The Happiest Medievalist

Or, St. George and My Tweed Hat

To celebrate this post’s destination, today we will feature British spelling.

This year I am known as the medievalist of the group (or The Most Awesome Medievalist, should you prefer my Superlative title, although I’m actually not that good a medievalist). My theory is that I’ve been nerding out about things medieval more this year because I’m not teaching the Middle Ages like I was last year. As I haven’t been given a safe outlet for this particular area of expertise,* it’s been manifesting itself outside of class rather often. Luckily, I live in Europe, ‘where the history comes from’, to quote Eddie Izzard, and wherein it’s much easier to travel than from without. I’m taking full advantage of both aspects there, and dragging people along with me.

As I mentioned about this time last year, I wanted to go to York or Edinburgh for spring break this year. I briefly considered changing my plans to travel with some of the others, just for the sake of being with them, but then I realised that I did really, really want to go to York. I started to look into flights and hostels, and along the way I somehow managed to convince one of my friends, Bear, to come along with me. (By ‘somehow’ I mean I submitted a proposed itinerary with dates and prices, and an annotated list of sites to visit. Apparently the things that sealed the deal were me admitting that I’d cry in York Minster and singing along to Celtic Thunder’s version of ‘Caledonia’. Let me tell you that I love you, and I think about you all the time…) And somewhere along the way the plan became to fly into London, take a train to York, and then travel to Edinburgh, from whence we would fly home.

For the weeks between buying our tickets and going, I passed random facts about our destinations on to Bear, and she practiced her Yorkshire and Scottish accents. Before we left, I also started compiling a list of tasks for her. The first task: Make sure I actually came back to Slovakia. Others included not letting me talk myself out of buying an issue of Top Gear magazine, and not letting me fall asleep on a bus/train/airplane with my forehead against the seat in front of me, as it inevitably leads to a sore forehead. We also prepared a playlist of pertinent music. I don’t have very much medieval-type music at all, so the playlist tends more toward the Scottish. In the end, the existence of the playlist did not keep us from walking around York singing Neil Diamond’s ‘Sweet Caroline.’

(Just before we left, a brewery in Scotland came out with the world’s strongest beer, the 41% ABV Sink the Bismarck! When I read an article about it and saw that it was from Scotland, I thought that if we saw any on the trip, we could buy a bottle and bring it back for one of our beer-loving friends. Then I checked BrewDog’s website and saw that a 330mL bottle cost £40; whereupon I informed my friend that if I saw some I would take a picture, but that was all he’d be getting from me. I do not even like my best-beloved brother enough to buy him a £40, 330mL bottle of beer. If it were a liter, that might be a different story.)

Now, if you’ve known me longer than five minutes, you know that I like old stuff, and that I enjoy walled cities. York covers those bases, but I’ve only wanted to go there for about two years. On the other hand, I’ve wanted to go to Scotland for as long as I can remember. I’ve begun to theorise that there are a limited number of dreams-come-true that one person can experience at once before that person ruptures something important. Going to Scotland puts me right about at the limit.

I don’t know if it’s fair to call it ‘spring’ break when it happens the last week in February. What I do know is that we managed to visit the UK when it is experiencing its coldest winter in 30 years. The Yorkshire Post’s national forecast for 23 February: ‘A sunny and frosty start in Scotland, Northern Ireland and northern England, although it will cloud over later in the south of these areas. Elsewhere, dull. Rain, drizzle and hill snow in southern England will edge north across Wales and the Midlands later.’ That ‘Elsewhere, dull’ is brilliant. What this meant for us was that we were snowed on 200% more than I had expected to be, because for some reason I thought that anywhere I could go would automatically be warmer than Slovakia. That was a silly thing to think, especially as we were bound well north of home.

York is in northeastern England. It’s the capital of Yorkshire, and sits between two rivers, the Foss and the Ouse (‘ooze’). It is a city of proper superlatives: It’s called the most haunted city in England; York Minster is the largest medieval cathedral in Northern Europe, home to about half of the medieval stained glass in England, and its Great East Window is the size of a tennis court. And so on and so forth. On our first full day we walked around in the snow before heading to York Minster for service. There were very few people out, even though it wasn’t terribly early, and we got to see things without other tourists that would later be crowded with them.

As I’m sure you gathered, visiting the Minster was one of the main goals of the trip. The first time I saw it was when our bus from Leeds was approaching York. We were sitting in the front and on the top of a double-decker, so we had an excellent view of the Minster all lit up at night. I don’t think I really believed I was there until I saw it. And yes, I teared up when I saw it. York Minster is a church, a cathedral (the seat of a bishop), and a minster (originally a community like a monastery, but now just meaning an important church). York is second only to Canterbury Cathedral in terms of importance in the Anglican Church. It’s an amazing building; it took 251 years to build the whole thing. Imagine working on something that even your grandchildren wouldn’t live to see completed. The Minster has been damaged by fires three times in the recent past, because the roof is still wood. But, by the grace of God, it’s survived. We went to two services there on Sunday morning, and then returned as tourists on Monday afternoon. There were about 20 people at the first service, which was held in St John’s Chapel in the north transept. The rest of the church was quiet, and even though he wasn’t loud at all, the reverend’s voice echoed in the building. The next service featured the choir of Girton College, Cambridge, and that’s really why we went, to hear them sing and to get to sing ourselves. All told, we probably spent about five hours in the Minster, though one could easily spend that much time just looking at it.

In the west end of the cathedral there is a large stained glass window. Some of the stone tracery in the arch of the window is in the shape of a heart, and is known as the Heart of Yorkshire. High above the ground is a gallery that once held a great many statues, but during the Reformation, many of the statues were destroyed, or at least beheaded. On the north side of the arcade a red-and-gold dragon’s head (visible in the photo below) juts out into space. The dragon was a crane that may have been used to lift the lid of a saint’s tomb in order to display his bones on holy days. Almost directly opposite the dragon is one statue who wasn’t beheaded: St George. George is my favourite saint, and the patron saint of England. I have a St George medal and I wore it for the entire trip, even when we were in Scotland.
On the opposite end of the church is the Great East Window. The window is highly detailed, even though it is nearly impossible to get close enough to make out the details; it’s said that they are meant for God’s eyes. I was especially looking forward to seeing this window, since I’d heard so much about it and because it is so very big. Imagine my disappointment when our volunteer guide told us that the window had been removed to be cleaned and restored. Instead of seeing this great window, we got to see a huge photograph of it. The photograph is the largest digital print in the world, and special printers had to be built to produce it, which is kind of cool; but I really would rather have seen the actual window.

Another highlight of the Minster is the quire screen. The screen, which separates the quire from the west end, is decorated with statues of all of the English kings from the Normans until the Minster was finished. Many of the kings are rather similar-looking. The most detailed is King Henry VI, who was king when the screen was created. I was a bit disappointed by the depiction of Richard the Lionheart, who’s probably my favourite English monarch and who, despite having kind of a cool forked beard, looks somewhat vacant; but William the Conqueror is scowling and looks much more impressive.

We managed to arrive in York on the final day of the Jorvik Viking Festival. York was first a Roman settlement, Eboracum,** and then a Viking one, Jorvik. Every February the Jorvik Viking Centre hosts a festival with a variety of events. We visited a market where traders were selling everything from chain-mail jewellery to animal skins. Most of the traders were dressed in what appeared to be fairly accurate period costume, and a large number of them seemed to be Polish. It was surreal to have to edge around a large group of large people dressed as Vikings.

Another of the famous medieval facets of York is the Shambles. The Shambles is simply a short street, now mostly full of tourist-trap shops. In the Middle Ages, it was home to York’s butchers, and most, if not all, of the buildings are original. This means that some of them are half-timbered, and parts sag, and the upper storeys overhang the lower. This is all true of all of the old buildings in York. I’m not sure there’s a true right angle in the whole city. We walked the Shambles several times, but the best was on Sunday morning, before anyone else was out.
Now I’m sure you’re thinking, ‘If York was walled, and a fairly prosperous medieval city, surely it had a castle. Tell us about the castle.’ Of course you’re right, and I shall tell you. Shortly after the aforementioned Conqueror did his thing in Hastings and was crowned king, he had to finish the conquest of the rest of England. This took a few years, and William built forts in the areas he’d successfully subdued. York Castle began as one of those forts. It was a motte-and-bailey castle: a tower atop a manmade hill. The tower was originally wood, but was later replaced by one of stone. Still later, more buildings were added. Today, the tower is all that remains of the castle, and it’s known as Clifford’s Tower. The tower is quatrefoil in shape--that is, it’s not round, but is like a four-leaf clover. In its current form, the tower is not very tall, and has no roof. It has a nice view of the Minster from the walkway round the top, though. This is all well and good, but it’s important to mention a certain story from the town’s history. In 1190, a mob encouraged by some jerk called Richard Malebisse forced around 150 of the Jews of York to hide in the tower. But they still were not safe there, and, rather than be forcibly converted or killed, they chose to commit suicide. There is a plaque at the base of the hill that tells this story, and cites Isaiah 42.11: ‘Let them give glory to the LORD and proclaim his praise in the islands.’ DOESN’T THAT MAKE YOU FEEL LIKE A JERK, RICHARD MALEBISSE?

As I mentioned earlier, York is supposedly the most haunted city in England. There are several groups that offer ghost walks of the city, and Bear and I decided that even if we are a little bit chicken about such things, we probably ought to go on a ghost tour. There are at least three different ghost tours offered in York, each declaring itself the original and/or best, so how does one decide which tour to take? We went with the scientific approach of taking the one that started closest to our hostel. Our guide took us through the streets and alleys and told some interesting stories about occurrences in York. It wasn’t too scary, and the guide made it humourous as well, but it was creepy enough to make me walk quickly past some strangers on the way.

One thing I was disproportionately excited about was going to Boots. You may remember that I discovered the British drugstore chain Boots last year in Belfast. I realised that I’d be able to go back and stock up on sundries and print pictures. Needless to say, I was thrilled at the prospect. I reckon I went into four different Boots locations over the course of the trip. We also went into WH Smith, a bookstore and stationer. There we began to eat Cadbury Creme Eggs. Soon we were having an egg-a-day ration.

Not too far from York are the ruins of Fountains Abbey, destroyed during Henry VIII’s Dissolution of the Monasteries. While I would have dearly loved to go there, it seemed too difficult to manage by public transport. Luckily the gardens of the Yorkshire Museum (currently closed for remodeling) are home to some smaller ruins, those of St Mary’s Abbey. This abbey was built in 1266. Only one section of wall is still standing, along with some piers of columns that would have supported the walls. The footprints of the other piers are in the ground as well. The abbey would have been a good-sized building in its day, judging from the height of the remaining wall and the space between the columns.

In my pre-reading about York I learned of a place called the Merchant Adventurers’ Hall. The name alone delighted me, and I added it to the list of places I had to go. The hall is one of the only surviving medieval guildhalls in England. The Merchant Adventurers were (and still are) tradespeople, and the hall was where they had meetings and where much of their charity work took place. Besides having a wicked cool name, the Merchant Adventurers also have a pretty awesome crest, with winged horses as supporters and the motto Dieu nous donne bonne aventure--God grants us good venturing. This hall too is half-timbered, although the plaster is dark butter yellow, rather than white. Inside, oak-beamed ceiling is the most salient feature of the main hall. The building houses many artefacts from the guild’s history, including a rare 15th-century ‘evidence’ chest. The undercroft of the main hall has the guild’s chapel, four brick ovens, and clear examples of the all-wood joinery of the construction. It also has high-water marks from some of the more recent floods. That of the 1982 flood was just below my waist, for those of you familiar with how tall I am.
It turned out to be nearly as inexpensive to take a train from York to Edinburgh as it would have been to take a coach, and only half as much time, so we gladly got on a train. The train travelled much nearer the coast than I’d expected it to. It stopped in Durham, and we were able to look over that city and see its cathedral in the near distance, and I made up my mind to return to visit it; we went through Newcastle-upon-Tyne, with its huge football stadium; and we passed a few beautiful coastal villages before reaching Berwick-upon-Tweed, to which I will someday return and spend the rest of my life. Berwick is the last town in England before crossing into Scotland. As the name implies, the River Tweed forms the border there. Unfortunately, we seemed to be too far east to see Hadrian’s Wall, for which I had been keeping a vigilant watch.

Edinburgh is the capital of Scotland. Although Scotland was united with England way back in the 17th century with the Act of Union, it was granted its own Parliament in the late 1990s, and there is a nationalist movement which may see the country gain independence in the future. It’s a bit ironic that the Scottish Parliament, which is kind of a nutty building, is directly opposite the Palace of Holyroodhouse, the Queen’s residence in Edinburgh. The day we arrived, Princess Anne was also due to come to the Palace to stay for a while.

Edinburgh is divided into two parts. The Old Town has everything up to the 18th century, and the New Town was designed and built during the late Georgian period. For that reason, the New Town is on a nice grid, with regular blocks, rather than Old Town’s organic and unorganised rambling, with wynds and closes leading off the main streets. The mainest main street is the Royal Mile, which stretches from Holyrood up to the castle.

When we’d dropped off our bags at our hostel, we set out to get tea and have a general look round. We walked down the Royal Mile and wandered into Canongate kirkyard, in large part because the sign out front said the economist Adam Smith was buried there. We didn’t locate his grave, but we did see the grave of Robert Fergusson, a poet whom Robert Burns admired so greatly that he wrote the epitaph for Fergusson’s headstone. After that we had tea in a café. Our scones came warm and split open with jam and clotted cream. It was delicious, and it turned out to be quite good that we fuelled up.

Beyond the palace, which we declined to enter as it cost nearly £11, is Holyrood Park. I don’t know how big the entire park is, but from what we saw, it seems to consist mostly of hilly terrain. Bear wanted to go up a steep hill, which, as I am much older than she is, I didn’t think I’d be able to manage; so we parted ways, to meet up in an hour and a half. I walked up a gentler hill to the ruins of St Anthony’s Chapel and looked out on the city and its surroundings, including the Firth of Forth, an inlet of the North Sea. This venture hadn’t taken very long, so I turned up the path that ascended further, all the way to Arthur’s Seat, the highest point in Edinburgh at about 250 meters. I kept saying to myself, ‘I’ll just see what the view is like from the next ridge,’ until I’d gone high enough where I began to say, ‘I should probably just go all the way up.’ Of course, I had to argue with myself, saying that I’d never be on time to meet Bear if I went all the way up; but eventually I convinced myself with the idea that Bear would prefer it if I went up and were late to me being on time for not having gone up. So up I went. From the top I had a good view of the area, including the snowy mountains off to the east. I managed to get down without taking a tumble, and Bear assured me that I’d been right to go.
That evening we ended up having dinner at the fantastically-named World’s End. Rejoicing in the possibility of beef, I had steak and ale pie; Bear had haggis with neeps and tatties; and we each had a pint of Strongbow. Before I rhapsodise over cider in the UK, let me explain the latter meal. Haggis is, of course, the food most closely associated with Scotland, except perhaps for Walker’s shortbread. It’s often served with turnips and potatoes, both mashed. Now, cider. I had somewhere around seven pints on this trip, and all but one of them were cider. Most were Strongbow, which is certainly available in cans in the US, and possibly on tap as well; one of them was a bottle of organic cider which shall remain nameless as it was crap; and possibly my favourite was a pint of ‘traditional scrumpy’ at the Jolly Judge near the Writers’ Museum in Edinburgh. The scrumpy, as you can see, was a cloudy, noncarbonated cider. A pint of that and a toasted sandwich with chicken, cheddar, and Branston pickle might’ve been my favourite meal of the whole week.

On Wednesday morning we took a free tour of the city. Of course, this was the day that it snowed all morning, and our tour started at 11. Our guide was called Seth, or, as he put it, “‘Seth, Seth, Seth, where is your Scottish accent?’” (he’s from Durham, but went to St Andrew’s University and has lived in Edinburgh for about eight years) and “‘Seth, Seth, Seth, how can this tour be free?’” (the guides work on tips, so we paid what we thought three hours of his time was worth). Seth told us a number of interesting and amusing facts about Edinburgh, including the story of Burke and Hare, the murderers who supplied corpses to the medical faculty for dissection and about whom a movie is currently being filmed on location in Scotland, and about the Stone of Destiny, about which more later. Burke and Hare were denizens of the Grassmarket, below the castle. The Grassmarket was also the site of most of the city’s executions, including those of the Covenanters, the Scots who protested the influence of the Anglican Church on their faith. We visited Greyfriars Kirkyard and saw the Covenanters’ prison, where over 400 were held in open cells during the winter and tortured, and the grave of John Gray and the memorial to his dog, Bobby. Greyfriars Bobby, as he’s usually called, was a small terrier who sat by his master’s grave for 14 years. Although he could not be buried next to Gray, Bobby is buried just outside the churchyard, and his memorial is the first thing you see on entering the grounds. The tour concluded in Princes Street Gardens, the area between the Old and New Towns, below the castle.

The Writers’ Museum is dedicated to three of Scotland’s most famous writers, Sir Walter Scott, Robert Burns, and Robert Louis Stevenson. There I learned that Scott helped rediscover the Scottish crown jewels, that Burns was pretty cute, and that Stevenson had his portrait painted by John Singer Sargent. The museum is in Old Town, but the huge monument to Scott is over in the New Town. I started trying to read Ivanhoe once, and only got through the part where they discuss the difference between the words ‘cow’ and ‘beef’; but Scott was a pretty big deal. And being in Scotland and walking the hills in Holyrood Park made me want to reread Stevenson’s Kidnapped, even though I just read it again last spring. I felt more amiably inclined toward Alan Breck while in Scotland than I’d felt before.

At about the halfway point of the Royal Mile is St Giles’ Kirk, with the Heart of Midlothian nearby. First, the Heart. Near the church there used to be a tolbooth, which was where courts met, taxes were collected, and prisoners were held. The tolbooth no longer stands--though one down the Mile, Canongate Tolbooth, still stands and is the home to the free museum The People’s Story--but the foundations are marked in the cobblestones by metal-edged stones. Where the front door was, there is now a heart, the Heart of Midlothian. Seth pointed out that because no-one liked the tolbooth or what happened there, the people of Edinburgh now walk around the Heart, and some spit on it for luck.

To be terribly pedantic and technical, St Giles’ Kirk is not a cathedral, although it’s often called that. A cathedral is the seat of a bishop, and the Church of Scotland has no bishopric. St Giles’ is instead the High Kirk of the Church of Scotland, kirk being the Scottish word for church. Its steeple is open, a curious design that I seem to recall seeing on a church in Newcastle as well. (By the by, if anyone can recommend a good book on sacred architecture in the whole of Europe, let me know. I feel the need for some education in this area. If I hadn’t just finished reading The Pillars of the Earth I don’t think I’d be able to correctly name any parts of a church.) Inside St Giles’ is the Thistle Chapel, spiritual home of the Order of the Thistle. The chapel includes at least one carving of an angel playing the bagpipes.

One thing that Bear really wanted to do was hear live music, and one thing I felt it necessary to do was drink whisky, so we went out in search of a place to do those things. Eventually we wandered in to the Royal Oak, a small pub where two men were playing guitars in one corner. We sat on small stools and listened to one of them sing for a while. He had a good voice and a good accent and we really enjoyed it. We also drank some Highland Park which, according to the barmaid, was neither very peaty nor very sweet, for what that’s worth.
Edinburgh Castle is built on an extinct volcano. In theory that sounds like a pretty good place to build a castle; and then you look at it and you realise how good a place to build a castle it really is. The rock is naturally dark, and when it’s wet it’s even darker. It’s very daunting to look up at. As with most castles, the site has been home to a number of fortified structures over the years, from wooden ones to the present complex. The castle has only been infiltrated once, and that was by the Scots themselves, when the English held it. Even then, the Scots had to enlist the help of a former guard at the castle, who had found a way to sneak down the rock to visit his girlfriend in the town below. Led by the guard and under the command of a nephew of Robert Bruce, the small Scots force got in and burned the wooden castle so that the English would not be able to retake it.

The oldest existing building in the castle is St Margaret’s Chapel, which was built in the 12th century. It’s quite small, with a whitewashed interior and a few modern stained glass windows. Then there are the palace buildings, with the rooms where James VI of Scotland and I of England was born and where the Honours are kept; and the newest building is the war memorial, commemorating all of the Scots who died in all of the branches of service. There was also an exhibit on the castle as it was used as a prison, during several British wars.

The most important thing that I needed to see at the castle was the Stone of Destiny. (Bear and I tried to recount this story to everyone else, but we couldn’t do it as well as Seth did.) One of the best things about the Stone is its name itself: the STONE OF DESTINY! It just sounds so epic. The Stone is also called the Coronation Stone or the Stone of Scone. It’s the stone on which all of the rulers of Scotland, England, and Britain have been crowned for quite a while now. Some scholars have suggested that the monarch was meant to have put his or her feet on the stone. In contrast, the Westminster Abbey coronation throne placed the stone beneath the royal posterior. As to the stone’s origins, some believe that it was the stone that Jacob used as a pillow after he wrestled with God in the Old Testament, and some believe it was brought from Ireland long, long ago. The stone was captured during the reign of the English king Edward I. It was taken to London and stayed there from the 14th century until nearly the end of the 20th century. In 1950, a group of young Scottish nationalists devised a plan to inspire their countrymen by returning the stone to Scotland. This involved driving from Glasgow to London, breaking into Westminster Abbey on Christmas, accidentally breaking the stone into two unequal bits, almost getting caught by the guard, hiding the larger piece in a field and taking the smaller piece back to Scotland, meeting with a good nationalist stonemason who’d help them repair it (‘That’s my favourite stone!’), returning to Kent to dig up the piece they’d hidden, getting the Travellers who’d encamped over where the stone was buried to let them dig it up, covering it with a tartan blanket and having someone sit on it all the way back to Scotland, taking it around the country to show the people it was back, and then finally taking it to Arbroath Abbey, where the Declaration of Arbroath was signed in 1320 to declare Scotland’s status as an independent nation. Police recovered the stone in Arbroath and took it back to England. In 1996 the stone was returned to Scotland in an attempt by the Conservative party to garner votes up north. The Scots accepted the stone but did not give votes in return. Although the stone is now in Edinburgh Castle with the Scottish crown, sceptre, and sword, it will be transported to London whenever a new monarch needs to be crowned. Since the stone’s return, Scotland has been granted its own Parliament, which some see as a sign that the country might indeed be moving towards independence from the United Kingdom. Honestly, it’s not a very impressive object. It’s a fairly big rectangular block, with a rusty old iron ring in each end. The interesting thing is the idea that it might not be the real stone. The real one, some people say, was actually marble, and was hidden long ago. Or the real one might not have been on display in Westminster; or the real one might not have been returned there. What tantalising possibilities.

On Thursday night, our last night before the homeward journey, we ate dinner at a chip shop, and then went out for a pint. We ended up at the Royal Mile Tavern, where we saw several people also staying at our hostel. We got seats at the bar and parked there for three pints’ worth of time. I was prepared to drink as much cider as humanly possible, in preparation for the next four months, when none would be readily available. Sitting at the bar allowed me to observe the bartenders in action, which I enjoyed as I’ve always had a secret desire to be a bartender. One drink in particular caught my interest. It was made with some amount of Fosters and a mysterious red syrup from a large, unlabelled bottle, and eventually I asked one of the bartenders what it is. She told me that it was a snakebite, made with half lager, half cider, and blackcurrant cordial. I had to try this, and found that it was quite good. Alas, while both lager and blackcurrant syrup are available here in Slovakia, cider isn’t; and while lager and cider and available at home, I don’t know how easy it would be to find blackcurrant syrup. Perhaps I’ll have to smuggle some of that home in order to recreate a snakebite.

On Friday we had some more walking-around time before we had to catch the bus to the airport. We got there with plenty of time to spare, especially as our flight ended being delayed about two and a half hours, and got a nice pasty before as our last meal. I was sad to leave, of course, and have to come back to the real world, although I missed the others. When we finally got back to Slovakia, the best part--aside from getting to my own bed and all--was that when the immigration agent in Bratislava checked my passport, she remembered us from when we were leaving the country the week before. Welcome home, girls.

*As my colleagues know, my areas of expertise are medieval stuff, odd phrases in British English, and pop culture. I’ve never seen that movie, but I know who was in it and what it’s about.
**This is the reason why one of my diplomas, the supercool all-Latin one, says “Neo Eboracum” on it.