Once we had Acts of Attainder so people could be declared guilty without any need for a trial. Despite so much else, the one thing which now chills me is a Government prepared to pass an Act saying what is true isn't true. Where does our democracy and freedom go from here?
Walked into the Lincolnshire Archives this week to be greeted by a scholar working on a volume of Charles II’s wife’s accounts. ‘There is her signature,’ he said. Very neatly ‘Catherine R’. ‘And the Countess of Suffolk, who kept the accounts for her, made wild guesses at how to spell place names – look at the jumble of letters which is meant to mean Sevenoaks where she is paying the Morris Dancers’.
Not the only highlight of the week. I got to the North Sea Observatory at Chapel St Leonards for the first time; the picture reflects the inside as well as looking out at the sea over which the sun had just set. And Lincoln has been taken over by inflated monsters for Half Term – a City Council attempt to compensate for the cancellation of the Christmas Market, an attempt local traders don’t think will have brought them in their missing trade.
A recent difficult week took me back to North Yorkshire where I found this new bench heading now stands just by Deborah's grave, while knowing how the outbreak of conflict in Gaza would so much have grieved her.
Having got her old website back up on the web again, I've been returning to her Tears over Gaza piece here - it can be seen in more detail by clicking on it.
A sombre background to a few days retreat a little way away, not enhanced by what felt like some misuse of scripture in the addresses.
And this week four interesting talks in the space of just three days - how much the City Council is doing to move Lincoln to net zero carbon, how Chaucer put poetic pressure on Henry IV to pay him, lots of material on a first training day as a potential Cathedral Tour Guide, and a striking amount about the impact of the life of Catherine Willoughby, Duchess of Suffolk.
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We were in Galilee this time ten years ago, on a trip half way through our Sabbatical Term at the Tantur Institute itself within walking distance of the centres of both Bethelehem and Jerusalem. It was as important an experience for Deborah as for me, which has made tracking the ten year old Blog posts a sad experience; it was here that she developed her interest in Palestinian embroidery which was to be such a feature of the rest of her life.
One of the things I remember in particular was the language of ‘dual narrative’, the same history and the same current context being experienced and expressed in mutually contradictory ways. I still have a school text book developed by Israeli and Palestinian teachers telling diametrically different versions of the same stories on opposite pages. And being told how even the most committed reconciliation-minded developers of that book went on finding it difficult teaching the opposite pages to their own.
So listening to the debates going on in the most responsible parts of the media today has felt so difficult. One ‘side of the page’ spoke of how the idea of Israeli apartheid was Soviet propaganda about an American ally before the first West Bank settlements had even happened, how many Arab citizens of Israel flourish today. On the ‘opposite page’ was spelt out how internationally agreed definitions of apartheid map across onto many features of life in the West Bank, how many Arab citizens of East Jerusalem do not find equal access to legal status and opportunity.
What is it to live beneath the shadow of centuries of murderous anti-Semitism, with memories of suicide bombers, alongside frequent recourse to panic rooms in one’s home? What is it to live in dispossession, corralled behind a separation wall, unable to resist even the destruction of one’s trees?
And now Hamas breaks out into war-crime scale violence, unjustifiable acts of terrorism which revolt the world, and which tragically cannot possibly enhance its cause. Nothing less than ‘We stand by Israel’ needs to be said, even knowing it to be a slogan of some who deny the possibility of any Palestinian having any rights of any sort at all.
There will be huge numbers of people in Gaza (and, say, Iran) who are committed to Hamas, to the very idea that the state of Israel should not exist. There will be huge numbers of people across Israel (and, say, the United States) who are committed to settler ideology, to undisputed Jewish ownership of the lands occupied in 1967. Does either group actually represent a majority position in its own community? What chance is there that those who do not do so finding a single narrative, a single future, any time soon?
These three shields (one is obviously missing, although we can see how it had been fixed to the stone) may not attract especial attention until it is realised that they include the only two brasses to have survived the Parliamentary incursion into Lincoln Cathedral in 1644.
The Cathedral is packed with indentations where brasses were levered off, taken, and melted down to make bullets. Their loss (and that of most of the mediaeval glass destroyed at the same time) is one of the most grievous episodes in the Cathedral’s history.
The three are on the tomb of Bishop Russell (a diplomatic servant and high office holder under Edward IV, Henry VI (when briefly restored), Edward V, Richard III and Henry VII – to have navigated the changes between them looks like having been a diplomatic feat in itself) in his chantry (now decorated with Duncan Grant murals).
From top to bottom one is reading from left to right (from west to east while facing north).
Their value is further enhanced by noticing where enamel colouring remains. There is enough to see that it would have made the mitre look bejewelled. And most intriguing of all is the Norman French motto VERUS CELIU JE SUIS (true one I am) across the the top of one shield – presumed to have been chosen because RUSCEL can be read across the join of the first two words.
15th September - Reading this morning in the Cathedral Library, I find that it is his personal arms at the top (on the left on the tomb) which makes sense that his personal motto is on that one, and it is his adopted episcopal arms in the middle (in the centre on the tomb) which makes sense that the mitre is on that one; he adopted as his episcopal arms those of William of Wykeham also then used as those of New College, Oxford which William of Wykeham founded and which Russell (who becomes the first life tenure Chancellor of Oxford University) attended.
Meanwhile, my writing up the David A Stocker’s 1986 suggestion about the position of St Hugh’s shrine made someone else point me to Jenny S Alexander’s later disputing of his analysis. She favours the site marked by Bishop Fuller as being that of both St Hugh’s original burial and later shrine.
She thinks the then easternmost crown of the Cathedral was more likely to have been the chapel of St John the Baptist than the other chapel identified as his original burial place, and is unconcerned that such a burial seems to have been partly outside the building as it was (she thinks the drawing of the external wall is not totally accurate anyway).
Her suggested sequence of events is that this site matches all the details of Hugh’s requested burial place, that his body would need to have been translated to the other chapel whilst the east end of the building was rebuilt to house his shrine (leaving behind the double coffin and wrappings discovered in the Nineteenth Century), and that he was eventually translated again to the shrine built on his original burial place in what was then the new Angel Choir; such double translations are not uncommon.
This would explain why the site marked by Fuller is not central to the Angel Choir, but still leaves a feature which puzzled Stocker (that the base of the shrine would need to have been so totally destroyed in 1540 as to leave not even a hint of its foundations).
I’ve taken pleasure in the last month in this flower peeping over a local wall. And in Bennachie, this small Scottish mountain (less than 530 m or 1750 ft), which the whole of my mother-in-law’s family climbed together as we buried her cremated remains nearby (as we had done when we did the same for her husband, my father-in-law, in 2010).
Also coming across Jarod Anderson’s observation that ‘bats can hear shapes and bees can dance maps’. And in knowing that a new Rector has come into post in Haworth – which lessens my feeling of guilt at having appeared to bail out on them, although, intriguingly, I’ve detected how I also feel jealous of him as he gets stuck in creatively there.
I’m also much caught up in different bits of Lincolnshire artistic and church history (some more of which I should really post here more regularly) especially just now with what those in the Seventeenth Century thought was the site of the grave of St Hugh in the Cathedral.
In the 1670s, Bishop Fuller (a friend of Samuel Pepys) had it marked. He was a poet (some of his work was set to music by Purcell) so the Latin inscription takes a literary bent, a touching detail I’d never noticed before.
He alludes to the destruction of the saint’s shrine in 1540 when he begins:
Gold, not marble, would have covered these remains,
if we did not fear another sacrilegious plundering;
our sorrow is that what was silver is now marble,
although mere stone somehow suits this denegerate age.
It is now just one of the table tombs in the retrochoir (the area east of the high altar) near where the substntial solid base of High’s head shrine is still prominent and honoured. Fuller himself is buried next to it.
Apparently shortly before the mammoth 1644 Cromwellian destruction of much of the shrines of Bishop Grosseteste and what was then called Little St Hugh and of much of the rerodos (the wall behind the high altar), the future Bishop Sanderson had recorded the (then widely shared?) assumption that this was the site, the footings of metal railings still being visible.
Reading, I’m reminded that it can’t be his original burial place in 1200 (this site is partly outside the then eastern edge of the building, and a chapel off the north choir transept is almost certainly the original burial site), nor the site of the shrine into which his remains were translated in 1280 after the Cathedral was extended to house them (the site is too small, off centre, and later investigation shows no indication of foundations for the shrine which may in fact have been on top of the rerodos).
When those ill recorded investigations took place in the 1880s, a coffin was found buried beneath the memorial erected by Bishop Fuller which looked a bit as if the stone coffin into which it was placed had to be roughly remodelled to accommodate it, within which were linen, vestments and tiny remains of gold thread, but no body.
Could it be that, when the richly jewelled reliquaries of his body and separately of his head were removed in 1540 and his remains simply disposed of, all that was left was this coffin? Could it be that this one remaining link with his shrine was (hurriedly?) buried in an available slot nearby, later (discretely?) enclosed by railings? Could it be that there was some (confused?) memory of this in the 1640s? Was Bishop Fuller aware of at least some of this?
This is speculation, more like the creation of historic fiction than of well evidenced history. But the story much more often shared today (that a headless skeleton found in a grave in the Chapter House in the 1880s might be Hugh’s body saved from the despoliation) makes greater assumptions on much less evidence.
Whatever the truth, I love now encountering Fuller’s poetical inscription.
