Let's celebrate #BonniePrince300 with Burns' Ode written for Charles's last birthday, 31 December 1787:

Afar the illustrious Exile roams,
Whom kingdoms on this day should hail;
An inmate in the casual shed,
On transient pity's bounty fed,
Haunted by busy memory's bitter tale!
Beasts of the forest have their savage homes,
But He, who should imperial purple wear,
Owns not the lap of earth where rests his royal head!
His wretched refuge, dark despair,
While ravening wrongs and woes pursue,
And distant far the faithful few
Who would his sorrows share.
False flatterer, Hope, away!
Nor think to lure us as in days of yore:
We solemnize this sorrowing natal day,
To prove our loyal truth-we can no more,
And owning Heaven's mysterious sway,
Submissive, low adore.
Ye honored, mighty Dead,
Who nobly perished in the glorious cause,
Your King, your Country, and her laws,
From great Dundee, who smiling Victory led,
And fell a Martyr in her arms,
(What breast of northern ice but warms!)
To bold Balmerino's undying name,
Whose soul of fire, lighted at Heaven's high flame,
Deserves the proudest wreath departed heroes claim:
Nor unrevenged your fate shall lie,
It only lags, the fatal hour,
Your blood shall, with incessant cry,
Awake at last, th' unsparing Power;
As from the cliff, with thundering course,
The snowy ruin smokes along
With doubling speed and gathering force,
Till deep it, crushing, whelms the cottage in the vale;
So Vengeance' arm, ensanguin'd, strong,
Shall with resistless might assail,
Usurping Brunswick's pride shall lay,
And Stewart's wrongs and yours, with tenfold weight repay.
Perdition, baleful child of night!
Rise and revenge the injured right
Of Stewart's royal race:
Lead on the unmuzzled hounds of hell,
Till all the frighted echoes tell
The blood-notes of the chase!
Full on the quarry point their view,
Full on the base usurping crew,
The tools of faction, and the nation's curse!
Hark how the cry grows on the wind;
They leave the lagging gale behind,
Their savage fury, pitiless, they pour;
With murdering eyes already they devour;
See Brunswick spent, a wretched prey,
His life one poor despairing day,
Where each avenging hour still ushers in a worse!
Such havock, howling all abroad,
Their utter ruin bring,
The base apostates to their God,
Or rebels to their King.

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More from @DrFrancisYoung

31 Dec 20
Of all England's megaliths, these are some of the strangest (in terms of why they are there). In the Middle Ages, a boat carrying them across Whittlesea Mere from Barnack capsized - for centuries they were visible lying in the mere (seen here in 1786)
Whittlesea Mere - the largest mere in the Fens - was finally drained in the 1850s (the last part of the Fens to be drained) but the stones are still there. We can only guess which church they were intended for; the quarry at Barnack supplied stone for many East Anglian churches
Are there any megaliths in the English landscape that are only there because someone accidentally dropped them from a boat and then drained the body of water? I'd be surprised if there were!
Read 5 tweets
29 Dec 20
On the feast of St Thomas of Canterbury, a short thread on the lost church of St Thomas of Canterbury at Westley near Bury St Edmunds. The house I grew up in was close to the ancient parish boundary between @StMarysBSE and Westley (although my parents' house is on the town side)
The present-day church at Westley dates from 1835 (and is famous for being one of the earliest c19th churches to make extensive use of concrete), while the old church and churchyard of St Thomas are abandoned, hidden and overgrown with trees
Much of western Bury St Edmunds was originally in the parish of Westley - the parish boundary (which was also the boundary of the ancient Banleuca established in 945) ran along West Road until the 1930s, when All Saints parish absorbed parts of the parishes of St Mary and Westley
Read 9 tweets
28 Dec 20
Interesting. I taught Religious Education for 14 years, and over that time I noticed children became less reflexively anti-religious; they weren't any more *interested* in religion, but they were less likely to have an instinctive negative reaction to it in 2015 than in 2005
That's purely my anecdotal experience, of course, but I suspect it's to do with receding parental pressure. Children kick against their parents, so as parents become less religious, so children are less likely to aggressively reject religion
The other phenomenon I noticed in my teaching career was that, by the time I gave up teaching in 2016, Christianity had become a more or less acceptable alternative way for teenagers to define themselves as eccentric
Read 5 tweets
27 Dec 20
One of the weirder subgenres of nonfiction is what I call the 'pastiche monograph': a book written by someone who doesn't really know how to write an academic monograph, and isn't really trying to do so, but wants the book to *look and feel* like they think a monograph should
(And yes, I know lots of really good monographs are written by people without formal academic qualifications - I'm not talking about those here, because their intent is more than just cosmetic)
(I'm also not talking about 'monograph-lite' trade books by academics and well-informed non-academics, which have some monograph-like features but aren't actually trying to be monographs)
Read 8 tweets
24 Dec 20
Without getting into the ins and outs of the ‘Is Christmas pagan?’ debate, it’s worth dealing with some faulty assumptions people often make about the ‘Christianisation’ of pre-Christian traditions (buckle up for the thread…)
First of all, language people use in this area can be quite emotive, e.g. talk of Christians ‘usurping’ or ‘sanitising’ a pre-existing pagan festival. There’s a tendency to ascribe a collective agency that never existed to ‘the Church’ or ‘Christians’ when it comes to Midwinter
That wasn’t how it worked; there was no centralised programme of reforming popular festivities. The Church introduced liturgical celebration of Christmas to northern pagan cultures; how those Christianised cultures then dealt with Midwinter festivities as a whole varied widely
Read 16 tweets
23 Dec 20
If I had no academic ethics, the documentary source I would fake would be an account by Thomas Netter of his mission to Lithuania in 1419, in which the Carmelite tells of how he used skills honed in his battle with the Lollards to convert the Samogitians...
Of course, now I've told you I'd do this, I can't do it...
I reckon I could do a better job than the Hitler Diaries, tho. Of course it wouldn't be the original ms; it would be a fortuitously discovered typed transcription of an original destroyed in a fire in an obscure uncatalogued archive, where the scholar who typed it died a recluse
Read 4 tweets

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