More details about the Galloway Hoard

As so often happens when one writes about an archaeological discovery and link to online report about it a day or two later there appears a more detailed report which one is also keen to share. 

The other day I posted about work on a runic inscription found on one of the pieces in the Galloway Hoard in The latest insight into the Galloway Hoard. I have now found a more detailed account of this latest research on the website of Popular Mechanics. It is well worth looking at and indicates with its various instances of items that were named as the property of individuals that this was a more literate society that one might initially have imagined. Much of this will doubtless remain hypothetical but named personal items of adornment suggests a degree of sophistication.

The article can be seen at Experts Just Decoded a Big Mystery Surrounding a Famous Viking Treasure

A medieval gemstone seal from Norfolk

I recently posted about a medieval seal ring with a Roman gemstone cameo that had been found at Fishlake near Doncaster and had been purchased for the city museum collection. That post can be seen at A thirteenth century ring from Fishlake in Yorkshire

I now see that a seal not dissimilar in appearance has been found near Kings Lynn and has been acquired for the Norfolk Museums service. Like so many such objects It was found by a metal detectorist. Dated to the period 1250-1350 the pendant seal is again a red gemstone  carved with the image of an elephant and castle and set in a gold frame with an inscription.

The report can be seen at King's Lynn elephant and castle seal find joins museum collection

As with the Fishlake ring such seals are a reminder of the striking items that at least some mediaeval people wore, and the need and desire to have a distinctive seal to authenticate letters and documents. Whatever the literacy of the individual owner they required such seals to authenticate items sent or issued in their name.

I have speculated in previous posts about fines from this part of Norfolk about weather they could have been owned by pilgrims to Walsingham or by people engaged in the important trading networks that flow through Kings Lynn and along the roads and waterways of East Anglia in the mediaeval centuries. That we will never know unless a document bearing the seal impression where to be found which might indicate its owner and something of their life. Even so it is one more link to the past and it is good to see that it will be available to public view in the museum. 

Arma Christi roll discovered in York

The BBC News website has a report about the discovery in the collections of Bar Convent in York of a later fifteenth century copy on a roll of the devotional poem about the Instruments of the Passion, the Arma Christi. This particular roll appears to have been intended for group recitation rather than just private meditation. 

Devotion to the Instruments of the Passion, and indeed to the physical sufferings of Christ developed over time and grew particularly in the later medieval period as can be seen from a Wikipedia article at Arma Christi

The poem is available with a commentary as can be seen from this online flier from Routledge at The Arma Christi in Medieval and Early Modern Material Culture: With a Critical Edition of 'O Vernicle'

In York itself in the Minster evidence for the devotion can be seen in one of the carved shields in the spandrels of the arches of the Lady Chapel. 

The illustrated article about the chance discovery at York can be seen at 

Rare medieval rolled manuscript found in York Bar Convent archive

For those who do not know the extraordinary history of Bar Convent there is an introduction on Wikipedia at Bar Convent

Septuagesima

Septuagesima has arrived, the ‘A-word’ is buried until Holy Saturday, the violet vestments and hangings are back in use - and I must say I was most impressed when watching the traditional rite Mass this morning from St Mary’s Shrine in Warrington by the really beautiful violet and gold cope worn by the celebrant for the Asperges. The lead-up to Lent and Easter has begun. 

Last year I wrote an article for the blog drawing together the links to my surprisingly large number of posts about this season of the Church year. These cover both specific liturgical actions and also the case for a time of preparation for our Lenten abstinence. The article with all these links can be seen at Burying the ‘A word’ and Septuagesima

May I wish a spiritually rewarding gesima season to you all.

The latest insight into the Galloway Hoard

The continuing investigation of the Galloway Hoard of silver from the Viking era has now yields a tentative reading of a runic inscription which may help to explain the nature of the hoard as that of a single community rather than just an individual or family’s accumulated loot, or if so, then as loot accumulated by a community, with a shared sense of identity, of some type.

The research can be read in a summary from The Independent at Owner of Viking Age ‘Galloway Hoard’ of silver and gold finally found

Dresden eighty years on

I recently posted a link through an online article about the rebuilding of Potsdam and how moving a story it is. On the eightieth anniversary of the bombing raids on Dresden it seems appropriate to say something, not least about the ongoing resurrection of the historic city centre of the “Florence of the Elbe”

Wikipedia has what is clearly intended to be a balanced account of the raids of February 13th-15th 1945 and the subsequent smaller raids. It looks at the events and the interpretations offered over the subsequent decades and can be read at Bombing of Dresden

The Duke of Kent, patron of the Dresden Trust, and representing The King, was present in the city for the anniversary and spoke of the work of reconciliation, something to which he has long given his support.

The Daily Telegraph has an article to mark the anniversary and which outlines the delights of the rebuilt city and its surroundings such as the royal palace at Moritzburg Castle

The article can be seen at How Germany’s most beautiful city was miraculously rebuilt

I have a slight reservation about one point it makes: just because the Germans did terrible things to other historic and beautiful cities such as Warsaw does not to my mind, excuse us from doing the same to similar cities such as Dresden and the difference in the scale of destruction makes the bombing of Coventry - terrible as that was - a rather shallow and overworked parallel to invoke.

Ed West has two really excellent articles about the Dresden that was lost and indeed the threats to it had it survived, and about the rebuilding of the city in recent years. They are very well worth reading and can be seen at  The beautiful rebirth of Dresden (1)

and at The beautiful rebirth of Dresden (2)

Quite a few years ago now I visited a small exhibition in the historic University Church of St Mary the Virgin in Oxford about the rebuilding of the Frauenkirche and the British gift of the new orb and cross to crown the dome as a sign of reconciliation. Viewing the photographs of the church before and since 1945 I found myself virtually in tears, tears that people could destroy such beauty, and tears that it was being re-born.

The death of King Richard II in 1400

February 14th is often given as the date of the death of the deposed King Richard II iin Pontefract Castle in 1400.  If that is correct then today is the 625th anniversary of that event. However if his body was publically displayed in St Paul’s in London on February 17th that would surely suggest a slightly earlier date for his death to have occurred to allow for the transportation of his body from Pontefract.

King Richard II

From the Westminster Abbey portrait

Image: Wikipedia 

As to what happened in the castle at Pontefract there is little hard evidence. 

The somewhat cryptic references in the Privy Council records to the former monarch in the wake of the failure of the Epiphany Plot to restore him to the throne yield little beyond that there was concern for the security of the prisoner at Pontefract and clearly rumours or reports were circulating. 

Starvation was alleged at the time as the cause of his death. The new government claimed he fell into depression and refused to eat until it was too late. This is not impossible, and might parallel the later instance of the insanity which seemingly gripped the Empress Charlotte of Mexico when in Rome in 1867.

The opponents of King Henry IV, such as Archbishop Scroogein 1405, charged the King with wilfully starving his predecessor to death.. They may, in addition, have had the allegedly similar fate of the Scottish heir, David Duke of Rothesay, in 1402 in mind.

If faced by an emergency one wonders why his keepers would wait a week to a fortnight, or maybe longer assuming that the patron of The Forme of Cury was well nourished, in an age when everyone carried a dagger and a probably a sword, unless they scrupled to spill the blood royal. Smothering as with the Duke of Gloucester in 1397, and quite possibly or probably the Princes in the Tower in 1483 would be quicker and not leave visible wounds.

The tradition of a violent bloody assault on the prisoner is the tradition of the-contemporary French chroniclers. With his marriage to the child Queen Isabel, daughter of King Charles VI there was interest in his fate and hostility to the new King from leading French figures, such as the Duje of Orleans, as well as the m longstanding view of English as regicicdal now reinforced all the more.

Shakespeare used this tradition in his play and by 1634 visitors to Pontefract were shown cuts on a pillar around which his “barbarous murderes” forced their victim to flee as they struck him down. This is the earliest specific reference to such a feature. It may have been in the Round Tower, the keep, clearly visible on the left in the picture below.

A couple of small rooms, one on the ruined entrance level of the Round Tower and the other the base of the adjacent Gascoigne Tower, being still recognisable as rooms have been pointed out on occasion since the early nineteenth century as ‘King Richard’s Cell’ but only I suspect because they were recognisable as rooms of a cell like nature. It is perhaps more likely he was kept in a larger part of the Round Tower, built as recently as 1374-78, and innermost part of the castle, or in part of the main residential apartments on the north east side of the main enclosure.

In 1530 the newly arrested Cardinal Wolsey asked, upon seeing the castle in the distance if he was being taken there to die “like a beast”, which might also refer to the fates of Rivers, Grey and Vaughn in 1483. Shakespeare gives Rivers lines referring to the castle as the scene of the 1409 regicide. Wolsey need not have worried, being lodged overnight at the neighbouring Cluniac priory.

A further weakness in Shakespeare’s version is the absence from the historical record of Sir 

Piers of Exton. The theory to explain him is that  he may be a misreading of Sir Peter Bukton, who is recorded. 

However the dramatic image of a death dealing blow to the royal skull was disproved when the grave at Westminster was opened in 1871. Although possessed of a thin nature the cranium was undamaged.

At the time the Constable of the castle was Sir Thomas Swynford, the new King’s step-brother, and the Steward of the Honour of Pontefract was Robert Waterton, who had been instrumental in meeting Bolingbroke at Spurn.the previous June. I wrote about him in a post last month at Robert Waterton. 

These were two men with everything to win or lose on the detention or final removal of Richard of Bordeaux.

When there were rumours that he had escaped and lived in Scotland as Thomas Ward until he died in 1419 and was buried in the Dominican house in Stirling one is reminded of the Danish False Okuf of 1402, the careers of Lambert Simnel and Perkin Warbeck, of the various false Kings Sebastian in Portugal after 1578, the false Ivan VI in eighteenth century Russia and of Anna Anderson in the twentieth century. When asked about such rumours in 1404 Waterton categorically assured Parliament that Richard was definitely dead - and left it at that. Interestingly he was to include King Richard II his intentions for those to be prayed for at his chantry at Methleyin his will of 1425. He must surely have known more than most ast o what happened on his watch in 1400.

Pontefract Castle in the 1630s

Image: Wakefield City Museum s/ Blogging 4 History

Ii have not yet read Helen Castor’s widely acclaimed joint biography of King Richard and King Henry The Eagle and the Hart. I have seen  her give excellent online seminars and interviews about her work on the two monarchs.

Last year I read Marie Louise Bruce’s  Usurper King which, despite its slightly sensational title and somewhat uninspired cover, attempts the same type of biography and was, I thought, well worth reading. 

Whatever his strengths and failings, his virtues and vices, and he was a complex man in so many ways, gifted yet flawed, one can at least pray for the repose of the soul of King Richard II. 

Magna Carta 1225

 

Yesterday was the eighth centenary of the reissue of Magna Carta and its accompanying text the Charter of the Forest in 1225 by King Henry III. It was these texts which became definitive, and they were the first enrolled as statutes of the realm in 1297. These were the texts which were customarily reissued by later medieval monarchs. Those few parts of the Great Charter which are still part of the law of the land, notably clause 29 ( clause 39 in the 1215 version ) derive their legal force from this1225 revised reissue.

 

The National Archives have issued a translation of the 1225 text on their website. This can be seen at Magna Carta, 1225

In Oxford the Bodleian Library is holding an exhibition until April of their copies of the various versions. This is in the Weston Library on Broad Street. This exhibition is described at Magna Carta 1225

Durham Cathedral Library has original copies of several of the versions of the texts of Magna Carta, including the unique copy of the 1216 reissue, and they will be on display in an exhibition this forthcoming summer and autumn. They are described and illustrated at Magna Carta and the Charter of the Forest - Durham Cathedral

In recent years there has been considerable debate as to whether the Magna Carta of 1215 should be viewed as a great constitutional document or as a peace settlement that rapidly 

failed. To that I am always inclined to give the answer that it was both, not polarised alternatives. The same argument can be made about the 1216, 1217, and 1225 reissues and redactions as the government of the young King Henry III sought to establish his rule and a new or restored relationship with the baronage.

Reissuing the charters was a pledge of a new way of conducting the business of government, and turned what had been an unwilling concession into a constitutional resource in the royal hand.

At the same time an indication that things could easily go wrong can be seen in the young King’s response to difficulties in Chester as early as June 1225 and as described by the National Archives in Magna Carta exploited, 1225

As King Henry III was to discover as monarch reissuing Magna Carta did not necessarily lead to a tranquil reign.