Wanted: All-in-one landlord, pub manager and monarch for remote U.K. island
Have you ever wanted to be crowned king or queen? A council in England might have a job for you.
But if you take the gig, you'll move to a remote British island with a population of exactly two, get drenched with beer, and be the caretaker and landlord of a centuries-old pub.
Oh, and the monarch title is purely symbolic.
The person who gets the job will also be crowned monarch of the island, Murphy said. It's not an official part of the council's job description, but Murphy says it's tradition.
It dates back to 1487, when Lambert Simnel, a 10-year-old pretender to the throne of England, camped overnight on Piel with 4,000 mercenaries on their way to London to claim the throne.
They were roundly defeated during the Battle of Stoke Field in Nottinghamshire, the last battle of the Wars of the Roses. The young would-be king was spared and pardoned, and later went on to be King Henry's falconer.
Incidentally, Lambert Simnel was pretending to be Richard, Duke of York, one of the two princes in the tower that mysteriously disappeared under suspicious circumstances in 1483.
Fast forward to the mid-1800s and "some of the local fishermen were sitting in the bar with a glass of very strong lemonade, and they were thinking, 'Well, if we can't have a future king of England, we'll have our own king of the island,'" Murphy said.
"So a decision was made that any landlord or any landlady, in turn, will be knighted king."