Such bartering in exchange for securing routes is not uncommon; the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) fighters in Sierra Leone regularly consumed crack cocaine and brown-brown (heroin) that were transshipped through their territories.
Judging from the surviving documents it would appear that Charles VII did nothing at all about Joan of Arc … but [she] also swore that she herself was often visited by God, dressed in a white robe with a scarlet huke over it.
Books and stories have always been my escape route from busy London life. As a child I was often found reading – in a corner at home in Battersea, or in the library, on a bus, or the back of a car, drifting into the lives of others for hours on end, with only the act of turning the page occasionally jolting me back into reality.
Ingulphus, the chronicler of Croyland Abbey, mentions that a peal of seven bells was put up there in the tenth century, and that there was not such a harmonious peal in the whole of England; which implies that rings of bells were then common.
