Æthelwulf was King of Wessex from 839 to 858. He was defeated in 843 in battle against the Vikings at Carhampton in Somerset, but achieved a major victory at the Battle of Aclea in 851. He went on pilgrimage to Rome in 855, leaving his eldest surviving son Æthelbald to act as King of Wessex in his absence. Æthelwulf stayed a year in Rome; on his way back he married Judith, the daughter of the West Frankish King Charles the Bald. When Æthelwulf returned to England, Æthelbald refused to surrender the throne, and Æthelwulf agreed to divide the kingdom, taking the east and leaving the west in Æthelbald's hands. Before the twenty-first century Æthelwulf's reputation among historians was poor: he was seen as excessively pious and impractical, and his pilgrimage was viewed as a desertion of his duties. Now historians see him as a king who consolidated and extended the power of his dynasty, and dealt more effectively than most of his contemporaries with Viking attacks. He is regarded as one of the most successful West Saxon kings, who laid the foundations for the success of his son, Alfred the Great. (Full article...)
... that the naturalisation of Handel(pictured) as a British citizen came via an Act of Parliament which required him to enter into communion with the Church of England?
... that cheese slaw is sometimes used as a topping for hot dogs?
The Mercator projection is a cylindrical map projection presented by the Flemish geographer and cartographer Gerardus Mercator in 1569. Because it represents paths of constant course as straight lines, it long served as the standard map projection for nautical purposes. However, it distorts the size of objects as the latitude increases: thus areas in the mid-latitudes appear significantly larger than their actual size relative to those the equator, and those near the poles are even more exaggerated. Most modern atlases no longer use the Mercator projection for world maps or for areas distant from the equator, preferring other cylindrical projections, or forms of equal-area projection.
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