Village Group AGM and talk by Jonathan Foyle

Why not join us for the Village Group AGM and see what we have been doing for the last year and have your say on what you would like us to be doing.

This year we are delighted to say that Jonathan Foyle will be giving a short talk on an interesting discovery.

In 2010, the elaborately carved, incomplete frame of an old oak bed was removed from the honeymoon suite of a hotel in Chester, to be auctioned. Three years later, Jonathan Foyle encountered it, expecting to use his training in history and archaeology to demonstrate a Victorian fake to its new owner. Instead, this talk reveals the evidence gathered over six years which shows it can only be an astonishing national treasure: the marriage bed of Henry VII and Elizabeth of York made by January 1486. It survived by leaving London in 1495 for Lancashire, then Yorkshire after the Civil War. In 1842 it fell into the hands of a Victorian fraudster who had no idea of its origin or meaning, but stripped and varnished it, and used it as the basis for a number of smaller, illiterate copies with arms of northern aristocrats, which he pretended to have discovered. The original royal crests of its royal inhabitants remain in his house. Now the story of this unique survival can be told.