Hnefatafl is an ancient board game that we date to the Vikings. It is like chess but different. Chess is symmetrical in pieces and in aim whilst this game is asymmetrical with each player attempting to achieve a different goal.
White represents a king and his bodyguard who are ambushed by black. White must escape whilst black wants to capture him. If black can surround him on four sides he is captured. If he escapes to the corner square he escapes. The kings side has warriors and a king whilst the ambushers are only represented by warriors.
Pictured is myself and a friend playing in the War Memorial Park in Coventry. We had several games and it was all fun because I won.
I have just got home from a dinner at the Old Mill in Baginton where I met a long term Facebook friend from Sardinia. Massimiliano Schirru and I have been friend on Facebook for over ten years and the other day I thought I would give him a call to have a chat. It turns out that his English is far better than my Italian and we talked about his Roman Fort and upcoming visit to the UK. Obviously I invited him to Coventry.
Our guest is in the enviable position of owning his own Roman Fort which took up most of the conversation. We discussed the Lunt Roman Fort and the challenges facing the heritage industry. Max is well connected in the heritage industry and I learned a lot about German and Polish Roman Forts which operate in the same way as his own and Lunt. At eight I waved him off wishing him a happy time in Britain taking in our Roman inheritance.
Coventry is blessed with cathedrals (Cathedra?) in that it has three of them. Of the first only a few ruins remain and of the third it stands but the third remains a ruin in memory of the Coventry Blitz of November 1940.
St Michaels was built in the between the 14th and 15th centuries in impressive red sandstone. The spire is the third highest in England and the choir sat on meisercords showing the famous Dance of Death. Nothing remains of these carvings beyond an account held by the city archives. It was an impressive Gothic church covered in carvings with wonderful stained glass windows. It was raised to Cathedral status in 1918 and served in that capacity till its destruction in the 1940s.
In 1940 it was destroyed during the Coventry Blitz by incendiary bombs. In an act of defiance against the Nazi hate Provest Richard Howard had the words “Father Forgive” inscribed behind the alter and used his Christmas address (Christmas Underfire), broadcast which was recorded in the bombed out ruins, to the world, to call for peace and reconciliation.
Housed in the ruins are the Coventry Blitz museum which I regard as one of the two second best museums in Coventry. A wonderful collection in an intimate space, well worth a visit.
The ruins of the Cathedral are a meditative and reflective space remaining holy ground and a national monument not to war or reprisal but to reconciliation and peace. If you’re visiting Coventry the Cathedral ruins are well worth a trip.
One of the best museums in Coventry is the Phil Silvers Archival Museum situated in Fargo Village. Fargo is home to a number of great shows, a fantastic barber shop and one of the smallest museums in the world. Size really has very little to do with the success of a museum. I have been to some huge, famous and well funded museums that have left me cold. The Phil Silvers museum is clearly a labour of love that rewards a visit and return visits.
If you are anything like me you grew up watching Bilko on the tv or remember Silvers from his appearance in Carry on “Follow that Camel”. He was a fantastic comic actor whose Phil Silvers show ran for a record breaking forty nine years. Modern admirers include Mark Hamill, Phil Jupiters and many others.
The collection itself is donated largely by the Silvers family and contains personal and professional objects associated with Silvers. These are lovingly displayed in a professional but not cold modern style allowing the visitor to discover them personally making visiting an intimate experience. It’s this personal, intimate and authentic experience that makes the display so effective putting it on a par with the Blitz museum and maybe even the Lunt.
Opening hours are 11am to 5pm Wednesday to Sunday.
Inside Holy Trinity church in the city centre of Coventry is an impressive Medieval Doom painting. Now, I think that Coventry first should be embarrassed by the amount and quality of Medieval remains there are so many and they are so impressive! The city is crawling with Green Men, wood woses and blood curdling gargoyles but Holy Trinity stands out as a church with everything.
The Doom painting is probably about three hundred years old and was ironically preserved by reformers who painted over it in white wash. It was rediscovered in the Victorian era and restored in the 1990s by specialist restorers who have made this wonderful example of Medieval art accessible for us today. It is moments like this that I live for. I love seeing things that people throughout the past have seen. This links us back to our ancestors who came to this church to practice their religion and be awed by the structure. Imagine living in a one story house outside Coventry in one of the villages. On market day coming into the city, trading, being entertained and then entering Holy Trinity. It is a huge structure made of stone and in the Medieval period reverberating to sung masses. The walls would not be bare but painted and like me, I imagine them staring at the dramatic Doom painting.
The Holy Trinity Doom painting is one of sixty known to exist in the country. It is an allegory of the last day known as Dooms day. This painting shows Christ front and centre, surrounded by the Apostles, raising his pierced hands in judgment, note the book of evidence and the orb symbolising Christs kingship over the world and over the living and the dead. The dead are being raised from their tombs in the left hand corner from which like the living they will have to give an account for their lives. Featured are two scrolls which issue an invitation to the righteous “Come you blessed of my Father” and a command to the damned “Depart from me, you who are cursed, into eternal fire!” Leading the redeemed into heaven is the Pope who enters by the door beside St Peter and Christ whilst Mary the virgin mother of Christ presents a scroll and bears her breast in intercession for the damned. These damned can be seen on the right hand side in chains being led to hells mouth. Some are already there, being licked by flames whilst a group of wealthy women carrying ale jugs are wandering oblivious to the danger hand in hand with the devils to hell.
This gem of the Medieval world can be seen in Holy Trinity Church which opens on a Saturday at 11am. Other sights of interest include a fabulous collection of Meisercords, Green Men and Victorian paintings. Well worth a visit and the evening service is sublime.
I often chide myself for my lack of mindfulness. Last month I was on holiday in Sorento and now I can only remember snippets of my week. I think to myself, did I really just wander around one of the most attractive places in the world not paying attention?
As most of you know I teach the Stone Age in schools and I pretty sure that our hunter gatherer ancestors were far more observant and in the moment than we are. I can hardly remember which schools I was at last week, hunter gatherers in contrast must have held enormous and complicated maps in their heads remembering where useful and fruitful trees were, where the animals went and where the dangers lay. It makes me ashamed to be wandering around like a mindless fool compared to them.
Archaeology is the science (sic) of things. It is a science of material that is lost, thrown away or placed on purpose in an inaccessible place. From the thing and its context a narrative can be created that sheds light on the past. I have done archaeology but prefer the historical activity of creating the narrative more.
Archaeology works best when you are dealing with a materialistic society. It is easier to draw conclusions when there is a lot of material to work with such as the grave of an Anglo-Saxon king or even a Anglo-Saxon peasants burial. These contain the remains and grave goods. Societies that don’t bury their dead with grave goods are far more tricky not least if you draw the conclusion that more grave goods means that the person was richer. Consider the grave of Medieval Christian knight verses the grave of the afore mentioned peasant.
If I lost all my possessions today I would be on a par with our earliest ancestors in the Palaeolithic era. These people were nomadic hunter gatherers who followed the seasons and the herds through the landscape. They pose a significant challenge to archaeology because they were a non-materialistic throw away society. First they were non-materialistic because they were nomadic. They needed to travel light and could not be encumbered with material possessions. Second they were a throw away society in that if they needed a flint tool they could pick up a nodule of flint, knapp a tool and then after it had been used throw it away. In fact at Boxgrove we can see where they knapped a handaxe, where it was used and where it was discarded afterwards. They were a throw away society to such an extent that stone tools are regularly found and in such numbers that museums are not interested in collecting them!
Jesus said “do not worry about tomorrow because it has its own problems…” and that is sound advice. Tomorrow like today will have a leaky boiler, a car to charge up, clothes to wash and food to make so Ill take the Lords advice and not worry about it.
All I want from tomorrow is that I won’t doom scroll on my phone, waste time watching nonsense tv or sit around doing nothing. I hate wasting time, I’ve wasted enough time in my life and now I don’t want to waste another minute.
So to square the advice and embrace my ambition my number one priority for tomorrow is to be productive. To leave the world a little bit better tomorrow night than I found it tomorrow morning.
My great regret from my school days is not paying attention in school. I do not know where it came from but the idea of paying attention, doing homework and trying hard was lame and though I was never a bad boy I was one who did not engage with my education.
Undiagnosed dyslexia certainly had something to do with it but I had certain blocks and barriers that prevented me from taking my work seriously. I hated maths, disliked English and was uninterested and unmoved by geography and languages which I now heartily regret.
I regret not engaging with my German lessons, not doing my homework or practicing. Somewhere along the line I got the idea that it wasn’t interesting or important. Not least that any German who I met spoke English much better than I an English speaker could. Now in my forties I recognise that my life is lesser because I can only speak one language fluently. I see now the value of other languages and have started very tentatively to work on my German, Latin and Old English.
This is obviously a professional decision because one of the topics I study is Old English and both Latin and Old English will support that.
Historytalker 