To touch a dead king's eyeball.

The trouble with Edward III was his fecundity, with so many children there were going to be problems further down the line. The conflict between his two grandsons, Richard and Henry, was only the beginning. 

Richard II was the legitimate king but unhinged.

The Wilton Diptych is a wonderful piece of art. It also illustrates the scale of Richard's sense of grandeur. It was a travelling altar piece commissoned by Richard at the time of his marriage to the six year old Isabella of France.  The first picture shows Richard being presented to the Virgin and Child by the martyred king St Edmund, Edward the Confessor, and no less than John the Baptist

The panel below, shows his homage being received by the infant Christ and the angels of Heaven, all wearing the king's personal emblem of the White Hart. 

His cousin, Henry, with less right to the throne was made for the job. When the increasingly tyrannical Richard banished Henry and seized his lands it quickly became a matter of life or death – for them both. Henry however prevailed, seizing what proved to be a poisoned chalice. Worn out by his exertions, Henry died in 1413. Deeply religious and consumed by guilt, he asked to be buried next to St. Thomas Becket in Canterbury. 

But even in death, neither king was left in peace.

Henry and his queen, Joan of Navarre

Henry hadn't even been buried before rumours circulated. One in particular. En route to Canterbury a violent storm appeared from nowhere, threatening to overturn the barge carrying Henry’s coffin. Terrified, the boatmen threw the body into the Thames and the storm miraculously cleared. A judgement from God—a monk with a grudge duly noted—an empty coffin being buried at Canterbury.

The story was clearly absurd but in 1832, antiquarians with more time than sense decided to exhume the body just to make sure. 

A section of the elmwood lid was sawn to allow a small cavity. Ropes of twisted hay used as packaging were removed. Beneath that lay a lead shroud in the form of a body. Two workmen removed an oval 7 x 4 inch section of lead only to find five layers of leather wrapping.The indefatigable antiquarians persisted.

The good news: they became the first people for over 400 years to see the face of Henry IV – the lower half at least: a rich auburn beard and a full set of teeth bar one at the front—probably knocked out in battle.

The bad news: an influx of air saw immediate decay, cartilage and nose withered, sank and vanished as they watched, though the embalmed skin remained moist and brown.  Feeling cheated by not being able to see the top part of his face, one enterprising investigator wriggled his fingers in the small space remaining and ‘felt the orbits of the eyes prominent in their sockets.’

Over the years, Richard II's tomb in Westminster Abbey, fell into a gross state of repair. Five metal coats of arms had been stolen leaving behind five holes in the tomb. These remained unsealed for years, allowing  anyone to put their hands inside and have a good grope.

In the 1870’s, under the auspices of Dean Stanley, everything was taken out piece by piece, labelled and catalogued. Queen Anne had more of her bones missing than her husband’s because most of the shield holes had been where she lay. Richard was less badly damaged, though his jawbone was missing. 

In its place were random objects dropped in by visitors to the abbey or the boys of Westminster School: ‘marbles, three tobacco-pipe bowls, seventy-two copper coins, a peach stone; an iron buckle, a copper-gilt button, the bones of a bird; a small broken table-knife, the bell from a dog’s collar; parts of a leather ball.’

Only after  meticulously restoring the tomb to its former glory did Dean Stanley receive a letter from a country vicar; it concerned  a treasured heirloom passed down from father to son— King Richard II’s missing jawbone. 

Back in the 1760s, his grandfather had been one of those sixteen year old schoolboys in Westminster. A fellow pupil had poked his hand through a hole in the tomb and dug a large piece of bone out and passed it out to the schoolboy in question.  It had even been labelled ‘the jawbone of King Richard the Second taken out of his coffin by a Westminster scholar 1766’

Richard II, one suspects, would not have been amused.

 

Should I be worried?

I recently googled Record of a Baffled Spirit to access a previous post. 

To my surprise, I discovered a whole new world: deep AI. I’ve been reading how AI is about to take over the world, at best make us all stupid, at worst terminate us one and all. I considered the options, considered I was fairly stupid anyway and clicked on the AI overview. My mind boggled. The amount of stuff it had dredged up on me—no dental records as yet—and all in semi-readable prose. 

The world and its wife now belongs to AI—largely to our benefit though others may argue. But as AI becomes ever more powerful, where will it all end? At present, it has access to our past, but why stop there? Quantum AI will no doubt predict our future as well: a boon for Insurance Companies, care homes filling vacancies with maximum efficiency, and the euthanasia business looming on the horizon. All very  gloomy for the likes of me who clicks out of idle curiosity and discovers he’s going to die next Tuesday- and no doubt being able to read a pre-written obituary 

Byland Abbey

The grand abbey entrance leading to:

In 1400, a monk of Byland Abbey chronicled how  James Tankerley, a dead priest, rose one night from his grave at the entrance of the abbey’s chapter house. The corpse then wandered into the nearby village of Cold Kirby, and there gouged out the eyes of his former mistress for reasons unexplained. The frightened monks promptly exhumed Tankerley’s body, which was thrown into Gormire Lake, a few miles away. 

It's a nice little ghost story and easy to believe when seeing the ruins of the abbey on a cold winter's night.  Not too hard to believe on wandering through the ruins on an overcast but hot summer's day. There was something about them that reminded me of Pompeii, easy to imagine ghosts lurked there still.

It began in 1177, when on the 31st  October, Cistercians arrived,  dedicating their lives to prayer and hard work. It had been a long journey, starting from the Cumbrian coast 43 years previously and involving several false starts, each time warfare and disputes forcing them to move on, until at last they settled in Byland and there built their abbey.

At the abbey’s  height in the early C13th there were 80 monks and 160 largely illiterate lay brothers who served God with their labour, while the monks sang and praised God in Latin. Monks and lay brothers were strictly segregated, the monks residing in the eastern part of the abbey, the lay brothers occupying the buildings to the west. 

Peace was shattered when Scottish soldiers sacked the abbey after defeating the army of King Edward II at the battle  of Old Byland. According to some medieval sources, King Edward who was at the abbey at the time of the battle, fled in panic when he heard of the defeat. No surprise there.

After that, little changed until 1538 when the monastery was dissolved, the 25 remaining monks were pensioned off and the great buildings left to decay.

It's very easy to wander through ruins, 

harder to work out their meaning and purpose. 

The illustration was a great help, enabling us to locate the east wing where the monks lived and the west wing where the lay brothers were quartered. If you zoom in, you can see how easy it was to locate the most important parts of the abbey.

The Chapter House

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Built in the late C12th. The Chapter House was where the monks gathered for their daily meeting. It would begin with the reading of a chapter from the Rule of St Benedict – a feature of all monastic life – and giving the building its name. Here the dead were commemorated, sins confessed, business done and distinguished guests received. It is believed that a memorial to Sir Roger de Mowbray, the founder of the abbey, was built under one of the niches in the eastern end of the building. Roger himself died on crusade in 1187, his body remaining in the Holy Land. 

The Cloister

The most important buildings of the monastery were arranged around the cloister, it’s central open square planted with fruit trees.

Byland Abbey boasted one of the largest Cistercian cloisters in England, an indication of the size of the community, which in its C13th heyday comprised as many as 240 monks and lay brothers. 

The quiet and seclusion of the cloister made it an ideal location for contemplation and was interpreted by monks as a form of earthly paradise.

On each side of the central square were covered walkways. Here, silence was strictly enforced. The north walkway was used for reading and copying manuscripts, the others  used for religious processions on Sundays and important holy days. 

What was truly amazing was that so much of the original tiling remains intact. You can almost hear the scuff and hiss of Cistercian feet. 

The Refectory and South Range.

Built in the late C12th, the refectory was where the monks dined together as a community. Meals were eaten in silence while listening to a spiritual reading from the pulpit, which would have been in a recess in the west wall. The monks sat at tables around the edges of the building and communicated using sign language.

The diet was healthy by vegetarian standards at least: hot thick soup  and vegetables like peas and beans with bread and ale. Meat was forbidden, but fish, eggs and cheese were allowed on special occasions. Food was served  through a hatch. The refectory, shown in the picture above, was on the first floor and accessed from the cloister by a short flight of stairs. Its position may have been a deliberate attempt to reflect the Upper Room in the New Testament where the Last Supper of Christ and his apostles was supposed to have been held.

And finally, all good things necessarily coming to an end, it was time to go—albeit with a further and more profound disappointment.

The pub opposite the Abbey was closed. 

Rosedale

Rosedale is a very pretty name and might have been even prettier when in earlier times it was connected to Europe by a land bridge and covered in dense forest. Celts and Romans left their mark as did the Saxons. In the C9th the Vikings arrived and may well have given Rosedale its name. Forget any image of a dale smothered in roses. Some believe it derives from Rossi which could be the name of a chieftain. Rossi also means horse. Then again it could come from ‘Rhos’ meaning moor, which had long since replaced virgin forest. 

In ll58 a Cistercian nunnery was founded, which is remarkable in itself, for the Cistercians were essentially a male order with a profound distrust of women and, indeed they seem to have been treated by their male counterparts with little respect. They were reprimanded for financial mismanagement, urged to give less to the poor in order to avoid bankruptcy. They were told off for allowing visitors into their dormitory, and warned against allowing puppies into the church lest they disturb the service. 

In 1535 the nunnery was dissolved along with other Catholic institutions as Henry and his minions went on their own distinctive property spree.

From then on, Rosedale slumbered, though the sheep remained. 

Then in the 1850’s everything changed. A rich seam of high grade magnetic iron stone was discovered and the population of Rosedale rose from around five hundred to three thousand in two decades.

Now, surrounded by heather and sky, it’s hard to imagine these bleak moorlands once resounded to the clanging of hammers; the air clouded in smoke, the nights glowing in fire. Giant kilns were constructed where the iron stone was purified;  track and rail lines were built built connecting the mines to the kilns, and then later to nearby Battersby from where the purified  product went to the furnaces of Middlesbrough and the Tyne. At its height, 300,000 tonnes a year was being processed, Chimney Top resembling one of those early ‘gold rush towns’ in America. 

A rail track bed snaking its way acrosss the moors. Ideal now for walking.

Twenty-nine years later the great ‘iron rush’ had ended, the seams now exhausted. And peace returned to the moors.  Peace and rain. We'd walked two miles or so along the track, taking the occasional photo. The cloud in the picture below took offence and followed us, shedding its load as we ran back to the car - in my case less a run than an inelegant stumble. Not a pretty sight. Within moments we were drenched. How I longed to dry my jeans alongside a once fiery furnace. Instead we had pictures of clouds.

Wilfrid's Place

 

We were driving past Ripon racecourse when I saw it, The Blackamoor Inn. We both did a doubletake, like all of us sensitised to the latest taboo. It’s hard to believe that such a sign would last long in some parts of Britain, when even ‘The Saracen’s Head’ is deemed controversial. 

By coincidence, it seemed, we saw The Blackamoor again, this time in Ripon Cathedral. What was going on? I remembered the stick Princess Michael got for wearing Blackamoor jewellery once terribly fashionable and still commanding high prices in many parts of Europe. 

 I asked a very nice lady in Ripon Cathedral that same question. ‘What’s going on?’ And like everything in history, things are not black and white. The Blackamoor held pride of place in an C18th stained glass window and was apparently part of the cathredal’s coat of arms, not out of frivolity or exoticism but because he—a family servant—had dived into a swollen river and rescued the son and heir of the local landed family.

The lady confessed that at the height of the Black Lives Matter movement, cathedral authorities had been extremely worried. Might this too be a target? Let’s face it, cathedral windows have long been a target for iconoclasts. 

Another stained glass window portrayed the man who founded Ripon Cathedral: Saint Wilfred. One wonders what he would think of such things.

The name Wilfrid is an old English word meaning one who ‘Desires Peace,’ or ‘Peaceful Ruler’. (Wil or desire and Frid or peace.) Wilfrid in fact was far from peaceful, causing dissent wherever he went. It’s debatable as to whether he was a saint but probably gained the honour, much like a dodgy OBE because he championed Rome and the Roman way of doing things against the indigenous Celtic Church.

Whatever the case, he founded Ripon Cathedral in 672 A.D, in the form of a small Roman basilica. The original crypt still stands, the oldest in Britain. The cathedral was rebuilt, in largely its present form, during the C12th. A tower was rebuilt after an earthquake in 1450 and extra naves added in the early C16th.

Sir Thomas Markenfield  born c.1340 d.1398, fought in the Hundred Years War.  His effigy lies here in the Markenfield chantry chapel on east side of the north transept.

A rood screening the High Altar. Bishops to the left, three random kings to the right

I think St Wilfrid would be impressed. From this

The original crypt of 672 AD

To this

The High Altar and stained glass window - worth zooming in for

The Hidcote Pasty

 

We went to Hidcote on the hottest day of the year. 

The gardens were beautiful, the perfect setting for strawberries, Pimms, and cucumber sandwiches. I though was there for its pasties. 

I’m a huge fan of the Cornish pasty, the perfect food. I could be as rich as Croesus and I’d still forgo filet mignon, lobster, and foi gras for a Cornish pasty.

Squirrels remember their nuts, dogs where they've buried a bone. Some people, especially the incontinent, remember toilets, their location and how far away they are from them. I remember the location of pasties. 

You can buy a fine Cornish pasty at Paddington Station. Tredegar House in Newport sells a good pasty. But to my mind the Hidcote pasty is the finest of all. So inspired was I by it, that I asked the kitchen where they bought them, wrote it down on a piece of paper and lost it two days later. 

The Cornish pasty must never be salty. It must though be peppery. That is essential. But how to eat it?

At Hidcote, I was momentarily flummoxed when they presented it with a knife and fork. I had told them firmly I wanted no green stuff with it. A plain white plate if they insisted. 

But when I sat down, I found myself surrounded by the middle-aged, the genteel and a group of elderly Americans—all of them using the cutlery provided.

Talk about peer pressure.

But the pasty is tactile, meant to be handled – it’s what the lumpy end bit is for, an inbuilt handle allowing you  to stuff the other end into your mouth – or in my case nibble. 

But the peer pressure, those sharp eyed old ladies. I temporarily succumbed out of pragmatism more than anything else. It was just too damn hot, scalding my teeth as I bit into it. Back on the plate it went, the knife and fork proving surprisingly useful in cooling it down while I drank a small pot of tea.

But the joy of taking up the pasty again, pushing plate and cutlery to one side. 

Hidcote is great for flowers, not too sure about its vegan scones, but the pasty is wonderful.