Blue eyes

A bit of a change of tack – this article was flagged up on Twitter today. I found it fascinating, partly because of the recent family history research that I've been doing, I think, and partly because I'm unscientific enough to be staggered by it. I suspect someone with more of a grounding in the subject would be considerably less surprised, just as they are generally less surprised by somebody finding out that they're descended from Edward III, or similar.

Stanislav Petrov

I did say that I'd be avoiding the constantly alarming news, but it's not entirely possible. I've heard the word 'escalation' more in the last three weeks than I have since the early 1980s, and the context in which it's used is maybe even more chilling now than it was then, probably because although I was reasonably well-read about politics and world affairs at the time, I didn't appreciate exactly what was going on. 

Much more recently, I've read a few books about the Cold War tensions that almost resulted in disaster in 1983. With the relationship between the USA and the Soviet Union already strained, a computer malfunction almost convinced the Soviets that the Americans had launched a massive pre-emptive nuclear strike. 

Almost, I said. Fortunately, a man called Stanislav Petrov was responsible for interpreting the faulty early-warning readings, concluded that the Americans would be mad to attempt such an attack, and decided not to initiate a response. 

I hope there are plenty of Stanislav Petrovs still around. 

My poem about it, below, appears in my second collection, hydrodaktulopsychicharmonica, from Nine Arches Press, which is still available as an e-book.

Stanislav Petrov

The hardest part? How to stay alive

(inside the bunker, remember,

there are no days or nights)

to a sight you'll only see once,

the screens suddenly flowering

with tendrils of light, taking hold

of the world as we always imagined

they would. For some, perhaps,

the danger is a mind that wanders,

to football, or vodka, or the legs

of Comrade Ivanova.

For me, only a waking dream

of days awaiting autumn in Fryazino,

and my wife asking, what did you do today

Yevgrafovich? Answering her

as I always do. Nothing, I did nothing. 

I'm back (again)

Yes, yes, I know. My promises to resume posting regularly here have been about as reliable as the Tory government's...no, I'm not going to go there. I have the urge to blog, and to write more generally, and I suspect one of the main reasons is the utter chaos out there at the moment. So, I'm going to restrict myself to talking about poetry, and literature more generally, and birds, and history, and maybe some cricket (although, there's not much about England that inspires me at the moment). I can't guarantee it will be upbeat, exactly, but it will definitely be more fun than the news.

Back to the Anchor Church

At the end of the ITN News last night, there was an item about the Anchor Church at Ingleby, Derbyshire. The gist of it was pretty similar to this article, but they went rather more heavily on the 'discovery' that the caves were an Anglo-Saxon dwelling rather than belonging to the late medieval period.

I know the site pretty well. In my Nine Arches Press collection hydrodaktulopsychicharmonica, there's a poem called Dreams From The Anchor Church, at least partly inspired by it. I've been walking there quite a lot over the years. Memorably, about 10 years ago, I saw a Red-footed Falcon nearby, the only time I've ever seen the species in the UK.

I was a bit surprised by the TV piece, because I thought it had long been established that it was an Anglo-Saxon site. I remember talking about it as such when I was at university, in the late 80s/early 90s. I mentioned it to my lecturer (I suspect I had heard the local tradition that it was the home of an Anglo-Saxon saint), and she then pointed me in the direction of a book or possibly an article in a history journal that confirmed it. 

It's strange, then, how knowledge gets lost, and found, and lost again, and refound, because this appears to be a case where the local folk tradition preserved an accurate recollection of the past. And given the amount of early medieval remains in the area (a couple of cemeteries of the Viking 'Great Army', and an Anglo-Saxon crypt in nearby Repton church that holds a couple of Mercian kings), it's surprising that this one was ever ignored.

The link with the church at Breedon-on-the-Hill is interesting, too. It appears possible that some of the wall friezes there were taken from the sarcophagus of St Hardulph, to some the church is dedicated, and who is likely to have been one and the same as Eardwulf, King of Northumbria.

The Lucksmiths

Wikipedia, and the Internet generally, are dangerous things. Yesterday, I heard the end of Tess of the D'Urbervilles on Radio 4, and looked it up online, never having read it. 

Wikipedia told me that its ending was inspired by Thomas Hardy having witnessed the execution of a woman called Elizabeth Martha Brown, for the murder of her abusive husband, in 1856, and that an Australian band, called The Lucksmiths, had recorded a song about it on their 1995 album The Green Bicycle Case.

Now, that immediately rang a bell, because years ago I read a book about the Green Bicycle Murder, which took place just outside Leicester in 1919. But the album also contains a song called The Tichborne Claimant, which sent me off reading about that particularly long and convoluted affair. Among the interesting things I picked up was that it involved the same Tichborne family as that of the poet Chidiock Tichborne, executed for his part in The Babington Plot against Elizabeth I, although not before he had written the famous elegy you can see on that page.

All of which is a very long way of getting to the point. If you've followed this blog over the years, you'll know that I have a very big soft spot for Australian bands. Two in particular, The Triffids and The Go-Betweens, but there are others. And I think The Lucksmiths will be joining them as favourites. The album mentioned above is excellent, both musically and lyrically, and is more than a little reminiscent of The Go-Betweens, and I'm looking forward to listening to the rest of their work. The follow-up album, I notice, is called What Bird Is That, which has to be a good omen.

Back to my roots

Over the last year or two, I've been trying to trace some family history, and at the end of last year, I sent off for one of Ancestry.com's DNA tests. 

When the results came back, there were no huge surprises - more Scottish and Irish blood than I'd expected, and some Norwegian/Icelandic ancestry (but not much). 

This week, though, they sent an email updating the results, because they have now refined the process further and have more DNA samples to compare. And the results are very intriguing (well, to me, at least).

They came out as: 

39% Welsh, and specifically south-east Wales, which is my mother's mother's side of the family, and which I already have a lot of background on.

30% English, particularly Devon and Cornwall. Again, I knew about the latter part.

18% Scottish - we'd always known that my dad had some Scottish blood, but this is much more than expected, so it's one of the areas I really want to dig into.

3% Irish - not sure where this comes from at all.

10% Norwegian/Icelandic - certainly no idea where this comes from. Reading the background notes, this isn't anything to do with 'Viking' blood, as that would come under the other headings. It's more recent than that. There is a bit of a Norwegian link to Cardiff, but I think more likely this is from my dad's side of the family (some of whom were trawlermen), possibly connected to the Scottish link.

Funnily enough, I also came across this story online yesterday. It confirms that, back in the so-called Dark Ages at least, what we once thought were ethnic groups were often nothing of the sort - 'Viking' came to be applied to people with no Scandinavian DNA at all, in the same ways as 'Anglo-Saxons' came to be used to refer to any of the Germanic settlers who arrived in the UK - Frisians, Franks and others would have been among them. 

Hwaet next?

Fascinating article here if you have any interest in Beowulf, Anglo-Saxon poetry more generally, linguistics, the Sutton Hoo burial, or early medieval history.

What's intriguing is that it focuses on the work of an archaeologist, Bo Graslund, who links it to the climate crisis of the mid-6th century, and whose detailed analysis of the material cultures of early Dark Age England and Sweden informs his argument.

Sadly, at the moment, you need to be fluent in Swedish to read the book, but hopefully there'll be an English translation before too long.

And another thing

I don't want to give his execrable book any more publicity than it deserves (ie., none), but I read another damning review of Jacob Rees-Mogg's The Victorians this morning. OK, the New Statesman was never likely to be that appreciative of the walking anachronism's hurriedly completed homework assignment (presumably the dog ate the original manuscript), but they do do the reader the favour of quoting some of the author's laborious and tedious prose.

The one part of the review I would immediately take issue with is "The one non-Westminster discussed is the cricketer WG Grace, included mainly because 'as Every Englishman knows', more than any other sport, 'cricket at its best captures the soul of the nation. Fair play, etiquette and gentlemanly behaviour.' Not much of the latter is evident in the modern game, but Rees-Mogg's perceptions, here as elsewhere, are myopically rooted in the past."

The reviewer appears to have missed the point about WG just as much as Rees-Mogg has. Dr Grace was undoubtedly a great player, a man who revolutionised batting technique in particular, but he really didn't give much of a damn about fair play, etiquette or gentlemanly behaviour. Reading about his career, it's hard to escape the conclusion that even David Warner and Steve Smith might have baulked at taking the field with such a master of gamesmanship (well, more like straightforward cheating), so the dig at the modern game is unwarranted. Nor, it should be noted, was WG alone in that respect.

'Staggeringly silly'

It's fair to say that Jacob Rees-Mogg has suffered a critical mauling for his book The Victorians. Dominic Sandbrook's comment that it wouldn't have been published had it been written by anyone else is rather redundant. Of course it wouldn't – it's just an attempt to cash in on his fame/infamy, with no regard to the quality of the writing or the historical research. Rather like with Boris Johnson's biography of Churchill. I tried to read some of that, but it was really pretty awful.

I almost want to read this to see if it is as bad as they say, but I think I'll take AN Wilson's word for it. He's hardly a raving leftist, so has no particular political axe to grind, and he has himself written a generally well received and readable history of the Victorian era.

Digging up the past

WARNING! I've slipped into early medieval history nerd mode for this post – if you're looking for ill-informed poetry ponderings, anything remotely ornithological, or cricket geekery, please come back in a few days.

You can go months without coming across anything to do with Anglo-Saxon England in the mainstream media, and then two stories come along at once. You'll probably have already seen this story, which raises all sorts of questions about the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons to Christianity, even if they're right about the burial being that of  Seaxa, who had a family connection to a Christian Frankish princess.

But earlier today I also came across this, concerning the 'Great Heathen Army'. Essentially, it explains why previous finds at Repton, between Derby and Burton, weren't the whole story, and how finds at the nearby hamlet of Foremark suggest part of the army wintered there in 873-74.

It's an area I know well, having walked the path alongside the river many times. In fact, I saw a Red-footed Falcon there about 10 years ago (oh, there you go, knew the birds wouldn't stay out of things for long). One of the poems in my second poetry collection, hydrodaktulopsychicharmonica (my first with Nine Arches Press, back in 2010) – Dreams From The Anchor Church – was inspired by the caves along that stretch of the Trent, and by the area generally. You can still get the collection by following the link above, direct from me, or on Amazon.

Oswald's Book of Hours

Litter has an interesting review of Steve Ely's collection Oswald's Book of Hours, from Smokestack Books. It's one that I'd really like to catch up with, partly because Ely's a very fine poet whose work I've enjoyed before, and partly because of the subject matter.

I just started reading The King in the North, by Max Adams, about Oswald, 7th century king of Northumbria and saint, reminding myself of what I've long forgotten since studying the period at university. The two books ought to complement each other rather well.

Battle Royal and Blood Royal

Over the last few weeks I've read Hugh Bicheno's two-part history of the Wars of the Roses, Battle Royal and Blood Royal. They're extremely readable, with plenty of in-depth material that I hadn't come across before, and he's particularly good at looking at what the motivations of the participants might have been, the more obscure members of the gentry as well as the big names.

But at times, he's prone to making big claims without producing much evidence to back them up, most notably regarding the legitimacy of Edward IV. Now you can make a good case for him not having been the son of Richard of York, but some of the reasons Bicheno gives don't really hold up. Yes, Edward was a lot taller than either of his supposed parents, but his brother George and one of his sisters were also notably tall, so I'm not sure what that proves. Given that much of his argument, especially in the second book, depends on you accepting his claim, this unwillingness to go into detail is annoying at best.

What also gives me cause for concern about these claims is that Bicheno is rather slapdash in his approach to minor details. He repeats the old myth about the Battle of Losecote Field being so called because the rebels threw away their livery as they fled. In fact, it was never called that until the 19th century, and the name more likely comes from 'hlose-cote field', a locally common name referring to a cottage with pig sties.

Similarly, in his description of the Battle Of Edgecote, he talks about the slaughter of the Welsh Yorkist troops as they fled, and says that Welsh Road runs through the battlefield, implying that it is so called because it's where the slaughter took place. But Welsh Road actually gets its name because it's an old drovers' route through the Midlands, used by Welsh drovers to avoid the main turnpikes. That's all pretty well attested, and long stretches of it even now show all the signs of having been so.

Nit-picking, maybe, but it makes me wonder about the lack of evidence for his bigger claims.

Coquet Island's Roseate Terns

When I was at university in Newcastle, we frequently had history field trips, or history society drinking trips, to various castles and other sites along the Northumberland coast. Warkworth Castle, near Amble, was a favourite.

I was in Amble this week, ahead of a trip out to Coquet Island, home to the UK's biggest breeding colony of Roseate Terns. The weather wasn't great, the sea was pretty choppy, but it was a memorable experience, nonetheless. The Roseates were present in numbers, along with Common and Sandwich Terns, Eiders, Puffins and Kittiwakes.

And history came into it, too. St Cuthbert, who lived as a hermit on the Farne Islands a little further north, came to Coquet to meet with Aelfleda, the daughter of the Northumbrian king Oswiu. Aelfleda was the Abbess of Whitby by then, I think. Cuthbert, I suppose, would have kept a close eye on the birdlife – he was particularly fond of Eiders, which are still sometimes known locally as 'Cuddy ducks', and ensured they had some sort of legal protection.

Words and Ears reading

A week on Thursday (July 30th), I'll be the guest reader at Words and Ears, in Bradford on Avon. The regular event, which includes open mic slots, takes place at the Swan Hotel, starting at 7.30pm, and entrance is £3 on the door.

I'm looking forward to it very much, having heard nothing but good things about Words and Ears from both readers and audience members. Here's poet Josephine Corcoran's take on it.

It'll also be nice to get a chance to look round Bradford. I seem to remember that there's a very distinctive Anglo-Saxon church there, and although I've been to nearby Bath many times, I've never got round to seeing it.

The Great Revolt

I'm a sucker for historical 'what ifs', and this excellent article examines what might have been one of the great turning points in British history. Certainly, as Paul Kingsnorth says, it seems every bit as pivotal as the dates mentioned at the end of the piece.

Postcards from Portugal

This is Mertola, a historic town in the Alentejo region of Portugal. I stayed there for a couple of nights last week, and as well as exploring the superb birdlife of the surrounding area, there was the chance to dig into the history of a settlement that has Roman, Moorish and medieval Christian remains.

I'll be posting a few photos from the town's museums over the next couple of weeks - to start with, here's a bowl from the Moorish period - the bird looks rather like a bustard, and both Great and Little Bustards can still be found in the area close to the town.

Essential viewing

So, tomorrow night at nine, our TV screens will once again be given over to the stories of a group of ruthless, back-stabbing, self-interested individuals and their endless machinations and romantic complications.

Of course, if you don't want to watch The Viking Sagas, on BBC4, which will look at the great outpouring of historically-based literature from 13th Century Iceland (it focuses on Laxdaela Saga, although my own favourite is Njal's Saga), you could go for something completely different and switch to BBC1 for The Apprentice. Which would, to be fair, be improved further by the contestants settling their differences with axes.

'Ard wok? Yeah, but worth mekkin' the effort, me duck

Still on a historical theme, I read this at the weekend.

I'm always wary of Hollywood versions of Robin Hood (well, I'm wary of pretty much any adaptation, be it TV or film or whatever), but I really can't wait to see this film now. Honestly. It'll be good to hear an attempt at an East Midlands accent. In the past, on the rare occasions that a TV programme has been set in the region, everybody's spoken like Brummies (Steve Coogan's Saxondale is the honourable exception). The prospect of England's greatest folk hero greeting his outlaw band with a gruff "ay up, me ducks" is too good to miss.*

I am sightly baffled by some of the pronunciations they mention. 'Corp' for 'cup'? No, and 'Noddinham' doesn't sound right, either. More like 'Nottnum', I'd have said. Still, 'tekking' is dead right, and hopefully they'll remember to drop their aitches and shorten all their vowels to ridiculous extremes. 'Wok' for work.** 'Oss' for horse, etc. And of course, they'll have to refer to their ill-gotten victuals as their 'snap'. Kudos to Crowe for even trying, though. I'll be first in the queue to see it.

* The comments thread, predictably, gets into the old Nottinghamshire vs Yorkshire debate. But we all know he was really from Leicestershire, don't we?

** Essential in terrible joke usually only intelligible to people from Whitwick (Johnny Wong's is the Chinese takeaway in the Market Place)...
"Have you heard? They're laying people off at Johnny Wong's."
"Really?"
"Yeah, they've got no wok."

Hoard saved for nation

Glad to see that the Staffordshire Hoard will be staying in the West Midlands after the £3.3 million purchase price was met with the help of a grant from the National Heritage Memorial Fund.

Exactly where it'll be is another matter. There'll probably be a lobby for it to be in Staffordshire itself, but I'd have thought that the logical place, in terms of security and ensuring it's accessible to as many people as possible, is Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery.

Still slightly disappointed that it was Dr David Starkey who was being interviewed about it on every TV and radio news report I heard last night. I'm sure he's very good when it comes to his own specialist area, but couldn't they have found an Anglo-Saxonist?

Robin Hood - loan shark

Well, that's how one of the radio news bulletins billed this, but the truth actually looks a lot less interesting. Can't really see anything particularly contentious in this, whether or not the author has interpreted the ballads correctly, and as you'll have noticed in the past, I'm a compulsive defender of RH's reputation.