A constitutional crisis ahead?

 

More than three quarter of those who cast a vote in the only by-election so far in this Parliament did so for either the Labour or the Reform candidate.  One of them got 26 more votes than the other.  It is arguable and ironic that the Rejoin EU candidate’s 129 votes was what won it for Reform.  Our one-member first-past-the-post elections throw up almost random results like this all the time.

Low levels of turn out also produces a further anomaly within our electoral system.  The new Reform MP elected then had the active support of less than one fifth (17.9%) of the registered electors in that constituency.  She is not unusual; my Labour MP had the active support of only 25.5% registered electors at the last General Election.

And don’t get me started on the way more people voted in the 2019 General Election for parties offered a ‘second referendum when we can see the terms of a Brexit deal’ policy (including Labour, Lib Dem and SNP) than for those which offered a ‘get Brexit done now’ one (including Conservative and Reform).

But something worse may be coming.  It is quite possible that the next General Election will have an unworkable result.  And it will do so just at the point at which it becomes even more obvious that no Government can deliver something which meets both the population’s wide spread aspirations and its desire for manageable levels of taxation.

Assume turnout is as poor as 60%.  This is plausible given recent General Election figures and political disconnection.

Assume that each individual who votes will vote one of five ways: for the present Government party (Labour); for the previous Government party (Conservative); for the ‘third’ party by current number of seats (Lib Dem); for the ‘third’ party by who is doing best in current polls (Reform); and for any one of the wide range of further alternatives (including the Greens and the Northern Irish, Scottish and Welsh parties).

The split in votes won’t be exactly five way (12% of registered voters for each of the five options), but whatever it is it will produce some quite eccentric outcomes in terms of the split in seats.  It is plausible that no single party will achieve a quarter of the seats (compare the Conservative’s present 18.6% of seats).

Present polling gives the possibility that Reform would do much better than one fifth of the votes cast and be the largest party.  Even then the polling doesn’t suggest it would have an overall majority of seats, and with the Conservatives (their only realistic coalition partner?) perhaps at their present level of seats. 

What if no plausible coalition would achieve 50% of seats?  Not just a Reform-Conservative one, but also a Conservative-Lib Dem one or a Lib Dem-Labour one.  What would we do then?

Reform are among those who are clear that the 2016 Referendum (when 37.5% of registered voters turned out to support leaving the EU) produced an unchallengeable democratic mandate.  What is they are clear that they have a democratic mandate to govern (27% of votes according to present polls, the active support of 16.2% of registered voters if turnout is 60%) but are being denied the opportunity to do so?  And no alternative Government can be formed either? 

It is hard for people to see the detail of the Lincoln Imp high up at the Cathedrals west end, but the huge pub sign at the Lincoln Imp on the city’s Ermine estate is very clear.

A tunica of russet furred with calaber

 

The religious life of the best known anchorites overlapped in the 1390s.  Margaret Kirkby of Hampole was coming to the end of her life.  Julian of Norwich was being enclosed.

We know Margaret’s name because the mystic Richard Rolle had been her spiritual director and addressed his writings On the Contemplative Life to her by name.

We don’t know Julian’s name, so she has acquired that of the church to which her cell was attached, and where her reflection on her visions (or ‘shewings’) led to her writing Revelations of Divine Love.

In modern times Julian’s growing fame (as the first female English author) has eclipsed Margaret’s (as the preserver of Rolle’ story and writings).

But I discover that at this time there was an anchorite living less than 300 yards from my home.

I have been reading the Will of Geoffrey Lescropp (as it records his name) or le Scrope (as it is now more commonly written).  His name is pronounced ‘scroop’.

He was a Canon of Lincoln Cathedral and his Will was written ‘in my lodgings within the close’ shortly before he died in 1382.

He was very well connected.  His father had been Lord Chief Justice and his oldest brother was made a Baron.  He also had an ordained nephew who was later to be Archbishop of York and still later to be executed for rebellion. 

The family will have known Bishop Henry Burghersh well.  Influence would have been behind the Bishop giving Geoffrey his canonry when aged only 25.  Both of Geoffrey’s parents’ coats of arms are certainly among those on the monuments in the chantry in the Cathedral which the Bishop founded.

One of his sisters married Sir Andrew Luttrell, whose father had commissioned the Luttrell Psalter, the greatest of the works of art and devotion created in Lincolnshire.

His bequests are sumptuous.  They include ‘my white silk cope with an orphry of blue velvet with the likeness of the apostles woven in gold’, left to the Cathedral, alongside his commissioning a silver gilt image of the Holy Trinity for a niche above the high altar.

There were also a bequest for each member of his large household.  Four of his servants were employed together: William the cook, Maurice of the kitchen, John the page of the kitchen and little William of the kitchen.  The last received 6s 8d.

And I find that he leaves money to five different anchorites, the first of whom (‘the anchorite of Hampole’) must be Margaret Kirkby.

The one I notice most is ‘the anchorite of the church of the Holy Trinity of Lincoln’.  This church stood on the terrace cut into the hillside at the foot of the Greestone Steps where school buildings and some cottages now stand.

He probably knew her well, and was certainly aware of her needs, as she is the only one of the five to whom he makes an additional more personal bequest.  He leaves her ‘a tunica of russet furred with calaber with a double hood and an armilausa of the same suit furred with grice’. 

So the tunica was lined with squirrel fur, the armilausa (sleeveless, so perhaps it would have been a gilet today) with the soft underfleece of a pig once debristled.  Plain and warm, as the thirteenth century Acrene Weiss (anchorite’s guidance) suggested, although the furs feel as if they would have been expensive.

The southernmost of Geoffrey’s anchorites was ‘at Staunford’, which ties in with the known cell at St Paul’s, Stamford.  His reach wasn’t as far as Norwich, where, Wikipedia tells me, the way Julian’s presence is evidenced historically is by four other people’s legacies between 1394 and 1416.

Two of those legacies for Julian name her servants, at one point Alice and at another Sarah, which is a reminder that the cell was not quite as an isolated place as all that; someone has to sort out bringing food in and taking night soil away.

Richard Rolle’s counselling and support for Margaret Kirkby, Margery Kemp’s known visit to Julian, and possibly even Geoffrey le Scrope's awareness of the the anchorite yards from his own home, all evidence levels of interaction. 

Indeed Acrene Weiss gives advice about the nature, extent and wisdom of such contacts, so it must always have been a live issue.  It also suggests the way a confessor or spiritual director’s involvement might partly be a sort of safety valve to ensure the anchorite did not engage in excessive self discipline in areas like fasting and flagellation. 

The picture of the rood is from St Peter in Eastgate where I went to a concert recently.  In the years since I last went in the remaining furnishings have been swept away to make a suitable setting for more puritan worship.

The Wren Library

 

Lincoln Cathedral has had to spend a huge sum of money securing the roof and floor timbers of the Wren Library.   

Putting a stock of valuable books into storage was one of the expensive projects with which great care needed to be taken.  It made sense doing the maximum amount of restoration and putting in things like new heating, lighting and humidifier control work while the books were away.

Some staff and volunteers were allowed one of several quick visit opportunities last week.  There will now be a deep conservation clean and months of careful environmental monitoring as the new systems operate before the books are brought back.

The doorway used to lead into a passageway into the old Deanery, and now the blocked off route provides a cupboard in which the switches and systems are placed.   

The humidifiers beneath the side tables will have discrete quality covers; the skirting boards have been widened to take service cables.

The Oxford Mallams

 

Algorithms knew it was worth drawing my attention to an item in the Law Society Gazette dated 12 January.  I realise it is just applied maths, but I still find this weird. 

RWK Goodman…, Thames valley legal giant, is to acquire HMG Law, which is reputed to be Oxfordshire’s oldest legal firm…  Staff… will be integrated… at Minns Business Park…  Herbert, Mallam, Gowers can trace its history back to 1838.  Founding father Thomas Mallam enrolled as a solicitor and set up… in Oxford’s Turl Street.

My father’s parents were cousins.  Their mothers were sisters, both daughters of Thomas Mallam. 

I have a pair of pictures in my hallway which are the wedding group in 1864 and the Diamond Wedding Group in 1924 of Thomas Mallam’s oldest child Jessie with the Revd Henry Mullins.  Thomas Mallam and his wife Martha Joy are at the back in the first photo.  My father, aged two, wriggling on his mother’s knee, is at the front in the second one.

My first thought was that the Gazette had, quite understandably, missed the way Thomas Mallam was to move his firm to 126 High Street (a rare surviving Tudor building) when his father, who died in 1850, ceased trading there. 

So, businesses with the Mallam name have been trading from the same premises for at least two hundred years.  Although I find HGM Law’s website gives the firm’s address as 1 St Aldates, which suggests it must have moved since I was last passing by, and the striking link had been broken anyway.

Thomas Mallam’s grandfather, Richard Mallam, became a freeman of Oxford in 1788.  His son, an older Thomas Mallam, is then listed as an auctioneer in the 1841 census.  Mallam Auctioneers, operating today in St Michael Street, has 1788 as its logo.  So the Mallam trading name in the city goes back fifty years before the younger Thomas Mallam’s career took a different legal path. 

And it will continue with Mallam Auctioners, although no member of the Mallam family will have worked in any of those firms for the last hundred years.  The last to be involved were the younger Thomas Mallam’s sons, a further Thomas and an Edward, who were still working in their father’s legal practice into the early 1920s.

So, to be clear, there were actually three Thomas Mallams, father, son and grandson.  They have appeared in this Blog before, as a search for the Mallam name will reveal.

An particularly niche piece of information is that each died in a house in Oxford called The Shrubbery.  The first Thomas Mallam (son of the Richard made a freeman in 1788, and himself twice Mayor of Oxford) built a villa in the countryside north of St Giles; the house is now the lodgings of the Principal of St Hugh’s.  He died there, as did his son (the one who became a solicitor in 1838).  The third Thomas Mallam (brother of my father’s grandmothers, the one who continued to work at 126 High Street until the 1920s) gave the same name to his home in Littlemore, which is where he died; Littlemore’s Catholic Presbytery is now on that site.  

Meanwhile, the picture was taken this week in St Marylebone Parish Church.

If you are God's son

 

The division of the New Testament into chapters and verses helps identify a quotation or find a text.  But it is has only done so for less than half the New Testament’s life so far.  The division into chapters is attributed to Stephen Langton, the Lincolnshire born Archbishop of Canterbury who pressed King John to grant the Magna Carta in 1215.  The division into verses waited until the introduction of printing and was the work of a bookseller in Paris. 

Each modern version often also includes section headings.  However helpful these prompts by individual publishers might be, they have also never been part of the text.  And each modern ‘lectionary’ also portions up the specific passages for reading at particular services, which means navigating around to find it isn’t always necessary anyway. 

So this Sunday’s reading from the Gospels can be listed as ‘Matthew 3.13-17’, easy to locate by that numbering, even easier to locate if the passage is placed under a heading ‘Baptism of Jesus’ or set out on its own as ‘the Gospel for the feast of the Baptism of Jesus’. 

After it, most Bibles have a short gap, a new chapter number, and often a fresh subheading – making a very firm demarcation from the next story.  It is what will be ‘the Gospel for the first Sunday in Lent’ – which is in six weeks time.  Matthew 3.13-17 is placed at some distance on the page and in time from Matthew 4.1-11.

But, just for a moment, consider the final forty-six words of the first of these passages and the first forty-six words of the second as one continuous text, which is how it was written.

… Jesus immediately

coming up from the water

and behold the heavens were opened

and he saw the spirit of God

coming down on him like a dove

and behold a voice out of the heavens

saying this is my son

the beloved in whom I delight.

Then Jesus was led by the spirit

into the wilderness

to be tempted by the devil,

and having fasted forty days and nights

afterwards he hungered,

and the tempter came near

saying to him if you are God’s son

say that these stones will become bread…

We see at once it is a single story, one poem. 

We see that Jesus’ encounter with the spirit of God is both about God’s delight in him and his being led to the devil almost as one connected act. 

We see the voice from heaven’s ‘this is my son’ quickly paralleled by the tempter’s close by ‘if you are God’s son’.

It is about Jesus and the spirit of God.  The journey begun at Jesus’ baptism is one which lead him to the cross.

But it feels as if it also hints that God’s delight in us is can be intimately, almost necessarily, linked not with a comfort blanket but with exposure to life, to danger? 

It feels as if it hints that the danger might often begin with an ‘if this is true?’?

The human Jesus, the 'problem of suffering', and questions about the nature of Christ all woven inextricably into the text from the very beginning.  And our journey alongside.

The picture is from Bishop Wordswoth’s grave at Riseholme.