Biscathorpe

The pictures come from a recent visit to a disused church in the Lincolnshire Wolds.

Meanwhile, a footnote to my last post, I discover (initially by the simple stratagem of a Google search) that ‘General Paralysis’ isn’t a wide open term which could cover things like the post-traumatic stress disorders but rather a consistently used and precise albeit euphemistic term for tertiary syphilis (that is the final stage long after initial infection when the brain is attacked).  I have been guilty in at least one case of over romanticised assumptions when telling the stories of our war graves; historians recognise the phenomenon of the amateur being distracted by what he wants to see and not pursuing things far enough to challenge his own initial assumptions.

Witham Shield

Does the legend of dying King Arthur’s sword being flung into a lake preserve a historical practice which would otherwise have been almost forgotten?  I am reminded of this question by the short-term loan of the Witham Shield by the British Museum to a museum in Lincoln; we went on Saturday to marvel at it.

The shield, which dates from perhaps 350 BC, was dredged up nearly two hundred years ago from the River Witham on the eastern edge of Lincoln.  Much more recently whole clusters objects have been recovered around a rediscovered timber causeway a short distance further east.

The dates of tree rings in the causeway also gives rise to speculation about whether this sort of flinging was associated with mid-winter lunar eclipses; if so, this is also something we would otherwise not have suspected.

The gap in the mount in the second photograph shows where coloured glass or some other backing would have been placed. This, the sheen of polished brass, and the use of things like coral decoration, would all have combined to create the impact of the piece.

The brass would have been on a lost wooden backing, the lip of which remains bent over on one side (third photograph) but has been lost on the other (fourth photograph, showing, therefore, how thin the brass sheet is).

The glass case meant I failed to get a full length photograph, and nothing which hints at the shape of a boar, an image which would have been laid as a further sheet on top of the brass but under the central mount.

It is clear that this was a show piece and never intended for use in battle, and ‘marvel’ is hardly the right word for a reaction to it then or today.

Heritage Open Days

This is a capital from the top of a column in Louth Park Abbey now upside down and used as the base of a garden ornament at near by Brackenborough Hall.  It is just one of a number of interesting things we were shown there on Sunday afternoon.

And this is me gesticulating at St George's, Bradley the previous day.  We provided guided tours of each of our three mediaeval churches on Saturday and most of the photographs seem to show me waving my hands around...

... including this one introducing people to the Tickler Memorial Window inside the church.  I had prepared a post yesterday about the announcement of the unexpected early retirement of our Area Bishop (including some quotations from useful things he has written in the past) but I can't get Blogger to accept any 'paste' commands so that will have to wait.

Half Term walk

Donna Nook today

The first seals in the annual breeding colony came ashore a couple of weeks ago; there is actually a splodge of afterbirth in the middle of the top picture.  We learnt that the deep scars round the neck of the adult in the middle picture come from being entangled in a net ten years ago, and that she has been easily recognised returning to about the same spot on the beach almost every year since.

Normanby Hall animals

... and Marshchapel

Donna Nook...

St Margaret's, Laceby

Nameless of Irby

The body of a baby abandoned at Addlethorpe last year was buried there in July after a funeral in the local church. Neither the identity of the baby nor that of his mother has been traced. The name Jacob was used. A local businessman met the costs involved, including those of a memorial.

Jacob’s death and burial is just one modern repetition of what we know is really a common story. I’ve been doing a tiny bit of research about an earlier one using the microfilm records in the Grimsby Central Library. The story is that behind the memorial in Irby churchyard to which Rod Collins’ Blog drew attention a short while ago.

There are records of all the burials at Irby between 1813 and 1996 on the microfilm. For only one of these is there no name. It was on 21st February 1888. The Parish Priest recorded:

By Coroners Order for Burial: I reverently committed to the grave the remains of the body of a new born child found in the parish.

With a date established, it was not then too difficult to find an item in the microfilm of the Grimsby News of 24th February 1888:

On Monday, an inquest was held… on... the remains of the body of a newly born child, sex unknown, which was discovered in a green field which belongs to Mr W Nainby on Sunday last. John Vickers, aged 13, in the employ of Mr Nainby stated that he was crossing the green field when he noticed a flock of crows ‘picking at something’… The remains of the body looking as if they had been buried and scratched up by a dog or some animal.

So the discovery (of what had been a shallow grave) was on Sunday 19th , the inquest (in a house in the village) was on Monday 20th , and the burial (with the Coroner’s say so) was on Tuesday 21st.

If the mother (or some other person) had buried the body a good while earlier then decomposition in the ground rather than the pecking of the crows may have been the reason that the sex of the child could not be determined, but they are rather gruesome details.

I remain a little troubled by the memorial stone. ‘Nameless’ seems much more harsh than ‘Unknown’, and possibly untrue. The text ‘Be sure your sin will find you out’ (Numbers 32.23) seems misplaced in seeking to address a third person rather than God or the reader. ‘A child known to God’ and something like ‘To such belongs the Kingdom’ or ‘Nothing can separate us from the love of God’ would somehow be less troubling.

But I realise that not knowing the sex of the child would have been one barrier to giving him or her a name like Jacob, and the person who chose the text would just have had the experience of dealing with the decomposing body of an unknown child.

Serenli massacre

The camel-mounted armed Constabulary of Somaliland at the time of the Great War has distracted my attention from the other things I should be doing.

I took the picture of the plaque in Gainsborough Parish Church when there for the Ordination recently. It caught my eye as the son of an African District Commissioner from the 1950s, but it stood out as a remarkable period piece in its own right.

There is the litany of names: Jubaland (that part of modern Somalia nearest Kenya, through which the Juba river flows), Bardera (one of its largest modern settlements), Serenli (around which the famine of the 1970s and the Civil War of the 1990s raged) and 'the frontier grave'.

There is Elliott’s close interest in the people he served: alongside his colonial service responsibility he is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and his family are sufficiently proud of the comments on the value of his research to include a quotation about it.

There is the quotation from the end of Henry Newbolt’s Clifton Chapel (published seven years earlier) with the Latin who perished far away before his time but as a soldier and for his country.

I discover that regular troops were withdrawn from Jubaland at the outbreak of War because they were needed elsewhere, so an armed Constabulary had to fill the gap. Elliott, thirty-five African police and fifty villagers were all killed in one attack by a local warlord while their arms were locked up in the guard room for the night. The looted arms and ammunition fuelled other raids for the rest of the year.

The Commonwealth War Graves Commission website gives him as of the Lincolnshire Regiment and his burial place as Mogadishu, one of only three Great War graves in a mainly Second World War cemetery to which his body must have been moved from its original burial place.

It also gives his birth place as Gainsborough and his father as a clergyman in Lincoln, who turns out to have been the Headmaster of Queen Elizabeth Grammar School in Gainsborough from 1874 (before his son Francis was born) until 1906 (by which time he would be twenty-five).

That is a satisfying amount to have found out in a couple of hours, but, nevertheless, I think I ought to get back to some work.