Thread by @holland_tom

We start our tour of #MiddleEngland in Oxford, where tonight in the garden in Christ Church that helped inspire Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland my daughter’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream is being staged. A sellout (so proud!), but there are tickets on the door…

Also an inspiration to Lewis Carroll was this holy well in Binsey, which in the Middle Ages was famed for the miraculous properties of its ‘treacle’ - its ‘healing fluid’.

Hence the Treacle Well in Alice…

The well appeared thanks to the prayers of Frideswide, the patron saint of Oxford. The pagan ruler of Leicester tried to make off with her; she struck him blind; being kind, she then healed him. Still he came after her: so she fled to the remote island of ‘Betona,’ aka Binsey.

The well appeared at Frideswide’s feet after she prayed to St Margaret of Antioch (patron saint of midwives!). Appropriately, the tiny 12th century church next to the well is dedicated to St Margaret. In the M Ages, “the very pavement was worn away by the knees of pilgrims.”

The shrine of St Frideswide, dedicated in 1289 in what was once the priory named after her, & is now Christ Church Cathedral.

Fragments of the medieval shrine, demolished in the Reformation, were subsequently found in a well, & reconstituted. Frideswide is shown in hiding.

Bartlemas Chapel, built in the 14th century as part of a leper hospital originally founded by Henry I (the story is that Rahere, as in @StBartholomews, was the inspiration).

It stands just off the Iffley Road, next to Oriel College’s cricket pitch, & has very lovely & holy vibe.

“Upon the midlands now the industrious muse doth fall,
The shires which we the heart of England well may call”
- Michael Drayton

To Coventry!

#MiddleEngland

And so we arrive in Coventry - England’s most central city! #MiddleEngland

Bastard Luftwaffe

Ford’s Hospital: ‘Alm’s house for old ladies of Coventry’. Named after William Ford, whose will of 1509 endowed the almshouses, it was badly damaged in the Blitz & restored 1951-3.

A flavour, perhaps, of what might have been!

“Then she rode forth, clothed on with chastity:
The deep air listen'd round her as she rode,
And all the low wind hardly breathed for fear.”

Tennyson on Lady Godiva

It’s 11.00, & Lady Godiva - as she always does on the hour - emerges to ride naked through Coventry, & thereby save the townspeople from the taxes imposed by her rapacious husband, Earl Leofric of Mercia.

All avert their eyes - save only Peeping Tom

Godiva died in 1057, famed for her piety & compassion. The legend of her ride was first recorded in the 12th century; Peeping Tom not until 1659. The story of the man blinded for peeping at the naked Godiva seems to have been inspired by this statue (now in the shopping centre)

Rather moved to find how vivid the memory of their Mercian benefactress still seems to be to the good folk of Coventry #MiddleEngland

The medieval spire of Coventry Cathedral, & what remains of the Sanctuary. The Cross is made out of burnt roof timbers. Every Friday at noon the Litany of Reconciliation is said before the altar.

Sir Basil Spence’s new cathedral, which uses the ruins of the old as a forecourt, & features Graham Sutherland’s stupefying 75 ft high tapestry, abstract stained glass designed by John Piper, & a font fashioned from Bethlehem rock.

“At Coventry, the distinction between architectural description & description of the furnishings loses its sense. The two are too much part of the same conception” - Pevsner

Wonderfully Byzantine

Still falls the Rain –
Dark as the world of man, black as our loss –
Blind as the nineteen hundred and forty nails upon the Cross.

The lost village of Stretton Baskerville, which got turned over to sheep in the 15th century, proves literally to be lost - we can’t identify which field it lies beneath. No trace of the guineas buried there by Dick Turpin; nor, sadly, of Dick’s ghost… ourwarwickshire.org.uk/content/articl…

Kudos to Stoke Golding - which witnessed the unofficial coronation of Henry VII after the battle of Bosworth - for describing itself as ‘The Birthplace Of The Tudor Dynasty’ #MiddleEngland

A fittingly Welsh welcome to the battlefield of Bosworth… #MiddleEngland

Richard III boars at the Battle of Bosworth visitor centre shop

To Leicester- home of King Lear, Gary Lineker & @nicholas_hogg!

“Leir was admitted ruler ouer the Britaines, in the yeare of the world 3105, gouerning his land and subjects in great wealth. He made the towne of Caerleir now called Leicester.”

Holinshed’s Chronicles (1577)

#MiddleEngland

It was a medieval tradition that “misfortune would attend the King who should enter Leicester.” John was reputedly so nervous of it that he never entered the city. It did for Edmund Ironside, Harold, William II, Edward II, Richards II & III, Mary Queen of Scots & Charles I.

Leicester is also famous as home to the country’s most inappropriately named school

A detail

The statue of Æthelflæd at the Guildhall in Leicester - a city which she captured from the Vikings. The statue was unveiled on this very day in Victoria Park, was stolen in 1978, replaced by a replica & placed in this beautiful courtyard.

Burbage, I am informed by @cvbushell, performed both King Lear & Richard III here, in the 14th century Guildhall. The two kings buried in Leicester!

I don’t think Leicester makes nearly enough of Richard III…

Gotta love a city that puts up a copy of the Statue of Liberty in the middle of a roundabout #Leicester

Anchor Church, by the banks of a tributary of the River Trent, is a cave house, & so called because of its association with anchorites. This, until very recently, was thought to reach back only until the 18th century, with its mania for follies.

Then, last month, a BOMBSHELL!!!!

“Archaeologists now believe the cave house can be dated to 1,200 years ago, probably lived in by Eardwulf who was deposed as king of Northumbria in AD806 and died in AD830.”

amp.theguardian.com/science/2021/j…

Standing beneath the anchorite’s cave, @jamiembrixton ponders the riddles of the past…

Another day of touring the wonders of #MiddleEngland beckons! Today’s excitements include cave art, disgruntled Tiddy people, and Chapel Sands…

A fleeting glimpse of England’s second best spire #Chesterfield

The Beast of Bolsover

I love it that the cost of repairing the damage to Bolsover Castle in 1223, after decades of sieges & civil war, was £33

The Riding School of Bolsover Castle

Offering this for free to anyone who’s writing a book on the British constitution & is stuck for a cover

*Waves*

And here is @KrustyAIG! Very grateful to him for coming up to the castle & telling us so much about its history, the shocking quality of its statuary, & putting it in the context of the coal fields that stretch all around.

Bolsover Castle was fantastic. It’s got none of the heritage gloss that can so often spoil a decent ruin. It’s a proper labyrinth, full of the occasional beauties, & a lot of brilliantly awful paintings & statues. I enjoyed it as much as any castle I’ve been to in a long while.

To Cresswell Crags!

“The most tantalising question about Creswell Crags is whether Stubbs could have known that in prehistory these caves were in fact the haunt of wild animals- not only of the horse, bison, woolly rhinoceros & hyena, but also of the cave lion & the spotted lion” - Judy Edgerton

Nottinghamshire is on the left, Derbyshire on the right. The lake was created in the 19th century by the Duke of Portland, because he wanted to stop a railway - thereby unwittingly preserving the archaeology of the caves. #CreswellCrags

Into Robin Hood Cave, where 12,500 odd years ago bands of hunters would gather to shelter from the bitter cold, skin mountain hares & kickstart British art… #CreswellCrags

Jawbone & tusk of a hippopotamus that roamed the Derbyshire-Nottinghamshire badlands 120,000 years ago

I’ve wanted to go to Creswell Crags for as long as I can remember, & they didn’t disappoint. Quite aside from the inherent beauty & fascination of the site, we had a fantastic guide, & there was even a spider sack containing 300 eggs hanging from the ceiling of a cave. Quality!

Once, amid the marshes that spread across north Lincolnshire, there lived the Tiddy people - so called because “they be tiddy critturs, no more than a span high.” They never spoke, but would yelp like dogs when angry, & “twitter & cheep like the tiddy birds” when pleased.

Caister, a beautiful Lincolnshire town just outside Grimsby, was once - as its name suggests - a Roman fort. There’s a single fragment of Roman wall that now serves to protect someone’s garden. A Roman cemetery was found where the Co-op now stands.

“It was here,” wrote a visitor to Caistor in 1695, “that Hengist begg’d so much ground of King Vortigern as he was able to encompass with an ox-hide.”*^

* Hengist cut it into thin strips, “& by that means got in round about a great compass of land.”

^This didn’t really happen.

The story derives from the Aeneid, in which Dido pulls a similar trick when founding Carthage – but even the association of it with Hengist is derivative (Hengist’s stamping ground was traditionally held to be Kent).

None of which is to diss Caister, which is gorgeous.

And so we arrive in Grimsby - founded, of course, by Odin (aka Grim the fisherman). #MiddleEngland

“Faintly reminiscent of the Campanile” - ‘Lincolnshire: A Shell Guide’ #Grimsby

The stretch of Lincolnshire we are driving through now - empty of traffic, barely a building, expanses of golden corn - feels so 1940 that I wouldn’t be surprised suddenly to see a squadron of Spitfires rising up into the cloudless blue sky.

Where sky and Lincolnshire and water meet…

“The character of Lincolnshire as it meets the sea is level & low, a great plane of clay-ploughed fields & bare-branched willows that spreads into the distance like a Dutch winter landscape” - @LauraCummingArt

We are now on Chapel Sands!

Chapel St Leonard not fully as I had been imagining it after reading @LauraCummingArt’s book (where ARE the dairymen?), but the dunes stretching down to the sea correspond eerily to the scene she paints of her mother’s abduction.

Here is @jamiembrixton capturing them on film…

I can’t possibly evoke the impact of the Lincolnshire coast with a photo - so thank goodness for artists!

And now - to Skegness!

Current mood…

Excited to have spent the night in the worst hotel in Britain!

Site of Bardney Abbey: founded in 697 by Æthelred of Mercia; pillaged by Vikings; refounded by Normans; dissolved in 1536 after the monks were implicated in the Lincolnshire Rising against Henry VIII. It was from here that Æthelflæd removed the relics of St Oswald to Gloucester.

In 1753, a local antiquary observed that the site of the abbey “is now a pasture, and the rubbish of the sacred structure has covered up the pavement of the church which the locals are now digging for the sake of the stones.”

The Saracen's Head in Southwell, built in 1463, is where, on 5 May 1646, Charles I spent his last night of freedom. He arrived at the inn disguised as a clergyman, then in the morning was taken prisoner by the Scots.

Southwell Minster - founded, probably by St Paulinus, the 1st Archbishop of York, on the site of a Roman villa - was comprehensively redeveloped in the early 12th century, & is one of the most impressive Norman churches to have survived in something like its original state.

Beneath the baptism of Christ in the Jordan, the stained glass beside the font shows Paulinus holding a model of the Minster while baptising multitudes in the Trent

Carved on the pulpit are Paulinus, the first Archbishop of York; Augustine, the first Archbishop of Canterbury; Æthelburh of Kent, who took Paulinus with her to Northumbria; & Edwin, the Northumbrian king whom Æthburh married & Paulinus baptised.

Devil looking down at the choir stalls in Southwell Minster

The lectern in the Quire was dredged from the lake at Newstead Abbey, where it had been lying ever since the Abbey’s dissolution, & auctioned to the Minster by the 5th Lord Byron, wicked great-uncle of the poet

A painting from the bath house of the Roman Villa that originally stood on the site of the Minster, showing Cupid & some fish; & small section of mosaic flooring from the original Anglo-Saxon minster

The Southwell leaves in the Chapter House.

“That it has a soul & does not only please the senses is due to the fact that the carvers were never satisfied with mere imitation but succeeded in keeping stone as stone, in achieving a synthesis of nature & style” - Pevsner

11th century lintel in Southwell Minster, showing St Michael & that ancient serpent, the Devil

To the workhouse at Southwell, built in 1824 at the behest of the Rev John Thomas Becher, & the prototype for the network of over 500 workhouses built in the wake of the 1834 New Poor Law.

“Every aspect of Becher’s workhouse was to be plain, boring & difficult.”

As @jamiembrixton drolly observes, the workhouse’s vibe can in some rooms seem less Oliver Twist, more hip coffee shop in Hoxton

Shades of the prison house…

And the stories about it they have recorded…

Groovy!

It’s LITERALLY like being in the 14th century #Laxton #MiddleEngland

“The largest & best-preserved Norman motte-&-bailey castle in Notts.”

So says Pevsner, & who am I to disagree? #Laxton

Closing in on @MuseumCromwell!

So excited!

Very pleased to see this crucial documentary evidence for Cromwell’s infancy on display in @MuseumCromwell

“The Theatre of God’s Judgements” by Thomas Beard, the priest & schoolteacher who taught Cromwell in the very building where @MuseumCromwell is now to be found.

Beard’s book “tells stories of the grim punishments imposed by God upon sinners, including Christopher Marlowe.”

Huge thanks to Stuart at @MuseumCromwell for not only showing me Cromwell’s sword close up, but actually allowing me to fantasise that I am leading the charge at Marston Moor!

The hilt is beautiful, the blade inscribed with Cromwell’s initials, & the sword itself startlingly light to handle

Bronze bust of Oliver Cromwell, made - astonishingly - in 1672

One of the less successful political shoutlines…

To Little Gidding!

If you came this way,
Taking any route, starting from anywhere,
At any time or at any season,
It would always be the same: you would have to put off
Sense and notion.

All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flames are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid.

History is now and England.

And so @jamiembrixton & I finish our tour of #MiddleEngland.

I am left with a sense of what a fascinating, beautiful, ugly, infinite country England is.

The more you explore it, the more inexhaustible it seems to be.

Now going to listen to the playlist that @jamiembrixton & I amused ourselves compiling: England, our England open.spotify.com/playlist/0ijFg…