End of Course

One of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse by John Thornton

There has been a lot of talk recently about the end of time, and this talk has resonated here at York because we have reached the end of the course and the end of the magical world we've been living in.  The time for final papers and final grades has arrived.  By tomorrow afternoon, only one Hamline student will remain on this side of the Atlantic.

Our medieval ancestors were always mindful of the approaching end of time, and one of the greatest depictions of the Apocalypse was rendered in glass by John Thornton of Coventry between 1405 and 1408 in the tennis court sized Great East window of the Minster.  That window is currently undergoing extensive painstaking conservation work and we had to content ourselves with viewing selected panels on display in the Lady Chapel and at the Bedern Studio.  But in a way being able to see only a few of the paintings magnified for us the achievement of the whole window, which is overwhelming when seen all at once.

Reproduced above is one of Thornton's Four Horsemen, a square yard of magnificent color and painting.  The photograph was taken by Peter Newton, my professor at York in the 1970s.  He took the slide from scaffolding that was erected in front of the East Window for cleaning it early in that decade.  The X across the Horsman's face is due to the Victorian protective glazing that was just outside the window at that time.  The newly conserved window will have protective glazing that matches the window's lead lines, allowing the image to reach us as it did those who stood in awe of it when it was new, 600 years ago.

Henry VIII's Mound.

Last London Posting.

An oak that has seen it all

We walked up on Saturday afternoon from the Thames at Richmound, and an excellent coffee shop under one of the bridge arches, to Richmound Park, the most extensive (at 2500 acres) of the "Royal Parks" in and around London.  The highpoint of the park is a prehistoric burial mound, now known as Henry VIII's mound, from which you can just make out the dome of Saint Paul's cathedral, 10 miles away.  Of course the prehistoric builders of the mound would only have seen a bend in the wild Thames, and Henry VIII, thousands of years later, would have looked out upon a much smaller London than we have today, crowned by a medieval Saint Paul's cathedral.  Charles II enclosed the land, irritating the local folk who no doubt had used it as common for grazing "time out of mind."  Charles instead established populations of deer in the park, and it now has a large population of deer grazing among the picnicking families.

We went, in fact, for the trees.  There's one in which Bertrand Russel, whose childhood home was here, used to play hide and go seek.  This was my best attempt at mathematical tourism, and I'm not quite sure if I learned anything particularly useful from it.

Where Bertrand Russel was often found.

And then, there's Two Storm Wood, on the north border of the park, which has a magical grove of medieval oaks, planted no doubt for building stock but never harvested.  It's clear, as you walk among them, that they are wiser and stronger, in their way, than we can ever be.   They were old and wise when Henry VIII rode among them, older still when London burned on the horizon in 1666.  Charles II had just moved into Richmound park to avoid the plague in 1665, and his enclosure of the land may well have saved these oaks from being used to rebuild London the following year.  Is there a destiny that shapes their ends, rough-hew them how we may?

The Best Wall

Tower Bridge from the Monument: The Best Bridge?

We took an architecturally themed walk in London's "Square Mile," from Saint Paul's Cathedral to the Tower on Saturday.  The walk zig-zags for five miles through the once medieval streets of the Old City of London.  Most of the actual medieval city was destroyed by the Great Fire in 1665, but the street plan remained close to its original geometry as the city was rebuilt by architects like Wren in the ensuing decades.  The famous Monument, a huge classical column designed by Wren, overlooks it all, and we climbed the 311 spiraling steps to the top to take in the view.

Along the way, we encountered St Mary's Wolnoth, the church which was a hotbed of anti-slavery movement in the late 18th century and where "Amazing Grace" was putatively first sung.  Our book told us that the north wall of this church is "certainly the best wall in Britain."   One tends to throw around a lot of questionable superlatives in London (the climb to the top of the Monument was "one of the most satisfying architectural experiences in the City"), but this one seemed to verge on absurd.  Nevertheless, thanks one's need to have seen the best of everything, we stood a while and appreciated what was indeed certainly a very interesting piece of architecture.  It's a wall.  Saint  Bernard said that if the wall is unbroken, it has no window.  But there are windows here, though the wall is unbroken, delightful windows that dance across the otherwise blank surface.  Grey, hidden, pigeon-dung encrusted, fabulous.

Saint Mary's Wolnoth: the best wall in Britain

But there are other walls in Britain in stiff competition for the Best.  One of them rings York.

This Majestical Roof

Shakespeare's Globe: May 6, 2011.

Friday night at the Globe Theatre (Shakespeare's Globe), we all watched Hamlet, the Dane, in a spare and energetic production that opened on the Bard's birthday a couple of weeks ago.  It was off-putting, at first, that the same actor playing Claudius played the elder Hamlet's ghost, the actor playing Horatio played also Rodrigo, etc, and all played instruments at one time or another, but this gave the work a sinew we soon appreciated, and the pace kept our minds off our weary legs, standing as we were in the "yard" for nearly three hours.  I was told later that someone had fainted behind me and had to be carted out, but I never noticed.

"this brave ore-hanging, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire"

To stand there for the entirety of Hamlet is to drink it neat.  The language needs no glossary, the tragedy and its balancing dark comedy were plain to us.  And more than this, it all seemed new, as if we were hearing it for the first time.

After Horatio commended Hamlet to his flights of angels and Fortinbras delivered his lines on the stage littered with bodies, we all stood there breathless, unable to applaud.  This was as it should be: Fortinbras then began a beat with stamping feet and this evolved into an athletic dance, joined by the rest of the company,  each springing back into life in the order they had succumbed to blade or poisoned cup.  The door back into our own time, into living reality, was thus thrown open and we stumbled out onto the bank of the Thames with its many bridges alive with trains and busses.

Another Day at the British Museum

Waiting for the All Clear

I think that all the students had in fact already been to London, most of them most recently for the great event of April 29, but we all went down together for three days this weekend anyway.

Our first stop as a group was the British Museum, where we spend a couple of hours formally showing each other things we had taken an interest in.  Objects ranged from the Admonition Scroll to the Lewis Chessmen, from a millions of years old stone knife, to the intricately decorated Holy Thorn reliquary.  Treasures, all.  As Abi was wrapping up her presentation of the glittering Mosaic Mask of Quetzalcoatl, perhaps a gift to Cortez, the fire alarm sounded and we were all ushered through many passageways under the museum and finally out into the front courtyard, while firemen in big yellow suits stormed the building through the monumental main entrance.  Happily, for all that wealth of art, a false alarm.

There were many things we saw this weekend which had "miraculously escaped" the Blitz, the Great Fire, the Iconoclasts, etc.  Humanity is hard on its treasures, and these treasures are also vulnerable to destruction day after day by random chance.  Today, we got the "All Clear."

Four Parish Churches

Today we toured and studied the glass in four of York's nineteen parish churches.  This put is in pretty close touch with glass from York's two great stained glass periods, 1330-40 and 1410-50.  There was a great deal of work being done on the Minster at those times, so there must have been large workshops in the city ready to improve the parish churches.  There were also a lot of people around who had the means to donate the needed funds.

Falling Angels at Spurriergate Centre

Two nicely contrasting churches are Saint Michael's, Spurriergate, now the Spurriergate Centre, comprising a sort of counseling center and informal tea and coffee shop, and All Saints North Street, very much still an active, formal church.  At Saint Michael's, we sat and had a cup of tea and some cake while we admired the windows, including the one at the right here, showing the fall of Lucifer.

In All Saints North Street, we took time in the chancel to observe the fine painted angels sculpted into the C15 hammer-beam roof.  Angels who have managed not to fall in 600 years, through the Reformation, and through fire.  Angels playing instruments, angels bearing souls into heaven, angels swinging censors.

The fire that blackened but did not burn the angels in the roof did in fact destroy the choir screen of the chancel.  It was replaced by a beautifully carved Gothic screen in 1906.  There's a long tradition of keeping the decorations in churches consistent: back in Saint Michael's Spurriergate, new arches were added to the C12 arcade in C14, but carved in C12 style.

Class in the chancel of All Saints North Street

Fell Walking and Running

A spectacular day, certainly one for enjoying the natural beauty of Yorkshire.  So we drove wast about 60 miles to the western Dales, a designated AONB (Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty).  The anagram includes "outstanding" because there aren't a lot of country vistas in Yorkshire that don't offer something to appreciate.

We targeted Ingleborough, a flat-topped fell on the western edge of the Dales and one of the renowned "three peaks."  The three peaks (Ingleborough, Pen-y-ghent and Whernside) make up the vertices of a famous triangular walk, 24 miles long (not including the elevation gain) that fell walkers from all across Britain like to complete in a single day.  And since walkers like to do it, fell runners also make it a destination.  On Saturday, there was an annual race being held on the three peaks, with 1000 contestants. The fastest among them complete the circuit in just over three hours!

Descent from Ingleborough

Though you wouldn't know it from the picture postcard blue sky in the picture, the wind, out of the east, was at gale force, gusting above 60mph.  On the top, as we took in the views of the Lake District peaks to the north and the Irish sea to the west, we could hardly remain standing.  And yet, there were all the runners, struggling up and then leaping from rock to rock downwards after checking in with the officials at the summit cairn.  We shared their path for a couple of miles before peeling off to the south to complete, exhausted, our modest 12 mile single peak circuit.