Damian Lewis fans line up for Wolf Hall tonight

[Travelledtheworld]

Wednesday 21st January BBC2 Channel 4

lush costumes.

www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/bbc/11358197/Damian-Lewiss-inspiration-for-Wolf-Halls-Henry-VIII-Wills-and-Harry.html

Ah, hang on, I've Just Fucking Googled It (sorry for not doing this in the first place) - The Giant, O'Brien is set in the 1780s.

IIRC, A Place of Greater Safety was her first book (so it's allowed to be flawed ) but no-one would publish it because they said no-one would want to read such a doorstop, so she went away and had some success with a couple of slim volumes and it was published a few years later.

tell you what gives me a bit of a [furrowed brow] re the Reformation

-ordinary people

Peter Ackroyd in his More biog gives a really vivid description of the late medieval mind/world. How there is a blurring between earth, heaven and hell- demons are everywhere, as are angels, in everyday life. It's a total belief system. Do this, and you'll have a bit less time in Purgatory. Do that and you'll burn in Hell for all eternity.

Now if suddenly you're told all that's a crock of shit-and that you will most likely burn if you continue to believe it- your world, even your whole calendar changes. How do you cope with that? There must have been thousands of people terrified of burning in either this world or the next

(sorry this is probably massive oversimplification- I never studied this at school and was straight on to modern European history at the earliest opportunity)

oooh I'm loads behind

I would advise- try again with APOGS

it is STUFFED with women

especially the utterly marvellous Lucile Desmoulins

YY, I imagine it would have left quite a lot of people quite seriously fucked. Especially if you had been a devout monk or nun, and you were institutionalised, and then all of that was gone. I remember thinking about it when reading Rumer Godden's 'In This House of Brede,' which is about twentieth-century nuns, but which has a very moving passage about how even going into a modern hospital was a sensory nightmare if you were used to the monastery.

That said, I am sceptical about 'the medieval mind' and about the idea everyone believed just like that. I think you can see from some plays that while people did believe in Purgatory etc., they could also laugh at the idea of demons - so it may be the same sort of cognitive dissonance people often have with modern religion, that we both know these things are only tropes and figures for something more abstract, and at the same time we mostly just imagine them as literal beings because it's easier.

Muddha - YES I KNOW.
My brow is furrowed about that too.

I find it hard to get my heard around it, though.

mudda - ok, I will try.

oh and if anything it's less blokey than WH, since it's not done in the first [bloke] person, so you get lots of different perspectives- notably the women, a lot of whom would never have had any sort of voice before, just been a name on a document

HM makes them walk about

oh god I need a [fangirl] emoticon

I will stfu now. PROMISE

Don't STFU! I was enjoying that.

Noooo, I want to read it now sounds great!

I loved A Place of Greater Safety. I'd tried to get hold of it for ages, and then discovered Amazon! (I'm always behind in the technology department). I lent it to my son's French girlfriend and she said that, even though they'd done the French Revolution at school, she'd learnt so much more from the book. She has since enjoyed Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies.l

Jeanne my 11 year old is currently learning about OC in humanities :)
We have had some really interesting discussions about this period.
I have told him about the massacre at drogheda (I am half Irish so this is a subject close to my heart)
He was asked if OC was a hero or villain.
My reply was that he was both, depending on your point of view!

What would a fangirl emoticon look like?

Like this?
But with zippy face

I'm jealous. All we got was 'erm ... Christmas banned ... let's move on'.

at Christmas banned-move on

And thanks for your medieval mind thoughts Jeanne- really interesting

HM fangirl emoticon would be something like prostrate Anne Boleyn at coronation

I'm off to shelve the Goldfinch for later and to read APOGS again

So if Henry was still catholic but resented Rome's power and hold on the purse strings, why the dissolution of the monasteries? Why not just say all the revenue/assets belong to the crown now and carry on as you were? Those that refused to refute Rome's authority could be re-assigned.

Weren't the (some) monasteries also places of learning, healing and refuge for pilgrims and a place of sanctuary for those needing help? What happened to all that after the dissolution?

The monasteries were very rich, and he did need money.

But this is the thing - there's no reason to assume that being Catholic automatically means you support the monasteries. It would be perfectly possible for Henry, or perhaps more realistically Henry's advisors, to have persuaded him to reform the Church and close down a lot of monasteries, and for him to have continued as a perfect Catholic king.

In bits of Europe that remainded Catholic, this did happen - lots of monasteries were rigorously reformed. And people have been arguing over monasticism as a way of Catholic life for centuries.

I think (and this is now getting too late for me, and I'm hazy) that there may be some connection between what look to be increasingly stringent laws against begging/vagrancy in Elizabethan England, and the closing of monasteries.

@Fiderer - I imagine the monasteries had all sorts of techniques for keeping their assets to themselves, which I suppose could have been reformed by law, but perhaps it seemed easier to chuck the monks out entirely and start over (obviously some monasteries were razed to the ground but some religious buildings/land turned into private homes, eg Woburn Abbey).

The cliche is that monks were all living in the lap of luxury and keeping all their wealth for themselves instead of distributing it to the poor (eg decreeing that duck is fish so they could eat duck on a Friday, or is that an old wives tale?). I am sure there were some who were truly living by their vows but it must have seemed easier to get rid of them than try to keep some and not the rest.

And yes I had heard the story that vagabonds and beggars in the time of Elizabeth I increased hugely because of former priests and monks who were destitute .

There was an increase in private charity that filled some of the gaps left by the abbeys - people set up hospitals, almshouses etc. It's one reason for all the King Edward Vi grammar schools. It wasn't enough though - there was great hardship caused especially in the north (hence the greater resistance to the dissolution here).
Northern money flowed south and the north south divide worsened.

The dissolution began under the pretext that they were just going to close the worst places and reform the rest. Then once people were softened up by closing some small ones it became less unthinkable to do the rest (sound familiar?) The Pilgrimage of Grace gave Henry an excuse to do some because the monks helped fund the rebels.

The monasteries were also massive employers, and their sudden closure left thousands of people without jobs and large areas of land without control. E.g. the Fens, which had been managed and drained by the big monastic houses in Lincs for centuries so crops could be grown there, but with the closing of the monasteries started flooding again, causing considerable hardship locally.

Also (sorry for the triple post, but this is brilliant and awful) prior to the dissolution the commissioners went into the abbeys and got the monks to confess to things, and quite a few confessed to masturbation (written down in Latin). This was then translated back to English as homosexual acts, to make the monasteries look like even worse hotbeds of immorality than they were and give more of an excuse for closing them down.

That's interesting about the Fens, Irene.