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Advice for the Road

2 June 2024
Edoardo
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Categories: History

Northumbria was a long way from Rome. For young Biscop, set on travelling as a pilgrim to Rome, the obvious place to find advice on how to make the journey was Canterbury. The archbishop of Canterbury at the time was Honorius, the last survivor of the original Augustinian mission to the Anglo-Saxons that had arrived in 597. Traditionally, Honorius succeeded to the archbishopric in 627 (although it’s possible the date was later, around 634). By the time Biscop arrived in Canterbury, Honorius had ruled over the church for 26 years. He most probably met the young Northumbrian in the spring or summer, for Honorius died on 30 September of that year. Alongside Honorius’s own knowledge of the best routes for a pilgrim to Rome, there was continued contact between Canterbury and Rome, allowing the clerics there to advise Biscop as to his best course.

Biscop sought secular as well as religious advice, seeking out Eorcenberht, the king of Kent. The Kentish royal family had long-established links to the Merovingian kings in France, so gaining Eorcenberht’s help for his pilgrimage would ensure Biscop a welcome when he crossed the Channel.

But at Eorcenberht’s court, Biscop met another young man who was also set on going to Rome. He was named Wilfrid and he would become a turbulent priest five hundred years before Thomas Becket earned that soubriquet from Henry II. Wilfrid was about five years younger than Biscop, so 20 to Biscop’s 25, and from a similar social background.

With letters of introduction safely tucked away in belt pouches, the two young men set off to one of the Kentish ports to find a ship to take them to France.

The First Pilgrim

28 May 2024
Edoardo
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Categories: History, Northumbria The Lost Kingdom

Let us programme our time machine to appear in Kent in the year 653. We want to meet a young man named Biscop before he sets off on his travels. Given that Biscop was a Northumbrian, Kent might seem a strange location but we know that Biscop was there in 653.

Biscop was about 25 years old. He came from a family of Northumbrian nobility, the Baducinga according to Stephen of Ripon. Nobility at the time was mainly a measure of ability with weapons and utility to the king. In one sense, these men were not dissimilar from the enforcers of a Mafia capo. But while they shared with gangsters a propensity for ultra-violence, the warriors of early-medieval Britain were different in an important respect: they were poet warriors. The culture of the mead hall demanded of them a facility and appreciation of words that you won’t find among mafiosi or narcos (transcripts of their conversations reveal a level of verbal banality that would make reality-TV viewers blanch).

This is a characteristic often shared among martial cultures. Woven through the violence is a thread of exquisite, often delicate, beauty. It’s there in the lament of the exiled Wanderer, one of the few Anglo-Saxon poems to have survived. It’s there in the jewelled intricacy of the sword hilts uncovered in Staffordshire and the glitter of garnets in the buckle discovered at Sutton Hoo.

It’s likely that that love of words was even more pronounced in the young Biscop than it was among his fellow gesith, the men who made up King Oswiu’s warband. For the young Biscop, having been one of the king’s men, decided to give up the life of arms, the company of his kin and his warrior brethren, and go on pilgrimage to Rome.

Empty Cities

27 May 2024
Edoardo
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Categories: History

As for towns and cities, there were none in the 7th-century Britain. The old Roman towns remained but they had for the most part been abandoned, although some form of civic life had lingered on in places up to the 7th century. Carlisle was one of the last outposts of Roman life: its aqueduct still worked and its council met into that century. Londinium, the capital of Roman Britain, had been abandoned. Its basilica, the largest north of the Alps, had been the centre of civic life for 230 years until, around AD 300, it was systematically demolished. There are no records saying why such a magnificent building was destroyed so we’re left to speculate that it might have been some form of punishment for the support the city gave to an imperial pretender of the time, Carausius. The city was gradually abandoned during the new two centuries until, by the 7th century, it was a place of ruin and legends of giants to the Anglo-Saxons.

However, life and commerce was returning to the area, although not to the Roman city. The new Anglo-Saxon trading settlement stretched upriver from the old city walls. Merchants drew their ships up on the beach, or the Strand as it was called, to sell their wares. But even at the height of a market, there would only have been a couple of thousand people living in the new London. Elsewhere, population centres ran to a few hundred. England was all but empty.

7th-century Farming

27 May 2024
Edoardo
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Categories: History
Philip Halling / Medieval Ridge and Furrow above Wood Stanway

Even where the land is cultivated in 7th-century Britain, it does not look like the hedgerow fenced countryside that we think of as quintessentially English. The fields are strip farmed, ploughed in ridge and furrow, without demarcation between the different fields beyond the knowledge of the men who work the land.

Ridge and furrow was a method of agriculture taken over from the period of Roman Britain but adapted by the people who came afterwards. Fields were dug into long ridges with furrows each side of the ridge, so that they looked like straight waves running towards the horizon. The ridges and furrows each foster a different microclimate, with the ridges draining faster and being more exposed, the furrows pooling rain water and being more protected. Thus a crop could be planted along the ridges and in the furrows with insurance against drought or flood: if either condition prevailed, at last half the crop should still survive, while in good years it could all be harvested.

In some quieter parts of the country, where fields have been turned to pasture for generations and not mechanically ploughed, it is still possible to see these earth waves, slowly subsiding back to the level but revealed when the sun is low or a thin dusting of snow collects in the furrows.

The Landscape of the 7th Century

27 May 2024
Edoardo
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Categories: History

But it is not just a different coast that we see as we emerge from our time machine. The landscape is different too. Most notably, there were a lot less people and a lot more trees. Population estimates for this time can be little more than guesses but those guesses often come to a figure for the areas that would become England of about a million. At the end of our time voyage, we step into a country that seems almost empty. But what we do see are forests. Not the tame, truncated forests of our time but vast areas of wood, where wolves and possibly even bears still roamed. While no longer the Wildwood of the immediate post-glacial period (the stone axes of the Mesolithic and Neolithic had efficiently cleared large tracts of land) there were still forests to get lost in, forests where the writ of no king ran further than the occasional tracks and clearings.

England before England

27 May 2024
Edoardo
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Categories: Archaeology, History

The world of 7th-century Britain was…different. Looking back to it now, we are faced with barriers of language, culture, religion. Everything was different. If a time machine were to transport us back to the 7th century, we would find ourselves in a strange landscape.

Although not something we could see when we emerge, blinking, from our time machine, perhaps the most unexpected difference is the shape of the country. The map of Britain is something we’re as familiar with as our own neighbourhoods. But even the shape of the country, particularly in its low lying eastern half, was different. Then, the sea took deep bites into the land: what is today Lincolnshire was almost an island, its boundaries as fluid as the tidal marshes that surrounded it. The Humber flowed through a markedly broader estuary and then spread, north and south, creating a vast marshland south of York. The Wash washed inland to take up almost all of present-day Cambridgeshire. The River Thames was not constrained, as it is today, behind concrete embankments but breathed in and out on every tide, sending its turbid water through deep channels into Southwark and up the now hidden rivers and streams that fed it. The Kentish spur that ends at the shingle beach of Dungeness was salt marsh too, with boats able to navigate up stream along the River Rother as far as Bodiam Castle, built in 1385 to guard against French invaders sailing up stream and landing there. At the eastern extremity of Kent, forming the hinge upon which so much of our history has turned, the Isle of Thanet really was an island, separated from the mainland by the Wantsum Channel, a safe anchorage where many a boat moored before attempting the passage along the north coast of Kent and into the treacherous tidal waters of the Thames estuary.

These tidal estuaries, salt marshes and broad rivers made the eastern coast of England markedly different from today. In the west, only the Somerset levels interrupt a generally familiar coast line, taking a big bite out of their eponymous county and providing, two hundred and fifty years later a refuge for a later Anglo-Saxon king.

Book review: James and the Giant Peach

13 May 2024
Edoardo
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Categories: Book review
Jame and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl

The mystery is why this was my first reading of James and the Giant Peach. I am 61 years old. The book was first published in 1961 so it’s actually two years older than me. It must have been on the book shelves of the children’s library that was my favourite place to go as a bibliophilic boy. As a child, I read. In fact, reading was pretty much all I did do! My favourite days were the Fridays before bank holiday Mondays because then you could take two books out on a library ticket rather than the usual one, which meant I could borrow eight books rather than the usual maximum of four. But to give you an idea of just how much I would read, I’d normally have finished all eight books by the end of the bank holiday weekend.

Yet in all that time, and among all those books, there were none by Roald Dahl. Now, trying to visualise the library (since closed) in Archway where I went for my books, I am pretty sure there were some by Roald Dahl there. But, for some reason, I must have picked them up, read the blurb, and then put them back again. The only reason I can think of for why I did this is that it was Quentin Blake’s illustrations. I suspect that, as a rather serious-minded boy, I would have found his caricatures off putting. I preferred the more realistic drawings to be found in Enid Blyton books. And then, as I got a bit older, I began to disdain books with pictures. So I think that Roald Dahl fell into the gap between my artistic appreciation and growing taste for more ‘grown-up’ books.

However, the plus side of this is that I can read his books now and come to them completely fresh. And what a delight James and the Giant Peach was. I read it in a morning, while staying at a friend’s house in the country, with everyone else recovering from a surprise birthday party and me settling down upstairs with a book plucked from the children’s (all now grown) book shelf, as the sun shone over the fields.

In particular, the story is a masterclass in drawing characters with a a few words, as exemplified by the caterpillar announcing, “I am a pest,” to James with evident pride. The story is wild, the aunts whom poor James is sent to live with are truly vile, and the giant creatures who travel with him in the giant peach are each marvels of imagination and the writer’s craft. A wonderful book – I will have to read Dahl’s other books!

Book review: The Ladies of Grace Adieu and other stories by Susanna Clarke

10 April 2024
Edoardo
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Categories: Book review
The Ladies of Grace Adieu by Susanna Clarke

In 2004, Susanna Clarke published Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, one of the best fantasy novels of the century. In 2006, this was followed by The Ladies of Grace Adieu, stories set in the same milieu as Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. But then we had to wait until 2020 for Piranesi, as astonishing a book as I have read in the last twenty years.

I would like very much, with such an extraordinary writer, to be reading new work from her every year. But reading her novels and stories, it’s clear that this will never happen: Clarke is a writer who sweats the words onto the page. They are pulled out, extracted, removed from somewhere deep within with all the effort and pain that such deep excavation requires: we are fortunate to have had as much as we have had from her.

That’s not to say that the writing is forced or laboured: far from it. What it is, is precise. Every word, fits. Fits precisely into its immediate context, within sentence and paragraph, and its wider context within the story. The stories have the feel of faceted jewels where every face has been cut and polished to perfection. Such polish cannot be achieved save with time and effort: I shudder to think how much thought goes into every page that she has written. So thank you, Susanna. This reader, at least, appreciates what you do very much.

Book review: The Bad Weather Friend by Dean Koontz

9 April 2024
Edoardo
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Categories: Book review
The Bad Weather Friend by Dean Koontz

He’s sold millions of books and has thousands of eager readers. I have sold thousands of books and have a few hundred eager readers. But the strange thing is, in most respects I am a better writer than Dean Koontz: my dialogue is better, I don’t grandstand my political views, and I edit out the second purple prose sentence rather than leaving it in.

But there is one area in which Dean Koontz is a much, much better writer than me, and 99.999per cent of other writers: he is the absolute master of the story hook. Of the ‘what if’ idea upon which the story turns, the idea that drags the reader into the story and keeps them there until the end, wanting to know what happens next.

What is astonishing about Koontz is his ability to come up with so many brilliant story hooks, each different but almost all of them compelling. In The Bad Weather Friend, Benny Catspaw, a hero for whom ‘nice’ is a compliment as well as a completely accurate description, has his life systematically dismantled by nefarious forces, only to take delivery of a seven-foot-tall bad-weather friend, a superhuman protector known as a craggle. Frankly, we all could do with a craggle and I wish I had one too. Reading how Benny deals with his craggle, and how the craggle deals with Benny, makes for a wonderfully entertaining story – although, strictly speaking, the title should have a hyphen: The Bad-Weather Friend.

Mr Koontz, I salute you. I may have a better grasp of the craft of writing but you far exceed me in your understanding of its heart: then what happened?

Book review: Time for the Stars by Robert Heinlein

9 April 2024
Edoardo
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Categories: Book review
Time for the Stars by Robert A. Heinlein

In the canon of Heinlein’s works, ‘juvenile’ actually translates as mature and substantial. His ‘adult’ works on the other hand, generally appear to have been written by a sex-obsessed teenager (‘I Will Fear No Evil’) with a peculiar fascination for incest (‘Time Enough for Love’). So read his juveniles and skip his adult works. ‘Time for the Stars’ ranks among the best of his juveniles, with a notable lack of the usual garrulous father figure character, a fascinating dynamic between the identical-twin lead characters, and a notably deep exploration of the motives and reasons for long-distance exploration.