On this day ....

Today's blip has no story, just a little excitement, I'll be using this little beauty in the next couple of days.

On this day the UK driving test was introduced (1934) & Ludwig van Beethoven died (1827).

Today, we also remember a remarkable woman, born Margaret Middleton, the daughter of a wax-chandler. Aged 15 she married John Clitherow, a butcher, in 1571 and bore him three children. She converted to Roman Catholicism and became a friend of the persecuted Roman Catholic population in the north of England. She educated children in her home and regularly held Masses in the Shambles in York, where she lived and worked. She was arrested and called before the York assizes for the crime of harbouring Roman Catholic priests. She refused to plead, preventing a trial that would force her children to testify. She was executed by being crushed to death on Good Friday 1586. The two sergeants who should have killed her hired four beggars to do it instead. She was stripped and had a handkerchief tied across her face then laid out upon a sharp rock the size of a man's fist, the door from her own house was put on top of her and slowly loaded with an increasing weight of rocks and stones (the small sharp rock would break her back when the heavy rocks were laid on top of her). Her death occurred within fifteen minutes, but her body was left for six hours before the weight was removed. After her death her hand was removed, and this relic is now housed in the chapel of the Bar Convent, York. Gruesome times, her death resulted in an outcry from Elizabeth 1.

These locations in York are very familiar to us & raise all sorts of thoughts.