In search of mutton pie.

Last week we drove to Ewyas Lacy, an old Norman settlement close to Monmouth. The reason was fairly mundane. An old friend had rhapsodised over a mutton pie he had enjoyed there; my stomach rumbled its approval, and my mind was made up. Even Meatloaf might have done ‘that’ for a mutton pie. To cut to the chase, when we got there we discovered the butcher’s had closed some time ago and even worse, the pub was shut too. There remained only the castle, which was brilliant but not as good as the mutton pie I had imagined for myself

 I’m standing in the outer bailey facing the gatehouse which controlled access into the inner bailey. Instead of, as now, empty fields, there would have been a number of timber framed buildings, stables, barns, storehouses and accommodation for visitors. In the early C13th the settlement had about 100 serfs, each given a plot of land (and no doubt mutton pie) in exchange for free labour on the Lord’s estates. By 1310 its estimated the population had reached 500 only to be savagely reduced by the Black Death thirty years later. The original settlement was called Ewyas Lacy – Ewyas meaning ‘sheep place’ and Lacy referring to the castle’s owners. By the C15th it was more commonly known as Longtown, referring to the overall shape of the settlement.

The castle was built to defend the borderlands from Welsh raiders and to protect the town of Ewyas Lacy. The first castle would have been a wooden keep on top of a man-made motte/mound,  but in the C12th Roger de Lacy replaced it with a stone castle for the princely sum of £37.

The de Lacys had come over with William the Conqueror and were rewarded with land on the Welsh borders (the Marches) and, along with other powerful barons were known as the Marcher Lords, their task to keep England safe from Welsh attacks and muscle into Wales when opportunity allowed. The name de Lacy  originated from their home in Normandy – Lassy in Calvados. 

Approaching the gatehouse from the outer bailey

And walking through the gatehouse into the inner bailey

The inner bailey as it would have been

The Keep The buttress to the left held a circular staircase. The one to the right, latrines.

The heart of the castle is the stone cylindrical keep built in the 1220s. The lower level of the keep would have been used for storage, the first floor contained the hall, and the upper storey was reserved as a private chamber for the family. Rounded keeps were seen as superior to the more common square keeps because without corners, they were stronger and easier to defend

The views from the keep are spectacular. The ridge, part of Offa's Dyke, separated England from Wales. The castle was very much in frontier country. 

Walking around the keep offers glimpses of the village,

As well as the once mighty stonework crumbling as nature does its work

And finally the inner bailey and gatehouse as seen from the keep

By 1403 the castle had fallen into disrepair but was restored by Henry IV to protect the area from the Welsh bandit, Owen Glendower in his search for mutton pie.

 

He who must not be named

I joined TikTok as a mechanism to sell more books. In marketing, my chief aim has been not to bore, but amuse or intrigue. In that respect, I have some competition on TikTok. Within a minute of signing up I had a home page bouncing with whirling body parts, mostly bums and wide, wide grins ranging from earnest to puzzled— as if to say what am I doing here? Not all grins were puzzled, mind, some were positively enticing, but it wasn’t exactly what I’d signed up to. But then again, needs must. If it sells books, I thought grimly. I can twirl bottoms with the best of them and my grin is magnificent.

And then, at last, the sanity of BookTok.

On the first day, I had 2 followers. Five days later I had 108 followers. Some people have 2K followers and counting, so there’s some way to go. 

That is if I’m allowed to stay on Tik Tok. Within three days I had three videos removed – essentially the same one as I struggled to understand what was wrong with them and tried to work out what to remove. Initially, I just reposted it, thinking they’d made a mistake. But algorithms don’t make mistakes. They’re imbued with an infallibility popes can envy but not emulate.

 So than I wondered whether it was the blurb, referring to The Gift: ‘An occult Downton Abbey involving Satanists, aristocrats, and Nazis.’ Could it be the Chinese owned Tik Tok with its own explementary record objected to the word ‘Nazis’? My third and final posting removed the blurb, but it was still banned with the warning that I would likely be banned too if any such thing happened again.

 Look at the video. Presumably they’re not objecting to Tredegar House, it can only be the one second glimpse of a moody looking Hitler in pin-up pose. Out of interest, I looked up Hitler on the Tik Tok site and immediately got the community guidelines message warning me off. Then, out of sheer bloody-mindedness, I looked up Stalin and Pol Pot. I didn’t look up Mao Tse Tung, fearing a Tiananmen Square response. No problem: Stalin and Pol Pot both feature on Tik Tok. 

A lazy algorithm perhaps or else Tik Tok fears it's in danger of imaginative Nazis with rotating bottoms and appealing grins are poised to take over the site. As it stands it appears that  Tik Tok has slipped into the Harry Potter universe with its own equivalent of Voldemort - ‘He who must not be named’? 

 

Fluff

I hate the lateral flow test. My wife has to prepare everything for me before leading me to the innocent looking twig you stick up your nose and throat. In the abhorrence stakes, the mask comes a close second, put on dutifully where required and ripped off as soon as my feet hit the pavement. They may or may not be useful in blocking an aerosol of covid, but I go along despite steamed up glasses and severely reduced vision and an irritating cough I get sometime later. On balance, I'm willing to accept they may have some use, especially on the London Underground. Have you ever blown your nose and examined your handkerchief after some time there?) But despite all that,  I will throw something out here: a word—phthisis or if you wish—byssinosis. 

In the early 1830’s Dr James Kay noticed cotton workers complained of bad lungs: 

“Entrance into the atmosphere of the mill immediately occasions a dry cough which harasses him considerably during the day, but ceases immediately after he leaves the mill….these symptoms become gradually more severe.” He coined a new word for it ‘spinners phthisis’ and indicated it could be fatal.

By the 1850’s the condition was well known. Elizabeth Gaskell wrote about it in ‘North and South.’ In fact one of her characters, Bessy Higgins dies from it. The manufacture of cotton released ‘Fluff . . . little bits as fly off fro’ the cotton when they’re carding it and fill the air till it looks like fine white dust. They say it winds round the lungs and tightens them up.’ Eventually (people fall) ‘into a waste, coughing and spitting blood, because they’re just poisoned by the fluff.’ 

In 1863 the Lancet noted ‘A carder seldom lives in a cardroom beyond forty years of age.’ Some factory owners put a fan in the room in order to disperse the ‘fluff’. Other factory owners objected to the expense. The workers too had their reservations noting the fans made them more hungry. Fluff had become part of their diet! As the unfortunate Bessie Higgins explained: ‘They’d been long used to swallowing fluff …and that their wages ought to be raised’ if forced to work in non-fluff conditions. 

A fluff diseased lung.

The problem persisted. As late as 1908 a study into the health of Blackburn cotton workers found that almost 74% of them suffered from asthma as a result of inhaling cotton dust. 

Spinners phthisis, later called byssinosis was recognised as an industrial disease under the 1946 National Insurance Act. Despite improved ventilation, a study in 1948 revealed that out of 103 men with at least ten years exposure to cotton dust, 52% showed symptoms of early onset byssinosis, and 10% had been disabled by it.  

Yes, the mask may on balance be necessary, though there is something abhorrent in the idea of children being forced to wear them in schools, but unless you see them as a useful appetite suppressant absorbing fluff as a dietary supplement, it may be well to recognise that not all good things come in small packages. 

 

 

The post originated from having taught factory conditions in an earlier life and speculation based on a rambling mind. Further research highlighted the possible danger, though again, too, they may have an axe to grind, whereas I just hate masks

. Link  https://eluxemagazine.com/culture/the-dangers-of-face-masks/

Thomas a' Kempis

In 1471 Edward IV became king of England ending the War of the Roses—for a time. In 1471 Thomas a’ Kempis died in the monastery of St Agnes aged 92. Thomas a who? 

Thomas a’ Kempis belonged to the school of mystics scattered along the Rhine from Switzerland to the Netherlands. He wrote many devotional works, copied the Bible by hand four times, but his great claim to fame is a small book ‘The Imitation of Christ’ referred to as ‘the pearl of all the writings of the mystical German-Dutch school of the fourteenth and fifteenth Centuries.’ Along with St Augustine’s Confessions, and Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress it is one of the great devotional works. General Gordon even took a copy of it with him on the battlefield—though it proved of little use at Khartoum. 

I inherited the book, a memento from a force of nature who recently died.

I was reading the Imitation of Christ during Advent and got a lot from it. It was, to the modern mind, inspiring and chilling in equal measure, an authentic window into the late medieval mind.  What struck me most powerfully was how wonderful it was to  hear the voice of someone who had died in 1471. Some written records by their nature are impersonal, and even the personal can be masked by self-censoring and buffing. Thomas a’ Kempis, however speaks from the heart, one that stopped beating five-hundred and fifty years ago—possibly in his coffin—for it seems likely that poor old Thomas was buried alive.

 From that moment on, he has become a bit of an anomaly in the Catholic Church. Two hundred years after his death, moves were afoot to make him a saint. Part of that process involved exhuming the body to see whether corruption had set in. When they opened the coffin, they found scratch marks on the lid and wood under his fingernails.

A cynic might laugh at the idea of a man who’d spent his entire life looking forward to union with God should have fought so desperately to delay things a little longer even though he was by this time 92. The Church though was not amused. Precisely because he’d fought for those few extra breaths instead of being reconciled to God, sainthood was denied the poor man.

 I’ve read some interesting counter-theories, such as for example the devil entered the coffin and was responsible for the scratchings and the incriminating wood under the fingernails just to deny Thomas sanctification. Another theory I read was that Thomas did it deliberately in order to deny himself sainthood because he was such a humble man—though that theory is basically illogical for only pride would have suggested he might be made a saint in the first place. 

The whole business illuminates the dross that can adhere to organised religion – rather like barnacles on the most glorious of ships. There is no doubt though that Thomas a’ Kempis was a deeply holy man and his voice rings clear today. He is also an anomaly: Though not a saint, he has his own feast day, and nuns scattered across the world  have assumed the name Sister Thomas a’ Kempis, and as we have seen, Gordon of Khartoum rode to battle with his book tucked under his chest. 

Aleister Crowley