The first nature conservationist

Nature conservation, it’s a modern thing right? We are gradually becoming more enlightened about the need to protect species and habitats?

Well, yes, we appear to be a bit better than we used to be but don’t go thinking that nature conservation is a modern thing.

This is St Cuthbert, former Bishop of Lindisfarne and a monk who lived for many years as a hermit on the island of Inner Farne off the coast of Northumberland.

He was born in 634 and died in 687 and was one of the most popular saints of early British Christianity.

While living on the Farne Islands, Cuthbert shared his rock in the sea with thousands of sea birds, including Eider Ducks.

He instituted laws protecting the ducks and the other sea birds that used the islands for nesting. These were the world’s first nature protection laws.

And that is why Eider Ducks are still called Cuddy (Cuthbert’s) Ducks in Northumberland.

 

 

Going to the wall

Pews. They come in a variety of shapes and sizes.

But once, they weren’t there at all. They are, in fact, a reasonably modern invention … well 13th century onwards at least.

Old churches had nowhere for the congregation to sit, they just sort of, well, congregated in the middle of the room.

Now this wasn’t easy for the elderly or infirm and so sometimes a ledge was built into the fabric of the church for these people to lean against for support.

You know the expression ‘going to the wall’ if you are talking about a company or business being on it’s last legs?

Yep, you’ve guessed it, that’s where the expression comes from.

I’ve yet to find one of these ledges … but I’m looking 🙂

 

Nan Scott’s chamber

This is the lovely little country church of St Giles at Holme, near Newark in Nottinghamshire. It’s a lovely little place with an intriguing little legend.

You can see from the photo that the porch of the church is two storey, there is quite clearly a room with a window above the doorway.

This is known locally as Nan Scott’s chamber.

In 1666 the Great Plague was ravaging the country and Newark was not immune to the infection.

Legend has it that in a bid to escape infection, villager Nan Scott fled her home and took refuge in the Priest’s room above the porch of St Giles’ Church.

Over the next few weeks she stayed in the room, watching through the window as the fellow villagers who had succumbed to the plague were buried in the churchyard outside.

After several weeks Nan Scott decided it was safe to leave her sanctuary but, when she finally ventured outside, she discovered a deserted village bar one man. All her neighbours had died of the plague.

In horror, she fled back to the Priest’s room where, the legend says, she lived out the rest of her life.

Truth, or old wives’ tale? Who knows. But pieces of clothing are supposed to have been found in the room and, apparently, there was also evidence of a table that could only have been made in the room (the staircase is very small and not easily accessible).

Perhaps a recluse did live there, or perhaps it was Nan Scott successfully avoiding plague infection.

 

The north/south divide

I am from southern England. I live in an area between London and the south coast where we pride ourselves on speaking the Queen’s English, English with no accent, pure English… at least that’s what I thought.

Now for more than three years I have been in a relationship with a Man from the East Midlands, Nottingham to be precise, where there is a distinct accent.

He, for instance says bath rather than barth, laff as opposed to larff and (if this isn’t bad enough) he has tried to convince me that this is the correct way to speak.

Now, however, I have a dilemma.

I am re-reading the book pictured above. It is a book I studied many years ago for A-level English (about 30 years to be precise).

It was first published in 1950 when its author Simeon Potter was Chair of English at the University of Liverpoool.

It is widely regarded as an expert text and a good starting point for the study of the etymology of the English language. This is why I am re-reading it.

And then I came across this:

“By the thirteenth century, however, the East Midland dialect had risen into greater prominence than the West. It was, after all, the dialect of the Court, of the City of London, and of both universities, Oxford and Cambridge. Later it became the dialect of Chaucer, whose English was essentially East Midland …  ”

Well I know now, the dilemma is: do I tell the East Midlands Man?

 

 

A punchy bit of etymology

Do you know who this guy is? No? Well the man with the staggering sideburns is Australian boxer Larry Foley.

He is, apparently, the father of Australian boxing from the days when there were bare knuckles and unlimited rounds.

He had enormous success.

Born in 1848 and retiring at the age of 31, he never lost a fight and his final bout carried a purse of £1,000. Quite a sum in those days.

Now I have precisely no interest in boxing (although I did quite like the Rocky films) and I had never heard of Larry Foley so why am I writing about him?

Well, if you have ever said the words “as happy as Larry” this is Larry.

Many people attribute the expression, which is particularly used across Britain and the Commonwealth, to this man. And I suppose if he won that amount of money he probably was quite pleased.

The expression was first used in print in New Zealand in the late 1870s, which ties in with the height of Mr Foley’s fame, and has been widely used ever since.

So now you know 🙂

Incidentally, there is another school of thought which says the expression comes from the originally Cornish word larrikins, meaning someone mucking around. And I suppose the expression ‘larking around’ might come from that too, but I prefer the first version.

And, in case you hadn’t guessed, I nicked this picture from the internet too.

A magnificent man and his flying machines

Farnborough, Hampshire: 1913

  Samuel Franklin Cody is a local hero in Farnborough.

Born in Iowa, he came to England with a traveling Wild West Show around 1890.

But this was a man fascinated by flying and his thoughts soon turned skywards.

His first efforts at getting airborne were in kites. In fact his kite designs were used by the British Army during the Second Boer War. And in 1903 he staged a big exhibition of his kites at Alexandra Palace.

From kites, Cody wanted to move on to planes, but the War Office wanted dirigibles so he joined a team based at Aldershot, the home of the British Army,  making British Army Dirigible No 1, an airship lovingly christened Nulli Secondus. They flew it as well, all the way to London in about three and a half hours – about the same amount of time as it takes to negotiate the M3 and the  M25 these days!

The Kite Team of the Royal Engineers, including Cody, eventually became The Royal Flying Corps and planes were back on the agenda. 

The plane they built was tested during 1908 and the ‘hops’ it made got longer and longer until in October that year Cody’s ‘hop’ was recognised as the first official powered flight in Britain.

His contract ended with the army but he continued to work on his designs at Farnborough. In May 1909 he successfully piloted a plane for more than a mile. The following year he won  a  prize for the longest recorded powered flight in Britain (more than four hours) and in 1911 his was the only British plane to complete in the round Britain air race organised by the Daily Mail.

This is the Cody Flyer. A replica of it, built by volunteers to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Cody’s first powered flight. It’s housed at the Farnborough Air Sciences Trust Museum, which itself is based in the original building that housed the Royal Engineers Balloon School (The Balloon Factory) at the turn of the last century. It’s a lovely little museum, packed with the history of British Aviation and, although it’s only open at weekends, it is free to enter. There is a roll of honour of test pilots who died in pursuit of the ultimate flying machine.

In 1913, Cody was testing his latest design in the skies above Farnborough. He had a passenger with him, the cricketer William Evans (Oxford University, Worcestershire and Hampshire). The Cody Floatplane, as the new plane was called, broke up at about 500ft. Both Cody and Evans died.

 It is said 100,000 people lined the streets as Cody’s body was taken from his home in Ash Vale to be buried with full military honours at Aldershot Military Cemetery nearby.

This is his gravestone. Alongside it lies the grave of his only son Samuel Franklin Leslie Cody, Royal Flying Corps, who was killed in action in 1917 fighting four German aircraft. In the First World War the average life expectancy of a pilot was 11 days.

There is  currently a campaign locally to erect a statue of Samuel Cody senior in Farnborough. There is currently no memorial to him in the UK. The Cody Statue Campaign is fundraising to change that and an official unveiling of the statue is planned for August this year on the 100th anniversary of his death.

It seems a fitting tribute to this magnificent man and his flying machines.

(all photos were blatantly nicked off the internet, apart from the picture of the gravestone, which I took)

Creating a spectacle

Eyeglasses or spectacles have been around for longer than you might think.

‘Lenses’ ground from crystal have been found among Viking artifacts but there is a school of thought that thinks these may have been decorative.

Marco Polo is meant to have found Chinese men using spectacles. But it is much more likely the invention of the spectacles was something that evolved over time.

One of the men associated with their creation was Friar Roger Bacon, an Englishman living in Paris, who wrote about the scientific prinicples of using lenses to correct eyesight in his Opus Majus around 1266. There are early references to a priest called Nicholas Bullet using spectacles to sign an agreement, but whether the reference means spectacles as we know them remains in question.

The epicentre of the glass making world, Venice, is also credited with being the place of their creation. Apparently a document called de Cristalleris includes a bylaw in Venice that only crystal and not white glass could be used for making the lenses to keep standards high.

According to the College of Optometrists’ history page the earliest artistic depiction of eye glasses are ” in series of frescoes dated 1352 by Tommaso da Modena in the Chapter House of the Seminario attached to the Basilica San Nicolo in Treviso, north of Venice”.

It adds :”1358 – A work of fiction by Franco Saccheti (1330-1400) has a Florentine prior saying ‘I don’t see well without my spectacles’ (Italian: occhiali)”.

Pictured above is Mistress Sue, re-enactor and a guide at Tutbury Castle in Staffordshire, UK.

She is dressed as a 14th century housekeeper and says the spectacles she is wearing were available at that time. They look like two magnifying glasses hitched together above the bridge of the nose and they have leather thongs wrapped around the ears to keep them on.

These, however, are slightly unusual. They have Sue’s prescription lenses in them. She took them to her optician and had the prescription lenses put into the reproduction frames.

Certainly quirky.

 

An artist in glass

This stained glass window can be found in St Mary Magdelene Church in Tortington in West Sussex.

The church is redundant and is now cared for by the Churches Conservation Trust.

The window depicts St Richard who was Bishop of Chichester  from 1244 until 1253. His appointment was highly controversial. The Canons of Chichester Cathedral had selected someone and Henry II had given his approval when The Archbishop of Canterbury (Richard’s former teacher) overruled their choice and appointed Richard instead.

The King was mad and both he and Richard appealed to the Pope. Richard, in fact, went to visit him and was consecrated as Bishop on the spot. Now the King was really mad, refused to recognise Richard and banned him from the bishopric. For two years Richard’s income was confiscated by the Crown and he had no access to his diocese or cathedral.

Henry II relented in the end.

But this stained glass window wasn’t created anywhere near St Richard’s time, it is 19th century and one of a pair in this church created by Charles Eamer Kempe, a Victorian master of stained glass.

The list of English cathedrals containing work by Kempe includes Chester, Gloucester, Hereford, Wells, Winchester and York.

He wanted to become a priest but had a severe stammer that he felt would hinder that career. Instead he set up a business making stained glass, vestments and furnishings for the church. By 1899 he had more than 50 employees.

He was born in Sussex and there are more than 100 churches containing examples of his work.

Do you know how you can tell if you’ve found one?

 

Look for the wheatsheaf. It was the trademark of the firm, taken from Kempe’s family coat of arms. After Kempe died, the company continued with a relative Walter Tower as chairman. In windows from this later period have a black tower – looking a bit like a castle from a chess board – on top of the wheatsheaf.

 

Of effigies and Templars

I love religious buildings. I like the architecture, the art, the icons, the symbolism and the monuments and gravestones.

I found this effigy at a church in Lincolnshire at the weekend. It’s a knight, a member of the Disney family and, it is believed, an ancestor of Walt Disney himself.

He is in full armour and his feet rest on a carved lion.

But why are his legs crossed?

Well one train of thought is that the crossing of his legs symbolise the fact that he was a Knight Templar and fought in the Crusades.

If the effigy has legs crossed at the ankles, he went on one Crusade, at the knees symbolises his participation in two and a third Crusade is depicted by legs crossed at the thigh.

I have to say, there are other schools of thought on this too but, personally, I like this one.

 

The story of the vicar who couldn’t leave his church

The Church of St Lawrence, Eyam, Derbyshire

Eyam, Derbyshire, UK

This is the church of St Lawrence in the village of Eyam in the Derbyshire Peak District. It was previously known as St Helen’s.

Eyam is famous for being the ‘plague village’, though that’s a story for another day.

This story begins a few years after the Great Plague decimated the town’s population.

In 1683 the Reverend Joseph Hunt became Vicar of Eyam. He was a young man and, judging by this story, a little naive and easily led when he first came to this village isolated in the Derbyshire peaks.

Shortly after he became vicar, he was asked to baptise a sick child. For some obscure reason not documented, the baptism took place not in the church but in a nearby pub.

After the service a little drinking appears to have ensued and in an act of tipsyness Rev Hunt joined hands with the landlord’s daughter and a member of the drunken congregation read the marriage service over them to much hilarity.

The Bishop of Lichfield, on hearing of this drunken prank, did not agree it was hilarious at all, in fact he was mightily put out. He insisted the couple got married for real and the marriage took place on September 4 1684.

And they lived happily ever after?

Well, sort of … but not quite.

Unfortunately the young Reverend Hunt had previously proposed marriage to a lady who lived in Derby whose family was pretty well off and who was not happy at all about this new state of affairs. She sued for breach of promise and the resulting legal battle cost young Rev Hunt and his new wife so much money that they fell into debt, which was a crime.

The bailiffs came after them to arrest them and sling them in debtors’ jail but, having been warned (or seeing them coming), Joseph and his wife Anne hotfooted it into the church and claimed sanctuary.

And there they stayed.

They couldn’t come out without being arrested and so they didn’t come out … at all, for 19 years apparently.

The couple is reported to have had nine children, all born inside the church. The fact that they had nine children is documented in the parish records.

At the time there was no vestry but the villagers seemed to like the pair and erected a sort of lean to thing on the side of the church for the couple and their family to use.

And, according to legend, there they stayed.

Anne died in 1703 and Joseph in 1709. They were buried in the same vault inside the church. During his time of self-imposed confinement the Reverend Hunt laboriously copied out the parish records in English apparently. And this is a reason why research into the births, deaths and marriages of the plague village of Eyam has been a relatively easy affair to conduct.

Truth? Embellishment? Complete fiction? I don’t know. But it’s a good story 🙂