Naomi Allen is a PhD researcher in the Department of Archaeology and History, working on the English Cluniac congregation after the Black Death. Standing in the north cloister walk of Benedictine Muchelney Abbey, Somerset on a perfect June day – skylarks and swallows overhead, sunshine turning the standing remains of the south cloister a dusty […]
Writing in 1879, the great Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins bemoaned the recent felling of the poplars at Binsey near Oxford: ‘All felled, felled, are all felled’. To him, those trees represented something precious, a ‘sweet especial rural scene’. Had he been alive in 1615, he might have felt similarly outraged about what had taken […]
The late medieval English cleric gets a pretty raw deal in film, TV and in popular histories. Where they appear at all, they are often ciphers, materialising merely to fulfil some dramatic function such as crowning a usurping monarch, or conducting the marriage of a pair of love-struck aristos. Those priests, bishops, nuns or friars […]
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