An Englishman's Home: A visit to Bodiam Castle.

Moated Manor House or True Castle?

A visit to Bodiam castle is undoubtedly a requirement for all those who want to get as near as they can to the touch and feel of a pivotal time in English history – the late 14th century. When Edward Dalyngrigge built the castle in 1385 (needless to say it was his social inferiors that actually built it) the English aristocracy was in the middle of the hundred years war with their French counterparts over the disputed French crown. Thus, as far as aristocracy was concerned the late 14th was business as usual; fighting over land inheritance and making sure serfs did their part in their Lord’s battles and in the tilling of his land. Dalyngrigge returned from France rich with the spoils of war and further enhanced his social position by marrying into wealth. He got too big for his manor house (and probably for his boots as well) and applied to the King for a license to crenellate his relatively pokey manor house; as the license says:

“…he [Dalyngrigge] may strengthen with a wall of stone and lime and crenellate and may construct and make into a castle his manor house of Bodyham…”

Somehow the ambitious Darlyngrigge managed wangle it so that the Kings permission became a license to build an entirely new castle, which he did further down the valley.

But times were changing. The Black Death in the mid fourteenth century had begun to make it a suppliers market for serf labour and this eventually led to the rise of a middle class of yeoman farmers who started to work in the service of profit rather than the service of noble masters. The peasant’s revolt of 1383 used startlingly modern slogans about the equality of man, and was among the first signs that feudalism was on the wane. But obviously Darlyngrigge, who played his part in the suppression of the revolt, didn’t think so. It is likely that in his mind his new castle was as much a deterrent to an upstart peasantry (or a rising middle class of yeomen) as it was to the French aristocracy.

The best ideas in defense

Bodiam castle is a monument to the fag end of the mediaeval period. There have been remarks to the effect that in the building of the castle Darlyngrigge’s taste for style, statement and comfort compromised its strength; the last of the castles and the first of the stately homes. The castle, situated in its wide moat, certainly conveys a sense of both romance and strength. Its structure incorporated all the best ideas in defense, but it is clear that Darlygrigge wanted to show it off to full effect and visitors coming from the east were taken on a circuitous “best views” sight-seeing tour round the castle before entry could be made. If an appearance of strength acts as a deterrent then Darlygrigge’s eye for theatre could be construed as a psychological defensive measure in itself.

Darlyngrigge, however, really had little time to enjoy that status symbol and fashion statement that was his castle – he died a few years after its completion leaving the legacy of an iconic building for future generations to savor the fancied air of chivalrous nostalgia and mystery. Dalygrigge is a fine example of that well known historical phenomenon whereby those in changing times seem to have no inkling whatever of the direction of historical drift or even that their times are fundamentally changing. From our modern perspective, with as much detachment as we survey his castle, we can survey the sweep of history that swept past Dalyngrigge leaving his castle a romantic and nostalgic ruin. But like many a high flier before and after him Dalyngrigge was a man jealous of his dignity, pride and status, which in turn meant that his emotions, motives and values were very much bound up with the cultural expressions of his day. In spite of his opinion of himself Dalyngrigge, to us, seems an unconscious play thing of history; a man who, in the final analysis, didn’t make history but who was in the rearguard of a culture that history was sweeping away.

And yet in spite of changing times the castle at Bodiam remained a home for aristocrats for more than 200 years – a period of time which measured backwards from our day takes us right back to the first stages of the industrial revolution, and which suggests that times in renaissance England were in, one sense at least, relatively settled. But is history ever settled? I fancy I see cusps of change and turning points everywhere in history, and so I wonder if history ever passes through settled times, times when it is just more of the same. Whatever the answer to that question, it is clear, however, that Dalyngrigge was so taken up with the ephemeral values and ambitions of his times as to be unaware of the greater context that ultimately passes final judgment on his (and our) doings. But far greater dignity and honour comes to those for whom immediate status and position is something they are not enslaved to.

5Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus: 6Who, being in very nature[a] God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, 7but made himself nothing, taking the very nature[b] of a servant, being made in human likeness. 8And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death— even death on a cross! 9Therefore God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name, 10that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, 11and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. (Philippians 2:5-11)

We think of the medieval world as imbued through and through with Christian religious values – and so it was. And yet the kernel of the Christian message, a message expressed in terms of servant hood, humility, sacrifice and grace was difficult to spot.

Status, style and comfort; but that was then

Autumn Holiday

After our holiday in the Isle of Wight here are some of the places the wife and I visited:

Mottisfont Abbey, Romsey:

This is not in fact an abbey but a stately home built on the site of an abbey. The abbey dates from the 13th century, but after the dissolution the abbey estate was given by Henry VIII to one of his cronies, Lord Sandys. Sandys didn’t demolish the abbey, but built his house around it using the old walls as the basis of his Tudor mansion. Later in the mid 18th Century the Tudor house was given a Georgian makeover. Today, therefore, the visitor is confronted with a Georgian facade that from the front betrays little sign of the ecclesiastical bones under the surface of the building. In fact the concept of a convincing façade permeates the whole building; from the mock painted “faux marbling” of the long gallery, through the extremely clever trick perspective artwork of the dining room, to the stunning trompe l’oeil effects of the Whistler room; these are just some of the amazing spectacles that make a visit well worth it. But peel away the two-dimensional veneer and a more ancient history is revealed: In the Yellow room some of the original abbey walls with their heavy early gothic stone work have been exposed, looking very incongruous in the Georgian setting. For the post dissolution builders the original abbey no longer held any sacred authority or sense of fearful holiness; it was a bygone that could be covered up and forgotten. In Georgian times English society was morphing into something completely different; an industrialised culture. But like Mottisfont house itself with its gothic vaulted undercroft, one still finds here and there the signs of a strange medieval ethos at the foundation of our civilization. One marvels at how society can so radically change its rationale and philosophy.

Bembridge Mill, Isle of Wight:

This mill was built at about the same time as the Georgian alterations were being made to Mottisfont abbey. A mill is one of those early non-miniaturized machines that one can actually get inside of and walk round; it is full of wheels, shafts and cogs. Bembridge mill wasn’t just about brute power, it was also about the control of power; it had a centrifugal regulator governing the separation of its grinding stones. The mill “reads out” the information from the relatively delicate regulator via a serious of levers that effectively acted as transducers; the lever arms increase in thickness as they get closer to their job of having to raise a ½ ton grinding stone.


The aristocratic background of Mottisfont abbey contrasts with the lower class of millers who understood and operated the mill. Conceptually speaking the mill was a precursor and symbol of the industrialised world to come. It is ironic that this lower class of millers were totally unaware that they were dealing with the basic concepts of mechanism, energy, power and control that were eventually to dominate the rationale of an industrialized and instrumentalist society. I was reminded of the fact that my schoolboy introduction to physics was via pulley’s cogs, and levers.

Compton Bay, Isle of Wight.

Compton bay has strata that straddle a good part of the cretaceous period, and it seems to be a good place for fossil hunting. (We were there looking for fossils until nearly sunset) The thickness of strata are measured in thousands of feet and I always marvel at the depth of time they represent as evidenced by the very different conditions under which the strata formed, sometimes separated by periods of uplift, folding, tilting and erosion. And here’s the peculiar part: If physics is fundamental those prosaic looking principles derived from levers, cogs and pulleys are reckoned to be sufficient to describe the prehistory of the changing face of our planet.

A Lower Cretaceous fossil we found in Compton bay (to me it looks like a form of coral[?])

The Thursford Collection

Tawdry, garish, ostentatious, baroque and loud, but there is much more to the fairground organ than meets the eye or ear. *

For the August bank holiday the wife and I visited the Thursford collection, a private museum of yesteryear farm and fairground machinery; traction engines, steam engines, carousels and organs.

As I have always been interested in machinery I thought I would be especially interested in the traction engines – well I was, but as am not a musical person I was surprised to find that I was even more interested in the fairground organs. The loud and gaudy exterior of these machines, usually to found in the raucous environment of the fairground has always been a put off for me, but on a second harder look within the subdued light and tranquility of the Thursford environment, however, these machines proved fascinating and their complex reality readily connected with my interest in computers.

The technology of mechanically reproducing sounds of all qualities simply from the vibration modes of a single surface recieving input from some kind of recording medium was not developed enough in the latter half of the nineteenth century to provide fairground music of sufficient body and quality. The fairground organ solves this problem by hiding behind its ostentatious exterior what is effectively a real orchestra: a large ensemble of wind and percussion instruments operated by compressed air. In the machines at Thursford this mechanical unmanned orchestra is programmed by books of punched card. The picture below was taken behind the ornate façade and you can see the racks of punched cards on the left. Also visible is the card reader as well as the pump supplying the compressed air.


Fairground organs are a fine example of a machine that can be programmed with a next to infinite combination of possibilities and this quasi-universality is, of course, very reminiscent of computers. It follows, therefore, that fairground organ music can be digitally analyzed into a set of punched hole instructions. Everything that happens during the playing of one of these wonderful machines is tokenized in the formal patterns on the cards. And yet if one didn’t know otherwise this reductive analysis gives no hint at all of the astounding holistic experience of standing in front of one of these organs as the whole show is powered up and its complicated rhythms, patterns, and harmonies fill the airwaves. That in the main fairground organs have been reserved for catchy popular music so easily reproduced on their tireless mechanics has unfortunately cheapened the experience. Moreover, association with the ungenteel and flamboyant culture of traveling fairground folk unconnected with the values of landed society have not helped place fairground organ music into the realm of fashionable high culture.

But as time moves on the associations of fairground organs with low culture will recede and the beauty and cleverness of these machines may be better appreciated. Call me musically naive but if one pays attention to the music generated by a fairground organ one hears a veritable wall of sound perfectly blending the rhythms and harmonies of its large ensemble of instruments. into a seamless whole. Give the machine another set of punched cards and a new wall of sound seems to come from nowhere, tirelessly and faultlessly reproduced.

As one stands in the front of one of these performing machines sight and sound all meld into one facade, but behind the scenes analysis and reductionism holds sway. The fairground organ is, needless to say, a fine metaphor of the experience vs. mechanism dichotomy. It all may start with an initial taking for granted of an experience that seems integrated to the point of indivisibility, but when curiosity kicks in there is a desire to look behind the scenes, to undress nature, to view its back end as it were and analyse it. In the case of a fairground organ, however, it’s a short walk round to the back of the machine to see how the show really works. But the sharp contrast between experience and underlying mechanism remains. On one level, everything one experiences is explicable in terms of mechanism; there is nothing that happens in a fairground organ performance that cannot be described without reference to the formalities of the punched cards and the model of computation model represented by the mechanical hardware. And yet although the sound is analyzable into an carefully orchestrated ensemble in the final analysis this formality of structure fails to capture the experience itself; formality is a good predictor of structure but a poor predictor of quality.

We must thank the private collector George Cushing who has left us with such a fascinating and beautiful legacy.

George Cushing 1904-2003
https://www.thursford.com/default.aspx

* footnote
The times on my photos look dodgy; I was supposed to be at work at that time. The explanation? The clock on my camera is 2-3 hours slow. The proof? The Thursford collection doesn't open until 12 o'clock mid day!

A History of History

During our yearly visits to London escorting her Spanish english language students the wife and I get a chance to visit a museum or two with them. (Usually the British Museum). Yesterday we spent some time in the Enlightenment gallery of the BM. The two photos below tell a strange story about the Enlightenment; unlike the other histories depicted in the museum European Enlightenment history is in part a history of the European’s view of history. The Enlightenment was a time of increasing self-awareness.

The Artifacts of the Enlightenment; somebody else's history. Basically it's a museum in a museum

The accompanying legend: A meta view of religion can threaten a parochial religion. (click to enlarge)

The Wars of the Enlightenment: We try not to mention Trafalgar to this lot, but if you're taking them round London it's difficult.

Pending Position Statement

As a result of direct inquiries I intend to produce, at some stage, a position statement regarding my views on Christianity. However, I am currently absorbed with one two other matters that I am following up; hence this promissory note.

The Last Enemy

Over the Easter break the wife and I visited my daughter and son-in-law and also my father-in-law and his wife. During that time we visited Hever Castle, the British Museum, the London Aquarium, and Beachy Head. In the great association game of life every concept is connected to every other concept by a few links in a kind of conceptual “small world”. So, I asked, what links all these visits? Life and death seemed a good bet and sure enough they ran through the whole of our long weekend like the letters in a stick of rock.


1. Hever Castle
Hever castle was built in the 13th century but it has been so altered and renovated that it would probably be unrecognizable to the original builders. In Edwardian times the interior was completely “updated” in a romantic Tudor recreation by the wealthy and enthusiastic American medievalist W.W. Astor. Although little that the visitor sees is original, the interior is beautifully decorated with finely carved woodwork and paneling and no expense has been spared. The overall aspect is of a cozy homely castle. Hever is just how we imagine the rich Tudors lived, either because it is has become the standard by which we judge all things Tudor or because it really does accurately portray the Tudor environment. All said and done W. W. Astor did the country a huge favor by helping to create a beautiful building and setting that may well otherwise have become ruinous desolation.

In spite of its slightly synthetic feel Hever castle has an authentic history. In the mid 15th century Hever passed into the hands of Geoffrey Bullen, a man with no known aristocratic lineage, a man who may well have been one of the peasant beneficiaries of the breakup of feudalism brought about by the Black Death. His very intelligent great granddaughter, Ann Bullen, did her finishing school in fashionable France, and in what may be one of the best PR maneuvers in history subsequently changed her name from Bullen to the French and elegant sounding “Boleyn”. Thus began a legend as a member of an obscure family moved to take up a pivotal place in the history of the nation; as everyone knows Anne went on to marry the opportunistic reformer Henry VIII. History suggests that it was Henry’s affair with Anne that precipitated him reviewing his relations with Rome and sowing English antipathy to the catholic cause, antipathy that grew as the reformation got underway. This paved the way for an independent England. In the to-and-froing between Catholicism and Protestantism over the next century and half English mercantile interests were more often than not bound up with the Protestant cause, and so the English middle class, who were such an important force in the industrial revolution, were better served by Protestantism. Since a commercialized Britannia and its industrial revolution in effect created the modern world, it is therefore arguable that the young Anne Boleyn was not just a pivotal character for English history but also for world history.


2. British Museum
The next day saw us visiting the Egyptian rooms of the British museum. As we wandered through these rooms I was struck once again by just how much Ancient Egyptian life style was thrall to the last enemy - death. From the monumental stonework of pyramids and elaborate rock cut tombs, to embalming and elaborate funerary rites, death was big business for the Egyptians and consumed a large part of their economy. But who can blame them; death confounds men of all cultures. Life seems full of promise, colour and rich experience, but then it is all so easily snuffed out, rudely truncating human purposes, often leaving questions of truth, justice and fairness dangling. It just doesn’t make sense. With man death is unfinished business and the many lose ends it leaves demand a solution. The Egyptians, it seems, were sure they had solution. For them this life was just a beginning and the best part was to come; the husk of their mummified bodies were sown as seeds for a future life, a life that they believed must surely must go on beyond the grave eternally. But as I looked at the funerary effigies, the sacred models, the amulets and the dried out blackened corpses lovingly prepared they were more moving than any monumental engineering effort made with huge stones. There was a pathos here, like a child's game of let's pretend, all so ultimately ineffectual. This just wasn't how the world worked and yet on an engineering level they had considerable skill, a skill that incongruously contrasted with their almost childish take on spiritual realities.



3. London Aquarium
Our next visit was to the newly opened London Aquarium, an appropriate place for someone like myself who is interested in evolutionary theory. Baring a few star fish and jelly fish most of the swimming organisms on view where roughly bullet shaped alimentary canals, no doubt a body plan emanating from the Cambrian explosion. Although I couldn’t quite see where the bizarre looking sea-horse fitted in, this was the environment of the first eras of vertebrate history. Evolution, I hardly need say, requires death to work - like a laborious computer algorithm it is a search, reject and select method repeated many times over. Thus, in evolution death paradoxically becomes the means of genesis and the passage to pastures new. Perhaps it would not have been such a surprise to the Ancient Egyptians who viewed death as a beginning to new life. But the unchanging eternity of the Egyptian after life is at much at odds with earthly morphological disequilibrium as it is with the thermodynamic disequilibrium of the wider cosmos.

4. Easter day service
The same issues of death, seeding, rebirth, eternity and escape from the last enemy were back on the agenda for the next day when we attended an Easter Sunday communion service at my daughter’s local C of E church, Henry VIII’s church. Instead of the elaborate funerary monuments, rituals, and interment of the husk of the cadaver, which was in any case largely for the Egyptian upper class, Christian rebirth is universally available and extremely simple to appropriate and practice. All who call on the name of Christ shall be saved and communion symbolizes the daily death to self, the ongoing daily renewal of the soul and ultimate assurance of eternal life, when as in Ancient Egypt, the dead body is sown for life everlasting.

5. Beachy Head
Our final outing was a walk on the chalk downs of Beachy Head with father in law and his wife. These downs are made of chalk to a depth of hundreds of feet thick, formed by the gentle deposition of millions of carbonaceous bodies of Coccolithophores as they perpetuated endless cycles of, birth, life, bodily renewal and death. Beachy Head forms a mound of chalky limestone of greater height than the Great Pyramid which is also made of (a harder) limestone. As we sat in the Beachy Head restaurant having our dinner my father in law reminded us of a book by Richard Hilary called “The Last Enemy”. It was this conversation that gave me the title of this post. Richard Hilary was a World War II fighter pilot who started his career with a self consciously chosen philosophy of self serving. This philosophy of self, he believed, provided the only arguable rationale to life, if such it could be called. And yet in a kind of conversion experience Hilary discovered a spark within him that could not endure a life of service to self. He was surprised to stumble across this seed of compassion whose growth he could not staunch.



Summing up
The Black Death of the fourteenth century help bring Europe out of the feudal era but it took until the century following the sixteenth century reformation before the popular medieval mindset started to go the way of feudalism. With the reformation salvation and the defeat of the last enemy became folk possessions rather than belonging exclusively to an institution. But the decentralization of the liturgy of death was accompanied by another form of decentralization symbolized by the Copernican system, science’s Wittenberg door. This first step in cosmological decentralization was to ultimately threaten man’s view of himself, whether catholic or protestant. Thanks to Henry VIII and the desire created in him by the socially ambitious Anne Boleyn, England was maneuvered into Protestantism. One of the consequences of this was that English resistance to the Copernican system, which thanks to Galileo had become a bogy of the Catholic Church, was lowered. (Conversely England made heavy weather in accepting the very convenient but “papist” Gregorian calendar). The break up the medieval mind set brought man face to face with the role that mechanism and symmetry play in the cosmic order. Today localised physics and cosmic decentralization have now been developed to the extreme: highly speculative Multiverses have been envisaged where symmetry has gone mad: Everywhere and everywhen looks the same and probability is spread evenly and thinly over the possible states a particular universe can assume. However, asymmetry cannot be completely expunged from our thinking about the cosmos; in the final analysis something must be a special case and sheer existence, something rather than nothing, is the one-off that challenges hyper symmetry. But who would have guessed that a country girl made good would inadvertently help put the whole world on track for the frenetic industrial age of plenty, an age when these issues would ultimately barge their way on to the modern conceptual agenda and rustic innocence lost to material ambitions and a spiritually alienating materialist vision.

A verse allegedly* written by Anne Boleyn goes:

A captive, I in this dread Tower, scenes of childhood gaiety recall,
They comfort bring in this dark hour, now gaiety hath flown,
Through Blickling’s glades I fain would ride, soft green sward,
Sequested shade, no cruel intrigues to deride my simple rustic day.
A child, I watched the timid fawn, gentle eyed, steal to the lake.
With thirst to quench when mists of dawn had from cool waters fled.
Strutting peacocks, shimmering blue, roseate arbour, scented walk.
Gladly I left, ’tis strangely true, for pageantry at court.
False vanities my pride hath tricked, this place of damp and anguished stone
By sullen river surges licked, doth mock my hopeless lot
Oh, were I still a child in stature small
To tread the rose-lined paths of Blickling Hall.

According to Hever castle’s guide “The ghost of Anne Boleyn is almost as famous as the lady herself was in life holding the record for the most sightings of any spirit. Since her execution in 1536, Anne is said to have been spotted 30,000 times in 120 locations, including Hever, Blickling and the Tower of London”. There is a story told at Blickling Hall that a butler intercepted a “grey lady”, presumed to be Anne’s shade, standing by Blickling’s lake, who in reply to the butler’s inquiry responded “That for which I search is lost forever”. The veracity of this story is an immaterial as Anne’s ghost, because given its compelling symbolic content, it might almost explain those many sightings as some kind of collective dream emanating from the subconscious, rich in Freudian meaning. For the world has grown up, partly in thanks to Anne, a world that can’t unlearn what it’s learned. As a culture we have long since left behind the rustic innocence of the ambitionless contentment described in the above verse, although like Anne’s ghost we may from time to time nostalgically and wistfully revisit it. We have lost the apparently tranquil agrarian world just as the first farmers who lived a life of backbreaking toil had lost the freely roaming world of the hunter gatherers. Like Anne many yearn for a fanciful romantic Acadian idyll, and Anne’s plight is symbolic expression of that fancy and the subliminal unresolved angst with the modern world. And yet the stasis of the idyll only serves to bring to the surface human restlessness and ambition as it did for Anne, although we are often ill at ease with the products of our ambitions and strivings. The fact is humanity is built more for the journey and the pilgrimage than the destination. For destinations, unless they be God himself, are partial, incomplete and ultimately unsatisfying to the heart of man – and, if Anne is to be believed, woman as well. But we must be careful in our peregrinations – they can become nightmares if journeys are conflated with destinations. It helps, I think, to develop a studied detachment from this world’s vaunted goals, the sort of detachment that John Bunyan was well aware of. We are then ready for the last enemy.


Footnote
* I have doubts about the authenticity of this verse

Alan J Cowcher 1951-2009

It was with great shock and deep sadness that I learned of the sudden death of Alan J Cowcher, a friend I had known since school days (from 1960 in fact). He was a person who, like myself, had a rather narrow focus and range of talent. My first memories of him are of his interest in two things: car number plates and clocks. Providence smiled on him when in adult life he secured a job in the car licensing department of Norfolk County Council, a place that could no doubt make use of his ability to recall car number plates and also his ability to add up in his head at lightning speed. (Compared to myself).

Alan’s regular, reliable and faithful nature in many ways found metaphorical expression in his other chief interest, an interest in clocks, an interest I shared. I remember him constructing a Meccano clock (see above) when he was young, a construction that lay bare the mechanism of clockwork. In later life Alan joined a clock club and repaired and restored traditional clocks in his spare time; he did a excellent job with two of my own clocks.

The home in which he lived with his parents, was quiet and tranquil. My memory of entering the hall of his house was that its peaceful ambiance resounded only to the gentle but firm tick of a grandfather clock displaying the phases of the moon above its dial. This spoke of a regular world, comprehensible and predictable and this was matched by the routine of the household itself. Like me Alan had the good fortune to be born into a stable and generally happy family. Alan and his family were part of my upbringing too. His was the second home I experienced, along with my own, where the regular routine of the household was surrounded by an ordered, well stocked and well kept garden. These were formative experiences for me and the help inculcate the feeling that the cosmos was a truly comprehensible and benign place! It made me feel glad to be alive; there was work to be done probing that cosmos; like a clock it could be disassembled and put back together again. That outlook has never left me, thanks in part to Alan and his home. And yet as his death shows the unexpected occasionally breaks in with evidence that our context is in turn part of a larger context.