“Take off your hat, sir, there’s a tear-stained eagle passing…”

Yes, we have heard the glory of the Founding Fathers, how the Second Continental Congress approved the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, but this coming Sunday also marks the 234th anniversary of our birthright as Americans: the plodding bureaucracy that almost gave the United States a cool, medieval-themed emblem.

On that first Fourth of July, Congress handled a fair amount of business, but before they adjourned for potato salad and horseshoes, their penultimate motion was this:

Resolved, that Dr. Franklin, Mr. J. Adams and Mr. Jefferson, be a committee, to bring in a device for a seal for the United States of America.

I’m no fan of group work, but that’s a committee I wish I’d seen. Franklin, for his part, offered a grand biblical vision:

Moses standing on the Shore, and extending his Hand over the Sea, thereby causing the same to overwhelm Pharaoh who is sitting in an open Chariot, a Crown on his Head and a Sword in his Hand. Rays from a Pillar of Fire in the Clouds reaching to Moses, to express that he acts by Command of the Deity. Motto, Rebellion to Tyrants is Obedience to God.

Adams was gung-ho on an allegorical painting that depicted

a succession of appeals to the young Hercules, by female impersonations of Virtue and Vice or Sensuality . . . . Vice speaks first and points out the flowery path of self-indulgence; Virtue follows and adjures Hercules to ascend the rugged, uphill way of duty to others and honor to himself.

Jefferson, meanwhile, was chasing forest murmurs of his own. As Allen J. Frantzen explains in Desire for Origins: New Language, Old English, and Teaching the Tradition, Jefferson proposed an embryonic vision of Manifest Destiny, complete with a rarity in American allegory: Germanic barbarians. “On one side,” says Frantzen,

he wanted to picture the mythical Anglo-Saxon warriors, Hengst and Horsa; on the other, he wanted to portray the Chosen People following a pillar of fire. Jefferson saw Hengst and Horsa as ideal leaders of a free and democratic people who were, at least in Jefferson’s imagination, “chosen” to live in a free world of individual rights and communal blessings. The English Constitution and Common Law were Saxon “legacies” for Jefferson, a time of wide-spread liberties for freedom-loving Anglo-Saxons, a pre-Christian Paradise destroyed by Norman-led feudalism and restored by the Magna Carta.

Jefferson’s take on the Anglo-Saxons wasn’t unusual for the time. In the 16th century, Matthew Parker, Archbishop of Canterbury, busily promoted the notion that England’s break from Rome marked the restoration of a pure and primitive church. In the late 16th and 17th centuries, parliamentarians were so awed by the venerability of English legal and political institutions that they hailed the Anglo-Saxons as a nation of freedom-loving democrats: elected kings! assemblies! jury trials! common law! For centuries, English churchmen and monarchs and politicians squinted, wallowed in wishful thinking, and selectively saw themselves in the Anglo-Saxons—thus giving Jefferson a myth on which to help found America.

After establishing the study of Anglo-Saxon at the University of Virginia, Jefferson further hoped to stabilize a young nation by rooting Old English in the national elementary school curriculum. Looking ahead, he proposed ways to make Old English spelling more comprehensible to the statesmen and humanists charged with propagating Anglo-Saxon institutions in America. “As the histories and laws left us in that type and dialect, must be the text books of the reading of the learners,” he wrote, “they will imbibe with the language their free principles of government.”

In the end, fourteen people on three committees spent six years working out a design for the Great Seal of the United States; only the Eye of Providence, “1776” in Roman numerals, and the motto E Pluribus Unum survived those initial Franklin-Jefferson-Adams brainstorming sessions. Horsa and Hengist failed to stake their claim, and Thomas Jefferson failed to found an America where surveyors measure farmland in “hundreds” and Old English leaps from the tongues of country lawyers.

Had Jefferson been a more persistent medievalist, Americans might still have spent this weekend grilling meat and blowing stuff up, but we might also have swelled with pride to celebrate the founding of niw rice, geacnod on freodome and gegiefen to þæm geþohte, þæt ealle menn beoð gelice gesceapen—without having to turn to graduate students to tell us what that means.

“Some are mathematicians, some are carpenters’ wives…”

Being a medievalist isn’t as glamorous as you might suppose. Often I can’t find a peon within thrashing distance to pit the olives for my Old Yellers, and during those baleful episodes, I pry myself from the vampiric talons of my forthcoming magnum opus (working title: “Sommes-nous encore là, Papa Schtroumpf?”: Henri Pirenne, l’Union européenne, et le médiévalisme prospective de Pierre ‘Peyo’ Cuilliford), disable the laser array around the DeLorean, and pursue intellectual regeneration in the shopping malls that serve as economic underwire to the sweat-dappled bosom of suburbia.

So did base commerce provide the hoped-for mental holiday? Alas, no. Having stumbled across an intriguing line of shirts at a charming cosmopolitan boutique, I found myself as startled as a stag in a Laibach video by the color designations on the tags. “Moonless Night” meant “black,” “Black Forest” meant “green”…and then a shirt hove into view, blue as the veil of Thetis:

Apparently, “medieval blue” is a real Pantone color, RGB #2F3654 (presumably inspired by medieval pigments), and all sorts of things are available in it, including wool, windbreakers, tank tops, snow boots, tennis shoes, and chiropractic pillows.

But isn’t “medieval blue” more of an idea—a simile, even? Trailed always by a trembling amanuensis, I made dramatic writerly gestures, paced the menswear aisle, and recorded these golden thoughts for later rumination:

“as blue as a miller’s Netflix queue”
“as blue as the metaphorical heavens in the pick-up lines of the Duc de Berry”
“as blue as the blood of Charlemagne’s nephews nibbling Roquefort while rowing in the Oxford-Cambridge Boat Race“
“as blue as absinthe in Utgard”
“blue as the grass where Auðumbla moo’d indigo”
“as blue as a summer princess sprawled across a winter grave”

Readers are invited to pass the weekend conjuring tortured similes of their own. Meanwhile, some of us, draped anew in cerulean shades that Carolingian clothiers could never envision, shall return to crafting prose that is plainly, unflinchingly purple.

“And the little wheel runs on faith…”

Tourists never notice it, but then neither do most locals. Behold: Alto Towers, catty-corner to the National Cathedral at 3206 Wisconsin Ave NW.

Alto Towers went up in 1932, in the heyday of D.C. suburbanization. This eight-storey apartment house is the work of Arthur B. Heaton, a half-forgotten architect who’s partly responsible for the look and feel of northwest Washington—and who was, briefly, an unabashed medievalist.

Heaton was ridiculously versatile. In 1901, he built Tudor Revival apartments and later designed the Altamont, a local apartment house with an Italian Renaissance twist. In 1914 and 1931, he put Classic Revival additions on the National Geographic Society building. In 1926, he gave his (now-demolished) Capital Garage a funny, car-themed facade, and his interest in the automobile led him to design our local “Park and Shop,” the prototypical strip mall, in a Colonial Revival style. Heaton oversaw the construction of new facilities on the GWU campus while also designing banks, churches, and countless other D.C. buildings and homes, apparently without ever developing an identifiable “Heaton style.”

…and that’s what makes Alto Towers a treat for the medievalist. Take a gander at the entryway.

When Heaton wasn’t serving as president of the local chapter of the American Institute of Architects, co-founding the Washington Building Congress, or spearheading the “Renovize” movement during the Depression, he was also, from 1908 through 1920, the supervising architect for the National Cathedral, where he helped chief architect Henry Vaughan oversee construction during the cathedral’s first 12 years.

In 1932, more than a decade after Heaton’s time there, the cathedral was little more than an overgrown apse festooned with a few angelic grotesques. Given a chance to design an apartment house across the street, Heaton—who could have built damn near anything—set loose his inner medievalist.

Those snarling, gargoylish grotesques are the most blatantly cool thing about Alto Towers, but the whole arcaded entryway is a neo-medieval romp.

The quatrefoils (four-leaf clovers) in the spandrels (the warped triangles above each arch) are pretty standard, but those thick, gabled supports are an architect’s fancy. Each one resembles a cathedral buttress while also containing blind tracery of a Gothic arch.

At Alto Towers, periods and cultures trip over one another and have a good laugh. The pine cone finials hark back to ancient buildings and the medieval fascination thereof, while those funny little nubs at the tops of the smaller arches—including the little ones in the triforium, the upper row—strike me as very American. Meanwhile, on both sides of the interior of each large arch are squared, Art Deco-ish shadows of Corinthian columns. Behind them, the brick-lined inner doors whisper “Cordoba” in an American accent.

Most of Alto Towers is plain brick, but Heaton decorated just enough of its topmost level to show that the neo-medievalish entryway wasn’t an afterthought.

Note the two types of ornamented shield. They may be purely decorative, but I’ll gladly send a free book to any heraldry buff who can show that they’re meaningful.

While Heaton’s 1926 Capital Garage (PDF with photo) featured large, leonine gargoyles, Alto Towers is his full medievalist statement, the rhapsody of a restless architect who knew he wouldn’t live to see the cathedral completed.

When Heaton died in December 1951 at 76, the new apartment buildings rising around the cathedral were blocky and bland. Today, tourists tromp right past them, fixated on the promise of sighting quirky gargoyles on the Gothic spires beyond.

Of course, the cathedral’s first proper gargoyles weren’t put in place until around 1960, so if the beasties at Alto Towers forever bare their fangs, I can’t really blame them. No one remembers that they were here first.

“Feathered, look, they’re covered in a bright elation…”

Too few Washingtonians have hobbies; for many people here, cultivating a career is apparently amusement enough. Fortunately, I sometimes encounter locals—like this fellow on the west front of the cathedral—who enjoy a pastime I’d never really thought much about, and I like when they explain its appeal in terms I can understand.

A SIMPLE DESULTORY PROSOPOPOEIA
(or, HOW I WAS RICHARD WAGNER’D INTO TRADITION)

“I do not think that they will sing to me”:
Impulsive mermaids drown in shallow words.
Await no witless warbling by the sea;
Rather, seek the songs of simple birds.
From perch and peak they twitter truths profound:
A woodbird stirs the Volsung in his blood;
A parliament of eagles circles ’round;
A curlew chills the farer on the flood.
The cuckoo croaks that sumer is icumen;
“Keep well thy tongue!” confesses Chaucer’s crow;
The nightingale her owl will merr’ly summon;
Despite their flyte, one insight they bestow:
Be still, but heed the rustle of a wing;
A legendary pigeon waits to sing.

(For all the entries in this series, hit the “looking up” tag.)

“So many shots fired, so many daggers thrown…”

Seven years ago, I stepped into a musty workshop in the Balkans and faced the glares of a thousand ancient Serbs. They leaned against walls and rested sideways in racks; a few were upside down. All around, drawn from every corner of the late Yugoslavia, the silent icons were burned, torn, drenched, or devoured by mold. They had been sent to this office for safe keeping—and to await the conservation and restoration that the Serbs may never have the funds or personnel to finish. An eerie sense of patience pervaded the place; in the Balkans, a thousand-year art project is the least reason for despair.

So as someone whose only friends in the Balkans hail from Serbia and Montenegro, I approached the publication of The Battle of Kosovo 1389: An Albanian Epic with caution. For a decade, I’ve taught the Serbian epic cycle about the Battle of Kosovo as a case study in medievalism that fosters the worst sort of nationalism and as one of the best examples of Balkan epic poetry, but I’d never heard of the Albanian take on the Serbs’ sacred story. Published only a year after Kosovo declared its independence, this book was bound to be sensitive; some condemned it as “science fiction” and sent its editor hate mail.

I suspect the angriest critics didn’t actually read the book, which turns out to be a relatively mild collection of eight poems about episodes tangential to the Battle of Kosovo. All but one of the poems were recorded between 1923 and 1955, each is presented in a facing-page translation by Robert Elsie, and the entire volume is introduced by Anna Di Lellio with a placid and decidedly un-Balkan ambivalence.

Most of the Albanian Kosovo variants tell the same basic story: The pious Sultan Murat has a prophetic dream. His seers interpret it, his mother weighs in, and soon the sultan sets off to conquer Kosovo. Like Moses, he prays to God to part the seas, and then he invades the Balkans. When a hungry soldier breaks the fast, the war goes badly, but after the sultan dismisses his less committed troops, his fortunes improve—until he is assassinated by Milosh Kopiliq, an Albanian Christian who picks up his own noggin and strolls away after the sultan’s men behead him.

Readers who know the Serbian poems about the Battle of Kosovo will be startled to see Miloš Obilić, a saint of the Serbian Orthodox Church, presented as an Albanian assassin, a variation that explains why Amazon reviewers have given the book one star if they’re pro-Serb and five stars if they’re pro-Albanian. In the Serbian texts, Miloš is a captain in the army of Serbian Prince Lazar. At the last supper before the ill-fated battle, Lazar unsettles him with a terrible prophecy:

Hail, Cousin! friend of mine and traitor!
First of all my friend—but finally my betrayer.
Tomorrow you’ll betray me on the field of Kosovo,
Escaping to the Turkish Sultan, Murad!
So to your health, dear Milosh, drink it up,
And keep the golden goblet to remember Lazarus.

Miloš does cross over to the Turkish side, but only to assassinate the sultan. Lazar is captured and beheaded. The Serbs are defeated, but their martyrdom wins them the “heavenly Serbia” promised by God—and a longing to reclaim Kosovo that haunted their descendants well into the 21st century.

The transformation of Miloš Obilić, Serb saint and patriot, into Milosh Kopiliq, Albanian Christian, may seem strange coming from the mostly-Muslim Albanians of Kosovo, but Di Lellio explains that a multifaceted Miloš represents an old debate: The Albanians claim ancient descent from the Illyrians, while the Serbs assert that they wandered into the Balkans more recently. Oddly, the existence of Milosh Kopiliq is, Di Lellio says, less a statement of division than a claim to brotherhood. Through Milosh, the Albanians are insisting that their ancestors fought and died alongside Serbs—and that Albanians have deep roots in Christian Europe.

Fortunately, despite a misleading subtitle that promises a far more inflammatory book, The Battle of Kosovo 1389: An Albanian Epic is not a propaganda pamphlet. In her 48-page introduction, Di Lellio carefully shows that the Albanians come by their assassin honestly, with a wealth of place-names near the village of Kopiliq attesting to centuries of belief in Milosh’s local roots. Still, Di Lellio leaps to no conclusions; she contrasts Albanian oral history with an overview of the development of Miloš Obilić in Serbian historiography, and she looks beyond the Balkans at a Catalan tradition that makes Milosh Hungarian. She also raises the possibility of etymological confusion based on the word kopil, which means “trickster” or “bastard.” The Albanian Milosh certainly is that: He gets close to Sultan Murat under false pretenses, he cracks jokes after being beheaded, and (in one 1955 variant) he uses magic to makes the eyeballs of two gawking maidens leap from their sockets.

Few scholars who lay a hand on Balkan folklore are objective. Di Lellio worked in Kosovo for the United Nations, and in 2006 she edited The Case for Kosova: Passage to Independence. This collection of texts was also published with the cooperation of the Centre for Albanian Studies, a reputable organization that nonetheless must have an opinion or two about the uses of history and legend. That said, The Battle of Kosovo 1389: An Albanian Epic was clearly published in good faith. Contrary to the claims of their critics, Di Lellio and translator Robert Elsie aren’t inventing the Milosh Kopiliq tradition; rather, the variants in this book were all recorded and published decades earlier by ethnographers and folklorists. (Students of medieval English literature will see a familiar name at the end of a 1937 variant: Albert Lord, whose theories about oral-formulaic poetry were picked up by Anglo-Saxonists.) Only one tale in this volume, a 32-line poem recorded in 1998, feels both too recent and too fond of its own historical awareness as it shows the decapitated Milosh Kopiliq striding into legend:

Mountain birds do chirp and wonder
Who is climbing up that hillside?
Headless now proceeds that body,
White with snow now turns the mountain.

Although these poets use Milosh to argue that Albanians are innately European, Di Lellio writes with detectable unease about official textbooks that treat the shadowy Milosh as an historical figure; refraining from overt judgments, she documents how Albanians have come to see themselves. “It is in this context,” she writes, “that I place the stories about Kopiliq, as I try to rescue them from turning into a new prison for collective memory.” With care, she catalogs “a unique production and diffusion of historical memory” since the end of the Balkan wars shaped by “war veterans, former political prisoners, journalists, teachers, politicians, and historians, engaged in owning and rewriting the past,” and no consensus emerges:

Interviews with a range of individuals, from intellectuals to political activists or ordinary people, confirm that Millosh Kopiliq occupies a contested place in Albanian historical consciousness. For some, the issue is a non-starter, a concern that remains confined to naïve nationalist circles. For many others, an Albanian Kopiliq is an undisputed fact: he was always “one of us,” just not always publicly.

If the unsettled yet minor role of Milosh Kopiliq in the Albanian national story makes him an ineffective foot soldier for propaganda, then the stories in this slim volume are also unlikely to eclipse the fame of the Serbian Kosovo epic. Even in its most witty variants, the legend of Milosh Kopiliq isn’t very engaging; the fact that an Albanian Kopiliq exists is itself far more interesting than the actual details of his brief, formulaic adventures.

Compared to the Kopiliq variants, the Serbian poems about the Battle of Kosovo are a far richer read. Their historicity is debatable, and they hold an unsavory place in the nationalist arsenal, but they’re also imbued with a sense of tragedy and loss that overshadows the tale of a single tricky assassin. I’ll continue to teach the Serbian epic in class, but I’ll also mention the Albanian poems for the way they highlight the Balkans’ baffling cultural churn. I’ll also be glad that a Serbian publisher has expressed interest in a translation of this book. Perhaps waiting for former countrymen to find amusement in each other’s cherished legends doesn’t need to become another of the region’s many thousand-year projects.

“Twisting like a flame in a slow dance, baby…”

Although no less a folklorist than Kermit the Frog wondered why there were so many songs about rainbows, someone once pointed out to me that there aren’t many songs about rainbows, really. Off the top of my head, I know only one or two others; few people can name many more. Such is also the case with volcanoes in medieval Icelandic literature: Given the relative size of the corpus, you expect to find far more of them than you actually do.

Norse myths smolder with the threat of fiery doom. According to historian Oren Falk, the great Sigurd Nordal perceived enough lava-flecked glimmers in the prophetic poem “Völuspá” to see in its portrayal of Ragnarok “a distinctively Icelandic apocalypse.” Falk also finds mountain-bound giants in the 12th-century poem “Hallmundarkviða” who watch as “glaciers blaze . . . coal-black crags burst; the curse of wood [that is, ﬁre] unleashes storms; a marvellous mud begins to ﬂow from the ground.” So where there’s lava there’s volcanoes, right?

Nope—these distant poetic wisps vanish when scholars get too close. Falk spots only four anecdotes in Landnámabók, the Icelandic Book of Settlements, that hint at medieval Icelanders’ perception of volcanic activity. He scours the late medieval Bishops’ Sagas and finds only two mentions of volcanic eruptions, while “[t]he entire corpus of Family Sagas, thirteen thick volumes’-worth in the standard modern editions, seems to know nothing of lava and ash plumes.”

Even if Icelanders didn’t work many volcanoes into their poems and sagas, the medieval world nonetheless responds with a low, subterranean rumble every time a flustered news anchor tries to say “Eyjafjallajökull.” Its name may look weird, and its proper pronunciation baffles the non-Icelandic ear, but as a simmering reminder of the relationships between Germanic languages, this billowing Aschenwolke of a word is very nearly English.

The first element of “Eyjafjallajökull” is familiar to English speakers as the suffix -ey. You see it in place-names like Orkney and Jersey, and it’s the related Old English ieg that gives us the first syllable of its modern descendant, “island.” (Eyja was the Old Icelandic genitive plural.)

The second element, fjalla, has mostly disappeared from English, but the OED points out that you can see it in northwestern England at Bowfell and Scawfell—the names of hills.

Jökull, the Icelandic word for “glacier,” is the diminutive of jaki, “broken piece of ice,” and had a cognate in Old English, gicel. When Anglo-Saxon scribes needed a homegrown equivalent for Latin stiria, they translated it as ises gicel. The original word became ikyl or ikel in Middle English, and you can still see it frozen in time at the end a modern noun that fuses all of these pieces: “icicle.”

Jóhann Sigurjónsson, one of the first Icelandic poets to write blank verse, foresaw an apocalypse both personal and cosmic in which jóreykur lífsins þyrlast til himna, “the steeds of life swirl their smoke to the skies.” The plume of the “island-mountains glacier” will eventually dissipate, but even if we can’t now see the volcanoes, we can at least watch the ash settle into craggy, unexpected places, and patiently look for the relevant words.

“…and the music there, it was hauntingly familiar.”

It’s a commonplace among historians that in the murky recording studio of medieval imperialism, Alcuin played a wizened Stevie Nicks to Charlemagne’s picky but regal Lindsey Buckingham. I can’t tell you how often some sharp young scholar has commandeered the conference lectern to rail against this tired way of imagining Europe at the turn of the ninth century, yet the metaphor persists, as metaphors do, because they’re the overwrought but ever-tempting self-guided audio tours that help us see beyond the bored security guards in the hushed, carpeted galleries of the past.

Similes, on the other hand, are like Canadian character actors in Sci-Fi Channel Original Movies: they jar you out of pseudo-historical reveries and lodge you unmistakably in the present. Case in point: the Los Angeles Times sent a writer to the Vancouver Olympics, and like Ignatius Reilly pursuing a Big Chief Tablet delivery truck, the King of the Franks followed him:

Besides, I don’t travel particularly well. Me flagging a media bus in a new city is like Charlemagne chasing the Saxons. But OK, whatever. I like the snow.

This curious simile is the brainchild of a reporter who assumes that the reader has some knowledge of medieval history, or at least possesses the basic curiosity required to look up stuff on Wikipedia. Bravo! That puts him ahead of other newspaper writers.

But what on earth does it mean? Is a portly king waddling with comical incompetence after a band of tireless warriors? Does the writer’s pursuit of public transportation take decades to accomplish while leaving headless corpses scattered among once-sacred groves?

I don’t know, but this simile slips from the reporter’s fingers (to quote Charlemagne himself) “just like a white-winged dove sings a song.” Perhaps, like the finest Carolingian poetry, this cryptic reference to Charlemagne is best read allusively, not logically. Otherwise, like a homesick reporter stranded on a Vancouver curb, we’re left to chase mysteries we weren’t really meant to understand.

“There is a green hill far away…”

Despite the presence of noble-minded buffoons sitting around tables making futile plans, Washington is not an Arthurian town. Sure, there’s that suburb with corny Arthurian names, but Washington culture may be better suited for mocking fabliaux than the charming fictions of medieval romance.

Still, this city never stops sprouting quasi-medieval surprises. Trudge through the snow three days after a blizzard, and you do so alone; no one’s out taking pictures anymore, not even at the perpetually lovely Bishop’s Garden. Climb over a wall or two, send a few squirrels bounding away from the racket you make, and you’ll stumble onto this, in the driveway of a neighborhood school: a tree which the gardening guild claims was grown from the Glastonbury Thorn.

Of course, the “real” Glastonbury Thorn, dubiously rooted in history, has died several times over the centuries, and there’s reason to believe that my neighbors occasionally replace the local offshoot. Interest in the Washington thorn peaked in the 1950s, which partly explains why I’ve spent many a summer afternoon dozing on the Bishop’s Lawn unaware that this trace of Arthuriana prospered a few yards away, the quiet center of its own Tennysonian scene:

“The cup, the cup itself, from which our Lord
Drank at the last sad supper with his own.
This, from the blessed land of Aromat–
After the day of darkness, when the dead
Went wandering o’er Moriah–the good saint
Arimathaean Joseph, journeying brought
To Glastonbury, where the winter thorn
Blossoms at Christmas, mindful of our Lord.
And there awhile it bode; and if a man
Could touch or see it, he was healed at once,
By faith, of all his ills. But then the times
Grew to such evil that the holy cup
Was caught away to Heaven, and disappeared.”

It’s a silly thing, really, but after a week of Washingtonians grousing about winter, I’ll be glad when they’re back to chasing political grails. In a city that imports its legends, we could do worse than remember stories that teasingly promise perpetual spring.

“On a dark new year’s night, on the west coast of Clare…”

“The old year limps to its grave, ashamed,” mutters some uncomfortable actor in Sword of the Valiant, a movie that’s otherwise hard to recommend for either its eloquence or its insight. At first, I thought Christopher Howse’s review of the new Medieval and Renaissance Galleries at the Victoria and Albert Museum might prove to be an equally hollow endorsement of all things medieval, especialle because Howse embarrasses himself by howling about television, sneakers, and Kids These Days.

But then, with crusty wit, he writes this:

Thus it was, at the V&A, that as I stood in front of a splendid five-foot painted and gilt statue of St Roche and his dog (from about 1540), two women came up and glanced at it. “I like the dog,” said one. “He’s licking his leg,” said the other, and they moved on.

In 1540, every peasant or Cockney in Christendom knew all about St Roche. They could see not only the statue but also what it was about: the saint of the plague years, whose dog licked his sores and brought him bread. For it was always a libel to call stained-glass windows “the Bible of the poor”. The poor might not be able to read. But they knew their Bible and saints’ lives, or they’d never have been able to make out what the pictures meant. Modern tourists are more ignorant and purblind than the most sore-smeared Chaucerian beggar.

Today, what we wear is ugly, though the meanest medieval labourer wore hand-made clothes. We can’t name the stars, except the ones we see on TV. We can read, but can’t be bothered to. We save time by driving, only to lose it by slumping on the sofa. We can’t sing, can’t dance, can’t paint and can’t drink politely in company. Yet we have the childish gall to patronise past centuries as inferiors.

In Howse’s place, I might not have so readily drowned my opinion in a cauldron of molten snide nor so openly pined for medieval ways. Even so, whether medieval people infuriate or intrigue you, the full range of their humanity is worth remembering, especially on New Year’s Eve. Janus, after all, has two faces; the one that looks backwards sees truths that the other face still needs to know.

“Card sharks and blues harps and dolphins who leap…”

…and so a new week dawns in small-town Louisiana, where by all accounts, medievalism is dead, I tell you. Dead!

There are certainly no traces of it at this castle in New Orleans.