The glory that is Swift

 Round about 1959-60, starting Irish Leaving Cert, my brain-cells absorbed the dictum about:

Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite ’em,
And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum.

I see I blogged about it, nearly a decade ago. And rather well, too, if I'm allowed to say so:

... the slim-line version was courtesy of Augustus de Morgan, the twice-coined professor of mathematics at the newly-minted London University: a great man who was ineligible for Oxbridge tenure because of his atheism — though he went the same way as Willie Yeats, seduced into spiritualism by the love for a good woman. Correction there: since the Yeatsian seduction was via that Surrey minx, Edith Maud Gonne, and de Morgan married Sophia Frend, that should read “the love for a better woman”.

Nothing like getting one's vicious retaliation in first; but around then — and continuing to this day — I've always felt the Gonne MacBride (from father to wife to son to son-in-law) set up was to be treated with very long tongs. Dammit: the fascist tendencies were never far from the surface.

But, just now, I had to remind myself of Swift's original. He was getting at his Critics. Here's the whole thing:

Hobbes clearly proves that every creature 
Lives in a state of war by nature. 
The greater for the smallest watch, 
But meddle seldom with their match. 
A whale of moderate size will draw 
A shoal of herrings down his maw. 
A fox with geese his belly crams; 
A wolf destroys a thousand lambs. 
But search among the rhyming race, 
The brave are worried by the base. 
If on Parnassus' top you sit, 
You rarely bite, are always bit: 
Each poet of inferior size 
On you shall rail and criticize; 
And strive to tear you limb from limb, 
While others do as much for him. 
The vermin only tease and pinch 
Their foes superior by an inch. 
So, nat'ralists observe, a flea 
Hath smaller fleas that on him prey, 
And these have smaller fleas to bite 'em, 
And so proceed ad infinitum: 
Thus every poet in his kind 
Is bit by him that comes behind; 
Who, though too little to be seen, 
Can tease, and gall, and give the spleen; 
Call dunces, fools and sons of whores, 
Lay Grubstreet at each others' doors: 
Extol the Greek and Roman masters, 
And curse our modern poetasters. 
Complain, as many an ancient bard did, 
How genius is no more rewarded; 
How wrong a taste prevails among us; 
How much our ancestors out-sung us: 
Can personate an awkward scorn 
For those who are not poets born: 
And all their brother dunces lash, 
Who crowd the press with hourly trash.

I'm fairly sure I've seen that printed as quatrains, and the punctuation suggests the same.

Why is it coming to mind just now?

Well, here's a tweet by the egregious @OwenJones84:

Labour needs to stop waging war on its own party and fight the Tories instead.

On @lbc shortly arguing just that...

Boosterism personified. Ah well, a young feller has to make it where he can, even if that means felling every fruitful tree in sight.

But who is 'waging war' on whom? Where I'm sitting, the far left are making life as hard as they can for anyone not of their little persuasion (meretricious* Steve Walker's Sqwawkbox, anyone?) and crowd the press with hourly trash.

* Now there's a good word.

It's the Anglicising (by Francis Bacon, no less) of the Latin meretricius, the adjective formed from meretrix. And meretrix is a prostitute. Related, then, to Swift's sons of whores. 

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From generation unto generation

There's something eerie in finding one's children, without prompting, have same books on their shelves. Except, in this case, I assume there was prompting from a university course.

21. Ronald Blythe: The Age of Illusion

That comes with the informative sub-title: England in the Twenties and Thirties, 1919-1940. The first chapter is A Great Day for Westminster Abbey. That Great Day was 11 November 1920, and the interment of the Unknown Warrior. The final chapter is The Destruction of Neville Chamberlain, and deals with the few dramatic days from 7 May 1940.

In between most of the chapters hang hats on various characters of the period:

• Home Secretary Joynson-Hicks and his use of the Defence of the Realm Act to crack down on London night-life;
• John Reith and the birth of the British Broadcasting Company (sic);
• T.E. Lawrence;
• Amy Johnson;
• Harold Davidson, the infamous, much-maligned, and much-mocked Rector of Stiffkey;
• Wallis Simpson and the Abdication (and let's not forget the canoodlings of Edward Windsor and his Baltimore floozy did more to create the modern republic of Ireland than any of the blood-sacrifices of 1916);
• George Lansbury's pacifism and the Labour Party. That involved a swift canter through Lansbury's strengths and weaknessses, notably his use of the minor Cabinet post as Commissioner of Works — in which he tore down the railings of royal parks and opened the Serpentine to mixed bathing.

Those are then divided by the passing 'crises' of the age:

• the attractions of arty-farty bourgeois Communism;
• the horrors of the Depression;
• Britain's distraction with sensational murders, while the Nazis seized power in Germany;
• Spain.

When the New York Times came to review the book it pointed out that (on publication in 1964) it was as remote from the events it describes which are already as much history as the Battle of Hastings or Magna Carta. That is perversely true in psychological distance: the interim involved several wars (one World, one Cold) and a couple of nuclear bombs. I feel that review's attempt at a punch-line is mistaken:

the large and variegated cast are assembled, put on their costumes and their makeup, speak their lines. But what of the play? What is the point of this so foolish, expensive, bloody and destructive spectacle? If point there be, it has eluded Mr. Blythe.

The use of the word spectacle is appropriate; but the lesson it tries to draw is not. Britain between the Wars was living a myth: the days of imperial grandeur had died none too far from Sarajevo, but the reality hadn't struck home. Despite the loss of Empire and Britain's diminished status, it still properly hasn't — and won't as long as Boris Johnson stirs the ashes. Dean Acheson's pungent remark was two years old when the NY Times came up with that review:

Great Britain has lost an empire and has not yet found a rôle.

The Age of Illusion, indeed. 

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A load of old Bull

Once upon a time Norfolk was dominated by two Norwich brewers: Steward & Patteson (which had over six hundred tied pubs) and Bullards (which had more than five hundred).

In 1963 Watney Mann acquired the whole lot. In a single stroke much of East Anglia was reduced to a single, monopoly supplier. Red Barrel became the universal fizzy concoction, the prototype for keg beers, flogged out at 3.9% alcohol. I have to admit it always seemed to me to have a metallic fore-taste and after-taste of onions. Red Barrel was widely and quite properly mocked:

"Why is Red Barrel like making love in a canoe?"

"Because it's fucking close to water."

One might think the British brewing industry couldn't fall lower. It could. Watneys was in turn taken over by Grand Metropolitan, a vertically-structured leisure, hospitality and property goliath, which in its turn was merged with Guinness to arrive at the Diagio empire.

All of which left me a trifle amused to find Bullards is not only still in business, but still producing 'the Spirit of Norwich' — or, at least, flavoured gins.

There's a faint whiff of pseudery in The Bullards Story Presumably the Bullard family, quite reasonably, retained the name through the Watney take-over.  Then decided to exploit it.

But what grates is the design of those gin bottles. My memory is: you went into even the better Bullards houses, and the young miss with whom one was accompanied (as if!) had advanced from expensive perries to someone 'harder' — a G&T perhaps (ha-ha! we're in luck with this one!). What was on offer was Gordon's. Or at a pinch, Gilbey's.

Since when we have had a tsunami of gins. Well, I mean, it's a raw spirit diluted to non-toxic levels, with added colouring and flavourings. And, unlike whiskey, it can be marketed without being natured in barrels. What's not for the marketing-manager and accountants to like?

So Bullards sell a gin.

Look closer.

Two small matters show up.

• The claim to be 'Est 1837' would be valid only if we ignore the 1963 sell-out. Oh, and various changes of business name through the nineteenth century. Still, if the Bullard family secured the name from Watneys, fair enough. Any link, though, has to be purely financial, as a 'family share-holder'.
• Then the trade-mark of the Anchor Brewery. That opened in 1867 at St Mile's Bridge. It closed in 1968, and the landmark chimney came down in 1982. If one pokes around the Coslany Street area one will find 'Anchor Quay' — but that's about it. Bullards distillery is now the other end of town, in Cattle Market Street, between an architect and a take-away.

So why am I griping?

It's yesterday's EDP, of course:

Famous Norwich firm locked in legal battle with Red Bull 

Despite being 150 years older, Bullards has been accused by Red Bull of "creating a conflict of interest" due to an apparent clash with the naming of the companies.

Basically, Red Bull which has existed for just three decades, believes a centuries-old company should ditch its famous name.

Major mistake, then, to feature a photograph of a very living Russell Evans, left, founder of Bullards Spirit.

Good luck with that one.

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Missed opportunities

Yesterday was a busy one. 

It meant I missed out on acknowledging a story from ecclesiastical history, a story more complex than most fictive plots.

16 September was when we might wish to celebrate the curious life of Louis Aleman (c. 1390 - 1450, and rather imaginative image as right).

All went well for Louis at the start of his career in the church. It always helps to have a benevolent and archiepiscopal relative in the trade. 

By his late twenties he was a Bishop of Maguelone — which is far more important than seems from beach that still carries the name — very popular with nude bathers and gay men — down the one-way track from Palavas-les-Flots.

Maguelone — that big blister in the middle of the map — was one lf the 'seven cities' (Septimania) of what once had been the Roman province of Gallia Narbonensis, and was absorbed as a buffer zone for Theodoric II's Visigothic kingdom.

The diocese is now based in Montpellier.

Anyhoo, Louis Aleman quickly received preferment, and within five years in 1423 was Archbishop of Arles, and soon after Pope Martin V Colonna dispatched his cardinal's hat.

Martin V Colonna was re-constructing western Christianity after the tumultuous and schismatic fourteenth century. After 1410 one had a choice of three popes: Gregory XII Correr, Benedict XIII in Avignon, and John XXIII Cossa. The 'middle management' of the Church had, it seems, had enough of this popology, held Councils at Pisa and Constance (where Jan His was immolated). Finally John XXIII and Benedict XIII were dethroned, Gregory XII was bought off and abdicated — and Cardinal Oddone Colonna was installed as Martin V, the first Renaissance pope, to rebuild Roma and the Vatican.

Louis Aleman had been in the midst of all this kerfuffle (fifteenth century Italian politics and church politics perfectly fitted that Russian's description of 'absolutism moderated by assassination'. In 1424 he had been Papal Legate and governor in Bologna (turbulent stuff!) in succession to Gabriele Condulmer (watch this space). The novelist manqué in me would make that the source of a continued feud.

The Bologna billet didn't last long: anyone claiming to have a full grasp of Italian politics in that era is too far ahead of me (though see here). In 1428 Louis Aleman was evicted from Bologna by the Condulmer faction. Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold — and Martin V pegged out in 1430: Condulmer got the nod and the white smoke as Eugenius IV.

The comparative stability of Martin V's pontificate was already failing. Eugenius IV was under real pressure, and Martin V had convened the Council of Basle. There were two basic questions: relations with the near-terminal Eastern Church in Constantinople, and the far more acute matter of governance of western Christianity (that latter came down to a monarchical papacy versus something more collegiate and oligarchic). The presiding authority at Basle, as nominated by Martin V, was meant to be Louis Aleman. Eugenius V squelched that with a Bull of 1437, transferring the sittings from Basle to Ferrara (i.e. somewhere nearer his control).

That was not entirely a wise move. The Council in Basle went schismatic, and deposed Eugenius, nominating instead Count Amadeus VIII of Savoy as Felix V (his anti-papacy and the Council would limp on in shadow form over a decade, but would fail because the Germans wouldn't give him support).

Eugenius was having none of that: he stripped Louis Aleman of his titles, cardinalate, and excommunicated him. Eugenius was on something of a high: he had cobbled a form of conciliation with the Byzantines; he had seen off the Council in Basel; and now seemingly disgraced his main opponent. Then Eugenius inconveniently died.

The next pope was Nicholas V Parentucelli, who may have risen rapidly as a protegé of Eugenics, but shows as someone far more subtle, more diplomatic, and more cultured. In short order he bri=ought about the resignation of anti-pope Felix V, lanced the boil of Bologna by conceding a form of near-independence from the papal states, and re-instating Louis Aleman.

Louis himself survived barely another year; but would be beatified by Clement VII de' Medici.

All this is more than a bit of a niche interest. Even so, were I looking for an outline plot for a historical fiction, Louis Aleman might be its centre.

in 1432Uachtarán na hÉireann

Uachtarán na hÉireann

Uachtarán na hÉireann

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Rudery and prudery

 20. Strumpshaw, Tincleton and Giggleswick's Marvellous Map of Great British Place Names.

It was an item in the Eastern Daily Press that reminded me:

A post about tranquil Cockshoot Dyke was removed by Facebook because it goes against community standards and constitutes "hate speech".

Steve Burgess, a businessman and administrator on the Facebook page Love the Norfolk Broads said the issue arose when a member posted she had moored along the popular stretch, the old entrance to Cockshoot Broad.

Her reference combing the words cock, shoot, and dyke was promptly removed by automatic filters, a notification citing both violence and sexual content as the reason.

Most keyboard warriors have had similar experiences. Way back when PC (in every sense) machines were becoming available to teachers, I was edifying examination classes studying Romeo and Juliet. The institution had a super-Bowdler blocker. It meant a text-search of the the text of the play hit a block, and recorded an alarm to Higher Authority, were one to scroll to Mercutio's Queen Mab speech. Since that comes as early as Act I, scene iv, it really put the mockers on cut-and-paste text extracts.

Since my days in Norfolk, it has become generally accepted that the Broads are flooded mediæval peat excavations. There's a passing mention in Michael Pye's Antwerp that the Netherlanders borrowed the process.

Cockshoot Broad is off the River Bure, and near to ... ahem! ... Horning. It isn't just Facebook that has a down on Cockshoot Broad — as a place-name it gets omitted from many another map. Even on the Ordnance Survey, one has to come down to finer definitions:

Cockshoot Broad and Cockshoot Dyke seem to miss out on Marvellous Maps of Great Britain:

Some of those seem eccentric selections, anyway. What's funny or peculiar about Stiffkey (apart from one past rector)? Especially since, nearby is Muckledyke, Cockthorpe, Cocklestrand Drive and others? Why is Great Snoring (even with its Duckstown End) more amusing than Little Snoring? And Binham used to have Lousybush Lane.

The EDP conclude that story with even better snorklers:

A scan around the county reveals Facebook could have a field day if it were feeling particularly easily offended.

From Balls Lane in Fakenham to Booty Road in Norwich, Norfolk has its fair share of rude street names.

Notable mentions go to Three Holes, a hamlet on the Norfolk and Cambridgeshire border and Two Mile Bottom campsite near Thetford and Stiffkey.

But top honours have to go to Slutshole Lane, Besthorpe, Cock Street and Hooker Road in Norwich, Dick's Mount in Beccles, and Trumpery Lane in Norwich.

 

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Fair exchange is no Robb-ery

 This one came about in the usual circuitous manner.

I re-used that earlier post on Michael Pye's Antwerp on politics.ie site. The exchanges drifted onto how mediæval monasteries were roadhouses on cross-country travel.

A poster made what, for me, was a strange claim: Europe's road network was near non-existent, and long journeys were dangerous. That begs the question: how soon did those Roman roads fall into disuse?

I take a passing interest in that, for my home cottage is none too far from the A19 from York to Thirsk — and that, once upon  a far distant time was how the Roman legionaries and auxiliaries tramped from Eboracum's Porta Dextra to Cataractonium (Catterick) and the Roman Wall.

The Itinerarium Antonini (the Antonine Itinerary) is a listing of the major Roman roads of Augustus's Empire, and lists some fifteen main roads, two thousand miles, across Britannia.

As Chesterton said:

Before the Roman came to Rye or out to Severn strode,
The rolling English drunkard made the rolling English road.

They weren't English: those Mesolithic track-makers came along eleven millennia ago. Perhaps here I reach for David Miles, The Tribes of Britain — or, better, leave that for another occasion. Whoever they were, they filled the landscape, and must have got around somehow. One of those ways, though not necessarily as  claimed 'the oldest road' would have been the Ridgeway:

If these routes pre-dated the Romans (as is generally agreed), they certainly took back their significance after Roman power in Britain fell. Henry of Huntingdon was commissioned (1129-30) by Bishop Alexander of Lincoln to compile a Historia Anglorum. Henry identified four royal highways: 

• Ermine Street, from Bishopsgate to Lincoln, and onto York;
• Fosse Way, from Exeter to Lincoln;
• Watling Street, from the Channel ports in Kent, via Westminster, to Utoxeter on the Welsh border;

and 

• Icknield Way, the line of the chalk escarpment that runs from Norfolk to Salisbury.

The Laws of Edward the Confessor, at least as re-invented by the Norman kings, declared these ways were under royal protection.

You may remember that this post was instigated by European history, not merely English. And that I'm not convinced mediæval routes across Europe were there to get from one Cistercian house to the next. More that the Cistercians needed to move their fleeces and sites their monasteries in good dsheep country, but also convenient to transport.

All this brought me to:

19: Graham Robb: The Ancient Paths.

Robb occupies several locations on my shelves. The Discovery of France and Parisians are with things French so bottom shelf, near the bay window. What I assume to be his latest, The Debatable Land is, for want of somewhere more frontier-like, high above my left shoulder, along with GM Fraser and Alistair Moffat. 

This one, though, is a bit of a lost soul: it wanders from travel (above right shoulder) to ancient European history (sort of near left side) as it feels appropriate.

I reckon that's because I haven't quite nailed down what I think of this book.

Its subtitle is Discovering the Lost Maps of Celtic Europe. For me, it's all a trifle too 'New Age-ist' — especially when he constructs a whole nexus of oh-so-precise geometrical connections. Try this one (page 275 in my paperback):

Hmm: too convenient, think you?

So I'm not leaping to accept Robb's thesis of a Road to the End of the Earth following a solstitial line, bearing 57.53° east of north from sunrise through the Alps at the Col de Montgenèvre, near Briançon, all the way to sunset at Cabo de São Vicente. 

I don't chase ley-lines; but cannot avoid the 'sense of the numinous'. The trend in the 1920s was to look for spiritual markers. Alfred Watkins was the prime-mover in Britain. Wilhelm Teudt and his similar „Heilige Linien" were doing something adjacent in Germany — but that was absorbed into the Völkisch movements, all that went with them, and so into post-War disrepute.

I am, though, prepared to accept that our Celtic (and Germanic) illiterate forbears were (in every sense) crafty, and used 'natural knowledge'. Then, again, I've read too much Arthur C Clarke not to apply his apothegm, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

And yet ... and yet ...

Even before Rome, there were tracks across Europe. They may have been seasonal (what wasn't?); but all the evidence is they were there. Some were transactional (something as universally essential as salt needed to be moved): others seem to have particular and spiritual significance.

The Camino de Santiago — the path to Compostela — follows the Callis Ianus. That notion stems from a belief there was a cult of Ianus as far back as pre-Roman times. Ianus gets absorbed into the classical pantheon as the two-faced door-keeper of the classical gods — but curiously takes precedence in some prayers: Livy's History of Rome, Bk 8, chap 6, has the priest invoke:

Ianus, Jupiter, Father Mars, Quirinus, Bellona, Lares, divine Novensiles, divine Indigites, ye gods in whose power are both we and our enemies, and you, divine Manes, — I invoke and worship you, I beseech and crave your favour, that you prosper the might and the victory of the Roman People of the Quirites.​

Ianus is the deity of 'beginnings' (January, anyone?) and so, inevitably, of endings. That's where we are all travelling: visit headlands facing the sunset, and spot the pre-historic burial grounds: the Celts and Scots chose Iona. All the pilgrim need do was follow the sunset to the 'field of stars' (campus stellae, in case you miss the significance).

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Would I were in Grantchester

 εἴθε γενοίμην. . . 

I can tell you that's optative mood. Latin manages just two moods — indicative and subjunctive, but the Greeks had already said 'Hold my Limnio!'and come up with a third. You have just been treated to a proper classical education in 1950s-60s Dublin.

Some present may recognise the expression: it's from Rupert Brooke's well-known celebration of Cambridgeshire:

... would I were
In Grantchester, in Grantchester! —
Some, it may be, can get in touch
With Nature there, or Earth, or such.
And clever modern men have seen
A Faun a-peeping through the green,
And felt the Classics were not dead,
To glimpse a Naiad’s reedy head,
Or hear the Goat-foot piping low: ...
But these are things I do not know.
I only know that you may lie
Day long and watch the Cambridge sky,
And, flower-lulled in sleepy grass,
Hear the cool lapse of hours pass,
Until the centuries blend and blur
In Grantchester, in Grantchester. ...

Gorgeous, pretentious, affected goo. Exactly what one expects from a privileged, effete Rugbeian. But — ooh — so emotive. Of course, the place and the poem come with all the trimmings. Byron swam nearby (Brooke gets that it). The village is the most up-market end of Cambridge, and it used to be an irregular number 18 bus.

If you detect empathy for the mosquito that got Brooke, you may have a point.

A Cantab once muttered his imprecations against his fellow alumni: 'The trouble with them is they spend the rest of their lives trying to crawl back into the womb of alma Mater.' I feel his pain.

One such is James Runcie, son of a former Archbishop of Canterbury. As I work it out, young Runcie was born while Runcie senior was dean of Trinity Hall — which, by a strange co-incidence, was young Runcie's college.

Young Runcie, though, made it in the big, bad world of media as a novelist, film-maker, and playwright.  And — perhaps more significantly — arts guru for the BBC.

In 2012, to gild a shining hour, young Runcie began a series of detective short-stories based on the fictional vicar of Grantchester. Either by intent, or calculation those six books provided a perfect basis for TV adaptation. Moreover, they had the quaint, cozy English feel that appealed to an American audience. The Runcie table would never be short of honey still for tea.

After half-a-dozen volumes of his Sidney Chambers, young Runcie went back to the fountain-head. And something quite remarkable came up:

18. James Runcie: The Road to Grantchester

We get four evenly-spaced 'Parts' — War, Peace, Faith and Love.

It starts:

London, 28 February 1938

They are in the Caledonian Club, dancing the quickstep. Sidney is eighteen. Amanda, his best friend’s little sister, is three years younger. The band is playing ‘Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen’: ‘To Me, You’re Beautiful’. He has asked her to dance out of politeness. He has good manners, everyone thinks so, but he enjoys the dance more than he had expected.

 Amanda Kendall is, of course, the on-off love-interest in the early Grantchester Mysteries. Then a crash cut:

No one believes there will be another war and, even if there is one, how can it possibly ruin the memory of this golden evening, with everyone in their finery, dancing on a polished wooden floor under the chandeliers with the orchestra playing and the candles ablaze?

Five years later, Sidney Chambers is on a transport ship with the 2nd Battalion, Scots Guards, preparing for landing south of Salerno.

Sidney's school- and Cambridge-buddy, Amanda's brother, Robert Kendall is in the same unit. 

We follow the blood-and-gore of the Italian campaign from Solerno to Monte Cassino. Sidney's problems with faith are implied: a visit to Mass at a ruined chapel, his occasional guilt, his exchanges with the padre:

'Rev Nev' Finnie is an Episcopalian from Markinch in Fife. He is an asthmatic in his early forties, technically too old for service, but he is a family friend of the Colonel. He has been offered leave but he has a determination to continue with his ministry, wherever it takes him, and people can’t be bothered to argue about his age or suitability. He is only a priest. There are plenty of soldiers to console and bury.

Page 69 (of 327) comes the crisis:

Kendall leads the advance; Sidney is behind with the Bren, waiting to open up when the German defence has weakened. It is a sustained cacophony, rifles firing, blazes of illumination, silhouettes of movement, men stumbling, falling, shooting, killing, dying; a sustained attack and then a lull; a moment for replenishing, rearming, reconsidering before another opportunity to take the initiative while both sides work out what to do next.

Sidney calls, ‘Down,’ and the men nearby fall low, allowing him a clear line of fire. But a few soldiers in the distance either haven’t heard or are confused about the battle orders and are scrambling back. In the darkness, it is hard to tell if they are Allied troops returning or whether it’s an enemy attack.

Sidney keeps firing. He can’t see Kendall, but then he can’t see very much at all in the melée. He only stops when he runs out of ammunition. Then he realises how many of his own men are wounded. He calls out for the stretcher-bearers. Where is the Advance Dressing Station? How soon can they get help?

One man is unconscious, bleeding from the neck and chest, his head to one side, his eyes open in glazed surprise.

It is Robert Kendall.

Two days later Sidney has a field promotion to Captain, and awarded a Military Cross. Robert Kendall gets a posthumous DCM. Sidney goes to 'Rev Nev' for some comfort:

‘Would you like to pray?’

‘I’m not sure if I can.’

‘Let me start for you.’

Rev Nev bows his head. ‘Merciful Father, look down on this, thy servant Sidney. Accept his penitence, calm his fears, bring him your peace, in the name of your son, Jesus Christ, who suffered and died for us. Amen.’

Sidney just manages to repeat the ‘Amen’.

A lesser writer might have skipped then to Sidney, post-War, taking Holy Orders. Runcie doesn't, but rushes the story through Sidney being wounded, cared for by an Irish nurse (hinted flashback to Sidney's earlier relationship), and the end of the War.

The reader now possesses Sidney's causes of guilt and of 'belief'. Post-war he is rootless: suggestion of a career in the Foreign Office, in teaching or whatever leave him inert, unmotivated. Amanda takes him to the National Gallery: 

They find themselves in front of Caravaggio’s Supper at Emmaus, Christ with outstretched arms in blessing, the two strangers suddenly realising who is with them, light in the darkness, the simplicity of bread and gesture, its distilled meaning. [...]

They study the picture in silence. It is an image of commanding serenity, perfectly proportioned in its beauty and stillness. He feels the painting is calling him. Christ is calling him. This is the peace that the world cannot give.

 Then follows a series of awkward exchanges: he meets 'Rev Nev' who arranges a retreat, he talks to his father, he tries to explain his intention to Amanda ...

From then there is a killing (involves a pair of duelling pistols, no great mystery), we follow Sidney through theological college, into his first parochial involvements in Coventry as curate to Canon Clitheroe (there's an awkward, youthful pregnancy which involves secrets needing to be confessed), he finds himself growing away from the social scene of Amanda and her family, until ...

On Easter Monday, Graham Clitheroe asks for ‘a serious conversation’. Sidney worries what this might be about. Has a parishioner made a complaint? He does not think he has been neglecting his duties. On the contrary, he has been working all the time. Perhaps the vicar thinks he has been too lenient with Julie Jordan? Or maybe someone has died? Or Clitheroe has decided to retire?

They sit in deep old sofas, inherited and in need of reupholstery, drinking sweet dark sherry that Sidney does not like but won’t say. There’s a loud clock too, and he wonders why people need to be so constantly reminded of time.

‘Do you fancy a trip back to Cambridge?’ Clitheroe asks. The tone is kindly, almost amused.

‘Why there?’

‘I’ve had a letter from the Bishop of Ely. I don’t think you know him, but he’s been asking after you. They need a new man in Grantchester and he wants to know if you might be ready for the task. It’s quite a job.’ 

The conclusion involves Sidney telling Amanda how her brother died, a finely written scene — any comment would be a spoiler.

The novel concludes with Sidney induction at Grantchester:

Sidney is supported by friends old and new: his parents and siblings [...] together with all the regular villagers, including Mrs Maguire, a fierce-looking woman who has been earmarked as his housekeeper, the Mayor of Cambridge, and Inspector Geordie Keating from the local police.

Sidney looks out into the congregation and spies Amanda at the back of the church. She must have arrived late and on her own.

They walk by the Cam:

‘I’d like you to answer another question,’ he begins.

‘Questions, questions, Sidney. Whatever next?’

‘Will you look after me, Amanda?’

‘That sounds like a proposal of marriage. You know I’m engaged to someone else?’

‘I think it’s more than that.’

‘More than marriage?’

‘Yes, probably, given our history, given all that we know about each other, given my hopelessly uncertain and impoverished future. . .’

‘And you expect me to answer that?’

‘I do.’

‘There you go again. Is that the only time you are going to use those two words in my company?’

‘Probably.’

Cliff-hanger ending.

All of that side-steps the question: to what extent is the story of Sidney Chambers at least partly an analogue of Runcie's father?

Robert Runcie served in the Scots Guards (✔︎ check), was in the Normandy campaign (not Italy), was awarded the Military Cross for acts of bravery ((✔︎ check), was a Classics scholar (✔︎ check), studied for ordination at Westcott House, Cambridge (✔︎ check), served as a curate in Newcastle, returned to Cambridge (✔︎ check), and then became Bishop of St Albans. Robert Runcie died in 2000.

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Something happened ...

No: not Joseph Heller's 'forgotten novel' — though I ought to get to Heller sometime. Just a thought about the moment English navigators and seamen looked across the Atlantic.

I doubt it was just Cristóbal Colón, antea Cristovão Colom, né Cristoforo Colombo finding his way and naming San Salvador.

All the evidence is that the shipmen of Bristol (and perhaps places like Waterford) had gone beyond the Porcupine Bank and been fishing off Newfoundland for at least two decades before — and presumably had some idea of land nearby. They just kept that knowledge to themselves. Else, how do we explain John Lloyd in a small vessel out of Bristol (15 July 1480) heading out to look for the mythical island of Hy Brasil? Lloyd's cargo included forty bushels of salt — a bit of cod-fishing was obviously part of the deal.

There's more evidence in Hakluyt, who included in Principal Navigations a Robert Thorne's map and some memoirs. Thorne, in two letters (one to Henry VII Tudor, the other to Edward Lee, the English Ambassador to Spain), tells of his father having been involved in explorations of the Newfoundland coast, and urging the 'authorities' to get on with repeating it.

All of which, and far, far more suggests to my mind that 'Something was happening' in Tudor times to turn English attention to look west. The only question is when to date it.

Allow me to leap a very eventful century to 4 November 1576. That date was the sacking of Antwerp, and a period of anarchy for the Spanish Netherlands, which had all kinds of consequence. Out of that, the Union of Arras (formulating a core for the remaining Spanish power) and the Union of Utrecht (the cohesion of the United Provinces), both in late 1579, explain why the modern Netherlands (mainly lapsed Protestants) and Belgium (heavily Catholic, but no longer as sincere as they used to be) still persist. This was when the Habsburgs were realising the limits of Spanish power in the Low Countries. After, the main commerce centre moved north along the coast to Amsterdam. From a specific English point-of-view, it destroyed the main export wool-market.

And it's why I have been reading ...

17. Michael Pye, Antwerp: The Glory Years

I bought this book on the back of very warm reviews, and because I knew (and took to) Pye's earlier The Edge of the World, How the North Sea Made Us Who We Are — which is very much the other half of this story. In the matter of the city and history of Antwerp, Pye's two books overlap to the extent one may spot borrowings from one to the other: the same names flit from one to the other.

Another reason for acquiring this book was — I know and like Antwerp. Getting there is too easy — off the Eurostar at Brussels-Midi, change platform and the same ticket takes me the rest of the way. Antwerpen Centraal is gloriously theatrical, turn-of-the-nineteenth-century and splendidly over-the-top.

Belgium as a whole is the epitome of Northern European bourgeoisification. Antwerp must count as the country's most bourgeois provincial city. And the ultimate bourgeois bit of Antwerp is Meir, the fashion district. Money still talks here — but with style.

Pye's story of the great century of Antwerp, the sixteenth century. His account is topped-and-tailed by two events, making for a compact account (the text is barely a couple of hundred pages). It kicks off with the arrival of Portuguese Jews fleeing from the Inquisition, bringing their skills, trades and acumen. It ends with Alexander Farnese, duke of Parma, suppressing of dissent, enforcing Catholic conformity, and so with the flight of those Jews, of Lutherans and Calvinists to more congenial cities. In between is a period of liberalism, especially in economics. 

Hence the story never strays too far from money. The book is delightfully full of anecdotes and vignettes. This is from page 116, starting chapter 8 (which is entitled — yes — Money):

The banker and merchant Erasmus Schetz tried to explain money to his 'most special friend', the 'great and most learnèd man', the philosopher Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam. He was not doing well. 'I was certain,' Schetz wrote, 'that within a year I would have rendered you capable of understanding all this.' He added: 'I would prefer that you were more capable of grasping this matter than I see you are.'

Erasmus was expecting income from a parish in England, but the coins seemed to have different values in different places. Schetz had to tell Erasmus that there was money in coins and money on paper and the value of the two could shift, that other people could take the difference between the markets in money 'to their own gain, and to your detriment'. The great philosopher had a simpler view: he assumed he was being robbed.

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