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Time was, when you shuffled off this mortal coil, you could take your stuff with you.

That was fine by the Egyptians, who built great pyramidic receptacles for the accumulated wealth and splendour of their dead leaders; it was fine by the Vikings with their ship-burning send-offs. It was standard for your average Ancient Brit or Celt. They all had stuff buried with them, to call on once that great and glorious afterlife began.

But those Christians: they held that you can’t pack a bag and kill a wife and servant or two to keep you company.

And so, when Christianity came to Britain, from the late seventh century onwards, the dead simply didn’t pack much. The phenomenon known to archaeologists as grave goods was far rarer.

And this meant that there was one material you saw a lot less of: glass.

There are plentiful, and rather beautiful, examples of Roman glass receptacles but when you get to the seventh century the trail goes cold. Yes, the later Anglo Saxons made less glass, and did not have the ingredients, or the Romans’ ability to import it in bulk; but they were not burying glass stuff for their loved ones to take to the next world, and the only glass archaeologists could find was the glass they filled the windows with.

So that now, in the 21st century, only one complete piece of late Saxon glass is known to remain in all the world.

It is thought it was made to hold a king’s heart.

It was found at Shaftesbury Abbey in front of the high altar, and the circumstances of its finding are rather veiled. They were found in one of two excavations, in 1862 or 1904; and circumstantial evidence led its discoverers to believe that this was the glass jar which held the heart of King Canute himself, who died in Shaftsbury around 1035.

His bones were taken to the capital of the land, at Winchester; and there they remain. At this very moment, they are being reviewed by archaeologists along with those of other Saxon kings and queens.

And so, it was concluded, the heart jar should follow suit. Winchester claimed Canute’s heart-bowl, and it sits high above the hoi polloi, in the cathedral’s museum on a second floor gallery overlooking the hallowed whispering transept.

Where I found it, and spent some considerable time looking, and wondering.

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    The Heart Bowl: or, What Happened to King Canute Time was, when you shuffled off this mortal coil, you could take your stuff with you.

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So I’m scooting through the V&A museum, Kensington, on a schedule. I only have an hour, max, and I am on the equivalent of an insane cultural trolley dash. Must take in my favourite stuff, of course; a bit of Leonardo, Some ancient locks and keys, a tomb or two.

And I’m practicing that “I’m not running” glide I learnt in the corridors of convent school conning nuns, when I come face to face with this man.

And I skid, like a choirboy caught sprinting for evensong, to a halt under that level gaze.

How deeply unsettling that he can gaze through marble, though he died in 1462. His name is Giovanni Chellini, and he was a lecturer  and doctor at the University of Florence. He was Donatello’s doctor.

His bust was made around six years before he died, by the Florence sculptor Antonio Rosselino. The artist used a life mask to cast his face; and such an immediate method of collecting a face brings the man into the hall with me on this Monday afternoon. Every fold, every line life has worn on his face is there for us to see. The way his decisions sculpted his face in life are preserved in death. He has, in some way, achieved immortality. His gaze is by no means stern; it has something of the benign about it; but there’s something else. Something I couldn’t put my finger on. Something familiar.

It was not until this evening. ten or so days after my visit, that I could identify who the fifteenth century cordial professor reminded me of so strongly.

Image via Wikipedia

I don’t know why. But for me, having met the academic in the marble, so to speak, there is something in the gaze which is the same as Grant Wood’s American Gothic. Not unkind, but austere. Not malevolent, but no less unsettling for all that.

Florentine Gothic.

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Time machines? Pah. You can fit one in your handbag.

There are already machines which freeze time. We are just so accustomed to them that occasionally we walk past the windows they create without looking properly.

But a camera as a time machine has  limited use. Because though we can see the precise details of everyday life in a time we could never experience, we can’t ask the subjects questions.

Wycombe sits on the London to Oxford Road in Buckinghamshire, and the Rive Wye has carried its goods away to London since ancient times.

And what did they send to the city?

Chairs.

The town’s Big Thing has always been chairs. Enough woodland to provide the wood and bodgers to cut and shape it; ample labour to make chairs aplenty. The town’s museum was a Chair Museum, which has now been adapted to hold the ancient knick knacks from other disciplines which Wycombe folks have squirrelled away.

Chairs have paid the bills for centuries, down at High Wycombe.

The question is: whose bills did they pay?

A time machine stopped by in a chair factory in High Wycombe, more than a century ago.

Picture from High Wycombe Museum

This is the business of chairs. Those men: every one of them looks solemn, and I am left wondering if it was just awe at being on an early camera that made their faces long, or whether they were just plain miserable. Even the dog, sitting on the chair, looks glum.

Look at the detail, and the ghosts begin to step out from the machine:

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The dog is blurred, because when did a dog ever sit still for more than a second? The young boys have faces old beyond their years. They stand like ghosts, hugging their lives to them. Not one of these men is smiling.

I have an insane desire to step into the freeze-frame and ask them why.

This is what is known as a Tommy Shop. Whilst legislation was passed to make them illegal in 1811, some were still operating in 1890. Men were paid , half in money, and half in tokens which could be used in the employer’s over priced truck shop. The tokens were of limited value: the stuff in the shop was often poor quality. You could sell your token back – at a fat loss. Thus, an eight shilling token might only fetch five shillings.

Employers could use it as a way of paying substantially less. Round Wycombe way, they used to say the Tommy shop owners could sell their chairs at cost price and live off the profits generated by the truck shop.

So in this snapshot of time they work hard for very little. There’s not much to smile about.

Let’s never go back there.

Faces in monochrome Time machines? Pah. You can fit one in your handbag. There are already machines which freeze time.

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Castles on Elephants

The Elephant and Castle.

A familiar sight, as you trundle through Southwark on the A3. Like so many pub names in London, this is an ancient one, and beloved of us all because it’s just so damn weird.

As is its effigy, perched up there above the traffic fumes.  Brightly coloured, there he is, thousands of miles from his native habitat and sporting an accessory from another age.

A castle.

There are…

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Image via Wikipedia

The spring is coming, and the birch trees which surround our house are preparing to wake.

Since I was a child, those white-silver tree trunks have been part of my life, and the dappled shade they provide in Summer like an impressionist Monet backdrop to the years.

Birches live around houses; but I always associate them with wilderness. I have heard that, on the Trans-Siberian Railway, you can be lulled to sleep in a carriage by the flicker-past of those birch forests, and wake the next day, and even return to sleep the following evening, still staring at the endless forests of birch.

They are common; yet enigmatic. They have infuriated me this winter because though their wood burns fiercely when dry, it becomes so easily waterlogged. It takes weeks to dry out enough to be put on a log burner.

Yet it is their ability to embrace water which has made them the bearer of a set of extraordinary stories: not least, stories from a little boy, which drift across time on birch-bark from the thirteenth century.

This is the tale of Russian birches, whose wood was used for many things. The Russians often traditionally used, not gravel and rock to pave their roads, but wood. And they used birch wood, in wafer-thin sheets, on which to write.

They are by no means the first to do so. The Buddhists wrote on birch and stored it in jars; there are Sanskrit manuscripts on this most versatile of writing materials. But the finding of the manuscripts in the early ’50s at Novgorod, an ancient Russian city and UNESCO World Heritage Site; it was quite frankly astounding.

Not only in the manner of their finding – the old peoples of Novgorod had recycled their old letters as road building material, and the excavation of the roads revealed the wet clay had preserved birch bar manuscripts containing an ancient language which informs modern Russian – but the content of those letters. Stories of stolen slaves, legal records of a case of horses which trampled a farmer’s wheat, and his recompense.

But most arresting of all is the birch-bark homework of a little boy.

His name is Onfin; and at the time he wrote the manuscripts, he was six or seven years old.

Onfin left seventeen beretsy, or birch bark manuscripts. five contain writing in the ancient language of old Slavic; psalms, the alphabet; the rest are pictures.

They might have been drawn by a little boy at a table today. Those of us who have sons will well remember the stick-figure fighting scenes, the knights, the self-portraits, the ordering of a world as seen by someone who is the age of Christopher Robin.

Me: I am smitten by Onfin, and his schoolwork, and his art, which – though it is many centuries old, seems as fresh as if it were drawn yesterday and inscribed: Mummy.

You can find out more about Onfim and his birch-bark writings here.

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The Golden Fool: a Swashbuckling Elizabethan Debacle

The Golden Fool

Lapworth Museum, Birmingham. You know, rocks n’ stuff. Geology. Part of Birmingham University’s great academic empire.

And  a tinder box of stories, all waiting to be told.

Mainly because rocks come from the strangest places, and man has to go there and undertake weird and wonderful experiences to get them.

Take the man who started the whole Lapworth collection off with a piece of amphibolite,…

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Meriwether Lewis: What Happened Next.

Meriwether Jones: What Happened Next.

Picture via Wikipedia

Well, my dear, I had no idea he was so handsome.

Those intense brows knitted together, his mind somewhere else, flitting amongst the scientific conundrums and administrative puzzlement; the Welsh hills deep in his eyes.

I fancy Lewis would have liked the longbow featured in the previous post. Hewn from a tree stem, smoothed by flint; Lewis had no formal education until he…

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Your accessories can say a lot about you.

Myself, I like my hats old. I was following the trail of a helmet I found in the Swiss National Museum at Zurich. I like helmets: I loved this one. It reminded me of the punk headware of my youth, all those studs and mohicans and so forth.

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This helmet was pulled out of the ground at a settlement where all the important tracks of the Alps, and a few others besides, meet. At Giubasco, Switzerland,  without any apparent settlement to fuel it, ancient man made a Necropolis; a city of the dead. 565 graves lie at the meeting of the ways, some of them impossibly ancient. Bronze age urns from the 11th century BC lie alongside Roman-era graves.

The place was finally deserted by the living some time after the 2nd Century AD, when Rome gave up the ghost, and everyone forgot about the dead city at Giubasco. The helmet in question belonged to the man from grave 423, who was buried in the latter days of the necropolis, around 30BC.

It was found again by treasure hunters in 1900, and plundered mercilessly until in 1905, the Swiss National Museum organised a dig and made finds secure for posterity.

These days Giubasco is a small community. It has three hotels, with 56 beds between them. Looking at the unassuming train station it is hard to believe that this was such an important city, once upon a time. Albeit for dead people.

The Swiss do not seem to have our passion for inventing and reinventing history. Here, it’s in the air; breathable.  People love Jane Austen’s Georgian era, the grace of Regency; they love the ribald soap opera of the Tudor dynasty, and the colour and fire of the Saxon and Viking times.

British history has its nerdy corners, though, where slightly obsessive enthusiasts have cornered the market in some very weird ware indeed.

Take flint knapping.

They are fighting it out for supremacy in the flint knapping world: survivalists and archaeologists. This is the process of making stone knives, shaping a substance like flint or obsidian, knocking flakes off until you have a sharp blade with which to cut.

It is how man started to make sense of his world, developing tools like these, and the reconstruction of the ancient skills has found quite an audience. Now you can attend flint-knapping workshops to learn how to make  axe heads or knives, and take them home to amaze your family at the end of the day.

But when the necropolis at began, that was state-of-the-art technology.

Not quite as state-of-the-art as this, however:

Image via pasthorizonspr.com

This is a cave drawing from the Sevilla Rock Art Trail, Clanwilliam, Northern Cape, South Africa. Stone knives were only the beginning for Prehistoric man. They moved on to develop ways of combing materials to meet their ends; one of them being the longbow. And what an accessory. Cave paintings acquire a new dashing appeal; forget the passé spears, take a look at this merchandise.

Truth is stranger than fiction.If you wish to make a prehistoric longbow today, there are people here in Britain who will tell you how.

I wonder if they found any evidence of these at Giubasco?

    Make Your Own Longbow: or, what you will Your accessories can say a lot about you. Myself, I like my hats old. I was following the trail of a helmet I found in the Swiss National Museum at Zurich.

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Ah, how a middle class English mother’s heart swells with pride when her 10-year-old son, out of all the available attractions in London, chooses the Tate Modern.

Felix has always loved this extraordinary conversion from a power station to an art gallery. It is ostentatiously huge, with lines to marvel at, it dwarves the ants who come to see it every day, swarming in though a slit at its foot.

And, cynic that I am, I thought it was because of all the buttons there were to press. There is always, on something mindblowingly high like floor five, a children’s interactive display. Felix stands at the balcony, overlooking ants far down below, and presses buttons and screens to his heart’s delight.

We filed mechanically in with the swell of art-lovers. We went to the information desk. Excuse me, I asked, but which floor had the most buttons to press?

The man looked at me just exactly as if I were an ant, and he said: floors three and four. I don’t know if he knew what he was talking about because we chose floor five anyway.

And when we arrived,  wheezing and panting- Felix the liftphobic insisting he and I took the stairs – there they were. Touchscreens asking what we though of the museum. Heaven.

But there was a queue, even on a Thursday. And when we did get to them the whole system had frozen. We confused the system a bit more by trying to repair it, but to no avail.

So Felix and I thought: there is nothing for it. We will just have to look at Art.

So off we went. Over the years, I have learnt there is only one way to appreciate art when you have a small boy in tow, and that is fast. He scoots from image to image like a gnat; yet every now and then, something will cause him to hover.

And none of us know why. Some exhibit or other will ring a bell, will fit with a pattern which lurks like a crocodile in the unconscious, waiting for synchronicity. This art works like Monty Python; it accesses constructs deep within us that we never even knew were there.

So we dash. And I grab my camera and snap the stuff which rings bells. A 3D Picasso sculpture (did he do those?), Candy-sweet Kandinski good enough to eat; Lynda Benglis’s Meteor which looks like someone has just poured lead in a corner of the old power station; firewood, in the form of  Giuseppe  Penone’s Tree of 12 Metres. 

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Felix liked the lights

Phil the rebel crossed the line

“I like it,” said Felix ruminatively, “but I have no idea why.”

And there’s the rub. We walked through these galleries filled with odd, off-the-wall stuff, and each thing made us think in a new directions. Every place Felix hovered, we considered stuff we had never considered before in our lives, an dug deep to find where it fit in our world.

Horizons and planes broadened before our very eyes. The world widened.

And all from a dash-and-grab art raid.

  Dash n' Grab Art - How to Appreciate Great Works in One Tenth Of A Second. Ah, how a middle class English mother's heart swells with pride when her 10-year-old son, out of all the available attractions in London, chooses the Tate Modern.

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So there’s this huge elephant in the room.

And it’s being throttled by the most magnificent dragon.

It is mediaeval, part of a bestiary, and a familiar image in mediaeval manuscripts. When you do a search for ‘dragon’ with any of these manuscripts, this is what comes up: a large lizard with two legs and a tail to vanquish whole fortresses.

Thing is this: when you look at mediaeval representations of dragons: count the legs:

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Do you make it the same number as I do?

Yet two legged dragons have their own separate name. They are a sub-species of dragon, current folklore says. Two legged dragons are called wyverns.

This distinction between dragons with two legs and four legs: it is absorbing. And I would like someone who really knows to tell me which came first in folklore: the two-legged or the four legged?

I have a very good reason for enquiring. For in my potterings about London I have come across these creatures which guard the City:

Popular myth, not to mention the City of London itself, in its guide to its arms, styles this a dragon. Online I have heard it referred to just as often as a griffin. Magnificent creature, whatever he is. I have heard his kind referred to as ‘supporters’ – those which hold up a central shield in a coat of arms. He has been part of the city’s arms for centuries, he and a mirror image.

Most coats of arms – including that of Wales – shows this form of dragon. four legs, stocky griffin-like stance. It has become a familiar form.

But from what I can dig up, he is not with what a dragon looked like to our mediaeval forebears. And in a modern context, look at Smaug, a long, lizard like creature. Or just check out the definition of a dragon from Mirriam Webster: “an imaginary animal that can breathe out fire and looks like a very large lizard with wings, a long tail, and large claws…”

Like a lizard with wings.

When did the dragon rampant make an appearance? And more importantly, where did he come from?

Back to one of my old obsessions. A creature I have seen all over and believe I can identify. Here he is, a gargoyle at Christ Church College, Oxford:

Here he is on silverware, two sauceboats dating from about 1740-50  from an old English family, the Champneys – you can read more about him here:

Here he is up in the gods, in the bell tower of St John The Baptist Church, Cirencester, famed for its mediaeval art:

And then, there is the story at Winchester Cathedral.

The painting is currently inaccessible – they’re using  the Lady Chapel, where it is situated,  to look at Kings’ bones – but it’s one of a number of panels illustrating miracles performed by the Virgin Mary.

So there was this painter, painting a picture of the Virgin, and Satan was so red-furious that he took the ladder and shook it, in the hope the artist would break his neck.

But Mary held the painter up so he could finish the work.

And here is a picture of Satan rattling that ladder:

Ring any bells?

Is it heretical, I wonder, or possibly treasonous,to make a link between Satan and the dastardly griffin-dragon of the City of London?

Probably

  Mediaeval Manuscript images from the collection at the Bodleian Library

Dragon So there's this huge elephant in the room. And it's being throttled by the most magnificent dragon.

[katepittstuff-blog]

Maybe you’ve met a celebrity.

Phil’s  news team met Kristen Davis on the plane over to Johannesberg the other day. We bumped into Olympia Dukakis in Starbucks in Greenwich Village our first time in New York. Diana Spencer’s brother wandered into our local pub in Cornwall once as we sat with our pints.

You never forget these moments: when a face you know well and have heard so much about is right there in front of you.

And I had such a moment today, though I must confess that the celebrities concerned must have died some two thousand years ago.

Regulars will remember my bemoaning the loss of the Crosby Garrett helmet into a private collection. It slipped out of the hands of the Carlisle-based  Tullie House Museum, outbid despite its brave effort to raise £1.7 million towards the helmet’s purchase.

The helmet is a true jewel of a find. Discovered by a metal detectorist, in Crosby Garrett, Cumbria, it is a ceremonial helmet; one not used for fighting but for contests. Thus, it is lavish beyond words.

I was sad because the helmet has left the place it belonged. It had been snapped up right in front of the world’s top museums, by who knew who for a private collection.

It now emerges that whoever the private owner is, one thing must be owned: they are nothing if not generous with their acquisition.

When the helmet left Carlisle, after the closure of the exhibition of the helmet at Tullie House on January 26th, it travelled down to London, to the British Museum.

Speculatively, I walked into the Museum today. Felix wanted to see the Rosetta Stone, and Phil the Zoroastrian room. I had half an hour to pack in all the British Museum’s greatest hits.

So I took in the Sutton Hoo collection at a rate of knots, and then turned to climb the stairs to the European galleries, my perennial favourites.

And I was completely unprepared for what lay in wait in the glass case at the top of the stairs.

There it was: the Crosby Garrett helmet. Exquisite, and large as life. For all of us to see and learn from. There, in the most public place possible.

And not only that: its partner was right next to it. The Ribchester helmet gazed levelly out alongside its companion, perusing the tourists who ambled by. Do you know who I am? the two seemed to say. Have you any idea how important and significant we are?

I knew. I squeaked, if truth be told. And I spent quality time there with my Ancient Roman pin-up boys, gazing so I could take them in, noting and photographing the fine details.

They are celebrities of the first order, and I was star-struck.

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#gallery-0-4-slideshow .slideshow-slide img { max-height: 410px; /* Emulate max-height in IE 6 */ _height: expression(this.scrollHeight >= 410 ? '410px' : 'auto'); } Ancient Roman Pin-Up Boys Maybe you've met a celebrity. Phil's  news team met Kristen Davis on the plane over to Johannesberg the other day.

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The Towers that Gundulf Built

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The Man In Red

Ever fall in love with a 500 year old man? Just one look is all it takes.

As we have lately been learning, people who are 500 years old can arrest you with a gaze, if they are painted right.

Our last subject caught us with his ingenuous charm; this next, with his splendour. And yet we may never know who either of them are, and…

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The Boy Behind the Window

The most incredible English Tudor portrait: looks modern to me....

  The strangest, strangest thing.

Hampton Court is full of windows. All of them leaded; glass wasn’t cheap when Wolsey attempted to build an exotic Italian palace by the Thames, but expense…

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Juggling cats and hairdressing dogs: the business of baffling humans

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As the flood waters keep rising: do we need an ark in the UK?

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The Man who set Stonehenge Straight

Picture by Martin Bates for the Daily Mail

Ah, the gales they are a-galing, and the rain it hammers…

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