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hello everyone and welcome back to the history of England episode 92 the fall of Lancaster

very soon we'll go back to Leeds Castle then and find out the answer to last week's

question did Isabella and Margaret take a calm and practical approach and sort this

matter out or did they take the route to war but I hope it's okay if you wait a little

longer while I start with two digressions this week firstly the strange practice of touching

for the king's evil and secondly the declaration of our growth without which no history of

England and Scotland can be complete. So in many conflicts since 1066 we've seen

that raising rebellion against the king was a rather different matter to having a scrap

with another local baron because there was something different about the king above

and beyond the feudal tie between lord and his leegeman the king had a mystical religious

authority that continued to cling to him and knighted by guard in the form of the pope

and the church and uniquely in England and France one of the manifestations of the

touch of divinity is an odd little habit called touching for the king's evil the king's

evil we're talking about here is a nasty looking skin complaint called scrofula scrofula

involves nasty swellings and blue purple growths on the neck and was pretty common in times

medieval the idea was that English and French kings had the power to cure the disease just

by touching it this idea first appears in the mid 11th century in both England and France

so the first king recorded as having power in England was Edward the confessor who healed

a woman with swollen throat lends it could be that the origin of the tradition is not in

...