All posts tagged Northumbria

Chris Killip @ the Photographers Gallery

This is one of the most powerful and moving exhibitions I’ve ever been to.

Chris Killip was one of the UK’s most important and influential post-war documentary photographers. He was born in 1946 and died in October 2020. He is best known for his gritty photos of working class life in the north of England in the 1970s and 80s and we really mean ‘gritty’ – portraits of people living in the depths of poverty, immiseration, neglect, illness, marginalisation, scraping a living in grim, depressed, forgotten communities.

Spread over the top two floors at the Photographers’ Gallery, including some 150 black and white photographs as well as a couple of display cases of ephemera (magazines, posters, publicity flyers) works, this exhibition amounts to the most comprehensive survey of Killip’s work ever staged. And dear God, it’s devastating.

Helen and her hula-hoop, Seacoal Camp, Lynemouth, Northumbria, 1984 © Chris Killip, Photography Trust. All images courtesy Martin Parr Foundation

I’m going to replicate the structure of the exhibition and summarise the wall labels because it’s important to get a good understanding of time and place to really appreciate the work.

Off to London 1964

In 1963, aged 17 and living on the Isle of Man, Killip opened a copy of Paris Match looking for news about the Tour de France and instead came across the famous photo by Henri Cartier-Bresson of the little boy carrying two bottles of wine along the Rue Mouffetard in Paris. On the spot he realised he wanted to be a photographer. He bought a cheap camera and worked that summer as a beach photographer saving up the money to move to London in 1964, just at the start of Swinging London.

Here he found work as an assistant to the commercial photographer Adrian Flowers. They were heady times and he was at the heart of London, arranging commercial photoshoots for magazines, fashion, commercials.

New York 1969

In autumn 1969 he went on a visit to New York which changed his life. He went to see the exhibition of Bill Brandt photos at the Museum of Modern Art but it was the museum’s permanent collection which made his head spin. Here he saw photos by Paul Strand, August Sander, Walker Evans and others like them, documentary photographers who tried to depict the life of the common people in communities often remote from flashy urban living.

He returned to England, quit his job in flash London and returned to his homeland, the Isle of Man, a man with a mission, to photograph his truth, to record the traditional peasant lifestyle of the island before it was eroded and swept away by the very commercialism he had formerly served.

Isle of Man 1970 to 1972

Between 1970 and 1972 Killip photographed the island and its inhabitants during the day and worked at his dad’s pub by night. In 1973 he completed his book, Isle of Man.

This was the first of the long-form or long-term projects which form the basis of his achievement. the next few decades would see him applying the same in-depth approach to capturing marginalised communities on film, living in them, getting to know them, sharing their privations, getting under the skin of their physically and spiritually impoverished lives.

As you would expect, many of the photos of the Isle of man are landscapes but they are not that great, they are not as powerful as, say, Don McCullin’s louring, threatening studies of his adopted region of Somerset. But it’s not the landscapes that matter, it’s the people.

Mr ‘Snooky’ Corkhill and his son © Chris Killip Photography Trust. All images courtesy Martin Parr Foundation

My God, what a wonderful, wonderful collection of portraits, warm, humane, detailed, candid but compassionate portraits of the kind of plain-living, rural workers who were dying out as a breed even as he photographed them. You know those lines from Yeats’s poem, Easter 1916:

We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead;
And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
I write it out in verse:

Invoking that mood of respect, it feels like an act almost of worship to write out the names of the people Killip photographed, the children, teenagers, farmers, wives and widows:

There is no God, no plan and no redemption. But images like this, full of understated dignity and wholeness on the part of the sitters, and respect and humanity on the part of the photographer, make you think maybe human love and compassion does redeem something, save something from the human wreck, raise us above our everyday lives into a higher realm blessed by more than human love.

(Note the way in the list above all the people are given titles, Mr, Mrs, Ms. It’s an old-fashioned mark of respect.)

Mrs Hyslop, Ballachrink Farm, the Braid © Chris Killip Photography Trust. All images courtesy Martin Parr Foundation

Immersion

He became an immersive photographer, living for months or more among the communities he sought to depict. His mission and his sympathies were not with the well-educated and well-heeled who run the country and write about it, but with ‘those who have had history done to them‘, the proles and chavs and pikeys and white trash who are dismissed by all commentators, make no impact on official culture, live and die in caravans or shitty council houses on sink estates at the arse end of nowhere.

Huddersfield 1972

In 1972 the Arts Council commissioned Killip to do a photo essay comparing and contrasting Huddersfield in Yorkshire with Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk for the exhibition ‘Two Views: Two Cities’. As far as I could see there was just one photo from Bury in the show, a neat-looking shot of some nice castle ruins. By contrast, as you can imagine, the rundown streets of Huddersfield with its mills, tenement housing, crappy high streets, boarded up shops and sad bus shelters grabbed Killip’s sympathies.

Playground in Huddersfield, 1974 © Chris Killip Photography Trust. All images courtesy Martin Parr Foundation

Newcastle 1975 to 1979

In 1975 Killip was commissioned to undertake a British Gas/Northern Arts fellowship. In his spare time from this commission he roved the streets and suburbs and slums of the city and as far afield as Castleford and Workington. My God, the squalor, the neglect, the decline, the decay, the old Victorian slums being demolished and the new cut-price, cheap council estates falling to pieces before your eyes. A landscape of vandalism and graffiti.

Demolished housing, Wallsend, August 1977. © Chris Killip Photography Trust. All images courtesy Martin Parr Foundation

Killip stayed in Newcastle for years, getting to know the area. For two years, 1977 to 1979, he served as director of a photo gallery, Amber’s Side Gallery. The May 1977 issue of Creative Camera was entirely devoted to Killip’s North East photos (a copy of it is one of the ephemera gathered in the display cases I mentioned earlier).

  • Children and terraced housing
  • Terraced house and coal mine
  • Two men on a bench
  • Looking East on Camp Road, Wallsend, 1975

There is a huge difference between the Manx series and this one. The Manx photos are dominated by large portraits of people who fill the screen, who are at home in their surroundings, their crofts or workshops. They’re big. They fill the photos as they fill their lives, at ease with who they are. They are fully human.

In the North East photos what dominates is the built environment. People are reduced to puppets, physically small against the backdrop of the enormous or decaying buildings. The buildings come in two types, terrible and appalling. The terrible ones are the old brick terraces thrown up in a hurry by the Victorian capitalists who owned the mines and steel works and shipbuilding yards and needed the bare minimum accommodation to keep their workers just about alive – badly built, no insulation, draughty windows, outside toilets and all.

Though Killip didn’t plan it, his time in Newcastle coincided with the wholesale destruction of the old brick terraces and their replacement with something even worse: the concrete high rises with broken lifts reeking of piss, the windswept plazas, dangerous underpasses, and oppressive network of toxic, child-killing urban highways, all the products of 1960s and 70s urban planners and brutalist architects.

May 5, 1981, North Shields, Tyneside © Chris Killip Photography Trust. All images courtesy Martin Parr Foundation

This is why I call the architects room at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition the room of shame. Go on a tour of British cities to see for yourself the destruction of historic centres and their replacement with brutal concrete urban highways full of thundering traffic, concrete underpasses tailor made for muggers and rapists, bleak open spaces where the wind blows dust and grit into your eyes, the concrete facias of a thousand tragic shopping precincts and, looming above them, the badly built tower blocks and decaying office blocks. Concrete cancer.

This isn’t an architecture for people, it’s an architecture for articulated lorries. Thus the human beings in Killip’s harrowing photos of these killing precincts are reduced to shambling wrecks, shadows of humanity, scarecrows in raincoats, harassed mums, bored teenagers hanging round on street corners sniffing glue. This is what Killip captures, the death of hope presided over by a thousand architects and town planners who could quote Le Corbusier and Bauhaus till the cows came home and used them to build the most dehumanised environment known to man.

Killingworth new town, 1975 © Chris Killip Photography Trust. All images courtesy Martin Parr Foundation

As Philip Larkin wrote of young northern mums in their headscarves supervising their unruly children in some suburban playground:

Their beauty has thickened.
Something is pushing them
To the side of their own lives.

(from Afternoons by Philip Larkin, 1959)

It’s epitomised by the photo of the silhouette of an old lady sitting in a half vandalised bush shelter in Middlesbrough. She’s wearing a headscarf and slumped forwards because her life, in this gritty, alienated environment, is bereft.

Woman in a bus shelter, Middlesborough, Teeside © Chris Killip Photography Trust. All images courtesy Martin Parr Foundation

Compare and contrast with the proud, erect, unashamed men and women of the Isle of Man. Pretty much all the humanity has been stolen from the mainlanders.

At some point I realised a lot of these grim Tyneside photos show a disproportionate number of children, children imprisoned in squalid houses, hanging round on derelict streets, trying to play in a crappy playground overshadowed by mines and factories, left outside the crappy, rundown bingo parlour, the cheapest nastiest, knockoff 60s architecture, complete with collapsing concrete canopy. A landscape of blighted lives and stunted childhoods.

Boy outside Prize Bingo Parlour, Newcastle 1976 © Chris Killip Photography Trust. All images courtesy Martin Parr Foundation

  • Two girls in Grangetown
  • Terraced house and coal mine, Castleford, 1976
  • Terraced housing, County Durham, 1976
  • Children and terraced housing, Byker, Newcastle, 1975
  • Butchers shop, Byker, Tyneside, 1975

Skinningrove 1982 to 1984

Skinningrove is a fishing community on the North Yorkshire coast. Killip had noticed its striking landscape on a drive up the east coast back in 1974 but found it difficult to penetrate the community. In fact locals chased him off the couple of times he tried to photograph them. His way in was through friendship with a young local named Leso, who made Killip feel welcome and reassured locals of his good intentions. Between 1982 and 84 Killip documented the crappy, poor, hard scrabbling lives of Leso and his mates – Blackie, Bever, Toothy, Richard, Whippet – as they fixed nets, repaired boats and hung around bored.

Leso and mates waiting for the tide to turn, Skinningrove, 1986 © Chris Killip Photography Trust. All images courtesy Martin Parr Foundation

This is an extraordinary, remarkable, amazing portrait of a dead-end community, poverty, low expectations and young people bored off their faces. No wonder they took to sniffing glue and as the 80s moved on and adopted the punk look pioneered down in London to express some kind of sense of identity and worth, rebellion against grey-clad council houses, the grey sky and the unremitting rhythms of the grey, cold, freezing sea.

This section is given tragic force when we learn that Leso, who got Killip his ‘in’ into the community and of whom there are many photos, fixing nets, waiting round for the tide to turn, hanging with his punk mates, walking across a dirty road carrying a rifle, he died tragically during Killips’s stay.

The fishing boat he and some mates were in was overturned at sea and Leso and David were drowned, tubby Bever made it back to shore. In tribute Killip made Leso’s grieving mother an album of three dozen photos of her lost son.

Leso, Blackie, Bever, ?, David, on a bench, Whippet standing, Skinningrove, 1986 © Chris Killip Photography Trust. All images courtesy Martin Parr Foundation

Seacoal Camp 1981 to1984

Killip discovered Lynemouth, Northumberland, in 1976. It had a strange and eerie vibe because there was a massive coalmine not far from the sea and waste coal was expelled into the sea, only to be brought back to shore on the incoming tides.

And a community of travellers or extremely poor people living in caravans and using horse-drawn wagons in and near the sea had sprung up which made a living scavenging this coal, using it to heat their homes, cook food, and to sell to other locals. An entire lifestyle based on coal scavenging.

Once again Killip had trouble penetrating this closed and fiercely protective community. From 1976 when he first came across it he made repeated attempts to photograph the people but was chased away. Only in 1982 was he finally accepted when, on a final visit to the local pub he was recognised by a man who’d given him shelter from a rainstorm at Appleby Horse fair and vouched for his good intentions.

So Killip set about taking photos, delicately tactfully at first. But in winter 1983 he bought a caravan of his own and got permission to park it alongside the community’s ones. Once really embedded he was able to record all the different types of moments experienced by individuals or between people engaged on this tough work, at the mercy of the elements, permanently dirty with coal muck.

Rocker and Rosie Going Home, Seacoal Beach, Lynemouth, Northumberland, 1984 © Chris Killip Photography Trust. All images courtesy Martin Parr Foundation

In the unpublished preface to the volume of poems he was working on when he was killed in the last days of the Great War, Wilfred Owen wrote:

Above all I am not concerned with Poetry. My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.

Same, with modifications, goes for Killip. The poetry, the deep, deep poetry of these photographs, derives from the immense love and compassion they evince, love of suffering humanity, the candour and accuracy of the shots, finding moments of piercing acuity amid the grinding poverty and mental horizons which are hemmed in on every side by slag heaps, metal works and the four walls of a cramped caravan.

Gordon in the water, Seacoal Beach, Lynemouth, 1983 © Chris Killip Photography Trust. All images courtesy Martin Parr Foundation

Photography and music

Photography is like music. Regarding music you can describe the notes and cadences, the technical manoeuvres and key changes, the invocation of traditions and forms and write at length about the ostensible subject (the Pastoral symphony, the Moonlight sonata etc). But in the end you have to let go of all of that and experience it as music, let the music do its work, what only it can do, triggering emotions, memories, fragments of feelings or thoughts, stirring forgotten moments, making all kinds of neural connections, filling your soul.

Same with these photographs. I’ve described what he was trying to do, bring respect and compassion to people right on the margins of society, the lost, the abandoned, the forgotten. He’s quoted as saying he had no idea he would end up recording the process of de-industralisation, it just happened to be going on as he developed his method and approach as a social photographer. Long essays could be written about class in England, about deindustrialisation and then, of course, about the Thatcher government which supervised the destruction of large swathes of industry and British working class life alongside it.

But at some point you pack all that way and let the photos do their work, which is to lacerate your heart and move you to tears. This is the best our society could offer to God’s children. What shame. What guilt.

Father and son watching a parade, West End of Newcastle, Tyneside, 1980 © Chris Killip Photography Trust. All images courtesy Martin Parr Foundation

The Miners Strike 1984 to 1985

A friend of mine at school in the Home Counties, his older sister was married to a copper. He told us the Miners Strike was great. They were bussed to Yorkshire, put up in army barracks, paid triple time wages and almost every day there was a fight, which he and his mates always won because they had the plastic shields, big truncheons and if things got really out of control, the cavalry. Killip apparently treated the long strike as another project with a view to producing another long-form series.

Durham Miners Gala, 1984 © Chris Killip Photography Trust. All images courtesy Martin Parr Foundation

But images from the Miners Strike project aren’t treated separately as the other projects are. Instead they’re rolled into the In Flagrante section.

In flagrante 1988

In 1985 the publisher Secker and Warburg told Killip they’d be interested in publishing his next book. This would mean access to a larger audience than previously and Killip was inspired. He worked with editor Mark Holborn and designer Peter Dyer to produce the 1988 book In Flagrante. Unlike all his previous projects which were heavily themed around specific communities and locations, In Flagrante deliberately cut his images adrift from their source projects to create a randomised cross-section of his career (although anyone who’d studied the previous projects has a good idea where each of them come from).

For the bitter bleakness and the unerring accuracy of the images, In Flagrante has been described as ‘the most important book of English photography from the 1980s.’ I was particularly taken by the set of photos of miserable English people from the 70s and 80s on various English beaches, at Whitley Bay, and so on. Narrow lives, no expectations, the quiet misery of the English working classes. They’ve come to the seaside for a break, for a ‘holiday’ and none of them know what to do there. Images of a nation at a loss what to do with the land it finds itself in.

Revolt

Respect goes to the tribes of young people who forged ways of rebelling against the poverty and low to zero expectations of their environment. In Flagrante contains a surprising number of photos of young punks who took the form to baroque extremes long after it was abandoned in London. There are lots of shots of the Angelic Upstarts of all bands, playing sweaty punk gigs in Gateshead. In fact the gallery shop has a music paper-size fanzine-style publication entirely full of shots he did of sweaty punk gigs in the mid-80s. ‘We’re the future, your future.’

The Station, Gateshead, 1985 © Chris Killip Photography Trust. All images courtesy Martin Parr Foundation

America 1991

What happened to Killip after that? America. I was disappointed to read that in 1991 he was invited to be a Visiting Lecturer at the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies in Harvard University. In 1994 he was made a tenured professor and was department chair from 1994 to 1998. He only retired from Harvard in 2017. Well, no doubt taking the Yankee dollar was the right move for him, but it meant the abrupt end of the sequence of breath-taking portfolio projects which had begun in 1970.

Summary

Killip’s oeuvre represents not only an invaluable document of social history 1970 to 1985 and, as such, a blistering indictment of an incompetent, uncaring, bewilderingly lost society – but it is also a testament to love and the redeeming possibilities of art.

The compassion and humanity of his work is embodied in its closeness and intimacy with its subjects, not the fake intimacy of eroticism, but being right there with poor suffering humanity; right up close as the dirty kids play in their abandoned playgrounds, the dispirited losers chain-smoke in a wretched bingo hall, an old lady loses the will to live in a vandalised bus shelter, bored young men sniff glue in a remote fishing town, and lost children spend all day every day clambering over filthy mounds of coal to help their mums and dads scrape a flimsy living The poetry is in the pity.

Youth on wall, Jarrow, Tyneside, 1975 © Chris Killip Photography Trust. All images courtesy Martin Parr Foundation

Levelling up

In the 50 years since Killip took these photos generations of politicians have come and gone, promising to narrow the North-South Divide and level up the whole country. All bollocks. Life expectancy for babies born in the North-East, like per household income, remain stubbornly below the national average. Pathetic, isn’t it. What a sorry excuse for a country.

Go and see this marvellous, searing, heart-rending exhibition.

The promotional video

Related links

More Photographers’ Gallery reviews

More photography reviews

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Posted by Simon on February 8, 2023

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Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms: Art, Word, War @ the British Library

According to the lady on the door, this has turned out to be one of the most popular exhibitions ever held at the British Library. I got there when it opened at 10 and within fifteen minutes it was so packed it began to be difficult to see some of the exhibits.

Why? Because it is the largest ever exhibition on the history, literature and culture of Anglo-Saxon England, with many manuscripts and objects brought from overseas, some for the first time in centuries, and many others on loan from museums all around England.

Which makes it an unprecedented opportunity to see treasures and texts, manuscripts and swords, carved crosses and coins, which paint the completest ever picture of the mysterious and evocative centuries between the departure of the Romans in 410 and the conquest of the Normans in 1066 – 650 years which saw the formation of the English language, geography (the founding of towns and cities and roads), politics and religion.

A brief recap of Anglo-Saxon history

According to the Venerable Bede, within a generation of the last Roman soldiers leaving Britain, raiders from north Europe came pillaging. They came from tribes Bede names as the Angles, Saxons and Jutes, based in north Germany and Denmark.

From bases in south England these tribes spread out and established kingdoms the length and breadth of the country. By the sixth century the land had stabilised into seven kingdoms, traditionally known as the Heptarchy, consisting of East Anglia, Essex, Kent, Mercia, Northumbria, Sussex, and Wessex.

Alongside the main entities was a fluctuating set of smaller kingdoms which included, at one time or another, the kingdoms of Bernicia and Deira within Northumbria, Lindsey in present-day Lincolnshire, the Hwicce in the southwest Midlands, the Magonsæte or Magonset, a sub-kingdom of Mercia in what is now Herefordshire, the Wihtwara, a Jutish kingdom on the Isle of Wight, the Middle Angles, a group of tribes based around modern Leicestershire, and the Hæstingas (around the town of Hastings in Sussex.

The main Anglo-Saxon kingdoms (source: Wikipedia)

The main Anglo-Saxon kingdoms (source: Wikipedia)

By 660 Northumbria was the most powerful Anglo-Saxon kingdom, and its contacts with both Ireland and Rome produced a golden age of culture.

Mercia began to displace Northumbria as most powerful kingdom in the early 8th century, a process which reached its climax in the long reign of King Offa, from 757 until his death in July 796. Offa controlled London, built the famous dyke along the border with Wales, and conquered Kent, East Anglia, Essex and Sussex.

In 793 Vikings attacked Lindisfarne monastery way up towards the Scottish border, and for the next two hundred years Danish invaders were a constant threat, eventually controlling the east of the country from the Thames to the border with the Scots. This area became known as the Danelaw, with its capital city at Viking-founded York.

England about 900 AD, showing the border between the Danelaw and Wessex

England about 900 AD, showing the border between the Danelaw and Wessex

Alfred the Great (849 to 899) is remembered because he fought the Danes out of Wessex, recaptured London, and unified all the tribes of England against the foreigner, signing a peace treaty with the Danish leader, Guthrum, in about 880.

But he didn’t manage to expel them. It was only under his grandson, King Æthelstan that, in the 930s, the Danes were completely expelled.

And even this unity was lost when the Danes under Sweyn Forkbeard reinvaded in 1013, leading the throne of England to be seized by his son, Cnut the Great, a Dane who ruled England from 1016 to 1035.

One last Anglo-Saxon king, Edward the Confessor, ruled again, from 1042 to 1066, but it was a dispute over the succession following his death, which led to the invasion of the county by William and the Conqueror and his Normans, and the death of the last Anglo-Saxon king, Harold Godwinson, at Hastings.

The period from 450 to 1066 was, in other words, one of almost constant warfare, in which kingdoms depended for their existence and stability on the military might and strategic canniness of strong rulers. The sophisticated economic systems of the Romans, their agricultural organisation, their towns laid out logically with strong defensive walls – all this was lost within a few generations of the Roman departure in 410.

For most of the next 600 years small communities of peasants eked out a subsistence living, and their surplus was skimmed off by violent kings to fund their high lifestyle and elaborate jewellery and weapons.

The Anglo-Saxon church

But alongside the history of kings and conquest, there is a parallel history, deeply intertwined with it – the history of the Christian Church in England.

There were Christians among the Roman community but their version disappeared when they left. Some missionaries came from Ireland which had a Christian tradition before England. But the main story begins with the mission to Britain of St. Augustine of Canterbury (not to be confused with St Augustine of Hippo, the great 4th century theologian).

Augustine arrived in 597, converted the king of Kent, Æthelberht a, established an episcopal seat at the Kentish capital, Canterbury (which is why we still have archbishops of Canterbury to this day), and established a monastery and seat of learning which could train and educate the monks who would then, themselves, be sent out to convert the various rival warlords to the true faith, throughout the 600s.

We know a lot about the process of conversion because it is described in detail by the monk known as the Venerable Bede, in his masterpiece, A History of the English Church and People, which I have reviewed elsewhere.

Bede was a product of Northumbrian culture, a Benedictine monk who spent his entire life at the monastery of St. Peter and its companion monastery of St. Paul near Jarrow. He wrote some 40 books but his masterpiece, the Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum or The History of the English Church and People.

The point is that, although the Anglo-Saxon kings and their people were all pagans they were also illiterate and so all we know about them is filtered through the writings of the literate Christian monks, who all wrote in Latin.

And the little we have of actual Anglo-Saxon, the language these people spoke and recited their histories and legends in, was also recorded by Christian monks.

We have some pagan jewellery, most notably the content of the fantastic burial hoard found at Sutton Hoo, attributed to King Raedwald who lived in the 7th century.

But even carved crosses, much of the remaining jewellery, and all of the remaining texts, are Christian in content, the crosses’ inscriptions in Latin, the jewellery including the cross motif, and even the handful of Anglo-Saxon texts we have – even the great Anglo-Saxon epic poem Beowulf – contain Christian imagery, or subject matter, and were written down by Christian monks.

Beowulf © British Library Board

Beowulf © British Library Board

Alfred the Great’s renaissance

By the 850s most of the kingdoms were thoroughly Christianised. Alfred the Great (d.899) acquired his reputation not only for his military victories against the Danes, but because he saw the need to raise the cultural level of the people he now ruled in the area known as Wessex. He realised he needed educated literate civil servants to administer his kingdom, and – being a good Christian king – he realised the gospels needed to be spread.

Alfred commissioned monks to begin writing a yearly chronicle of events, thus founding the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles which ended up existing in various versions, kept by monks in monasteries around the kingdom. These are an invaluable source of historical information, and for the grammatical structure of the various regional dialects of Anglo-Saxon. Some of which continued for a generation after the Conquest.

Alfred also commissioned the translation of important texts into Anglo-Saxon. These included a translation and copies of Pope Gregory the Great’s book Pastoral Care. He distributed these along with ‘æstels’ or wooden pointer sticks, which were used for following words when reading a book.

Attached to the end of each pointer was a valuable example of Anglo-Saxon jewellery which featured a portrait of the king and, around the sides, the words ‘Aelfred mec heht gewyrcan’, meaning ‘Alfred ordered me made’. The one and only surviving copy of this is usually in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, but has been brought here for this exhibition. It is wonderful, the quaintness of the likeness of the king contrasting vividly with the sophistication of the dragon (snake?)’s head beneath it, from whose mouth pokes the nozzle which is where the wooden pointing stick came out.

Alfred Jewel © Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford

Alfred Jewel © Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford

Anglo-Saxon treasures on display

This exhibition is so blockbusting because just about every single book, every Bible, psalter, breviary, every manuscript letter, poem, deed and legal document which tells and illustrates these tumultuous 650 years has been brought together and assembled in one place.

The Alfred jewel is just one of the inestimable treasures on display at this massive, comprehensive and dazzling exhibition. Other highlights include:

  • the stunningly ornate gold buckle from Sutton Hoo
  • treasures from the Staffordshire Hoard
  • the River Erne horn, a wooden trumpet from the 8th century discovered in the river in the 1950s on loan from National Museums Ireland
  • displayed alongside the Vespasian Psalter, which includes the oldest translation of part of the Bible into English and depicts two musicians playing similar instruments
  • archaeological objects including:
    • the Binham Hoard, the largest collection of gold from 6th century Britain, on loan from the Norfolk
    • the Lichfield Angel, which has never been displayed outside of Lichfield since it was excavated in 2003
    • key objects from the Staffordshire Hoard, discovered in 2009, the largest hoard of Anglo-Saxon gold ever found
  • the Sutton Hoo gold buckle
  • the Fuller Brooch on loan from the British Museum

Layout

The exhibition is beautifully laid out, in mysterious low lighting (obviously, to protect these priceless manuscripts), the walls hung with long, narrow photographs of unspoilt countryside, vividly conveying a sense of what must have been the largely untamed landscape of the times. It is organised into rooms which take us carefully through the period, with rooms and areas devoted to:

  • Kingdoms and Conversion
  • The Rise of the West Saxons
  • Mercia and its Neighbours
  • Language, Learning and literature
  • Kingdom and Church
  • Music making
  • Conquests and Landscape
  • The Empire of Cnut
  • The Cnut Gospels
  • Domesday Book

There are three or four videos scattered throughout, interviewing scholars who explain key moments or ideas in Anglo-Saxon culture, namely curator, Dr Claire Breay, and well-known TV historian Michael Wood.

The video on the Domesday book is simple and interesting. And there’s a longer one showing the process of preparing vellum parchment and then how the ink and pain for the illuminations were prepared.

Vespasian Psalter © British Library Board

Vespasian Psalter © British Library Board

Mostly manuscripts

But the exhibition, as you would expect from its location, focuses mostly on books, on a huge selection of early medieval manuscripts, alongside, letters and other written matter, including:

  • the beautifully illuminated Lindisfarne Gospels
  • the one and only surviving copy of Beowulf
  • a copy of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History
  • the St Augustine Gospels on loan from Corpus Christi College Cambridge
  • the Book of Durrow on loan from Trinity College Dublin
  • the Echternach Gospels on loan from the Bibliothèque nationale de France
  • the Utrecht, Harley and Eadwine Psalters from Utrecht University Library, the British Library and Trinity College Cambridge respectively
  • the four principal manuscripts of Old English poetry on display together for the first time, with the British Library’s unique manuscript of Beowulf displayed alongside:
    • the Vercelli Book returning to England for the first time from the Biblioteca Capitolare in Vercelli
    • the Exeter Book on loan from Exeter Cathedral Library
    • the Junius Manuscript on loan from the Bodleian Library
  • Domesday Book, the most famous book in English history and the earliest surviving public record, on loan from The National Archives
  • the earliest surviving English charter, issued in 679 and granting land to the Abbot of Reculver;
  • the oldest original letter written in England, from the Bishop of London to the Archbishop of Canterbury, dating from early 8th century
  • the earliest surviving letter in English, the Fonthill letter, from the early 10th century on loan from Canterbury Cathedral
  • the earliest surviving will of an English woman, Wynflæd
  • St Cuthbert Gospel, the oldest intact European book with its original binding, made at the monastery of Wearmouth-Jarrow in the north-east of England in the early 8th century
  • and the enormous Codex Amiatinus, the earliest surviving complete Bible in Latin made at the monastery of Wearmouth-Jarrow in the north-east of England in the early 8th century and taken to Italy in 716 as a gift for the Pope. It will be returning to England for the first time in more than 1,300 years, on loan from the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana in Florence
Codex Amiatinus on loan from Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana to Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms at the British Library © Sam Lane Photography

Codex Amiatinus on loan from Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana to Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms at the British Library © Sam Lane Photography

Cnut and Emma

I’d expected it to end sometime after the loosely titled Kingdom and Church section, so I was surprised that the exhibition devotes not one but several sections to reign of King Cnut, the Dane who united England with his home territory to form a short-lived North Sea Empire. He was king of England from 1016 to 1035 and the exhibition shows how manuscripts and books, gospels and psalters of great quality continued to be produced.

There is a section devoted just to Cnut’s strong-minded queen Emma, bringing together references in documents and even illustrations which appear to be of the queen.

The Norman Conquest

And then a final section devoted to a massive copy of the Domesday Book, commissioned by William the Conqueror to list in fine detail every scrap of land in his new domain. The exhibition includes not only a hefty copy of the book, but a rare example of one of the preliminary rolls on which data was initially gathered by William’s army of census takers,before being collated and copied into the Big Book.

Domesday © The National Archives

Domesday Book © The National Archives

Thoughts

Several points emerged for me:

  • The distinction between the Northumbrian Golden Age of the 660s onwards, which is all about Iona, Lindisfarne, St Cuthbert, Benedict Biscop and Bede – and the rise of Mercia under Offa about a century later – there are illuminated books from both periods which, to the really scholarly eye, show the difference in date, origin and cultural links.
  • The idea that the rise of Wessex (which led, eventually, to the unification of England) was a product of the Viking invasions: pushed back into the South-West and West Midlands, the remaining Saxon kingdoms were forced to co-operate and coalesce, and Alfred is the symptom of this newfound focus
  • The sense that, once you get to Alfred, the difficulty of trying to remember the kings and rulers of all the scattered other kingdoms disappears; Alfred is succeeded by his son, Edward the Elder (899 to 924), who is himself succeeded by his son, Æthelstan, who, from 927 to 939 has the right to claim himself to be the first king of all the English. From this point onwards it becomes easier to follow the kings, and there is a kind of cultural and legal as well as military unification.

Slaves

I was surprised to come across a record of Athelstan freeing a slave. The earliest will made by an Englishwoman, Wynflæd, from the tenth century, records her wish to free her slaves. And the section about Domesday Book, while running through some of the staggering stats included in the book, mentions that there were some 28,325 slaves in England in 1086 (compared with some 288,000 peasants). I.e. around 10% of the work-force was slaves.

A little-known fact about the Norman Conquest is that it was William the Bastard who formally abolished the (thriving) slave trade in Anglo-Saxon England.

Slight criticism

I had one big caveat. I counted 125 books and manuscripts in the exhibition – books carefully propped open so we could see illuminations and text, manuscripts carefully flattened. These were all, of course, accompanied by information panels explaining what they were, what to look for in the illumination or style of writing, and so on.

BUT – none of them contained a translation of the actual words on show.

Most of the books are in Latin, Latin versions of various books of the Bible, breviaries and psalters, texts of Christian advice, letters from bishops to kings or vice versa, deeds to properties, adjudications in land disputes, and so on, with just a handful of texts in Anglo-Saxon, such as Beowulf, the Exeter Riddles, the Dream of the Rood, wills, charters and so on.

But early medieval writing was highly stylised. Although I studied Latin for GCSE and Anglo-Saxon at university, I always find it next to impossible to read Latin or Anglo-Saxon manuscripts because of the cramped and stylised nature of the handwriting.

So it would have been a very good idea, next to the panel telling you the history of the book, to have had a panel simply laying out the actual words on display, in modern orthography.

And then, logically enough – it would have been a good idea to have translated the words into modern English.

We are presented with a page of Beowulf, or of the Domesday Book. It looks great – but I can’t read a word of it. Not only can I not read it, but even if I could, I wouldn’t understand it.

I think this was a big flaw with the exhibition. The overwhelming majority of objects on display are texts. And although the exhibition gives plenty of help with the manuscripts’ provenance and style and general content – visitors are given no help at all with actually reading or understanding them.

Lindisfarne Gospels f.27r © British Library Board

Lindisfarne Gospels f.27r © British Library Board

Introduction by the exhibition curator

Related links

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by Simon on December 8, 2018  •  Permalink
Posted in Anglo Saxon, Art, Exhibition, History, Literature
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Posted by Simon on December 8, 2018

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2018/12/08/anglo-saxon-kingdoms-art-word-war-british-library/

A History of the English Church and People by the Venerable Bede (732)

Bede’s life

Bede was a monk who spent most of his life in the monastery of Saint Peter at Monkwearmouth and its companion monastery, Saint Paul’s in what is now modern Jarrow, both situated in the Dark Age Saxon kingdom of Northumbria.

He lived from 672 to 735 AD. The honorific Venerable (as in ‘the Venerable Bede’) apparently derives from the tombstone erected some years after his death.

Bede was fortunate in that his monastery was run by the enlightened abbot, Benedict Biscop, and his successor, Ceolfrith, who both encouraged his historical studies.

It also contained probably the most extensive library in Anglo-Saxon Britain. Thus encouraged by kind sponsors and in a uniquely well-provisioned environment, Bede began to write, and went on to compose some 40 works, including commentaries on numerous books of the Bible, a life of St Cuthbert, lives of famous Saxon abbots, and so on. (He usefully provides us with a list of his works.)

But Bede is best-known for his masterpiece, regularly described as the first and greatest work of English history, the Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum (The Ecclesiastical History of the English People). I have the old 1955 Penguin translation by Leo Sherley-Price, who translates the title as A History of the English Church and People.

Bede is called the Father of English History for several reasons:

  • He checked his sources, requesting documents and information from libraries in all the other Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, correlating documents against each other, enquiring of eye-witnesses or descendants of eye-witnesses wherever possible. He clearly lays out his methodology in the introductory letter, and thus established a tradition of scrupulously checking the facts.
  • He describes in wonderful detail a period – from the Roman departure 410 until his own day, the 720s – for which we have pitifully little alternative material. Without his history there would be a big hole in our knowledge of the period and, since this was when our country was founded, he is an invaluable source for the earliest years of our nation.
  • Bede’s whole conception of History is wonderfully rounded. At a time when his contemporaries were struggling to produce the blunt line-for-each-year Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Bede set the events he reports in the contexts of Papal, European and wider British history, going backwards and forwards in time to situate events within broader historical themes as well, of course, as setting everything he describes within the overarching framework of God’s great redemptive plan for Man.

Structure of the Ecclesiastical History

The work is divided into five books, each of which covers a certain period. But the more important division is of each book into 30 or so one- or two-page chapters. These focus on one incident or theme (the miracles of so and so, the death of one bishop, the succession of another, and so on) and were obviously designed to provide good, practical meditations for his (entirely religious) audience to hear read out loud and ponder.

Leo Sherley-Price

Sherley-Price’s prose translation is crisp and brisk, presumably a faithful translation of Bede’s practical style. But the most striking thing about this translation is Sherley-Price’s attitude: he is himself a devout Christian and his beliefs come out in the introduction and (brief) notes, in a way a modern writer would not permit themselves. Thus his note on Pelagianism:

Pelagianism, ‘the British heresy’, denied the reality of original sin, and affirmed that man could attain perfection by his own efforts, unaided by the grace of God. This misconception is still strong today! [emphasis added]

In the introduction he gives a stout defence of miracles and the presence of the miraculous in the History:

Even when ruthless pruning has greatly reduced the number [of plausible miracles in the text], there remains an indissoluble core that cannot be explained by any known natural means, and attributable solely to the supernatural power of God displayed in and through His saints. And this is as it should be. For a true miracle (and who may doubt that such occur?) is not due to the supersession or inversion of the natural laws of the universe ordained by the Creator, but to the operation of cosmic laws as yet unrealised by man, activated by non-material forces whose potency is amply demonstrated in the Gospels. (Introduction, page 30, italics added)

These are confidently Christian words from a pre-1960s era which, in its own way, seems as remote to us today as Bede’s 8th century.

But the most telling sign of their datedness is, I think, not his Catholic faith as such – there’s no shortage of relic-kissing Catholics in 2013 – it is that Sherley-Price tries to make a rational, scientific distinction between improbable or forged miracles, and those which are undoubtedly the real thing. He thinks it is worthwhile to make this distinction and, in so doing, sounds like a member of the Brains Trust, like a reputable academic wearing a tweed jacket and puffing a pipe, debating atheism and belief with Bertrand Russell; he sounds like C.S. Lewis in his apologetic works, naively confident that you can reason someone into belief.

Our understanding of texts and discourses has leapt forward massively in the past 60 years.

The miraculous in Bede

In my opinion, Sherley-Price is missing the point by his nitpicking. The miraculous is the element in which Bede lives and breathes. God is all around him and his angels regularly appear to the people he is describing, to people he actually knows, with important messages and predictions.

Bede’s world is full of miraculous recoveries, holy rescues and blessed cures because God’s angels and saints are continually battling demons and spirits, the forces of the Old Enemy, who are at work everywhere and in everyone.

The miracles in Bede aren’t incidental; they are symptomatic of a world utterly drenched in the presence of God’s powers. To try and unpick the more likely from the less likely ones is to misread the coherence of the imaginative world, the worldview, the psychology, the culture which Bede inhabits. It is to apply absurdly flat and literalistic criteria to a world of wonders.

It is like undertaking a scientific assessment of which bits of magic in Harry Potter might actually be feasible. You are missing the point; the point is to abandon yourself entirely to the endless wonder and richness and unceasing miraculousness of Bede’s world, a world in which God always helps his saints and always punishes his sinners.

Some miracles

  • Book I, chapter 7 St Alban, sentenced to execution by the Roman authorities, can’t cross the packed bridge into Verulamium, so the river blocking his way dries up just as the Red Sea did. As the executioner decapitates Alban, his own eyes pop out.
  • 1. 17 as Germanus sails to Britain, devils raise a storm and the ships are in peril of foundering so Germanus prays and sprinkles holy water on the waves, which puts the demons to flight and the storm passes.
  • 1. 18 Using relics he’s brought from Rome, Germanus cures the blindness of a tribune’s young daughter.
  • 1. 19 A fire threatens the house where Germanus is staying but he calls on the Lord and the flames turn back. Demons throw Germanus off his horse and he breaks his leg. In a vision an angel raises him and lo! his leg is healed.
  • 1. 20 Picts and Saxons invade but bishops Germanus and Lupus organise the Britons into a defensive force. They call on the Lord and leap out of hiding shouting so effectively that the Saxons and Picts all run away, many of them drowning in the river.
  • 1. 21 Germanus heals the crippled son of the chieftain Elaphius.
  • 1. 33 The priest Peter is drowned off the coast of Gaul and buried by the locals in a common grave but God makes a bright light shine over the grave every night until the locals realise he is a holy man and bury him properly in a church in Boulogne.

The power of Christianity

The miracles are just the most striking way in which, for Bede and for all the early missionaries, bishops and believers he describes, Christianity works. It is better than paganism because its believers wield the real power which drives the universe, not the foolish, deluded voodoo of illiterate peasants who believe in amulets and spells and worship stones and trees.

For many profaned the Faith that they professed by a wicked life, and at a time of plague some had even abandoned the Christian sacraments and had recourse to the delusive remedies of idolatry, as though they could expect to halt a plague ordained of God by spells, amulets, and other devilish secret arts. (IV, 28)

Christianity is the Real Thing, it is the real magic that pagans only pretend to harness.

Believers in it win victories and become kings or emperors (as Constantine famously won the Battle of the Milvian Bridge after invoking Christ’s name), they heal the sick and raise the dead and cast out demons and do battle with devils and quench fires and bring down rain and make the crops grow. It is all the supernatural things paganism falsely claims to be – except it actually is.

Crediting witnesses, believing in miracles

Bede goes out of his way to tell us that he has many of these stories from people who knew the saints in question, that he personally has listened to their stories of angelic visitors and wrestling with devils and curing the sick and of coffins which magically resize themselves to fit the bodies of deceased saints.

An old brother of our monastery, who is still living, testifies that he once knew a truthful and devout man who had met Fursey in the province of the East Angles, and heard of these visions from his own mouth (Book III, chapter 19)

I have thought it fitting to preserve the memory of one of these stories, often told me by the very reverend Bishop Acca, who said that it was vouched for by some very reliable brethren of the monastery. (IV, 14)

Among those who told me this story were some who had actually heard it from the mouth of the man to whom these things happened, so that I have no hesitation about including it in t his history of the church as it was related. (IV, 23)

My informant in all these events was my fellow-priest, Edgils, who was living in the monastery at the time. (IV, 25)

Even if we disbelieve every story, we are impressed by Bede’s conception of the historian as one who seeks out eye witnesses, who listens, who writes it down.

Anyway, even our sceptical age is alive with urban myths, and still suffers from the profound irrationality and credulousness of human beings. There are still people who under stress clutch any straw, who pray and promise God they’ll believe in him, who believe it was their prayers that saved the plunging plane or their sick relative or clinched the extra-time winner.

But we also know about the Somme, the Holocaust, about 9/11, we know that vast massacres occur and no-one is saved and God is nowhere to be seen.

Personally, I apply David Hume’s Calculus of Probability to all accounts of miracles. Is it more likely that the vast and universal laws of Nature were suspended, often for childish and petty ends? Or that the people who claim to have experienced a miracle, simply have a need to appear important, or are propagandising for their faith, or are naive and credulous?

It will always be the latter. An entirely rational assessment will always militate against miracles. But where, then, is the point or pleasure in reading Bede or indeed any other Christian literature?

For me such Christian literature can still be immensely rewarding, you just have to suspend disbelief. You just have to make the effort to cast yourself back into that mental world. Indeed, that is precisely the point of reading old literature: to expand your mind.

Lots more miracles

  • Book IV, chapter 28 Cuthbert makes spring water appear on a barren hillside and crops to grow out of season.
  • IV 29 Cuthbert prophetically foretells his own death.
  • IV 30 Eleven years after his death Cuthbert’s body is found to be uncorrupted, soft and sweet.
  • IV 31 Brother Baduthegn suffers a paralytic stroke but drags himself to Cuthbert’s tomb where he dreams a great hand touches his wound and he awakens healed.
  • IV 32 Hairs from Cuthbert’s corpse cure the tumour on a brother’s eye.
  • V 1 The hermit Ethelwold calms a storm threatening to drown some monks.
  • V 2 Bishop John cures a dumb, scrofulous servant.
  • V 3 Bishop John cures Coenburg, a sick serving girl.
  • V 4 Bishop John cures the thane Puch’s wife.
  • V 5 Bishop John cures thane Addi’s servant.
  • V6 Bishop John cures a brother who foolishly races a horse, falls off and cracks his skull.
  • V 8 Archbishop Theodore foresees his own death in a vision.
  • V 9 Holy Egbert plans to evangelise the Germans but is prevented by God who sends visions and a storm.
  • V 10 Two missionaries to the Old Saxons are murdered by pagans but their bodies are washed upstream and a light shines over them every night till their companions find them and give them decent burial.

And so it goes on… To try to weight up the ‘valid’ miracles from the ‘invalid’ may be an interesting academic exercise but is pointless. Take out the miracles and there’d be nothing left. The entire story of the growth of the English church is, for Bede, miraculous and made up of miracle piled upon miracle.

Therefore, we should embrace the supernatural elements of Bede’s history unquestioningly, both as a vital component of his worldview, without which his whole history is pointless; and also because of the sheer pleasure it gives. How wonderful to live in this world of angels and demons! Surrender to its visions and what a wonderful, informative, imaginative, delightful book this is!

But what did the pagans believe?

Notoriously, and tragically, Bede (like all the Christian writers of the Dark Ages) tells us almost nothing about what his heathen and pagan opponents believed.

Worshiping trees, stones and rivers, wearing amulets and slaughtering horses seem to be part of pagan belief but we only glimpse these as throwaway asides. There are only a few exceptions, a few places where Bede paints a ‘conversion scene’ and allows us to see what the pagan worldview actually consisted of.

The most famous is in Book II, chapter 13, where King Edwin of Northumbria has already converted to Christianity but needs to take his nobles with him. He convenes a council (AD 627). They are sitting in the king’s large hall, illuminated by a huge fireplace and maybe other torches, but with glassless windows. And one of the king’s thanes uses their setting for a famously beautiful metaphor of human life.

Another of the king’s chief men signified his agreement and went on to say: ‘Your majesty, when we compare the present life of man on earth with that time of which we have no knowledge, it seems to me like the swift flight of a single sparrow through the banqueting-hall where you are sitting at dinner on a winter’s day with your thanes and counsellors. In the midst there is a comforting fire to warm the hall; outside, the storms of winter rain or snow are raging. This sparrow flies swiftly in through one door of the hall, and out through another. While he is inside, he is safe from the winter storms; but after a few moments of comfort, he vanishes from sight into the wintry world from which he came. Even so, man appears on earth for a little while; but of what went before this life or of what follows, we know nothing. Therefore, if this new teaching has brought any more certain knowledge, it seems only right that we should follow it.’

Yes, but what were they converting from? Bede doesn’t sully his book by telling us. Probably the mere act of writing down pagan beliefs would in some sense validate them. It might even conjure them up. Best left unmentioned, undescribed.

The conversion of King Sigbert of the East Saxons

There is another exchange, less poetic but, I think, more revealing in Book III, chapter 22:

About this time also, the East Saxons, who had once rejected the Faith and driven out Bishop Mellitus, again accepted it under the influence of King Oswy. For Sigbert their king, successor to Sigbert the Small, was a friend of Oswy and often used to visit him in the province of the Northumbrians. Oswy used to reason with him how gods made by man’s handwork could not be gods, and how a god could not be made from a log or block of stone, the rest of which might be burned or made into articles of everyday use or possibly thrown away as rubbish to be trampled underfoot and reduced to dust. He showed him how God is rather to be understood as a being of boundless majesty, invisible to human eyes, almighty, everlasting, Creator of heaven and earth and of the human race. He told him that he rules and will judge the world in justice, abiding in eternity, not in base and perishable metal; and that it should be rightly understood that all who know and do the will of their creator will receive an eternal reward from him. King Oswy advanced these and other arguments during friendly and brotherly talks with Sigbert, who, encouraged by the agreement of his friends, was at length convinced. So he talked it over with his advisers, and with one accord they accepted the Faith and were baptised with him by Bishop Finan in the king’s village of At-Wall, so named because it stands close to the wall which the Romans once built to protect Britain, about twelve miles from the eastern coast.

In the context of the Dark Ages this is gold dust. How fabulous to be told so much detail about these obscure kings, Oswy and Sigbert, about social intercourse between the kings of these early English kingdoms, about the relationship between a king and his advisers, about the geography of the region.

Christianity trumps paganism

But the core of the passage is the absolute crux of Bede’s History – the sheer majesty and breathtaking sweep, the intellectual, moral and imaginative scale and thoroughness and universality of Catholic Christianity compared with the thin, local, petty, shallow gods and practices of paganism.

For me this one chapter shows how Christianity was a VAST improvement on the limited, dark, unintellectual world of the pagan gods.

Miracles and all, if you compare the intellectual coherence of Bede’s position with the worldview of the pagan Poetic Edda, Christianity wins hands-down for its scope and thoroughness.

Thor throwing his hammer at giants is for children, the Last Battle between gods and giants is a fable for fatalistic warrior-kings.

Neither can stand comparison with the wonder and coherence of the Christian notion of one, all-powerful, all-loving Creator, with his flocks of angels ready to help the mightiest king or the lowliest serf to lead a more holy, just and – ultimately -–satisfying life. This vision offers hope to everyone.

One by one, the kings of Dark Age Britain who Bede describes, realised this mighty truth and bowed to the inevitable.

Little was Bede to know that just 60 years after his death in 732, furious straw-haired pagans were to appear from across the seas and do their damnedest to destroy everything he and his brothers had built up. But that is another story…

"The Venerable Bede Translates John" by James Doyle Penrose (Wikimedia Commons)

‘The Venerable Bede Translates’ John by James Doyle Penrose

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1 Comment
by Simon on December 9, 2013  •  Permalink
Posted in Anglo Saxon, Books, Christianity, English literature, European History, History, Old English
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on December 9, 2013

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2013/12/09/a-history-of-the-english-church-and-people-the-venerable-bede/

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