Henry imprisoned Robert for life after capturing him in 1106. With Henry in a much stronger position, he ignored many of the restrictions set out in the Charter of Liberties. King Charles is visiting an Edinburgh hospital. He enters a ward full of patients with no obvious sign of injury or illness and greets one. Reporters crowd around for a chance to ask the Prince a question. Geoff Harvey, renowned Perth journalist finally has the courage to ask “Your Royal Highness. Thank you for visiting our great state. If I may ask, what was the inspiration behind your interesting hat?”.

After months spent poring over medieval texts for her PhD, Martha Bayless made a surprising discovery. She was looking at some of the earliest jokes written in Latin by Catholic scholars (some in excess of 1,000 years old). Few had ever been translated into English before, yet many were still funny – and some even made her laugh out loud.His laws fundamentally shaped medieval England and would long be considered the standard which English people expected their kings to follow. When King Cnut invaded decades after Edgar’s death, Cnut swore that he would continue to uphold the laws of King Edgar. [7] When his father failed to arrive to lead the army he’d raised, Edmund and Earl Uhtred of Northumbria took matters into their own hands and joined forces, raiding Eadric’s lands in retaliation for his betrayal. Cnut’s army landed in Northumbria and forced Uhtred to submit before killing him, leaving Edmund without any allies. However, his wise, levelheaded approach to governance couldn’t last forever. When tensions began to rise once more between England and Scotland, Robert did everything he could to avoid war and alienated many of his supporters in the process. Edmund defeated the Danish army once again, this time at Otford, and chased Cnut’s retreating army into Kent. The momentum clearly appeared to be with him. Things changed, though, when he met the Danish army at Assandun. When Aethelred died in early 1016, Edmund made his way to London to be crowned the new king of England. Both of his brothers had died in 1014. In a final effort to halt the Danish invasion, he went to Wessex to raise an army. He fought the Danes at Penselwood and Sherston. Then he made his way to London where he successfully broke the Danish siege.

The ensuing Battle of Burnanburh was a decisive victory for Athelstan and secured his position as the most powerful man in Britain for the rest of his lifetime. He called himself the king of Britain, and the Welsh and Scottish kings were forced to attend his council, where they witnessed and accepted his laws. [3] In May 1216, the heir to the French throne landed unopposed on the island of Thanet with a big army in tow. From there, he marched on London. Instead of rejecting the French king, the people of London opened the city’s gates and proclaimed him king of England in Old St. Paul’s Cathedral with many of the English nobles and even the king of Scotland watching. His claim to the throne was tenuous at best. [1] Shortly after, while waiting for her train, Bayless was reading a copy of Truly Tasteless Jokes 3 – a popular joke anthology from 1983. She was surprised to find, almost word for word, a joke that she had been transcribing just a day earlier.

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This phenomenon has been happening ever since there has been stand-up comedy," he says. As the two jesters from Richard I's court demonstrate, comedy has always been risky, and the power has always ultimately rested with the audience. Bayless has found that many of the oldest written jokes were scribbled in the margins of ornate early Latin Bibles. Even in a culture where only academic and religious elites could read and write, early Church scholars were busy entertaining each other with smutty comments.

If Kenneth was the first king of a united Scotland, then his grandson Constantine was the king who shaped the country into something we’d recognize as Scotland today. Over the course of his 43-year reign, it went from being called the Kingdom of the Picts to the Kingdom of Alba, the Gaelic word for “Scotland.” The words “Scot” and “Scotland” were first used during his reign. Now seriously troubled, Charles turns to the accompanying doctor and asks, “Is this a psychiatric ward?” Some hae meat an canna eat, And some wad eat that want it, But we hae meat an we can eat, So let the Lord be thankit.”Edmund Ironside was never expected to be king. During a time of peace and stability in Anglo-Saxon England, he was third in line to the throne behind his two brothers. However, that changed when the Viking King Cnut invaded in 1015.

That wasn’t the end of his story, though. He returned to England in 1069 to lead a rebellion in Northumbria and joined forces with the Danes in 1070 when they invaded northern England, even seizing York in his name. The rebellion lasted for almost a year, with Edgar leading a guerrilla campaign from the Yorkshire marshes before eventually retreating to Scotland. This type of modern comedy, which dates in minutes, is a far cry from a joke scribbled in the margins of a Latin text, which needed to remain funny for the next scholar at whichever time they stumbled across it. What is wrong and what is OK is determined not by the teller, but by the audience member, by the receiver, and by their mood, the context they're in, the number of drinks they've had, their culture, their identity," continues McGraw.The patient replies, “Fair fa your honest sonsie face, Great chieftain o the puddin race, Aboon them a ye take yer place, Painch, tripe or thairm, As langs my airm.” Did you hear about the British who is such a big fan of the Royal Family, each of his four sons is named after a king? While Athelstan was the first actual king of England, it was Edgar the Peaceful who laid the foundations of a long-lasting, powerful realm. He worked tirelessly to centralize the power of the monarchy over the whole kingdom. He was also responsible for defining a system of weights and measures to be used across the kingdom. Although many kings had tried this, he was the first whose system was widely implemented and used. Some researchers suggest that because humour brings us together it might have an evolutionary purpose. Perhaps our ability to make light of bad situations helped us to overcome them – by joining together in laughter, we were able to reinforce our social bonds. Some scholars point to the existence of teasing-like behaviours in primates like chimpanzees as evidence of an early evolutionary origin of humour in humans. However, captive animals could be copying behaviours they have seen in us.