Ancestry

 

I thought my family tree was just a wizened small twig with nothing much to speak of until I started my genealogy search. It seems that my family dates back to this man ... ... ...

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Visiting my Ancestor

In Britain we have many castles. Not just up North and in Scotland, but also in every part of the country whether East and West or North and South. Some are still standing as in the photo above, whilst others are either just the outer shell of what was once a castle, or just a pile of bricks and stones beaten down by years of history.

Lately I visited a castle where purportedly my ancestor, the medieval King and Knight, Baron Sir Richard the Lion Liver, once lived. Click the crest on the right to learn more about him.

As soon as I entered the castle I was greeted by this armour which I understand he once wore when in battle, and also at the many jousting tournaments which he always won.

Note the lovely colourful plumage at the top of the helmet. Which explains why I always wear a cowboy hat with a feather on the side.

In one of the castle rooms we entered there was a table with two skulls side by side in a glass case. One skull was small and the other one much larger. They belonged to my ancestor, Sir Richard the Lion Liver.

       Sir Richard as a young child.     Sir Richard as an adult years later.

In another room we saw where the Knights of Sir Richard's triangular table used to hang their coat of arms.

In yet another room there was this intriguing painting with a story about Sir Richard written below it.

 Apparently, years ago Sir Richard fell down the stairs after a night's drinking with his knights and hurt his back. For ages he was bent with pain and walked with a stick as in the painting above. Eventually, he was persuaded to go to Gherkin the Wizard for a cure. After about five minutes with Gherkin, he came out walking straight and proud as if nothing had ever gone wrong.

Everyone cheered and danced with joy believing it to be a miracle. Sir Richard explained it was no miracle at all. Gherkin the Wizard had given him a longer stick.

The following photo best explains a famous story about my ancestor Sir Richard the Lion Liver.

Look at the windows on the left how narrow they are and shaped like a cross. This is deliberate so that the soldiers inside the castle could shoot arrows with their acurate crossbows without being seen by the attacking army outside, or shot back by the enemies' bowmen.

One night Sir Richard came back after a night's drinking with his knights at the local pub. He found the front door, (on the right of the picture where the visitors are), locked shut and his wife had gone to bed in a huff ... or was it a minute and a huff? I can't remember.

Anyway, Sir Richard did not want to ring the door bell and wake up the dragon inside ... or his wife for that matter. So he asked one of his servants to enter the castle from the back door. Now Sir Richard was a very accurate shot with the crossbow, even after a lot of drinking. So he said to his servant that he would shoot an arrow from outside through the second narrow window you see on the left. The servant inside the room would pull the arrow to which was attached a string, which was in turn attached to a rope. He would pull the rope inside the window and tie it to the furniture securely so that Sir Richard could climb into the castle.

All worked relatively well. Sir Richard shot the arrow through the window and it hit the servant waiting inside the room in the leg. The servant stifled a painful cry so as not to wake up the dragon. He didn't much care for his master's wife anyway.

He then tied the rope to the furniture so that Sir Richard could climb up. Once up Sir Richard discovered that the window was too narrow for anyone to get in.

So he got down again and asked his servant to let him in through the back door.

If you've enjoyed this tale about my visit to the castle half as much as I have enjoyed telling it; then I have enjoyed it twice as much as you.

Richard who?

Ever since I have put the above Coat of Arms on my sidebar on the right I have been inundated with letters and e-mails asking me what it is and what it stands for.

I do not lie. I have received at least one e-mail enquiring about the Coat of Arms and a phone call asking if they could speak to Sandra. As I do not know who Sandra is I assumed they had dialled the wrong number; but the caller assured me this could not be so because Sandra does not have a phone. I also had a door-to-door salesman asking me if I wanted to buy a new door. He had a small suitcase full of samples but I declined to buy any because they were all too small for the apertures in our house.

Anyway, back to the Coat of Arms. This dates back to medieval times and is the family crest of one of my ancestors - the Baron Sir Richard The Lion Liver - as you can see from the depiction of a lion wearing a crown.

The crown is significant because Baron Sir Richard The Lion Liver was indeed a king of a northern land where men were strong and big and tough and women told them what to do. Can you imagine ... big red beards covering savage warrior faces, mighty muscles bulging from their arms and a six-pack that looked more like a twelve-pack on their chest? And the men were just as masculine!

My brave and courageous ancestor was known as The Lion Liver on account of his excessive drinking which surprised many doctors of the time as to how his liver survived all that alcohol. Apart from mead, which is an alcoholic medieval drink made from honey, Sir Richard also drank all sorts of wines and spirits. They may not have had whisky or vodka at the time but he certainly drank spirits just as potent as the ones we have today, if not more so.

As a Baron and Knight in his own right, he usually fought many jousting tournaments up and down the land, where he charged another knight on horseback with a lance, with an aim to unseat him from his horse.

Because Sir Richard used to drink so much he was not that steady on his feet, never mind on horseback. So his aids used to lift him on the horse and then tie his legs together underneath the horse's belly.

Since horses at these tournaments were always covered with large decorative blankets depicting the colours of the knight rider, no one noticed that brave Sir Richard was literally tied to the horse. Consequently, he won every jousting tournament in the land and was never un-seated from his horse; even that time when sadly his horse collapsed and died and Sir Richard was still seated upon him. He won a special medal on that day as his horse was carried away with him still seated upon it.

Sir Richard The Lion Liver is best known for the invention of the triangular table. As King of his own northern kingdom, he shunned King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table in Camelot and decided to create his own army of valiant knights.

He designed his own triangular table because Sir Richard had only two knights in his army, so a triangular table suited him best as the three of them could sit around it quite comfortably and none of them would think himself superior to the others; (although he knew full well that he was!)

In a famous battle against one of his fiercest enemies Sir Richard showed his prowess as an incredible warrior and strategist. The advancing enemy army had surrounded his castle and planned to take it at night when all the soldiers and villagers were fast asleep. Sir Richard ordered his peasants to collect and bring every cat they had in their towns and villages. In those days cats were in abundance to keep down the rats and vermin population. Sir Richard commanded that all cats which were not black by nature had to be dyed black using a mixture of coal dust and oil.

At midnight precisely he opened the castle gates and the villagers let all the cats run loose. At the same time his soldiers played the violin as loudly, and as badly, as they could. The cacophony of thousands of screeching violins and hundreds of black cats running wildly everywhere frightened the attacking army and their horses who thought Sir Richard had unleashed evil spirits to attack and kill them. They all ran away not to be seen ever again.

That episode gave rise to the superstition still prevalent today: It is bad luck to walk under a black cat.

As already mentioned, Sir Richard The Lion Liver drank so much that he had little blood in his alcohol circulation system. Once during a medical check up he was asked to give a urine sample and it had an olive and a little umbrella in it.

He died at the fermented old age of 101 and according to his wishes he was cremated on a funeral pyre on the grounds of his castle. It took the fire brigade a fortnight to put the fire out. They then had to beat his liver with a stick to stop it wriggling around in search for a drink.

And that's Sir Richard The Lion Liver - a great ancestor of mine whose Coat of Arms is proudly displayed above. Let's drink to his good health.