Hello everyone and welcome back to the History of England.

Last week we left things in a ferment of intrigue and suspense with the execution of the

L of Kent.

So you might think that the perfect thing to do this week would be to finish that story

off, but I'm afraid that's not the way I see it, because as it so happens, this is

by my reckoning the 100th episode, given the few supplementaries that I've done, so

have a laugh at that and let's have something a bit different.

So this week we have a special episode, a murder mystery if you like.

Our job gentle listeners, it's to make a once and for all final decision about how Ed

the Second died.

Did he die in 1327 in England, or did he in fact die much later?

The traditional story of course that everyone knows, and indeed which I knew until I started

doing the history of England, was that Ed with the Second had an accident with a red

hot poker.

However, that has for a long, long time been another version of events, after the discovery

of a letter in 1855.

Essentially, this version says that Ed with the Second wasn't in fact killed, but was

instead secretly kept alive by Ed with the Third and Mortimer and then went to live abroad

before finally dying many years later.

Now normally, this is the sort of thing one would dismiss as fodder for the credulous

and pathological conspiracy theorists, but then the historian Ian Mortimer picked it

up, and he made a pretty good case, and he also makes the point that many fine historians

...