Tea at Trianon: Searching the Site of Cerne Abbey

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

Tuesday, August 8, 2023

Searching the Site of Cerne Abbey

From Once I Was a Clever Boy:

Today the village of Cerne Abbas in Dorset is best known for the figure of the Giant cut into the hillside above the houses. Recent years have seen further research to establish its date as being Anglo-Saxon, and there has been discussion about the extent to which it has been ‘modified’over the centuries. In the high and later middle ages however it was not the figure of the Giant - which may indeed have been overgrown at the time - but the Benedictine abbey which drew visitors to the valley. The abbey was associated with legends of a visit by St Augustine of Canterbury and the hermit St Eadwold, who was belived to be the brother of the East Anglian St Edmund the Martyr. The monastery was founded, or maybe refounded, in 987, and survived until 1539, but today all that survives above ground is the Guest House, the very handsome porch of the Abbot’s House from the turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and a portion of the South Gate incorporated into a house, as well as a tithe barn. In terms of national history arguably the visit to the abbey of Queen Margaret of Anjou and her son the Prince of Wales together with Lancastrian leaders in April 1471 was the most famous event in the later centuries of the abbey’s existence. (Read more .)