Once I was a clever boy learning the arts of Oxford... is a quotation from the verses written by Bishop Richard Fleming (c.1385-1431) for his tomb in Lincoln Cathedral. Fleming, the founder of Lincoln College in Oxford, is the subject of my research for a D. Phil., and, like me, a son of the West Riding. I have remarked in the past that I have a deeply meaningful on-going relationship with a dead fifteenth century bishop... it was Fleming who, in effect, enabled me to come to Oxford and to learn its arts, and for that I am immensely grateful.


Friday 11 July 2014

A link to a past era



Yesterday's Daily Telegraph contained the obituary of Mary, Duchess of Roxburghe, who has died at the age of 99. This caught my attention because it not only recorded an aristocratic lifestyle and connections that belongs in so many ways to a lost world, but because s the daughter of the one and only Marquess of Crewe (d.1945) her ancestors once lived in my home area. Her father, of whom there is an illustrated online life here, inherited from his father, the first Lord Houghton, the estate at Fryston just north-east of Pontefract.  His father, the first Lord Houghton (d.1885), had been MP for Pontefract as a Conservative and then as a Liberal from 1837 to 1863, when he was elevated to the Lords, and was a well known patron of artists and the literary scene - as well as a notable collector of pornography.  There is an illustrated life of him here.

The obituary of ther Duchess camn be read at Mary, Duchess of Roxburghe




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