Sabbatical

2007-08-17T15:33:00.001-07:00

New Blog

The Sabbatical blog is now complete. Now that I'm back in the United States, regular blogging will resume at http://rbhardy3rd.blogspot. com

2007-08-15T19:35:00.001-07:00

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2007-08-13T08:53:00.000-07:00

English Instructions for Installing New Toilet Seat Hardware

1. Offer up seat and lid centrally to holes in toilet. Mark edges of seat and lid to show the centres of both holes.
2. Fit the lid first. Line the right hand fitting centre upright C with the right hand mark you have made on the lid. Place the right hand arm A as illustrated against the lid.
3. Ensuring the marks are lined up as in 3, fit screws provided through the two holes in each fitting into the lid as illustrated.
4. The left hand fitting is a mirror image design to the right hand fitting so the arm A will now be on the left. Repeat 2 and 3.
5. Position seat centrally under lid and ensure marks line up with the centre upright C of each fitting, and offer the seat so that it butts up to the back of arm B of both left and right hand fittings. Fit screws provided as in (3) (screws not shown).
6. Screw the straight threaded bolts into one of the holes in the underside of the fitting (whichever is more suitable). Take care not to damage the thread.
7. Slide the washers onto the threaded bolts and offer the complete unit to the holes in the toilet so that the bolt protrudes below the holes.
8. Screw the nylon nuts to the protruding bolts and finger tighten only.

Note: I discovered that if you don't attempt to make sense of the instructions, the entire operation of replacing the toilet seat hardware takes about 15 minutes.

2007-08-12T00:38:00.000-07:00

Curtain Call

Last night, we went down to Stratford again for our last play of the season at the Royal Shakespeare Company: Henry IV, Part II. The performance was a little unusual this time. David Warner (Falstaff) was sick, and the understudy (Julius D'Silva) hadn't thoroughly learned the part yet. It's perfectly understandable: the same 34 actors have been performing 264 different roles in the RSC's complete cycle of the History Plays. Henry IV, Part II is the penultimate play to join the repertoire, and has only been running for two or three weeks, and this was the first time that understudies were needed. In any case, poor Julius D'Silva had to come out as Falstaff holding the script in his hand for the entire play. The remarkable thing was that, in many ways, he was better than David Warner—he has a clearer, louder voice, and a greater sense of vitality. He was given a well-deserved solo bow at the end for his remarkable high-wire act.

The last play of the History Plays cycle to join the repertoire will be Henry V, at the end of October. It would be tempting to fly back to England in March, when all eight plays in the cycle will be performed, in historical order, over three days. We've seen six of the eight plays, and one of the highlights of the year for me was seeing the three parts of Henry VI in a single 24-hour period.

Here are all of the plays we've seen at the Royal Shakespeare Company since the beginning of September 2006: The Tempest (with Patrick Stewart), Much Ado About Nothing, Coriolanus, Merry Wives: The Musical (with Judi Dench), A Midsummer Night's Dream, Henry VI, Parts I, II and III, The Seagull (with Ian McKellen), King Lear (with Ian McKellen), Richard II, Henry IV, Parts I and II.

2007-08-11T07:48:00.000-07:00

Warwick Castle

Mary, Michael, Peter and Clara on top of Guy's Tower at Warwick Castle, with St. Mary's church in the background. Peter is holding ice on his head, since he didn't heed the sign warning him of a low stone doorway.

Last night, Clara and I joined Mary and Steve for Henry IV, Part I at the Royal Shakespeare Company. Another brilliant production (with David Warner as Falstaff). Unfortunately, during the first act I started to feel a sore throat and congestion coming on, and I am now in the midst of my record-breaking fifth cold of the year. These aggressive British cold germs really like me.

The exterior of Warwick Castle.

Today, despite a slight fever, I joined Clara, Mary, Michael and Peter for a morning at Warwick Castle—our last tourist experience of the year. Warwick Castle, billed as "Britain's Greatest Medieval Experience," is astonishingly expensive, but we paid for our admission entirely with "Nectar points" earned each time we've shopped at Sainsbury's this year. The castle was begun in 1068 under orders from William the Conqueror, and became for centuries the home of the Earls of Warwick, including Richard Neville, "The Kingmaker," who played a crucial role in the Wars of the Roses.

The castle was heaving with people on a fine July Saturday morning (perhaps, according to the forecast, our last sunny day in England this time around). Highlights of the visit were the firing of the world's largest trebuchet, and a medieval tournament—complete with jousting. Below are some pictures: Guy's Tower with the tower of St. Mary's church in the background; the trebuchet; two pictures from the tournament; and the crowds leaving the tournament grounds.

Tonight, we go back to Stratford for Henry IV, Part II—our last play at the Royal Shakespeare Company for the year. Meanwhile, here's a new thing for me to worry about: the Met Office has issued a severe weather warning for the West Midlands for Wednesday, when we are due to fly out of Birmingham. Gale force winds are expected for parts of the UK.

2007-08-08T13:57:00.000-07:00

A Kensington Gardens Picnic and a West End Matinée

Twelve of us took the train down to London this morning for a picnic lunch in Kensington Gardens, followed by a matinée of The Sound of Music, Andrew Lloyd Webber's new production at the London Palladium. We had been hoping to see Connie Fisher as Maria—the role she won as the result of the BBC One programme How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria? in the fall. Instead, we saw her excellent understudy, Aoife Mulholland, who was also a contestant and semifinalist on the programme. Today's show was actually quite wonderful. Now, however, I am exhausted, so let's move on to the photographs: the once-controversial 1822 nude statue of Achilles in Hyde Park, honoring the Duke of Wellington; the Serpentine in Hyde Park, looking back toward the Houses of Parliament; our picnic in Kensington Gardens; Phoebe and Helen at the Peter Pan statue in Kensington Gardens; a sign whose advice we all followed.

From left to right: Phoebe, Clara, Peter, Will, Margaret (Maggie), Chris, Steph, Mary, Michael (not pictured: Helen, who is behind the tree, reading the first of three books she finished in the course of the day; me, taking the picture; Steve, who joined us later at the Palladium for the show)

2007-08-07T12:32:00.000-07:00

Quiet Evenings at Home

Each evening, the unread portion of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows grows smaller and Clara's sweater grows larger.

2007-08-07T09:08:00.001-07:00

Oxford Revisited

The Bodleian Library, Oxford University

This morning, Clara had an appointment to do some research at the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama (APGRD), so I decided to join her for another day in Oxford. While Clara settled down at the Ioannou Centre for Classical and Byzantine Studies on St. Giles, I walked over to the Bodleian Library to look at an exhibit of 15th-century manuscripts and early printed editions of Boccaccio, Petrarch and Dante. For me, the biggest thrill was seeing Petrarch's own copy of Suetonius's Lives of the Caesars, with Petrarch's own marginal annotations. There, in Petrarch's own handwriting, was the name "Cicero." Let me explain my geekish glee. Petrarch was such a fan of Cicero that he even wrote a letter to the long-dead Roman author—perhaps one of the first examples of "fan fiction" in the history of literature.

From the Bodleian, I walked over to the university church of St. Mary the Virgin and climbed the tower, which gave me good views over Oxford. Below are the tower of St. Mary's behind the Radcliffe Camera (the famous Palladian style annex of the Bodleian); the best view of the Radcliffe Camera, from the tower; and a view of the quadrangle of All Souls College from the tower.

From St. Mary's, I forced myself to resist the pull of Blackwell's Bookshop and met Clara for lunch at the café in the Ashmolean (carrot and leek soup, bread, elderflower pressé, and pear and vanilla cake). After lunch, we looked at Greek vases, then Clara returned to the APGRD while I wandered through the Ashmolean (stopping again to see the charming portrait of Camille Pissarro's little daughter, Jeanne), then walked over to the Museum of Natural History and the Pitt Rivers Museum. The natural history museum is where Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) used to take little Alice Liddell to show her the taxidermy, including the famous Oxford dodo, and tell her fantastic stories. Below are: Clara looking at Greek vases in the Ashmolean Museum; violins (the one in the center is a Stradivarius) in the Ashmolean; and the view the greets the visitor upon entering the Museum of Natural History.

The Pitt-Rivers Museum, in the rear of the Museum of Natural History, is quite cluttered and dimly lit, so it was not conducive to photography. Here's the best I could do, showing the enormous totem pole that dominates the museum. The museum contains an enormous Victorian anthropological collection, with everything from musical instruments to shrunken human heads (tsantsas) from South America.

2007-08-06T12:44:00.000-07:00

Book Review: Stella Gibbons, The Matchmaker (1950)

Stella Gibbons (1902-1989)

In 1995, Kate Beckinsale appeared as Flora Poste in a television adaptation of Stella Gibbons’ novel Cold Comfort Farm, and in the following year starred in the title role in a television adaptation of Jane Austen’s Emma. The casting of Beckinsale in these particular roles may have been fortuitous, or it may have been a clever attempt at intertextuality. Stella Gibbons herself wrote an introduction to an edition of Emma (1964), and the character of Flora Poste is similar in many ways to Austen’s Emma Woodhouse. Like Emma, Flora thinks she can successfully arrange other peoples’ lives.

The Matchmaker (1949) is Stella Gibbons’ postwar take on Emma, with Mrs. Alda Lucie-Browne in the role of the meddling Emma Woodhouse. After their home has been destroyed in an air raid, the family—Alda and her three young daughters—find themselves living in a bleak cottage in Sussex, with a middle-aged chicken farmer, Mr. Waite, as their nearest neighbor. Alda’s husband, Ronald, is absent for most of the novel as part of the occupying force in Germany. Once settled at Pine Cottage, Alda immediately sets about attempting to pair off her unmarried acquaintances in the neighborhood.

It has been suggested that there is a colonial subtext in Flora’s efforts, in Cold Comfort Farm, to improve the lives of the backwards, rural Starkadders. There is a sense of the “white man’s burden”—or rather, upper class Englishwoman’s burden—in the attitude of not only Flora Poste and Alda Lucie-Browne, but of Emma Woodhouse herself. This is not to suggest that Emma is an overt critique of British colonialism, but it certainly seems to understand the frame of mind behind colonialism—the idea that a certain type of English person should be given the task of sorting out the rest of the world. One can imagine Tony Blair, blundering into Iraq with George W. Bush, as a kind of geopolitical Emma Woodhouse, confident that he can arrange a marriage between Islamic tribalism and Western liberal democracy.

Gibbons' novel is full of lovely descriptions of the Sussex landscape, of the passing seasons, and of rural English life. Clearly, Stella Gibbons was a meticulous observer of the English countryside. When she describes one of the characters sorting though seeds and placing them into labeled envelopes—“the large curved seed of the marigold; and the poppy seed small as dust; the flat yellow grain in which dwells the wallflower; and the large, blue and purple, marbled seed of the runner bean”—I imagine the seeds before the writer’s eye, spread out on the desk as she writes. The descriptions of the landscape, too, have the vivid freshness of something seen just outside the window.

It’s a shame that The Matchmaker has long been out of print. On Amazon.com, there are only three second-hand copies available, starting at just over $94. Near the end of the novel, one of the characters walks through a small meadow, surrounded by coppices, and crosses a small stream; Gibbons comments:

Meadow, coppices and stream covered not more than five acres of land and were only two miles from the main road: but they proved, as they lay there under the grey evening sky in deep solitude, how small England is, and how secret still: in spite of holiday camps, and motor coaches and the horrifying increase in our numbers, how secret still!

I have had that feeling, as I’ve walked the footpaths this year, that England is still full of small, secret places, still holding onto their unspoiled beauty. And English literature is still full of small, secret treasures like The Matchmaker.

2007-08-06T05:24:00.000-07:00

My Last Amazon.co.uk Purchase

This morning's post brought the new CD, Eternal Light, from the young Welsh soprano Elin Manahan Thomas, featuring pieces by Handel, Vivaldi, Bach, Dowland and others. Elin Manahan Thomas is the soprano who provided the ethereal high Cs in Allegri's Miserere with The Sixteen at Tewkesbury Abbey back in March. The CD, on the Heliodor label (available only as n expensive import in the USA), begins with a short unaccompanied piece by Hildegard von Bingen that shows off Thomas's ravishingly pure and lovely voice. She's joined on the rest of the CD by The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, conducted by The Sixteen's Harry Christophers. The last of the sixteen selections on the CD—"Pur Ti Miro" from Monteverdi's L'Incoronazione di Poppaea, with countertenor Robin Blaze—is absolutely breathtaking, and leaves me gasping for more. You can hear excerpts from the CD at the soprano's website.

2007-08-05T09:42:00.000-07:00

Farewell to the Tipperary

This afternoon, Clara's sister Mary joined us for our last walk over for a pint at the Tipperary Inn. The sun was beating down upon us, but there was a pleasant breeze, and the Tipperary beer garden was waiting for us at the end of the four-mile journey. The four miles back, after a pint of Old Speckled Hen, were the hard part!

2007-08-05T03:35:00.000-07:00

English Summer

Today it's finally summer in England. The sky is clear and blue, and the thermometer is inching up toward 28°C (or 80°F). Yesterday, on my walk around the castle, the air hummed with the sound of tractors at work on the grain harvest. Yesterday evening, we had a cookout at Clara's sister's house—lamb and sausage kebabs, tabouli, strawberries and blueberries with cream—and this afternoon we're looking forward to a farewell visit to the beer garden at the Tipperary Inn. Meanwhile, here's a photograph I had meant to include in my post on Chichester. These lovely summery-looking light pastel houses stand on the road that leads into town from Fishbourne. If only there weren't so many cars spoiling the view.

2007-08-03T04:38:00.000-07:00

13 Days and Counting...

A lovely summer day. I slept well last night, and today I'm lazing around reading a novel in the flickering shadow of laundry drying in the back garden. The novel is Stella Gibbons' The Matchmaker (1950), which I found on a shelf in my sister-in-law's house. Inside the front cover, the book is inscribed with a woman's name and then: "On loan to S— H— [my brother-in-law]. August 1978." I guess the loan has become rather permanent.

Stella Gibbons' only novel to remain in print is the perennially popular Cold Comfort Farm, which was made into a charming film starring the lovely young Kate Beckinsale. There are only three copies of The Matchmaker available on Amazon.com, the least expensive of which costs $94.14. The situation is even worse for Rachel Ferguson's astonishing novel The Brontës Went to Woolworths, two paperback copies of which are available on Amazon starting at $167.19. Worst of all is the $2,475 price tag for the unique copy available on Amazon of Margery Sharp's first novel, Rhododendron Pie.

What is one to do when one develops a taste for authors like Stella Gibbons, Rachel Ferguson, and Margery Sharp? Acquire their books on permanent loan, I suppose.

One of the side effects of my reading is to make me look forward to returning to England and spending more time in the south. The Matchmaker takes place in West Sussex, about fifteen miles from the village of Amberley, to which two of the characters have just made a Sunday afternoon expedition and walked beneath the walls of the castle (now a luxury hotel, then a near-ruin). The novel is full of beautiful and affectionate descriptions of the Sussex countryside. This year in England, we favored the Midlands and the north of the country, with week-long holidays in the Lake District and North Yorkshire. Clara and I have talked about coming back in a couple of years and walking the South Downs Way.

2007-08-02T07:06:00.000-07:00

14 Days and Counting....

Clara and I packed up five boxes of books and took them to the Post Office, and sent them via surface mail for about £130. At the Post Office, a customer in another line finished his transaction and said to the woman behind the counter, "Have a nice day!" The woman behid the counter said, "I can tell you've spent time in America. Here people just grunt." As soon as the polite man left, the woman behind the counter started mocking him, repeating, "Have a nice day! Have a nice day!" in a voice like a parrot.

I woke up last night at midnight with my heart pounding. Unable to sleep, I went downstairs and found out on the internet about the collapse of the I-35W bridge over the Mississippi in Minneapolis.

In two weeks, we'll be back home in Northfield. This is what we're currently missing back home:

Today at Northfield's own English pub, The Contented Cow, volunteers will pose for a photographic reproduction of Renoir's painting Le Dejeuner des Canotiers (The Luncheon of the Boating Party, 1881). Too bad I won't be there to pose as the redhead in the yellow straw hat. I love Renoir. His Les Parapluies is one of my favorite paintings in the National Gallery.

Starting tomorrow evening, the Northfield Arts Guild is presenting Seamus Heaney's The Burial at Thebes (a version of Sophocles' Antigone) on the stage in Central Park.

2007-08-01T08:55:00.000-07:00

The Countdown Begins: 15 Days

Today, Clara and I walked to the University of Warwick through battalions of stinging nettles and returned Clara's library books. I washed and hung out three loads of laundry. I made piles of stuff on the bed and on the living room floor, and threw some stuff away, including a stack of old train tickets and Tube passes.

2007-07-31T13:32:00.001-07:00

Another Obscure English Writer's Memorial

I blogged several months ago about the ubiquity of writers in England. At the time, I had just come across a memorial in Tewkesbury Abbey to the obscure Victorian novelist Dinah Craik. At Salisbury Cathedral, I found this monument to the late Victorian nature writer, Richard Jefferies, who was a native of Wiltshire. For anyone interested in Jeffries, there's a good website here. I bought one of his books at a second-hand bookshop in Warwick, but I haven't read it yet. (Click to enlarge the photograph and read the inscription.) On the subject of obscure writers, I was chuffed to find that John Mutford, the moderator of an online book discussion blog called The Book Mine Set, has posted a thoughtful and complimentary review of my short-short story "Kumquat," which appeared a couple of years ago in The Plum Ruby Review.

2007-07-31T12:24:00.000-07:00

Last English Road Trip, Part 2: Fishbourne and Chichester

On Monday morning, we left the car parked at the highly- recommended Rokeby Guest House and walked to the Salisbury rail station to hop on a train to Fishbourne, Sussex, by way of Southampton and Chichester. Anyone who has reached Unit 3 of the Cambridge Latin Course will remember the ill-fated King Cogidubnus, the client king who meets his doom at the hands of the evil Salvius while helping to illustrate cum-clauses and gerundives. Fishbourne Roman Palace, about two miles east of Chichester in Sussex, may have been the home of poor old Cogidubnus in the first century AD. Today, Fishbourne is home of the most spectacular Roman mosaics in Britain.

The foundations of the palace, with its mosaic floors, were discovered in the early 1960s, when excavation was being done to lay a water main for a new residential development nearby. The find was amazing. Because of its position on England's south coast, Fishbourne was settled soon after the initial Roman occupation in 43AD, and its mosaic floors are among the oldest in the country—many of them laid by foreign artisans, since there were as yet no native artisans skilled in the art of mosaics (as there would be, later, when Cirencester in the Cotswolds became a center of mosaic production). In Fishbourne, you can see the development of mosaics from early black-and-white floors (see above) to polychrome floors such as Fishbourne's masterpiece, the mosaic of Cupid riding on a dolphin (at left). Fishbourne is also remarkable for its reconstructed Roman garden (below). The box hedges are planted in the actual excavated trenches from the Roman palace, and thus reproduce the exact design of the original Roman hedges.

From Fishbourne, it was a short walk into Chichester, where we visited Chichester Cathedral and then walked around the city walls. Chichester, like Lincoln and York, started out as a Roman military camp, built around two main streets (the cardo and decumanus) meeting at right angles in center of the city, surrounded by walls pierced by four gates at the four compass points. Chichester has remarkably complete medieval city walls, built upon Roman foundations. At left are Clara and the boys on the walls, near Priory Park, with the spire of the cathedral in the distance.

The interior (nave) of Chichester Cathedral.

Unlike Salisbury Cathedral, with its expansive close, Chichester Cathedral is pressed right up against the town. Inside, it reminded me more of Winchester Cathedral or Tewkesbury Abbey, with its earlier Norman architecture updated with later Gothic additions and ornamentations. Beneath the cathedral, recent excavations have revealed even more Roman mosaics from the Roman praetorium. (As in Lincoln, the cathedral seems to have been built over the old Roman military command center in the town.) Chichester is quite a lovely little cathedral, and is noted for incorporating some surprising bits of modern art, such as the stunning Marc Chagall stained glass window pictured below, dating from 1978.

One of the things I love about England is that poetry occasionally pops up in unexpected places. There is, for example, the Edward Thomas poem in the bus shelter in tiny Adlestrop, about which I blogged in January. There is also a little Philip Larkin poem in the train station in Coventry. And in Chichester Cathedral, there is another Larkin poem, inspired by a tomb in the cathedral of one of the early Earls of Arundel. On the tomb (carefully reconstructed in the nineteenth century), the earl has removed his gauntlet so that he can hold hands with his wife, who lies beside him. Here's Larkin's poem:

An Arundel Tomb

Side by side, their faces blurred,
The earl and countess lie in stone,
Their proper habits vaguely shown
As jointed armour, stiffened pleat,
And that faint hint of the absurd -
The little dogs under their feet.

Such plainness of the pre-baroque
Hardly involves the eye, until
It meets his left-hand gauntlet, still
Clasped empty in the other; and
One sees, with a sharp tender shock,
His hand withdrawn, holding her hand.

They would not think to lie so long.
Such faithfulness in effigy
Was just a detail friends would see:
A sculptor's sweet commissioned grace
Thrown off in helping to prolong
The Latin names around the base.

They would not guess how early in
Their supine stationary voyage
The air would change to soundless damage,
Turn the old tenantry away;
How soon succeeding eyes begin
To look, not read. Rigidly, they

Persisted, linked, through lengths and breadths
Of time. Snow fell, undated. Light
Each summer thronged the glass. A bright
Litter of birdcalls strewed the same
Bone-riddled ground. And up the paths
The endless altered people came,

Washing at their identity.
Now, helpless in the hollow of
An unarmorial age, a trough
Of smoke in slow suspended skeins
Above their scrap of history,
Only an attitude remains:

Time has transfigured them into
Untruth. The stone fidelity
They hardly meant has come to be
Their final blazon, and to prove
Our almost-instinct almost true:
What will survive of us is love.

2007-07-31T11:28:00.000-07:00

John Constable at Stonehenge

Here is a John Constable oil painting of Stonehenge, completed in 1836—the year before his death. According to information that I gleaned at the Salisbury Museum, Constable only started paining ruins, such as this, after the death of his wife in 1828. When she died, he told a friend, "the face of the World is totally changed to me." Constable (1776-1837) is one of the wonderful artistic discoveries I've made this year in England—a painter with whom I was not previously very familiar, and who is quintessentially English. Ironically, during his lifetime he was more popular in France than in England, but he refused to leave his homeland, telling a friend, "I would rather be a poor man in England than a rich man abroad." Notice in the painting that several of the large stones, or sarsens, have fallen; some of what one sees at Stonehenge today is a modern reconstruction, in which fallen stones have been replaced in their original positions.

2007-07-31T07:08:00.000-07:00

Our Last English Road Trip, Part 1: Stonehenge and Salisbury

Even with the crowds of tourists and the A303 whizzing past, Stonehenge is awe-inspiring. Something ancient and inexplicable dwells at Stonehenge. Both Turner and Constable painted Stonehenge, in watercolors that give the impression of something elemental rising out of the landscape. In Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Tess and Angel Clare spend a night at Stonehenge, and its brooding, mysterious presence inspired Thomas Hardy to do what he did best: paint the dark landscape in words.

The band of silver paleness along the east horizon made even the distant parts of the Great Plain appear dark and near; and the whole enormous landscape bore that impress of reserve, taciturnity, and hesitation which is usual just before day. The eastward pillars and their architraves stood up blackly against the light, and the great flame-shaped Sun-stone beyond them; and the Stone of Sacrifice midway. Presently the night wind died out, and the quivering little pools in the cup-like hollows of the stones lay still.

The downs around Stonehenge are broad and lovely under a mild July sky. The ridges are dotted with ancient burial mounds, or barrows, that immediately reminded me of the eerie scene in The Fellowship of the Ring in which the hobbits, soon after leaving Tom Bombadil's house, cross the treacherous Barrow Downs. In the photograph at left, you can see the "heel stone" (with three people standing in front of it), framed in one of the arches of Stonehenge. On the morning of the summer solstice, the sun rises directly above the heel stone and shines through that arch into the inner stone circle.

The mechanical clock in Salisbury Cathedral (ca. 1386).

It's remarkable that Stonehenge has been measuring out the months, and the risings and settings of the sun, for about four thousand years. Time was a theme in our last road trip of our English sabbatical year. We were conscious, the whole time, that in two weeks we will be leaving England. And at Salisbury Cathedral, we serendipitously stumbled upon the world's oldest mechanical clock, which has been ticking away inside the cathedral since 1386. The clock, which runs on weights and gears, has no face or hands, and only strikes the half-hours and hours.

From Stonehenge, we drove down to Old Sarum—the ancient hill fort where the city of Salisbury originally stood. There was a Norman castle on the hilltop, overlooking the original Salisbury Cathedral. In the 13th century, however, it became clear that a waterless hilltop was not a perfect place for a city, and Sarum was moved downhill to modern Salisbury. The foundation stone of the new cathedral was laid in 1220, and the spire (England's tallest) was finished a hundred years later. Since it was built in such a relatively short time, the cathedral is architecturally unified, being all in the Early English Gothic style. In his Notes from a Small Island, Bill Bryson (an American whom the Independent has called the nicest man in Britain) says: "There is no doubt in my mind that Salisbury Cathedral is the single most beautiful structure in England and the close around it the most beautiful space."

The tomb of William Longspee, Earl of Salisbury, who died in 1226.

In the Cathedral Close, there's an "outstanding" (Bill Bryson) little museum with exhibits on Stonehenge and the history of Salisbury, including three wonderful Turner watercolors of the cathedral. One of the oddities is a well-preserved rat discovered inside the skull of William Longspee, a 13th-century Earl of Salisbury, when his tomb was opened a century or two ago. It was suspected that Longspee may have met his death by poison, and, in fact, traces of arsenic were found inside the rat! Longspee is interred in an unusual tomb with a stone effigy resting on a wooden chest. He was the first person to be buried in the new cathedral.

Also in the Cathedral Close is Mompesson House (pictured below), a National Trust property that, unfortunately, we didn't have time to visit on this trip. For me, the chief interest in Mompesson House is that it appeared as Mrs. Jennings' London residence in the superb Ang Lee film of Sense and Sensibility (1995).

After wandering around the cathedral, we headed back to the Market Square for a pub meal. I had forgotten that the pub to visit in Salisbury is The Haunch of Venison (fabulously haunted, and home to a mummified hand cut off in a fight during a card game in the pub), so we ended up eating in a distinctly ordinary pub before rushing over to the local cinema to watch The Simpsons Movie. (In case you're wondering, Louise, I had a pint of Ringwood Best Bitter.)

The façade of the Odeon cinema, Salisbury.

The movie was the boys' reward for putting up with cathedrals and Roman ruins (see the upcoming entry). One of the best things about the experience was the cinema itself, the Odeon, which was worthy of Diagon Alley. The lobby is built into a fifteenth-century banqueting hall, with much of its original façade still intact. From this medieval front, the cinema (opened in 1931) magically widens to accommodate four large screens. The website Cinematopia says: "Surely one of the most remarkable and outright spectacular cinemas in the country, the Odeon Salisbury shows both what can be achieved in cinema design and what twenty-first century audiences are missing in their modern picture palaces."

Next: A day at Fishbourne Roman Palace and Chichester Cathedral.

In fifteen days, we will be reunited with our ridiculous dog, Pippi. This dog, much quieter than Pippi, lives on a tomb in Salisbury Cathedral.

2007-07-28T23:44:00.000-07:00

Tourists at Kenilworth Castle

Yesterday afternoon, Clara's Carleton College colleague, Jackson, took the train from Oxford to Leamington Spa and joined us for a tour of Kenilworth Castle. For those of you who don't know him, Jack spends most of his sabbaticals, and part of most summers, living in Oxford and researching Lactantius at the Bodleian. We spent a good long time at the castle, then had a couple of pints and a meal at the Famous Virgins and Castle pub on the High Street, before walking home in (yet more) rain and returning Jack to Leamington to catch a 2030 train back to Oxford. Clara was home in time to catch the last half hour of Bettany Hughes' television programme on Athens on Channel 4, featuring a brief talking-head segment with our graduate school friend Jay Samons, who is now the chair of the classics department at Boston University.

Above are Jack and Clara standing in front of Kenilworth Castle's Norman keep—begun in the twelfth century, it withstood the longest siege in English history in 1266 (when Henry III besieged the rebel barons following Simon de Montfort) and was finally "slighted" by Cromwell's forces in the Civil War of the mid-17th century.

The weather is looking better today for our trip down to Stonehenge and Old Sarum. We're spending two nights at a bed and breakfast in Salisbury, and tomorrow we'll be making a long side trip to Chichester to see Fishbourne Roman Palace. I'll report on this, our last big excursion of the sabbatical year, in a post on Tuesday or Wednesday.

2007-07-26T05:54:00.000-07:00

More Rain

It's raining heavily here in Kenilworth again. Here's the latest warning from the Met Office for the West Midlands:

Outbreaks of rain will be heavy at times during the rest of this morning and into the early afternoon. 15mm is likely in 3 hours in places. The public are advised to take extra care and refer to the latest Environment Agency, Floodline and 'Flood Warnings in Force', and to the 'Highways Agency' for further advice on traffic disruption on motorways and trunk roads.

Issued at: 1023 Thu 26 Jul

2007-07-24T06:50:00.000-07:00

Return to Old Milverton

An old postcard of Gaveston's Cross on Blacklow Hill, between Leek Wootton and Warwick.

The level of the Avon River has subsided north of Warwick. At noon today, I crossed the river on the footbridge tucked away behind the Saxon Mill pub in Guy's Cliff. Employees were hosing mud out of the pub, and it was clear that 24 and 48 hours earlier, the water had been much higher. All of that water has flowed south, through Warwick and Stratford and down to Tewkesbury, where the Avon joins the Severn. Water from the flooded river has seeped into Tewkesbury Abbey for the first time since the 18th century. One of the people buried in Tewkesbury Abbey is George, Duke of Clarence, the brother of Richard III who in Shakespeare is drowned in a vat of malmsey. His tomb is in a crypt beneath a grille that looks suspiciously like the grille of a storm sewer drain. I wonder if poor Clarence is drowning again in the muddy water of the Severn and Avon.

One of the things we seem to have left until it was too late this year was a trip down to Gloucester to visit Gloucester Cathedral. Gloucester, unfortunately, is now nearly inaccessible due to the flooding. Gloucester Cathedral is famous for the beautiful tomb of King Edward II. Fans of Braveheart will remember Edward II as the weakling son of the vicious English king, Edward Longshanks. Poor Edward had an unfortunate knack of choosing favorites who annoyed the rest of the English nobility. In 1312, his chief favorite was Piers Gaveston, 1st Earl of Cornwall. The obnoxious Gaveston found himself besieged by the Earl of Lancaster at Scarborough Castle (which we visited in April). He was eventually captured, imprisoned at Warwick Castle, and executed on Blacklow Hill. A cross (with an inscription composed by Dr. Samuel Parr of Hatton) used to stand on this site—where this slip road now comes off the northbound lane of the A46—which I pass on my walks to the Saxon Mill, Warwick, and Old Milverton.

Thanks to a tip from Marise, on LibraryThing, I was able this time to locate the grave of the writer Vera Brittain, author of the superb World War I memoir Testament of Youth. Below are pictures of the grave, and then a picture across the churchyard toward the wooded crest of Blacklow Hill.

2007-07-23T08:31:00.001-07:00

Britain's Worst Flooding in Modern History

from the Telegraph (click to enlarge)

2007-07-22T06:23:00.001-07:00

Flooding on the River Avon

Here are a couple of photographs taken from the footbridge over the River Avon just beyond the church in Ashow, a short walk east of Kenilworth. The bridge usually crosses the Avon and connects with the public footpath through the field on the opposite side of the river. At the moment, the bridge looks more like a dock than a bridge. From the second picture, you can see that the Avon, at least at Ashow, is now more lake than river.

All of this water will have to flow southeastward, and will join the similarly flooded Severn at Tewkesbury. (More on the flooding in Gloucestershire from the BBC here.) This is what Tewkesbury looks like now:

You can see Tewkesbury Abbey—my favorite English parish church—at the right of the photograph, on a little green island above the flood. We had been planning a last-minute trip to Gloucester, but at the moment flooding has submerged many of the roads that lead to Gloucester, and has disrupted rail service.

2007-07-21T05:19:00.001-07:00

200th post

More Flooding in the Midlands

Yesterday was another day of heavy downpours in England. The Midlands were particularly hard hit. Both the Severn and the Avon were flooded; Tewkesbury, where the two rivers come together, is at the moment virtually cut off. In Stratford-upon-Avon, water seeped into the Swan Theatre, prompting a cancellation of last night's performance of Macbeth. Train service into Oxford is temporarily suspended. Below are pictures of the main street through Chipping Campden in the Cotswolds: as it looked when we visited in September, and a detail of how it looked yesterday.

2007-07-20T16:23:00.000-07:00

Harry Potter Night

This was the scene in front of Browsers Books on Talisman Square in Kenilworth at 12:01 a.m. GMT Saturday, as the first copies of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows were flying magically off the shelves. Earlier in the evening, to make a proper holiday of it, Clara and Peter and I went to the Odeon in Coventry to see the film of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Now begins the long and arduous process of reading all 607 pages (in the English edition) out loud.

Update: Photographs of the much larger celebration back home in Northfield, Minnesota, can be viewed here. Among those queuing up in front of River City Books are our friends Jeff and Mary, whom we will be overjoyed to see in less than a month!

Muggle magic on the London Underground.

In the latest film, there's a wonderful little throw-away scene in which Harry and Mr. Weasley, on the way to Harry's trial at the Ministry of Magic, travel on the Tube. Mr. Weasley sees a Muggle use an Oyster Card—an electronic Tube pass that the user waves over a sensor—and tries to wave his hand over the sensor to open the barrier. The barrier, of course, doesn't open, and Harry (with more first-hand experience of the Muggle world) shows him how to put his ticket into the slot to open the barrier. I love Mr. Weasley's sense of wonder at the Muggle world. In the magical world, children spend seven years at Hogwarts learning, sometimes with great difficulty, to point a wand at something and make something happen. These ingenious Muggles simply wave an Oyster Card and the remarkable underground world of the Tube opens up to them. So much easier than flicking a wand with exactly the right wrist action and saying something in Latin with just the right tone of conviction.

2007-07-20T09:06:00.000-07:00

Blogging toward the future...

Twenty-seven days until we're back in the U.S.A., at which point this blog will have served its purpose. I've enjoyed blogging, though, and I'm considering whether to start a new blog once I'm settled back in Northfield. So, my legions of loyal readers, help me out with this:

(1) Should I continue to blog after the sabbatical ends?
(2) Should I stay here at Blogger, or follow the shifting tide over to Wordpress? To help you decide, this exact blog entry can also be found here, on the Wordpress platform. I've liked Blogger and have found it easy to use. Does anyone have a good word to put in for Wordpress?

Please, leave a comment to help me decide. Meanwhile, this blog will roll along for two or three more weeks. There's still an upcoming trip to Salisbury, Stonehenge, and Chichester to tell you about...

2007-07-18T08:17:00.000-07:00

Time to Come Home

From today's Wall Street Journal:

"Europe's 13-nation currency hit new highs against the dollar Wednesday and the British pound traded above $2.05 for the first time in 26 years amid ongoing worries about the U.S. economy driven by its weak housing market."

2007-07-15T01:25:00.000-07:00

The Peaks Revisited, Part V: Haddon Hall

Haddon Hall, the beautifully-preserved medieval manor house near Bakewell in Derbyshire, was first known to me from the Joseph Nash print of Elizabethan reveling in Haddon's fourteenth-century banqueting hall. Nash's print of the hall, with its minstrel's gallery, was appropriately featured on the cover of Jethro Tull's classic 1975 album Minstrel in the Gallery. A copy of the print also hangs in our dining room in Northfield. It was a thrill to stand in the actual room, although the revelers had been replaced with sedate mannequins wearing the costumes of Jane Eyre and Mr. Rochester. It was during a night of Elizabethan reveling, so the story goes, that Dorothy Vernon, the daughter of the Catholic lord of Haddon Hall, eloped with the upstart Protestant peer Sir John Manners. The story of the elopement may be fanciful, but it's true that Dorothy's father objected to her marriage to Manners. In time, however, he overcame his objections, and on his death Haddon Hall passed into the hands of Dorothy and her husband.

Sir John Manners was the son of the first Earl of Rutland, and in the seventeenth century, the Manners family closed up Haddon Hall like a time capsule and withdrew to their much grander home, Belvoir Castle, further east in Nottinghamshire. Then, in the 1920s, the 9th Duke of Rutland reopened Haddon Hall, much of which is unchanged since the Middle Ages. The family chapel still has magnificent medieval wall paintings (though these have faded to a monochrome, as in the example at left), and the kitchen was never modernized in the Victorian era, as is the case in so many historic homes that one can visit in England. Haddon Hall is currently the home of Sir Edward John Francis Manners, the second son of the 10th Duke of Rutland—and the thirty-first generation of the family who have owned Haddon Hall since the twelfth century. His elder brother, the 11th Duke, lives at Belvoir Castle.

This is the last installment in the series "The Peaks Revisited."

2007-07-14T09:00:00.000-07:00

The Peaks Revisited, Part IV: The Industrial Revolution on the Derwent River

Sir Richard Arkwright (1732-1792), with a small model of his water frame.

Heading south toward home from the Hope Valley, we stopped outside the little spa town of Matlock Bath to visit Sir Richard Arkwright's Masson Mills and its working textile museum. Sir Richard Arkwright was born to a working class family in Lancashire in 1732. As a lad, he was apprenticed to a barber, and enjoyed modest success as a barber and wig maker. In the 1760s, however, the fashion for wearing wigs was in decline, and young Dick was casting about for new prospects. That's when (according to the juicier version of the story), he fell in with a middle-aged clockmaker named John Kay. Kay was an associate of a man named Thomas Highs who, in 1767, had invented a water-powered mechanism for spinning cotton thread. Arkwright may have crossed paths with Kay at a pub, lubricated him with drink, and extracted from him the secret of the Highs' as-yet unpatented contraption. In due course, Arkwright himself patented the machine, known as a "water frame," and in 1771 built his first water-powered cotton mill in the Derwent Valley. Arkwright's fortune was made. A few years later, having tweaked the existing cotton carding machine, he was able to incorporate the entire cotton textile manufacturing process—from carding the cotton to weaving the cloth—under one roof. For this innovation, Arkwright is known as the Father of the Factory System.

Arkwright's Masson Mill opened in 1783, and was the showcase mill in his cotton empire that stretched across the Midlands. The Industrial Revolution was born. For English workers, this meant that water-powered machines would do the work that men and women had traditionally done as piece-work in their cottages or small shops. The introduction of the factory system meant that a traditional way of life came to an end. Arkwright also came to use James Watt's new coal-powered steam engine to pump water to his mill's water wheel, thus moving industry away from reliance on renewable energy sources like wind, water, and animal muscle. Finally, Arkwright imported most of his cotton from the American South, where it was produced by slave labor.

A power loom producing cotton cloth at Masson Mill.

One of the superintendents in one of Arkwright's cotton mills was a young man named Samuel Slater (1768-1835), a native of Derbyshire with a keen memory for details. Having memorized the construction of Arkwright's water frame, he emigrated to America in 1789, bringing with him the knowledge to build his own textile mill. He did this in defiance of British law, which forbade the exportation of industrial secrets. In America, Slater established his own mill on the Blackstone River in Pawtucket, Rhode Island (with the backing of local bigwig Moses Brown, whose family's money financed the university from which I received my Ph.D.). The Industrial Revolution—based on Slater's theft of Arkwright's patent, which was in turn stolen from inventor Thomas Highs—had come to America.

The Masson Mill was in continuous operation from 1783 until 1991, and reopened in 1999 as a "working textile museum." The old machines are working again in the old part of the mill (pictured above), and the new part of the mill houses a four-story factory outlet center. In 2001, the Derwent Valley was inscribed as a World Heritage Site for its importance as "the cradle of the Industrial Revolution."

2007-07-14T02:25:00.000-07:00

The Peaks Revisited, Part III: Peveril Castle

Peveril Castle's ruined Norman keep.

In the first years of the Norman occupation of Britain, William the Conquerer parceled out lands to the nobles who fought with him at Hastings. Among those knights was William Peveril, who was granted land in what is now the Peak District, where he built himself a castle. Sir Walter Scott, who was under the impression that William Peveril was an illegitimate son of the Conqueror, wrote a novel called Peveril of the Peak, set during the Popish Plot of 1678. The novel, published in 1823, begins:

"William, the Conqueror of England, was, or supposed himself to be, the father of a certain William Peveril, who attended him to the battle of Hastings, and there distinguished himself. The liberal-minded monarch, who assumed in his charters the veritable title of Gulielmus Bastardus, was not likely to let his son's illegitimacy be any bar to the course of his royal favour, when the laws of England were issued from the mouth of the Norman victor, and the lands of the Saxons were at his unlimited disposal. William Peveril obtained a liberal grant of property and lordships in Derbyshire, and became the erecter of that Gothic fortress, which, hanging over the mouth of the Devil's Cavern, so well known to tourists, gives the name of Castleton to the adjacent village."

Seth and Peter looking out from the keep.

Scott wrote that Peveril "chose his nest upon the principles on which an eagle selects her eyry, and built it in such a fashion as if he had intended it, as an Irishman said of the Martello towers, for the sole purpose of puzzling posterity." Today, little remains of the castle but some of the northern curtain wall and the ruined keep, built under Henry II in the 1170s. The castle, though in what would seem to be a highly defensible site, was never used as a military stronghold, and seems to have served mostly for administrative purposes, and as a base for hunting parties. Today, the castle offers a good climb up from Castleton, with fine views around the Hope Valley.

Next: The Industrial Revolution on the Derwent River and a Medieval Hall

2007-07-13T11:20:00.001-07:00

The Peaks Revisited, Part II: On the Trail of Jane Eyre

In the 14th and 15th centuries, the Eyres were lords of the manor in Hope and Hathersage. Sir Robert Eyre fought at Agincourt and returned home to the village of Hathersage to renovate the local church (pictured above). The church is full of Eyre family memorial brasses, including those of Sir Robert and his wife, Lady Joan, on their altar tomb in the sanctuary. At left is the memorial brass of Ralph Eyre (d. 1493) and his wife. Robert Eyre is said to have built seven houses around Hathersage for his seven sons. One of these houses was North Lees Hall (pictured below).

In 1845, Charlotte Brontë visited a friend in Hathersage, and stayed in the parsonage near the church. At the time of her visit, Hathersage was already known as the burial place of of Little John, Robin Hood's right-hand man. The village was also known as a center of pin and needle manufacture. But Charlotte Brontë seems to have been most inspired by the Eyre name and by North Lees Hall, standing in the shadow of the dramatic cliff known as Stanage Edge. In her imagination, North Lees Hall became Thornfield, the home of Mr. Rochester, where young Jane Eyre comes as a governess for Mr. Rochester's ward, Adele. Brontë describes Thornfield as follows: "It was three storeys high, of proportions not vast, though considerable; a gentleman's manor hours, not a nobleman's seat; battlements around the top gave a picturesque look."

Poor Jane spends some of her time in the novel wandering brokenheartedly on the Peak District moors, such as those that lie beyond Stanage Edge (pictured above). In the 2005 film version of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth (Keira Knightley) somehow finds herself on Stanage Edge with the wind blowing through her dress. Pictured at left is Keira; below, even more stunning, is Clara striking a similar pose.

Haddon Hall. Peter is holding an umbrella borrowed from the nice man in the ticket booth.

In the 2006 BBC Jane Eyre, the scenes at Mr. Rochester's Thornfield were filmed at Haddon Hall, the beautifully-preserved medieval manor house of the Manners family just south of Bakewell, Derbyshire. It was raining heavily when we arrived at Haddon Hall (about which I will say more in a later post), but we were pleased to discover that Andrea Galer's costumes for the BBC Jane Eyre were still on display (the exhibit was supposed to end in June, but will now run into August). Below are (1) Jane's governess outfit and Mr. Rochester's everyday suit, in the banqueting hall, (2) costumes on display in the great hall, where several scenes in the BBC adaptation were filmed (the costumes were worn by Blanche and Lady Ingram, and Mr. Rochester's ward, Adele), and (3) Adele's costume.

Next: Peveril Castle

2007-07-13T09:46:00.000-07:00

The Peaks Revisited, Part I

Our Northfield friends Bob and Debbie are on vacation in England, and we spent the latter part of this week sharing a self-catering cottage with them on the side of Win Hill, overlooking the village of Hope, Derbyshire, in the Peak District. Last October, Clara and the boys and I spent a couple of days in the Peaks Pictured here is the landscape we covered on our major walk on that occasion, beginning at Lose Hill and ending at Mam Tor (from right to left in the photograph). This photograph was taken from Win Hill, just above our cottage. The walk up Win Hill was lovely. There were friendly sheep and lambs along the way, and an amazing view from the top of Win Pike. Below are pictures of (1) Win Hill Pike, (2) a sheep and lamb on the footpath up Win Hill, (3) a morning rainbow over the Vale of Edale, and (4) Clara standing on the summit of Win Pike.

The legend is that Win Hill and Lose Hill took their names from a 7th-century battle between Edwin of Northumbria and King Penda of Mercia and his Wessex allies, in which the winning army took its position on Win Hill and the losing army encamped on Lose Hill. The village of Hope is mentioned in the Domesday Book. Hope's long history is attested to by this Anglo-Saxon cross shaft in the churchyard of the parish church of St. Peter, in the center of the village.

Next: On the trail of Jane Eyre.

2007-07-10T06:36:00.000-07:00

Richard II

Last night, we drove down to Stratford-upon-Avon for Richard II, the latest installment in Michael Boyd's magnificent cycle of Shakespeare's History Plays at the Royal Shakespeare Company's Courtyard Theatre. Richard II may be my favorite of the history plays, simply because of the special beauty and pathos of the language. The play contains two of Shakespeare's most wonderful speeches: John of Gaunt's "this other Eden" speech and Richard's "hollow crown" speech. "For God's sake, let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings..." It always sends shivers down my spine.

The RSC production was brilliant, and perfectly up to the standard set by the earlier productions of Henry VI, Parts I-III. It brought out beautifully the grandeur, pathos, and desperation of the play. Richard is rather pathetic as a king, although Jonathan Slinger was quite stunning in the role. He has a remarkable voice with a remarkable expressive range, from simpering to menacing to full of rage. In forcing Richard's abdication, Henry Bolingbroke attempts to be both strong and merciful, but already the heads are rolling and, as the Bishop of Carlisle predicts in another powerful speech, we see that the ultimate consequence of Henry's act is the bloodbath of the War of the Roses.

Now I'm looking forward to our last two plays at the RSC before we return to Minnesota— Henry IV, Parts I and II, with the wonderful Clive Wood in the title role.

2007-07-04T00:46:00.000-07:00

Happy Independence Day

2007-07-01T00:13:00.001-07:00

Clara's Farewell Concert

Quiz: Which sister teaches preschoolers?

I was in Leamington yesterday evening for a concert by the St. Michael's Singers, featuring music by Purcell, Handel, Elgar, Parry and several others. Clara has been singing alongside her sister Mary in the choir's alto section since September, and yesterday's concert was her last. With the choir, she's sung Mendelssohn's Elijah in Coventry Cathedral and Westminster Cathedral (with the Parliamentary Choir), and other concerts at Coventry Cathedral, Tewkesbury Abbey, and St. Andrew's Church in Rugby. Yesterday's concert was at Holy Trinity Church in Leamington Spa, founded 160 years ago as a "proprietary chapel"—an evangelical chapel outside diocesan control and funded entirely by the support of donors.

2007-06-30T14:22:00.000-07:00

Lansdowne Circus, Leamington Spa

I've mentioned Nathaniel Hawthorne in several of my posts recently. In 1852, Hawthorne obliged his old college friend, Franklin Pierce, and wrote an official campaign biography. It's undoubtedly the low point in Hawthorne's literary career—especially the part in which he urges voters to elect a man who will leave slavery alone to run its course. If left alone, he argues, slavery will eventually outlive its usefulness and simply vanish without a fuss. When Pierce won the Presidency, he rewarded Hawthorne by making him the American consul in Liverpool, England. For part of Hawthorne's time in England, though, he lived in Leamington Spa. His home was at 10 Landsdowne Circus, pictured here. Nearby is Landsdowne Crescent, pictured below, which is also the work of architect William Thomas (1799-1860), who left Leamington during an economic depression in the 1840s and emigrated to Toronto, where he became Canada's leading exponent of Decorated Gothic Revival architecture. St. Michael's Cathedral in Toronto is Thomas's work. Ontario's Ministry of Culture has set up an historical marker in front of Landsdowne Crescent. As for Franklin Pierce, who sent Hawthorne to England, he is consistently ranked among the worst United States Presidents (for example, he's #4 in the U.S. News and World Report ranking of worst Presidents).

2007-06-29T07:19:00.000-07:00

You may have seen or heard on the news that police in London found and defused a potential car bomb early this morning near Piccadilly Circus. Yesterday, I stood in Marylebone Station waiting for my sister-in-law Mary, who was my traveling companion for the day, to emerge from the Tube and join me on the 1630 train. At about 1615 (4:15 p.m.), there was still no Mary, when an official suddenly closed the gates to the Tube station and announced that the Bakerloo Line was suspended due to a security alert. A few minutes later, a swarm of police in flak jackets emerged from the Tube. Fortunately, Mary had gotten off the Tube at Regent's Park and had run the rest of the way to Marylebone, and we were able to make the train back to Warwick.

2007-06-29T00:04:00.000-07:00

The rain it raineth every day...

Monday was the wettest day in England in the past century. The heaviest rain fell north of here, with severe flooding in Shropshire, Derbyshire, Yorkshire, and Lincolnshire. Clara and I had considered a trip to Ludlow, in Shropshire, for our 18th anniversary, which is today. (Ludlow is known for having the most Michelin starred restaurants in England outside of London.) But Ludlow was hard-hit by the flooding, with bridges out, roads closed, and homes evacuated. The highest rainfall total in England on Monday was in Fylingdales, North Yorkshire, just outside of Robin Hood's Bay. When we visited North Yorkshire, we were in the middle of an exceptionally dry April, with only a fraction of an inch of rain all month. Over four inches of rain (103.7 mm) fell in Fylingdales on Monday. In April, there were fire warnings in the Peak District because of the dry conditions; on Monday, most of Sheffield, just outside the Peak District, was underwater. The picture here, though, is of Pickering, a village in Yorkshire that we drove through in April on our way to Helmsley Castle and Rievaulx Abbey.

Meanwhile, I seem to be losing my will to be a tourist. With only a month and a half before we return to Minnesota, I've started to think about packing up and clearing out our house in Kenilworth. In the end, the list of things I failed to do in England will be longer than the list of things I've done.

2007-06-28T10:51:00.000-07:00

The Courtauld Instutite and The Wallace Collection

Today I left Clara at home to get some work done and took the train to London to spend the day looking at art. My first stop was the Courtauld Institute, where my sister Ruth had sent me to look at Edouard Manet's famous "Bar at the Folies-Bergère." Unfortunately, the painting is on loan to the J. Paul Getty Museum until September. I wasn't in much of a mood for Impressionists in any case. I stood for a while in front of Van Gogh's "The Crau at Arles" Peach Trees in Blossom" (a poster of which hangs in Clara's office at Carleton) and felt slightly queasy—something about the dark blue-gray mountains looming in the background of all that hectic color. I was in much more of a mood for spirit-freshening Italian Renaissance Madonnas and for the special exhibit focusing on Lucas Cranach the Elder's 1526 "Adam and Eve," which was displayed with companion pieces from the National Gallery, the Getty, and the Queen's Collection. I loved Cranach's round-faced Saxon Eve, and his penchant for painting reflections in water. Notice, in the "Adam and Eve" above, that the deer is catching its reflection in a small pool of water.

From the Courtauld (in Somerset House), I walked back down the Strand, past Trafalgar Square, down the Mall past Buckingham Palace (where I saw the famous guards on duty; see below), along Piccadilly, up past Berkeley Square, to Manchester Square and Hertford House, the home of the fabulous Wallace Collection. The Wallace Collection has a marvelous collection of medieval and Renaissance armor, as well as a world-class art collection. Arguably the most famous work in the collection is Frans Hals' "The Laughing Cavalier," but what I enjoyed the most were the paintings by the seventeenth-century Spanish artist Bartolomeo Esteban Murillo. The collection also includes too many Greuzes and Fragonards—after a while, all Fragonards begin to look alike. The most famous Fragonard in the Wallace Collection—or anywhere—is "The Swing." The pink girl on the swing has launched her little pink shoe—but my favorite detail is the man in the background, who appears to be holding onto her with strings as if she were a kite. I have to admit that by the time I came to "The Swing," I was exhausted from so much art.

2007-06-27T01:48:00.000-07:00

The Shakespeare Houses, Part III: The Birthplace
(and More Thoughts on Hawthorne)

“After wandering through two or three streets, I found my way to Shakespeare’s birthplace, which is almost a smaller and humbler house than any description can prepare the visitor to expect; so inevitably does an august inhabitant make his abode palatial to our imaginations, receiving his guests, indeed, in a castle in the air, until we unwisely insist on meeting him among the sordid lanes and alleys of lower earth...I should consider it unfair to quit Shakespeare’s house without the frank acknowledgment that I was conscious of not the slightest emotion while viewing it, nor any quickening of the imagination. This has often happened to me in my visits to memorable places.”

—Nathaniel Hawthorne

Was Shakespeare born in the Birthplace? Probably. Was he born in the room known as the Birthroom? It's impossible to know. The Birthroom is identified as such in a tradition that goes back only to the eighteenth century, which was the beginning of a boom in visits to the Birthplace. Thomas Jefferson and John Adams visited together in 1786; Hawthorne visited in 1855; Mark Twain visited in 1873. Millions of others from around the world, famous and unknown, have visited since the eighteenth century. It's easy to imagine a series of garrulous old ladies, tenants and tour guides of the house on Henley Street, eager to impress their paying visitors by showing them the exact room in which Shakespeare was born or the exact chair in which young Shakespeare sat. For a little extra, she would even take out her handy knife and whittle off a bit of the chair for you too take home as a souvenir.

As I walked through the churchyard of Holy Trinity Church on my way to the Birthplace, I noticed a tall cedar of Lebanon with a sign that identified it as a tree brought back from Gethsemane by a former vicar of the Stratford church in the late nineteenth century. After the experience of Madame Tussauds, I was full of thoughts about the need to feel a physical connection with the past, the sacred, or the celebrated. P.T. Barnum felt that need so strongly—or rather, felt its profitability so strongly—that he made a bid to buy Shakespeare's Birthplace and transport it to his museum in New York. Why do we need to touch something, walk through something, own something? Does walking through the Birthplace bring us closer to Shakespeare? Does it add anything to his plays?

For Hawthorne, the answer was no. One of my favorite Hawthorne stories, "The Virtuoso's Collection," is about a visit to a museum which brings together such improbable items as the dove from Noah's Ark and Puss in Boots (both in the large collection of taxidermy), the tortoise that fell from the sky and killed Aristotle, the hatchet that George Washington used to cut down the cherry tree, and hundreds of other objects from myth, history, and literature. Again, Hawthorne explores the obsession with physical objects, and wonders in what sense those objects are more "real" than the stories that animate them and give them meaning.

Hawthorne’s most famous work, The Scarlet Letter, begins with the discovery of an artifact—the scarlet letter itself, discovered in the attic of the Custom House. The discovery of the scarlet letter prompts the telling of a story in which the letter is originally intended to sum up the entire physical and spiritual life of Hester Prynne for the society in which she lives: she is an adulteress. The artifact is at the center of two stories: the story that Hawthorne tells to his readers, and the story that the letter itself tells the people of Boston about Hester Prynne. The scarlet letter allows the people of Boston to objectify Hester, and its discovery allows the writer to tell a story which redeems her from that simple objectification.

2007-06-26T09:24:00.000-07:00

The Shakespeare Houses, Part II: Mary Arden's House

The platform and bridge at the Stratford- upon-Avon railway station.

I started today's journey at the Stratford-upon- Avon railway station, where for £1 (less than the cost of a small cappuccino at the station café) I bought a single ticket to Wilmcote. Back in 1973, when her father was on sabbatical in Stratford, adorable twelve-year old Clara had violin lessons in Wilmcote and made this same five-minute train journey each week, racing across this same bridge over the tracks to the northbound platform with her high-heeled shoes and her violin case.

Until 2000, the half-timbered house at left, on the Station Road in Wilmcote, was called Mary Arden's House. Tourists walked through it and imagined Shakespeare's mother spending her girlhood there, and imagined John Shakespeare, the glovemaker of Stratford, coming to court the prosperous farmer's daughter. Unfortunately, the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust had the wrong house. This house belonged to Adam Palmer, a neighbor or Mary Arden's father, Robert. As you can see, the house was getting a new stone wall in front. Wilmcote was long known for its quarries of gray limestone. The Mason's Arms, where I ate my ploughman's lunch, is a reminder of Wilmcote's history of stoneworkers. The real Mary Arden's House, identified by documents discovered in 2000, is pictured below.

Palmer's Farm is now home to the Shakespeare Countryside Museum, with displays of antique agricultural implements and a small working farm with rare English breeds such as Cotswolds sheep, Tamworth pigs, Gloucestershire Old Spot pigs, Buff Orpington chickens, and longhorn cattle. At left is a Cotswolds sheep. After the sheep are sheared, a long forelock is left so that the quality of the sheep's wool can still be judged on the animal. The farmyard of Mary Arden's House is also the home of the Heart of England Falconry Centre, and regular falconry exhibitions are offered. Although I missed seeing an exhibition, I did see several of the birds, including this young kestrel (below). The centre is also home to several owls, including the owl who played the part of Hedwig in the first Harry Potter movie.

After my lunch at the Mason's Arms, I walked three miles back to Stratford along the Stratford Canal, where I saw several narrowboats negotiating the Wilmcote locks. The Wilmcote locks are narrower than those at Hatton on the Grand Union Canal, which can accommodate two boats at a time instead of just one. At the pub, I overheard a conversation between several old men about the difficulties yesterday's severe flooding caused for navigation on the canal. Heavy rain fell across England from the Midlands north yesterday. It was the wettest June day on record in England, and flood conditions still persist, especially in the Sheffield area, where flooding has closed the M1. The water levels of the Stratford Canal are well regulated, but the River Avon through Stratford was overflowing its banks.

A Tamworth pig.

Tamworths are one of the rarest and purest breeds of pig,
considered fairly direct descendants of England's original wild boars.

2007-06-23T23:57:00.000-07:00

Tourists in London

The London Eye

As a thirteenth birthday present for Peter, we took the train down to London on Saturday morning and crossed two of the standard tourist attractions off our list: The London Eye and Madame Tussauds. The British Airways London Eye is the largest ferris wheel in the world, taking its passengers 130 meters (426 feet) over the Thames in space-age glass and steel capsules which comfortably hold 25 people. It's expensive (£13/$26 for a 30-minute "flight"), but provides spectacular views over London—especially of the Houses of Parliament and Westminster Abbey across the river. The queue to board was long, but moved quickly, and the ride was perfectly non-threatening, even for someone like me who is afraid of heights!

The birthday boy on the London Eye

The Houses of Parliament and Westminster Abbey from the Eye

With so many things to choose from in London (my list still includes St. Paul's Cathedral, the Tower of London, and the new Rembrandt and Hals exhibit at the National Gallery), Madame Tussauds would not have been my personal first choice, but it was a fun—if crowded and expensive—place to take teenagers on a star-studded tour of hyperreality. It's a strange experience, wandering around having your picture taken with wax effigies of celebrities. Peter posed with everyone from Albert Einstein to Jimi Hendrix. At left, the boys pose with Captain Jack Sparrow. Both the London Eye and Madame Tussauds are operated by the large UK entertainment conglomerate Merlin Entertainments, which also operates the Sea-Life Centres (such as the one we visited in Birmingham), Warwick Castle, and Alton Towers, Britain's largest amusement park. Will spent Friday at Alton Towers on the Kenilworth School Year 10 reward trip.

Wax museums became hugely popular in the nineteenth century. In America, Charles Willson Peale's famous museum, established in 1784, included waxwork figures. During her miserable sojourn in the United States, Mrs. Trollope even started a wax museum in Cincinnati, with wax figures created by the young sculptor Hiram Powers. But the most famous wax museum has always been Madame Tussauds, opened on Baker Street in London in 1835.

Clara battling it out with Lance Armstrong in the Tour de France.

Nathaniel Hawthorne seems to have had an interest in waxworks: he mentions them several times in his notebooks, where he collected ideas for his writing. I have always thought that waxworks may have inspired the chapter in The House of the Seven Gables where the narrator seems to circle around the dead body of Judge Pyncheon. Hawthorne was fascinated with questions of life and art. Stories like "The Artist of the Beautiful" and "Drowne's Wooden Image" are obsessed with the attempt of art to imitate, or even recreate, life and the human soul. Hawthorne was exploring these questions at the beginning of the age of machines, an age in which human skill and creativity had been unleashed in new and unexpected ways. Mary Shelley, in Frankenstein, was fascinated with these questions, too. How far can humans go in exercising their almost god-like powers of invention? It's interesting that Shelley, in exploring this question, creates a monster. Madame Tussauds had its start during the French Revolution, and the popular Chamber of Horrors still includes wax depictions of the Reign of Terror (including the actual guillotine blade that beheaded Marie Antoinette) along with its gallery of cool-looking nineteenth-century killers. The French Revolution is the classic historical example of the pursuit of human reason and perfectibility ending in slaughter, of god-like creativity ending in god-like destruction.

The boys with Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt.

The first thing you come to on a visit to Madame Tussauds is a room full of Hollywood celebrities, with strobe lights and glitter balls and music playing to create the atmosphere of an Oscar night party. It seems a far cry from Madame Tussauds original wax depictions of Voltaire and Robespierre, icons of the human potential for both creative reason and mad destruction. The first thing Will wanted to do was to have his picture taken with Brad Pitt. Why Brad Pitt? "Because of Fight Club," Will said.

2007-06-22T00:39:00.000-07:00

Guest Blogging on AustenBlog

Now my brother-in-law Jason Mittell is not the only guest blogger in the family. Over on AustenBlog, you can read my piece on a visit to Stoneleigh Abbey.

2007-06-21T00:25:00.000-07:00

Summer Solstice

A heron in the pond in Abbey Fields.

The sun rose this morning at 4:43 a.m. and will set tonight at 9:31 p.m., giving us a longest day of the year that lasts for 16 hours and 48 minutes. (In Northfield, Minnesota, the day will only be 15 hours and 32 minutes long.) Tomorrow, the day will be two seconds shorter as we begin the long slide toward winter.

2007-06-20T04:28:00.000-07:00

The Wheat that Springeth Green

A wheat field near Chase Lane in Kenilworth, looking toward the site of Henry V's Pleasaunce.

Yesterday on my walk I came across this field of wheat, with its soft green tassels waving in the strong breeze. The effect was like wind on water. The entire field seemed fluid and alive. It was, strangely, one of the most spiritual experiences I've had in England. The great churches and cathedrals and ruined abbeys impress me more with their sense of history and grandeur than with their spirituality. But the wind through the tender green wheat was like a spirit made manifest. It rippled through the wheat and seemed to pass through me, leaving me quite at peace. I also imagined what Minnesota must have been like, a hundred years ago and more, when wheat, not soybeans and corn, sprang from the beautiful rolling hills of the former prairie, swelling against the dramatic Minnesota sky.

2007-06-19T05:09:00.000-07:00

Home in Fifty-Seven Days

"There was not time now for them to visit all the churches, castles, museums and exhibitions they would have liked to see. Such expeditions had been among their most delightful pastimes."

—Elizabeth Jenkins, The Tortoise and the Hare

2007-06-18T06:32:00.000-07:00

Vindolanda Tablets

Yesterday, Clara made a quick trip down to London and stopped in at the British Museum to have a look at the Vindolanda tablets. In my earlier post about Vindolanda, I mentioned that one of the tablets is an invitation to a birthday party sent by a woman named Claudia Severa to her friend Sulpicia Lepidina. This is the earliest example we have of a correspondence between women and the earliest example of a woman's handwriting:

2007-06-15T05:55:00.000-07:00

Compton Verney

Another day, another stately home and/or art museum. Compton Verney is both: an art museum housed in the eighteenth-century country house designed by Robert Adam for the Verney family. The house is set in a pastoral Capability Brown landscape, and houses a good small collection of Neapolitan and Germanic paintings from the 15th through the 17th century, as well as one room of English portraits. The house stood empty for many years after being requisitioned by the military during the Second World War. In 1993, funding from the Peter Moores Foundation allowed the house to be purchased and restored as an art museum. Among the museum's most popular works is this 1550 portrait of young Edward VI, attributed to William Scrots.

As you can see from the dark clouds in this photograph (of one of the four sphinxes on the Robert Adam bridge), we returned to the car just as the light rain was starting to fall. Yesterday brought an afternoon and evening of torrential rains that, for a time, closed a long stretch of the M40 between Warwick and Banbury. With 70mm (2.76 inches) of rain, yesterday was the wettest day in Coventry since 1900. We're in the midst of another heavy downpour as I write this blog entry— the 175th entry in the record of our sabbatical year in England.

2007-06-14T02:37:00.001-07:00

St. Catherine of Alexandria in Christ Church

Christ Church Cathedral has two windows depicting St. Catherine of Alexandria. The one on the left is medieval glass. The one on the right is from a window by Edward Burne-Jones. It is said that Burne-Jones's model for the face of St. Catherine was Edith Liddell, the younger sister of Alice. Unfortunately, her face is unclear in this photograph because of the brilliant light that was shining through the window.

2007-06-13T12:58:00.000-07:00

Oxford

The "dreaming spires" of Oxford from Christ Church Meadow.

This morning, Clara and I boarded the train in Leamington Spa and traveled to Oxford. Clara spent the morning researching in the Sackler Library while I wandered around the Ashmolean Museum. I spent quite a while looking at the Roman sculptures from the Arundel Collection, which was given to the university in the seventeenth century. One of my favorite pieces in the collection was this first century AD Roman statue of a hermaphrodite. The Ashmolean, which opened its doors in 1683, is the world's oldest university museum. It holds an impressive collection— everything from Guy Fawkes' lantern to a Stradivarius guitar to French Impressionist paintings. One of my favorites among the latter was Camille Pissarro's portrait of his eight-year old daughter Jeanne-Rachel.

"Tom Tower" and the quadrangle at Christ Church.

After lunch, Clara and I were joined by her sister Mary and mother for a special tour of Christ Church, courtesy of Mary's friend Sarah, who is the dean's assistant. From Sarah's office, we could look out into the garden where eight-year old Alice Liddell used to sit while Charles Dodgson, one of the college dons, watched her from the windows of the old library. Alice, the daughter of the late nineteenth-century Christ Church dean Henry Liddell (known to classicists for the Liddell and Scott Greek lexicon) inspired Dodgson, under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll, to write Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Below is one of Dodgson's photographs of Alice, possibly sitting in the dean's garden.

Christ Church is also home of Oxford's cathedral, the former priory church of St. Frideswide, which has some fine stained glass—both medieval and modern—including a Burne-Jones window depicting scenes from the life of St. Frideswide. One of the more charming details in the window is the late Victorian toilet in the corner of this detail from the death of St. Frideswide (partially hidden by the red curtain on the right). Finally, the spectacular Great Hall of Christ Church can be seen, transformed through the magic of cinema, as the Hogwarts Great Hall in the Harry Potter movies.

From Christ Church, Mary, Clara's Mom and I (Clara had returned to the Sackler) walked around Christ Church Meadow, past punters on the River Cherwell, to the Botanic Garden (founded in the seventeenth century), where I admired the roses, poppies, and waterlilies. The Botanic Garden is across the street from Magdalen College, where we attended a beautiful choral evensong service in the chapel. But before the service, we joined Clara's Carleton colleague, Jack, for a pint at the Turf, Bill Clinton's favorite pub during his Rhodes Scholar days in Oxford.

Magdalen Tower from the Botanic Garden.

2007-06-13T00:08:00.000-07:00

Caterpillar Infestation on Helvellyn

If you look at the photograph of the peak of Helvellyn below, you'll notice that it's awfully brown. On our ascent of the fell, we noticed hundreds of small caterpillars along the path. It turns out that Helvellyn is in the midst of a periodic large-scale infestation of antler moth caterpillars. The moths lay their eggs on the fells, and every eight to ten years there is a large-scale emergence of caterpillars, which strip the grass and leave the fells brown and bare.

Link:
BBC: "Caterpillars devour Lakes grass"

2007-06-12T01:09:00.000-07:00

McKellen's Lear

There was a controversy here in England because critics were not allowed to see the new RSC production of King Lear for review until the run was sold out and nearly over. During rehearsals, Frances Barber, who plays Goneril, was riding her bicycle in Stratford when she swerved to avoid hitting a pedestrian and fell down. She ended up needing knee surgery, and the production had to go on with an understudy in the role of Goneril. The RSC didn't want the production reviewed with an understudy in one of the main roles, so reviewers were banned until about two weeks ago. This, I think, was a mistake. First, It made the reviewers grumpy, causing bad press. Not that this matters, since the production is sold out. Second, I can't believe that Frances Barber is vastly better than her understudy. Goneril is really not such a big part, and Frances Barber is not such a great actress. She seems to have two basic settings: nasty and loud.

Having said that, the production was amazing. Ian McKellen is the greatest actor I have ever seen. He's surrounded by some other very good actors, especially in the roles of Edgar and Gloucester, but he had me completely spellbound. First of all, he has the most wonderful voice. At least one critic, crankified by not getting to review it earlier, complained that the production was more about McKellen than Shakespeare, that it was impossible to think of McKellen as King Lear or anything other than England's greatest living actor showing off his great acting. I completely disagree. It seems to me that when you see a play, you are always aware, on some level, that acting is going on. Like any great art—painting or music or a great poem—it's something artificial that somehow gets you to think about what's real. It stimulates feelings that in everyday life are often half asleep. McKellen's performance was great art.

The production passed my two basic tests: it kept my brain engaged throughout, and it made me cry at the end. I should warn you: in one crucial scene, Sir Ian strips off his trousers and exposes his orbs and sceptre. It makes sense. King Lear is stripped down, exposed, as powerless as a naked infant.

One scene I particularly liked was when Edgar, disguised as Mad Tom, leads his blinded father, Gloucester, to what Gloucester thinks is the edge of the cliffs of Dover. Gloucester intends to jump off the cliff. Edgar vividly describes the cliff, although we know there is nothing there and see nothing but the empty stage. Gloucester "jumps" and curls up on the stage. Edgar returns, disguising his voice, and tells Gloucester it's a miracle that he survived such a fall. It's a scene in which nothing actually happens. No cliff, no jump, no death. But so much happens. Edgar makes Gloucester believe. He believes in something that never happened. Something entirely made up becomes a miracle. Well, isn't that what theater is about—the possibility of being changed by the imaginary? Nothing really happens on stage—no one is betrayed, no one dies. It's just what the actors, like Edgar, make up for you. You jump, expecting something to happen, and although you remain safe in your (by this time in the play) increasingly uncomfortable seat, you are briefly given a new life.

2007-06-11T06:52:00.000-07:00

June in England

Roses in our back garden.

May is the season of bluebells in the woods and white blossoms of hawthorn, or may, in the hedges. May also brings the laburnums into bloom, with their cascades of yellow flowers. Finally, late May brings the roses and, in the fields, the buttercups and daisies. The stinging nettles are also back in full force, crowding around every kissing gate.

After a dry and mild April, this past May was one of the wettest in the past century. In fact, April was the driest month of the year so far in Warwickshire, with a spell of eighteen days without rain (April 4-21) and a scant five millimeters of total precipitation. Five times that amount of rain fell on a single day in May (May 13), and May ended with a total of 141mm. of rainfall for the month.

In the Lake District, which is further north than Warwickshire, we were getting more than seventeen hours of daylight almost four weeks before the summer solstice. On our first night in Dacre, I stood in the churchyard at 9:30 in the evening and watched a spectacular rainbow that seemed to stretch from Penrith to Ullswater. Here, there is now light in the sky (and loud birdsong outside the window) from just after 3:00 in the morning until after 10:00 at night.

June has started with ten days of dry weather, but the rain should be moving in again soon. The black-and-white cows are lying down on the humps and bumps of Henry V's pleasure ground beyond the castle. In the garden, the roses have already begun to drop their petals.

2007-06-10T09:01:00.000-07:00

Upton House and Berkswell

On Saturday, we drove to Upton House, not far from the site of the Battle of Edgehill (October 1642), the first battle of the English Civil War. Upton House is a seventeenth-century stately home that in 1927 became the home of the 2nd Viscount Bearsted who, in addition to being the chairman of the Shell Oil Company, was also an avid art collector. The house is now an art gallery operated by the National Trust, full of wonderful European paintings dating from the fourteenth to the nineteenth century—everything from quattrocento Italian altarpieces to the sentimental eighteenth-century soft porn of Jean Baptiste Greuze. The painting below, though not itself in Upton House collection, is typical of their five Greuze paintings, and of his work as a whole. He churned out paintings such as this to pay the debts incurred by his wife's extravagant lifestyle.

Upton House is also known for its collection of fine porcelain, its beautiful gardens, and its dramatic ha-ha.

This afternoon, we made good on our intention to visit Berkswell, a small village about five miles north of Kenilworth. The name Berkswell is thought to come from "Bercul's Well;" Bercul was the original Anglo-Saxon inhabitant, and his well still stands near the church. In the Middle Ages, the "well" was evidently used for immersion baptisms, but today seems mainly to breed insects.

Church of St. John the Baptist, Berkswell, Warwickshire

The lovely Norman church, much of it dating back to the late twelfth century, is notable for its fine Norman crypt and for the lovely half-timbered vestry over the porch. The church was included in Simon Jenkins' book England's Thousand Best Churches (less expensive from amazon.co.uk than from amazon.com), which remarks upon the "immaculate" setting of the church in the picture-postcard English village of Berkswell.

The Berkswell Museum.

In the summer, afternoon teas are offered in the village reading room. We chose instead to spend a quarter of an hour in the village museum before heading down to Meer End for a pint of Timothy Taylor Landlord Bitter at the Tipperary Inn. The museum is full of artifacts from the history of the village, from fourteenth-century tiles from the church, to WWII ration booklets, to special displays on the three most famous natives of the village: former England cricket captain R.E.S. Wyatt, actor Jeremy Brett, and Maud Watson, the first women's singles champion at Wimbeldon (1884). Maud Watson is buried in Berkswell, where her father was the rector of the church.

2007-06-05T00:57:00.000-07:00

More on England's Most Bizarre Prejudice

The Chapman children from Newcastle

From this morning's Telegraph newspaper:

By Laura Clout

A father whose children allegedly suffered years of abuse because of their ginger hair was told by a council official to dye their locks, it was claimed yesterday.

Kevin and Barbara Chapman, from Newcastle upon Tyne, say they have been forced to move twice because of name-calling, graffiti and attacks on their children, aged between nine and 13.

Their 11-year-old son Kevin became so depressed that he tried to hang himself, they claim, and he has since been taken out of school.

Mr Chapman alleged yesterday that a housing officer from Newcastle council suggested that he dye his children's hair to "take the pressure off". He told Jeremy Vine on Radio 2: "Why should we dye their hair? We are proud to be redheads." Mr Chapman said their windows have been smashed and graffiti daubed on their property.

Their children, Kevin, 13, Ryelle, 10, and Daniel, nine, have been punched, kicked and thrown over a hedge, he said. Mr Chapman said of their tormentors: "I just wish they would stop and realise what they are doing to the family."

Sgt Colin Murray, of Northumbria police, said the incidents had been fully investigated.

The council denied that the family were advised to dye their hair and said it was "in discussion" with them about the alleged abuse.

Other links to the story:
The Daily Mail
BBC

2007-06-04T01:45:00.000-07:00

Lake District Holiday V (Final): Helvellyn

Legend and poetry, a lovely name and a lofty altitude combine to encompass Helvellyn in an aura of romance; and thousands of pilgrims, aided by its easy accessibility, are attracted to its summit every year. There is no doubt that Helvellyn is climbed more often than any other mountain in Lakeland... (Alfred Wainwright).

Peter and Will on the summit of Helvellyn, with Striding Edge in the background.

Since our first visit to the Lake District in 2000, we have wanted to climb Helvellyn,* at 3115 feet the third-highest mountain in the Lakes. The classic and preferred route to the summit is along Striding Edge, a dramatic knife-edge of rock that Wainwright calls "the finest ridge there is in Lakeland." Striding Edge occasionally requires the walker to claw his way up steep chimneys of rock that rise thrillingly above the sheer precipice on either side. Unfortunately, my bad knee forced us to reroute our ascent of Helvellyn to the west side, which Wainwright dismisses as "unattractive and lacking in interest."

Clara on the ascent of Helvellyn, with Thirlmere in the background.

There are several ways up Helvellyn from the west, including a long route from Grasmere that Wordsworth followed when he was in his seventies. We chose the shortest and easiest, from the car park beside Wythburn church. The church is all that remains of the village of Wythburn, which was wiped out in 1890 when the valley in which it lay was flooded to create the Thirlmere Reservoir and provide a water supply for the growing city of Manchester.

The final ascent to the summit of Helvellyn from the west: "unattractive and lacking in interest"?

The ascent from Wythburn is not Striding Edge, but I wouldn't dismiss it as unattractive. The early stages, with Thirlmere in the background, are quite lovely. It is only the final ascent to the summit that seems a little dull. But from the summit itself there are glorious views northeast toward Ullswater, with Red Tarn and Striding Edge in the foreground. One of the advantages of the western ascent was that we met relatively few other walkers along the way. When we had our first sight of Striding Edge, we could see walkers lined up all along the ridge, like a queue at a post office.

My knee was in good shape during the ascent, but was aching by the time we reached the car park again at the end of the walk. Striding Edge will have to wait for another year.

*Will persisted in referring to the mountain as "Van Halen."

2007-06-04T00:50:00.000-07:00

Lake District Holiday IV: Aira Force and Grasmere

Clara (sister) and Rob at Aira Force.

On Thursday morning, the Claras and I wandered lonely as a cloud down the A591 to the National Trust car park beside Aira Beck, a half a mile downstream from Aira Force, the Lake District’s most famous waterfall. The path up from the car park climbs through lovely parkland, among flowering purple azaleas and past an enormous Sitka spruce hanging out over the ravine (or “gill”) of Aira Beck. It was on a visit to Aira Force in April 1802 that William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy came upon a “field of golden daffodils” in Gowbarrow Park, along the shore just beyond where Aira Beck enters Ullswater. In her diary for April 15, 1802, Dorothy wrote: “I never saw daffodils so beautiful they grew among the mossy stones about & about them, some rested their heads upon these stones as on a pillow for weariness & the rest tossed & reeled & danced & seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind that blew upon them over the Lake, they looked so gay ever glancing ever changing.” Her brother William wrote:

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of the bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

It’s not surprising that William and Dorothy used the same words, and seem to have had the same thoughts. They were close. Dorothy’s journals probably helped jog William’s memory of experiences that he then turned into poetry. When the poems were written, Dorothy wrote out fair copies of them in her neat handwriting.

For a decade between 1799 and 1808, Dorothy and William lived together at Dove Cottage in the village of Grasmere, on the northern end of the lake of that name. Dove Cottage is small—four small rooms up and four down—and after Wordsworth’s marriage in 1802, the cottage quickly filled up with family and guests. Coleridge was a frequent visitor, as was Thomas De Quincey, who took up permanent residence in Dove Cottage after the Wordsworths moved out. William loved Dove Cottage and Grasmere. He called the hillside garden behind the cottage “of all the spots that are/The loveliest surely man has ever found.” But one of the things that particularly struck me as I stood in the garden was the acrid smell of coal smoke pouring from the chimneys.

Dove Cottage from the back garden, Wordsworth's "sweet garden-orchard."

William and Dorothy were prodigious walkers. Dorothy walked fourteen miles a day, to Ambleside and back, to fetch the mail. Unfortunately, I came to Grasmere with a sore knee, and could only walk a short distance along the shore of Grasmere, stopping briefly to sit on a stone and read a few lines of Wordsworth’s poetry. Back in the village, we found the Wordsworth graves behind St. Oswald’s church, surrounded by American students. There were William and his wife Mary and their daughter Dora, and there were sister Dorothy and brother John. The smell of Grasmere’s famous gingerbread floated across the churchyard from the nearby shop.

The grave of William and Mary Wordsworth

2007-06-03T09:13:00.000-07:00

Lake District Holiday III: Hallin Fell

In 1930, a young accountant from Blackburn, Lancashire, strolled up Orrest Head, near Windermere in the southern Lake District, and fell in love. He was in an unhappy marriage, and worked weeklong at a desk job—to young Alfred Wainwright, the fells of the Lake District represented freedom and fulfilment and happiness and a little glimpse of heaven. He called his stroll up Orrest Head “our awakening to beauty.” For the next fifty years, Wainwright devoted his life to the Lakeland fells, publishing eight popular hand-printed and illustrated guides to the fells.

One of the smaller fells in the books, at 1271 feet, is Hallin Fell. Despite its diminutive size, Hallin Fell commands spectacular views over Ullswater and beyond. Helvellyn (3115 feet) and Dove Crag (2603 feet) rise impressively to the southwest. “The rich rewards its summit offers,” says Wainwright, “are out of all proportion to the slight effort of ascent.”

Clara and Will on the Ullswater Steamer ferry, with Hallin Fell in the background.

To start the walk, the Ullswater Steamers ferry took us (me, Clara, Will and my sister Clara) from Pooley Bridge to Howtown, the small hamlet at the foot of Hallin Fell. Howtown always reminds me of e.e. cummings, but actually “how” is an old word for “cairn” (a pile of stones marking the summit of a hill or mountain). The word “how” is derived from the Old Norse, as are several other important words in the Cumbrian dialect, notably “fell” (“mountain or hill”) and “pike” (summit or peak).* On our first walk of the holiday (see “Lake District Holiday I,” below), we climbed Barton Fell, which incorporates several crags hanging out over the lake (Long Crag, Whinny Crag, Raven Crag) and a pike (Arthur’s Pike).

The Hallin Fell cairn, looking northeast toward Pooley Bridge.

From Howtown, we had an easy walk up to the cairn at the summit, where we took in the famous views. The descent was the hard part. On the descent from Barton Fell, I hurt my left knee, and the short descent from Hallin Fell was agonizing. Before we tackled Helvellyn (3115 feet) on Friday, I would get hold of a knee brace to see me through the descent (2500 feet of descent in two miles).

*The local Cumbrian dialect is rich in words for hills; others include “dodd” (a round hill, or shoulder of a higher hill, from the Middle English) and “crag” (a steep ciff, from the Celtic). A rocky ravine is a “gill” (from the Old Norse) and a “beck” is a brook or stream (also from the Old Norse).

2007-06-03T00:03:00.000-07:00

Lake District Holiday II: A Day on Hadrian's Wall (Northumberland)

The Lake District is in the English county of Cumbria, created in 1974 from the older counties of Cumberland and Westmorland. Most of Hadrian's Wall is in the neighboring county of Northumberland, which stretches east to the coast at Newcastle-on-Tyne, although some traces of the wall can be found in Cumbria. Originally, the wall stretched from Newcastle in the east to Bowness-on-Solway in the west. Today, the best-preserved stretches of the wall are in western Northumberland, and on the second full day of our holiday we drove about an hour northwest of Dacre, past Carlisle, to make a long-anticipated visit to Hadrian's Wall.

The praetorium,or headquarters, at Vindolanda.

The weather in Cumbria was fair, but an hour away in Northumberland there was a persistent drizzle. We parked at the national park information centre in Once Brewed and walked south (away from the wall) to Vindolanda, one of the most fascinating Roman sites in Britain. Vindolanda was a pre-Hadrianic Roman fort, part of the loose defensive network in the north of England that predated the construction of the wall. In addition to the walled military post, Vindolanda included a small civilian settlement where the families of soldiers lived. Since 1973, archaeologists at Vindolanda have been unearthing fragments of wooden writing tablets, well-preserved in the often anaerobic underground environment. The tablets offer an extraordinary glimpse into daily life in a settlement at the northern limit of the Roman Empire. In one tablet, the fort's C.O. writes requesting more beer (cervesa) for his thirsty soldiers. Also among the tablets are letters written by a woman named Claudia Severa to her friend Sulpicia Lepidina (one letter is an invitation to a birthday party!): these represent the earliest surviving correspondence between women, and the earliest surviving writing in a woman's hand! These tablets, which are still being excavated, are so important that the British Museum has called them Britain's greatest treasure.

Excavations at Vindolanda

The excellent conditions at Vindolanda have also yielded an amazing array of materials that have rarely survived elsewhere, including leather slippers and sandals, tools, kitchen utensils, and items made out of hair moss—including a woman's wig and the only surviving helmet crest from ancient Rome.

Clara and Peter at Milecastle 37, west of Housesteads Roman Fort.

From Vindolanda, we walked northeast to join Hadrian's Wall near the Roman fort of Housesteads. In AD 122, the Emperor Hadrian decided that the system of forts (like Vindolanda) along the northern border were insufficient to defend against the threat of marauding Picts from the north. His solution was to build a coast-to-coast wall across the frontier, defended by a series of "milecastles" and turrets at regular intervals along the wall. Housesteads Roman Fort lies between milecastles 36 and 37, and incorporates turret 36b (the second of two turrets between the milecastles). It was built in about 124 to add another layer of defense to the wall (in all, twelve forts were built along the wall). Below are two of my favorite features of Housesteads: the granary and the latrine.

The granary (horreum) at Housesteads. The floor was raised on pillars to aid in the drying of the grain, and to keep away vermin.

The remains of the latrine. Below is the information sign posted at the site (click to enlarge and read the text).

The Romans occupied Britain into the fifth century, although in the later days of the Empire there was a significant draw down in the number of troops stationed along the wall. The world was restless in the fifth century. The Huns pushed westward from Asia. The Goths pushed into the territory of the Roman Empire. The Anglo-Saxons were squeezed westward in England from their homeland in Germany. The Romans watched them nervously from signal stations along what is now the north Yorkshire coast (see the end of Clara's blog entry on The Romans in the North).

In this area of western Northumberland, the Roman defenses were aided by the often dramatic natural topography. Around Housesteads, the wall runs along the top of a high ridge: to the south lies the hilly countryside of Northumberland; to the north (after an often precipitous drop), the land stretches out flat toward Scotland. At left is a particularly dramatic section: the lake of Crag Lough below the sheer cliff of Whin Sill.* The wall (no longer visible) ran through the woods at the top of the cliff and up to the top of the peak (Steel Rigg) at right center. In the photograph below, Will is sitting at the top of the sheer cliff of Whin Sill; beyond him lies the relatively flat landscape stretching north from the wall toward Scotland.

After the Romans left Britain, the wall stood for centuries along the bloody border between England and Scotland—made more bloody in the 13th century when Edward I stirred up fierce resistance to his efforts to conquer Scotland. Pele towers, like the one in Dacre, were built to provide some defense against the Scots, but it wasn't until the Act of Union in 1701** that the border area became relatively safe for settlement. (Other than the church and castle, most of the buildings in Dacre date from the first half of the eighteenth century.) Standing at Hadrian's Wall, I couldn't help reflecting on the fact that, more than 1,500 years after the wall was abandoned and the Roman Empire crumbled, we're still building walls: in Gaza, in Baghdad, along the Mexican border. We still haven't learned how to bring people together, so we persist in building walls to keep them apart.

*Whin Sill was formed in the late Carboniferous when an injection of magma cooled to produce an escarpment of basaltic rock, known as "whinstone." Click here for a map from 1817 showing the Great Whin Sill in Northumberland and County Durham. Crag Lough is the small peanut-shaped lake along the wall west of Sewingshields.

**Interestingly, the anti-Unionist Scottish National Party (SNP) received the largest number of votes in May's Scottish parliamentary elections, despite the fact that a majority of Scots favor the Union. The vote was construed as being against the Labour Party rather than for the SNP. There's an ongoing debate about whether Scotland benefits from the Union. Certainly England benefits, since Scotland is a source of North Sea oil, and since the UK's controversial Trident nuclear submarines are based off the coast of Scotland. Sir Sean Connery is a high-profile supporter of the SNP; the supporters of the Union include Sir Alex Ferguson, the Glasgow-born manager of Manchester United.

2007-06-02T12:30:00.000-07:00

Lake District Holiday I: Dacre

One of the mysterious stone bears in the Dacre churchyard.

This was our second week-long stay in Dacre. The first was in August 2000, when Will was 9 and Peter was 6. Dacre lies in a secluded valley on the edge of the Lake District, west of Penrith and about two miles from the popular holiday village of Pooley Bridge. This time, we stayed in Barn Croft, a lovely self-catering cottage right next door to the 18th-century public house, the Horse and Farrier. The cottage is owned by Brenda and Mike Walton. Mike was a dairy farmer in Dacre until his retirement last year. I asked him if his herd was affected by the outbreak of foot and mouth disease that hit England in late 2000. He said the valley around Dacre was untouched, and lay under a heavy protective quarantine, but he could see smoke from the pyres of burning carcasses rising from neighboring valleys and hills all around.

The Horse and Farrier, Dacre

Dacre has been inhabited since Anglo-Saxon times. The old church of St. Andrew stands on the site of an Anglo-Saxon monastery mentioned by the Venerable Bede. Inside the church, there's a shaft of a Viking cross, and in the churchyard are four mysterious stone bears, including the one at the head of this entry, in the northeast corner of the churchyard. Not far from the church stands Dacre Castle, a "pele tower" built in the 14th century as a defense against Scottish marauders. The walls of the castle are seven-feet thick. Dacre Castle is now owned by the Dalemain estate.

Dalemain

Dalemain is a stately home about a mile east of Dacre. Another pele tower once stood on the site; this was succeeded by a medieval hall (now a tearoom) and an Elizabethan manor house. Finally, in 1744, the manor house was given a make-over with this Georgian facade.

Will on Barton Fell, overlooking Ullswater.

One of the main reasons to visit the Lake District is for the opportunity to walk the fells, or hills, amid some of the most beautiful scenery in England. On our first full day in Dacre, we walked over to Pooley Bridge and up Barton Fell toward Arthur's Pike. Clara and Peter turned back before reaching the summit, but Will and I continued on to enjoy the stunning views over Ullswater. Ullswater is the furthest north and east of the Lakes, and is comparatively peaceful, although Pooley Bridge was busy on a Bank Holiday Monday and we had to squeeze into the Sun for our pint of Jennings Cumberland Ale after the walk.

Bonus text: Bede's Ecclesiastical History, chapter 32: The miracle at Dacre (AD 698):

NOR is that cure to be passed over in silence, which was performed by his [St. Cuthbert's] relics three years ago, and was told me by the brother himself, on whom it was wrought. It happened in the monastery, which, being built near the river Dacore, has taken its name from the same, over which, at that time, the religious Suidbert presided as abbot. In that monastery was a youth whose eyelid had a great swelling on it, which growing daily, threatened the loss of the eye. The surgeons applied their medicines to ripen it, but in vain. Some said it ought to be cut off; others opposed it, for fear of worse consequences. The brother having long laboured under this malady, and seeing no human means likely to save his eye, but that, on the contrary, it grew daily worse, was cured on a sudden, through the Divine Goodness, by the relics of the holy father, Cuthbert; for the brethren, finding his body uncorrupted, after having been many years buried, took some part of the hair, which they might, at the request of friends, give or show, in testimony of the miracle. One of the priests of the monastery, named Thridred, who is now abbot there, had a small part of these relics by him at that time. One day in the church he opened the box of relics, to give some part to a friend that begged it, and it happened that the youth who had the distempered eye was then in the church; the priest, having given his friend as much as he thought fit, delivered the rest to the Youth to put it into its place. Having received the hairs of the holy head by some fortunate impulse, he clapped them to the sore eyelid, and endeavoured for some time, by the application of them, to soften and abate the swelling. Having done this, he again laid the relics into the box, as he had been ordered, believing that his eye would soon be cured by the hairs of the man of God, which had touched it; nor did his faith disappoint him. It was then, as he is wont to relate it, about the second hour of the day; but he, being busy about other things that belonged to that day, about the sixth hour of the same, touching his eye on a sudden, found it as sound with the lid, as if there never had been any swelling or deformity on it.

2007-05-25T04:14:00.001-07:00

Half-Term Holiday Hiatus

Another brief (one-week) blogging hiatus while we travel to the Lake District for a week of fellwalking in the persistent light rain. Yesterday, in Leamington Spa, I bought new Hi-Tec V-Lite hiking shoes (see photo) to replace the bald-soled shoes I bought last summer. Unfortunately, at the moment I'm laid low by my fourth bad cold since we arrived in England. These English germs really like me. The blog will be back on the Saturday or Sunday, 2nd or 3rd of June, if I don't fall off Swirral Edge or St. Sunday Crag.

2007-05-21T02:02:00.000-07:00

Traces of Bertie Wooster in Worcestershire

On the way down to the Malvern Hills, we drove along the A422 from Alcester to Worcester, one of the most winding roads we've encountered yet in England. The road also passes some English villages with exceptionally entertaining names. The road meanders past Peopleton, White Ladies Aston, Upton Snodsbury, and, best of all:

In P.G. Wodehouse's Jeeves and Wooster books, Bertie Wooster attended the fictional Malvern House Preparatory School, where he met his newt-fancying friend Gussie Fink-Nottle. In a famous incident in the novel Right Ho, Jeeves!, Gussie unwittingly drinks orange juice spiked with vodka and delivers a memorably drunken prize-giving speech at the fictional Market Snodsbury Grammar School. Upton Snodsbury is the only real "Snodsbury" in England. Worcestershire (where Bertie's Aunt Dahlia lives in the fictional Brinkley Court) seems to have inspired Wodehouse with its wealth of colorful and humorous place names.

2007-05-20T07:41:00.001-07:00

Malvern Hills

Sir Edward Elgar loved to ramble in the Malvern Hills, a short distance from Worcester, where he was born on June 2, 1857. The hills rise dramatically from the surrounding plain, and have been occupied since the Iron Age, when well-defended hill forts were built on the summits of the southern hills. At left is a view of the hills from the A449 from Worcester to Great Malvern, where we started our Sunday morning walk in the footsteps of Elgar. The photograph is taken through the windshield of our Rover.

We parked the car in Great Malvern and in less than an hour walked up to the highest point in the Malvern Hills, the Worcestershire Beacon (1395 feet). The hills are popular with Sunday walkers, and we found ourselves sharing the footpaths with the Malvern area Lions Club, out for a group ramble in the hills. The ascent from Great Malvern is initially quite steep, but the walking is never too hard. At the summit of the Worcester Beacon is a viewfinder, or topograph, which shows you what you're looking at in all directions. To the east, we thought we could make out Broadway Tower, in the Cotswolds, but most of the views were obscured by a typical English haze. The topograph was erected in 1897 to commemorate the 60th year of Queen Victoria's reign.

Sugarloaf, Table, and North Hills

From the Worcester Beacon, we walked back north to the top of North Hill, where we sat an ate our lunch of a baguette, Somerset brie, olives, and Cadbury chocolate. In the photograph above, you can see North Hill to the right, Table Hill in the middle, and Sugarloaf Hill to the left. While we ate our lunch, a pair of skylarks wheeled about overhead, serenading us with their slightly hectic song. In the photograph at left, Clara is eating a garlic-stuffed olive, with the Worcestershire Beacon in the background.

Malvern Priory from North Hill

After lunch, we headed back down to Great Malvern, stopping along the way at a hillside café, St. Anne's Well, for a pot of tea. In Great Malvern, we paid a short visit to Malvern Priory—another medieval monastic church, like Tewkesbury Abbey, that was converted into an Anglican parish church after the Dissolution in 1538. The stout Norman columns in the nave date to 1089, but the rest of the church dates to a major 15th-century renovation. The church contains some lovely 15th-century stained glass, including a "Magnificat" window donated to the priory by Henry VII. In the photograph at left, you can see the Norman columns and the 15th-century rebuilding, including the lovely coffered ceiling and great east window (with its original 15th-century glass).

2007-05-19T00:19:00.000-07:00

Things to Do Before We Leave: Visit Berkswell

We're fortunate, in Northfield, Minnesota, to have a world-class producer of ewe's milk cheese at Shepherd's Way Farms in Nerstrand. Nerstrand is about ten miles from Northfield. Even closer to Kenilworth, five miles away, is Berkswell, home of the Berkswell Cheese Company, another world-class producer of ewe's milk cheese. They produce a delicious hard cheese, with a distinctive basket-weave markings on its rind, and two soft cheeses (Marlow and Kelsey Lane). On my list of things to do before we leave—in less than three months now!—is to visit Berkswell. Not only is the village the home of Ram Hall Farm, where the cheese is produced, it also has an Anglo-Saxon well (from which the village gets its name) and an unusual Norman church.

2007-05-14T08:19:00.000-07:00

Clara's Trip to Athens

Clara was in Athens, Greece, from last Wednesday (May 9) until yesterday (May 13). She has five great posts about the trip over at her blog.

2007-05-10T02:59:00.000-07:00

Market Day

Thursday is Kenilworth's market day. Since Clara is in Greece, I took advantage of her absence to buy a scotch egg for my tea. I had never eaten a scotch egg before, and Clara has always dismissed them as "gross." She's obviously never had a scotch egg from the Cotswold Pudding and Pie Company. A scotch egg (pictured at left) is a hard-boiled egg encased in sausage meat, rolled in bread crumbs, and deep-fried. Fortnum & Mason is often credited with having invented the scotch egg as a picnic food in the mid-eighteenth century. The one I had was delicious. And for dinner, I have pan-seared scallops on a bed of samphire grass—all from the fishmonger's—to look forward to.

Link: A scotch ostrich egg (with photographs).

2007-05-09T06:56:00.000-07:00

Welcome

Kenilworth Castle, a prominent feature of my daily walks.

Welcome to anyone who may have wandered over here from the discussion of the Mill Towns Trail on Locally Grown (thanks to Griff for the link). I hope you'll explore this blog, which is a fairly complete record of the Hardy family's year in England. Some highlights include trips to the Peak District and to Salzburg, Austria (October); a Jane Austen tour to Chawton, Winchester and Bath (January); and trips to Lincoln and North Yorkshire (April). You'll also find posts about long walks in the English countryside, books I've read this year, Shakespeare plays in Stratford-on-Avon, and local Warwickshire attractions—including our local castle (pictured above). Still to come are posts about our upcoming week in the Lake District (end of May), where we hope to venture out on one of the classic English walks—along Striding Edge to the summit of Helvellyn. Finally, there are links at left to blogs and music by other members of the family. Stay tuned to Clara's blog for posts about her current solo trip to Athens, Greece.

2007-05-07T11:02:00.000-07:00

May Bank Holiday

Bluebells in Bullimore Wood (in the southeast corner of Kenilworth)

2007-05-04T00:02:00.000-07:00

Self-Promotion: Rob's Latest Publication

The current issue of the New England Review (28.1 2007) includes my essay "The Passion of Rose Elizabeth Cleveland," about the life and literary career of President Grover Cleveland's youngest sister. In the late 1970s, a researcher in the Minnesota Historical Society discovered a box of passionate love letters between Rose Cleveland and Evangeline Whipple, the wife of Minnesota's first Episcopal bishop. Rose and Evangeline were outed in The Advocate and in Lillian Faderman's groundbreaking Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in the Twentieth Century. It made a sensational story: the bishop's wife exchanging passionate love letters with the former First Lady of the United States (a position Rose held before her brother married in his second year in the White House). But there was much more to the story which hasn't been told until now. Rose was an intellectual and a writer, and her published writing says interesting things about gender, fashion, and the place of women in late 19th-century American society.

Classicists may also be interested in a new translation of Book 6 of Vergil's Aeneid by Ian Ganassi, which also appears in the current NER.

To order your copy of the New England Review, click here. Individual copies are $8, and the website offers secure ordering. You can also check out my two previous contributions to the NER, on Sinclair Lewis (25.3 2004) and Theodore Roosevelt (26.4 2005; available online by clicking the link).

2007-05-03T10:21:00.000-07:00

Things I'll Miss About England, Part I: The Fishmonger

I love Kenilworth's Thursday market. Some weeks, when we're too lazy to cook, we buy pies from the pieman—pork pies, rabbit pies, game pies (pheasant and wild boar), pigeon pies, and chicken-bacon-stilton pies (and, of course, a vegetarian pie for Peter). Usually, though, we buy fish from the fishmonger. I've bought Conwy mussels at the market, and scallops, and clams, and silver dourade, and sea bass, and halibut, and salmon. Today, there were fresh "new season" winkles, but I went for a quintessentially English fish: south coast John Dory. I pan-fried the fish fillets, and served it with blanched samphire, or sea asparagus (tossed with olive oil and fresh lemon juice), and garlic-parmesan mashed potatoes (or, simply "mash," as the English call it). All washed down with a good 2005 vouvray. I will definitely miss the fishmonger when we return to Minnesota.

2007-05-01T08:36:00.000-07:00

May Day Walk

Today I walked for a little over thirteen miles, from Kenilworth Castle to Hatton, then along the Grand Union Canal to Warwick, then back to Kenilworth through Leek Wootton. There were quite a few narrowboats going through the Hatton Locks, and I had a pleasant time daydreaming about drifting slowly from Birmingham to London on the canal. It seems like such a lovely way to travel. At each lock, I wanted to leap up and open the gate, pushing back the balance beam, or to turn the valve on the paddle gear to fill or empty the lock chamber. I stopped at the Hatton Locks café for lunch (French onion soup and bread), and again at the Saxon Mill for a half pint of Leffe. Sitting under a massive sycamore, sipping Belgian beer and looking out over the old mill pond after a ten-mile walk, I felt very European.

2007-04-30T01:12:00.000-07:00

150th entry.

Not the Actress...

Elizabeth Taylor (1912-1975) is one of my favorite English novelists. I discovered her in the mid-1990s, when I read her second novel, Palladian, about a young woman named Cassandra Dashwood who is engaged as governess to the daughter of a man named Marion Vanbrugh, an arid classicist who inhabits a crumbling Palladian mansion. I loved the novel for its literary echoes (especially of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, and George Eliot), and for how it blended and undercut this self-conscious literariness with straightforward realism. Cassandra is a palimpsest of Marianne Dashwood, Jane Eyre, and Dorothea Brooke; Vanbrugh is Colonel Brandon, Mr. Rochester, and Edward Casaubon. But the novel is much more than a literary pastiche. One theme that runs through most of Taylor’s novels is the tension between the life of the imagination and the life of ordinary dailiness in the real world. She’s interested in how we see life through what we read, and in how literature provides an inadequate substitute for life itself. Her novels are shaped by the female Great Tradition in literature and the day-to-day realities of women's lives. Her earliest novels are full of characters who are insulated from real life by literature, including an out-of-touch novelist significantly named Beth Cazabon, in her third novel, A View of the Harbour (1947).

Taylor was born in Reading, attended the Abbey School (as did, more than a century earlier, Jane Austen), and worked as a governess and librarian before marrying a business man and settling down for the rest of her life as a housewife in Penn, Buckinghamshire. Her father-in-law was at one time the mayor of nearby High Wycombe, which we pass through on the train journey from Warwick to London. In a rare interview, she confessed, “I dislike travel or change of environment, and prefer the days (each with its own domestic flavour) to come around almost the same, week after week…. I also very much like reading books in which practically nothing ever happens.” She raised two children, who must have been quite young when she wrote her first novel, and seems to have enjoyed hanging out the laundry. Here’s a passage from Angel. The title character has become a successful romance novelist, writing novels that have very little relation to real life. Her poor mother, Mrs. Deverell, has been forced to leave behind her familiar cramped shop in town to live an idle life in Angel’s large suburban home:

At a time of her life when she needed the security of familiar things, these were put beyond her reach. It seemed to her that she had wasted her years acquiring a skill which in the end was of no use to her; her weather-eye for a good drying day; her careful ear for judging the gentle singing sound of meat roasting in the oven; her touch for the freshness of bacon; and how, by smelling a cake, she could tell if it were baked: arts, which had taken so long to perfect, now fell into disuse. She would never again, she grieved, gather up a great fragrant line of washing in her arms to carry indoors... The smell of ironing being done or the sound of eggs being whisked set up a restlessness which she could scarcely control.

In the background of this, I catch a glimpse of Taylor herself, the successful novelist, determinedly holding onto her ordinary life—the raising of her children, the drying of laundry, the middle-class anonymity of a Home County businessman’s wife. She kept herself rooted in what was real from day to day. All of this (the erudite literary references and the grounding in dailiness) had an immense appeal for me in the mid-1990s when I was making the sometimes difficult transition from visiting assistant professor of classics to stay-at-home father. Elizabeth Taylor seemed like a kindred spirit: someone who had read and appreciated Middlemarch, but who also knew what it was like to rinse out diapers in the toilet.

For years, Elizabeth Taylor felt like my own personal discovery. I found her novels in yellowing old Virago paperback editions languishing on the shelves of used book shops. There was no biography, and only one or two scholarly articles on her work. But Elizabeth Taylor is suddenly becoming popular. Virago has reissued her novels in slick updated editions, and two recent films have been made of her novels: Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont (2005), starring Joan Plowright, and Angel (2007), starring Romola Garai, Charlotte Rampling, and Sam Neill.

2007-04-28T04:18:00.000-07:00

Ryton Wood
Updated Sunday, April 29:
New photograph added at end of post.

Bluebells in Ryton Wood (click photo to enlarge).

Ryton Wood is Warwickshire's largest surviving ancient woodland. Some parts of the woods date back to the eleventh century, and some, it's thought, to the last ice age. The trees are primarily oak, hazel, and small-leaved lime (tilia cordata, or, in American terms, basswood). The woods, crisscrossed with excellent paths, adjoin Ryton Pools County Park, which is built on the site of an old county landfill that operated from the early 1960s to the early 1990s. One interesting feature of the park is a methane factory which taps the methane produced by the buried garbage and converts it to electricity. But at this time of year, the real reason to visit Ryton Wood is to see the bluebells carpeting the woods. Ryton Wood is a ten-minute drive from Kenilworth. Clara and I drove over this morning for a brief walk in the woods. In some places, it was like walking into an Impressionist painting.

2007-04-27T05:30:00.000-07:00

A Midsummer Night's Dream

Last night, we saw an absolutely stunning production of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Swan Theatre in Stratford. The production was directed by Tim Supple, and was cast entirely with Indian actors, dancers, acrobats, musicians, and street performers. At least half of the dialogue was in either Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, Malayalam, Marathi, Sinhalese, or Sanskrit. Despite the language barrier, the entire production was breathtakingly beautiful, side-splittingly funny, and unexpectedly touching. If anything, the language barrier heightened the effect of being transported to a mythical world of mischievous fairies and strange transformations. The first half ended with an ingenious tour-de-force of creative staging in which Puck caught the four lovers in a web of elastic tape stretched across the stage; the actors' movements through the web were both comic and beautiful. It was absolutely perfect and priceless. And, near the end of the second half, I was surprised to find myself close to tears over the death of Thisbe in the mechanicals' silly play-within-a-play. For a moment, a comically tall, thin Indian man in a blue dress, speaking in Bengali, wrung real emotion out of me. The whole production was a classic example of the magical, transformative power of theater.

You can see a short "trailer," and read more about the production, here.

2007-04-26T00:34:00.000-07:00

Stratford-upon-Avon Public Library

Stratford-upon-Avon Public Library (1906).

In 1902, American steel-magnate Andrew Carnegie, who was on a library-funding spree in the United States, agreed to fund a new library for Stratford. The town authorities in Stratford wanted to build the new library on Henley Street, the street on which Shakespeare's Birthplace stands. The plans called for razing several cottages on the proposed site. Enter the romance novelist Marie Corelli (see yesterday's entry), who had only recently moved to Stratford. She protested against the destruction of the cottages, and said that a new building would deface historic Henley Street, which she called "the central aisle in the cathedral of literature." The town authorities produced reports claiming that the cottages were Victorian, but Corelli dug deeper and proved that some of the cottages had, in fact, belonged to Shakespeare's granddaughter Elizabeth (see yesterday's entry). The cottages were spared, but the new mock-Tudor library was built on Henley Street after all, only a few yards from the Birthplace. Marie Corelli, meanwhile, sat down a novel in which she aired, behind the veil of fiction, some of the resentment she felt over the whole affair. (To get a sense of Corelli's style, you can read the first chapter of that novel online here.)

Northfield Public Library, Northfield, Minnesota (1910).

The tug-of-war between development and historic preservation is familiar to residents of places like Northfield, Minnesota, which in recent years has been attempting to balance the preservation (and revitalization) of the historic downtown area with the growth of outlying commercial developments. It's often (but not always) the relative newcomers, like Marie Corelli, who come down on the side of preservation; they want the town to remain as it was when they chose to move there. One of the issues Northfield will have to face in the coming years is whether its public library will remain in the cramped but historic downtown building or move to a more spacious location. Northfield's public library, like Stratford's, is a Carnegie library, built at around the same time as Stratford's.

2007-04-25T08:23:00.000-07:00

The Shakespeare Houses, Part I

Exactly 443 years ago tomorrow (April 26, 1564), John and Mary Shakespeare presented their eldest son, William, for baptism at this font in the thirteenth-century chancel of Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon. William had been born a few days earlier, on the 22nd or 23rd, in John Shakespeare's house on Henley Street, where John also had a glovemaker's shop.

William grew up in Stratford, where his father was a prominent citizen, serving variously as alderman, high bailiff, and in other important civic offices. In 1563, John was town chamberlain, and as such he was ordered by the Protestant town authorities to whitewash over the medieval religious murals inside the Guild Chapel. The chapel is pictured here. Past the chapel to the right is the King Edward VI School, where young Will may have attended school and learned his little bit of Latin and less Greek. In the foreground you can see the signs for the Chaucer's Head Bookshop (founded in Birmingham in 1830 and later moved to Stratford) and for Nash's House (about which more later). At the bookshop, I bought a Virago Modern Classics paperback of Elizabeth Taylor's 1957 novel Angel, about the career of a romance writer loosely based on former Stratford resident Marie Corelli, whose old home now houses the Shakespeare Institute. Taylor's novel is sometimes included on lists of greatest novels of the 20th century; for an appreciation, click here.

William was still a teenager when he started walking out to the village of Shottery, about a mile west of Stratford, to woo Anne Hathaway. He did more than woo, since when eighteen-year old Will married twenty-six year old Anne in November 1582, she was already pregnant with their first child, a girl named Susanna (b. 1583). Anne Hathaway's cottage in Shottery is an icon of rural Englishness, with its lovely garden, half-timbering, and thatched roof. Unfortunately, when I visited today the picturesqueness of the cottage was marred by blue scaffolding (just visible to the left in this photograph). The grounds of the cottage include a tree garden planted with species of trees mentioned in Shakespeare's works.

In 1607, Shakespeare's daughter Susanna married a prominent local physician, Dr. John Hall. In about 1613, Dr. Hall built himself a large house, known as Hall's Croft, where he and Susanna lived for only about three years. When Susanna's father died in 1616, she and her husband moved to his old house, known as New Place. Hall's Croft is still standing (pictured at left), but Shakespeare's New Place was demolished in 1702; only a bit of the medieval foundations of the house remain. Next door to the site of New Place is the house which once belonged to Thomas Nash and his wife Elizabeth, née Hall, the daughter of Dr. and Mrs. Hall. Elizabeth Nash was William Shakespeare's last surviving direct descendant.

When New Place was demolished in 1702, a new house was built on the site. In the 1750s, this was owned by a Rev. Gastrell, who quarreled with the town council about his property taxes, and eventually decided to demolish the house rather than pay his taxes. In the house's garden was a large mulberry tree, supposedly planted by Shakespeare, which Rev. Gastrell cut down because he was annoyed by all of the tourists who came to look at it. An enterprising local man bought up most of the wood from the tree and used it to carve little Shakespeare-related souvenirs, some of which are on display in Nash's House. The house also has a good display of early editions of Shakespeare's plays. At left are the gorgeous wisteria vines growing up the side of Nash's House, seen from across the site of New Place.

For £14, I bought a ticket to all five houses owned by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. Today, I visited three of them: Anne Hathaway's Cottage, Hall's Croft, and Nash's House. On another occasion, I'll go back and walk out to Mary Arden's House in Wilmcote, and visit the Birthplace itself. Meanwhile, tomorrow night we're going to see a Royal Shakespeare Company production of A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Swan Theatre in Stratford. Above is the new Courtyard Theatre, the RSC's wonderful temporary space (being used while the main theatre is being renovated), where we saw the three parts of Henry VI, and where in June we will see Sir Ian McKellen in both King Lear and Chekov's The Seagull. Both productions are coming to The Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis in October (October 5-14), with the expensive tickets ($30-$90) going on sale on July 22.

2007-04-23T23:09:00.000-07:00

Clara's Blog Updated

Clara has finally posted her long-awaited blog entry on the Romans in Lincoln and York.

In other news, the American dollar is now at its weakest against the British pound in more than two decades. A dollar is worth about 49p. Financially, this is the worst possible time to be in England. And just how much more expensive are things in England? Let's look at the price of gasoline (or "petrol"). In England, gas is heavily taxed, as it should be, and sold by the litre. A litre of gas is now about 95p, which translates to roughly $1.90. Remembering that there are 3.78541 litres in a gallon, gas in England costs approximately $7.19 a gallon.

Here's a letter that appeared in yesterday's Guardian newspaper: "I have always been opposed to the US-led invasion of Iraq. Shortly after the war started I instituted limited trade sanctions against the US, trying not to buy products made by American companies. I am astounded how successful this has been in bringing low the once-mighty dollar. It makes me wonder what would happen if there were two of us doing this."

The pound's rise versus the dollar is fueled in part by inflationary trend in the British economy, which means a double whammy for us: British goods are more expensive as the buying power of the dollar is weakened. Last week, inflation in Britain rose above 3% for the first time since 1997; at the same time, the pound rose to $2.0074, the highest it's been since 1981.

2007-04-16T12:33:00.000-07:00

Breaking News: Warwick Wins University Challenge Final

On Monday evening, the University of Warwick defeated the defending champions, the University of Manchester, to take home this year's University Challenge trophy!

2007-04-16T01:41:00.000-07:00

Yorkshire Holiday, Part 5 (and last): York

Mickelgate Bar, York.

We took the Transpennine Express from Scarborough to York and spent about five hours in a city that really deserves at least a week of its own. The city is full of ancient churches, full of medieval stained glass, Anglo-Saxon dedication stones, and other historical treasures. From the rail station, we walked down to Mickelgate Bar, the main gateway to the medieval city. In the Middle Ages, it was customary to display the severed heads of traitors from Mickelgate Bar. In Shakespeare's Henry VI at the RSC, we heard Queen Margaret demand the beheading of her enemy, Richard, Duke of York, with the words: "Off with his head and set it on York gates;/So York may overlook the town of York." The Duke's head was set above the gate in 1461. He was not the first figure from one of Shakespeare's histories to suffer this fate: in 1403, the head of Harry Hotspur (see Henry IV, Part I) was set on a pole above this same gate.

On the walls of York

St. Anne teaching the Virgin to read, All Saints, North Street, York. Click to enlarge for more detail.

From this gruesome beginning, we walked north along the city's western walls to the River Ouse, then headed up North Street to the marvelous church of All Saints, where it's possible to get right up close to the beautiful medieval glass, such as this delightful window (early 1400s) of St. Anne teaching the Virgin Mary to read. The church also contains a window illustrating the harrowing medieval poem "The Pricke of Conscience," depicting the last fifteen days of life on earth—beginning with rising sea levels and other disasters that seem eerily like global warming.

York Minster

The "Heart of Yorkshire," the great west window of York Minster. Click to enlarge for more detail.

From All Saints, we walked to York Minster, the largest cathedral in northern Europe, where we spent about two hours looking at the stained glass. We also went down into the undercroft, where excavations have revealed fragments of the Roman garrison (including a well-preserved section of a Roman wall painting) that, as in Lincoln, once stood on the site of the cathedral.

Like Lincoln, York had a large Jewish population in the early Middle Ages, before the expulsion of the Jews from England in the 13th century. As in Lincoln, and elsewhere in Europe, the Crusades brought a backlash against the Jews, and in 1190 a hundred and fifty Jews of York took refuge from a mob in the wooden tower of the castle. Rather than surrender to the mob, the Jews set fire to the tower and committed suicide. This later stone tower, known as Clifford's Tower, stands on the site of that earlier wooden tower.

2007-04-16T00:18:00.000-07:00

Yorkshire Holiday, Part 4: Helmsley and Rievaulx

On the Cleveland Way between Whitby and Robin Hood's Bay.

We visited Whitby twice—once with Will and Peter, and once with my mother. On the first occasion, we left Whitby Abbey and headed south along the Cleveland Way, the long distance footpath that runs for over a hundred miles through the North York Moors and down the coast from Saltburn-by-the-Sea to Filey. We walked a dramatic eight-mile section along the clifftops from Whitby to the picturesque fishing village of Robin Hood’s Bay.

Entering Helmsley Castle.

The following day, we drove to the western terminus of the Cleveland Way, in Helmsley, to visit the ruins of Helmsley Castle, the medieval seat of the powerful de Ros family—and another keep slighted by the Parliamentarians in the Civil War. Everywhere in England there are reminders of those two catastrophic events in English history—the dissolution of the monasteries and the Civil War. From Helmsley Castle, we walked three miles along the Cleveland Way to visit one of the most famous of the dissolved monasteries, the Cistercian abbey of Rievaulx in the peaceful Rye valley.

Rievaulx Abbey from Rievaulx Terrace.

In the early sixteenth century, Yorkshire was home to more monasteries than any other county in England. Among these were weathly houses like Rievaulx, Whitby, and Fountains Abbey. For the profligate King Henry VIII, who had squandered most of his inheritance, these houses represented an amazing source of untapped wealth. In 1535, he began to dissolve the monasteries and confiscate their wealth, selling off their land to the highest bidder. In Yorkshire, there was a rebellion, and a man named Robert Aske raised an army of 40,000 men to defend the monasteries in what became known as “the Pilgrimage of Grace.” The king sent the Duke of Norfolk to negotiate, and Aske extracted a promise that the Yorkshire monasteries would be exempt from dissolution. As soon as the army disbanded, the king broke his promise, executed the rebels (including the abbots of Rievaulx and Fountains), and dissolved the Yorkshire monasteries. Rievaulx was bought by the Duncombe family, who began to dismantle it to build a new stately home. Astonishingly, the shells of not only the grand church, but of many of the monastic buildings remained—the cloister, the chapter house, the refectory, the infirmary. Rievaulx gives a remarkable and, in its ruined state, poignant suggestion of what the great monastic community must have been like.

The Ionic temple, Rievaulx Terrace.

In the mid-eighteenth century, as the picturesque came into fashion, Thomas Duncombe built a neoclassical terrace on the hill overlooking Rievaulx, complete with a Tuscan and an Ionic temple. From Rievaulx Terrace, connoisseurs of the picturesque have remarkable views of the ruined abbey in the valley below.

Beatrice de Ros, in the St. William window, York Minster.

After a stroll around Rievaulx Abbey and a steep climb up to the terrace, we walked back to Helmsley for one last look at the slighted keep. The castle was besieged in the autumn of 1644 by Parliamentary troops led by Sir Thomas Fairfax. Fairfax was fresh from successfully laying siege to the walled city of York, which had been a Royalist stronghold. Fairfax was a native of Yorkshire, and when York surrendered, he did a remarkable thing—he insisted that the city’s medieval stained glass be spared. Thanks to Fairfax’s intervention, York is England’s great treasure trove of medieval glass. Among the windows spared was a window donated by Beatrice de Ros, daughter of the lord of Helmsley Castle.

2007-04-15T09:09:00.000-07:00

Yorkshire Holiday, Part 3: Whitby Abbey

A memorial to Caedmon in St. Mary's churchyard, Whitby.

On Easter Monday, we took a bus from Scarborough to Whitby, further north along the Yorkshire coast. Appropriately, it was at Whitby, in 664, that a synod met to reconcile the traditions of the Ionan and Roman churches concerning the date of Easter. An extensive (and contentious) account of the Synod of Whitby appears in the Venerable Bede’s Ecclesiastical History. Bede also preserves for us the only surviving fragment of poetry from Whitby Abbey’s most famous brother, Caedmon—the first English poet to write religious verse in the vernacular.

The iconic image of Whitby Abbey.

Whitby Abbey was founded by St. Hild in 657, and the original Anglo-Saxon monastery—a mixed community of women and men—survived for about two hundred years, until it was sacked by the Danes in the mid-ninth century (ca. 867). It was refounded in about 1077 by a knight of William the Conqueror who saw the picturesque ruins of the old monastery and vowed to rebuild a religious community on the same dramatic headland overlooking Whitby.

The abbey was dissolved with England’s other monastic communities in 1538 and purchased from Henry VIII by the Cholmley family, who began dismantling the abbey to build their stately home. In the nineteenth century, the romantic ruins of the abbey began to attract artists and writers like Sir Walter Scott, who worked “high Whitby’s cloistered pile” into his long poem “Marmion.” But perhaps most famously, Whitby is the scene for a dramatic episode in Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula, in which the medieval monastic ruins become the perfect setting for Victorian Gothic horror, as Lucy Westenra encounters Dracula in the churchyard of St. Mary’s, in the shadow of the old abbey.

The parish church of St. Mary, Whitby

Whitby, as first described by Stoker’s narrator, Mina Murray, is a beautiful place, and not at all sinister:

This is a lovely place. The little river, the Esk, runs through a deep valley, which broadens out as it comes near the harbour. A great viaduct runs across, with high piers, through which the view seems somehow further away than it really is. The valley is beautifully green, and it is so steep that when you are on the high land on either side you look right across it, unless you are near enough to see down. The houses of the old town, the side away from us, are all red-roofed, and seem piled up one over the other anyhow, like the pictures we see of Nuremberg. Right over the town is the ruin of Whitby Abbey, which was sacked by the Danes... It is a most noble ruin, of immense size, and full of beautiful and romantic bits... Between it and the town there is another church, the parish one, round which is a big graveyard, all full of tombstones. This is to my mind the nicest spot in Whitby, for it lies right over the town, and has a full view of the harbour and all up the bay to where the headland called Kettleness stretches out into the sea. It descends so steeply over the harbour that part of the bank has fallen away, and some of the graves have been destroyed.

Mina also mentions the famous steps, 199 of them, which curve upward from the cobbled streets of the old town to the churchyard and abbey:

The steps are a great feature on the place. They lead from the town to the church, there are hundreds of them, I do not know how many, and they wind up in a delicate curve. The slope is so gentle that a horse could easily walk up and down them.

I’m not so sure that a horse could easily walk up and down the steps, but as you can see from the picture, they were eventually conquered by my seventy-year old mother with her replacement knee. Fortunately, Dracula was not waiting for her at the top of the steps.

When I got almost to the top I could see the seat and the white figure, for I was now close enough to distinguish it even through the spells of shadow. There was undoubtedly something, long and black, bending over the half-reclining white figure. I called in fright, "Lucy! Lucy!" and something raised a head, and from where I was I could see a white face and red, gleaming eyes...

2007-04-15T01:14:00.000-07:00

Yorkshire Holiday, Part 2: Cayton and Scarborough

Easter morning, St. John the Baptist, Cayton.

Our Easter holiday began on Saturday, as we drove from Kenilworth to Cayton, on the North Yorkshire coast, with a stop for lunch in Lincoln. These days, Cayton is known primarily for its crowded caravan parks, where vacationers set up their campers within easy walking distance of the broad beach on Cayton Bay. But Cayton also has the distinction of being one of England's 32 "thankful villages"—that is, one of only thirty-two villages in England that lost no young men in World War I. Cayton sent 43 men off to World War I, and all 43 returned home safely—more than any of the other 31 thankful villages. No young men from Cayton died in World War II either, making it one of the rarest places in England—a village without a war memorial. The church of St. John the Baptist is a simple Norman church, with a low roof and squat tower. The High Church service, complete with bells after the blessing of each of the communion elements, was led by a humorously grumpy old vicar whose sermon was mostly an extemporized venting of the irritations faced by a priest during Holy Week, including cleaning up vandalism of the vestry, leading daily services that no one attends, and putting in the potatoes on Good Friday (the traditional day).

Will and Peter on the Scarborough beach (South Bay), with the castle headland in the distance.

From Cayton, it's a short (about four mile) walk along the coast to Scarborough, England's first seaside resort. In the seventeenth century, a natural spring was discovered in the town, and a popular spa quickly grew up on the site. A busy street now separates the crowded beach, where traditional English seaside donkey rides are offered, from the rows of tacky amusement arcades and fish and chip shops. Further along the beach, fresh seafood stalls offer treats like cockles, mussels, and whelks; across the busy street, the Golden Grid offers "the world's best fish and chips."

A steep climb up from the beach brings the curious tourist to St. Mary's church and, in the churchyard across the street, the grave of Anne Brontë, author of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and the least famous of the three Brontë sisters. She came to Scarborough to teach, but died there after only a few days. On a bench next to the grave, a large shirtless man was sunning his massive white belly and reading a Sunday newspaper. A few tourists walked past and wondered aloud who Anne Brontë was.

From Brontë's grave, it's a short climb to Scarborough Castle, on a dramatic headland wedged between Scarborough's north and south bays. The ruined castle stands on a site occupied for 3000 years. A Bronze Age settlement once stood on the promontory, as did a much later Roman signal station, established in the fourth century to warn of Anglo-Saxon coastal raids. In the thirteenth-century, the castle belonged to Edward II's favorite, Piers Gaveston. Gaveston was captured in a siege of the castle, and taken to Warwick, where he was executed (on a hill outside of the village of Leek Wootton, within easy walking distance of Kenilworth). The castle was "slighted" during the Civil War—as was the case at Kenilworth Castle, a wall of the keep was blown up to prevent the castle from being retaken and used against the Parliamentarians.

John Paul Jones.

In 1779, Scarborough witnessed one of the greatest sea battles of all time. It was in the waters off Scarborough that the American John Paul Jones, in the leaky old Bonhomme Richard, rejected a call for surrender from the British commander of the vastly superior Serapis with these famous words: "I have not yet begun to fight." Although the Bonhomme Richard was lost (sunk off Flamborough Head, south of Scarborough), Jones won the day, and became one of the iconic figures of the American Revolutionary War.

The Humber Bridge, seen through the windshield of our car (click to enlarge for a clearer view).

Incidentally, our trip to Yorkshire took us across the Humber Bridge, at 7,283 feet the fourth-longest single span suspension bridge in the world. The bridge between Lincolnshire and Yorkshire at Hull was begun in 1972 and completed in 1981, and spanned the last unbridged estuary (of the Humber River) in England. Until 1997, the Humber Bridge was the longest single span suspension bridge in the world. (The main span of the Mackinac Bridge is only 3,800 feet, making it the tenth-longest in the world.)

2007-04-14T07:25:00.000-07:00

Happy 30th Birthday, Sarah Michelle Geller (Buffy the Vampire Slayer)

Yorkshire Holiday, Part 1: Wetwang

England is full of villages with humorous names, places like Spital in the Street (North Lincolnshire) and Bishop's Itchington (Warwickshire). But for a teenage boy, no place name is funnier than Wetwang (East Yorkshire).* Wetwang received some attention in 2001, when an Iron Age chariot buria l was unearthed in the village. Wetwang was also the ancestral home of one branch of the Hardy family, descendants of a Hardy who came over with William the Conqueror. We found a few nineteenth- and twentieth-century Hardys in the churchyard of St. Nicholas, Wetwang, and there was a Hardy listed as a current member of the altar guild. But for Will and Peter, the biggest attraction was the name of the village itself.

(Etymological note: wang is an Anglo-Saxon word for "field," so "wetwang" is a marsh. In Middle Earth, Wetwang is the name of the marshes at the mouth of the river Entwash.)

2007-04-06T00:27:00.000-07:00

Brief Hiatus: Spring Break

This blog will go on a brief hiatus this week while we are on holiday in Yorkshire. Posts will resume next Sunday, April 15. This week we'll be based in Scarborough, but we'll also be visiting York, Whitby (Whitby Abbey), and Helmsley (Helmsley Castle and Rievaulx Abbey), and walking along the North Yorkshire coast on the Cleveland Way.

2007-04-03T12:15:00.000-07:00

Nathaniel Hawthorne on Gothic Cathedrals

Since our visit to Lichfield, I've rediscovered Nathaniel Hawthorne's essay on his own visit to Lichfield while he was American consul in Leamington Spa (during the ignoble administration of his college friend, Franklin Pierce). Having seen Lichfield Cathedral, Hawthorne writes:

A Gothic cathedral is surely the most wonderful work which mortal man has yet achieved, so vast, so intricate, and so profoundly simple, with such strange, delightful recesses in its grand figure, so difficult to comprehend within one idea, and yet all so consonant that it ultimately draws the beholder and his universe into its harmony. It is the only thing in the world that is vast enough and rich enough.

Hawthorne also writes about his stay in Lincoln, where he saw all of the things we saw: the cathedral, the Jew's House, the castle, Newport Gate. He said that the cathedral "had taken possession of [him], and would not let [him] be at rest." He had to keep going back to look at it. I know the feeling, having recently taken fifteen photographs of the west front alone. Hawthorne writes:

York Cathedral is comparatively square and angular in its general effect; but in this at Lincoln there is a continual mystery of variety, so that at every glance you are aware of a change, and a disclosure of something new, yet working an harmonious development of what you have heretofore seen. The west front is unspeakably grand, and may be read over and over again forever, and still show undetected meanings, like a great, broad page of marvellous writing in black-letter,—so many sculptured ornaments there are, blossoming out before your eyes, and gray statues that have grown there since you looked last, and empty niches, and a hundred airy canopies beneath which carved images used to be, and where they will show themselves again, if you gaze long enough.

Hawthorne's essays on his travels in England are collected in Our Old Home, originally published in 1863.

2007-04-02T01:43:00.000-07:00

Captain Dangerous Live in Nottingham

My nephew Mark is the bassist in the Nottingham-based band Captain Dangerous (click on the banner above for more information, and to hear their first single, "You Could Be My," which will be available for download on iTunes at the end of the month). The band won a competition to open the weekend of music celebrating the opening of Nottingham's new market square. On Saturday afternoon, Nottingham was treated to fifteen minutes of Captain Dangerous's "outrageously catchy melodies." Nottingham is not a beautiful city, although it does have a lovely "castle"—not the Sheriff of Nottingham's castle, but a 17th-century ducal palace on the hill where the original castle stood. Nottingham is also home of the oldest pub in England, the Trip to Jerusalem, established in 1189. The name comes, of course, from the Crusades, led by England's King Richard I. The pub is built into the side of the hill on which the castle stood, and incorporates some of the caves underneath the hill.

2007-04-02T01:05:00.000-07:00

Lincoln III: Lincoln Castle

The towers of Lincoln Cathedral and the Observation Tower of Lincoln Castle, from inside the castle.

Construction on Lincoln Castle began soon after the Conquest. The Castle and Cathedral, facing each other across the square, were a potent symbol of the power of the new Norman regime. In the 18th and 19th centuries, Lincoln Castle housed a prison, organized on the Pentonville system, in which prisoners were kept strictly segregated. Condemned criminals were hanged on one of the castle towers (known as "the long drop"), and buried inside the old castle keep. The old Georgian prison building now houses a display on the Magna Carta (Lincoln is home to one of four remaining originals, though when we visited it was on its way to the United States for a tour). We visited the Victorian cell block and the eerie prison chapel, in which hooded prisoners were segregated into enclosed, coffin-like pews.

The east gate of Lincoln Castle. The brick building to the left beyond the arch is the Georgian prison building; the colonnaded building straight ahead is the Crown Court.

The castle keep, atop one of the castle's two mottes. Lincoln Castle is one of only two castles in England with two mottes. Inside the keep is a courtyard containing the graves of prisoners executed in the prison in the nineteenth century.

Clara has promised to blog in more detail about Roman Lincoln. I'll let you know when she gets around to it.

2007-04-01T23:39:00.000-07:00

Lincoln II: The Cathedral

The famous west front of Lincoln Cathedral.

The building of Lincoln Cathedral was begun soon after the Conquest by Bishop Remigius, who died in1092, before the original Norman cathedral was completed. Much of the building of the present cathedral was begun under St. Hugh, in the twelfth century. After his death, St. Hugh's grave at the east end of the cathedral became a focus of pilgrimage. Although his shrine was destroyed in the sixteenth century (in the time of Henry VIII), there is still a decorated plinth in the "Angel Choir" on which his relics—specifically, his head in a jeweled casket—were displayed.

The south side of Lincoln Cathedral, from the ruins of the medieval bishop's palace.

Another macabre feature of Lincoln Cathedral is the tomb of Queen Eleanor of Castile's viscera. When she died near Lincoln in 1290, her grieving husband, King Edward I, had her body embalmed for the long journey back to Westminster Abbey. Her viscera were buried in Lincoln Cathedral. As the funeral procession made its way south, the king had a cross erected at each resting point—the remains of one of these Eleanor crosses stands in Lincoln Castle, and Charing Cross in London takes its name from another such cross (no longer extant). Also buried in Lincoln Cathedral, in a rather plain tomb in the sanctuary, is Katherine Swynford, the wife of John of Gaunt and heroine of Anya Seton's novel, Katherine.

The Dean's Eye, the medieval rose window in the large north transept (click to enlarge).

"Crazy Vaulting" in the roof of St. Hugh's Choir.

The statue of Tennyson on the northeast side of the cathedral.

The cathedral and market square, seen from the walls of Lincoln Castle.

My interior photographs of the nave don't at all do justice to the awe-inspiring internal space of the cathedral. To get a sense of that, you just have to visit. You can see some scenes of the interior of Lincoln Cathedral in the movie The Da Vinci Code, in which Lincoln Cathedral doubles as Westminster Abbey.

2007-04-01T12:00:00.000-07:00

Lincoln, Part I

Lincoln is a remarkable town. When the Romans invaded Britain in 43 C.E., a post for the Ninth Legion was almost immediately established here; when the legion moved on to Chester, Lincoln became a colonia, a community settled by Roman veterans and Romanized Britons. The name "Lincoln" comes from Lindum Colonia (Lindum being a Romanization of a Celtic name meaning "the town beside the pool"). At left is Newport Gate, the northern gate into the walled Roman city. In Roman times, the ground level was nine to twelve feet lower than it is today, so much of the arch is under ground. Newport Arch is the only Roman arch in England still used by traffic. In 1964, a lorry (i.e., truck) misjudged the height of the arch and smashed the upper part of the arch (now carefully restored). It's amazing to think that this arch was already a thousand years old when William the Conqueror passed under it in 1068.

After the Romans left, there was eventually an Anglo-Saxon settlement at the bottom of the hill on which the Roman city stood. The oldest church in Lincoln—older than the cathedral—is St. Mary-le-Wigford Church, an Anglo-Saxon church in the lower city. When the Saxons built the church, they incorporated a Roman tomb stone into the tower. The stone, memorializing a Roman named Sacer, was reused for an Anglo-Saxon inscription commemorating the contributions of a Saxon named Ertig toward the building of the church.

Lincoln became important again after the Conquest, when William the Conqueror had both a large castle and an impressive cathedral built in the upper city, on top of the old Roman colonia. The cathedral was expanded throughout the Middle Ages, but the west front of the cathedral (seen here) retains many of its Norman features (especially the rounded arches; the pointed arches are Gothic additions). The famous English art critic John Ruskin said: "I have always held and am prepared against all evidence to maintain that the cathedral of Lincoln is out and out the most precious piece of architecture in the British Isles and roughly speaking worth any two other cathedrals we have."

Norman House, or "Aaron the Jew's House."

How did the church pay for such a massive building project? For one thing, the diocese borrowed money from one of the great financiers of 12th-century England, a Jew named Aaron of Lincoln. Aaron (ca. 1125-ca. 1186) loaned millions of pounds during his lifetime, and after his death, the King took over all of his loans—thus, the cathedrals and abbeys who had borrowed money from Aaron now became indebted to the King. Aaron of Lincoln's house still stands on Steep Hill, and may be the oldest extant building in England to have been built as a private residence.

Further down Steep Hill stands this house, known as "The Jew's House," another 12th-century private residence, connected to another stone building (in this photo, the one with people in front), which may have been Lincoln's medieval synagogue. Lincoln had a thriving Jewish community in the 12th-century, but (see my post on Gilbert Crispin for February 1) life for England's Jews was precarious. In 1190, York's Jews were slaughtered after taking refuge in Clifford's Tower, and, as I mentioned earlier, Christian crusaders slaughtered Jews throughout Europe during the 1190s. Lincoln's Jews escaped by taking refuge in the castle; and the church authorities usually did what they could to protect the Jewish community. In 1255, however, Lincoln's Jews were accused of ritually murdering a young boy named Hugh, and 91 members of the community were rounded up and sent to the Tower of London. Eighteen were executed. Update: English Heritage has just published a book called Jewish Heritage in England: An Architectural Guide, by Sharman Kadish, which, among other things, explores the Anglo-Jewish medieval heritage of Lincoln and York.

In my next post, I'll have more photos from the beautiful town of Lincoln.

2007-03-29T07:37:00.000-07:00

Spring Lambs

I finally managed to get out and find some lambs who were willing to have their photograph taken. I took this photograph about a half mile south of Kenilworth Castle. A little further along the path, a lamb came up to me and sniffed my trouser leg, then bounced away as if its legs were made out of springs. (Click photo to enlarge for maximum cuteness.)

2007-03-28T23:51:00.000-07:00

CheddarVision

Since January, it's been possible to watch a genuine West Country cheddar maturing on live webcam, courtesy of West Country Farmhouse Cheesemakers. Over the past three months, more than 500,000 viewers have tuned in to see the cheese sitting there, going slightly gray with mold. This morning, with James Naughtie reporting live on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, a hand reached in and took a sample from the cheese. It was about as exciting as CheddarVision gets, and Clara and I were there to see it.

In other entertainment news, on Monday evening the University of Warwick University Challenge team secured a place in this year's final four with a quarter-final victory over Aberystwyth. They face University College London (UCL) in the semis on April 9.

2007-03-26T04:48:00.000-07:00

More English Spring

2007-03-23T15:46:00.000-07:00

Jane Austen's Makeover

Jane, before and after. Left: plain Jane, in the watercolor by her sister Cassandra. Right: the new Jane.

According to a story in The Times, the publisher Wordsworth Editions has commissioned a new portrait of Jane Austen to grace the covers of their budget-price editions of her novels. Helen Trayler, Wordsworth's managing director, tells The Times: “The poor old thing didn’t have anything going for her in the way of looks. Her original portrait is very, very dowdy. It wouldn’t be appealing to readers, so I took it upon myself to commission a new picture of her. We’ve given her a bit of a makeover, with make-up and some hair extensions and removed her nightcap. Now she looks great — as if she’s just walked out of a salon.”

Other great writers may soon receive makeovers. Trayler continued: “Virginia Woolf wasn’t much of a looker. I’m also considering making over George Eliot, who was frumpy, and William Wordsworth, who was pretty hideous. Most poets were really unattractive, with the one exception being Tennyson, who has wonderful bone structure.”

2007-03-23T03:19:00.000-07:00

Coventry Cathedral

On Sunday afternoon, while Clara rehearsed with the St. Michael's Singers for a service of Lenten meditation in the new cathedral, I wandered through the ruins of the old Coventry Cathedral, destroyed by German bombs on the night of November 14, 1940. The ruins of the cathedral are still consecrated ground, and are an important part of the symbolism of resurrection, reconciliation, and peace that are central to the new cathedral's ministry.

The ruins of Coventry Cathedral in November 1940

The interior of old Coventry Cathedral: once a superb example of fourteenth-century ecclesiastical architecture, now lost forever

I have to admit that I find genuine medieval cathedrals, like Winchester and Lichfield, more inspiring than the dated, early-Sixties modernism of the new Coventry Cathedral. But there is something very moving in the spirit behind it. The St. Michael's Singers performed Morten Lauridsen's Lux Aeterna, which in that space was particularly beautiful and apt.

Outside the cathedral, there was a crowd of youths, all dressed in black, swarming around the ruins and milling around on the cathedral steps. There were about two dozen all together. As I wandered through the ruins, I was momentarily harassed by a small group of them, who of course were making unpleasant comments about my "ginger" hair. After the concert, I came out to find that the glass had been broken out of one of the message boards in from of the cathedral. In this photograph, which takes in both the new cathedral and the ruins of the old, you may be able to see some of the trash the crowd left behind, strewn under Epstein's sculpture of St. Michael and the devil.

2007-03-18T00:34:00.000-07:00

Music

In what looks like a bit of a faux pas, the Bank of England has chosen this year—the 150th anniversary of the birth of Sir Edward Elgar—to replace Elgar's picture on the reverse of the £20 note. In a periodic redesign intended to combat forgery, Elgar and Worcester Cathedral will be replaced on the £20 with economist Adam Smith and a picture of a pin factory. (Elgar was preceded on the £20 note by scientist Michael Faraday.) In a little over a month, I'll report to you from Worcester Cathedral (Clara and the St. Michael's Singers are giving a concert there with the English String Orchestra) and, perhaps, the nearby Elgar birthplace.

Meanwhile, this has been a week of great music. On Tuesday evening, I had the treat of listening to the University of Warwick orchestra and chorus perform Elgar's "The Music Makers" and Mahler's massive second symphony. My niece Margaret was shining in the violin section, and in the viola section I spotted Harold Wyber, a member of the University of Warwick's University Challenge team, which pulled off a thrilling 165-160 victory over the University of East Anglia three weeks ago. The Mahler second was thrilling, too, and loud, anchored by a particularly good horn section.

Last night, Clara and I drove down to Tewkesbury again for a concert in the abbey by the choral group The Sixteen–part of their annual Choral Pilgrimage, which takes them to various cathedrals and major churches around Great Britain to perform a special programme of choral music. This year, it was glorious music by sixteenth century papal composers Palestrina, Felice Anerio, and Allegri, in a programme called "Music from the Sistine Chapel." It was heavenly to sit in Tewkesbury Abbey, under the decorated Gothic vault of the nave, listening to one of the greatest choral groups in the world. The high points were Allegri's famous Miserere, with breathtaking high-Cs provided by soprano Elin Manahan Thomas, and Anerio's Stabat Mater. Most of the works performed at the concert are available on CD.

2007-03-16T05:18:00.000-07:00

Reading

Marghanita Laski.

Marghanita Laski's The Village was first published in 1952, and has recently been reissued by Persephone Books, but I picked up an old book club edition from the early 1950s at the Staffs Bookshop in Lichfield. I didn't know what to expect, and I was very pleasantly surprised. The novel opens at the end of World War II. Peace has just been declared, and the people of Priory Dean are celebrating—all except Mrs. Trevor and Mrs. Wilson, who, as they have done for the past six years, take up their posts at the Red Cross and spend the evening chatting over cups of tea. Mrs. Trevor is a member of the village gentry, with an old house on Priory Hill. Before the war, working-class Mrs. Wilson from down on Station Road was Mrs. Trevor's "char," but the war has brought them together. Now the war is over, and the village faces new challenges as it struggles to piece together its crumbling class structure. It's difficult, especially now that the gentry are struggling to make ends meet and the sons of the working class—the Poor People—are bringing home fifteen quid a week. Soon Churchill and the Conservatives are out and Labour is in—bringing to power working class men like Aneurin Bevan, architect of the National Health Service and far-left bogeyman to the Tories. But the cracks in the old class system really begin to show when Miss Margaret Trevor and Roy Wilson fall in love. It's a wonderful story—beautifully written, bitter and hilarious, full of tenderness and anger—about the end, for better or worse, of a traditional way of life. Sarah Crompton wrote in the Daily Telegraph: "If anyone asked me to describe life in post-war Britain, I would suggest they read The Village, a story of lovers divided by class that tells you more about the subtle gradations of life in the Home Counties and the cataclysmic changes wrought by war and a Labour government than any number of plays by J.B. Priestley or more famous tomes by Greene and Waugh."

All Saints Church, Chilvers Coton, near Nuneaton, Warwickshire. The church were Mary Ann Evans (George Eliot) was baptized; it appears on the cover of the new Wordsworth Classics edition (2007) of Scenes of Clerical Life, in which it is fictionalized as Shepperton Church.

Now I'm on to George Eliot's Scenes of Clerical Life—her first published work of fiction. The 150th anniversary of its publication in 1857 is being celebrated in Warwickshire this year, with special events in Nuneaton (where Mary Ann Evans was born) and council sponsorship of the new 150th Anniversary Edition of the book, which is being offered for free to reading groups across the country. Middlemarch is a masterpiece; Scenes of Clerical Life impresses me at first glance as the work of a young writer who needs to work some sesquipedalian vocabulary out of her system. Here's how she describes the clean walls of the new Shepperton church: "the walls, you are convinced, no lichen will ever again effect a settlement on—they are smooth and innutrient as the summit of Revd. Amos Barton's head, after ten years of baldness and supererogatory soap." Here she praises real farmhouse cream—although the praise somehow gets lost: "...most likely you are a miserable town reader, who think of cream as a thinnish white fluid, delivered in infinitessimal pennyworths down area steps; or perhaps, from a presentiment of calves' brains, you refrain from any lacteal addition, and rasp your tongue with unmitigated bohea." Likewise, a hen laying an egg doesn't cluck, or whatever ordinary people with commonplace vocabularies think a hen might do—it "advertis[es] its accouchement, pass[ing] at regular intervals from pianissimo semiquavers to fortissimo crotchets." So far, I'm only kept going by the knowledge that she would go on to write one of the greatest novels of the nineteenth century.

2007-03-14T05:35:00.000-07:00

Spring

2007-03-10T08:56:00.000-08:00

Views from Warwick

Clara and I walked down to Warwick today and climbed the tower of St. Mary's church: 53 meters high, 160 steps, with marvelous views from the top of the surrounding area. Below are some photographs: the steps up to the tower; me at the top (with the spire of St. Nicholas Church in the background); Warwick Castle from the top of the tower; the castle and the church tower from St. Nicholas Park; the Saxon Mill pub; Clara recovering with a pint of Old Speckled Hen at the Saxon Mill pub.

2007-03-08T23:52:00.000-08:00

Mural Monuments and Smallpox

Among the great features of English churches are the mural monuments, the often beautifully sculpted memorial plaques that line the walls of most old churches. The monuments often indicate that the person memorialized is interred nearby, but often the plaques commemorate someone who is buried elsewhere. Poet's Corner in Westminster Abbey is full of this latter kind of mural monument (for example, the memorial to William Shakespeare, who is actually buried in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon).

In Bath Abbey, Clara discovered a memorial to someone named Manley Power. Bath Abbey was crammed with mural monuments—one indication of the wealth of the inhabitants of Bath in the eighteenth century. I love mural monuments for the small glimpses they provide of otherwise unknown or little-known lives. In Lichfield Cathedral, fairly easy to miss just inside the visitor's entrance, is this memorial to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu—buried elsewhere, but important to the woman who erected the monument (click photo to enlarge for more detail).

Sacred to the Memory

of
The Right Honorable
Lady MARY WORTLEY MONTAGUE
Who happily introduced from Turkey
into this country
The Salutary Art
Of inoculating the Small-Pox.
Convinc'd of its Efficacy
She first tried it with Success
On her own Children
And then recommended the practice of it
To her fellow-Citizens.
Then by her Example and Advice
We have soften'd the Virulence
And escaped the danger of this malignant Disease.
To perpetuate the Memory of such Benevolence,
And express her Gratitude
For the benefit She herself has receiv'd
From the alleviating Art,
This Monument is rerected
by
HENRIETTA INGE
Relict of THEODORE WILLIAM INGE, Esq.r.
And Daughter of Sir JOHN WROTTESLEY Baronet
In the Year of OUR LORD MDCCLXXXIX

We know about Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762)—how she accompanied her husband to Turkey when he served there as ambassador, and how she learned from the Turks about inoculating for small pox. We know about her efforts, half a century before Edward Jenner,* to educate the English about inoculation. We also know of her as a famous letter writer and a subject of Alexander Pope's satire. But I can find nothing about Henrietta Inge other than what the memorial tells us, and that her husband was a son of the Inge family which held the manor in Thorpe Constantine, Staffs., and that she came from one of the great families of Staffordshire, the Wrottesleys. But what personal experience led her to express such extravagant gratitude? We know that smallpox was one of the scourges of eighteenth-century England, and that there were periodic outbreaks of it in Staffordshire. Samuel Johnson contracted it as a child, and his face was left with permanent disfiguring pock marks. Another prominent Staffordshire man, Josiah Wedgewood (Charles Darwin's other grandfather), also suffered from smallpox as a child. Erasmus Darwin, as a physicial in Lichfield, must have seen many cases of it.

A Turkish postage stamp (1967), showing inoculation for smallpox. The procedure is also known as variolation, and Lady Wortley Montagu called it "ingrafting."

The monument in Lichfield Cathedral was erected in 1789. In the previous decade, a devastating smallpox epidemic had swept through America, coinciding with the Revolutionary War. That story is told by Elizabeth Anne Fenn in Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775-1782. The effects of that epidemic were mitigated by a program of inoculation carried out by George Washington, who as a young man had been exposed to smallpox on a visit to the Caribbean, and who had learned about inoculation for smallpox. Inoculation meant that an incision was made in a healthy patient and a small amount of live smallpox (in the form of pus from an infected person) was introduced into the wound to build up an immunity. A hospital for smallpox inoculation had been in existence in Virginia since 1767, and its work was as controversial as Lady Wortley Montagu's earlier efforts were in London. Most people were afraid that inoculation—deliberate exposure to smallpox—would spread the disease rather than prevent it. And it was true that, if an adequate period of quarantine wasn't observed after the inoculation, the disease could be spread.

One of the most famous literary cases of smallpox is probably that of Esther Summerson, in Charles Dickens' Bleak House. She is left permanently scarred by the disease. In the eighteenth-century, women who had been scarred by smallpox sometimes resorted to black patches to cover the most prominent pock marks. The picture at left is a detail from the series of paintings The Rake's Progress, by William Hogarth (now part of a major Hogarth exhibit at the Tate Britain in London, through the end of April). This woman, a harlot who would have been exposed to numerous diseases, has several such patches on her face.

*Dr. Edward Jenner's discovery was not inoculation, but vaccination: using the related cowpox virus instead of smallpox to produce immunity.