LONDON, ENGLAND—Parts of Greenwich Palace, where Henry VIII as well as his daughters Mary I and Elizabeth I were born, have been unearthed, according to The Wharf. Two rooms from the Tudor Palace were discovered during construction of a new visitor center at the Old Royal Naval College in southeast London. The rooms are thought to have been used as kitchens, a brewhouse, or for doing laundry. One of the rooms included a lead-glazed tiled floor, and the other had what are thought to have been “bee boles,” pockets in the wall where beehive baskets could be kept during the colonies’ winter hibernation. In the summer, when the hive baskets were kept outdoors, the cavities may have been used to keep food and drink cool. The palace was built in the fifteenth century and included state apartments, a chapel, courtyards, gardens, and a jousting area, but was demolished in the seventeenth century under the Stuarts and ultimately replaced with Greenwich Hospital, which today houses the Old Royal Naval College. “To find a trace of Greenwich Palace, arguably the most important of all the Tudor palaces, is hugely exciting,” said Duncan Wilson, chief executive of Historic England. For more, go to “Letter from England: Stronghold of the Kings in the North.”
