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Significant villages

 

I conducted a church service yesterday at St Mary's, Hardington Mandeville. You get a sense of the historic significance of the church and small village by doing so: the large and well appointed church, the impressive architecture of many of the houses around it, the spacious fields where the keeping of sheep contributed to village income in medieval times. Inside the church is a large neo-Norman arch - or pseudo Norman - paid for by a curate in the mid 1800s. It's partly obscured by choir pews, though there is now no choir at the church. The churchwarden told me the village story that the Rev John Hancock, who funded the work, had a relationship with a local woman in the village, but when the relationship ended, it wasn't only his ardor that cooled, since the arch was never fully finished. It sounds psychologically plausible. A church like this was once the centre of community and cultural life in the village, but now it is so much more marginal. 

  

 

Village reading room

 

In the village there's a small building which is locally called Room@the Park. Its owned by the parish church and has been recently refurbished, using much volunteer help. Its origins were as a reading room for the village, and it was erected in 1902. My voluntary help was used to strip paint off the hardwood board which was over an alcove in the little building. It had been painted over with cream emulsion at some point, but looks much better now, when cleaned back to its original hue. 1902 was the second year of Edward VII's reign, and the local carpenter who made the board pinned two wooden I.I. numerals to mark the occasion. The board is fairly basic, made with hand tools, including chisels, a saw and a hammer. It's perfectly in keeping with the building itself: simple and unpretentious. Sanding it down one week this summer, I became almost fond of it and the accompanying chisel marks used to create some texture around the lettering. It's childlike in its simplicity. It fits that period leading up to the first World War, when village people in 1902 would have felt that life would go on indefinitely in the same old way. What a cataclysm lay ahead of them.

 

  

Roman coins

A neighbour in the village is a detectorist and she unearthed these Roman coins in a nearby field. She said that on another occasion, and in a similar location, she had found Russian coins dating from the early nineteenth century, which were probably lost by merchants who had brought flax over to Somerset when local crops were insufficient. So Russian flax would have ended up in ropes and canvas for the British Navy, since the flax industry had a significant presence in the area. Rope was produced at West Coker at the twine works and flax canvas was woven at Crewkerne and over the Dorset border in Bridport. The Russian guy who lost his coins in a Somerset field must have been pretty annoyed with himself.

 

 

 

SATs

As part of my school governor involvement, I attended a couple of the SATs at our local primary school. Standard Assessment Tests have been on the go in primary schools since the 1990s, so by now a lot of children have experienced them. But until now, I'd never seen how they are administered. Sitting as an observer in a school hall with twenty Year 6 pupils, each at individual desks, separated by a regulated distance from one another, I felt for these eleven year olds. The strict exam protocol reminded me of my school exams, and not pleasantly so. Exam papers were placed on desks, and at an agreed start signal, the children would turn them over and begin, for the specified duration of the exam. No wonder that some children find it stresses them out. I felt nervous myself, especially as I read the questions. Finding examples of adverbial nouns took me a while, as did an example of a past completed tense.  These youngsters do pretty well to cope with this level of examination.   

M R James at Bury St Edmunds

 M R James' Ghost Stories are a treat to read, and can still send a tingle down the spine, couched as they are in James' buttoned up English voice of the 1930s.It's his restraint and economy of words which hints at hidden horrors in the lives of his characters and the things they are gradually and unexpectedly uncovering. The stories were only a sideline to his professional life as a medievalist scholar, but they made his name very well known to the reading public.  Visting Bury St Edmunds recently to see my sister, I took a walk through the ruins of the once large and influential Benedictine monastery in the town, and was pleasantly surprised to see James' name on one of the display boards at the site of the Chapter House. He was a key player in discovering, from his research, that six former abbots of the monastery were buried there. It led to an excavation at the turn of the 1900s. No wonder that James was able to turn his hand to Christmas ghost stories, because he had a large reservoir of detailed medieval knowledge which he was able to creatively re-work. One such story springs to mind:  'The Treasure of Abbot Thomas'.

 

 

Coming of the rain

 Two wood pigeons were enjoying a water bath this morning when I walked the dog in the rain. Some runner beans I'd planted a while ago, have sprouted into life over night. After weeks of dry and hot weather, when temperatures have rivaled or exceeded those in Italy, the parched ground is soaking up the steady rain of today. It's a relief to see.