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Thomas à Becket

              ... from every shires ende
Of Engelond to Canterbury they wende,
The holy blisful martir for to seke,
That hem hath holpen, whan that they were seke. 
      - Canterbury Tales, General Prologue

Canterbury, Canterbury, Thomas à Becket, everybody loves a martyr!
      - Sheriff Vaisey, BBC Robin Hood, 2006.

Today is, as every inhabitant of the Middle Ages would have known, the feast day of Thomas à Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, killed in Canterbury Cathedral on 29th December 1170 by four knights of Henry II. The king and the Archbishop had been at odds as to whether the king had jurisdiction over the church. According to legend, when the Archbishop refused to sign the Constitutions of Clarendon, which would have restricted ecclesiastical powers, Henry cried "Who will rid me of this troublesome priest?" - an invitation which the four knights took literally.

Henry II and Thomas à Becket, via

This is an eyewitness account of the Archbishop's murder, by one Edward Grim, displaying the usual medieval flair for the dramatic:

...The wicked knight leapt suddenly upon [the Archbishop], cutting off the top of the crown which the unction of sacred chrism had dedicated to God. Next he received a second blow on the head, but still he stood firm and immovable. At the third blow he fell on his knees and elbows, offering himself a living sacrifice, and saying in a low voice, 'For the name of Jesus and the protection of the Church, I am ready to embrace death.' But the third knight inflicted a terrible wound as he lay prostrate. By this stroke, the crown of his head was separated from the head in such a way that the blood white with the brain, and the brain no less red from the blood, dyed the floor of the cathedral. The same clerk who had entered with the knights placed his foot on the neck of the holy priest and precious martyr, and, horrible to relate, scattered the brains and blood about the pavements, crying to the others, 'Let us away, knights; this fellow will arise no more...

Thomas was immediately hailed as a martyr and the King was not popular (he later performed public penance - whether out of genuine remorse or political astuteness is debatable...) The Archbishop's tomb quickly became a drawcard for pilgrims (the medieval equivalent of tourists!) - famously, the pilgrims in the Canterbury Tales are all on their way to the shrine of St Thomas.

The site of Becket's murder in Canterbury Cathedral, via

Thanks almost solely to Thomas à Becket, medieval Canterbury became the pilgrimage capital of England. This seems rather to have annoyed its northern counterpart, York; for most of the Middle Ages there was a rather undignified struggle between the two sees, each seeking supremacy and one-upmanship over the other. Rivalry between the north and south of England appears to go a long way back!

If Canterbury's pet saint was Archbishop Thomas, York's was Archbishop William, who died in 1154 (reportedly from poisoned wine in his chalice). Following his burial in York Minster, rumours of miracles abounded, including the miraculous preservation of his body in one of the Minster's many fires (a miracle which was later mirrored almost exactly at Canterbury with St Thomas' body). William's cult, however, only really took off from the 1170s onward - at exactly the time of Thomas à Becket's murder and the outpouring of veneration which followed.

It is probable, however, that the sudden renewed interest in St William at York was not coincidence at all, and that York began to play up its association with William in response to events at Canterbury. The latter, finding itself suddenly the centre of pilgrimages from all over the country, no doubt thought itself immensely important. York must have resented Canterbury and Canterbury's saint being the centre of attention; the sudden blossoming of the cult of St William was surely at least partly an attempt to redress the balance. If this was indeed so it was only partially successful; York did become a popular tourist, sorry, pilgrimage destination, but never to the same degree as Canterbury.

Feast of the Holy Innocents: Coventry Carol

Many people know the Coventry Carol, but most do not realise that it comes from one of the Middle English mystery play cycles - not the York cycle, but a now-lost Coventry cycle (not to be confused with the Ludus Coventriae cycle, which is now thought to come from East Anglia). It appears in the play known as the Shearmen and Tailors' pageant - one of the only two plays from the cycle to survive (the other is the Weavers').

The Shearmen and Tailors' play tells the story of the nativity, but this song is not a joyful carol welcoming the birth of Christ; instead it is a lament for the innocent children killed by Herod.

When sung today the words are modernised, but the Middle English words to the carol are:

Lulla, lulla, thow littell tine child,
By, by, lully, lullay, thow littell tyne child,

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By, by, lully, lullay!

O sisters too, how may we do
For to preserve this day
This pore yongling for whom we do singe  
By, by, lully, lullay?

 Herod, the king, in his raging,
Chargid he hath this day
His men of might in his owne sight
All yonge children to slay, - 

That wo is me, pore child, for thee,
And ever morne and may
For thi parting nether say nor singe,
By, by, lully, lullay.


The part of Herod seems to have been played as a raving, maniacal bully; there is a stage direction in the York Slaughter of the Innocents play to the effect of now shall Herod descend [from the pageant wagon] and rage in the streets. When Shakespeare was writing Hamlet, by which time the mystery cycles had long been banned for being too Catholic, the part of Herod was still a by-word for blustering, over-theatrical behaviour: "O, it offends me to the soul," laments the Melancholy Dane, "to hear a robustious periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters, to very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings, who for the most part are capable of nothing but inexplicable dumbshows and noise: I would have such a fellow whipped for o'erdoing Termagant; it out-herods Herod: pray you, avoid it."

Coventry is not very far from Stratford-Upon-Avon so several scholars have suggested that Shakespeare may have seen the mystery plays when a boy.

Rubens' Massacre of the Innocents, via

Happy Christmas!

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MARY: This has he ordained of his grace,
My son so young,
A star to be shining a space
At his bearing.

For Balaam told full long before
How that a star should rise full high,
And of a maiden should be born
A son that shall our saving be
From cares keen.
Forsooth, it is my son so free
By whom Balaam gan mean.

JOSEPH: Now welcome, flower fairest of hue,
I shall thee mensk [worship] with main and might.
Hail, my maker, hail Christ Jesu,
Hail, royal king, root of all right,
Hail, saviour.
Hail, my Lord, learner of light,
Hail, blessed flower.

MARY: Now, Lord, that all this world shll win,
To thee, my son is that I say,
Here is no bed to lay thee in.
Therefore, my dear son, I thee pray,
Since it is so,
Here in this crib I might thee lay
Between these beasts two.

And I shall hap thee, mine own dear child,
With such clothes as we have here.
JOSEPH: Oh, Mary, behold these beasts mild,
They make lofing in their manner
As they were men.
Forsooth, it seems well by their cheer
Their Lord they ken.

From The Nativity, l.95-126, in York Mystery Plays: A Selection in Modern Spelling, edited by Richard Beadle and Pamela King (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

Thesis update

This card was sitting on a shelf in the university bookshop just begging to be bought for my supervisor, so I duly obliged :) It is a Mike Williams cartoon.

I'm dreaming of... not a white Christmas, but of getting my thesis finished sometime before Doomsday :D

I have the required number of words - 40,000 (well actually a few more than that by now...) Whether they make sense or not is another matter. Currently I am trying to determine the sense or otherwise of my many words, a process also known as editing (colloquially termed tearing one's hair out). This delightful little procedure shall be finished by the end of February, because it has to be, otherwise this is what the university will do to me:

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Working title number... well, I can't remember, but it's very many, is currently Faith and the City: Piety, Place and the Passion in Fifteenth-Century York. The thesis is in two parts, the first looking at the nature and character of the York Mass and the York mystery plays, the second re-imagining or re-creating the medieval experience of Mass and and plays. This gives me opportunity liberally to illustrate Part II with lots of my lovely photographs of the lovely York churches.

This is what my future examiner will ask when confronted with my thesis. Via

MA students discuss their work in the University of Auckland Arts Computer Lab, which is so dark, dingy and grey as to pass for a very fair imitation of a medieval dungeon. (This is why I work mostly from home.) via

Deutsche Weihnachtslieder

No one does Christmas carols quite like the Germans and Austrians! These are some of my favourites...

Pop-Up Globe looking for volunteer ushers

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The Pop-Up Globe is looking for volunteers to act as ushers during its Auckland run, February to April 2016. Join ze fun and see Shakespeare for free :D

link to Expression of Interest form

As in a theatre, the eyes of men,
After a well-grac'd actor leaves the stage,
Are idly bent on him that enters next,
Thinking his prattle to be tedious.
Richard II V.2.

Christmas at Camelot

This kyng lay at Camylot upon Kyristmasse
With mony luflych lorde, ledes of the best,
Rekenly of the Rounde Table all tho rich brether,
With rych revel oryght and rechles merthes.
Ther tournayed tulkes by tymes ful mony,
Justed ful jolilé thise gentyle knightes,
Sythen kayred to the court, caroles to make.
For ther the fest was ilyche ful fiften dayes,
With alle the mete and the mirthe that men couthe avyse;
Such glaum ande gle glorious to here
Dere dyn upon day, daunsing on nyghtes;
Al was hap upon heghe in halles and chambres
With lordes and lades, as levest him thoght.
With all the wele of the worlde thay woned ther samen,
The most kyd knights under Krystes selven,
And the lovelokkest ladies that ever lif haden,
And he the comlokest kyng that the court haldes.
Pearl, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, edited by A.C. Cawley (London: Everyman, 1970), l.37-53.

This is part of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, describing the festive atmosphere at Camelot just before the Green Knight so dramatically appears on the scene and puts rather a dampner on things.

Christmas at King Arthur's court must have been rather fun - at least, if it really was anything like that described in the poem. Roughly translated, the lines mean:

This King [Arthur] lay at Camelot at Christmas time
With many noble lords, men of the best,
All courteous brethren of the Round Table,
With rich revelry and carefree [or reckless?] mirth.
There travelled very many knights -
They jousted full jollily, these noble knights,
Then rode to the court, carols to make.
For there the feast was the same full fifteen days,
With all the meat and mirth that men could devise;
Such noise and merriment glorious to hear,
Day upon day, dancing by night;
All was high happiness in the halls and chambers
Among the lords and ladies, as they preferred.
With all the joy of the world they lived there together,
The most renowned knights under Christ Himself,
And the loveliest ladies that ever had life,
And the comeliest king that the court could hold.

 

I doubt this is an authentic medieval Christmas song, but never mind :D via

The origins of the Christmas tree: a mystery?

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Most people regard the Christmas tree as a German tradition, brought to the English-speaking world in the 1840s by Prince Albert, the German prince who married Queen Victoria. The German custom seems to date from the Middle Ages, but what are its origins and the reasoning behind it?

As usual when dealing with the Middle Ages, there are lots of suggestions and no definite answer. But one theory is that the Christmas tree comes from the German mystery plays - not, as one might reasonably expect, from the Nativity plays, but from those dramatising the Fall of Adam and Eve.

These plays seem to have been staged on Christmas Eve and their props would have included a tree of some kind, representing the Tree of Knowledge and hung with apples symbolising the forbidden fruit. Over time, scholars suggest, the trees moved inside homes, where they remain today - and the traditional round baubles are what remain of the original 'fruits.' (In Germany and Austria some still do decorate their trees with dried fruit.)

A nice little story, but unfortunately one hard to prove. (There is an alternative tradition that the Christmas tree is neither Germanic nor Christian, but an adaption of a very old pagan custom Christianised by St Boniface.) Still, it deserves to be made known, if only because very few realise they may have the mystery plays to thank for their Christmas trees. Told you the mystery plays were still relevant :D

NB I must confess that despite being thoroughly acquainted with the English mystery plays and reasonably aware of the German and French ones I had never heard this story until last Sunday's sermon... which shows, firstly, that one can never know everything; secondly, that a good grounding in medieval literature comes in handy when writing sermons.

And thirdly, it proves that I was listening to the sermon ;)

Feast of the Immaculate Conception

Tota pulchra es, Maria, et macula non est in te

 

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Who is she that cometh forth as the morning rising, fair as the moon, bright as the sun, terrible as an army set forth in battle array?

Hayle, jentilest of Jesse in Jewes generacioun,
Haile, welthe of þis worlde, all welthis is weldand,
Haile, hendest, enhaused to high habitacioun,
Haile, derworth and dere is þi diewe dominacioun,
Haile, floure fressh flourissed, þi frewte is full felesome,
Haile, sete of oure saveour and sege of saluacioun,
Haile, happy to helde to, þi helpe is full helesome.
Haile, pereles in plesaunce,
Haile, precious and pure,
Haile, salue þat is sure,
Haile, lettir of langure,
Haile, bote of oure bale in obeyesaunce.

Thomas' speech praising Mary, The Assumption of the Virgin l. 132-43, in The York Plays: A Critical Edition of the York Corpus Christi Play as recorded in British Library Additional MS 35290, edited by Richard Beadle, Oxford University Press for the Early English Text Society, 2009.

The translation of this lovely German Christmas song is:

There is a rose sprung up,
From a tender root,
As it was sung to us in the old days,
From Jesse came its lineage.
And it has brought forth a bloom
In the middle of the cold winter
Halfway through the night.

The rose which I mean,
Of which Isiah told,
Has alone brought us
Mary, the pure maid.
According to God's eternal plan
Has she a child borne
Halfway through the night.

From the heart we ask you
Mary, gentle rose,
Through this flower's pain
Which it has felt,
Will thou help us
That we may make for Him
A home beautiful and fine.

(Es klingt besser auf Deutsch!!)

Christmas preparations

Christmas is coming,
The geese are getting fat,
Won't you please put a penny in the old man's hat?
If you haven't got a penny, then a ha'penny will do,
If you haven't got a ha'penny then God bless you!

Advent wreath

Roasting almonds

Lighting home the soldiers on Finnish Independence Day

Finnish Independence Day

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 6th December is Nikolaustag for the Germans, Austrians and Swiss but for the Finnish it is their Independence Day - itsenäisyyspäivä according to Wikipedia; unfortunately it does not provide a guide to the pronunciation!

The day marks Finland's 1917 Declaration of Independence from Russia and is a public holiday.

Finland shares 1,340km of its borders with Russia; in 1917 the population of Finland was around 3 million compared to well over a hundred million in Russia. So winning independence from its much larger, more powerful neighbour was no small feat for Finland.

Traditionally on this day the Finnish put lighted candles in their windows, to guide the Finnish soldiers home from the Russian frontier.

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Nikolaustag

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6th December is St Nicholas' Day, or Nikolaustag in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. In these countries Nikolaustag is an anticipation of Christmas. Customs vary between countries and even between regions. In parts of Germany children leave their shoes outside their doors on the evening of the 5th; by the next morning St Nikolaus will have filled them with fruit and sweets (let us hope the shoes are not over-old...).

In other areas, St Nikolaus comes to find out whether children have been good enough for him to dole out presents. On these visits he is accompanied by the Krampus (this is the Austrian name: in Germany he is Knecht Ruprecht and in Switzerland Schmutzli). The Krampus is as scary as St Nikolaus is benign; he is an ugly, troll-like figure, trailing clanking chains and carrying a switch and a big sack. If children have been good, St Nikolaus will reward them with fruits and sweet treats, but naughty children get a spanking by the Krampus. Really naughty children get put in the sack and carted off to the Black Forest!

Draussen weht es bitterkalt,

Wer kommt da durch den Winterwald?

Stipp stapp, stipp stapp und huckepack

- Knecht Ruprecht ist's mit seinem Sack.

Was ist denn in dem Sack drin?

Äpfel, Mandeln und Rosin' und schöne Zuckerrosen,

auch Pfeffernüss fürs gute Kind;

die andern, die nicht artig sind,

die klopft er auf die Hosen!

Outside it is blowing bitter cold,

Who comes there through the winter forest?

Stipp stapp, stipp stapp and piggy-back

- It is the Krampus with his sack.

What then is inside the sack?

Apples, almonds, raisins and beautiful sugar roses

and Pfeffernüsse for the good child;

the others who are not good

get spanked on the seat of the trousers!

St Nikolaus is based on a historical (according to some) or legendary (according to others) figure, Nicholas, Bishop of Myra, who is thought to have lived in the second half of the third century AD in modern-day Turkey (did he know St Barbara, I wonder?). He is the patron of children, sailors, students, teachers and merchants, but is best known for being very generous, giving readily to those in need. Somehow this became the basis of the Christmas present-giving tradition.

Barbaratag

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4th December is the feast day of St Barbara, known in German as Barbaratag. Barbara is thought to have lived in what is now Turkey. She died around 306, martyred by her own father after converting to Catholicism. 

Her father, Dioscorus, apparently kept her locked up in a tower when he was away from home so that his daughter's virtue would remain unsullied. You can see the tower, and just make out its three windows, in the picture above; legend has it that it originally had only two windows and that Barbara added the extra one after her conversion, as a symbol of the Trinity.

Dioscorus, coming home to find the extra window and his daughter a Christian, was not happy. He had her tortured and eventually executed. After burning her failed (the torches were apparently miraculously extinguished as soon as they came near her), Dioscorus himself beheaded her. However, his triumph was cut short; on his way home he was struck dead by lightening!

St Barbara is one of the Fourteen Holy Helpers, and (presumably due to the method of her father's premature but hardly untimely end) is also invoked against thunderstorms. Because of her association with fire, she is also the patron of firemen and those who handle explosives, including miners and artillerymen. Her name comes from the Greek, meaning 'foreign' or 'stranger.'


Der Barbarazweig

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An old German tradition attached to Barbaratag is the Barbarazweig (Barbara branch). According to legend, while locked in her cell waiting execution, Barbara watered a stick of cherry with her drinking water (what the branch was doing there is not recorded!) The branch blossomed, comforting her with its beautiful flowers.

The German tradition sees cherry branches, or other fruit trees such as apple, peach or pear, brought into the house on St Barbara's Day. The idea is that the branch blossoms in time for Christmas, thus recalling the "Flos Carmeli... Radix Jesse, germinans flosculum" [Flower of Carmel, stem of Jesse, who bore one bright flower] - i.e. Mary and her Son.

Telegraph | Commonly misused words and phrases

The 51 most commonly misused words and phrases

See how many you know!!

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Public lecture: Why the Arts matter

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Jonothon Neelands (a professor at Warwick Business School) is giving a public lecture at the University of Auckland on "Culture, Creativity and Growth: Why the Arts matter."

Where: Owen G. Glenn Building lecture theatre 092, Grafton Road, University of Auckland.
When: Monday 7th December, 6pm.

See more: http://www.creativethinkingproject.org/jonothan-neelands-fellow/

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Book lover

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"The deep/Moans round with many voices"

                              Come, my friends,
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die. 
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down;
It may we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Though much is taken, much abides, and though 
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are:
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find and not to yield.

From Alfred, Lord Tennyson, "Ulysses," l. 56-60, in Three Victorian Poets, ed. Jane Ogborn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

Annual ballet concert

I know this is nothing to do with Middle English, but whatever :D 

Come along to see my twinkies (dancing Friday/Saturday) and Isabel being the Wicked Witch of the West. "How about a little fire, scarecrow?"

Remembrance Sunday

Blow out, you bugles, over the rich Dead!
There's none of these so lonely and poor of old,
But, dying, has made us rarer gifts than gold.
These laid the world away; poured out the red
Sweet wine of youth; gave up the years to be
Of work and joy, and that unhoped serene,
That men call age; and those who would have been,
Their sons, they gave, their immortality.

Blow, bugles, blow! They brought us, for our dearth,
Holiness, lacked so long, and Love, and Pain.
Honour has come back, as a king, to earth,
And paid his subjects with a royal wage;
And nobleness walks in our ways again;
And we have come into our heritage.

Rupert Brooke, "The Dead," in In Flanders Fields and Other Poems of the First World War, edited by Brian Busby (London: Arcturus Publishing, 2005), 15.

Where did the mystery plays come from?

The short answer is... nobody knows.

The long answer is... very long indeed!

One branch of scholarship suggests that the mystery plays had a strong didactic element - that they were, alongside the churches’ stained glass windows, the means of teaching the illiterate masses their faith. Robert Huntingdon Fletcher’s take on medieval congregations and the development of the mystery plays is gloriously patronising and quite startlingly simplistic:

We must try in the first place to realize clearly the conditions under which the church service, the mass, was conducted during all the medieval centuries. We should picture to ourselves congregations of persons for the most part grossly ignorant, of unquestioning though very superficial faith, and of emotions easily aroused to fever heat. Of the Latin words of the service they understood nothing; and of the Bible story they had only a very general impression. 

(Robert Huntingdon Fletcher, A History of English Literature (Boston: Richard G. Badger, 1916), accessed at http://www.luminarium.org/medlit/medievaldrama.htm.)

For such poor ignorami it was necessary “that the service [the Mass] should be given a strongly spectacular and emotional character,” which led slowly but inevitably to “the process of dramatizing the services.” Two very common forms of liturgical drama were Easter sepulchures (the church crucifix, after it had been venerated on Good Friday, would be 'buried' beneath the altar to symbolise Christ's death, then 'resurrected' on Easter morning and restored to its rightful place, either above the altar or on the rood screen) and the Quem Quaeritis trope (this was a dramatisation of the angel's speech to the three Marys at the empty tomb - 'Quem Quaeritis' means 'whom do you seek?'). Parts of the Christmas liturgy were also dramatised, but the Easter ceremonies were the main ones.

These dramatisations of the liturgy, says Fletcher, morphed gradually into the complete vernacular cycle of Bible stories when “the people... ceased to be patient with the unintelligble Latin." Originally also part of the liturgy and performed inside the churches, eventually

the churches began to seem too small and inconvenient, the excited audiences forgot the proper reverence, and the performances were transferred to the churchyard, and then, when the gravestones proved troublesome, to the market place, the village-green, or any convenient field. [...] Gradually, too, the priests lost their hold even on the plays themselves; skilful actors from among the laymen began to take many of the parts; and at last in some towns the trade-guilds, or unions of the various handicrafts, which had secured control of the town governments, assumed entire charge.

This evolutionary approach, very popular in the early to mid twentieth century, is today seen as somewhat outdated, although it lives on in popular culture (i.e. Wikipedia entries). And Fletcher's over-simplistic take on medieval drama (published in 1916) is, worryingly, still used by the Luminarium website as a general introduction to medieval plays.

Most scholars now suggest that liturgical and vernacular drama developed separately but in tandem, each influenced by the other but each with its own particular purpose and function. Although both were forms of worship, liturgical drama belonged to the church and the mystery plays to the city. The structure of each reflects this. Liturgical drama used only the ecclesiastical Latin and was played by the church hierarchy; suiting the enclosed, sacred space of the church, it was highly ritualised and fairly static. The vernacular mystery plays, whose cast and playing space was the entire city, had far greater scope for colour, movement and theatrical energy. 

And why were the plays called mystery plays? No one really knows that either, but here are the main theories:

• In Latin - the language of the church - mysterium meant "mystical or religious truth" (OED Online: mystery, n.1). Because religious truths were a main focus of the plays, the Latin may have been anglicized to mystery and associated with the plays. 

• There is a very similar Latin word, misterium, which originally meant "duty, service, office" (OED Online: mystery, n.2), but which by the Middle Ages meant "occupation, trade" (ibid) in association with the craft guilds. Since the guilds were the primary producers of the plays, this may be why the plays became known as mystery plays. 
  

 Which is correct? Take your pick!

Mystery plays were not uniquely English; they were widespread throughout Europe. The four main English cycles are those from are York, Chester, Wakefield, and the so-called N-Town; three Cornish plays also survive. On the continent, France, Germany, Spain and Italy all had their own plays.

Bonfire Night

The Gunpowder Plotters, via

Remember, remember, the fifth of November,
Gunpowder, treason, and plot.
I see no reason 
Why gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot.

These are the first lines of an old English folk ballad commemorating the 1605 Gunpowder Plot, when English Catholics famously tried to blow up the Protestant King James I and the Houses of Parliament. Also famously (or infamously), Guy Fawkes was caught lighting the fuse to the gunpowder, which was the end of the plot and also (eventually, after chase, capture and torture) of Guy (or Guido, as he was also known) and the other Gunpowder Conspirators.  

The Protestants were (and continued to be) highly gleeful about the failure of the plot and the conspirators' ignominious ends. The rest of the above rhyme, which dates from the latter half of the nineteenth century, runs

Guy Fawkes and his companions
Did the scheme contrive,
To blow the King and Parliament
All up alive.
Threescore barrels, laid below,
To prove old England's overthrow.
But, by God's providence, him they catch,
With a dark lantern, lighting a match!
A stick and a stage
For King James's sake!
If you won't give me one,
I'll take two,
The better for me,
And the worse for you.
A rope, a rope, to hang the Pope,
A penn'orth of cheese to choke him,
A pint of beer to wash it down,
And a jolly good fire to burn him.
Holloa, boys! holloa, boys! make the bells ring!
Holloa boys! holloa, boys! God save the King!
Hip, hip, hooor-r-r-ray! 

via http://www.potw.org/archive/potw405.html


Today most people only remember the first few lines, just as they remember Bonfire Night only for the fireworks, forgetting the bitter political and religious struggles which spawned it.

The last third of Jessie Child's book God's Traitors: Terror & Faith in Elizabethan England deals with the Gunpowder Plot, a thorough and scrupulous account of the conspiracy from a Catholic perspective. Like the rest of the book, it is fair, just and unsentimental. Well worth a read!

Here is poor old Guy Fawkes laying the gunpowder:

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being tortured on the rack:

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and finally being hung, drawn and quartered:

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Guy Fawkes was from York; he was baptised here in April 1570, in St Michael le Belfrey, which is in High Petergate, right next door to the Minster. Alas, I neglected take a picture of the whole church while I was in York, but here is a very nice one of its doors:

Was the baby Guy carried through these doors on his way to baptism?

Across the street is a row of houses, one of which claims to be his birthplace:

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But there are at least two other buildings in York claiming the same thing!
 

All Souls' Day

Pleasington Priory, Lancashire

Dies irae, dies illa,
Solvet saeclum in favilla,
Teste David cum Sibylla.

Quantus tremor est futurus,
Quando judex est venturus,
Cuncta stricte discussurus!

Tuba mirum spargens sonum
Per sepulchra regionum,
Coget omnes ante thronum.

Mors stupebit et natura,
Cum resurget creatura,
Judicanti responsura.

Liber scriptus proferetur,
In quo totum continetur,
Unde mundus judicetur.

Judex ergo cum sedebit,
Quidquid latet, apparebit:
Nil inultum remanebit.

Quid sum miser tunc dicturus?
Quem patronum rogaturus?
Cum vix justus sit securus.

Rex tremendae majestatis,
Qui salvandos salvas gratis,
Salva me fons pietas.

Recordare, Jesu pie,
Quod sum causa tuae viae,
Ne me perdas illa die.

Quarens me, sedisti lassus,
Redemisti crucem passus:
Tantus labor non sit cassus.

Juste judex ultionis,
Donum fac remissionis,
Ante diem rationis.

Ingemisco tamquam reus:
Culpa rubet vultus meus:
Supplicanti parce Deus.

Qui Mariam absolvisti,
Et latronem exaudisti,
Mihi quoque spem dedisti.

Preces meae non sunt dignae;
Sed tu bonus fac benigne,
Ne perenni cremer igne.

Inter oves locum praesta,
Et ab haedis me sequestra,
Statuens in parte dextra.

Confutatis maledictis,
Flammis acribus addictis,
Voca me cum benedictis.

Ora supplex et acclinis,
Cor contritum quasi cinis:
Gere curam mei finis.

Lacrymosa dies illa,
Qua resurget ex favilla
Judicandus homo reus.

Huic ergo parce Deus:
Pie Jesu Domine,
Dona eis requiem. Amen.

Sequence from the Mass of All Souls.

All Saints' Day

The East Window of All Saints Pavement, York (19th century) - see key below

Gaudeamus omnes in Domino, diem festum celebrantes sub honore Sanctorum omnium: de quorum solemnitate gaudent Angeli, et collaudent Filium Dei. Exsultate, justi, in Domino: rectos decet collaudatio.

Introit of the Mass of All Saints


York has two churches named All Saints - one in North Street and one on the Pavement. Both have beautiful stained glass but that of All Saints North Street is particularly famous, mainly because of the Pricke of Conscience Window and the Corporal Acts of Mercy Window, but also because of the Great East Window (also known as the Blackburn Window, after its donors) and the Nine Orders of Angels Window:

The Nine Orders of Angels Window (c.1410-20) in All Saints North Street, York

 (The nine orders, or choirs, are angels, archangels, thrones, dominations, principalities, powers, virtues, cherubim and seraphim.)

 

This panel shows a man wearing medieval spectacles! This is very unusual (and very uncomfortable they look too...)

Key to the All Saints Pavement East Window:

Moses, Abraham, Noah                            Risen Christ             St Lawrence, St Agnes, St Stephen

Isiah(?), St David, John the Baptist  Mary Magdalene, BVM, St John   St Paul, St Peter, St Andrew

St Catherine, St Margaret               St Augustine, St Ambrose       St Hieronymus, St Benedict

Aidan, Wilfrid, Paulinus          Oswald, Alban, St George       V. Bede, William of York, St Cuthbert 

The nine saints in the bottom row were popular English saints throughout the Middle Ages, and (apart from St George, who despite being England's patron saint from the very early Middle Ages never set foot on this damp and foggy island) all have close links with Yorkshire or York in particular.

Hamlet retold

Act I

Act II

Act III 2B/2B

Act IV

Act V