Review of Kelly Oliver at the Lynn Arms Syderstone

showing Bob Harris how to introduce a young star.

  

The Ballad of Anne Boleyn and the Burglar

               

Hear it sung at Cecil Sharp House in a musical collaboration with Anto Morra  here

And at my house in a musical collaboration with King Henry VIII here

I stole to the door of Blickling Hall

On the nineteenth night of May

And met the ghost of Anne Boleyn

Shining bright as day.

 

Six headless horses drew her coach,

A headless coachman drove,

‘Give them their head!’ she laughed, then turned

On me her look of love.

 

‘I stalked you once, who later flew,

And kissed you wild and free

With lips of sweet and dangerous rose

Before the King took me.

 

‘I lost my head for the rose of the world

And the rose withered on the thorn.

I gave my heart for a hunted hour

And my soul to the Harrying horn.’

 

Her raven-headed throat was graved

With a bloody royal band

 ‘I’m Caesar’s’ cut in diamonds red

And King’s gold on her hand.

 

‘I am wild to hold, though I seem so tame

And smile like the blossom of May

‘And my poor heart died for a worldly crown

And I’ll take your breath away.’

 

‘I am not your True Thomas!’ I cried in dread.

Her face clouded like the moon,

‘Ah! You’ve named the angel who guards my grave,

To hell I must return.

 

‘I lost my head for the rose of the world

And the rose withered on the thorn.

I gave my heart for a hunted hour

And my soul to the Harrying horn.’



Moral- follow your head and lose it, choose love!

Read the full story here

 

Heacham Electrician Has South Georgia On His Mind (EDP Front Page Pic and Feature 23/11/14)

My Lynn News review of Ray's November 2014 lecture to the King's Lynn Society of Arts and Science on his previous A4 months on Halley Station, Antartica, is here

Link to this EDP cover pic and story here

 

“I’m just popping out for a career break. I may be some time…”

 

Kids gone, mortgage paid, pension looming, many of us dream of throwing up the day job and all our routine securities to do what we always dreamed of, while we still can. Some of us ‘of a certain age’ even do it.
 

Not many of us leap as far as the South Atlantic!

 

But that’s exactly what Heacham electrician Ray Thirkettle has just done. (Last Sunday) he joined the British Atlantic Survey (BAS) on remote South Georgia, the best part of a thousand miles east of the Falklands, for a 13 month stint as an electrical technician. On a pinprick island in a vast cold ocean, with long hours of darkness coming next ‘summer,’ Ray will certainly be needed.

 

 

This is in fact Ray’s second ‘leap in the dark’. In 2012, he was granted a 4 month career break by the NHS to join the BAS’s flagship Halley station on the Antarctic continent itself. This included a midsummer White Christmas. Clearly it wasn’t enough! And this time, it’s not so much a break as the end of an NHS career.

 

Does he have any regrets?

 

“Yes, I’ve just bought a sports car!” he jokes.

 

More seriously, he adds. “I had a secure position as NHS electrician at the QEH in Lynn, where I’ve been for 7 years. While there are definite rewards in joining BAS, money definitely isn’t one of them.

 

“But most of all, of course, I regret a 13 month parting from my wife of 32 years, Pauline.”

 

I ask the 7,697 mile question. And how does his wife feel about being a BAS widow on the other side of the world, starting with another solitary Christmas?

 

 

 

I’m not the first to ask. During Ray’s recent King’s Lynn Arts and Science SocietyLecture about his Antarctic expedition at which Pauline provided technical support – she answered herself with a pair of jazz hands and a big grin. The audience of 65 was suitably amused, if not entirely reassured.

 

Today, however, we get the real answer. “This is something Ray has always wanted to do. Of course I want to support him in fulfilling his lifelong dream.”

 

Ray’s sheepish smile of gratitude says it all.

 

He justifies further, “In this digital age, it’s not that we won’t hear from each other. During my Antarctic trip, we were in email contact every morning and evening and there was a telephone link every week – by satellite to Cambridge and then up the land line to Heacham. All of this will apply equally to South Georgia, where there may even be the luxury of Skype.
 

“In some ways we’ll see and hear more of each other when I’m on the other side of the world than when we’re living in the same house!”

 

 

I stare fascinated at Ray’s map of the bottom of our planet.

It’s easy to forget Antarctica is a continent. The South Pole is on a plateau but elsewhere there are huge snow-and-ice-buried mountain ranges. Halley station was on the frozen coast. South Georgia is a mountain range and a coast in a lot of deep water. It’s not got many similarities to Heacham. Did he learn anything last time to make the long trip south any easier?

 

“Yes, we’d got to South Africa before I realised I hadn’t packed any underpants!”

 

Ray moved to Sedgeford with his wife and young family as an employee of Eastern Electricity in 1986 and their youngest daughter grew up there. He got interested in science via the Sedgeford Archaelogical Research Project. (SHARP). “I had an Iron Age horse skeleton in the garage for six months.” I mention that this must have intrigued visitors even more than the sports car and he laughs.

 

Ray’s involvement with SHARP continues and his distinctive hat and regulation archaeological beard adorned Open Day last year. “I was going to be SHARP’s animal bones expert for the 2015 season. Obviously, since the BAS phone call at the end of September informed me I’ll be in South Georgia that’s all now on hold. But I’ll always be grateful to SHARP for the original inspiration and they are cool about my having a year away.”

 

Ray’s experience with SHARP led on to an OU Degree in Natural Sciences. The degree involved a lot of detail collected by BAS and the more he found out, the more he wanted to see a station for himself. Lamenting one day in the field to Melanie Van Twest, a young Australian member of SHARP, that he was too old to apply to join one of BAS’s projects, the youngster urged, “Go for it, Ray. They’d snap you up.” And they did. “My OU degree in Natural Sciences was crucial in getting me this job.”

 

Does he feel smug at escaping the Norfolk winter before it sets in?

 

“I’m more likely to see a White Christmas than you will in winter Norfolk – South Georgia is mountainous and snow is possible all year. But the main snow will come during May-October.”

 

Temperatures across the South Atlantic vary enormously. A quick glance at the BAS website (at the time of writing) reveals it is currently minus 11 degrees at the Halley station in Antarctica, +9.4 at King Edward Point on Georgia, where it is more than sheltered than the otherwise equivalent Bird Island (+3.1) - and a chilling minus 38 degrees at the South Pole.

 

The temperatures Ray can look forward to in his upside down year will typically range from minus 15 C to a sweltering high of 20 C. Luckily, he will be living in a sheltered valley on a long peninsula called King Edward Point. The high surrounding mountains will protect the small team from the worst excesses. He has been preparing for this and other eventualities with training courses since October.

 

“We had better weather in the Antarctic in Spring 2013 than Norfolk did. And I came back to a colder welcome – from the weather – than I’d left in the frozen South.”

 

“But by June 2015 it’ll be dark and chilly and may even plummet to 20 degrees below.”

 

Is he worried?

 

“No. I am equipped with 22 kg of state-of-the-art Antarctic kit to keep me safe and warm.

 

 

“BAS don’t own the station. It belongs to the South Georgia government. As you might expect, it uses cutting edge sustainable fuels – in 2008, a new  Hydro Electric Power station (designed and built in Kendal, Great Britain by Gilkes Ltd) was installed, using the mountainous terrain and a lake, and – reassuringly – there is a stand by generator.  I’ll be a snug as a Norfolk bug in a rug.”

 

His new penguin-populated Georgia base does have some reminders of home. King Edward Point includes a church; a whaling station converted to heritage and protection; Shackleton’s grave and a harbour for tourist cruise ships. It even has seals. A corner of the world forever England?

 

The scientific research, as you might expect from its location, is primarily fishing based. The BAS-contracted laboratory re-opened after a 20 year impasse caused by the Falklands conflict –Argentinian forces briefly occupied this island and still claim it - and is aimed at providing scientific advice to assist in the sustainable management of valuable and commercial fisheries around the island. What is Ray’s part in it all?

 

“Twofold: 1. to keep the base’s electrical equipment running and also to assist the scientists. The latter includes crewing the power boats as they conduct fishing surveys.

 

2. To generally help run the station, keep it tidy and clean, and take my turn to cook– making use of a recent crash course from Pauline. Unlike the Halley team’s happy arrangement where international chefs in search of adventure and a CV embellishment are typically employed, the Georgia team is too small to justify dedicated chefs. But I’ll do my best!”

 

Ray is keenly aware of the role of science in rescuing the planet. “The station is important to the world as it is collecting data about sustainable fishing and the viability of fish stock.

 

“And also how many whales have been pinched by unauthorised whalers!” adds Pauline.

 

There are penguin and seal colonies to monitor and reindeers to control. Rats were accidentally introduced to the island via whaling boats and the damage to bird species is clear by comparing the birds’ relative thriving on nearby Bird Island, which is rat-free. The station has overseen an enthusiastic rat-eradication programme, still not quite successful.

 

Ray hates talk of ‘decimating’ rats though –because it’s a sloppy and unscientific use of the word. “We need to get rid of them all, not just one in ten!”

 

It is this precision that helped get him the job. He was the only person on the Halley station trusted with polishing the glass frontage of the spiral staircase.

 

This scrupulousness also typifies Ray’s concern with the wider environment and the sustainable survival and prospering of the world to which BAS is so committed. Ray’s recent lecture for the KLSAS ended with his passionate advice to British youngsters. “Don’t follow popstars and footballers– the really exciting place to be in the modern world is Science.”

 

Looking at Ray’s example, there might be a few more ‘of a certain age’ who feel the same!  

Original EDP Feature by Gareth Calway here

The Cambridge-based British Antarctic Survey is one of the world's leading environmental research centres and is responsible for the UK's national scientific activities in Antarctica.  ‘Digging Sedgeford’ the full story of the SHARP project’s first 18 years is published by Poppyland Publishing www.poppyland.co.uk  Gareth’s Norfolk Notables features for the EDP are available online at www.garethcalway.co.uk His Christmas show with Dr Paul Richards ‘A Hanse Christ  Mess’ is in the Hamburg Suite at Hanse House in King’s Lynn on 6 December details www.garethcalway.co.uk  or www.marriottswarehouse.co.uk.

 

RAY OF HOPE: AN OCCASIONAL BLOG FROM UNDER THE BEYOND-

 

Ah! Gentoo Penguin with Chick and an egg!!

“Arrival Sunday 23 November

 

Just got here after a week's travelling! Phew.

I am not a great sailor and the ship was going from side to side a lot.

The Hydro plant we have here was designed and built in Kendal, Great Britain by Gilkes Ltd.

Skype, alas, does not work, it has taken me I hour to log on to emails! Still quite incredible that I can do this on a very remote island down here.

I will keep you in the news loop, may be able to send small photos if I pick my time. This is written at 22:30 on a Sunday when things are quiet.

Seals are very very smelly!

Cheers and love to all,

Ray.”

'Shackleton' Day 5 Dec

Me - Thinking of you on the day Shackleton set off from South Georgia 100 years ago. 'The Guardian' has a centrefold of Endurance in the ice today. The crew are playing football next to it!

Good job we’re all British or we’d faint!

Ray- One of my workplaces, the Hydro Power Plant, is no more than 100 yards from the gentleman's grave. There is a fence around the graveyard, to keep reindeer and seals off.
 

 

Kind Edward Point Factfile (adapted from BAS website http://www.antarctica.ac.uk/index.php)

 

Position: King Edward Point lies 860 miles east of the Falkland Islands, on South Georgia, a mountainous island near the bottom of the world, no nearer South America than Antarctica. Access is by boat or ship-based helicopter.
Purpose: Administration support; applied fisheries research.
Occupied: By the British Antarctic Survey.

Station Facilities

3 separate laboratories; a dedicated communications room; offices with excellent computing facilities; a walk-in freezer for specimen storage and a library

Administration & Status

South Georgia, part of British Overseas Territories, is administered by its own government, based in the Falkland Islands, and represented locally at King Edward Point by a Government Officer. BAS staff at King Edward Point provides logistic support assisting the Officer to carry out his duties plus the delivery of an agreed science plan.

Scientific Research

BAS scientists provide sound scientific advice to assist in the sustainable management of the valuable commercial fisheries around the island.

Climate

Surrounded by cold waters originating in Antarctica, South Georgia has a harsher climate than expected from its latitude. Permanent ice covers over half the island, large glaciers flow from the highest peaks in sharp contrast to the green coastal belt.  Mountain-sheltered, King Edward Point receives drier and calmer weather. Temperature range −15°C to +20°C with well-defined summer and winter, though snow can fall on any day of the year. The island is typically snow-covered from May to October.

Landscape

Mountainous and glaciated.

Coastal fringe is snow-free in summer with lush vegetation.

The island was once the home of the whaling industry. Tens of thousands of whales were brought ashore to be rendered down for oil. Many of the beaches are littered with whalebones. The whaling station at Grytviken, across the bay from King Edward Point, is now a heritage site and includes a museum.

Wildlife

Abundant seabirds including penguins. In summer the station beach becomes a breeding ground for Elephant seals.

Station Personnel

King Edward Point station has 22 people living on station in summer and 12 people throughout the winter. BAS staff comprise 2 fisheries scientists; 2 boating officers; 2 technicians (electrical and mechanical); a doctor and a Base Commander.

Life on Station

Everyone is on a rota to clean, cook evening meals and make bread. Comprehensive training in navigation and Search and Rescue techniques is provided initially in the UK and continued upon arrival.

 

Review of Jubilee String Quartet Music For An Engish Country House (EDP July 22)

Music for an English Country House

Jubilee String Quartet

 

This King’s Lynn Festival event at Sandringham’s Park Houseouse was heavenly music and all the more so for defying both composers’ reputations for fairweather grace.  The playing was passionate and intense and both quartets gave ample material to express this. In Haydn’s consummate late G major quartet, the signature avuncular humour, ease and beguiling folk melodies were present and welcome but the old master pioneers a personal expressiveness that would have taught the young pretender more than he ever managed to do as Beethoven’s tutor. The themes are strong and the quiet warmth achieved at the end of the slow movement is won from strenuous effort, conveyed in virtuosic performances. Mendelsohn’s String Quartet in F minor was a furious meditation on disillusionment and grief in which the composer’s familiar calm, effervescence and tenderness – where present – are contextualised in stark contrast with dissonances and savage syncopations, full of menace and anxiety. We wait for consolations in vain.  The energy and power of the playing, like the music, never falters and somehow combines savagery with poise, four instruments in soaring unison. Music for an English country house haunted by sorrow and despair.

 

EDP Tuesday 22 July

Review of The National Youth Jazz Orchestra With Clare Teal (EDP July 21)

 

Corn Exchange, King’s Lynn

It was hot work on stage at this sell out King’s Lynn Festival event for band leader Mark Armstrong but the band was hotter still. Big band jazz might be approaching its second century as a popular art form but these 22 musicians, all aged under 25, and with women soloists as well as men, brought new life to the genre. While the enthusiastically-applauded classics – ‘Love For Sale’, ‘Embraceable You’, ‘That Old Black Magic’, ‘Lady Be Good’, ‘Cheek to Cheek’ - were all present, finger-clicking correct and in splendid order – the band was equally impressive in Rolling Stones territory (Willie Dixon) a Columbian tempo or the stomping – and complex - contemporary jazz rhythms of Siegel’s MBadgers - and as assured giving a razzamatazz showbiz entry to guest singer Clare Teal as they were providing a torch-song pianist for her on ‘Secret Love’. Teal – voted British Jazz singer of the year 2005 and 2007 - was the highlight, presenting evergreen songs like the warm-hearted yet super-cool Radio 2 pro she is, then hot as Africa singing ‘I Just Wanna Make Love To You.’

Anne Boleyn at Blickling Hall: EDP Feature 19 May

Ghostly Legacy of a Queen

I stole to the door of Blickling Hall
On the nineteenth night of a moonlit May
And saw the ghost of Anne Boleyn
Shining bright as day…

When I asked Norwich composer Tom Conway to set these lines from my Ballad of Anne Boleyn and the Burglar it seemed to strike a chord with our audiences. Actress Joanna Swan – Tom’s musical partner in the Familiars folk duo– made it one of the highlights of our ‘spooky folk’ tour of Norfolk.

Blickling Hall is certainly a good place to set a ghost story. It was voted the most haunted house in Britain in a National Trust survey in October 2007.

Tonight is the 478th anniversary of Anne Boleyn’s execution and her spirit has good cause to be restless. Her failure to provide a male heir for the Tudor dynasty convinced Henry VIII his marriage was cursed by God.

Her miscarriages, defective births, alleged extra finger and a prominent neck mole didn’t help, encouraging the myth that she was a 'she-devil'. The famous sexual magnetism of her then-unfashionable dark looks and small frame contributed further to her occult mystique. Less famously, but more significantly, her advanced and well-read Protestantism fanned the flames of anathema.

She could not be placed at any of the scenes of the ‘crime’ with any of the six ‘adulterers’ accused, including her brother Lord Rochford and the famous poet Sir Thomas Wyatt (the only one released.) But the witch-hunter’s accusations that she could materialise anywhere, anytime, rather hampered her defence!

At her trial for treason, presided over by her uncle, the Duke of Norfolk, she was accused of acting the 'libertine' before her marriage to Henry, and of being a disciple of Satan who had 'bewitched' (seduced) Henry with sorcery.

During her imprisonment at the Tower in May 1536 - in the very state rooms she had spent her happy coronation – this ‘witch’ enquired anxiously about her father, also her 'sweet broder' and lamented that her mother would die of 'sorrow' for her.

The Boleyn family was living a nightmare, their fairy castle of achieved ambition swept away in one spring-tide of trauma.
It had taken Anne’s father Sir Thomas Boleyn a lifetime to build.

Well established as a diplomat and linguist at the Royal Court before Henry became King in 1509, his calculated marriage to the well-connected royally-descended Howards, Catholic dukes of Norfolk, aided his upward drive.

Thomas’s three children, George, Mary and Anne, were all well-educated and part of his grand plan to attain ever greater power and status.

The girls spent their teenage years in France as ladies-in-waiting to Henry's sister the French Queen, then consecutively joined Queen Katherine of Aragon’s household, as maids of honour. Both caught the King’s eye.

Anne played harder to get and her family benefited from her perceived ‘consort in waiting’ status. Thomas was created Earl of Wiltshire and her brother Lord George Rochford appointed to the Royal Privy Chamber.

Henry secretly wed Anne on 25th of January, 1533, and secured the Boleyns' status as one of England’s pivotal families, in an England that under Henry VIII was really going places. It was said she was the only woman who ever dared answer Henry back – his later wives were expressly required to be 'untroublesome'.

There was probably more head than heart in Anne’s requiting Henry’s troth. Her initial betrothal to Lord Henry Percy had been callously terminated by Cardinal Wolsey (on the King’s orders) and she had inspired Sir Thomas Wyatt’s aching love long before Henry’s.

On Monday 15 May, 1536, her uncle the Duke of Norfolk proclaimed the death sentence on Anne with 'tears in his eyes'.
On Friday 19 May, 1536 at 8.00am, aged 29, she took her place on a scaffold - her brother and the other ‘adulterers’ had already died on theirs, horribly - dressed in a robe of black damask covered by an ermine mantle of white.

Instead of denying her guilt as an adulteress and disciple of witchcraft, she delivered a generous speech praising her former lord and lover Henry VIII. After being blindfolded, a French swordsman severed her head from her delicate neck.

The story goes that on May 19 every year, a carriage pulled by six headless horses with a headless coachman carries a headless Anne to the door of Blickling Hall and the former Queen gets out brandishing her severed head! She then roams the hall’s corridors until daybreak when she disappears.

Perhaps she meets her father’s ghost. Sir Thomas had – inexplicably - continued to work closely with Henry, his children's treacherous killer and true source of his family’s new infamy. After his wife died in 1537, a year after Anne's death, he passed away himself (in 1539.) Elizabeth, Anne's mother, had reportedly died from a broken heart.

Mary – distanced from Anne by the latter’s replacing her in Henry’s affections - died in 1542 but was survived by a young daughter and the rumoured illegitimate son of Henry.

Legend has it that, as penance for the untimely deaths of two of his children, Sir Thomas’s ghost must cross 12 bridges before cockcrow every 19th May. With his own coach of headless horses, he starts at Blickling and crosses bridges at Aylsham, Belaugh, Burg, Buxton, Coltishall, Hautbois, Meyton, Oxnead and Wroxham.

It’s not all legend. The original manor house in Blickling (the surviving red-bricked Hall is Jacobean) was the Boleyn family home and it is reasonable to assume that in 1507 Anne was born there.

The family was deeply rooted locally. The earliest evidence that the Rev. Canon W. L. E. Parsons, Rector of Salle (“Some Notes on the Boleyn Family” published in the Norfolk and Norwich Archaeological Society’s journal in 1935) could find was a John Boleyn mentioned in 1283 in the Register of Walsingham Abbey. There is a record of the Prior of Walsingham suing William Boleyn of Thurning, and Prior’s Bailiff in Salle, for an account and a John Boleyn acting as a surety.

The family status was not all Thomas-won and Tudor-riche. “The descendants of Nicholas Boleyn,” notes Parsons, “weren’t just holders of land under the Lord, they owned the manor of Calthorpe as of fee and right.”

A Geoffrey Boleyn was laid to rest in Salle Church in 1440. His children included Cecily, buried at Blickling; Thomas, a priest and Master of Gonville Hall, Cambridge, from 1454-72 and Geoffrey, a Lord Mayor of London.

It was this second Geoffrey who brought the family to financial and social prominence in the reign of Henry VI. As the protégé of his Norfolk neighbour, the famous Sir John Falstaff (grossly caricatured by Shakespeare) he travelled to London, achieving fame, fortune and royal favour, married into the nobility, and served as Sheriff of London.

Falstaff sold Blickling manor to Geoffrey before dying at Caister Castle in 1459. Geoffrey’s son William served as Sheriff of Norfolk from 1500 to 1501. He was buried in Norwich Cathedral on his death in 1505.

Thus, Thomas Boleyn, Anne’s father, inherited from William the manors of Blickling, Calthorpe, Wikmere, Mekylberton, Fylby, West Lexham, Possewick, Stiffkey and Hever Castle. But he didn’t stop there.

Honours were heaped upon him in the 1520s: first Treasurer of the Household, then Knight of the Garter, Viscount Rochford, and finally, in 1529, the Earldom of Wiltshire. In 1533, when his daughter Anne Boleyn became Queen, the Boleyns had reached the top.

Their fall was as spectacular - and much more swift. Within eight years, not one member of the immediate Boleyn household survived. The remaining relatives, stigmatised by tragedy and shame, disappeared, reportedly to Ireland.

Their curse continued. Even the Howards were infected – Anne’s cousin Catherine Howard later mirroring her own fate. After Sir Thomas’s death in 1539, Blickling passed through his brother’s hand to his relatives, the impressively wealthy Cleres. Yet Sir Edward Clere died a bankrupt in 1605 and eleven years later his widow sold the whole Estate.

Blickling Hall today is one of Norfolk's top visitor attractions, boasting nearly 5000 acres, that impressive Jacobean build, gardens and parkland walking. The landscape, with its hedges, tree-lined lanes, woodlands and red brick manor reaches back to a Tudor-founded England, despite the top secret work carried out by the RAF during the Second World War. A great place to root yourself.

Watch out for the ghosts though!

Gareth’s play Tom and Harry, about the men in Anne Boleyn’s life, and set at Blickling Hall, toured as a Room at the Gin production last year. Hear excerpts here

Hanse Festival in King's Lynn 17 May EDP Weekend Feature and Lynn News link

A glorious sun-drenched day in Lynn, on the Hanseatic waterfront, previewed in my EDP Weekend feature (not available online so copied below.) The concerts ended with these two acts: Eplemoya, who sang with Nordic fire and ice, and the Mediaveal Baebes, from England, whom I reviewed in Monday's EDP (also not available online so copied below) and in The Lynn News 23 May. View review here Above - rock pics by the fabulous Al Pufford.
Link to Lynn News online at end of post.

Feature in EDP Weekend 17 May

King’s Lynn celebrates its Hanseatic heritage this weekend in sumptuous style. Attractions include mediaeval markets; guided Hanseatic walks; arts and crafts stalls; street entertainment including fire breathers and minstrels; children’s activities; fireworks; music from the Paabel and Hermitage ensemble and, from 8 pm Saturday, the bewitching choral music ensemble Mediaeval Baebes.

Hanse Day has been celebrated annually in King’s Lynn since 2009 when the Borough Council organised the town’s first ever Hanse Festival. Amid mediaeval merriment and quayside sea shanties, the majestic Lisa von Lubeck, a 15th Century caravel reconstruction, cruised up the River Great Ouse from its port in Lubeck, Germany, to greet the crowds.
The original mediaeval Hanseatic League, of a group of towns around the Baltic and the North Sea, was an extremely influential trading association and an integral part of King's Lynn's development and past.
Let’s take a walk through ‘Hanseatic’ Lynn.
In the Custom House on Purfleet Quay, one of the most gracious buildings of any era, are housed models of North East Europe’s first ‘container ships.’ These 14th century ships – whose ability to carry bulk cargoes made them so successful - linked Lynn with Hamburg, Bremen, Lubeck and Rostock. Later ships like the Lisa von Lubeck, a 15th Century caravel, were built bigger and with castles fore and aft for soldiers to defend against pirates.
Stockfish Row (laid out by the Norwich bishops who ruled ‘Bishop’s Lynn’ in the 1140s; renamed King St in a fit of patriotism in the Napoleonic Wars) was where Lynn’s top 15C merchants built new houses and alehouses running down to the river. The Great Ouse was deeper in this part of town enabling bigger ships to moor at private quays. The main public quay - ‘the Common Staith’ - was off Tuesday Market Place.
St George’s Guildhall is the only part of King St that survives from the mediaeval period. Hanse merchant John Brandon was a leading patron.
An archaeological excavation of The Purfleet between Baker Lane and the river revealed a timber-supported 14C quay three times its current width, a safe and impressively broad harbour for English and foreign ships. Pilgrims disembarked here from all over Christendom, including Britain (Lynn was more water-bound then) en route to Our Lady at Walsingham. German pilgrims arrived on Hanse vessels and merchant vessels commonly took passengers across North Sea and Baltic.
Clifton House was probably the first house built on the west side of Queen St after the Great Ouse was diverted from Wisbech to Lynn in the 1260s. It retains an early 14C tiled floor of the Westminster type and an impressive mid 14C brick undercroft. Germans were the only foreign merchants allowed to rent or own their own dwellings in Lynn and the late mediaeval mansion which stood here doubtless housed Hanseatic traders as house guests.
In Thoresby College a slate plaque marks the line of the late 13C quayside and a timber wharf excavated in 1964 shows by how much the river has moved west. Ships from Europe loaded and unloaded here. There is a fine wooden door dating from the reign which put the ‘king’ into King’s Lynn, Henry VIII’s in 1510.
Lynn Fair in Saturday Market Place was one of the most important in the Eastern counties and a major attraction for German and European traders seeking wool and cloth. The busy weekly market and annual summer fair shared the limited space with a charnel chapel and cemetery so must have spilled along High St.
Period brasses and chests in King’s Lynn Minster have counterparts in Lubeck. The Greyfriars tower was erected about 1400 to enhance the Church and provided an important seamark for ships sailing into the Wash until the 19C. St Margaret’s spire served the same function, before falling in a great storm in 1741.
St Margaret’s was the local church of Lynn’s mystic in residence Margery Kempe (c1373-1440), daughter of five times Mayor John Brunham. Margery’s son lived and worked in Danzig but died during a visit home. Margery’s famous Book, the first surviving autobiography in English, compellingly recounts how she took her son’s widow back to Danzig on perilous seas into war zones - against accepted female practice; the express instructions of her confessor and her own terror – in obedience to her divination of God’s will.
The Holy Trinity Guildhall was the home of Lynn’s great Guild of Merchants, including natives of Lubeck, the pioneer port of the Baltic and of the Hanseatic League until the 1350s – and then Danzig, the chief trading partner of the Wash port thereafter. This was where Lynn’s merchant rulers heard the treaty conditions following the Anglo-Hanseatic War (1468-1473) securing German traders a resident post in the town.
Hanse House, the only remaining Hanseatic trading post in England, came into German possession as a condition of the peace when in 1475 the Hanseatic ports resumed trading with Lynn after years of sea-warfare. Merchants from Lubeck, Hamburg, Bremen and Danzig had their lodgings, warehouses, offices, stalls and shops here. The original mediaeval timber frontage was doubtless adorned with the imperious double-headed Hanse Eagle. German merchants occupied it until the 1560s. Today, its handsome Georgian frontage welcomes visitors to an indoor market, Rathskeller bar and the festival’s unique Hanse heritage.
Further information: http://www.visitwestnorfolk.com/explore/kings-lynn/history/international-hansa-day; http://www.marriottswarehousetrust.co.uk
‘Margery Kempe of Lynn’ (a new Marriott’s Warehouse Trust production) plays the Hanse House courtyard on August 2 and 3.


Review of The Mediaeval Baebes
Lynn Hanse Festival Waterfront

This perfect May festival day on the Ouse needed a climax and it got one. As its name suggests, the Baebes’ chorale ensemble, currently topping the classical pops, flirts enticingly with the popular but with an Early Music pedigree. The singing is joyous but stylish, the tunes compelling, the rhythms infectiously contrapuntal, the cadences gorgeously modal, and a mediaeval world away from pop. The arms lifted into the warm summer sky above long scarlet dresses and flower-decked hair, hands clapping energetic accompaniment while the drum thunders and the strings pluck, hint at dancing girls, especially when the singing takes on an Arabian tinge, but ultimately it is the ear that is ravished and excited.
There are nods to witch coven, Bacchae and sirens in their relentless hour-long attack, particularly when ‘Adam lay y bounden’ gets female delight in his plight. The Baebes’ two devotional chants – normally performed in Cathedrals in white dresses– are at odds with their glee in an immaculate birth achieved ‘without the seed of a man’ and in ‘I Sing of a Maiden’ their exquisite hymning in feisty scarlet of Mary’s virgin motherhood, but the disconcerting of audience sensibilities is all part of the fun.

Gareth Calway

See also Lynn News story, which made it a record 4 day sequence for me troubling the regional dailies here:

And just to prove Al isn't the one who can shoot a camera, this photo-gallery of the day by Maz and me.