Secret of the king’s smile
QUESTION Is it true that Henry V had a scar which made it appear that he was permanently smiling? On July 21, 1403, a rebel army led by Sir Henry Percy, son of the 1st Earl of northumberland, known as Harry Hotspur, joined battle with the forces of King Henry IV at Shrewsbury. The battle demonstrated the deadliness of the longbow and ended the Percy challenge.
A chronicler recorded that the arrows flew ‘so fast and thick that it seemed to the beholders like a thick cloud, for the sun, which at that time was bright and clear then lost its brightness so thick were the arrows.’
In the battle, 16-year-old Prince Henry, while leading a cavalry charge, was wounded in the face by an arrow which embedded itself six inches into his right cheek. Despite this, he continued the fight, demanding, according to the scholar and writer Tito livio Frulovisi: ‘lead me, thus wounded, to the front line so that I may, as a prince should, kindle our fighting men with deeds not words.’
Afterwards he was ministered to by surgeon John Bradmore, who in his book Philomenalater reported one of the earliest descriptions of maxillofacial surgery. Surgeons at the time were often skilled metalworkers who made their own instruments, and Bradmore’s account of the operation is a fascinating insight into his skills:
‘First, I made small probes from the pith of an elder, well-dried and well-stitched in purified linen [made to] the length of the wound. These probes were infused with rose honey. And after that, I made larger and longer probes, and so I continued to always enlarge these probes until I had the width and depth of the wound as I wished it.
‘And after the wound was as enlarged and deep enough so that, by my reckoning, the probes reached the bottom of the wound, I prepared anew some little tongs, small and hollow, and with the width of an arrow.
‘A screw ran through the middle of the tongs, whose ends were well-rounded both on the inside and outside, and even the end of the screw, which was entered into the middle, was well-rounded overall in the way of a screw, so that it should grip better.’
Bradmore worked away at widening the wound with his novel implement until ‘then by moving it to and fro (with the help of God) I extracted the arrowhead’.
Bradmore then washed the wound with white wine and wiped it out with a probe covered with honey, an early antiseptic, barley, flour and flax. He continued this process for 20 days, before suturing the wound.
Though the theory has been promulgated that the remaining scar, which must have been significant, left the future Henry V with an enigmatic smile, there is no evidence for this. The only contemporary portrait shows him in profile, his left side facing the viewer. It seems probable that he was intent on hiding his damaged right cheek. no other contemporary account describes the scar. Edward B. Landseer, Bude, Cornwall.
QUESTION Has a video game ever been banned in Britain? In 2004 rockstar Games released Manhunt, a particularly violent survival horror video game on the PS2/Xbox. The object of the game was to increase your score depending on how violently you could perform an execution.
later that year, the game was linked to the violent murder of 14-year- old Stefan Pakeerah by his 17-year-old friend Warren leblanc in leicestershire. Subsequently, the game was removed from shelves by some vendors, though it was not banned.
At leblanc’s trial it was eventually ruled that the game had no connection with the crime, but three years later, in the build-up to the release of Manhunt 2, the controversy re-ignited.
The uncut version became the only game to be refused classification by the BBFC (and so was banned) because of the excessive violence. A modified version was eventually deemed suitable for release.
Colin May, Brighton. BACK in 1996, Sickworld Software in the u.S. released a game called Schoolyard Slaughter on the Amiga and Atari consoles. While the graphics and gameplay were rudimentary by today’s standards, the content was particularly offensive. The object of the game was to shoot children running around a schoolyard, and players were told ‘only head shots count’.
When the game was released in the UK by Penguin Public Domain, there was a public outcry as it was the year of the Dunblane massacre. Home Secretary Michael Howard warned that suppliers of such games could face up to two years in jail.
While it was never officially banned, Penguin Public Domain destroyed the master copy and issued an apology. Gina Reeve, Whitby, North Yorks.
QUESTION Why does Leuchars, in North Fife, have a Norman Castle (only a motte survives) and a Norman Romanesque Church? FURTHER to the earlier answer, the idea that there was no norman conquest of Scotland is misleading.
In 1066, the Saxon heir to the English throne, Edgar the Atheling, fled to Scotland, and King Malcolm III of the Scots married his sister Margaret.
In 1072, William the conqueror invaded Scotland and Malcolm submitted, paying homage to William and surrendering a son as a hostage.
William the conqueror’s youngest son, Henry, became Henry I of England in 1100 and married Malcolm’s daughter Matilda.
Her youngest brother, David, was raised in Henry’s court where he spoke French, learned norman ways and made norman friends. He married the widow of a great norman lord who brought to the marriage huge tracts of English land.
With Henry’s military backing, David returned to northern Britain in 1124 and was ‘parachuted’ onto the throne as King David of Scotland — albeit as a subordinate or lesser king.
As a ‘norman’ Earl, David doled out land to his norman-French followers, families now thought of as archetypically Scottish: Bruce, Douglas, Stuart, comyn, etc.
David remained loyal to Henry, supporting Matilda in the civil war which followed his brother-in-law’s death. It was arguably only the chaos after that long civil war which resulted in David establishing independent authority.
The consequence would be a three-nation independent Scotland: the Gaelic-speaking Scots of ‘Scotland-proper’ in the Highlands and the English-speaking Anglo-Saxons of the lowlands. Both were ruled, just as in England, by a norman-French elite. Stephen Ainsworth, Halifax, West Yorks.