Category: Spain

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Ash Wednesday

Ash Wednesday Forehead Ash Cross.  Photo by Ahna Ziegler on Unsplash

Ash Wednesday and Lent

Ash Wednesday this year is late and on 5th March.  It is the First Day of Lent, the solemn time which runs up to Easter, and is symbolic of Jesus’ 40 days in the wilderness.

In Anglo Saxon the name for the season of Spring was ‘lencthen’. It is thought to derive from the idea of the lengthening days. Lighting up time has just increased to 6pm here in London. So strictly, Lent means Spring. The Romance languages use the term used for Lent which derives from the Latin ‘Quadragesima’ which means the 40 days of Fast. Spanish (Cuaresma), French (Carême), and Italian Quaresima). For Germans it is the fasting time: fastenzeit. In England, Lent became a specialised word for the fast period. And Spring took over as the name of the season.

A time of fasting? Maybe once upon a time. But when I was young, it was 40 days when you were supposed to give something up. Smoking, or drinking, or chocolate. An idea taken up by a new generation, as, for example, Dry January? A time of reflection? No, never did that.

Ash Wednesday is named after the ashes smeared on the heads of worshippers to remind us that we are dust. I’ve never seen this done either. However, my footballing Vicar friend Andrew missed our Wednesday Game so that he could mark foreheads with ash crosses. The ashes were traditionally made from palms used for Palm Sunday decorations, which is indeed what Andrew did. Look here to see my post on Palm Sunday.

Dust to Dust and Stardust

“In the midst of life we are in death, earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, in sure and certain hope of the Resurrection.”

— Thomas Cranmer

On the subject of dust here are lyrics by Joni Mitchell.

We are stardust
We are golden
And we’ve got to get ourselves
Back to the garden

Woodstock by Joni Mitchell

!970’s Live performance by Joni Mitchell of Woodstock

40 Days

We all know that there are 40 days in Lent, except there are not. Its 46 this year. This is pointed out by Tim Harford who presents a BBC radio programme called ‘More or Less’. It is a programe about statistics, or more widely about Fact Checking statistics in the news. This week’s episode was about the 40 days and claims about the US had spent much more than Europe on the defence of the Ukrainians. (No, that was Fake News, Europe and America spent about the same amount.) Anyway, back to Lent. Take away the Sundays was one answer proposed but, my mathmatics tells me this still leaves 42. The answer Tim Harford came up with is that 40 days just means a long time.

So it is the length of time of Lent, but also:

The duration of the Great Flood
The time Moses was on Mt Sinai
The time the Israelites spy on Canaan
Goliath trails Saul
Elijah Walks
Jesus in the Desert
The time from Resurrection to Ascension

In other words, a long time to be doing any one thing. As Hartford says, it’s like our word ‘umpteenth’. For example, ‘Kevin this is the umpteenth time I’ve told you to tidy your bedroom’. So my mother said to me as she threw my clothes out of the window.


Read about Shrove Tuesday in my post here.

To read about the ‘Month of Purification’ in Latin.

First published 2024, revised 2025

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Winter Song by William Shakespeare December 4th

When icicles hang by the wall,
    And Dick the shepherd blows his nail,
And Tom bears logs into the hall,
    And milk comes frozen home in pail,
When blood is nipp’d and ways be foul,
Then nightly sings the staring owl,
                Tu-whit;
Tu-who, a merry note,
While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.

When all aloud the wind doth blow,
    And coughing drowns the parson’s saw,
And birds sit brooding in the snow,
    And Marion’s nose looks red and raw,
When roasted crabs hiss in the bowl,
Then nightly sings the staring owl,
                Tu-whit;
Tu-who, a merry note,
While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.

William Shakespeare - Love's Labours Lost

William Shakespeare – Love’s Labours Lost (LLL V.ii.901)

The poem is near the end of the play, by way of a conclusion, two works are composed for the King of Navarro in praise of the Cuckoo and the Owl, one read by a representation of the Spring and the other, shown above, by ‘Hiems’ the representation of winter.

Is it very Shakespearean?  No, not if you are expecting ‘sweet and honeyed words’ but it brings us deep into the heart of cold winter, what with the icicles on the wall, the fouled muddy roads, the cold wind, the nip in the air, and the outbreak of winter colds.

The focus is either from a working-class point of view or from a member of the gentry looking at his servants.  Each part of the poem is ended with the owl and Greasy Joan cooking the food; roasted crabs are crab apples which would have been heated in the oven then thrown into a dish of beer where they would hiss.  So there is a hint of winter conviviality.

The nail means warming your fingers by blowing on them, alternatively it means twiddling your fingers. Greasy Joan is probably a cook or kitchen maid, and she is cooling the pot by stirring it.   But some suggest that ‘Greasy Joan’ might refer to a prostitute.  But it doesn’t really fit the poem? Although the spring part of the poem, narrated by Cuckoo refers to cuckolding. Tu-whit, tu-whoo is, in fact, two tawny owls calling to each other, the female calling first and the male answering. John Lyly first used the call in 1595. Some say it could also be read ‘To it, to who?’ In Shakespeare’s day, to go ‘to it’ was a sexual reference, but then he also uses that phrase mostly innocently. The parson’s saw means the parson’s sermon, which cannot be heard because of all the coughing in the cold nave.

Here it is set to music by Ralph Vaughan Williams

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All Hallows Day – November 1st

chrysanthemums
Chrysanthemums Flowers for the Dead (the author’s back garden)

How the Celtic festival that marked the beginning of Winter became All Hallows is not clear. Some say the Church set up its own festival independent of the Northern European traditions, but it is as likely that the Church adopted existing pagan festivals, and gave them a Christian spin.

Samhain, on October 31st, was, for Celtic religions, not only the beginning of Winter but also the beginning of the Year. As I noted on my Halloween post the Festivities began on the evening before the day because Celtic and Germanic traditions began their day at Dusk. So Halloween is not, in fact, the evening before, it is the start of the day of the festival.

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The Church adopted the Roman tradition of the day beginning not at Dusk but at Midnight. So the festival of All Hallows is on November 1st not October 31st. But the Church mimicked the old ways of doing things by celebrating the evening before as the Vigil of All Hallows’ Day which was called All Hallows Evening or Halloween.

In London there is a Church called All Hallows, which was associated with Barking Abbey which was founded in the 9th Century. It is known as All Hallows Barking or All Hallows by the Tower. It has a prominent position on Tower Hill, which would have been visible from boats coming up the Thames. It has the earliest Post Roman arch in a Church in the City of London which is made of reused Roman bricks and in the crypt were Roman tessellated floors.

The Roman floors look domestic rather than from a Roman temple or church but its position on the hill would have made it a good position for a Roman temple. In the 6th Century Pope Gregory wrote to St Augustine suggesting to him that he should adapt pagan practices into Christian ones, so a temple should not be wrecked but should be converted to a Church and a sacrifice of an ox into a feast dedicated to God. Is this what happened at All Hallows? Here is what the Pope wrote:

Now, I don’t want to be shot down in flames because there is no evidence that there was a Roman Temple here, nor indeed a Roman or immediately Post Roman Church. But it is one of the earliest Churches in the City of London, and there must have been Christian Churches in Roman London, and this would be on my list of candidates. It is simply that the attribution to All Hallows provides a possible link to Celtic festivals.

For the Celts Samhain was an uncanny day when all the sprites and spirits are alive and in the world. The Church took that, and span in on its heads, so it became a ‘hallowed’ holy day when all Saints are celebrated and alive to us, and celebrated on October 31st and November 1st.

A celebration of All Saints was originally in May in the Church but was changed to the 1st November in the 7th Century by Pope Boniface, later swapped back to May, and in the 9th Century fixed on the 1st November. It is followed on the 2nd by All Souls’ Day.

So on the 1st November, those celebrating the pagan festival would be in full swing after a hard night of celebration. The embers of the Fire would be still burning, stones left around the fire would be inspected for the prophecy they told of the future. Each person had a stone, and if it was still intact it was good luck, if it had disappeared the future was not good.

In France, All Hallows or All Saints is called La Toussaint, and flowers such as Chrysanthemums, which blossom in late October, were put on the graves.

In Spain, it is Dia de Todo Los Santos and is a national holiday upon which people put flowers on the graves of the dead.

In Mexico, Dia de los Muertos celebrates Holy Innocents on the 1st – Dia de los Inocentes. People create altars to the lost ones, with their favourite flowers, toys, food stuffs,, photographs. People argue about the pre-colombian aspects of the festival as there are similarities to European All Saints Days celebrations but Quecholli, was a celebration of the dead that honoured Mixcóatl – the god of war. It was celebrated between October 20th and November 8th.

My correspondent in Mexico has sent back these pictures of the festivities in Mexico.

Day of the Dead in Mexico. Photos by Sylvie Morice

The female figure to the left is La Catrina. This image was popularised by an early 20th Century design by José Guadalupe Posada and developed in a mural by Diego Rivera. For more details click here.

A Day Off for the English

In the the Laws of King Alfred the Great, this day was a day off for freemen.  I will be writing about Days off in the Anglo Saxon Calender on august 15th.

First published in 2022, revised in 2023 and 2024.

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Francis Drake Knighted at Deptford April 4th

Sketch from an old print. In fact, the Queen delegated the dubbing to a French Diplomat

The Queen’s half share in the profits of the Golden Hind’s circumnavigation of the world, amounted to more than her normal annual income. So it is no wonder she knighted the Captain, Sir Frances Drake, in the dock in what is now South East London at Deptford. The Spanish were furious that a Pirate should be so honoured. The Queen may have given a French man the honour of dubbing Sir Francis to align the French more with the English against the Spanish.

Drake was one of the British heroes I read about as a child. I had a thick book with stories about people like Hereward the Wake, Drake, Charles II, Bonny Prince Charlie, and David Livingstone. Drake was remembered for being the first English person to sail around the world, and his exploits in ‘singeing the beard of the King of Spain’ and his piratical raids on the Spanish Main. In these books, the Spanish were the bad guys and we were the good ones. Drake was one of a brand of swash-buckling heroes who turned Britain from a not very important country on the edge of Europe, to one of the World’s Great Powers.

Portrait of Francis Drake with Drake Jewel given to his by Queen Elizabeth I

On the other hand, he was also a pioneer in the Slave Trade, was involved in atrocities in Ireland and in the Spanish Territories, and had one of his crew executed in dubious circumstances. Perhaps more significantly, his contemporaries did not entirely trust him.

On the first days of contact between the British Navy and the Spanish Armada, he was tasked with leading the nightime pursuit of the Armada up the Channel. The idea was to stop them landing and to drive them away and into the North Sea. Drake in the Revenge was leading the pursuit, and the other ships were told to follow  a single lantern kept alight in the stern of Drake’s ship. The light went out, and the British pursuit was disrupted. The next morning Drake comes back having captured the disabled Spanish galleon Nuestra Señora del Rosario, flagship of Admiral Pedro de Valdés, and substantial gold to pay the Spanish Armada.

In the end, the lantern incident did not stop the British forcing the Spanish to flee around the North of Scotland, upon which perilous voyage only about 60 of their ships returned to Spain out of about 130. Britain was saved.

The Nuestra Señora del Rosario and its crew were taken to Torre Abbey, Torbay and imprisoned. The Abbey is now a lovely museum with an Agatha Christie Poison Garden amidst the ruins of the Premonstratensian Abbey. Its tithe barn was used to hold 397 prisoners of war from the Spanish Armada in 1588.

The Spanish Bar, Torre Abbey. Photo 2012 Kevin Flude
The Spanish Bar, Torre Abbey. Photo 2012 Kevin Flude

Sir John Gilbert, who was Sheriff of Devon at the time also used 160 Spanish Prisoners of War to develop his estate above the River Dart which is now enjoyed by those millions of visitors to what became the summer home of Agatha Christie (Greenway).

Queen Elizabeth I decided that the Golden Hind should be permanently docked in Deptford, and the ship was placed in a ‘dry’ dock filled with soil until the ship decayed slowly with time, and by about 1660 nothing much was left. 

I remember as a young archaeologist that some of our team took time out to work with Peter Marsden, one of the great experts in Naval archaeology, leading a search to find Drake’s ship.  There was a huge fanfare in the London newspapers, but, rather embarrassingly, given the build up, they failed to find anything of significance. Another attempt was made in 2012, but the prize of the discovery of a largely intact Elizabethan Galleon was not made.

The defeat of the Spanish Armada 1588 showing July22nd Start Point Devon with English ships pursuing the Spanish
From an old history book

The Keeper of the Naval Stores at Deptford made chairs from the ruins of Drakes ship, and one of the three said to have been made is on display at the Divinity Hall, Oxford.

Chair made from the ruins of the Golden Hinde