Tea at Trianon: The Anchor Church

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Saturday, January 1, 2022

The Anchor Church

A hermit's cave survives in England. From Archaeology:

A cave carved by human hands out of a sandstone cliff above a tributary of the River Trent in Derbyshire, England, may have been occupied as early as the seventh century A.D. Edmund Simons, an archaeologist at the Royal Agricultural University, recently led a team that found that the Romanesque doors of the three-room cave are very similar to those found in other medieval buildings. Moreover, a rock-cut pillar in the cave is of a style found in many Anglo-Saxon structures, including a seventh-century A.D. crypt in nearby Repton. This raises the possibility that the cave may have been built to imitate the crypt, or possibly even by the same architect.

Legend holds the cave was once inhabited by a ninth-century A.D. saint named Hardulph, who has been identified with Eardwulf, a deposed king of Northumbria who lived out his final years exiled in the early medieval Kingdom of Mercia, where the cave is located. Likewise, its name, Anchor Church, which dates to at least the thirteenth century, suggests the cave was home to anchorites, or religious hermits. “Saint Hardulph has a cell in a cliff a little from the Trent,” reports a fragment of a medieval book preserved in a 1545 volume. “Anchor Church is the only real contender because there aren’t any other caves by the Trent that are like it in that area,” says Simons. The cave went on to be used in the eighteenth century by inhabitants of the nearby manor house, Foremarke Hall, as an entertainment venue. Archaeologists have found evidence that the gentlefolk knocked out some of the cave’s walls to provide an airier space with better views of the valley below. (Read more.)