7 things you (probably) didn’t know about Henry VIII's flagship the Mary Rose

History Extra

For 34 years the Mary Rose was Henry VIII’s flagship. Faced with the threat of the French navy and a strong Scottish fleet, Henry started building up his naval firepower as soon as he became king. Built in Portsmouth, the Mary Rose was launched in 1511.

 • The Mary Rose first saw battle in 1512, in a naval operation with the Spanish against the French. The English attacked the French and Breton fleets in the English Channel, while the Spanish attacked them in the Bay of Biscay. The ship also helped escort English troops over to France when, in 1522, the countries went head to head once more.

 • There were 415 crew members listed on board the Mary Rose in 1513, but during wartime operations there would have been more on board – numbers could have reached around 700 in total, says the Mary Rose Museum. Even with the normal crew size of around 400, conditions would have been very crowded. Most people on board were in their late teens or early twenties.

 • The Mary Rose sank in July 1545 in the battle of the Solent. Hundreds of men aboard the ship drowned, and only around 25 survived. There could be a number of reasons why she sank while turning: human error, overloading, a gust of wind that made the ship unstable, or a cannonball fired by the French. The most likely reason for the loss of the ship was human error, says the Mary Rose Museum.

 • The ship was discovered in May 1971, and raised in 1982. As the Mary Rose sank into very fine silt, much of the ship and the items on board – including tools owned by onboard carpenters, ointments and medicine flasks used by the surgeon, and a large number of wooden dishes – are very well preserved.

 • The remains of a small dog named Hatch were found on board the ship. Although he can’t be attributed to a specific breed, most of which originated after 1545, he is classed as a terrier-type, most closely related to the Jack Russell. Hatch's remains went on display four years ago at the Mary Rose Museum.

 • Approximately 19,000 artefacts have been recovered from the wreck site, which has taken more than 30 years to excavate. Now in the final stages of conservation, she today sits in the Mary Rose Museum in Portsmouth. Source: the Mary Rose Museum

7 things you (probably) didn’t know about Henry VIII's flagship the Mary Rose

History Extra

Henry VIII's Mary Rose (© 19th era/Alamy)

• For 34 years the Mary Rose was Henry VIII’s flagship. Faced with the threat of the French navy and a strong Scottish fleet, Henry started building up his naval firepower as soon as he became king. Built in Portsmouth, the Mary Rose was launched in 1511.
• The Mary Rose first saw battle in 1512, in a naval operation with the Spanish against the French. The English attacked the French and Breton fleets in the English Channel, while the Spanish attacked them in the Bay of Biscay. The ship also helped escort English troops over to France when, in 1522, the countries went head to head once more.
• There were 415 crew members listed on board the Mary Rose in 1513, but during wartime operations there would have been more on board – numbers could have reached around 700 in total, says the Mary Rose Museum. Even with the normal crew size of around 400, conditions would have been very crowded. Most people on board were in their late teens or early twenties.
• The Mary Rose sank in July 1545 in the battle of the Solent. Hundreds of men aboard the ship drowned, and only around 25 survived. There could be a number of reasons why she sank while turning: human error, overloading, a gust of wind that made the ship unstable, or a cannonball fired by the French. The most likely reason for the loss of the ship was human error, says the Mary Rose Museum.
• The ship was discovered in May 1971, and raised in 1982. As the Mary Rose sank into very fine silt, much of the ship and the items on board – including tools owned by onboard carpenters, ointments and medicine flasks used by the surgeon, and a large number of wooden dishes – are very well preserved.
• The remains of a small dog named Hatch were found on board the ship. Although he can’t be attributed to a specific breed, most of which originated after 1545, he is classed as a terrier-type, most closely related to the Jack Russell. Hatch's remains went on display four years ago at the Mary Rose Museum.
• Approximately 19,000 artefacts have been recovered from the wreck site, which has taken more than 30 years to excavate. Now in the final stages of conservation, she today sits in the Mary Rose Museum in Portsmouth.

Gold pieces retrieved from Thames River most likely part of elaborate Tudor era hat

Ancient Origins

Beautifully fashioned little gold fasteners that probably adorned a hat or clothing in the 16^th century have been turned up by eight people with metal detectors scanning the mud along the Thames River in London over several years. An archaeologist speculates the 12 pieces found over the years, all in the same place, belonged to a single piece of headgear that was blown into the river by a gust of wind. They think the person wearing the hat may have been on a ferry in the Thames.
The media are calling it a treasure hoard of Tudor gold, dating to 1500 to 1550, when the main way to get across the river was by ferry.
“Such metal objects, including aglets – metal tips for laces – beads and studs, originally had a practical purpose as garment fasteners but by the early 16th century were being worn in gold as high-status ornaments, making costly fabrics such as velvet and furs even more ostentatious. Contemporary portraits, including one in the National Portrait Gallery of the Dacres, Mary Neville and Gregory Fiennes, show their sleeves festooned with pairs of such ornaments,” says The Guardian in an article about the finds.
The fabric has long since worn away to nothing. Some of the pieces are inlaid with little bits of colored glass or enamel. In total they comprise a very small amount of gold but are legally treasure that must be reported to a British government finds officer, in this case Kate Sumnall of the London Museum. The museum hopes to acquire the pieces and put them on display after a valuation and inquest.

Jane Seymour painting by Hans Holbein, 1537; note the gold worked into the fabric along the collar and the gold and jewels and pearls on the hat. Jane Seymour was briefly queen of England as Henry VIII’s wife. (Photo by UVM.edu)

It is Sumnall’s theory that wind blew a fantastic, gold-adorned hat off someone’s head into the river. She said the pieces are of very fine quality workmanship.
“These artefacts have been reported to me one at a time over the last couple of years,” she told the Guardian. “Individually they are all wonderful finds but as a group they are even more important. To find them from just one area suggests a lost ornate hat or other item of clothing. The fabric has not survived and all that remains are these gold decorative elements that hint at the fashion of the time.”
The website A History of Tudor Clothes, written by Tim Lambert, says all people of the era in England wore wool, poor people coarse wool and the rich fine wool. Fashion was important to the rich, the article says.
Rich men wore trousers that were called breeches, tight jackets called doublets and a jerkin over that. They also wore a gown over the jerkin or later a cape or cloak.
Women wore a shift or chemise of wool or linen under their dresses, which were also of wool or linen. The dress was in two parts—a skirt and a bodice. Sleeves were detachable and were held on with laces. Over all this, working women wore linen aprons. The clothing was woven with silk or even gold or silver thread.
Lambert writes that all Tudors wore hats, in fact by law after 1572 all men except nobles were required to wear a woolen cap on Sundays.
In the 16^th century, buttons were decorative because most clothing was held together by pins or laces. Furs used in clothing included cat, beaver, rabbit, bear, polecat and badger. Dyes were vegetable-based and fixed with chemicals called mordants. Bright red, purple and indigo were the most expensive, so the poor wore brown, yellow or blue.
It’s rather unsavory to consider, but people who could afford it wore a container of sweet spices on their belts to cover up the smells in the streets. Lambert says, however, that it’s a myth that people of Tudor times were dirty and stunk. They tried to keep clean, he writes, but many people did have lice. Many lice combs were found on the wreck of the Mary Rose, he writes.

A 1547 illustration of the carrack Tudor ship Mary Rose, upon which were found many lice combs. (Wikimedia Commons)

Featured image: Twelve gold pieces of very fine workmanship have been discovered in the mud of the River Thames over the years by people with metal detectors. (PA photo)
By Mark Miller

History Trivia - The Tudor warship Mary Rose capsizes

July 19

1545 The Tudor warship Mary Rose capsized and sank off Portsmouth with the loss of approximately 500 men.

1553 Lady Jane Grey was replaced by Mary I of England as Queen of England after only nine days of reign.

1588 Anglo-Spanish War: Battle of Gravelines – The Spanish Armada was sighted in the English Channel.

Santa Maria! Five more shipwrecks that came back from the deep

Marine archaeologists think they have located the remains of Christopher Columbus's flagship, the Santa Maria, off the coast of Haiti. It joins an impressive list of other historic wrecks that have been found recently

Christopher Columbus's flagship, the Santa Maria, and his other two ships in a dramatic artist's impression. Photograph: Alamy

 

Queen Anne's Revenge

Perhaps the most famous of all pirate ships began life in 1710 as a Royal Navy frigate called the Concord. Almost immediately after launch, she was captured by the French and converted into a slave ship, before being captured again by the pirate Ben Hornigold near Martinique. Hornigold put her under the command of one of his men, Edward Teach, soon to be known as Blackbeard. Just one busy year later, Blackbeard ran the ship aground off the coast of North Carolina, where it remained undisturbed until being rediscovered by the private research firm Intersal in 1996. Since then, many items have been salvaged, including a motley assortment of cannons, and the 1.4-tonne anchor.

Quedagh Merchant

Originally an Armenian-built Indian merchant vessel, this ship became famous when it was captured by Captain Kidd in 1698 near Kochi in the Arabian Sea. A privateer with instructions to loot enemy vessels, Kidd was subsequently considered a pirate, and hid the Quedagh Merchant before being captured and hung, after a sensational trial. For centuries, the ship's unknown location was a matter of legend, until it was at last found off Catalina Island in the Dominican Republic in 2007. Incredibly, it lay in shallow clear water close to the shore, and had never been touched.
A reconstruction of the day the Mary Rose sank in the Solent in 1545. Photograph: Richard Schlecht/National Geographic/Getty Images

The Mary Rose

It was never very far away – only in the Solent – but Henry VIII's beloved warship proved remarkably elusive after it sank in 1545, while leading an attack on the invading French fleet. A group of specialist salvors from Venice managed to reclaim some bits and pieces straight away, but soon afterwards it was forgotten. In 1836, the diving pioneers John and Charles Deane returned after a fishing net snagged on part of the wreckage, but they promptly lost the location again after recovering a few timbers and weapons. Finally, in 1971, the ship was found again, and then famously raised in 1982. It is now on display in Portsmouth.

HMS Beagle

In itself, the ship that launched the theory of evolution was unremarkable. Built as a basic 10-gun Royal Navy brig in 1820, it was soon refitted as a survey vessel, in which state it carried Darwin on his momentous voyage to South America in 1831. Years later, it began to be used as a Customs and Excise patrol boat, catching smugglers off the Essex coast, and was last heard of being sold for scrap (for £525) in 1870. Yet recent research appears to have found most of it buried under 12ft of mud in the river Roach. If correct, the Beagle could, in theory, be excavated and one day put on show.
HMS Beagle Photograph: Bettmann/Corbis

HMS Victory

Nelson's flagship of the same name never sank, and today is in Portsmouth as a museum ship. Its predecessor, however, was one of the Royal Navy's greatest warships until it disappeared in a storm near the Channel Islands in 1744. In 2008, it was found by the underwater treasure-hunting company Odyssey Marine, which plans to raise the wreck in the near future. As their website says: "Research indicates that the Victory sank with a substantial amount of specie aboard." Specie means coins – specifically here gold and silver – which might today be worth as much as £500m.
• This article was amended on 14 May 2014. The Mary Rose was raised in 1982, not 1980 as a previous version said.

http://www.theguardian.com/science/shortcuts/2014/may/13/five-great-shipwrecks-back-from-deep-santa-maria

History Trivia - Henry VIII's flagship Mary Rose raised to the surface after 437 years at the bottom of the Solent.

October 11

 

1303 Pope Boniface VIII died. He instituted the first Jubilee (special year of remission of sins and universal pardon).

 

1521 Pope Leo X granted Henry VIII the title Defender of the Faith for a tract defending Catholicism.

 

 1542 Thomas Wyatt died. The English lyrical poet is credited with introducing the sonnet into English.

 

1551 John Dudley, Earl of Warwick was made the Duke of Northumberland.

1537 Lady Jane Grey, Britain's nine day queen, was born, the exact date is not known.

 

1982 Henry VIII's flagship Mary Rose was raised to the surface after 437 years at the bottom of the Solent. After a long and successful career, the Mary Rose sank on July 19, 1545 off Portsmouth, during an engagement with a French fleet which had attacked the English coast. The reason for the sinking is still a mystery, although many theories exist. Human error and indiscipline amongst the crew are possible explanations. Almost all of the men on board drowned.