History
In the 18th century, the owner of Hawkstone Manor built a park in an adjacent garden. A neighbor named Thomas Wright began adding antiques. In 1920, workmen hired to move some statues located in a cave in the park accidentally broke a statue of St. John and the cup fell out of a hidden compartment. Believing it to be unremarkable, it was taken to the manor itself and placed among other objects. However, in 2004, Graham Phillips, who was working on a book about King Arthur, identified it as the Holy Grail based on clues which suggested Wright had hidden the cup in the park. Phillips deciphered the clues and concluded that the cup now known as the Hawkstone Grail was the cup Wright had written about.
The Hawkstone Grail was featured prominently in The Real Da Vinci Code, a documentary presented by Channel 4 in Britain. The documentary was produced to examine claims made by American author Dan Brown in his worldwide best-selling novel, The Da Vinci Code, which Brown contends is based on actual events and that organizations cited in the book are factual. He reiterates a theory that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married; the union produced a daughter. The real Holy Grail is not a cup, but the womb of Mary Magdalene, and that there are possible living descendants of their child.
However, host Tony Robinson appeared unimpressed with the Hawkstone Grail and Phillips' story, stating that, "No, we can do better than this, can't we?"
Read more about this topic: Hawkstone Grail
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“In nature, all is useful, all is beautiful. It is therefore beautiful, because it is alive, moving, reproductive; it is therefore useful, because it is symmetrical and fair. Beauty will not come at the call of a legislature, nor will it repeat in England or America its history in Greece. It will come, as always, unannounced, and spring up between the feet of brave and earnest men.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are rather of the nature of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.”
—Aristotle (384–322 B.C.)
“History is more or less bunk. It’s tradition. We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker’s damn is the history we make today.”
—Henry Ford (1863–1947)