Medieval Journeys

Morris Dancers

 

Here's a picture from my medieval journey last weekend.  I've been reading a book called "The Stripping of the Altars" by Eamon Duffy. 

Eamon Duffy was interviewed recently on TV.  He took part in a debate about "Wolf Hall".   This book, as I wrote in my last post, includes depictions of Thomas More, (and Catholics) as bad, bad people.  Eamon Duffy is a Catholic, and a Cambridge Don.  His book is scholarly (by which I mean very detailed, and not an easy read).

Professor Duffy also contributed two letters to the debate in "The Times" (I refer in my post below). Perhaps needless to say, he defended the reputation of Thomas More. 

In the book are some black and white photographs portraying aspects of medieval pre-reformation worship.  Of course, it was not called Catholicism then.  It was just national worship.

I noticed that a lot of the photographs were from churches in Norfolk, which is a county reasonably accessible for me.  Last weekend, on a return trip from Wells-next-the Sea, I made a detour to find the parish church in North Elmham.  The picture in "Altars" shows part of a wooden screen, called a "Rood Screen".

I was stunned by the colours, having only seen the rather faded black and white picture in the book.  Above is just a very tiny part of the screen, some decoration filled into spaces in the carving above portraits of the saints which make up most of the screen.  Isn't it glorious?  And this is after more than 500 years, and at least three sets of iconoclasmic attacks -

(1)  the "Reformation" - Henry VIII's personally motivated attack on traditional church worship.
(2) Elizabethan reversal of her elder sister Mary's restoration of the traditional church.
(3) The "Puritans" who "won" the Civil War and fiercely opposed decoration and pictures in churches.

The screens apparently survived by being turned upside down and used as floorboards, where the pictures stayed safe until the nineteenth century, when some antiquarians dug them up. 

What I also like, is that the pictures are not restricted to religious themes.  The Morris Dancers, while not pagan, are a fun thing.  People enjoyed them.  Of course, the Puritans repressed them, but Charles II restored the tradition.

English history is so endlessly fascinating.

Norfolk Coast

And here is the harbour at Wells-next-the-Sea.  It is still a working port. Although you might think you were stepping back in time several hundred years.

You see, not a person in sight, again.  Lovely for getting away from it all.  And, unusually, the sun is shining.

We went to Wells regularly when the children were small. Always I remember it being absolutely freezing cold, the sea a deep dark grey colour, most uninviting, and a chill wind blowing from the North at all times.  Norfolk, the country of the North Folk, unprotected by any shield from weather gusting straight from the North Pole. 

We always walked the long mile down the sea wall to the shoreline, in the teeth of the North Wind.  The children moaned and cried. Their legs were tired, it was too cold to eat an ice-cream, and it was not buckets and spades weather.

The sands were not golden, but hamster-coloured.  Sort of dun verging on grey.

Then, after a short spell on the so-called beach, we would have to walk all the way back again.  Strange that I never remember the sea being blue, or the sands golden. 

So today, it seems like a huge treat, and a delight.  Blue sea and sky, golden sand, and driving the mile to the end of the sea defences.  This is my alternative to the Outer Hebrides, and not a bad one.