Witches in the dock: 10 of Britain's most infamous witch trials
- Thread starter Blackleaf
- Start date
If they don't write it down, then how can it be history? It's prehistory.
Yeah, right.
Not really. Because, like them, we have a lot of it.
As the Anglophile American author Bill Bryson (who has lived in Britain since the Seventies) said in his 1995 book Notes from a Small Island, in which he tells us of his journey around Britain which he made before he decided to go and live in America with his wife and kids (it turned out to be the case that he didn't live in America for long and eventually came back to Britain in 2003 with his family, and is now living in Norfolk and became chancellor of Durham University and a member of the Campaign to Protect Rural England): Do you know that in my Yorkshire village alone there are more seventeenth-century buildings than in the whole of North America?
Here is the whole paragraph:
It sometimes occurs to me that the British have more heritage than is good for them. In a country where there is so astonishingly much of everything, it is easy to look on it as a kind of inexhaustible resource. Consider the numbers: 445,000 listed buildings, 12,000 medieval churches, 1,500,000 acres of common land, 120,000 miles of footpaths and public rights of way, 600,000 known sites of archaeological interest (98 per cent of them with no legal protection). Do you know that in my Yorkshire village alone there are more seventeenth-century buildings than in the whole of North America? And that's just one obscure hamlet with a population comfortably under one hundred. Multiply that by all the other villages and hamlets in Britain and you see that the stockpile of ancient dwellings, barns, churches, pinfolds, walls, bridges and other structures is immense almost beyond counting. There is so much of it everywhere that it's easy to believe that you can take away chunks of it - a half-timbered frontage here, some Georgian windows there, a few hundred yards of ancient hedge or drystone wall - and that there will still be plenty left. In fact, the country is being nibbled to death.
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A few paragraphs later:
I would probably forgive Salisbury anything as long as they never mess with the Cathedral Close. There is no doubt in my mind that Salisbury Cathedral is the single most beautiful structure in England and the close around it the most beautiful space. Every stone, every wall, every shrub is just right. It is as if every person who has touched it for 700 years has only improved it. I could live on a bench in the grounds. I sat on one now and gazed happily for a half-hour at this exquisite composition of cathedral, lawns and solemn houses. I'd have stayed longer except that it began to drizzle, so I got up to have a look around. I went first to the Salisbury Museum in the hope that there would be a kindly person behind the counter who would let me leave my rucksack while I looked at the museum and cathedral. (There was, bless him.) The Salisbury Museum is outstanding and I urge you to go there at once. I hadn't intended to linger, but it was packed with diverting Roman oddments and old pictures and little scale models of Old Sarum and the like, for which I am always a sucker.
I was particularly interested in the Stonehenge Gallery because I was going there on the morrow, so I read all the instructive labels attentively. I know this goes without saying, but it really was the most incredible accomplishment. It took 500 men just to pull each sarsen, plus 100 more to dash around positioning the rollers. Just think about it for a minute. Can you imagine trying to talk 600 people into helping you drag a fifty-ton stone eighteen miles across the countryside, muscle it into an upright position and then saying, 'Right, lads! Another twenty like that, plus some lintels and maybe a couple of dozen nice bluestones from Wales, and we can party'!' Whoever was the person behind Stonehenge was one D ickens of a motivator, I'll tell you that.
From the museum, I wandered across the broad lawn to the cathedral. In the tragic event that you have never been there, I warn you now that Salisbury has long been the most money-keen of English cathedrals. I used to be pretty generally unsympathetic about ecclesiastical structures hectoring visitors for funds, but then I met the vicar of the University Church of St Mary the Virgin in Oxford - the most-visited parish church in England - and learned that its 300,000 annual visitors between them deposit a miserly £8,000 in the collection boxes, since which time I have mellowed considerably. I mean to say, these are glorious structures and deserve our grateful support. But Salisbury, I must say, takes things a good step beyond what I would call discreet solicitation.
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Before each of us was born, there was nothing but story. After each of us dies there is nothing but memory. What is true for the individual is also true for nations.
I read somewhere these people might have been eating contaminated wheat
I don't remember what the contamination was but it might have had the same
effect as the 1960's acid trip. Interesting don't know if it was true but I was
trying to find the site where I read it
I don't remember what the contamination was but it might have had the same
effect as the 1960's acid trip. Interesting don't know if it was true but I was
trying to find the site where I read it