-hand bookshop based mostly on how fantastic the cover art is--although I have heard a little about the strange and tumultuous careers of the Shirleys, so I'm sure it'll be an interesting read!
#onmydesktoday is a big and timely book about European communication by the great Joad Raymond Wren. Exploring a world of #earlymodern newsmongers, translators and postmasters, Joad highlights that news moved and were shared, and that news binds us together. Good news for #skystorians.
...but their presence may explain the high opinion of the diplomat and military theorist Sir John Smythe, a witness to the wars in Flanders, who praised the skill of "Light horsemen borderers" with "speares in the field" as "they... by their continuall exercise are so skilful with al such weapons".
I don't know enough about how English expeditionary forces were recruited, what other routes would have been open to borderers to find employment in these wars, and whether they might have served as companies of light horsemen as they had in Henry's continental expeditions a generation before...
On the other side of the border, Martin's Arch Elliot was particularly dangerous because "he hath been brought vpp in the warrs, in ffladers, & Fraunce"--or at least, so Lord Warden Ralph Eure claimed when he reported that Elliot had been slain on an illegal cross-border incursion.
The warfare of the Dutch revolt offered opportunities for the skilled horsemen of the 'riding surnames'.
One was the infamous Redesdale murderer George Hall, who fled and was outlawed but allowed to return home at the request of Sir Philip Sidney, "w[ith] whome he s[er]ued in the Lowe cuntries".
A particularly stark example of iconoclast damage: the tomb of Jan van Arkel, bishop of Utrecht from 1342 to 1364, damaged in 1580, in Domkerk, Utrecht.
Wonderful artefact at the Plantin-Moretus museum in Antwerp: weights for dozens of different coins from a range of countries! I noticed ones for English angels and rose crowns.
At the Bourse in sixteenth-century Antwerp you could enter a sweepstake for the Papal election, where you were assigned a random cardinal and won the pot if they were chosen!
(Geoffrey Parker, The Dutch Revolt).