Gold Leopard found in Norfolk

This is not about the equivalent of the “Beast of Dartmore” or “Beast of Exmoor”, and not a big cat lurking in Thetford Forest or on the banks of the Broads. Such reports are two a penny. This is something probably rarer - a fourteenth century gold coin, of which fewer examples survive than of the gold penny of King Henry III about which I posted recently. 

The leopard was in fact the next attempt by an English monarch to establish a gold currency. In 1344 King Edward IiI  minted the leopard worth 3 shillings, the double leopard worth 6 shillings and the helm worth 1/6. Like his great grandfather’s 1257 gold penny it was not a success, being outside the normal sequence of accounting values, and not at a suitable relation to the existing silver currency. A few years later the King tried again and established one of the quintessential coins of English numismatics, the gold noble with its image of the King in the ship. We lost however the splendidly jaunty leopard with his heraldic cape from the imagery of the coinage with the withdrawal of the leopard from circulation. The design, as with the noble, is a great tribute to the artistic skill of the royal moneyers of the earlier fourteenth century.

The one found in Norfolk last year was with an early noble which suggests the leopard remained in circulation longer than had been thought - as a piece of specie it would of course retain its value.

The discovery of the coin was reported in June last year by the BBC News at Detectorist finds rare gold coin from plague era, and there is more about it and its sale from the Smithsonian Magazine at Amateur Treasure Hunter Unearths Rare 14th-Century Gold Coin

Four Spaniards and a Saint

Four hundred years ago, on March 12th 1622, the Feast of St Gregory, Pope Gregory XV canonised five saints. Roman wags at the time described this group as “Four Spaniards and a Saint”. This comment presumably reflects an element of Roman dissatisfaction with the contemporary Spanish domination of the Italian peninsula in the Kingdoms of Naples and Sicily and the Duchy of Milan, which were territories of the Spanish crown.

The Saint was, of course, the Romans very own St Philip Neri, and the four Spaniards the medieval St Isidore the Farmer, the patron Saint of Madrid, and three giants of the Catholic Reformation of the sixteenth century - St Ignatius of Loyola, St Francis Xavier and St Teresa of Avila. Rarely can a canonisation ceremony have included a group of saints  who were to be of such influence in the future life and direction of the Church.

To celebrate this quartercentenary the Oxford Oratory celebrated a Solemn Mass and Te Deum this mirning, with Jesuits and Carmelites in attendance as well as Dominicans and Franciscans. Due to my current severe bout of arthritis I was unable to physically attend but was, thanks to the wonder of the internet, to be virtually present.

Fr Dominic Jacob CO preached an excellent sermon which drew upon the lives of the five saints to show how individuals, now as in the past, can seek sanctity in their own lives by following the same principles as that group of five in their daily lives. We may not be called or able to do what they did but we can aim to be the saints God created us, individually, to be.

The YouTube link to this morning’s celebration is at Solemn Mass of the Five Saints — 400th Anniversary of Canonisation

For those who want to know more about the rather endearing figure of St Isidore - who is not as well known in the Anglophone world as the others - the Wikipedia life of him is at Isidore the Laborer

St Isidore Pray for us

St Ignatius of Loyola Pray for us

St Francis Xavier Pray for us

St Teresa of Avila Pray for us

St Philip Neri Pray for us

Ember Days

The Lenten Ember Days have arrived for those who follow the traditional Calendar whilst their absence from that of the Novus Ordo is the subject of a post on Rorate Caeli. This looks at how they appear to have disappeared through oversight rather than deliberate omission and can be read at Ember Days in the Post-Vatican II Liturgical Reforms: An Accidental Elimination? 

I have two posts, containing appropriate links, from last year on this theme at September Ember Days and at More on Ember Days

Rural England in 1857

There is a striking series of photographs of English and Welsh rural life in 1857 which can be found on the blog Rare Historical Photographs at Idyllic vintage photographs capture the rustic rural life in Victorian England, 1857

They are the work of William Morris Grundy, who had taken up photography in 1855 aged 49. Some were used to profuce that popular Victorian pass time of viewing them as stereoscopic images and others were reproduced in a book in 1861.

Grundy’s photographs are similar in date and subject to those from the 1840s and 1850s of life in Sussex about which I wrote in October 2020 in my post Victorian rural life in photographs

As with that series one is looking at the rural world of Thomas Hardy, and at a time, according to the 1851 Census when agriculture was still the largest single employer in the country. These are not just images of that world but, obviously, of something much older. Both sets are, consciously or otherwise, basking in a rural idyll that was to be increasingly under the pressures of economic change and urbanisation alongside the expansion of industry. Within a generation the agricultural depression was to arrive which lasted until the 1920s, if not until after the Decond World War. That was to affect the lives of everyone who lived in the countryside, from landowners to the lowliest farmhand. As with so many popular Victorian paintings of similar themes there is a delight in the landscape and in rural life and, alongside, a sense of its vulnerability in the changing circumstances of the time. This can also be seen, as I suggested above, in the novels of Thomas Hardy and of late Victorian and early twentieth century writers who drew upon their observations of the world in which they had lived and which they sensed was slipping away.

The Ukraine - ecclesiology and schism

The conflict in Ukraine is not just military and political it is, as anyone with an awareness of the history of that country and the wider region knows, also a religious one. That may be missed by secular commentators and reporters in the mainstream media but it is of great significance to the people of the Ukraine and to our understanding as observers, the more so the more sympathetic we are.

The Pillar has a series of useful articles, for which I will reproduce the links in their text:

This week, Anatolii Babyinkyi, [ their Ukraine correspondent ] writes about how we got to this point, and examines Vladimir Putin’s much discussed but little understood concept of Russkiy-mir — the Russian world — and how Vatican diplomacy has played into Moscow’s religious and political worldview.

This is essential context for what is happening. Read the whole thing here.

Religion is a big part of understanding the history and culture of Ukraine, and its relationship with Russia. While there is the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, Ukraine is majority Orthodox and is home to two Orthodox Churches. 

The Ukrainian Orthodox Church is under the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of the Patriarchy of Moscow, which claims spiritual authority over the neighboring country. The Orthodox Church of Ukraine is an independent Church, led by its own patriarch. In 2019, the Patriarch of Constantinople, together with many of the oldest and largest Orthodox Churches, recognized the independent OCU, causing Moscow to break communion with nearly half of the world’s Orthodox.

Since the invasion began last week, Ukrainian Christians of all Churches — Catholic, OCU and UOC — have been calling on the Patriarch Kirill of Moscow to denounce the war and call for peace. Instead, Kirill said that Ukrainians and Russians are one people, and called to Christian unity — unity under his authority. 

This week, several Ukrainian bishops of the UOC — the one under Moscow’s authority — announced they were no longer going to be acknowledging Kirill in their liturgies, which prompted the Moscow patriarch to declare them in schism. 

The Orthodox landscape in Ukraine is undergoing real-time change, and it will likely continue to shift as Russian forces continue their attacks. The implications of these religious shifts for the political situation are real — both in Ukraine and in Russia. Stay up to speed here.

In addition The Catholic World Report has insightful articles at How the Ukraine conflict is reshaping relations between Churches and two by George Weigel at The religious roots of Ukrainian resistance and at Impending Russian attack on the Cathedral of Holy Wisdom in Kyiv?. This site also has an interesting piece by Adam DeVille at Opinion: Addressing Russian delusions about past, present, and future

More on Fasting, and on Ashes

I was recently introduced to The Pillar which is an excellent source of Catholic news and ideas. This week’s digest from them is relevant to the beginning of Lent with posts about fasting and abstinence and also about the really rather obscure origins of the imposition of ashes on Ash Wednesday. I will let The Pillar introduce its two articles with their links:

Of course, we Catholics also tend to be good at getting a little obsessive about the details and the rules. So, on Ash Wednesday, we published a primer on fasting and abstinence, to help you keep clear on what’s expected, what’s suggested, and what the rules are.

As is customary at the beginning of Lent, some people have been asking about the mystery of ash smudging vs. ash sprinkling: If you want to know what that’s all about, we looked into it for Lent last year.

Cardinal Slipyj and the Ukraine

Faced with the horrors being inflicted on the people of the Ukraine one feels deep sympathy and a somewhat impotent solidarity with them under such wanton aggression. This is undoubtedly a situation that requires our prayer and spiritual support. 

That underlies an article on Rorate Caeli about the heroic life and ministry of Cardinal Slipyj which can be read at In honor of Ukraine and of Cardinal Josyf Slipyj, at the 130th anniversary of his birth (1892-2022) — by Roberto de Mattei 

To help understand something of the background to the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church and the cultural background to the life of the Cardinal and to the ecclesial history of what is now the western Ukraine the illustrated Wikipedia article about its main city which can be read at Lviv - is otherwise Lwow, Lemberg or Lvov -  worth perusing as it has many useful links.

Pray for the Ukraine, its people and independence.

Fasting and Abstinence in Lent

Today is Shrove Tuesday and with the imminent approach of Lent one thinks about the fasting discipline one will try to adhere to over the coming days and weeks.

Little is mandated these days in the wake of Papal pronouncements in the 1960s and continuing cultural social and changes. I think that we can also fall into confusion about the differences between the practice of fasting and abstinence and of creating our own rule or ‘tradition’ - of what we choose to ‘give up’. There is also the impact of  the various dispensations allowed on Solemnities and such things as not revealing what you have chosen to abstain from when accepting hospitality - and where the rule of charity is invoked. These are very tempting means of relieving the discipline.

Although I am now of an age that makes me exempt from such stipulations as there are I do try to maintain the discipline in respect of eating in Lent that I have aimed to observe for the last forty or so years. I will not set it out but it is I think, by contemporary standards, relatively strict. That said it is not necessarily in accord with historic practice and does reflect the exigencies of my own life.

By contrast I have Orthodox friends who observe the traditional fasting rules laid down and maintained by that part of the Church, ans speak well of it both as a spiritual discipline and as an expression of religious identity.

In respect of cultural norms, as an Oratorian priest was saying to me some years ago, we eat differently from our predecessors at the beginning of the twentieth century or even in the mid-century. Three cooked meals a day is a rarity I imagine, for convenience or simply because we do not need that calorific intake for physical labour. Many of us do have only one main meal and light collations in an average day - so reducing that becomes more difficult. Substitution of foodstuffs is a way of course. 

At the same time food is more plentiful than in those past times, more varied, more highly promoted by advertising, more tempting …. Fasting and abstinence, as opposed to the fads and fashions of dieting, is distinctly counter-cultural.

There is a classic account based on the historical evidence as it stood at the beginning of the twentieth century by Fr Herbert Thurston in the Catholic Encyclopaedia which can be read online at Lent

The history of Lent and its fasting rules is at out at The history of Lent and at A Short History of Lent and the Lenten Fast

A 1986 article from the New York Times has more about the development of Lenten observance at EVOLUTION OF THE LENTEN FAST and there is also an interesting article, citing textual sources, from The Conversation from 2016 at The surprising truth about fasting for Lent

Finally from SSPX there is Think Lent is Tough? Take a Look at Medieval Lenten Practices which has at its end a link to a useful and clear listing of the requirements for fasting and abstinence today in the Catholic Church and also the regulations as they were at the time of the promulgation of the 1962 Missal.

A Holy, happy, spiritually renewing and abstemious Lenten Fast to all my readers.