New show in Oxford is full of dodgy prophets
A few years ago, I found myself in the Rare Books and Manuscripts Room of the British Library, reading a prophecy. The Tudor commonplace book containing ‘In the Yere of Our Lorde’, as the prophecy is known, can be dated to about 40 years after the events it describes – or, if this is really a copy of an older original, the events it predicts. There I read that, in 1483, ‘betwixt the departing of April and not far from May,/ The bull shall depart and pass away’. That, plausibly, was King Edward IV, who died – a little before this schedule, admittedly – at the end of April that year. The text also ‘predicts’ that ‘Wales shall bear arms and to Albion go’. That might just be a reference to the coming invasion of Henry Tudor, who landed in his native Pembrokeshire, again not quite to the text’s timetable...
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