A Long Chapter by Trollope and then Exeter’s Past, cut short by an inept Gretel

To be ept! Oh to be ept!  The episode I produced today failed to save and so I’ve had to use the shorter version which ends at a dramatic rather canine point.

This episode is only for you if you love Trollope, love long rambles about England, or love me so much you could listen to my voice ad infinitum!

Thank you for your kindness, support and loyalty.  Email me, please do!  Tell me what you ponder in your heart.  What beauty moves you?  What birds are in your garden?  Where do you live?  What is your life like?  And if you do email, let me know whether I can read it out or not.

Love Gretel xx

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Good morning. Chapter twenty-two The Thorns of Ullathorne. On the following Sunday, Mr. Arabin was to read himself in at his new church. It was agreed at the rectory that the archdeacon should go over with him and assist at the reading desk, and that Mr Harding should take the archdeacon's duty at Plumstead Church. Mrs. Grantley had her school and her buns to attend to, and professed that she could not be spared, but Mrs. Bold was to accompany them. It was further agreed also that they would lunch at the squire's house and return home after the afternoon service. Wilfrid Thorne, Esquire of Ulathorne, was the squire of St. Ewald's, or rather the squire of Ullathorne, for the domain of the modern landlord was of wider notoriety than the fame of the ancient saint. He was a fair specimen of what the race has come to in our days, which a century ago was, as we were told, fairly represented by Squire Weston. If that representation be a true one, few classes of men can have made faster strides in improvement. Mr Thorne, however, was a man possessed of quite a sufficient number of foebles to lay him open to much ridicule. He was still a bachelor, being about fifty, and was not a little proud of his person. When living at home at Ullathorne there was not much room for such pride, and therefore he always looked like a gentleman, and like that which he certainly was, the first man in his parish. But during the month or six weeks which he annually spent in London, he tried so hard to look like a great man there also, which he certainly was not, that he was put down as a fool by many at his club. He was a man of considerable literary attainment in a certain way, and on certain subjects. His favourite authors were Montaine and Burton, and he knew more perhaps than any other man in his own county, and the next to it, of the English essayists of the two last centuries. He possessed complete sets of the idler, the spectator, the Tatler, the Guardian, and the Rambler, and would discourse by hours together on the superiority of such publications to anything which has since been produced in our Edinburghs and Courterlies. He was a great proficient in all questions of genealogy, and knew enough of almost every gentleman's family in England to say of what blood and lineage were descended all those who had any claim to be considered as possessors of any such luxuries. For blood and lineage he himself had a most profound respect. He counted back his own ancestors to some period long antecedent to the conquest, and could tell you if you would listen to him how it came to come to pass that they, like Cedric the Saxon, had been permitted to hold their own among the Norman barons. It was not, according to his showing, on account of any weak complacence on his part of his family towards their Norman neighbours. It's a funny thing, isn't it, that people who always pride themselves on going back to the Norman conquerors, but a lot of the people who the soldiers who joined William were those who were without lands and were therefore the poorest younger sons of Norman families, and and not just Norman wider in France, and so they were they were just chancers a lot of them. Norman chancers. Some Aylfrid of Ullathorne once fortified his own castle and held out not only that but the then existing Cathedral of Barchester also against one Geoffrey de Burr in the time of King John, and Mr Thorne possessed the whole history of the siege written on vellum and illuminated in a most costly manner. In fact, I think in the history of mankind no chancers have ever chanced more successfully than those who came over with William and including William in ten sixty six. What do you think? It little signified that no one could read the writing, as had that been possible, no one could have understood the language. Mr Thorne could, however, give you all the particulars in good English, and had no objection to do so. It would be unjust to say that he looked down on men whose families were of recent date. He did not do so. He frequently consorted with such and had chosen many of his friends from among them, but he looked on them as great millionaires are apt to look on those who have small incomes, as men who have Sophocles at their fingers ends regard those who know nothing of Greek. They might doubtless be good sort of people, entitled to much praise for virtue, B very admirable for talent, highly respectable in every way, but they were without the one great good gift. Such was Mr Thorne's way of thinking on this matter. Nothing could atone for the loss of good blood. Nothing could neutralise its good effects. Few indeed were now possessed of it, but the possession was on that account the more precious. It was very pleasant to hear Mr Thorne descant on this matter. Were you in your ignorance to surmise that such a one was of a good family because of the head of his family was a baronet of an old date, he would open his eyes with a delightful look of affected surprise, and modestly remind you that Baronetsies only dated from James I. He would gently sigh if you spoke of the blood of the Fitzgeralds and the De Burs, he would hardly allow the claims of the Howards and Lothers, and has before now alluded to the Talbots, Talbots as a family who had hardly yet achieved the full honours of a pedigree. In speaking once of a widespread race whose name had received the honours of three coronets, science from which sat for various constituencies, some one of whose members had been in almost every cabinet formed during the present century, a brilliant race such as there are few in England. Mr Thorne had called them all dirt. He had not intended any disrespect to these men, he admired them in every men in many senses and allowed them their privileges without envy. He had merely meant to express his feeling that the streams which ran through their veins were not yet purified by time to that perfection, had not become so genuine as incorrect as to be worthy of being called blood in the genealogical sense. When Mr Arabin was first introduced to him, Mr Thorne had immediately suggested that he was one of the Arabins of Uphill Stanton. Mr Arabin replied that he was a very distant relative of the family alluded to. To this Mr Thorne surmised that the relationship could not be very distant. Mr Arabin assured him that it was so distant that the families knew nothing of each other. Mr Thorne laughed his gentle laugh at this and told Mr Arabin that there was now existing no branch of his family separated from the parents stock at an earlier date than the reign of Elizabeth, and that therefore Mr Arabin could not call himself distant. Mr Arabin himself was quite clearly an Arabin of Uphill Stanton. But, said the Vicar, Uphill Stanton has been sold to the de Greys, and has been in their hands for the last fifty years. And when it has been there one hundred and fifty, if it unluckily remain there so long, said Mr Thorne, your descendants will be will not be a whit the less entitled to describe themselves as being the family of Uphill Stanton. Thank God no de Grey can buy that, and thank God, no Arabin and no Thorn can sell it. In politics, Mr Thorne was an unflinching conservative. He looked on those fifty three Trojans who, as Mr Dodd tells us, censured free trade in november eighteen fifty two as the only patriots left among the public men of England. When that terrible crisis of free trade had arrived, when the repeal of the corn laws was carried by those very men whom Mr Thorne had hitherto regarded as the only possible saviours of his country, he was for a time paralyzed. His country was lost, but that was comparatively a small thing. Other countries had flourished and fallen, and the human race still went on improving under God's providence. But now all trust in human faith must for ever be at an end. Not only must ruin come, but it must come through the apostasy of those who had been regarded as the truest of true believers. Politics in England as a pursuit for gentlemen must be at an end. Had Mr Thorne been trodden underfoot by a Whig, he could have borne it as a Tory and a martyr, but to be so utterly thrown over and deceived by those he had so earnestly supported, so thoroughly trusted, was more than he could endure and live. He therefore ceased to live as a politician, and refused to hold any converse with the world at large on the state of the country. Such were Mr Thorne's impressions for the first two or three years after Sir Robert Peel's apostasy, but by degrees his temper, as did that of others, cooled down. He began once more to move about, to frequent to frequent the bench and the market, and to be seen at dinners, shoulder to shoulder with some of those who had so cruelly betrayed him. It was a necessity for him to live, and that plan of his for avoiding the world did not answer. He, however, and others around him who still maintained the same staunch principles of protection, men like himself, who were too true to flinch at the cry of a mob, had their own way of consoling themselves. They were and felt themselves to be, the only true depositories left of certain Eleusinian mysteries, of certain deep and wondrous services of worship by which alone the gods could be rightly approached. I'm just gonna look that up. So Eleusinian refers to Eleusis, an ancient Greek town near Athens, and most commonly to the Eleusinian mysteries, the secret religious relight rites held there in honour of the goddesses Demeter and Persephone. The mysteries were among the most important religious ceremonies in the ancient world. They promised initiates a blessed afterlife or deeper spiritual insight. And these, my friends, will come to you if you continue to listen to Gretel Ponders. To them and to them only was it now given to know these things and to perpetuate them, if that might still be done by the careful and secret education of their children. We have read how private and peculiar forms of worship have been carried on from age to age in families which to the outer world have apparently adhered to the services of some ordinary church, and so by degrees it was with Mr Thorne. He learnt at length to listen calmly while protection was talked of as a thing dead, although he knew within himself that it was still quick with a mystic life, nor was he without a certain pleasure that such knowledge through him, uh sorry, though given to him, should be debarred from the multitude. He became accustomed to hear, even among country gentlemen, that free trade was, after all, not so bad, and to hear this without dispute, although conscious within himself, that everything good in England had gone with his old palladium palladium, sorry. He had within him something of the feeling of Cato, who gloried that he could kill himself because Romans were no longer worthy of their name. Mr Thorne had no thought of killing himself, being a Christian, and still possessing his four thousand pounds a year, but the feeling was not on that account the less comfortable. Do you not think that every person is born optimistic? The optimism has its first death as a teenager. It then it then grows again in late teens, early twenties, and grows magnificently if you then have children and then once your children grow up it plummets and then when you're nearer to death and particularly well, especially if you've reached a good old age and you're living well, you can then end on an optimistic note. What are your thoughts? Mr Thorne was a sportsman and had been active, though not outrageous in his sports. Previous to the great downfall of politics in his country, he had supported the hunt by every means in his power. He had preserved game till no goose or turkey could show a tail in the parish of St. Ewl's. He had planted gorse covers with more care than oaks and larches. He had been more anxious for the comfort of his foxes than of his ewes and lambs. No meat had been more popular than Ullathorne, no man's stables had been more liberally open to the horses of distant men than Mr Thorne's. No man had said more, written more or done more to keep the club up. The theory of protection could expand itself so thoroughly in the practices of a country hunt, but when the great ruin came, when the noble master of the Barsetshire Hounds supported the recreant minister of the House of Lords, and Beastly surrendered his truth, his manhood, his friends and his honour for the hope of a garter, then Mr Thorne gave up the hunt. He did not cut his covers, for that would have been not the act of a gentleman. He did not kill his foxes, for, according to his light, that would have been murder. He did not say that his covers should not be drawn or his earth stopped, for that would have been illegal according to the bylaws prevailing among country gentlemen, but he absented himself from home on the occasion of every meet at Ullathorne, left the covers to their fate, and could not be persuaded to take his pink coat out of the press, or his hunters out of the stable. This lasted for two years, and then by degrees he came round. He first appeared at a neighbouring meet on a pony, dressed in his shooting coat, as though he had trotted in by accident. Then he walked up one morning on foot to see his favourite gorse drawn, and when his groom brought his mare out by chance, he did not refuse to mount her. He was next persuaded by one of the immortal fifty three to bring his hunting materials over to the other side of the county and take a fortnight with the hounds there, and so gradually he returned to his old life, but in hunting as in other things, he was only supported by an inward feeling of mystic superiority to those with whom he shared the common breath of outer life. Mr Thorne did not live in solitude at Ullathorne. He had a sister who was ten years older than himself, and who participated in his prejudices and feelings so strongly that she was a living caricature of all his foebles. She would not open a modern quarterly, did not choose to see a magazine in her drawing room, and would not have polluted her fig fingers with a shred of the times for any consideration. She spoke of Addison, Swift and Steele, as though they were still living, regarded Defoe as the best known novelist in the country, and thought of Fielding as in his country, sorry, and thought of Fielding as a young but meritorious novice in the fields of romance. In poetry she was familiar with names as late as Dryden, and had once been seduced into reading The Rape of the Lock, but she regarded Spencer as the purest type of her country's literature in this line. Genealogy was her favourite insanity, those things which are the pride of most genealogists now I think it's genealogists, were to her contemptible. Arms and mottoes set her beside herself. Aylfred of Ullathorne had wanted no motto to assist him in cleaving to the brisket Geoffrey de Burr. And Aylfrid's great grandfather, the gigantic Ullafrid, had required no other arms than those which nature had given him to hurl from the top of his own castle a cousin of the base invading Norman. Oh, so of course that's a Saxon name, so there was me talking about Norman invaders, all for no cause. To her all modern English names were equally insignificant. Hengist, Horser, and such like had for her ears the only true savour of nobility. Well I agree with that. She was not contented unless she could go beyond the Saxons, and would certainly have christened her children had she had any by the names of the ancient Britons. I'm with her on this. In some respects she was not unlike Scots Ulrica, and had she been given to cursing, she would have certainly done so in the names of Mr, Scogula and Cernibok. Not having submitted to the embraces of any polluting Norman, as poor Ulrika had done, and having assisted no parasite, the milk of human kindness was not curdled in her bosom. She never cursed, therefore, but blessed rather. This, however, she did in a strange, uncouth Saxon manner that would have been unintelligible to any peasants but her own. As a politician, Miss Thorne had been so thoroughly disgusted with public life by base deeds long antecedent to the corn law question, that that had been but little moved her. It you do sometimes wonder with Trollop that he needs to give a whole chapter introducing each of his new people. I mean you sort of want to say, Come on now, let's hear the story. In her estimation, her brother had been a fast young man hurried away by a too ardent temperament into democratic tendencies. Now happily he was brought to sounder views by seeing the iniquity of the world. She had not yet ret reconciled herself to the reform bill and still groaned in spirit over the defalcations of the Duke as touching the Catholic emancipation. If asked whom she thought the Queen should take as her counsellor, she would have probably named Lord Elden, and when reminded that that venerable man was no longer present in the flesh to assist us, she probably would have answered with a sigh that none now could help us but the dead. In religion Miss Thorne was a pure druidess. We would not have understood it by that, that she did actually in these latter days assist in any su human sacrifices or that she was in fact hostile to the Church of Christ. She had adopted the Christian religion as a milder form of the worship of her ancestors, and always appealed to her doing so as evidence that she had no prejudices against reform when it could be shown that reform was salutary. This reform was the most modern of any to which she had as yet acceded, it being presumed that British ladies had given up their paint and taken to some sort of petticoats before the days of Saint Augustine. That further feminine step in advance which combines paint and petticoats together, had not found a votary in Miss Thorne, but she was a druidess in this, that she regretted she knew not what, in the usages and practices of her church, she sought to She sometimes talked and constantly thought of good things gone by, though she had but the faintest idea of what those good things had been. She imagined a purity had existed which was now gone, that a piety had adorned our pastors, and a simple docility our people, for which it may be feared history gave her but little true warrant. She was accustomed to speak of Cranmer as though he had been the firmest and most simple minded of martyrs, and of Elizabeth as though the pure Protestant faith of her people had been the one anxiety of her life. It would have been cruel to undeceive her had it been possible, but it would have been impossible to make her believe that the one was a time serving priest, willing to go to any length to keep his place, and that the other was in heart a papist with this sole proviso that she should be her own pope. Not quite true in either case. And so Miss Thorne, but I but I get his po get his point, and so Miss Thorne went on sighing and regretting, looking back to the divine writers kings as the ruling axiom of a golden age, and cherishing, low down in the bottom of her hearts, a dear unmentioned wish for the restoration of some exiled Stuart, who would deny her the luxury of her sighs or the sweetness of her soft regrets. Have I lost any of you? I suspect I may have may have done. We've got to keep going, folks. In her person and her dress she was perfect, and well she knew her own perfection. She was a small, elegantly made old woman, with a face from which the glow of her youth had not departed without leaving some streaks of a roset hue. She was proud of her colour, proud of her grey hair which she wore in short, crisp curls, peering out all round her face from the dainty white lace cap. To think of all the money she had spent in lace used to break the heart of poor Mrs. Quivacle with Quiverfle with her seven daughters. She was proud of her teeth which were still white and numerous, proud of her bright, cheery eye, proud of her short jaunty step, and very proud of the neat, precise small feet with which those steps were taken. She was proud also, aye, very proud of the rich brocaded silk, in which it was her custom to ruffle through her drawing room. We know what was the custom of the lady of Branksham. Nine and twenty knights of fame hung their shields in Branksham Hall. The lady of Ullathorne was not so martial in her habits. I'm wondering if that's is that Walter Scott? Let me look it up. Yes, so that's Walter Scott, and those lines are from the lay of the last minstrel eighteen oh five, and they occur near the beginning of Canto one, describing the martial household of the Scots of Branksham Hall on the Scottish borders. The Lady of Ullathorne was not so martial in her habits, but hardly less costly. She might have boasted that nine and twenty silken skirts might have been produced in her chamber, each to fit fit to stand alone. The nine and twenty shields of the Scottish heroes were less independent and hardly more potent to withstand any attack that might be made on them. Miss Thorne, when fully dressed, might have set been said to have been armed cap a pie, and she was always fully dressed, as far as was ever known to mortal man. For all this rich attire, Miss Thorne was not indebted to the generosity of her brother. She had a very comfortable independence of her own, which she divided among juvenile relatives, the milliners and the poor, giving much the largest share to the latter. It may be imagined, therefore, that with all her little follies she was not unpopular. All her follies have, we believe, been told. Her virtues were too numerous to describe, and not sufficiently interesting to deserve description. While we're on the subject of the thorns, one word must be said of the house they lived in. It was not a large house nor a fine house, nor perhaps to modern ideas, a very commodious house, but by those who love the peculiar colour and peculiar ornaments of genuine tudor architecture Gretel does, I that's my favourite period of architecture. It was considered a perfect gem. Oh that's my dream. We beg to own ourselves among the number and therefore take this opportunity to express our surprise that so little is known by English men and women of the beauties of English architecture. The ruins of the Colosseum, the Campanile at Florence, Saint Mark's, Cologne, the Bourse and Notre Dame are with our tourists as familiar as household worlds at words, but they know nothing of the glories of Wiltshire, Dorsetshire, and Somersetshire. I agree with that. Nay, we much question whether many noted travellers, men who have pitched their tents perhaps under Mount Sinai. Mount Sinai, by the way, I've climbed, shall I tell you about that one day? Are still not ig are not ignorant beg your pardon, are not still ignorant that there are glories in Wiltshire, Dorsetshire and Somersetshire, and we beg that they will go and see. Mr Thorne's house was called Uller Thorne Court, and was properly so called, for the house itself formed two sides of a quadrangle, which was completed on the other two sides by a wall about twenty feet high. This wall was built of cut stone, rudely cut indeed, and now much worn, but of a beautiful, oh heaven, rich tawny yellow colour, the effect of that stone crop of minute growth which it had taken three centuries to produce. The top of this wall was ornamented by huge round stone balls of the same colour as the wall itself. Entrance into the court was had through a pair of iron gates so massive that no one could comfortably open or close them. Consequently they were rarely disturbed. From the gateway two paths led obliquely across the court, that to the left reaching the hall door, which was in the corner made by the angle of the house, and that to the right leading to the back entrance, which was at the further end of the longer portion of the building. With those who are now adepts in contriving house accommodation, it will militate much against Ullathorne Court, that no carriage could be brought to the hall door. If you enter Ulathorne at all, you must do so fair reader, on foot, or at least in a bath chair. No vehicle drawn by horses ever comes within that iron gate, but the those iron gates, but this is nothing to the next horror that will encounter you. On entering the front door, which you will do by no very grand portal, you'll find yourself immediately in the dining room. What? No hall, exclaims my luxurious friend, accustomed to all the comfortable appurtenances of modern life. Sorry again for all my stutters. Yes, kind sir, a noble hall, if you will but observe it, a true old English hall of excellent dimensions, for a country gentleman's family, but if you please, no dining parlour. Both Mr and Miss Thorne were proud of this peculiarity of their dwelling, though the brother was once all but tempted by his friends to alter it. They delighted in the knowledge that they, like Cedric, positively dined in their true hall, even those they dined tet. But though they had never owned, they had felt and endeavoured to remedy the discomfort of such an arrangement. A huge screen partitioned off the front door, that's exactly what you're meant to do. And in fact, I that's having visited Monticute, that's pretty much what they've got. They have got a bit of a hall, but it does yeah, I think that's that's what Montecute has. I wonder if they've used that as a as a basis for for this court. So a huge screen partitioned off the front door and a portion of the hall, and from the angle so screened off a second door, which led into a passage and ran along the larger side of the house next to the courtyard. Either my reader or I must be a bad hand at topography if it be not clear that the great hall forms the ground floor of the smaller portion of the mansion, that which was to your left as you entered the iron gate, and that it occupies the whole of this wing of the building. It must be equally clear that it looks out on a trim mown lawn, through three quadrangular windows with stone mullions, each window divided into a larger portion at the bottom and a smaller portion at the top, and each portion again divided into five by perpendicular stone supporters. There may be windows which give a better light than such as these, and it may be, as my utilitarian friend observes, that the giving of light is the desired object of a window. I will not argue the point with him, indeed I cannot, but I shall not the less die in the assured conviction that no sort of description of window is capable of imparting half so much happiness to mankind as that which had been adopted at Ulathorne Court. It's a point I've made so often, and it's equivalent to this do you always want to drive the quickest route? No. Do you always want to drive to walk the quickest walk? No, not if you've got imagination, not if you like to ponder beauty in your heart. You want to drive perhaps a new drive, a different drive, a drive that part takes you past new things and is attractive and the same with the walk and the same with windows. Are windows just for looking out and for giving of light? No, they're for what whatever you want them to be, and they are sort of artistic canvases in their own right, and there's nothing nothing more attractive than the Mullyan window. Ah that's what I think. What? Not an Oriel, says Miss Diana de Middle Age De Middle Age. No, Miss Diana, not even an Oriel, beautiful as is an Oriel window. It has not about it so perfect a feeling of quiet English homely comfort. Let Oriole windows grace a college or the half public mansion of a potent peer, but for the sitting room of quiet country ladies, of ordinary homely folk, nothing can equal the square mully and windows of the Tudor architects. It's so true. The hall was hung round with family female insipidities by Lily and unprepossessing male thorns in red coats by Nella, each thorn having been let into a panel in the wainscotting in the proper manner. At the further end of the room was a huge fireplace which afforded much ground of difference between the brother and sister, and an antiquated grate that would hold about a hundred weight of coal had been stuck on to the hearth. By Mr Thorne's father, the hearth had of course been intended for the consumption of wood fagots, and the iron dogs for the purpose were still standing, though half buried in the masonry of the grate. Miss Thorne was very anxious to revert to the dogs. The dear good old creature was always glad to revert to anything, and had she been systematically indulged, would doubtless in time have reflected what that fingers were made before forks, and have reverted accordingly. But in the affairs of the fireplace Mr Thorne would not revert. Country gentlemen around him all had comfortable grates in their dining rooms, and he was not exactly the man to have suggested a modern usage, but he was not so far prejudiced as to banish those which his father had prepared for his use. Mr Thorne had indeed once suggested that with very little contrivance the front door might have been so altered as to open at least into the passage, but on hearing this his sister Monica, such as Mrs. Thorne's name, had been taken ill and had remained so for a week. Before she came downstairs she received a pledge from her brother that the entrance should never be changed in her lifetime. At the end of the hall opposite to the fireplace, a door led into the drawing room which was of equal size, and lighted with precisely similar windows, but yet the aspect of the room was different. It was papered, and the ceiling, which in the hall showed the old rafters, was whitened and finished with a modern cornice. Miss Thorne's drawing room, or as she always called it, with drawing room, was a beautiful apartment. The windows opened on to the full extent of the lovely trim garden. Immediately before the windows were plots of flowers in stiff, stately, stubborn little beds, each bed surrounded by a stone coping of its own. Beyond there was a low parapet wall, on which stood urns and images, fawns and nymphs and satires and a whole tribe of Pan's followers, and then again beyond that a beautiful lawn sloped away to a sunk fence which divided the garden from the park. Mr Thorne's study was at the end of the drawing room, and beyond that were the kitchen and the offices. Doors opened into both Miss Thorne's withdrawing room and Mr Thorne's sanctum from the passage above alluded to, which, as it came to the latter room, widened itself so as to make space for the hunk black oak stairs which led to the upper regions not hunk huge. Although I like hunk. My glasses are smudged, it's been so difficult to keep them clean today because of the weather's so uh hot that we're all covered in sun cream. Such was the interior of Ullathorne Court, but having thus described it, perhaps somewhat too tediously, here we beg to say that it is not to the interior to which we wish to call the English tourist's attention, though we advised him not to lose no legitimate opportunity of becoming acquainted with it in a friendly manner. It is the outside of Ullathorne that is so lovely. Let the tourist get admission at least into the garden and fling himself on that soft sward just opposite to the exterior angle of the house. He will there get the double frontage and enjoy that which is so lovely, the expanse of architectural beauty without the formal dullness of one long line. It is the colour of Alathorn that is so remarkable. It is all of that delicious tawny hue which no stone can give. I wonder if he's describing hamstone, unless it has on it the vegetable richness of centuries. Strike the wall with your hand and you will think that the stone has no covering, but rub it carefully and you'll find that the colour comes off upon your finger. That's exactly what hamstone does. No colourist that ever yet worked from a palette palette has been able to come up to this rich colouring of years crowding themselves on years. Ullathorn is a high building for a country house, for it possesses three stories, and in each story the windows are of the same sort as that described, though varying in size and varying also in their lines athwart the house. Those on the ground floor are all uniform in size and position, but those above are irregular both in size and place, and this irregularity gives a bizarre and not unpicturesque appearance to the building. Now do you remember that's how I described Monticute with the windows being irregular and the hood ah actually I've not published that podcast. Yeah, so Montecute, the windows are on the second floor i irregular and the the moulding that hoods them to protect from the weather, it sort of adds to the to the inj interest of it. Puppy's come out to join me now. Has it been very hot for you today and you've not understood why you felt so tired, huh? I'm gonna take her out later when it's cooler. Along the top on every side runs a low parapet which nearly hides the roof, and at the corners are more figures of fawns and satires. I'm just gonna quickly look at a picture of Montecute, see if they're see if there's a parapet like that. She's not quite the same because the windows are regular on the front of the house, and they're only irregular on the side. Such, thank goodness, is Ullathorne House. But we I said thank goodness, but we must say one word of the approach to it. Oh goodness, it's forty minutes this chapter. Oh I fear for my listeners, which shall include all the description which we mean to give to the church also. Okay, well that's good. The picturesque old church of St. Ewald stands immediately opposite to the iron gates which open into the court, and is all but surrounded by the branches of the lime trees which form the avenue leading up to the house from both sides. This avenue is magnificent, but it would lose much of its value. In the eyes of many proprietors by the fact that the road through it is not private property. It is a public lane between hedgerows, with a broad grass margin on each side of the road from which the lime trees spring. Allathorne Court, therefore, does not stand absolutely surrounded by its own grounds, though Mr Thorne is owner of all the adjacent land. This, however, is the source of very little annoyance to him. Men, when they are acquiring property, think much of such things, but they who live where their ancestors have lived for years, do not feel the misfortune. It never occurred to either Mr or Miss Thorne that they were not sufficiently private, because the world at large might, if it so wished, walk or drive by their iron gates. That part of the world which availed itself of the privilege was, however, very small. Such a year or two since were the thorns of Allathorne, such we believe are the inhabitants of many an English country home. May it long before their number diminishes. Oh though I was going to read another chapter, but I can't because I'm exhausted, you're exhausted. Mr Kat's lying at my feet, he's exhausted. The puppy is so exhausted she's gone off, and as for Doggo, there's no sight nor sound of her, so yeah. But the next chapter you'll be pleased to know is chapter twenty three Mr Arabin reads himself in at St. Ewald's, and I hope that there's no other chapter entirely dedicated to a building. As much actually it's really fascinating to hear and lovely to hear a description, but you know, even he used the word tedious, didn't he? Now do I leave it at that or do I try and win you all over for having bravely, not bravely, but sort of stoically, manfully, womanly ish, whatever that word is, uh listened to it all by reading something entertaining. I was going to read to you something from the history of the church, but hmm. So for a bit of fun, fun in the kind of this what this podcast does, um we're going to read carry on reading from the book Exeter Truro and the West by Edward Ford. And this was kindly given to me by one of my listeners, who's one of my loyal most loyal listeners, and I'd like to call him B, and thank him so much for the postcards he recently uh sent my way. So the last sentence we'd got to, but I warn you that was probably about five months ago, was however this may be, must be accepted as established history that Exeter and its district were politically part of England by about 680. Christianity. Had reached the city centuries before. Modern criticism is disposed to reject altogether the legend of Saint Joseph of Arimathea's mission to Britain after the death of Christ, but it is as well to face the fact that there is nothing inherently impossible in the story. Thanks to the Pax Romana and the VI Romanae, a journey from Jerusalem to northern Gaul was much more practicable and safe in the first century of our era than in the 18th. In fact, it was a journey which could be made without difficulty or danger by all who could afford the expense. Transit into Britain was also a simple matter, for there was a regular and considerable maritime commercial intercourse. After about 50 AD, the entire south was settled under the control of Rome, and there was nothing to prevent any number of missionaries from entering the island. What progress they might be able to make among a people who always seem to have been distinguished for stubborn conservatism is another matter. There is abundant evidence that Christianity made little headway in Britain until a very late period. The dedications of some of the most ancient churches in Exeter, as elsewhere in the West, are to West British saints of the 6th, 7th centuries, supporting the modern view that it was not until about 500 that the Christian faith gained a really strong hold upon the country, that, even so, it was often of a superficial character, is well known from the diatribes of Gildas. Constantine II, the king of Dalmonia, said to have been a cousin of King Arthur, who about in six for five granted lands at Bodmin to St. Petroch, was a cons conscience less that's a funny word, conscience less, ruffian, who murdered two young relatives at the very altar of a Christian church after having taken a solemn oath to spare them. After this, Constantine's divorce of his wife and second marriage to a woman who seems to have been pagan may count as a venial sin, but it is evident enough that his Christianity was a mockery and a sham, and the laxity even of the clergy excited the fierce and somewhat hysterical indignation of Gildas. It must be admitted that the strong and simple faith of the incoming English, at any rate for the two centuries after the mission of St. Augustine, was something better than this. But though it may be admitted that when the English invaders began to fasten their talons into the shores of Roman Britain, the land was still largely pagan, and there is no doubt that there existed a Christian community in most towns, no but there is no doubt, and Ishgar Damnoniorum is unlikely to have been an exception to the rule. The little church of St. Pancras claims to date from Roman days, certainly if, as I think probable, the Forum of Ishgar Damnoniorum lay at the Carfax, the position of St. Crank Pancras resembles that of the church at Caliver or Silchester. It is tempting to believe that both these little places of Christian worship were built in the Constantinian age as symbols that, though the bulk of the population might still be pagan, the faith of the cross was triumphant. But such speculations are not history, though the dedication is one which might well have been made in the fourth century. None of the churches of Exeter seem to antedate the Norman conquest, and it is probable that their predecessors were either of timber or rude stone chapels of the type so common in Western Britain and Ireland. Still, it is unsafe to dogmatise, and sorry, puppies has come over, an excavation may yet prove the existence of a Romano British church in Exeter.

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Bancras, by virtue of its unusual dedication, is the most promising candidate for the position of successor to the Roman Basilica, in which some obscure bishop presided over a tiny Christian community in this remote outpost of Roman civilization. What is it, old darling? Are you hungry? Would you like a little bit more food? Go and sort you out.