Dr Francis Young, Discover and Read the Best of Twitter Threads by @DrFrancisYoung

Dr Francis Young

DrFrancisYoung

One of the most remarkable stories in the history of European diplomacy is surely that of Vincas Balickas, a Lithuanian diplomat who arrived in London in 1938 - and ended

#OTD in 1257, on the Feast of the Translation of St Edmund, and having first visited the shrine of St Edmund in Bury St Edmunds, Richard Duke of Cornwall embarked

A curious feature of Lithuanian religion is that Lithuanian pagans seem to have adopted the name Jurginės (St George's Day) for this day even before their conversion to Christianity. Lithuanians

I think it’s time to talk about the time James II and VII nearly became King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was an elective double

It's really a bit disappointing that Peterborough doesn't have a restaurant or takeaway called 'Upon This Wok'. In a city that's dedicated to the patron saint of all you can

You’ve heard of the Norman Conquest in 1066; but have you heard about the Lithuanian invasion of England in 1069? Buckle up… (thread) If you read the standard Oxford edition

The Teutonic Knights were almost comically bad at what they were actually supposed to do, i.e. converting the pagan Balts to Christianity The Prussians, Latvians and Estonians hated the Knights

I've been thinking about heritage collections lately (whether archives, museum collections, or built heritage), and the problem of 'presentism' - the prevailing popular view, hard to eradicate, that these things

This is an absolutely extraordinary judgement from a @churchofengland consistory court, ruling that the Irish language cannot appear on a memorial on account of 'the passions and feelings connected with

For #scaryfairies I'm sharing some stories from my book 'Suffolk Fairylore', which goes into depth about the fairy traditions of one English county. First up, an attempted fairy abduction in

Why does #OakAppleDay matter? Personally, it isn't the political aspect that interest me but the extraordinary folkloric resonances. It's a sort of feast day of English folklore, a festival for

A language that very nearly came into existence in medieval England was what I call 'Normanglish', a kind of Norman French with English orthography and English pronunciation. We could also