Flint Castle, Wales

Flint castle lies on the west bank of the river Dee, on the road leading to the north coast of Wales. It was one of the earliest of Edward I's Welsh castles, built in his plan to subdue and hold the rugged north of the province. From summer 1277, workmen were being recuited: diggers, masons, carpenters and smiths; and timber and stone obtained. Accounts survive showing the payment given for wages and materials; and by the time work was completed at the end of 1286, the total cost came to about £7,000. It was actually one of the cheapest and least elaborate of Edward's Welsh castles.
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The castle takes the form of an inner ward, exactly square in shape, with round towers at the four corners. This is the north-east tower:-

 and the south-west one. Apart from the southern section, the curtain walls have been reduced to ground level.

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The most noted feature is the massive south-eastern tower, which was designed to stand as a separate fortress if needed, being separated from the rest of the castle by a moat, and reached by a drawbridge.

South of the main castle, and separated by a moat, was a large outer ward. Originally the River Dee flowed by the northern and western walls, but it has since silted up considerably, and is now some distance away

Flint was the scene of a crucial and epoch-making incident in English history in August 1399, when King Richard II, returning from Ireland, was intercepted and taken there by his cousin, Henry Bolingbroke, and held as effectively a prisoner. Richard was compelled to abdicate in favour of Henry, and taken to Ponterfract castle in Yorkshire, where he was presumably murdered soon afterwards.

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Social Distancing!.

Social distancing enforced on artists!
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Annunciation for 2020

March 25th is the Feast of the Annunciation, when the Archangel Gabriel appeared to the Virgin Mary. In this painting by Botticelli, Mary is telling Gabriel to retreat to the recommended 2 metres distance. 
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Women's Work

The woman on the right is carding wool; that is, working it between two instruments like large hairbrushes covered with little hooks, to disentangle it and ensure the fibres all point in the same way, producing a kind of fuffy sausage.
   The lady on the left is spinning the result on what was called the "Great Wheel", an important invention of the later Middle Ages. 
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Spinning was always done by women, and was their main occupation after farmwork, which is why an unmarried woman became known as a Spinster. Weaving cloth was usually done by men; but a woman weaver was known as a Webster. Other surnames originating in the woollen industry include Fuller and Dyer. Fulling involved trampling the woollen cloth to pre-shrink it; using "fuller's earth" in the process. After this, cloth would be stretched out on a "tenter frame" to preserve its shape whilst drying: hence the phrase "to be on tenterhooks".
   
   From the earliest mediaeval times, raw wool and woollen cloth constituted the vast majority of English exports, until overtaken by cotton at the end of the 18th century. Very many of the great churches and monasteries were built on the profits of the woollen industry; almost all of which would have passed through women's fingers!  

Incidentally, the shadowy figures in the background show that this document is a "Palimpsest": a previously-used parchment that had been carefully scraped so that it could be used again. Parchment was too valuable to be thrown away!

The Arch of Titus and the Menorah

The Arch of Titus in the Forum in Rome was erected to celebrate the memory of the Emperor Titus (reigned 79-81).

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His main achievement had come when his father, the Emperor Vespasian, had placed him in charge of crushing the great Jewish revolt, which culminated in the destruction of the Temple in the year 70 A.D. The interior of the arch therefore  depicts scenes form his triumph, including the plunder from Jerusalem being carried in procession.
   Here is the Menorah; the great sacred candlestick from the Temple.
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 Originally the scene would have been brightly painted, looking something like this:-
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The Menorah remained in Rome until the city was sacked by the Vandals in 455 A.D., when, along with other plunder it was taken to Carthage. I don't know what happened to it after that. A job for Indiana Jones, perhaps?
   TheTemple in Jerusalem has never been rebuilt.

A different kind of freedom?

The western liberal tradition has been that individual liberty is fundamentally the ability to "do your own thing" with minimal interference from the state. It is sometimes mocked as being no more than a "Liberty pile": a list of things that you are, or are not, permitted to do; the latter hopefully being very short. But a wholly different concept of liberty does exist. It is found in the prayer of St. Ignatius Loyola,in the phrase, "Christ,whose service is perfect freedom". A similar concept is advanced by Rousseau in his "Social Contract", with his argument that "true freedom" is to be found in following the "General Will".
   The doctrine of the General Will is best understood in the following analogy. Suppose the members of a sports team (football, cricket, rugby or whatever) are asked what they would hope for at the next match. Every team member would reply, "I'd want the team to win, and I'd like me to have a brilliant game". In Rousseauist terminology, the desire for victory for the team is the "General Will". All team members should subordinate their individual desires for personal glory to the cause of team victory; and, indeed, individuals who are deemed to be playing solely for their personal glory are not respected by their fellow team members. Rousseau, however, confuses the picture by calling this overaching commitment to the team as "freedom", and saying that those who refuse to give it must be excluded: these people are not being "free", but merely perverse. As with Loyola, freedom is not to be found in "doing your own thing", but in total commitment to a greater cause.
   This is all very well for a small, voluntary organisation like a football team, or a religious faith, (or, for that matter, a company), but is it at all applicable to a much larger and essentially non-voluntary body, such as a state? Rousseau acknowledges that it can really only apply to very small communities, but Hegel, in the early 19th century, believed it held good for the State of his day, within which all the citizens would gain true freedom in return for absolute commitment. Hegel's dictum on this has been translated as, "The state is the march of God through the world". Bertrand Russell mocked this as "freedom to obey the policeman".
   Karl Marx was much influenced by Hegel in his early days. He always maintained that, because of the inevitability of class conflict and exploitation, "bourgeois liberty" was a fraud, because most people could not afford to make meaningful life-choices. After the establishment of Communist society, however, there would no longer be any conflict between individual desires and the good of society as a whole. But obviously, this Utopian society was never actually brought into existence. What Marxist governments maintained, however, was that they were well on the way to achieving Communism, and that therefore all citizens had a duty to submerge their individual desires in this movement, because it represented not the "march of God", but the march of historical inevitability. Those who resisted this were exhibiting not personal freedom, but "petty-bourgeois individuality", or some such condemnatory term, or were even perhaps active saboteurs.
    It cannot be denied that many people experience a sense of fulfilment in immersing themselves in some greater cause; but on the whole, "doing your own thing"; making your own lifestyle choices, seems preferable to compulsion.

The salutary tale of Ed Punch

Despite his impeccably middle-class background, Edwin was always fascinated by organized crime and the activities of gangster leaders. This led to his hanging around in the bars and clubs of Soho, hoping to be noticed by the Kray twins and their associates, who at this time were enjoying the heyday of their power in the district. This made him feel superior to his less adventurous friends.

   For a long time he was simply ignored, but one evening a thief who was being pursued by the police thrust a piece of jewellery into his hand with the words, “Hold that for me, mate!” Quite probably he had mistaken Edwin for someone else in the gloom. The police arrived shortly afterwards and questioned everyone on the premises, but Edwin, with his respectable appearance and accent, was allowed to leave without being searched.

   He felt immensely proud of his coolness under pressure. A few days later he was approached by two threatening-looking men in dark suits who hustled him into a car and demanded that he handed over the stolen item to them. For a wild moment he considered answering them with snarling defiance, but common sense prevailed. Managing to show no trace of the gnawing fear he felt inside, Edwin answered them respectfully and politely, complied with their wishes without protest, and indicated that he was willing to undertake any similar work in the future. Feeling, probably correctly, that his real name of Edwin Prosserly, was nowhere near hard enough for a would-be gangster, he told them that he was called Ed Punch. His self-regard increased greatly in consequence.

   Before long he was approached again. Edwin sensed that he was being tested, with increasingly important tasks. He was asked to dispose of a pistol, which he duly chucked into the Thames near Windsor early one Sunday morning. Was it, he wondered with a thrill of vicarious danger, a murder weapon? For this task he was rewarded with a considerable amount of money in old banknotes. He decided to devote himself to this new, exciting and potentially lucrative life; and he dropped out of college.

   He rented a flat in Old Compton Street, where shortly afterwards he was required to play host to Tony, a young man he had never met before. Edwin felt very uneasy in Tony’s presence, and took great care not to annoy him, for the young man showed every sign of being a psychopath. He was most relieved when after a couple of weeks Tony disappeared and was not seen again.

    Other tasks followed over subsequent months. He drove getaway cars and later disposed of them, he kept account-books for semi-literate criminals, and occasionally vacated his flat when it was required for other purposes by persons unknown. He was well paid for his work, but the tension was beginning to take its toll. He could sense that, although the mobsters occasionally found him useful, he wasn’t really one of them and never would be: he was just a middle-class kid who thought it was cool to hang around with gangsters, and that they might cast him off or betray him at any moment, without a second thought. And did he really want to spend the rest of his life in company with men like Tony?

     Then one day the police conducted a swoop and arrested the entire gang. They were all interrogated separately, on a charge of involvement in a murder. It should surprise no-one that Edwin was the first to crack and turn Queen’s Evidence in return for immunity from prosecution.

    He is believed to be living in South Africa under an assumed name.  It is safe to assume that he never admits to ever having been called Ed Punch.  .
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