And the most bonkers part is Lord Beaumont Hotham’s pseudo cadaver tomb with Four Virtues bearing up the ledger stone. A Gothick fantasy

The perfectly bonkers estate church Lord Hotham built at South Dalton in and after 1861. A pocket cathedral to serve a village of around 400 souls

Unsolicited blanket postal drop from local Tories. Sort of sad really. Beverley and Holderness stayed Tory (just) in 2024, and panic is clearly in the air. But the local branch has clearly not got the Kemi line (there is no climate change and the ECHR is a danger to our way of life).

Here’s something unexpected. Cadw reckons the stone wall surrounding the old clas site of St Gybi above Holyhead is 4th century, the former circuit of a Saxon shore fort. Probably not the door, though. Glad I stayed the night

Somehow it was a thing when I was a boy in Cardiff that we all had to be able to recite this piece of Victorian whimsy

But there is a problem. The resurrected in 12th-century imagery are depicted as sexless, but the single naked figure has a penis. In fact its imagery echoes contemporary vision narratives of Purgatory or Hell with the naked male figure to one side occupying the place of the dreamer. 4/5

Its eccentric imagery included an outer hood mould of tormented faces, crested by a keystone of a double horn, and on the southern end, a naked recumbent human figure. The inevitable temptation was therefore to conclude it depicted the General Resurrection and Last Judgement. 3/5

The tower arch is an elaborately-carved mid 12th-century Romanesque creation of several orders, opening now into an early 20th-century tower space. It was once suggested that it was the original chancel arch (a suggestion rightly mocked by Pevsner). Excavation had revealed a 12th-century W. tower

The church of St James, Nunburnholme (East Riding) may look a bit on the ordinary side but it houses several symbolic mysteries, such as the imagery of its famous Anglo-Scandinavian cross pillar. But VCH East Riding Vol XI (in press) had to deal with another, its eccentric tower arch. 1/5

This is the wonderful and little-known chapel at Harswell, a DMV in the East Riding, sometime manorial chapel of the Silvain family, built within the surviving banks and ditches of the manorial precinct. Rebuilt 1871 using original materials. Still has an incumbent!

The Metham cartulary I discovered and edited for YAHS Record series included a large number of otherwise unknown early Nun Monkton deeds

Lovely sight. A pair of swans and a healthy brood of 5 cygnets, on the Barmston Drain south of Beverley Pastures

Cartularies are for various reasons one of my enthusiasms. I must have read every English, Irish and Northern French example, and found one from the 15th century that had been lost. But the oddest of a very odd MS genre is right on my doorstep, the so-called Constable family cartulary.

Yorkshire has a few such overcooked Romanesque restorations. St Helen Kilnwick Percy (1864) by the Atkinsons is just as sumptuous.

A familiar sigh for drivers heading south down the A614 towards Howden and the M62. All Saints Church on its hill above Holme-on-Spalding Moor. VCH has now commenced work on the beacon district to which it gives its name. The hill we've found had a medieval name, 'Arnesnest' (the eagle's nest) .

Nice picture, and good to see. Recent work has established that the chapel was founded as a chantry early in the 13th century by a bailiff of Howden town. What remains is the medieval chancel. There is a rare damaged photo of the chapel as it was before part demolition in 1876.

On Thursday, the remarkable north porch door of Kilnwick Percy church. The dilapidated church was reconstructed in an elaborate neo-Romanesque style in 1864–5 to designs by J.B. & W. Atkinson for Arthur Duncombe, and this door was shifted from the south side to the new north porch facing the Hall.

Not great but here are a couple of pics of the chancel arch against which it's been parked since the beginning of the 20th century (I think)

Coming out this week, Lindy Grant's definitive revisionist biography of a Queen all too often obscured by literary and cultural myth.

The Treasurer also had a fine moated Manor House at Bishop Wilton, next to the church of St Edith. It was quadrangular set in gardens. Only two arms of the moat now survives

St Peter’s church Woodmansey. Pass it most days and this weekend the door was open. Neat little church of around 1896 built by the local manorial lord. The font’s the surprise. Genuinely 14thC. Pevsner says ‘where is it from?’. Good question Sir Nikolas

Takes me back ...

One result of Methodism's great age in 19th-century Yorkshire was the number of Wesleyan schools founded in its towns. Methodist children could thus escape the compulsory catechism and church attendance enforced by Anglican National Society Schools. This is the Pocklington Wesleyan School (1852)

Graham Loud's new biography of Frederick is published on 1 February by Reaktion, and at the bargain price of £16.95. It's designed as an accessible teaching book rather than an academic 'door-stopper' as he puts it, which sets it apart from previous volumes. reaktionbooks.co.uk/work/frederi...

I do love seals. This is Earl William's great seal, one of only two impressions (Wiltshire & Swindon HC, 9/15/6), now he too apologised for the 'wrong' seal on a letter (to Henry III) which he got his cousin and seneschal to seal *quoniam sigillum meum mecum non habui* (TNA, SC1/4/67)

But does that mean that John had been born in Gillingham? Not really likely. In 1167-8 Queen Eleanor was in England, and resident from Michaelmas onwards in Winchester, while her husband was in Normandy. A designated wet nurse some fifty miles away makes the city the likely birth site. 7/9

However that's the wrong Christmas. Now a 1212 inquest reports a certain William Baillebien held land at the gift of King John’s father ‘because he tended him [John] in his cradle’. Baillebien was keeper of Gillingham in Dorset and its forest, what ,ight this indicate about the birth? 5/9

If we believe the passing comment of a canon of Laon in NW France that John was born ‘around the feast of St John’ and was given the name of the saint and evangelist as his quasi-godparent, then he was born around the 27 December, though that might have been his baptismal date not his birth. 3/9

But one other source, John’s own clerk, Gerald of Wales, tells us that when he arrived in Ireland in April 1185 John was 17 years old. That would indicate 1167 is the correct date, and it would also match his known knighting in 1166, for which the customary age was 16. 2/9