24 August: Review, ‘Edmund, in Search of England’s Lost King’.

Saint Edmund by Dame Elizabeth Frink, 1974.

A few days before our visit to Bury Saint Edmund’s, a book turned up on our shelves that none of the family remembered: ‘Edmund, in search of England’s lost king’, by Francis Young.* It was a good preparation for our time there and made it more memorable. Young is both enthusiastic and knowledgeable, but he can tell us little for certain about the life of Saint Edmund. It is for his martyr’s death that he is remembered.

The Danes’ Great Heathen Army ravaged much of Eastern England for a second time in 869, capturing and assassinating King Edmund of East Anglia. Edmund’s armourer was an eyewitness to his binding to a tree and execution as an archery target, before being decapitated and his head tossed into the brambles, where a wolf cared for it till the search party arrived.

It seems that Danes as well as Anglo-Saxons recognised his sanctity, and indeed he was celebrated across England to Wessex, and beyond the North Sea to the rest of Europe. King Canute, Danish King of all England after he had had King Ethelred executed, established the great Abbey at Bury Saint Edmund’s, no doubt from very mixed motives. Future Kings patronised the Abbey, publicly deriving authority from their alliance with Edmund.

However all that came to an end when Henry VIII dissolved the monastery in 597. The fate of the Saint’s body is not known, despite searches in the 19th and 20th Centuries. Francis Young has his own theory of where they might have been hidden before the King’s representatives arrived.

Parts of the Abbey buildings have been incorporated into homes and offices near the Cathedral.

Francis Young brings to life not only Edmund, but a host of characters, Danish, English and French; scholars, churchmen and royalty. He throws light on the evolution of English society over seven centuries before the dissolution and in the time since then. He argues that England needs its former patron saint now more than ever, with the reason for the United Kingdom under question post Brexit, and a new relationship with our continental neighbours yet to be established.

Read this book if you are a potential pilgrim to Bury, or else interested in almost forgotten English history. Young’s deep scholarship is presented in clear, flowing English. If you read it for the history, you may well find yourself looking up train times to Bury. You will not be disappointed when you go on pilgrimage.

*Edmund, in search of England’s lost king’, by Francis Young, London, I.B. Tauris, 2018.

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27 May: Saint Augustine of Canterbury.

There was a time when I felt in two minds about Augustine: Saint Augustine? Saint? Hmm. He was a most reluctant Missionary, delaying his departure from Rome to make his way across Europe in 596-597, and indeed, dilly-dallying on the way. But he did get here and began work with his community. He established the dioceses of Canterbury, Rochester and London, which exist to this day in the Church of England.

And then there was the incident when he remained seated to greet the British bishops who went to visit him. They saw this as grossly insulting. For all that, he founded a Church that has lasted.

Let us pray that we may become the missionaries that Gregory’s successor, Francis, calls us to be, and that, like Augustine, we may co-operate with God’s grace, thriving in our weakness.

18 February: Changeable Skies and Uncertain Seasons.

Winter’s Afternoon, Old Ruttington Lane.

Another visit to the eighteenth century in the company of Doctor Johnson and James Boswell.

In The Idler, No. II, Johnson shews that ‘an Englishman’s notice of the weather is the natural consequence of changeable skies and uncertain seasons… In our island every man goes to sleep unable to guess whether he shall behold in the morning a bright or cloudy atmosphere, whether his rest shall be lulled by a shower, or broken by a tempest. We therefore rejoice mutually at good weather, as at an escape from something that we feared; and mutually complain of bad, as of the loss of something that we hoped.’

Boswell for once is quoting from Johnson’s written words rather than conversation. I found this text on the same day in winter that I took the photograph. My father called the piercing of clouds by sunbeams such as we see here ‘The Gate of Heaven’. A saying worth recording, as Boswell would no doubt have agreed.

I am reminded of the line of Chesterton: ‘The gates of heaven are lightly locked.’ But do we look up to see them? Dare we set a toe over the threshold, pausing even for a moment, to catch a glimpse of glory? What does the voice from the cloud tell us? I found myself hurrying the next moment, as my grandson’s school bell had rung and he would soon be out, scanning the playground for his adults. But the moment stayed with me.

From “Life of Johnson, Volume 4 1780-1784” by James Boswell

12 July: A no-nonsense name.

Sheila Billingsley has sent us a poem about the great golden cloud that descends on Southern England and elsewhere at this time of year – oilseed rape, a member of the cabbage family and the source of much of the vegetable oil on supermarket and kitchen shelves. It’s actually a staple of our diet, keeps us alive, so deserves a poem of its own.

Oilseed Rape. 

Do you then reflect the sun ? 
Out-- buttering the buttercups. 
You gild our fields and hillsides 
With your glory!

Oilseed Rape, 
An in-your-face  
                 no-nonsense name. 
Your down-to-earth mothering 
To feed yet glorify the earth. 

There must be-----somewhere---- 
In God's eternal memory, 
Another, golden name.

SB  February 2021

Ines’s foreshortened view of Canterbury crosses a patch of bright yellow oilseed rape, or colza as the French call it. I don’t know that colza is quite the golden name that Sheila was looking for; it won’t catch on!

The photograph above is by Myrabella, and shows a crop of colza – or oilseed rape – in Burgundy, France.

5 July: From our sports pages

We don’t generally cover sport in the Mirror, but this generous editorial from the Irish Times was worth sharing with our readers. Let’s hope their optimism about English Society proves well-founded. (Pink was the colour of the Birmingham sports paper, The Argus, when I was growing up.)

28 February: Blessed William Richardson

You never know what you might find on the Web! I’d never heard of Blessed William Richardson till I saw his name in Hallam News, from the Catholic South Yorkshire diocese. A remarkably brave man to go prison visiting among Catholics, aware that he might be betrayed at any time. The full article from which this is taken can be found here. Remembering him, we also honour Christians of many allegiances, killed for their beliefs, and pray that we may continue to work to bring all our communities together.

Blessed William Richardson grew up close to where the South Yorkshire, Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire borders meet.

We know from the Entry Book in the English College in Spain that William was a convert to the Catholic faith and was received into the Church by one of the clergy at Wiesloch, Germany, where at that time he was working.  He was called to the priesthood, attended the English College in Spain, studying Philosophy and Theology, and was ordained priest there in 1594 and then returned to England.

Most of William’s life was spent working in London often with the legal profession in the Inns of Court.  He visited prisons as an ordinary visitor, to take Mass to Catholics imprisoned for their faith, and he was sentenced to death after being betrayed by a priest catcher.  His execution took place on Tyburn Gallows, by the barbaric act of being hung, drawn and quartered on 17 February in 1603.  There is no knowledge of his last resting place, but if we can find a King under a car park, we may one day learn of his last resting place.

William’s death was in the reign of Elizabeth 1 and he was the last priest to be murdered at that time.  Elizabeth 1 died one week later.  Bishop Challoner tells us he accepted his death with such constancy and faith, and praying for the Queen, that impressed his executioners.

5 September: Wesley’s thoughts upon slavery V; Kidnapping slaves.

Slaving Ship from a 19th Century Methodist history book.

 The first sentence of today’s extract from Wesley’s thoughts upon slavery suggests strongly that the white men of the day who accepted and promoted slavery were not to be trusted to give an accurate and honest account of the lives of he West Africans they abducted into slavery. The remainder of the extract makes clear why these writers were not to be trusted.

We have now seen what kind of country it is from which the Negroes are brought; and what sort of men (even white men being the judges) they were in their own country. Inquire we, Thirdly, In what manner are they generally procured, carried to, and treated in, America.

 First. In what manner are they procured? Part of them by fraud. Captains of ships, from time to time, have invited Negroes to come on board, and then carried them away. But far more have been procured by force. The Christians, landing upon their coasts, seized as many as they found, men, women, and children, and transported them to America. It was about 1551 that the English began trading to Guinea; at first, for gold and elephants’ teeth; but soon after, for men. In 1556, Sir John Hawkins sailed with two ships to Cape Verd, where he sent eighty men on shore to catch Negroes. But the natives flying, they fell farther down, and there set the men on shore, “to burn their towns and take the inhabitants.” But they met with such resistance, that they had seven men killed, and took but ten Negroes. So they went still farther down, till, having taken enough, they proceeded to the West Indies and sold them.

24 April: Two or three days in the year.

A version of this posting has appeared  on the Will Turnstone blog.

Abel was coming away from the L’Arche Glebe garden when his eye was arrested by the round, tan-coloured husks beneath the hollow yew outside Saint Mildred’s church. They must really be discarded cones, since the yew is a conifer – with no recognisable cone. 

I was half reminded of when Mrs T and I went to see the cowslips near Brogdale, happily growing on the chalk. Another chalk-lover is the beech tree, one I loved to climb as a boy, and a mile or so on from the cowslip field our walk took us through a beech wood. Unlike the above picture from last year, it was a grey day, the path was wet, but we could still appreciate Edward Thomas’s observation in The South Country. By which he meant the South of England; where else could he have recorded this scene?

Then in the early morning the air is still and warm, but so moist that there is a soul of coolness in the heat, and never before were the leaves of the sorrel and wood sanicle and woodruff, and the grey-green foliage and pallid yellow flowers of the large celandine, so fair. The sudden wren’s song is shrewd and sweet and banishes heaviness. The huge chestnut tree is flowering and full of bees. The parsley towers delicately in bloom. The beech boughs are encased in gliding crystal. The nettles, the millions of nettles in a bed, begin to smell of summer. In the calm and sweet air the turtle-doves murmur and the blackbirds sing — as if time were no more — over the mere.

The roads, nearly dry again, are now at their best, cool and yet luminous, and at their edges coloured rosy or golden brown by the sheddings of the beeches, those gloves out of which the leaves have forced their way, pinched and crumpled by the confinement. At the bend of a broad road descending under beeches these parallel lines of ruddy chaff give to two or three days in the year a special and exquisite loveliness, if the weather be alternately wet and bright and the long white roads and virgin beeches are a temptation.

There is never enough traffic on this bridleway to order the husks  into parallel lines, but there they are, colouring the path. The nettles are in evidence ahead; we would discern the white of cow parsley if we were closer, but the pale celandine was not yet in flower here. (The bright, low-growing, lesser celandine is all but finished.)

Close to, the russet husks are indeed cool and luminous. Who would have said that brown could shine?

Thank you Edward Thomas!

And Laudato Si!

(Since this was written, a neighbour told me that the buds were once used for sewing, the points piercing the fabric with relative ease. Some of the husks in the picture still show that point. With a solid bud inside them, the buds would be sharp – for a little while. Poor people always had to work hard and even foraged for sewing needles.)

27 January: The murder that shook the Middle Ages.

This link is to the British Museum blog  post about ‘the murder that shook the Middle Ages: that of Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, in his own Cathedral.  In this period of Brexit and withdrawal from Europe, it is as well for us all to realise that:

In death Becket remained a figure of opposition to unbridled power and became seen as the quintessential defender of the rights of the Church. To this end you can find images of his murder in churches across Latin Christendom, from Germany and Spain, to Italy and Norway. Becket was, and remains, a truly European saint.

By no means was Thomas simply an anti-establishment English hero. Let us pray for the grace to discern when to support and when to oppose or challenge authority.

The British Museum will be holding a major exhibition about Becket and his world in the Autumn of 2020.

 

From 1170 to 1220, Saint Thomas’s remains lay in the Crypt of Canterbury Cathedral.

 

7 December: Passion flower III, close to home.

We reflected on the passion flower story back in June and in November last year, after we’d spotted gravestones in Chartham with carvings of them, and again on the capital of a column at a doorway in St Thomas’ church, Canterbury. This one, well, let’s say it’s very close to home, but I only found it thanks to Chartham.

A few weeks ago the L’Arche  Kent community, with friends and relations on weekend vacations, did a 3 mile sponsored walk – we sponsored ourselves – from Chartham to Canterbury, in particular from Saint Mary’s church, Chartham to Saint Dunstan’s church in Canterbury. My companion and I had time for a coffee on arrival before joining the others, so I had my eyes open walking through the graveyard. And:

Here’s a passion flower, flanked by a daffodil and a rose, with blooms above that I’ve not yet identified. The rose for Saint George and England, the daffodil for Saint David and Wales, and the passion flower? This is how we concluded last year’s post:

When you see a passionflower let it remind you that Jesus is real, his death was real, as indeed will ours be – but so, too, will our rising. And when you see a passionflower on a gravestone, send us a picture to put in the blog!

The rest of that post, describing the story told  by the passion flower, can be found here.

Thank you for following Agnellus Mirror or just looking in and reflecting with us.

Will Turnstone and Co.