Tag Archives: medieval

Mar 11 2025
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Daily Post, Interior

Manuscript weights

Monday 10th March 2025, 3.35pm (day 4,946)

Manuscript weights, 10/3/25

I am still making my fortnightly Monday visits to the John Rylands Library for my Palaeography (literally, ‘old writing’) course. With two classes after today’s to go, we have reached “Early Modern English Scripts”. I do not know whether this will ever have any impact on my life, but it’s been interesting enough. Manuscript pages should be touched as little as possible, so rather than holding them down by hand, one should use weights, two types of which are seen here. These will be the kind of thing, never seen in other contexts, that some tiny specialist company based in an old mill in Bradford-on-Avon has been manufacturing and selling for a few hundred years.

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Dec 03 2024
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Daily Post, Friend, Portrait

Learning with a Psalm

Monday 2nd December 2024, 2.45pm (day 4,848)

Psalm lecture, 2/12/24

My Monday afternoons as a student continue, though the next one isn’t going to be until February. It crossed my mind today that we are being taught in much the same way as we would have been a thousand years ago, had we been doing much the same in an abbey somewhere. Look at examples of other people’s writing, be told about some idiosyncracies and abbreviations, and then do our best to reproduce it all. We don’t get handed a quill pen and some parchment, which is a shame, but then again these were valuable items in medieval times and perhaps not to be wasted on students just starting out. It does work if one merely wants to learn to write, or rather to copy: but although I admit my Latin is getting a bit better, there is no interpretation here. What does any of this text actually mean, not just in translation, but really mean for anyone’s life? Beats me. But for that, I guess we would have taken different classes.

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Nov 05 2024
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Daily Post, Portrait, Stranger

Inspecting the manuscripts

Monday 4th November 2024, 2.00pm (day 4,820)

Rylands manuscripts, 4/11/24

Another one of my Palaeography classes in the John Rylands Library. We have moved from Hogwarts (the old reading room) upstairs and into the new seminar room, with tape still on the windows. Checking out the manuscripts themselves is always the best bit, and they need to be ready, and cared for — would that students got to sit on such comfortable-looking cushions.

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Jul 03 2024
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Daily Post, Interior, Transport

The Mary Rose

Wednesday 3rd July 2024, 11.15am (day 4,696)

Mary Rose, 3/7/24

The Mary Rose went down in the Solent during a battle in 1545 and then sat on the sea floor for 437 years until what remained of it was raised in 1982. I remember watching this event on TV in my teens and then not long after, on my only previous visit to Portsmouth, visiting a mouldering hulk that was hanging in a big shed being sprayed constantly with water to stop it drying out catastrophically. Four decades on and the Mary Rose‘s transition from the mud of the sea floor to hanging off a wall has been completed, and what we’re all rewarded with is one of the most interesting museums I’ve ever visited, for sure. The amount of stuff — not just weapons, but personal effects, foodstuffs, even the skeleton of the ship’s pet ratcatching dog — that came up with the wreck is astonishing. Not an easy thing to photograph with my mediocre equipment, but I gave it a shot.

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Aug 08 2016
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Art and architecture, Daily Post

Conwy Castle

Monday 8th August 2016, 10.55am (day 1,810)

Conwy Castle, 8/8/16

Conwy is a few miles from Llandudno. First-ever visit there today, and what a beautiful and interesting place — there were many potential candidates for today’s photo. But in the end, had to go with the castle. This is premium castle. Built, along with its accompanying town walls, in only four years, in the 13th century by Edward I. Public engineering projects in this epoch take longer (look at Manchester city centre for instance). Then again this was a fortress of occupation: no Welsh were allowed to live within the Conwy walls.

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Feb 23 2014
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Daily Post, Portrait, Stranger

Charge!

Saturday 22nd February 2014, 3.10pm (day 912)

Charge! 22/2/14

Joe and I went to York today, which is certainly the most interesting place easily reachable from my house (we have a direct train), and ranks up with Edinburgh and Oxford as one of Britain’s best and most attractive (but also busiest) cities. Today there was some kind of medievalist festival on, and these guys were going through their paces for the cameraman and director to the right. I would like there to be better light on this shot but I think it captures their movement pretty well.

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