David Crouch 🏳️‍🌈

And in the week when G-A-Y closed its doors. The old Soho club culture is dying its own natural death, without silly performative evangelicals claiming credit.

I do hope it closes off that historiographical cul de sac for good and all. It proved only that French historians could be brainwashed as easily as the British by grand narratives, in our case by Oxbridge constitutionalist history, still twitching

The recent VCH volume suggests from extant remains that the Gothic collegiate church was preceded by a major cruciform Romanesque church with stone vaults, the one presided over by the famous historian Roger of Howden as minster head, or ‘persona’ between c.1169 and 1202

My German is crap, but "Gefallt aus" was a phrase I was glad I understood on my last visit

I remember the damp black dust it deposited on the fields of Mountain Ash comp down the valley

F**k Calvinism

Might be makeshift staithes, set in banks of tidal rivers to deflect the ebb rip from undermining the sea bank. A medieval strategy in Yorkshire

Already sold out. They need a bigger venue dammit

Fantastic. My town. I will be there.

Ah Senate House. Home of the Institute of Historical Research. Best history library in the UK.

I would point to certain publishers, amongst whom grew the belief that professionally trained historians were Dry-as-dusts incapable of writing accessibly. This became apparent in the 1990s when unqualified writers began to publish titles on very serious topics sources for which they could not read.

Roberts does seem to be one of those scientists who believes the humanities are easy subjects and anyone can do them. without any formal training. History as much as theology suffers from these berks.

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.

If you were a boy educated in the 1950s the comics you read were full of heroic Tommies mowing down Nazis and winning VCs. My first German words were inevitably ‘Achtung’ and ‘Handes hoch’. No wonder so many men in their sixties were Brexit fodder

Another dismally dumb low quality HE Exec

And a nod to Scarborough whose 12th century town walls closed off its promontory. Its rebuilt gate on Westborough survived till as late as Victoria’s reign and gave its name to Bar Street

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)

There’s one of those freestanding mini-fonts I know of in St Margaret’s Millington, East Riding. No picture unfortunately but more Romanesque than Gothic in shape

Quite a survival rate for stoups though almost all I know are set in walls by doors. Fons pascalis sounds interesting

Miniature font or portable stoup? How does one tell?

Castle Hedingham is rural and has the turreted square keep but not now the forebuilding

So you can see why he refused Edward’s offer to make him an English earl. It was a deliberate insult from the Psycho King

It depends on how you define capitalism I guess. The first universities were run as money-making machines with tutors paid directly by their pupils, mostly on a career path into the ecclesiastical hierarchy. The devotion to research we so venerate now was not their business in Paris and Oxford

He was an individual for sure, though not framed by camp the way Stephen Fry is. But plummy he could be. He was at Strawberry Hill when I first met him (and you) in the early 80s. Hadn’t realised he taught at UEA.

Note my qualifier. Promises and their fulfilments are something lawyers are trained to view differently from a homo rationalis trained in the humanities

Timorous and visionless maybe, but I don’t doubt his honesty. But wth he’s a lawyer.

The IHR library in Senate House was my benchmark for a great library. I used to take an early morning train from Cardiff to Paddington in the days I was doing my doctoral research, on Saturdays when it was open, amazingly. It had every published northern French cartulary. Awesome.

Harper-Bill's gravelly, whisky-serrated voice lives still in my head

Or the classic Normandy before 1066 by David Bates. Normandy seems to attract scholars called David … cf David Douglas