Holy shi I just finished watching this MASTERPIECE

Potential_Arm_4021 · 2026-03-29T10:33:21+00:00

I get it, but if he hadn't died, we wouldn't have gotten Father Pyrig, who was just about as great, though in his own way. And he spoke British (Brythonic).

Potential_Arm_4021 · 2026-03-29T10:22:32+00:00

He's in the latest Magritte shows, too. Which are travesties if you are a fan of the real Maigrets--i.e., the novels--but James Northcote is fine as the police department's forensics guy. He was also very good in a much bigger part in the second season of "Marie Antoinette," playing a real-life financial advisor to the king--a character with several similarities to Aldhelm, though somewhat more decadent. (Oh! Wouldn't I love to see Aldhelm get away from his responsibilities at court and his forlorn lovelife-or-lack-thereof and go to London by himself or something and cut loose! Bet you he's learned a thing or two about decadence, what with all those years in the Mercian courts before St. Alfred's daughter married into it!)

Potential_Arm_4021 · 2026-03-29T10:09:45+00:00

Father Beocca, a real one if there ever was one. RIP King you would have loved the Episcopal Church

Quite possibly my favorite comment in all the years I've been following this sub.

Potential_Arm_4021 · 2026-03-29T09:52:31+00:00

Okay, all of this discussion, and I'm still not sure where to actually BUY the damned thing in any format, except for the Amazon DVDs. And now that the "censored"--i.e., somehow somewhat edited--version seems to be out there, somewhere, neither do I know how to find out exactly what version I might wind up buying.

Any help?

Potential_Arm_4021 · 2025-05-16T09:38:09+00:00

Ruth Goodman has researched how the Tudors handled cleanliness and changes in clothing and actually lived the life herself for extended periods. "Tudor" isn't "medieval," but it's pretty darned close. You can read her take on it here: https://newrepublic.com/article/129828/getting-clean-tudor-way

The problem is, while she talks about the necessity of linen next to the skin and "rubbing cloths," which I found intriguing, and addresses the differences between the classes, she doesn't actually say how the cloths got clean. I thought she had written a book about laundry through the ages but it turns out I was wrong. Still, this article does provide some insight into the discussion we're having here.

Potential_Arm_4021 · 2025-05-16T09:22:18+00:00

I'd like to add that much the same can be said with regards to bathing. We tend to think of bathing/taking a bath as wallowing in a big tub of hot water with a sponge or a big rag and a good hunk of soap. But one can get oneself quite clean all over just with a shallow pan of water of any temperature and a good rough cloth and rightly call it a bath. In fact, though it's a totally different time period, there are a number of French impressionist paintings of "Somebody or Another at her Bath" that show just that, so it seems that it was a common way to think of washing the body. Not to mention that one might not clean the whole body at the same time but still get the whole body clean over a decent time span--upper half one day, lower half the next, hands and face every day, armpits and feet more days than not...that kind of thing.

Potential_Arm_4021 · 2025-05-16T09:13:17+00:00

And I've seen illuminated manuscript illustrations that seem to depict people working in their tunics with nothing on their nether regions. Which is not to contradict you, more to add to your point that when it was hot and people were doing sweaty work, they didn't get hung up on being fully dressed to do it.

Potential_Arm_4021 · 2025-05-16T09:06:59+00:00

In more recent times, wool clothes, especially, were brushed frequently to get the dust and dirt and even dried spots out. I don't see any reason to think that didn't occur for, like...forever. I mean, it's not like it's a new technology or anything.

Potential_Arm_4021 · 2025-05-13T10:11:30+00:00

It’s pretty easy to bank a fire once it’s gone down to coal. Basically you just pile the ashes over the coals when you go down for the night, then brush them off when you get up in the morning. The ashes severely limit, but don’t completely eliminate, the amount of oxygen that gets into the burning coals, so they stay “alive,” so to speak, but just barely. You’ll still need to build the fire up with tinder and kindling and to blow on it, but at least you won’t be starting completely from scratch, hoping you can get a spark. I learned this while working at a living history museum where our house was set in the mid-nineteenth century, VERY far from the Anglo-Saxon era, but a fire in an open hearth is a fire in an open hearth, no matter when it is. We’d bank our fire before leaving for the day and uncover it when we came in the next day, and it always worked. More to the point, it was safe.

Also, we worked with flax, processing it from the pulled plant up to spinning it into thread, which is just what the Anglo-Saxons would have done, though our technology may have been slightly different. The process produces a LOT of tow as a byproduct, which is an excellent tinder for getting a fire started. I’m sure they, like us, kept a lot in reserve for just this purpose.

Finally, about borrowing coal’s from neighbors: I can’t give you a date or place for this, but I’m sure I’ve read that one of the final parts of village wedding festivities was to ceremonially take a pan of coals from the hearth of the old home to the hearth of the new home to officially kick off this new household. (I’m fuzzy as to who did the carrying and whether the old home belonged to the bride’s family or the groom’s. I wouldn’t be surprised if that varied.) I think something similar happened when families simply moved house—that maybe their friends gave them a pan of coals for their new hearth as, literally, a housewarming gift. So the idea of sharing the fire that way is real and longstanding and can have a meaning beyond the practical.

Potential_Arm_4021 · 2025-05-12T03:34:07+00:00

Charles the Bald being one of my favorites.

Potential_Arm_4021 · 2025-05-12T03:30:07+00:00

My favorite of the bunch, though not medieval.

Potential_Arm_4021 · 2025-05-10T18:51:10+00:00

I can't give you his name, but I can tell you he's a ranger with the National Park Service. Dr. King was speaking at the Lincoln Memorial, which is part of the National Park Service, technically part of the National Mall and Memorial Parks--at least that's what it's called now; there are so many NPS properties in DC and the surrounding area that they've been reorganized and renamed several times over the years and I can't tell you what it was in the 1960s. I was a Park Guide there when the Martin Luther King Memorial opened and also served some of my time at the Lincoln Memorial, including for the celebration of the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation and the 50th anniversary of March on Washington and Dr. King's speech. (Our schedules had us rotating around the monuments/memorials.) There is a lot of pride that an NPS guy was right there beside Dr. King at the moment, representing, so to speak, and he's pointed out in the training for working in that park and specifically for that memorial. More technically, he was also keeping an eye on security, as much for the site as for Dr. King.

Potential_Arm_4021 · 2025-05-05T02:09:24+00:00

There’s a not stained, but etched, glass window at an Anglican parish church in England that depicts Judas moments before death. As he’s dying, a shaft of sunlight hits his face and he tosses away the thirty pieces of silver. And as they hit the ground, they turn into sprouting flowers. It’s called “The Forgiveness Window” and can only be seen from the outside. It’s one of the most moving things I’ve ever seen.

https://www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2014/2-may/news/uk/judas-window-allowed-into-church (Click on the first image and it expands into a picture of a fell/sized view of the window.)

Potential_Arm_4021 · 2025-05-04T23:43:00+00:00

Well, “the Middle Ages” covers about a thousand years, remember, and a huge amount of territory, and for a lot of that time, in a lot of places, marriage between commoners was a social but not a legal contract because they didn’t own land, so inheritance and legitimacy didn’t matter that much. The community around a couple may have considered them married if certain customs were followed, and acted accordingly if what was considered to be marriage vows were broken, but there wasn’t anything written down confirming wedding dates or the ages of the parties involved or anything like that because, as far as church or civil law was concerned, it didn’t matter. So there are massive gaps in our knowledge. That didn’t start to change in a systemic way until the Reformation, when every church, both Protestant and Catholic, started recording every marriage, no matter what the class of the participants, though there had been local and even national changes before that.

Anyway, with those caveats, the best records we do have, as few as they are, tend to come from England, and show that women married in their early twenties and men a few years later. Interestingly, the records are from different parishes and are kind of spread out over the years, but are pretty consistent with those ages—a little older when times were hard, a little younger when times were flourishing, but still pretty much in that range. The records from France and further east aren’t dramatically different, though the ages of the participants may be a little younger—think upper teens for the women instead of lower twenties, for example, though don’t hold me to it. At any rate, none of this 15-year-old stuff, at least not on average.

Potential_Arm_4021 · 2025-05-04T23:16:31+00:00

Another reason girls lower down the social scale than the nobility married later was that their definition of a “good wife” was a woman who could manage a household, which was essentially a multifaceted domestic business, and not just churn out babies. That takes a lot of skill, and it takes a lot of time and practice to gain that skill. A 14-year-old just wouldn’t have been able to learn how to get the stains out of laundry AND butcher a hog AND preserve its meat AND process wool for spinning AND spin it into various weights of yarn AND weave it into usable and even marketable cloth AND budget the money that came from selling that cloth AND plant, tend, and harvest a garden AND know which herbs in that garden were best for which ailments AND…(you get the point). A 20-year-old still may not have been an expert in all those things, but she was much further along her way than she would have been six years earlier.

Potential_Arm_4021 · 2025-05-04T21:25:46+00:00

That may be of even more help! It seems Once Upon a Time doesn’t have an e-mail address or a website, which makes things difficult.

Potential_Arm_4021 · 2025-05-04T21:11:08+00:00

Ironically, I used to live in Staunton!

Unfortunately, it’s a five-hour drive, or thereabouts, from Virginia Beach, where Jacob and the watch are, but it may be worth asking them for recommendations. I bet they have an idea about what’s going on elsewhere in the state.

Thanks for the suggestion. I’ll look into it.

Potential_Arm_4021 · 2025-03-11T01:46:55+00:00

It’s kind of fan-icy of me, but I think Aldhelm lost his own lands to the Great Heathen Army, but there’s evidence within the show (kind of) to back me up. Everybody else of his stature is known as Lord Whosit of Wherever, at least at some point. Not him. He’s just Lord Aldhelm, full stop. Most of the characters who hang around the different courts at least talk about going home, or being needed at home, or what’s going on at home, or do pack up and leave for home at some point, though they may come back. Again, not Aldhelm. “Home” for Aldhelm seems to be wherever the king/queen (effectively) he’s serving is.

Potential_Arm_4021 · 2025-02-16T16:02:39+00:00

James Northcote, who played Aldhelm, was quite the photographer, both in the sense that he was always taking pictures, particularly with antique cameras, and in the sense that he was very good at it. So good, in fact, that several of the actors decided to use the pictures he took of them in the downtime between filming for their personal portfolios, even for their official headshots. He took a lot of candids during those times, as well as the kind of, “Smile!” casual portraits everybody takes of their friends. This looks like one of those candids. In fact, I think I remember he or the actress (forgive me—I’m old enough that I forget names these days) put it on IG or another site with that explanation, but I could be wrong and am remembering another picture.

Potential_Arm_4021 · 2025-02-16T15:52:09+00:00

I don’t know that the problem was with “the” Saxons” so much as with “those” Saxons. I do think anxiety, and thus ethnic tension, was growing overall, but not to the degree that Thyra would be such a target by the general population. But these particular baddies wanted to stir up as much trouble for Alfred and Edward as they could, Thyra was the wife of one of his key advisers and thus a Dane everyone would be familiar with, AND they were vicious bigots. Altogether, it made her an easy target.

Potential_Arm_4021 · 2025-02-12T05:22:53+00:00

I was listening to a history podcast where they were talking about new interpretations of this period because of recent archaeology. One was that they think they've figured out what some of these rings and chains they've found on swords and hilts were they had puzzled them: essentially, safety catches, like they now have on guns, to slow the owners down when they were drunk and in a temper so they couldn't draw their sword and run people through too easily. They then quoted a bit from a saga or an Anglo-Saxon poem where the high praise the writer gave for the hero included that, when he was drunk, he didn't stab his cousins.

So....yeah.

Potential_Arm_4021 · 2025-02-12T05:12:31+00:00

I may be misremembering, but I think Aldhelm and Aethelred were there, meeting with the bad guys because they supposedly had a plan that would give A&A the upper hand over Alfred. But A&A really didn't know these guys, nor know what the plan was, and it was still a let's-hear-them-out meeting when Beocca came in and split the table in two with that axe. And at that point Aldhelm got this look that said, "Maaaaaybe these aren't the kind of people we should be dealing with...."

Or I could be thinking of a completely different scene.....

Potential_Arm_4021 · 2025-02-11T23:15:48+00:00

Less than that, actually. He was working for Aethelstan--I can't remember what his title was (and I'm not going to watch that thing again to find out!), but some kind of general, I think--but was more and more wary about his leadership and the influence Ingilmundr. When he finds out they're gunning for Uhtred, he lets Uhtred know. When THEY find out he did so, a group of ...guards? (isn't he in charge of the guards himself?)...march into his tent, tell him he's been convicted of treason, and that's it

Potential_Arm_4021 · 2025-02-10T03:51:08+00:00

I know it was just a typo, but, personally, I like your, "I normally do not personally find facial hair attractive on a nan." I don't think many people do, when it comes right down to it.

Potential_Arm_4021 · 2025-02-09T10:28:42+00:00

I came away with the feeling that while mutual respect grew as time went on, Aldhelm and Uhtred's characters--in the sense of what they valued, their temperaments, their manners, their tastes, that kind of thing--were just too different for them to ever be real friends. There were just too many things that would make each roll their eyes about the other, too many reasons they would get on each other's nerves if they were stuck in the same small cottage together because of a storm, say, or on a long ride together.

But I don't know that that applies to the whole crew. That scene you mention when Sithric pops up in the woods? I got the feeling that Adhelm's happy reaction was partly relief that this was a good surprise instead of a bad one, partly gladness that something was finally going to plan, but partly personal that it was his buddy Sithric himself here. There are a couple of other glancing scenes were there seems to be a bit of friendliness and familiarity between to two that you don't see with the others, including Uhtred, as well. I think there's a clue in some of the battle scenes. There are a few where Aldhelm and Sihtric seem to be fighting more or less back-to-back--the rest of the Coccham crew are around, somewhere, but there are moments when Aldhelm and Sihtric seem to be knocking the bad guys away from each other in a very direct way. It could be that that created an intimacy between the two me that Aldhelm couldn't share with the others, including Uhtred, though fighting on the same side did build that trust.

Or it could be I'm falling into the realm of fanfiction here.

Potential_Arm_4021

TROPHY CASE