by Desconhecido
The first castle at Windsor, a motte and bailey, was built by William the Conqueror in 1070, to take advantage of a strategic bluff above the River Thames and guard the western approaches to London. Putting a round tower on the motte, or mound, fed conveniently into the local belief that this was the site of King Arthur’s Round Table, helping William to wrap himself in the mantle of that legendary predecessor. The walls of the castle today enclose the same area and follow the same shape as William’s original castle, which Henry II rebuilt in stone and expanded in 1170.
Windsor Castle, the English monarchy’s weekend cottage, is now THE OLDEST AND LARGEST OCCUPIED CASTLE IN THE WORLD. It offers a fairytale vision of towers and turrets and battlements from wherever you view it – a fitting first glimpse of England for the millions who fly over it on their way into Heathrow. As one awe-struck tourist was heard to gasp, ‘It’s real dandy – but why the heck did they build it so close to the airport?’
Order of the Garter
EDWARD III was born at Windsor in 1312, and amongst his many ambitions, two were paramount. To press his claim for the throne of France, and to create a court based on the Arthurian knightly values of chivalry and valour. In 1348 he initiated THE FIRST AND MOST PRESTIGIOUS ENGLISH ORDER OF CHIVALRY, THE NOBLE ORDER OF THE GARTER, consisting of the monarch, his son the Black Prince, and 24 of his most courageous and trustworthy knights. The Order was based on King Arthur’s Knights of the Round Table – and was intended as a mark of royal favour and a reward for loyalty.
The symbol of the Garter was derived from an item of military dress, and the Order’s motto referred to Edward’s claim to the French throne. There is, however, a much more romantic and memorable tale of how the Order came by its name and motto. During a dance at Windsor, Joan, Countess of Salisbury, a noted beauty rumoured to be the King’s mistress, dropped one of her garters. To cover her embarrassment, Edward picked it up and tied it around his own leg, much to the shock and amusement of the assembled court. ‘Honi soit qui mal y pense,’ he said, and this became the motto of the Order – ‘Shame on him who thinks evil of this’.
To strengthen the knightly theme, Edward proclaimed St George, who was patron saint of soldiers, to be the patron saint of the Order. Edward was a renowned warrior king and had just achieved a great victory against the French at the Battle of Crecy in 1346, and thus the chivalrous St George was a highly appropriate choice for the furtherance of his aims.
St George’s Chapel
Subsequently, the magnificent chapel at Windsor, begun by Edward IV and completed by Henry VIII, was dedicated to St George and became the spiritual home of the Order of the Garter.
Today the Order of the Garter, which is still in the sole gift of the monarch, consists of 26 Companions and a number of royals. Every June, members process in their robes to St George’s Chapel for a service.
Windsor Town
The town that grew up under the mighty castle walls is one of England’s show towns and has some stories of its own to tell. In 1597 William Shakespeare stayed at Windsor’s Garter Inn and there wrote The Merry Wives of Windsor for Queen Elizabeth I.
WINDSOR GUILDHALL was built in 1689 by Sir Christopher Wren, whose father was Dean of Windsor. He modelled his design on the old market hall that was being replaced, which had open arcades, but the good burgesses of Windsor didn’t trust the slender columns supporting the upper floors and insisted he put in some more. Wren complied, but those with a keen eye will spot that the extra columns don’t actually reach the floor above.
As well as the Royal Family, Windsor gives its name to a brown soup, the perfect knot for a tie, and a kind of chair.
Windsor is also the reason why Berkshire is THE ONLY ENGLISH COUNTY WITH THE PREFIX ‘ROYAL’. Reading football club are nicknamed the Royals.
St George, Patron Saint of England
ST GEORGE was born in Cappadocia, in what is now Turkey, around AD 280. He joined the Roman army at the age of 17 and rose rapidly through the ranks to become a military tribune, while his valour and strength made him a favourite of the Emperor Diocletian.
They were restless times for the Roman Empire, and Diocletian decided to try and restore order by reviving the pagan gods and traditions of old Rome. This involved persecuting other religions that were threatening the authority of the Emperor, particularly Christianity, which Diocletian suppressed with ruthless cruelty.
St George, who had become a convert to Christianity, used his position to try and temper the worst excesses of the persecution, rescuing Christians from execution and helping many to escape to safety. Eventually, in AD 303, he confronted Diocletian in the city of Nicomedia, then the eastern capital of the Roman Empire, and condemned the Emperor for his injustice and brutality.
Diocletian had St George cast into prison and tortured, but the saint would not renounce his faith, and on 23 April he was dragged through the streets and beheaded. His body was laid to rest at his mother’s home at Lydda in Palestine, while his head was later taken to be buried in Rome, where Constantine, the first Christian Emperor, had a church in St George’s name built over the grave.
The legend of St George and the Dragon, as documented by Jacobus de Voragine, Bishop of Genoa, in his Golden Legends, originates from St George’s time as a soldier in North Africa, when he was stationed near Silene in Libya. The town was being terrorised by a large beast akin to a crocodile with wings, which had settled on a nearby lake. To keep the creature satisfied the townsfolk had sacrificed all their animals and then their young maidens, until only the King’s daughter was left. When her turn came she was tethered outside the town walls and left to her fate. As the dragon approached, St George appeared, riding on a white charger, and fought the monster to a standstill, finally cutting off its head with a single blow. He was rewarded by the jubilant King with a bag of gold, which he then distributed amongst the poor.
The story is an allegory for the triumph of good over evil, and as St George’s fame spread across Europe he became a symbol of valour and Christian values. His connection with England begins during the Crusades, when he is said to have appeared to the English Crusaders, riding under the banner of a red cross and inspiring them in battle. Hence the English knights adopted the red cross, on a white or silver background, as an emblem, and it became recognised as the Cross of St George.
St George is mentioned in the writings of the Venerable Bede, and the earliest physical reference to him in England is carved in stone above the south door of an early Norman church at Fordington, in Dorset. In 1222 the Council of Oxford dedicated 23 April, the date of his martyrdom, as St George’s Day.
After 1348, when Edward III made St George the patron saint of his chivalrous new Order of the Garter, the English began to regard him as their own. Shakespeare has Henry V exhort his troops before the Battle of Agincourt with the words ‘Cry God for Harry, England and St George!’ and indeed, in 1415, the soldier saint was made patron saint of England to celebrate the English victory at Agincourt.
John Cabot flew the pennant of the Cross of St George when he sailed to discover Newfoundland in 1497, and it was also flown by great English explorers such as Sir Francis Drake and Sir Walter Raleigh. In 1620 the St George’s flag flew from the Mayflower as it sailed into Plymouth, Massachusetts.
Today the flag of St George is recognised throughout Christendom as the flag of the Church of England, and is also sported by followers of the England football and rugby teams.
In 2005 police in Oldham fined 20-year-old football supporter Neil Prendergast £30 for having a cross of St George sticker over the European Union flag on his car number plate.
The First English Minimum Wage
On the western outskirts of Newbury lies SPEEN, once known as Speenhamland, which was the scene of the FIRST ATTEMPT IN ENGLISH HISTORY TO APPLY A MINIMUM WAGE. In the late 18th century there was devastating poverty amongst agricultural workers due to land enclosures, inflation caused by the war with France, and the move towards industrialisati
on. Across the country, riots were fermenting and in 1795 Berkshire magistrates met in Speenhamland to announce the SPEENHAMLAND ACT. This was a revolutionary system which set wages according to the price of wheat and the number of children in the family. If a farmer couldn’t afford the wage, then the shortfall was subsidised from the poor relief fund – it was the first time poverty had been tackled with wage subsidies for farm workers, rather than by the creation of monstrous workhouses.
However, farmers soon began to employ only workers who qualified for the subsidy, and those who weren’t indigent became unemployable, leading to a collapse in the labour market, and a huge burden on the relief funds.
Shaw House
Lying unexpected and lovely to the east of Newbury is SHAW HOUSE, one of the finest Elizabethan houses in England, built by a Newbury clothier called Thomas Dolman. English history was almost drastically altered here in 1644, when Charles I was using the house as his headquarters during the second Battle of Newbury. On the morning of the battle, a Roundhead soldier, spotting Charles dressing by a window, fired his musket at the King, missing him by a whisker. The place where the bullet struck the wall can still be seen.
Well, I never knew this
about
BERKSHIRE FOLK
Jack O’Newbury
Although John Lombe of Derby is rightly credited with building England’s first mechanical factory, and Richard Arkwright England’s first factory complex, it is a Berkshire lad from Newbury who gave them both the idea.
Newbury today is best known for traffic jams and horse-racing, but this prosperous old town actually deserves a prominent place in history as the home of ENGLAND’S FIRST FACTORY OWNER. In the late 15th century, an apprentice clothier called John Winchcombe, better known as JACK O’NEWBURY, in good entrepreneurial style married the boss’s daughter, and used her money to build up a huge clothing business. Eventually he had over 200 weavers working for him in one building, along with areas for drying and stretching the cloth, and retail outlets selling the finished product. This was the first time that all stages of manufacture had ever been brought together under one roof – the first factory building. There is nothing left of the factory, but some of Jack’s house remains near the River Kennet, and the beautiful Jacobean Cloth Hall, now the town museum, is a reminder of the wealth brought to Newbury by Jack and the cloth trade.
Born in Berkshire
SIR JOHN SOANE (1753–1837), architect, born in GORING-ON-THAMES. Best known for designing the Bank of England (demolished in 1920) and for his house, now a museum, at Lincoln’s Inn Fields in London.
HUGH LOFTING (1886–1947), author of the Dr Doolittle books, born in MAIDENHEAD.
MIKE OLDFIELD, musician, born in READING in 1953. Composed Tubular Bells, the first record produced by Richard Branson’s Virgin record company.
TRACY EDWARDS, yachtswoman, born in READING in 1962. Skippered the first all-female crew to sail around the world.
Buried in Berkshire
SIR WILLIAM HERSCHEL (1738–1822), German-born astronomer, is buried at St Laurence’s Church in Upton, SLOUGH. Discovered Uranus in 1781. Built a famous telescope in the back garden of his house in Slough, Observatory House (now demolished).
SIR STANLEY SPENCER (1891–1959), painter, was born and buried in COOKHAM.
England’s traditional source of wealth was WOOL, and even today the focal point of the House of Lords is the ‘WOOLSACK’, a seat of stuffed wool on which the Lord Chancellor sits as a reminder of what underpinned England’s prosperity. (The Woolsack is now stuffed with wool from Commonwealth countries.) The great wool merchants of old proclaimed their wealth by building magnificent ‘wool’ churches, most commonly found in the Cotswolds and East Anglia. St Nicholas’s church in Newbury, built by Jack O’Newbury around 1500, is a fine example of a wool church.
Buckinghamshire
CHILTERN HUNDREDS ∗ AN ENGLISH INVENTION
∗ FREEDOM OF CONSCIENCE ∗ GREATEST ENGLISH POEM ∗ HELLFIRE ∗ ENGLISH HYMNAL ∗ PANCAKE RACE
Jordans Quaker Meeting House, built in 1688. Burial place of William Penn, the founder of Pennsylvania.
BUCKINGHAMSHIRE FOLK
John Hampden ∗ George and William Grenville ∗ Benjamin Disraeli
∗ Sir George Gilbert Scott ∗ Major George Howson
∗ Herbert Austin ∗ Roald Dahl
Chiltern Hundreds
Buckinghamshire has always been at the forefront of British politics, particularly the Chilterns, which have even lent their name to a political procedure. To resign as a Member of Parliament is forbidden, but an MP who wishes to step down between elections may apply for the ‘STEWARDSHIP OF THE CHILTERN HUNDREDS’. The Chilterns were once plagued by ruffians and highwaymen, and so a Steward was appointed by the Crown to impose law and order. Anyone who held an office paid for by the Crown was prohibited from sitting as an MP, and thus, by applying for the post, an MP would effectively disqualify himself from sitting in the House.
Bletchley Park
During the Second World War, BLETCHLEY PARK, a Victorian mansion now on the edge of Milton Keynes, was very much in the front line. In 1939 a small group of mathematicians and crossword puzzle enthusiasts were assembled here, in total secrecy, with orders to crack Germany’s Enigma code. To begin with, using knowledge smuggled in by the Poles of how the Enigma worked, mathematician ALAN TURING, regarded as the founder of modern computer science, developed an apparatus that could decipher a large number of Enigma machines at one time, and this proved key in helping the team to unravel the code. This feat allowed England to monitor German plans for bombing raids and U-boat attacks, and shortened the war by two years, according to Winston Churchill.
In order to process messages even faster, Alan Turing’s lecturer from Cambridge, PROFESSOR MAX NEWMAN, and engineer TOMMY FLOWERS, using Turing’s theories on computation as a basis, designed and built ‘COLOSSUS’, the world’s first programmable electronic computer. It is to them that we owe the computers that run the world today, and yet for a long time the invention of the computer was credited to the Americans – because Colossus and Bletchley Park remained covered by the 30-year rule of the Official Secrets Act until 1974.
Bletchley Park was ENGLAND’S FIRST GOVERNMENT LISTENING POST, and forerunner of today’s GCHQ at Cheltenham. The mansion itself was saved from demolition and is now run as a museum, complete with a working model of Colossus, in memory of the vital work done there and its contribution to winning the Second World War.
Jordans
Tucked away down an undulating country lane near Beaconsfield is JORDANS, a hidden place of supreme importance to English freedoms both at home and overseas.
There is a Tudor farmhouse, a barn made with timbers from the Mayflower, one of the earliest Quaker meeting-houses, and the simple graves of men and women who fought for the freedom of English people to think for themselves.
Amongst those lying here is THOMAS ELLWOOD (1639–1713), a leading Quaker who learnt young what it meant to question authority. On becoming a Quaker, as a young man, he refused to take off his hat at meal times in case that signified a deference to his father which should be shown only to God, whereupon his father confiscated all Thomas’s hats and beat him roundly for such impudence. Ellwood went on to edit the journals of George Fox (1624–91), founder of the Society of Friends, and read for John Milton, who was going blind (see Milton’s Cottage).
Another Quaker buried here is WILLIAM PENN (1644–1718), the son of a famous admiral, and the founder of the State of Pennsylvania.
The Quakers’ belief that every individual has a personal relationship with God and should be free to worship God without the intervention of priests, brought them into conflict with the Church authorities, and many Quakers, including Penn, were persecuted and imprisoned.
In 1670 William Penn’s father died, leaving him a considerable fortune and a debt of £16,000 owed by Charles II. In lieu of the debt Penn was granted land in the American colonies, and he founded
Pennsylvania, named in honour of his father, as a place where those fleeing persecution in England could live and worship freely by their own or Quaker principles. He named the principal settlement Philadelphia, which is Greek for ‘brotherly love’. And in the tiny meeting-house at Jordans, in 1701, William Penn wrote his CHARTER OF PRIVILEGES, Pennsylvania’s original constitution. With its emphasis on human rights, religious freedom and the inclusion of ordinary citizens in the law-making process, it was a template for the American Constitution.
By virtue of his friendship with James II, Penn persuaded the King to issue a Declaration of Indulgence, allowing everyone in England to worship God in their own way, and thereafter persecution of all religious sects ceased. Some of the more fundamentalist groups disapproved, suspecting the Catholic King of merely trying to gain freedom for the Roman Catholic religion, which they despised, but William Penn believed in freedom for all, not just his own, and he would not back down. He remains one of the most courageous and influential fighters for freedom of conscience in English history.
In 2005 Jordans Meeting House, built in 1688, suffered a serious fire, but has since been restored as near as possible to its original state.
Milton’s Cottage
Not far away from Jordans, in the village of CHALFONT ST GILES, is a pretty timber-framed brick cottage – the last and only remaining home of JOHN MILTON. He rented it from his friend and reader Thomas Ellwood, and came here in 1665 to escape the plague and finish his epic poem PARADISE LOST, about man’s fall from grace. When he showed the poem to Thomas Ellwood, Ellwood replied, ‘Thou hath said much here about Paradise Lost, but what hast thou to say about Paradise Found?’ And so Milton wrote Paradise Regained, about Satan’s unsuccessful temptation of Jesus in the desert.