Perhaps the one thing people agree on, even those who like to snub Wikipedia for its own content, is that it is a marvelous place to find sources and other materials. Me, I don't feel the need to pooh-pooh the 'pedia and make a show of superiority to it - maybe I'm Just That Confident in myself that publicly snipping on websites seems pointless to me. Whatever the case, I do sometimes read the 'pede.
Today, catching up on some of the Ricardian goodness, I ran across a quote which interested me and got the creative (speculative, if not defensible) brain churning. The quote was from Welsh poet Gut-or Glen, telling of Sir Rhys ap Thomas, the Welsh soldier who may have struck Richard down, and it goes like this:
"(K)illed the boar, shaved his head"
Clovis I, as I have mentioned before, was perhaps the most famous of the reges criniti, the Long-Haired Kings. The depth of power invested in a king's hair was explicit, public, and a strong enough part of the charisma of rule, during Late Antiquity, that tales are told of tonsuring and shaving those who held or wished to hold Frankish thrones. These make great legends, and the Frankish dynasties which eventually became France were unsubtle for centuries upon the point of emasculating any pretentions to rule by whacking off the hair (perhaps not scrupling to take heads) of those who presumed to crown themselves with more than their own hair.
So, because I am a writer and not a historian, and have the freedom for such musings, I'm struck (less than Richard was ...) by the phrasing above. Spoken just a few centuries earlier, its import would have been equally as punnish, just as deadly, but layered with a sense of royal outrage and retribution.
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