For West of the Clee, Ripples and Corvedale News in May ‘24.

Relatives, Creditors and The Holy Inquisition.

Jean Baptiste van Helmont was a doctor and alchemist in 17th century Holland. He was most probably asleep when there was a thunderous knock on his door.  He may have thought only relatives, creditors and the Holy Inquisition (as Oscar Wilde didn't quite say), knock like that!  Sorry J.B. it is The Inquisition!                                                                                   You really have to know that at this time Holland was under the grip of Spanish overlords and The Inquisition no doubt came on political coattails. It's not that our friend J.B. had been that naughty a boy but he was very interested in the processes of the natural world and wanted to know ‘what was going on under the bonnet‘.  The chaps from The Inquisition were none too impressed.  It was blasphemy they said to inquire into such things.  God was responsible for everything.  Jean Baptist showed “impudent arrogance“.

When it came down to it, J. B. didn't do that badly, his sentence was house arrest, It could have been a lot worse and The Inquisition may well have lived to regret the decision.

Now, a lively and inquiring mind like von Helmont’s was never going to be content with sitting at home doing the crossword, or the 17th century Dutch equivalent, he got to work straight away and did something so simple and yet so profound.

Our man had several years in front of him, time for a long term experiment. He was already fascinated to know how a large tree could develop from a small seed, possessing no mouth or teeth or gut or legs to take it to grub; so where was the seed getting its nourishment from? The current idea in his time was that the seed somehow ate the soil, but how could this be?

His experiment followed this recipe; Take 1 Willow sapling, 200 lbs of dried soil and a large pot.  Next Plant the Willow sapling in the dry soil and water, yes and keep watering for a few years!                                                                                                                                                           In fact, it was five years at the end of which the tree had gained 164 lbs weight and the soil had lost just 2 pounds!

Glory Be! Jean Baptiste had discovered the carbon cycle!  Of course, clever science in the intervening years has worked out all the stages that Jean Baptiste would not have realised. We now know that green plants contain a chemical called chlorophyll. This in combination with water from the ground, sunlight and carbon dioxide from the air makes carbohydrates (organic therefore their basic structure formed by carbon atoms), in form of sugars. Even cleverer people in recent years have worked out a glorious symbiosis between the plants and the soil. In a transition zone around the roots of the plant, the so-called rhizosphere.  The biology of living soil takes up the sugars of the plant and thrives. In exchange, health giving chemicals derived from the activity of the soil micro organisms, their life and death cycles, are taken up by the plant and these are vital in its growth . What is more, if the soil is healthy (which unfortunately it isn't always these days), these natural chemicals which are now in the plant, (phyto-chemicals), can be of enormous benefit to animals such as ourselves, we eat them and breath out carbon dioxide. It’s a cycle.

I think we can be justifiably dismayed when we walk around our local garden centre and see shelves products claiming they will feed plants. No, in a healthy world it just shouldn't be like that! The other side of the argument is that when we put lots of organic matter into our soil we are feeding the biology and that is how it should work!                                                          If you want a bit of convincing that we are closely linked to this process…. below is the basic chemical structure of chlorophyll, which makes plants green and haemoglobin which makes blood red, they have some differences but generally show remarkable similarity.  

Presenting haemoglobin to the left and chlorophyll to the right.

(Sorry due to my technical incompetence I have not been able to reproduce these chemical structures here - please look them up for yourself the central part of each molecule looks rematkably similar)

Of course, we now have to take up the story of what happens when we take up all those life-giving chemicals into our bodies – next time I hope!

Peter.

villageadamandeve.uk

Published in Local Magazines in June ‘24 - I am sorry that I can’t publish the two pictures that went along with the article, one was a medieval illumination that went with the quotation from Job - below. The other a picture of the Wells Medieval Cathedral Clock.

Added 30.6.24

Bath the baby, certainly, but don't forget the ancestors!

Linda was wondering when Descartes was going to appear within her editorial gaze, so I thought I better carry on a bit!

This month’s ranting  was sparked by a visit to the Celtic northwest of Britain, the remarkable island of Iona. Celtic and northern European culture which so dominated the culture here and in other parts of West Britain was animalistic, believing animals and plants had spirits, quite distinct from their bodies… let's call them “souls“.  “Ask the beast and it will teach thee, and the birds of heaven and they will tell thee.”  Job12:7

The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle believed that our bodies lived within our souls, massively different from what we may believe today and certainly what was believed in the Middle Ages. Then, the soul was assumed to reside inside the body, being released on death. Let's call Aristotle's idea the “soul containing body”. Some believe today that  soul moulds body, let's call that “a soul shaping body”.  A crazy idea? Well hang on a bit.

René Descartes and his followers started a new trend in thought. In the Middle Ages people had never questioned that this was God's world and this extended towards nature, earth, sea and sky, and no doubt the whole cosmos.

R.D. begged to differ.  His was the dream of a mechanical world governed by 'laws’ of nature. It turns out even before his time in the 17th century, the mechanical view of the world had been creeping up on us. Yes, God had started the world off, but was now resting on his laurels.           Perhaps the rot set in with the clock. Time had been measured in seasons and days and cycles and that sort of thing. What a shock to the system when it could be measured by some monstrous clockwork thing, like the mediaeval clock in Wells Cathedral.

This mechanical view really hadn’t changed much by the time that most of us were at school. We were told that very matter was composed of atoms like billiard balls; the nucleus like a sun the electrons like planets . Do you remember? This mechanistic assumption works well for technology and for the science that that it has bent to its will, but not people.

We  look around us today, walk through countryside town and city, in an often troubled world we see writ large “we know the world (more or less) we can control it, subjugate it, we just have to get nature to follow our rules.”

I wonder how many of us continue to believe this stuff . The tragedy is that this suffocating narrow clockworkism has penetrated our societies, just like ‘Blackpool’ through a stick of rock.

Going back to the soul and body argument. We start our lives as a single cell, we multiply differentiate, migrate and within a few weeks form a recognisable being. As far as I know nobody, be they biochemist, zoologist , geneticist  or even embryologist can explain this miracle.  Would Aristotle be surprised? I wonder.

Anyone who's held a new-born baby would know that their souls had mingled . This is not provable, this is not disprovable, but we know it. Bizarrely,  it would probably seem eminently reasonable to a new generation of quantum physicists who have such a gift for explaining their astonishment and wonder to us ordinary mortals.  It seems to open such possibilities to understand ourselves – it turns this new pure science into philosophy….. it’s currency colossal energetic and resonant forces, universes and dimensions.

It is really only in the western world and in recent centuries that we have got stuck in clawing narrowness.  Our ancestors worked, danced, sang and storified together, now we do it only by proxy through speakers and head-phones and power tools.  Yet our soul forming bodies are still there….. a direct link to our ancestors.

If you are in touch with children under the age of 10 ask them, they understand and take for granted the universal before (dare to say it?….. I will), it gets educated out of them!

Today we seem to have thrown away the baby – but look how useful the bath-water is; couldn’t do without it!

Peter Cornah (villageadamandeve.uk)

With huge homage to many, especially, to the work of Rupert Sheldrake, whose work I am currently trying to digest!!

Vanity, all is vanity …….I'll never be able to look a pick-axe in the eye again!

 Here was my offering for July ‘24. Again apologies there are no pictures - I still don’t know how to do that yet!

Shortly before writing this piece for our wonderful local magazines I made two  visits to Hartlebury in Worcestershire where you may know there is a ‘castle‘.  In truth it doesn't look much like a castle, the place being mostly transformed from its mediaeval origins by successive bishops of Worcester.  We as a family, made several visits to the archaeological dig on a hill adjacent to the castle. I'm not going to describe here what it was all about, it's a bit too complicated to do it justice, but if you Google “Dig Hartlebury”, and look out the Facebook page you will see interesting explanations and spectacular aerial photography. If you don't know how to do that please give me a ring and I will try and talk you through it.

We've had many civil wars in this country but one of them we call ‘The Civil War’ and with good reason.  We know so much more about it than earlier civil disasters, as by the 17th century printing was a mass industry.  This probably means we grossly underestimate the burden of human misery in earlier conflicts on English soil.                                                                                In the bloody and bitter struggle between Parliament and Crown it's reckoned that some 6% of the population of the country died.  Proportionally, this is comfortably a higher national mortality compared with the First World War, that’s how bad this tearing of the nation was.

The vast majority of ‘stuff ‘written about the English Civil War is on political and military topics - fair enough this is fascinating and hugely formative of our past. I've noticed that there is now also a lot of interest in the social aspects of the war, hitherto probably neglected. For instance, there is now a civil war pensions project. (https://www.civilwarpetitions.ac.uk/discoveries-of-the-civil-war-petitions-project/).

In brief, what our son Tim discovered in the hot summer of ‘22 was a huge defensive structure….. a ‘bastion‘, which would be hard to fit into 2 proverbial football pitches laid side to side . Last year we got a real sense of the colossal ditch that surrounded this structure but his year we got astonishing detail.                                                                             When we arrived a lot of the work had already been done, the 3 meter deep ditch had been excavated in a step-wise progression to its base. 

Remarkably if not uniquely, the ditch was bounded by a walkway and the massive post holes dug to accommodate timbers which supported this were excavated.

What really struck me was the detail on the side wall of the ditch -  you could see the blooming pick marks! All this was dug by men and perhaps women with hand tools, pick-axes and the like! It’s thought this was achieved within a few months, fashioning ditch, wooden superstructure and bastion.          

Consider; 17th C. Worcestershire was a country which had not lost it’s medieval clothing a land of small isolated farms, woodland, heath and common, straggling villages with ‘ends’, what is known as ‘ancient’ countryside, in a land-historical sense.                                                     The hinterland of the castle must have suffered a colossal haemorrhage of people and resources to build this monumental structure.  Fields would have been untilled or unharvested, huge woods obliterated and vast areas stripped of turf (stone was no defence against ordinance but a turf wall stopped a cannon ball in its tracks). Beasts must have been left untended and small family farms near abandoned while the country was bled dry to feed the vast army of workers.                                                                                            The result of all this effort was?....... well nothing much at all it seems.  The history suggests that the castle was surrendered to parliamentary forces by the royal garrison near the end of the war without a shot being fired on either side.  The archaeology thus far seems to back this up.  It seems the bastion likely was never used purposefully.   

Peter Cornah.  01584 823 858 or 07786 232 434.                                                                           p.s. I am starting to put some recommendations for viewing and listening to talks from last month’s Groundswell festival on villageadamandeve.uk – (Talks and Discussions section).  It was tremendous and issues that bounced up are vital to the kind of future humankind is going to have!

For September 24

Civic Art and 3 – a number to conjure. (Again aplogies for lack of picures)

If you are reading this then the exhibition on the theme of ‘time’ in the Shrewsbury Museum and Art Gallery – part of the July and August Art Trail will have already closed. If you didn’t see it you missed something really good.                        

The large striking image here by Jacob Chandler was part of a series depicting  various human forms mainly by the use of triangles.  The triangle has the number 3 at its heart – it has 3 sides and 3 angles.  As I contemplated these shapes certain thoughts came into my mind.                             How very apt to use the triangle. The human body is full of triangles, like the chest with apex at the root of the neck. If you look at the belly more particularly lining of the belly - the  peritoneum that forms a triangle with it apex at the bottom end.  Inside the chest the heart is triangular in shape - though it's popularly always displayed upside down for some reason! The lungs are triangular in multiple planes and so are a lot of other organs like the liver. The neck and the limbs contain lots of triangles formed by different muscles…… and so on.         It turns out that the number 3 has always been important – here is a quote from the Welsh National Opera programme notes for a production of The Magic Flute…………..

“The ancient Greek philosopher, Pythagoras, postulated that the meaning behind numbers was deeply significant. In (his) eyes the number 3 was considered as the perfect number, the number of harmony, wisdom and understanding. It was also the number of time – past, present, future; birth, life, death; beginning, middle, end – it was the number of the divine.”  Later it became central to Christian symbolism but the Old Testament is also packed with significant 3s.  As you would expect it is important in Islam and the God Shiva is depicted holding a trident in Hindu iconography; there will be hundreds of examples from many cultures I feel sure.        Now, I have sometimes mentioned the prevalence of the oval in our historical and modern landscapes and another idea struck me.  I have often wondered how ancient peoples, presumably without instruments or geometrical knowledge managed to ‘describe’ these important shapes on the ground.  Well, maybe the triangle could have helped here.  To take a local example – Nordy Bank – (that many of us know), although it doesn’t work particularly well here, we could maybe see the principle. With an observer and pole at each point on the oval and one at each point of the triangle (7 of course is a highly significant number too!) it would work even on the steeply sloping ground.     Of course, they could have used the rectangle to much the same effect – but the number 3 was very special to the Celtic Iron-Age peoples.  If the springs rising on Clee above Nordy were sacred, likely they were, they would surely have been protected by three goddesses.                             Funny to note also, is that the long axis of the fort is east-west just like your local parish church! Come to think of it I don’t know if that is a general principle – anyone fancy a project?                                                                                           Not for a moment am I suggesting that any of this stuff was in the mind of the artist as he planned his work, he was portraying characters from “As you like it”, which apparently has a Shropshire connection.  It gave me pause to think…..all our ancestors over millennia, barring only the last few generations have been aware of tides of energy snaking through nature the earth and the cosmos, which far from being  dead mechanical things were living interdependent creations.  We think we have controlled and managed all with our technology and blinkered knowledge.  Are we becoming ever more foolish?  Answers on a postcard please to……..

Peter Cornah. villageadamandeve.uk

p.s. It will have passed nobodies notice that our whole locality is bounded to the east by three hills!                  

October ‘24

Tramping with Cuddy – from Welsh to Scottish March.

Children back to school and Sue and I set off to walk St. Cuthbert’s Way 100km from Melrose to Lindisfarne – Holy Island.  Melrose is protected from the east by three hills, it is therefore ‘West of the Eildon’!  They had to be crossed first though whether Cuddy was weighed down by half a ton of bacon eggs and Cloutie dumpling the annals inexplicably have failed to record.  First we walked a wild mosaic of vegetation which save for the absence of the odd wild auroch could have been primaeval.  We traversed valleys and woodlands, hillsides and streams.  By the third day were among The Cheviots, showing off their loveliest browns and greens in the gorgeous September sunshine.  We visited homely villages like Bowden and delightful planned medieval villages such as Town Yetholme.  We passed through prosperous milk and honey post-enclosure landscapes with the final adventure of crossing the mud and sands to Holy island, at the last up to our undercarriages in the retreating tide….. at curlew-choir practice time, whilst the seals moaned their derision.  The whole thing was, well – lovely – no other word.                                       Now what of Cuthbert?  Life a millennium and a half ago seemed startlingly simple if endlessly tough.  He was a stellar holy man with no thought his own comfort – that is the tradition that has come down to us; friend to the poor, miracle worker, politician and prophet.                                                                                                                                      All well and good but what really catches the eye is his amazing career after he died – not everyone manages that!  The whole thing was written up by a chap called Bede and he was pretty venerable himself.                                                                                                                     It should have been a peaceful eternal repose on his chosen island but a few generations after his death Holy Island had it first and dreadful visit form Norwegian Vikings, not for cream tea and few souvenirs.  Nor was this the only time, British and Scandinavian history became intertwined for centuries; it was not always polite.                                                          To cloistered monks the whole world was collapsing around their tonsured heads and they made a momentous decision…. abandon their island home which was no longer tenable – they literally could not hold it despite its proximity to the main power base of the  dominant Northumbrian Kingdom.  You may wonder what you might take with you on such a journey in such urgency.  They certainly took labouriously copied gospel books, a copy is still to be found in the British Library, but even more remarkably fragments of a carved coffin are still to be seen in the museum of Durham Cathedral – come with me…… I will try to explain.         Their most prized possession was Cuthbert’s body carried in that coffin and about to start a remarkable journey.  The coffin was opened and Cuthbert was found incorrupt, the theme to come; this was the body that would not rot!  This became his spiritual power.                                                       After many wanderings around the borders the body came to rest for a hundred years at Chester-le-Street still fresh.  Yet another opening occurred for King Athelstan to place beside the saint the bones of Oswald (of Oswestry fame).                                                                                   It was no doubt inevitable that in time the supreme regional power – The Prince-Bishop of Durham would claim this prize and again the coffin was opened at Durham – you know the result.                                                                                                                                                                Think of the excitement any pilgrim would feel approaching through field and street, then through the vast cathedral heavy with incense and chanting and the object of veneration……… no finger or shred of wood but the whole man, the most famous, still life-embued though centuries dead. Posses that, posses power.    To complete the story two further openings occurred in Victorian times the first an unauthorised shambles, attempting to debunk the myth of the body.  They found what they expected, (we generally do), only bones, though a final inspection which put things to rights and recovered the coffin fragments had many experienced observers present who reported a much shrunken right eye still present and discernible marks of soft tissue around the mouth of the saint’s head.                                                                                                            I am not sure I mind if Cuthbert’s body was miraculously incorrupt or whether it was a case of the embalmers art or even if the whole thing was a mistake or even a put up job, what about you?  The fact is his modern pilgrimage both in his memory and many, many more is on the rise and that is a good thing, no?

Peter (1,436 years 6 months and 17 days after the death of Cuthbert), contact details (for me not Cuthbert)on;    villageadamandeve.uk

Psalm 66; He Turneth the Sea into Dry Land.

Last month I recalled an incident wading through sea water to reach our destination.  As every school-child knows, one molecule of oxygen teams up with  two molecules of hydrogen to make the water molecule and it's interesting stuff. It turns out that if we draw it on a piece of paper it looks a bit like this (I am just hoping not too many chemists read this).  The angle between the bonds is a ‘constant’ – it’s all to do with mysterious electron clouds – uhm clever!  From everyday life we know that water exists in many forms ………liquid, droplet, solid, crystalline, vaporous, tense surface and most interesting of all intracellular, of which more anon.  This ‘classic’ shape can metamorphose when water for instance freezes.

This substance is the commonest in our bodies by a country mile. We have always needed it; yet as we know all too often excess of water brings flooding and destruction and lack of water is even worse.

Throughout a long history on earth, we've had an intimate relationship with the wet stuff, but starting a few thousand years ago we've increasingly tried to master it; draining canalising, piping, sailing over and through.  Eastern Britain especially Scotland is a classic example of terrain which has snubbed its nose at water.

We have done our usual thing;  learned a bit -  think we're on the verge of knowing everything.

A couple of years ago I fell off my bike! Straight away I couldn't move my arm and despite a gash the limb wasn't swollen. A couple or three days later it was very swollen.  All the knackered cells had discharged their water, but it was not something that Seven-Trent would recognise!          

Almost every part of the body is made-up of cells.  In health, they are plump active bundles of energy and constructive chemistry, guarded by a double cell membrane which, crudely, keeps the good stuff in and the bad out, while also managing to expel waste to (exta-cellualar) water outside the cells. Life is totally dependent on the integrity of this system. The cell is full of little helpers ‘mitochondria’ the cells battery packs, endoplasmic reticulum, proteins factories, nucleoli, genetic banks, together with a great swirling dance of proteins and charged ‘ions’ doing whatever they do.                                                                                                 As I understand it, the water is not sloshing around,  intracellular water is akin to a gel which when released takes time to change into something like your bathwater.  That’s why it took my arm days to swell.

Some would say that one of the biggest contemporary dangers we face is not something you will ever hear about on the 10 o’clock news.  It is the narrowing of science that backs up technology and industry.  My old profession of medicine is a prime example.  If a miracle happened and I was asked to talk at a high-profile meeting I would be asked to give a list referenced from a narrow range of ‘approved’ journals to justify the points I was to make.  How Jo. Stalin would have approved!  This sort of thing is packaging dogma and unconscious automatic behaviour.  I tell you this because there are now brilliant people trying to step out of the straight-jacket, and water is a topic of great interest to many of them.  Just to ‘give you a taste’, water vapour has an interesting part to play in earth’s homeostasis, (keeping on an even keel, sort of important these days…. no?), while brave souls have shown and told how water has memory. I am fascinated to know the electro-magnetic energies and other ‘fields’ around us which help form us, sense the world, let us now we are alive, store memory etc. affect the water in our cells  in interesting places such as the brain!!  Could the fixed ‘constant’ of water structure be challenged?

Water has been a massive part of our cultural, religious and spiritual past, from the Vedic traditions of India to old John the Baptist near drowning people in The Jordan to reset their lives!  In a nutshell water is so much more than an item on your list of direct debits.

Peter Cornah

p.s. I am just off to a conference organised by “Ecological Medicine” (I doubt any fat corporate sponsorship here) on the brain.  I will put some points on………………villageadamandeve.uk please let me know if this is of interest.

East to West and West to East.

If you're reading this it is December! If it's December it must be nearly Christmas, literally The Mass of Christ.

You are not supposed to know what you're being given  for Christmas but this year I had a sneak preview! Although I've got far too many books already at my bedside, I am really looking forward to reading William Dalrymple's book about the wisdom of ancient India, particularly as I've already heard him talking about it.

The Tibetan plateau is huge and bare, it warms and cools spectacularly during the year sparking trade winds around the vast Indian subcontinent and its seas. Choose the right time; easily trade west or east.

Perhaps it is coincidence, but our ancestral religion was born, literally, in the midst of the Roman Empire. Christianity became a global force inevitably when once adopted by the Emperor Constantine who founded the vast and long-lasting Eastern Roman Empire based on the city we today called Istanbul but in antiquity Constantinople.                                                   It was inevitable that Rome (the western empire based in Rome) was massively influenced by ancient cultures around the Mediterranean basin, but I'm pretty sure that William is going to make a compelling  case for India likewise.

This map shows density of Roman coin hoards found in the Indian subcontinent in orange (on the original map), Kerala and Sri Lanka standing out. The Romans were clearly extremely interested in India but why, what are we missing?  The Roman writer Pliny who could be dyspeptic at the best of times, belly-ached about the massive trade imbalance – Rome was being stripped of gold by purchase of Indian luxury goods.  Perhaps their Roman world, like ours, was suffering from an accelerating acquisitive spiral.

It seems  likely that ancient India gave us a colossal amount of knowledge and culture in maths (including our modern numerology), geometry and philosophy, but this is Christmas time, so the significance of that story and some speculation are in order.             Where commerce  flourishes so ideas are blown along the trade winds and India was a crucible of thought and for sure, concepts, like fine goods, would have made their way into The Red Sea and after a short land crossing into The Mediterranean.

Here I feel a little nervous, I know next to nothing of comparative theology, but I wonder if there is going to be a Christmas related notion is in the offing.  In Christian thought God is said to be a Trinity, Father…. the ultimate consciousness, Son…. the word and Spirit …… wind or breath. This is maybe perplexing to many…… can’t they make up their minds? is it one or is it three?

However,  such an idea would be, more than likely, no surprise at all in Ancient India where Buddhism and Hinduism, both greatly predate Christianity, also have notions of three aspects of one God. For instance, in Hinduism, the ultimate being is personified by Brahma, consciousness  by Siva and bliss by Vishnu.  These gods have other properties that complicate to western minds, but is this so far from the Christian?  Many have pointed out the similarities between Buddhism and Christianity even to speculating that Christ’s missing years were spent on the subcontinent; though you may think there is a more every-day, understandable explanation for the similarities.  It turns out that so many other world religions show a trinity principle… was three then the perfect number?

The Christian narrative is well-known, God’s Son, from the moment of conception receiving The Spirit, or as some insist at his baptism.                                                                                             Do these far-more ancient resonances diminish the narratives we yearly tell?  I would argue not, au contraire, if anything they make it more interesting and deeper set in humanity.

At any rate the cult of Jesus and Christian God  was, you might think, a ready-made trinity, ready to move up smoothly through the gears of world religion.

I hope, like me, you adore Christmas the music, stories, lore…..especially our island traditions, the anticipation of Advent and all that.  Even the glitz can be exciting once we have a sense of why we are making this age-old yearly remembrance.

Happy ChristMas and as Tiny Tim observed “God bless us everyone”.

Peter Cornah

(contactable via)…. www.villageadamandeve.uk

The January contribution - the new year 2025 (Again apologies that I have not been able to include the pictures that should accompany the article! )

Off to Occitania.

These days we think of France as stretching from the North Sea to the Mediterranean and from Spain to Italy, but not so in ancient times; so welcome to Occitania a vast swathe of land, what we today think of as southern France.  This was not a kingdom but a series of duchies, the western part occupied by the powerful Aquitaine Duchy.  Both the culture and the language (The Langue d’Oc) of Occitania were a fusion of the Latin and the Celtic, Gaulish culture, as opposed to Francia, a fusion of the Frankish and Latin.  This area is substantially larger than the modern concept of Languedoc.

When Ludlow was perhaps only in a planning stage, in Aquitaine there arose a remarkable figure.  By strange chance Eleanor became the ruler (Duchess) of Aquitaine and at the age of thirteen was married to the King of France. Langue d’oc was of course her mother tongue and It said her sons Richard and John both Kings of England, knew that tongue first.  Later in life Eleanor apparently apologised for her poor French – she had learnt it only in England despite having been Queen of France!  Her marriage to the French King was a disaster and, as soon as it had been dissolved, she married one Henry  Plantagenet…. who then only went on to be King of England!  Throughout her long life (to say it was colourful would hardly be sufficient), this double queen was by turns de-facto regent of England, negotiator on a massive stage, conspirator, 16 year prisoner and tireless wheeler and dealer especially in favour of her sons and rather against her husbands.  An instance is when she raised insane amounts of cash to ransom her son Richard – he of the lion heart – freeing him from a German prison.

In our own times Occitania has gained some recognition as a region (Occitanie) of France albeit somewhat smaller than the old language area, perhaps  an effort to forestall any moves towards a nationalist movement.

So why is it worth us knowing about all this?  Even on slight acquaintance it’s pretty clear that the south is a different, the land, climate, sense of place and deep history.

I think there is reason for saying it gave a big push to English History; as when Henry and Eleanor tied the knot (1154) his lands and her dowry, fused, formed a vast empire that flowed from the Scottish Border to the Mediterranean. We were part of the power block with a remarkable queen who did what queens were supposed to do, quickly produced boy heirs (you could say she was too successful in that sense – but that is another story!).  She was also said to be a great beauty, she was forceful, quixotic, uncontainable .  Impossible no doubt, but some woman; a shock-wave hitting the stayed Anglo-Norman Upper Crust and English populous. 

Locally. I like to think  we can see something of a tidal wave of exoticism that must have broken over England in the mid 12th century.  Here is an example of the outrageously florid boisterous style of the ‘Herefordshire School’ a carved font at Eardisley wrought by Occitan masons.

Surely the most famous and riotous  example is Kilpeck Church south of Hereford where the exterior of the church is covered in a profusion of astonishingly energetic carving.

I must confess I do like to imagine another ‘Eleanor effect’; pure speculation!  She came as queen to England 94 years after the conquest of 1066.  The English Language had had, to put it mildly a rough ride.  All the ‘power ones’ were Francophone, aristocracy and higher levels of the church.  Official documents, law and proclamations were French or Latin.  The monoglot English person was, you get the impression, seen as somewhere between an earthworm and an amoeba.  All this was to change in decades and centuries to follow, English was in many ways to swallow its rivals and rise again to a remarkable place.  No doubt the old guard were trying to hold on to a superior, urbane French, but just perhaps, it became fashionable even cool to speak in a different way – maybe it was not going to be too long before that old school French was going to be a bit of a laughing-stock.

Peter Cornah

villageadamandeve.uk

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