Looking out over Oxford

To Oxford, the city of the dreaming spires – so-called because of the number of religious establishments in said city. Each college has its own chapel, you see, and there are some churches as well. Funnily enough, one of the churches is designated as the university’s church, even though the colleges have chapels – one of which, the one at Christ Church, doubles up as Oxford’s cathedral. That makes for a lot of spires.

It was to the University Church of St Mary the Virgin, located on the High Street, that I went. There has been a church on that site since Anglo-Saxon times, and in the early days of Oxford University it became an important building, being used for lectures and as a meeting-place for the university authorities, as well as having an upstairs room used as the university’s first library. In the 1550s, it was the location for the trial of the Oxford Martyrs – bishops Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley and archbishop Thomas Cranmer, leading figures in the Reformation under Henry VIII and Edward VI who found themselves on the wrong side when Henry’s daughter Mary became queen. Her attempts to turn the clock back and make England Catholic again have given her the nickname ‘Bloody Mary’. She had those three churchmen charged with heresy, and – this being the sixteenth century – they were found guilty. Latimer and Ridley were burned at the stake on nearby Broad Street in October 1555, with Cranmer suffering the same fate five months later. The church was also used for the awarding of degrees, until these increasingly rowdy ceremonies met with disapproval by the church authorities in the seventeenth century (which, after the Civil War, resulted in Christopher Wren – who’d studied at Wadham College – being commissioned to build the Sheldonian Theatre; henceforth, graduation ceremonies took place there instead). Samuel Johnson is known to have attended services at St Mary’s while he was a student at Pembroke College. In the nineteenth century, the Oxford Movement – calling for the reinstatement of older Christian traditions in the C of E, eventually becoming Anglo-Catholicism or High Church Anglicanism – was kick-started at St Mary’s by the likes of John Henry Newman and John Keble (while the former ended up going all the way and converting to Roman Catholicism, the latter did not and would eventually have an Oxford college and a church in Mill Hill named after him; I should know, for that is the church I was baptised in).

But it was to the tower that I was drawn. It’s the oldest part of the church, dating back to the late thirteenth century (the main body of the church having been substantially rebuilt in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, while the porch dates back to the 1630s – the statue of the Virgin Mary above it was considered so scandalous that you can still see the bullet-holes from when Cromwell’s soldiers shot at it after they’d captured Oxford during the Civil War). I, of course, wanted to climb the tower for a view of Oxford’s dreaming spires. I like climbing towers. I’d previously looked out over Oxford from the tower of St Michael at the North Gate (the City Church, as opposed to the University Church) and from the Carfax Tower, and I reckoned it made sense to complete the hat-trick by going up St Mary’s too; if nothing else, it is reckoned to be the one with the best view over Oxford.

So I paid my £4 and made my way up the narrow spiral staircase. 

Through a window on the way up, I could see the chapel of Exeter College – a college best known by me and doubtless many others as the college where, in the final episode of Inspector Morse, the titular inspector suffers his fatal collapse after figuring out who the murderer was in his last mystery.

Once out in the open, I was confronted by the statue of a bishop which, funnily enough, I’d seen before – on the cover of an Inspector Morse novel (I forget which one). I’ve not been able to find out which bishop it represents; this being Oxford, it’s not like there’s a shortage of candidates.

Looking out to the north, I had the Radcliffe Camera – as in camera being the Latin for ‘room’, this being the reading-room of the Bodleian Library – before me; Exeter and Brasenose Colleges to the left, All Souls College to the right. 

Interesting one, All Souls. First of all, it has no students. That’s not actually true, of course – it has no undergraduate students, and those graduates and postgraduate students who do get to be at All Souls (they have to take a famously hard exam in order to do so) are Fellows of the college. Not students. It’s also home to one of the more bizarre of Oxford’s many academic traditions – a ceremony which consists of a torchlit parade, led by a man carrying a wooden duck on a pole, which takes place once a century (the last one was in 2001, so it looks like I’ve missed out on that).

Moving to the south side, the view takes in Oriel College (with its statue of Cecil Rhodes) and Christ Church, the college that doesn’t call itself a college and which is unique in being the only higher educational institution in this country that’s also a cathedral. 

That particular quirk goes back to its foundation. Or rather, its second re-foundation. Cardinal Wolsey had wanted to establish a college on the site of a priory which he had suppressed, but was prevented from doing so by his own fall from grace. This led to the suppression of Cardinal College while it was still being built; it was re-founded by Henry VIII as King Henry VIII’s College (that king not being short on modesty) although in 1546 it was re-founded again thanks to a re-organisation of the Church of England which led to the creation of the Diocese of Oxford; henceforth, the college chapel – built on the site of the priory church – would be the Cathedral Church of Christ, with the college attached to it going by the name of Christ Church (not ‘Christ Church College’, for the word ‘college’ does not appear in its title). Charles I stayed there during the Civil War (since he had been kicked out of London when the war started, Oxford became his capital until it fell to the Parliamentarians in 1646). Its clock tower, the Tom Tower, is another Wren creation.

Looking at the tower itself, I noticed that there was some old graffiti carved into the brickwork. 

Not exactly surprising, as there are quite a few old buildings where someone’s taken a knife to the stonework to carve their initials for posterity. ‘AR’ was here in 1676, and ‘WF’ in 1762. Who, I wondered, were these people? Had they come to the church intending to carve their initials in the tower, or just spotted the chance to do so once they’d climbed it and noted that there was no-one else around? Did they wonder if they’d be found out, maybe getting them into trouble with the vicar or the university authorities (assuming, of course, that they were students)? Who knows? I wondered, as I have done before, about the point at which graffiti stops being an act of vandalism and becomes historically significant, as witness, for example, the Parliamentarian soldier who carved his name onto the lead lining of the font in the church at Burford when he was being held prisoner there in 1649 (one for another time, that one).

Satisfied with the view, and by now in need of a cup of tea (for it was although the sun was out, it was a cold and windy day), I made my way back down.

Mushroom Bolognese

In the kitchen, and looking for something healthy, what with it being January and all. It just so happened that we noticed a recipe in the latest edition of the BBC’s Olive magazine for mushroom bolognese. Well, we like pasta and we like mushrooms, so why not give it a go?

I have form when it comes to bolognaise sauce. For a long time, spaghetti bolognese – ‘spag bol’ – was the only Italian dish I could cook (it took me a while to get carbonara right, often ending up with a sort of scrambled egg with pasta). I learned how to make spag bol in the Scouts, when the sauce only needed three ingredients; an onion, beef mince and the contents of a pasta sauce jar. And spaghetti, of course. When cooking in the comfort of an actual kitchen rather than a mess-tent, I usually used the sauce recipe in Delia Smith’s Complete Cookery Collection (listed as Ragu bolognese, “really the all-purpose Italian pasta sauce: it can form the basis of Lasagne or Baked meat and macaroni pie (see the recipes on pages 332 and 334)”) although I sometimes skipped the chicken liver as it wasn’t always the easiest thing to get hold of.

Now I am well aware that any actual Italians would be appalled by spag bol, which is not something that you will find in Italy; in Bologna, where bolognese sauce comes from, they’d use tagliatelle, not spaghetti which is more of a southern Italian pasta. That said, Rick Stein recently came across an actual spaghetti bolognaise recipe during the course of his recent Rick Stein’s Long Weekends TV show (“hey Rick, where’re you going this weekend?”). This actual spaghetti bolognese is a dish “which the locals cook of a Friday fish day, made with tomatoes, tuna and dry pasta”. Not mince. But that’s something for another time.

Anyway – the mushroom one. First of all, there’s no spaghetti, for Olive magazine is being geographically correct by stating that this is a dish that goes with tagliatelle. It was an easy-to-follow recipe involving two types of mushroom – porcini (soaked in water, which also gets used) and chestnut mushrooms, along with plenty of veg – carrots and celery as well as onions. And we still have thyme and rosemary growing in the garden, adding a nice homely touch. The two adaptations we made were to skip the star anise, because that sounded a bit out-of-place, and add more water than the recipe suggested – it was looking dry even before we started on the final “cook for 30 minutes” stage, so I filled the empty tomato-tin with water and added that.

The result – delicious! Provided, of course, that you like mushrooms…

The Bayeux Tapestry

So, the Bayeux Tapestry is to be displayed in this country for the first time? Well I for one am delighted to hear this. There’s a personal reason, for it’s the Bayeux Tapestry that first got me interested in history when I went on a family holiday in Normandy in 1987 (we visited Bayeux, among other places, and a few months later there was a school trip down to Kent and Sussex which included a visit to Battle Abbey – and that, as they say, was that).

The most famous depiction of the events of 1066 – the most famous date in English history, for that was a year of three Kings and two invasions – the Bayeux Tapestry was probably made in the 1070s under the orders of Bishop Odo, the half-brother of William the Conqueror. It is actually an embroidered cloth rather than a tapestry (although ‘Bayeux Embroidered Cloth’ just sounds wrong) and measures 230 feet by 20 inches. An alternative theory is that it was made at the orders of (or even by) William’s wife, Queen Matilda, which is why it’s sometimes known in French as La Tapisserie de la Reine Mathilde. The Odo theory is more likely, though, and not just because the man himself makes an appearance. He is seen fighting at the battle of Hastings, albeit armed with a club rather than a sword (perhaps symbolic of his clerical status, although it’s worth noting that William himself is shown carrying a club into battle too, so maybe it was a sign of seniority). 

Odo was the Bishop of Bayeux, and after the Conquest he also became the Earl of Kent which supports the theory that the Tapestry was actually made in England. The earliest known reference to the Tapestry dates back to 1476, when it was mentioned in an inventory of Bayeux Cathedral which it had probably been made to adorn. Bayeux was where William made Harold promise that he would support his (William’s) claim to the English throne, although the cathedral itself wasn’t consecrated until 1077.

Although obviously intended to tell the story of the Norman Conquest from the Normans’ perspective – to the extend that King Harold’s victory over the King of Norway at Stamford Bridge and subsequent twelve-day march from York to Sussex in order to fight William doesn’t get a look-in – it’s not all one-sided propaganda. William did not recognise Harold as the rightful King of England after Edward the Confessor’s death in early 1066 (indeed, as far as he was concerned Harold had promised to support him), but Harold is nevertheless shown on the Tapestry with the regalia of kingship and explicitly named as England’s King (the text reads Harold Rex Anglorum – Harold, King of the English – the first King of England to be crowned at Westminster Abbey, in fact). It’s a funny way of depicting someone who, according to the brother of the man who had the Tapestry made, had no right to be King. Maybe the English seamstresses who stitched the Tapestry were being a bit subversive.

In Harold’s death scene, the famous arrow-in-the-eye could well be more propaganda than fact, because perjurers were commonly punished in Medieval times by way of having weapons poked through their eyes. William’s claim to the throne would be upheld by depicting Harold as an oath-breaker, which this is evidently an attempt at doing (whether Harold was coerced into promising support for William is, of course, another matter although it does seem likely). Other historical sources state that the King was hacked to death by some Norman knights, and indeed the very next scene shows a man, who may well also be Harold, being slain by way of a sword.

There is also a depiction of some Norman brutality towards the English – they’re shown as burning down someone’s house, although given the brutal and ruthless way in which William would later deal with any English resistance to his rule, perhaps that is to be expected.

The Tapestry is also unfinished, or rather incomplete – for the end is missing. When it was first made, it would doubtless have brought the story of the Norman Conquest to a conclusion by showing the (remaining) English nobles surrendering to William at Berkhamstead, and William’s subsequent coronation on Christmas Day, 1066, although for as long as people have been studying the Tapestry that part has not been there. There have been attempts in modern times to make the final part, though, as witness the 2013 effort by over 400 people on Alderney. As it is, the last (remaining) scene on the Tapestry shows the English fleeing from the battlefield.

The Tapestry did not become widely known until the eighteenth century. After the 1476 inventory, the next reference we have to the Tapestry is in 1724. The first detailed account of it in English was written in the 1730s but not published until the 1760s, although William Stukeley, the antiquarian who has cropped up on this blog before in relation to Avebury, mentioned it in a 1743 book of his. During the French Revolution it narrowly avoided being used as covering for wagons, and after Napoleon Bonaparte came to power it was displayed in Paris for the purposes of propaganda – this was, after all, a depiction of a successful invasion of England. It remained in Paris, and by the Second World War it was on display in the Louvre – the SS tried to have it shipped to Berlin when the liberation was imminent, but fortunately they were not successful. After the war, it was moved back to Bayeux. It’s been there, in its own museum near the cathedral, ever since. Previous attempts to have the Tapestry moved to England on a temporary basis – for the Coronation in 1953, and later for the 900^th anniversary of the battle of Hastings in 1966 – have not been unsuccessful, and tests will need to be done on it to make sure that it can be safely moved. The question of where it will be displayed is also one that will need to be addressed.

Getting back to the tapestry itself, some of the detail is fascinating – we see people hunting and ploughing the fields while the political/military stuff is going on above them, and Westminster Abbey makes an appearance, as God blesses it (yes, He’s there too) in time for the funeral of Edward the Confessor, the man who built it. This, weirdly, is shown before Edward’s death scene. 

Halley’s Comet appears in the sky. 

Then there are the oddities which are part of what makes the Bayeux Tapestry such a fascinating piece or artwork. Why, for example, is Edward the Confessor shown dying after his funeral? And, on a more trivial matter, are the invading Normans really eating kebabs? It looks like they are.

And, of course, what’s with the naked people in the, ahem, bottom section? There’s a man doing what appears to be a carpentry job in the buff, while his friend looks like he’s doing some exercises!

When a full-size replica was made in the 1880s, the naked people were given underpants; that version is on display in Reading, while there are other replicas of the Tapestry in North America and Denmark.

Two Scottish novels

Following on from my visit to the Writers’ Museum in Edinburgh, I’ve recently been reading a couple of books by Scottish authors – John Buchan and Ian Rankin, both of whom happen to be favourite writers of mine. One is a tale of cruelty and intolerance in the Lowlands of the seventeenth century, the other a story of murder and violence in modern Edinburgh.

First published in 1927, Witch Wood is one of John Buchan’s historical novels, and as such there’s a lot more depth to this than there is in what he called his ‘shockers’ – think Midwinter rather than The Power-House and Greenmantle. Buchan himself thought of it as his best novel. It’s set in Scotland at the time of the Civil War, an age of religious extremism which came in the form of the Presbyterian-inspired Solemn League and Covenant. In such an age, those who sided with Charles I could expect to be denounced as traitors and hunted down without mercy (their leader, the Marquis of Montrose – also the subject of a biography by Buchan, and who makes a brief appearance in Witch Wood – was a particular hate-figure), while by contrast it was not unknown for apparently upstanding and devout Covenanters to privately dabble in crime and devil-worship (Major Thomas Weir of Edinburgh being the most notorious example).

Witch Wood is the story of David Sempill, a newly-ordained Church of Scotland minister sent to a Lowland village called Woodilee. Although the villagers are firm in their Covenanter beliefs, their minister is less so to the point of befriending and sheltering Mark Kerr, a fugitive supporter of the afore-mentioned Great Montrose. Such tolerance is a dangerous act in itself, but it soon turns out to be the least of his problems.

Devil-worship is at the dark heart of Witch Wood, for David witnesses a diabolic ritual taking place in the woods; the satanists’ ringleader turns out to be Ephraim Caird, a prominent elder of the Kirk who is able use his standing in the community to turn the parish against its minister. A witch-finder arrives in Woodliee, and in the communal hysteria that follows the innocent suffer more than the guilty; to this is added an outbreak of the plague (vividly described) while a love-story between David and the ethereal Katrine plays out to its tragic conclusion. It is here that Buchan comes into his own, raising questions about human nature and religious tolerance with particular reference to self-deception and self-righteousness while not yielding to the temptation to merely brand certain characters as out-and-out hypocrites, although the novel certainly does deal with the contradictions which can become apparent in a society where religion totally dominates life (to a degree that is difficult to comprehend nowadays).

The conclusion is nothing if not dramatic, as David loses everything before he finally confronts Caird in the wood, forcing the latter to choose between God and the devil. David is never seen in the locality again, thus giving rise to the legends of the minister’s disappearance which are related in the novel’s prologue. This is a novel that works on many levels, with the exploration of important questions coming alongside an excellent description of the landscape – always a strong feature of Buchan’s – and strong depictions of the ordinary parishoners caught up in the events described; farmers so attached to the land that they are known by the names of their farms, cottagers, women – especially Isobel Veitch, David’s housekeeper – and Daft Gibbie, the village idiot. These well-drawn characters serve to add another layer of complexity, for with the notable exceptions of the leader characters Buchan has written much of the dialogue in the Lowland Scots dialect which can make the story a bit hard to follow at times; thank goodness my copy – a modern Polygon paperback version – has a glossary! A heavy read, but a rewarding one which I think may well benefit from a second or even a third reading, so I’m not getting rid of my copy yet.

Of a more recent vintage (2016), Rather be the Devil by Ian Rankin is the twenty-first appearance of John Rebus, the hard-nosed Edinburgh detective who by now has once again retired from the police but that doesn’t stop him from getting involved in cases alongside his younger associates, Siobhan Clarke and Malcolm Fox (both DIs in Police Scotland, as Scotland’s various constabularies became in 2013, here depicted as a somewhat frayed organisation). Here, Rebus – trying to cut down on his trademark drinking and making a surprisingly good go of giving up smoking (thanks perhaps in part to his pathologist girlfriend giving him a specimen jar containing part of a diseased lung) – becomes obsessed with an old case from the Seventies, the unsolved murder of a glamorous socialite in the Caledonian Hotel.

This isn’t the first time a Rebus novel has focussed on a case from the past (witness 2013’s Saints of the Shadow Bible which was in part about investigations into an old CID unit which had a distinct whiff of Life on Mars). He’s showing his age – he first appeared in Knots and Crosses, 31 years ago – and mortality isn’t far from the surface as he is diagnosed with having a shadow on one of his lungs (naturally, he takes to referring to it as Hank Marvin; musical references are never far from the surface in the Rebus books, the title of this one coming from a John Martyn song).

Age and shadows are recurring themes here, along with violence, power, greed and betrayal. Once again Rankin’s focus is on the seedy side of Edinburgh – think dodgy nightclubs and even dodgier betting-shops, with much of the action taking place in the evening rather than in broad daylight. A would-be crime boss by the name of Darryl Christie has been beaten unconscious on his own doorstep. He’s trying to fill the void left by Rebus’s old nemesis, veteran crime boss ‘Big Ger’ Cafferty, and it’s not long before rumours abound that Cafferty himself is behind it, hoping to come out of retirement. The beating should be Clarke’s case, but because Christie’s money-laundering activities are of interest to HMRC, Fox – previously transferred to the Scottish Crime Campus, which Clark resented – gets involved too. An attention-seeking vagrant who serially confesses to crimes (and who had previously appeared in 1997’s Black and Blue, one of the best in the series in which Rebus investigated an updated version of the real-life ‘Bible John’ murders) serves to bring Rebus himself on board in a semi-official capacity.

There is of course a link between the decades-old murder and the beating, for Christie is associated with Anthony Brough, the scion of an old Scottish banking family – and the murder victim, Maria Turquand, had been married to a man who worked for said bank. Not that she’d been faithful to him, adding various lovers to the list of suspects which includes a rock star who was staying in the Caledonian along with his entourage at the time of the murder (and who now lives just around the corner from the hotel in question). Brough, by the way, has disappeared, and the body of an ex-copper who worked on the Turquand murder is fished out of the Leith Docks (suicide it isn’t). There’s a mysterious Russian, who’s actually Ukrainian. Oh, and there’s violence a-plenty, some of it involving a hammer and some six-inch nails.

These distinct yet interlinked plots lead to something of a juggling act on Rankin’s part. Rebus and Cafferty are approaching the same point from very different angles. Being a criminal, Big Ger of course is subject to fewer constraints – although the retired Rebus, explicitly more concerned with the outcome rather than the process, is not averse to cutting a few corners himself, such as when he pretends to be Fox (a non-drinking anti-Rebus who, despite his more by-the-book approach, is the one who becomes increasingly compromised as the plot thickens). As was the case with Buchan, local knowledge and detail are key features alongside skilled story-telling. The ‘Caley’ is a real hotel, although as Rankin points out, it’s now the Waldorf Astoria, and there are nods to ongoing roadworks on Lothian Road and (of course!) the Oxford Bar amid confusion about the geography of Edinburgh on the part of some cops sent in from elsewhere. In short, this is a fast-paced and well-told story; Rebus may be getting on a bit, but his creator is still at the top of his game.