St Bartholomew the Great
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A congregation of cacophonous starlings chatters vivaciously in the tops of two trees only and because of the birds’ blackness against an indigo sky and because they have chosen for conversation a graveyard by an ancient priory church alongside its sister hospital their chattering seems ominous, filled with dark knowledge. Birds whose ancestors witnessed the
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My first visit I barely made acquaintance, dragged along by a medic and musician boyfriend in the hot summer of ’76; while he discussed diapasons in the organ loft I drooped around the pillars, glad of somewhere cool. My next encounter, more than ten years later, I was ‘depping’ for a friend who sang. Late
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Doctor of Physick, philosopher, you hold a teasing pen; what wisdom would you give us if your hand could move again? Scientific formulae, concepts to explain our mind and frame? – the spread of human knowledge still your worthy aim? Or would you spell out now the name above every name? Have you entered on eternity,
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If we open our story in the year 1530 or thereabouts, we find little to suggest the turmoil to come – apart from the King’s increasing impatience with Rome, and the rise of Lutheranism in parts of Europe. (Soon after Luther’s teachings had been condemned by the Pope in 1521, his works had been publicly burnt
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Percival and Agnes stare from neighbouring frames. She outlived him thirty years, as her lined face tells. Stern in starchy Tudor collars, how remote they seem, as though their eyes would barely recognise our world. Yet underneath, their naked bodies tell another story and inform the formal faces with more sympathy, till hers seems sad,
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Of the burnings which took place in England between 1529 and 1558 by far the largest number occurred in one small area of London – the area known as (West) Smithfield. Just outside the City walls though still within its bounds, not far from Newgate prison, ten minutes’ walk from both the Guildhall and St
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At the shrine of Rahere the cowled monks read the same pages from Isaiah for eternity; little heads cluster like buds around the canopy and a winged creature with bestial but not unfriendly face recalls the monster who seized Rahere in dream before Bartholomew appeared to issue his commission. With our worldview, sophisticated – so we
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what the dead had no speech for, when living, They can tell you, being dead … [T.S. Eliot, Little Gidding] Mildmay, in the dark you look ornate but barely comprehensible, and so dead; the tokens you’ve chosen to be remembered by far less eloquent than the naked Smalpace bodies. Your heavy marble out of place amongst the
Virginia Rounding: Author, editor, proofreader, indexer 