New to me last week

A campaign is under way to bring this mediaeval chess piece (which was discovered in Habrough churchyard, a little north of here, in the 1980s) to the museum at Immingham. It was striking to learn that it exists and how beautiful it is, and I’d really like to think it might be roughly contemporary with Rognvald jarl Kali Kolsson (who died in 1158) the first and second of whose poems in the Orkneyinga Saga which I’ve been trying to translate boasts of his chess playing prowess and tells of his being stuck in Grimsby on a trading trip. The archaeologists who worked at the back of St Michael’s, Little Coates a while ago told me that most work for people like him isn’t on major projects but is simply done following those digging a pipeline, and it turns out this is exactly the circumstances in which the Habrough piece was discovered.

The only surviving copy of the mediaeval text of an alliterative Morte d’Arthur is held in the Cathedral Library. It appears that a fifteenth century Yorkshire squire copied it, one of his descendant’s husbands gave his manuscript to Durham Cathedral in the hope of preferment, and a Canon of Durham brought it with him when he became Bishop of Lincoln; it isn’t the only work which would not have survived but for his copy. The opening of Simon Armitage’s new translation of it, about which we heard him speak when he came to talk in the Cathedral Library in the week, includes lines which I think would do well as a prayer at the beginning of my next sermon there is due course, and I look forward to reading further into it:

May words trip from my tongue at this time,
not hollow and vain but in honour of Him,
and which profit and please every person who hears them.

Hearing Armitage speak about translating poetry prompted me to spend part of my Day Off putting some of the things I’ve tried to translate and write in order, including having a go at creating a new haiku:

Half the blossom falls
half clings to the Spring branches
making a lace tree.

David Hockney remarked in a documentary about the way in which the invention of metal tubes for paint (patented in 1841) changed art. He said that Constable (who died in 1837) did most of his work back in his studio taking a long comfortable time trying to represent clearly what he had seen, while the Impressionists (who exhibited in the 1870s and 1880s) were able to paint in the open air and thus worked faster. I wonder whether art historians also speculate about the way photography was becoming common at exactly the same time; a sub-conscious reaction might have been that, since exact reproduction could now be done as it were automatically, art should move to a more atmospheric approach.  I like the way that factors in the 1840s and 1850s which were quite divorced from painting itself might have been what shaped its development.

New Scientist reports the discovery that, say, 2.5 million years ago a human genetic mutation which doubled a particular gene happened to enable the brain to make far more connections and thus made modern humans possible.  Reading this with my brain, it seemed disconcerting to be discovering something about this previously elusive step, as well as to know how much is richly new to me every week as a result.

Meeting St Hugh

Lincoln has its own ‘widow’s mite’ story. The Swineherd of Stow gave his penny towards St Hugh’s rebuilding of the Cathedral; Hugh had one of his palaces at Stow. So the life size figures high up on the two pinnacles of the west front are the swineherd (north) and the saint (south).

Last week I had the opportunity to go up and meet Hugh (and look across at the swineherd) as scaffolding is up there for the first time since the 1930s. The masons think he is a statue from the 1700s, last repaired in the previous scaffolding of the pinnacle in the 1870s. He seems to be in good enough condition not to require attention this time beyond multiple layers of protective lime washing.

Cathedral stonework

These two dates (1746 and 2009) appear in the section of the Cathedral where major work is being undertaken at the moment which a group of us were taken to visit after the meeting of the Cathedral Council last week; this is where the modern statues posted here then can be found.

There has been Victorian work in this area in between the dated work; we’ve been told before that the cycle of work on the building means this sort of major work visits every part of the building once every century or so.

We were shown examples of where the Victorian work had used iron wedges and sandstone blocks the deterioration of both of which had contributed to the problems now being addressed. But the most significant engineering feat appears to have been managing to insert this new stone into a flying buttress in 2009.

On the Cathedral roof today

Jonah 9.24

The great East Window in Lincoln Cathedral includes the impossible biblical reference Jonah 9.24. I hadn’t previously spotted that it included any biblical references at all, but I was looking at Gordon Plumb’s Flickr images (he has recently put up sets of the twentieth century stained glass in St Michael’s, Little Coates and St Nicolas’, Great Coates) and found his set of the sixty-four panels in the main body of the window. I knew that sixteen of them are images of prophets but had not spotted the fact that each carries a scroll giving a reference. The sixteen references help explain and shape the character of the window as a celebration of the sacrificial nature of Jesus’ death. At least fifteen of them do; I can’t explain (and I’ve contacted Gordon and he cannot either) the reference in the scroll in Jonah’s hands in the panel almost at the bottom right. The twenty-eight panels in a large central cross are stories from Jesus’ life. The remaining twenty round the edge are from the Old Testament and favour stories of sacrifice including several stages of the scape-goat story. The prophets are in groups of four between the central cross shape and the outer frame. (I can’t lift pictures from his Flickr site, so the illustration above is a general view of the window from elsewhere.)

Meanwhile, I very glad to learn that I may have been more apocalyptic than I need to have been in my two references earlier this month to the side aisle coming away from St Nicolas’, Great Coates. The structural engineer’s report which arrived just before Christmas suggests it is possible that the crack is long standing and that what has deteriorated over time and finally fallen out is in-fill introduced to repair it relatively recently; a genuine earthquake type shift would have been likely to show up in other ways. Nevertheless, there are different more minor cracks in the plaster elsewhere in the aisle and he will monitor the situation to be sure there isn’t something more serious going on.

Giotto's Bones

What from even quite close looks like a standard quality piece of thirteenth century stiff leaf capital moulding on the west front of Lincoln Cathedral, albeit the colour of the stone and the sharpness of its edges shows recent restoration, turns out on even closer inspection to be a replacement carved in the year that hunting was made illegal. The Subdean, who is also the Canon Pastor, pointed out the signature detail, which I had never noticed before, when hosting the annual gathering of the Canons Pastor from about half the English Cathedrals in the week.

I shared with them the material I’d trailed here on 7th August, and then observed and tried to feed back for them the way they are alive to the almost artistic balance in the contrasts, complexities, constraints and opportunities of their roles and that of the Cathedrals they serve. Being magnets for some of the most vulnerable people and for the most powerful, each appeared to be seeking to be alongside the development of faith and commitment for a whole variety of communities from significant groups of volunteers to regular congregations, from those with a tangential but nevertheless real sense that the building belongs to them to those who choose to come precisely because they don’t want to be bothered by people like a Canon Pastor.

Some of them expressed appreciation for the poem I blogged here on 31st May and for the sort of bible study I blogged here on 9th November 2008 and 6th March 2009 (which was obviously a nice response to have, although I was much more impressed by them) and I also enjoyed sharing a poem of Robert Bringhurst’s newly published in England about the investigation of the twisted mismatched bones of Giotto discovered in Florence Cathedral precisely where Vasari said the marker used to be speaking of the man who could make plaster dust and water, egg yolk, charcoal and red ochre hunker down and sing the blues by making a taut and perfect gesture with a splotched, disfigured hand.

Confessing Cathedral

The foundation of Lincoln Cathedral was an act of aggressive and controlling conquest and colonisation.

From time to time there are documentaries and historical novels which seek to show what would have happened had Nazi Germany won the Second World War: the conqueror’s language becomes that of everything from Government to Universities, institutions from the monarchy and Parliament downwards are run on puppet or direct German terms, and assets from Banks to country estates fall into the hands of invaders whether individually or corporately.

This is exactly the process began in 1066. People are familiar with the way in which all legal documents were issued in French (the use of the Saxon language quickly became viewed as vulgar) and an early survey of the whole country (‘The Doomsday Book’) reveals how most settlements once owned by someone with a Saxon name were already in the hands of someone with a French name.

People are less aware of the way taking over and reshaping the church was one of the earliest moves. The Saxon diocese of Dorchester-on-Thames (which had absorbed the earlier diocese of Lindsey, and thus stretched form the Thames to the Humber) was given one of the sponsors of the invasion as a new Bishop and had its headquarters moved to the other end of the diocese to a fortified city where both a Castle and Cathedral could be built next to each other.

So what looks to us today like a place of holy magnificence stood then as a symbol and tool of French control. Nothing like a ‘Confessing Church’ resisted this. Over the next few hundred years the international nature of the church and the power of the Gospel did enable holiness and challenge to the powerful to flourish and be expressed, but equally a place built to express and enact the will of successive dictators remained their instrument right through to the promotion of ethnic cleansing.

I love the place, its ministry and its potential, and I value highly the privilege of having a stall in it, yet somehow this love and valuing seems to me to demand an acknowledgement of this ‘other side’. I’ve been dwelling on the idea because one of my August projects has been getting some material together for the annual Conference of Canons Pastor of English Cathedrals which Lincoln hosts this autumn and to which I’ve been asked to contribute. How do they fare when the powerful (which may include at different times regular congregations and interest groups, the armed forces and the holders of heritage purse strings, among many others) claim their own?