Norwich

Hello friends and family,

I’ve had a big weekend, so my apologies if this post is long.

First off, I finally got my baggage on Friday, so I spent most of the afternoon unpacking. I cannot begin to tell you how excited I am to have a full-length towel instead of just a hand towel, and to have a real blanket instead of sleeping in sweatpants (or are they sweat-trousers?) and socks, etc. Really and truly, though, living without my stuff was profitable. It was a reminder of just how little we really need and how much we allow ‘stuff’ to rule our lives.

Like the old lady and the penny, I decided to celebrate Friday night. The church I had visited the week before was holding a coffee house concert featuring a South African guitarist. It was a great evening and made me want to play guitar all night long when I got back to my flat. I couldn’t though, because I had a date with Norwich the next day (the city of Norwich, that is).

So, Saturday morning, I left the house at 5:50 am to make the train. The trip was 4 hours long, but only because we had to make a long dogleg to Nottingham. Norwich is in East Anglia, in the Norfolk region near the English Channel. The train took me past some beautiful farmland including one disked field where the soil was so black and fertile that I couldn’t even see the crows except for the glint of the sun off their oily feathers. We also passed more ring-necked pheasants than I have ever seen in my life. I probably saw thirty on my trip.

We passed the town of Grantham on the way. Grantham is the hometown of Margaret Thatcher and Isaac Newton. Newton was known to spend hours in the local 13^th century church, pouring over the volumes in its library.

The city of Norwich (rhymes with porridge, not –witch) has over 1000 years of history, but I only had 8 hours to explore before the train took me home. It was a daunting task, to see it all, but I knew it could be done. I started the day at the Norman Keep, a medieval palace/stronghold and now museum.

In the museum, I learned about East Anglia’s early history, most importantly Queen Boudica’s revolt in AD 60. Before the Romans invaded England, the land was divided between small Celtic tribes. The Iceni Celts lived in the thick Norfolk woods and swamps in small wood and mud huts. They were herdsmen and farmers (in fact, Soay Sheep and Kerry Cows are very similar to the historic breeds) and worshiped local gods. Their religion was marked by sacred groves, trees, pools, and rivers. When the Romans arrived, the Iceni quickly allied themselves with the foreigners, but soon, even though they were allies, the Romans started treating them like slaves. When the Iceni queen, Queen Boudica, was brutalized by the Romans, the people revolted. The Celtic army sacked the Roman capitol, Colchester, and marched on London. Although they were initially successful, the discipline and organization of the Roman legion won the day and the revolt was suppressed. Rome ruled Britain for the next 350 years. In AD410, with the empire was crumbling, Emperor Honorius ordered the last of the Roman army back to the Continent, leaving Britain defenseless against the coming Saxon raiders.

In the museum, I also got to look at several mummies in the Egyptian Collection, which was largely donated by the local author Rider Haggard, who wrote the incredible adventure novels King Solomon’s Mines and She.

I also toured the art galleries, and saw, among other things, the iconic Samuel Drummond painting The Death of Nelson. Lord Horatio Nelson grew up near Norwich and his daring victories against the Spanish fleet, culminating in the monumental battle of Trafalgar, launched him to superstar fame in England, and especially Norwich. Nelson is definitely one of my heroes.

So, next I went down into the castle dungeon and learned about all sorts of crimes and punishments in the olde days. One device of punishment was a small wooden box with a crank handle coming out of it. The crank was connected to a paddle inside the box and a counter on the top (to count the revolutions). The box was filled with sand and gravel to make the cranking very difficult. Prisoners, in the early 1800s, were required to crank the handle 1800 times before every meal in order to get their daily allotment of bread and water. This is where the term ‘cranky’ comes from. Doubtless, you would be cranky too if you had to do that before breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

There was also a large collection of death heads. In the 1800s, the pseudoscience of Phrenology was eminently popular. Phrenologists held that a person’s personality and character traits could be read from the shape of one’s skull. They figured that just as a bicep grows bigger with exercise, the lobes of the brain that account for various behaviors grow bigger with use. Thus, an especially benevolent person should have a lump on the skull over the particular region associated with benevolence. Charlotte Bronte’s characters repeatedly refer to this now-debunked science in Jane Eyre. At any rate, phrenologists were especially concerned about what could be learned from the shape of criminals’ heads. So, when someone was executed, they would make a plaster of Paris mould of the head for examination, and now there are thousands of death heads in storage around the country.

One head they had on display was that of an Italian fellow named Fieschi. He tried to assassinate the French king, King Louis Felipe with an elaborate plan. He rented a second story room along a city road where the king was going to appear, and built a contraption of 24 guns pointing into the street all tied together with one trigger. Well, when the king walked by, Fieschi pulled the trigger and all went terribly wrong. His machine exploded in his face, twelve innocent townsfolk were killed, and the king was unscathed. The criminal was caught and sent to the guillotine. The Norwich Phrenology society politely asked for and received the head.

Eventually, I made it all the way down to the original dungeon. We turned off the lights to see what it would be like down there 1000 years ago – not a lot of fun…and very dark. Charles Dickens once said that the only thing good about Norwich was the public hangings – he regularly attended. (That sentence doesn’t really belong in this paragraph, but I’m going to leave it there.)

I then went to the top of the Keep (the strongest tower in a castle and the last line of defense) and looked out over the city.

“People of God, walk around Zion and count the towers; take notice of the walls and examine the fortresses, so that you may tell the next generation: ‘This God is our God forever and ever; He will lead us for all time to come.’” Psalms 48:12-14.

Once I escaped from the dungeon and castle, I went to the Royal Norfolk Regimental Museum, and saw the shakos, medals, unit insignia, and battle flags of the historic regiment, which saw action from the Battle of Kabul Afghanistan (in the 1800’s), to the American Rebellion (they surrendered at Saratoga), to the Crimean War, to Ireland. Actually, they went to Ireland about every ten years for the past 350 years… Interestingly, Major John Andre, of the regiment, was the British officer who was caught and hung for helping Benedict Arnold defect to England.

After the regimental museum, I went to the Norwich Cathedral, which has the second tallest spire in England and is a magnificent example of Romanesque architecture. The Cathedral was started just before the Norman Conquest in 1066. The large wool industry in the surrounding area allowed the church to enlarge over the years (Norwich was the second most important city in all of Medieval England, after London). Behind the church is the grave of Edith Cavell, a WWI nurse who was shot by the Germans in Brussels for her role in helping over 200 prisoners-of-war escape to Holland. After her execution, enlistments in the Royal Army doubled! Also near the cathedral was the King Edward VI School, where Lord Nelson was educated.

Next (I told you I had a busy weekend!), I went to the open-air market, which has been running since 1025. I wandered through some historic, cobblestone streets to get there, and then strolled through the candy-striped tents of the market. I wasn’t interested in the fake Gucci bags and the cheese was too pricy (although let me just say that I found a good hunk of Cheshire cheese in the Sheffield supermarket), so I left empty-handed.

Fortunately, the city centre is small, so it didn’t take me long to hoof it to my next waypoint – the Julian Shrine. Julian of Norwich was an anchoress (a hermit) in the 1300’s, having taken vows for a solitary life of prayer and contemplation. She grew deathly ill in 1373 and when she recovered, she spent the next 20 years writing a book about a series of visions she received when she was sick. This was the first book written by an English woman, and also turned out to be a classic. Her Revelations of Divine Love has some remarkable and insightful (considering that she wrote this over 600 years ago) thoughts on God’s love for us and on suffering in the world. C.S. Lewis was familiar with this book, and her most famous words, “All shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well,” is the basis for the song of the same name by my favorite songwriter, Andrew Peterson.

I was trying to pick out the best passage of the book to quote below, but was having a very hard time of it, so here are three quotes:

“Our soul is so wonderfully loved of Him that no one can comprehend it. That is to say, no creature can fully comprehend how much, and how sweetly, and how tenderly our Maker loves us. Therefore we may with grace and His help stand in awe of this love, and forever marvel at this high, overpassing, inestimable Love that Almighty God has toward us of His goodness.”

“He said to me, ‘If I would have had to suffer more to bring you to myself, I would have done so.’”

“Thus, in my folly, I often wondered why the great foreseeing wisdom of God did not prevent sin from entering the world, for then, I thought, all should have been well. However, this line of reasoning only led to mourning and sorrow, not to a solution to the problem, and I should have left it behind. But Jesus spoke to me all that I needed to understand, and here is what he said, ‘Sin has a part to play in my plan, but all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well’… So pain endures for a time. Its role is to purge us, make us to know ourselves, and it drives us to the Lord to plead for mercy. The passion of our Lord and the knowledge that his will will indeed be done gives us strength to bear up to all this.”

The room where she wrote this was torn down during the reformation and the rest of the building was heavily damaged by German bombers during WWII (as was much of the city). It was rebuilt after the war as a chapel.

After dinner, it was getting dark but I still had some time, so I took a walk by the river Wensom. At night, the Wensom turns into a kaleidoscope for the senses. River water tends to smell bad, but it’s connected to so many good memories that it’s a good smell to me. This smell mixed with Authentic Greek Cuisine and A Taste of Kashmir. The total void of sound coming from the water was contrasted by the clinking of mugs and the laughing spilling out of the nearby pubs. It was hard to tell if the light sparkling off the waves was from the city or some other more enchanted source. I sat on a bench for a while and waited for the Lady for the Water to lift Excalibur out of the river, but alas, she never came and I had to catch my train home.

I got back to Sheffield at 11:00 pm and quickly realized that Sheffield on Saturday night is very different than during the day. Recently, the whole of England has been blighted by the very serious problem of binge drinking. Great Britain has always enjoyed a rather prolific drinking culture. After church, folks would head to the pub to discuss the sermon over a few beers. Politics and business matters were handled the same way – in the pub. While there were certainly problems with drunkenness, the vice was, by and large, the exception.

However, my generation has ratcheted up drinking to a whole new, and dangerous, level. In the thirty minute walk from the train station to my house, it seemed like I saw the majority of the city’s 50,000 plus students out at the clubs (I’m exaggerating a bit, I know). Hmm… a drunk pirate walking in the middle of the road. Oops, let me just step over this puddle of puke on the sidewalk. Hi there, have fun peeing on the wall. Looks like someone is walking home barefoot, because here are her shoes; good luck stepping over all the broken glass. I wonder if that car is going to see the fellow about the bolt across the street.

It’s not that I’m naive and have never been around drunk people before, quite to the contrary. It’s just that the scale of this self-destruction and self-deprecation was disgusting.

It seems that in the 600 years since Julian of Norwich wrote, we haven’t learned many lessons at all. She saw the value in suffering and the role it had in God’s plan; she knew joy in knowing Christ. We try to avoid suffering like the plague and still think we can find lasting happiness in the bottom of a bottle.

“All manner of things will be well.” Even so, come, Lord Jesus.

Goodnight,

Will