by Desconhecido
Until then, sheep had been bred mainly for wool and cattle mainly for leather, and the animals were thin and under-nourished. Bakewell introduced irrigation, and set aside some of his land for growing grass and crops to feed his animals during the winter months, so they could fatten up to provide good meat. He also improved the condition of his cattle by building winter stalls that were raised above ditches, so that manure fell into them and could be gathered for fertiliser, and the cattle did not have to lie down in their own waste.
He also began to separate male and female animals, allowing them to breed only at certain times and putting together those with the most desirable characteristics. The resulting sheep were known as New Leicesters, and they were big, with good-quality fleece and plenty of fatty mutton, which was popular at that time.
Bakewell noticed that Longhorn cattle seemed to eat less but put on more meat than other breeds, so he inbred them to enhance these qualities. Soon he began to hire out his prize rams and bulls to other farmers and quickly became a wealthy man.
For a while, Robert Bakewell’s farm was the most famous farm in the world. He was visited by farmers and producers from all over the world who wanted to learn his breeding techniques. His methods enabled a small number of efficient farms to provide enough food for the populous towns, and the same methods are still practised everywhere by farmers today.
Leicester City football club are known as the Foxes, because – in addition to the county’s fox-hunting associations – on the map the county of Leicestershire resembles, appropriately enough, a fox’s head.
JENNY PITMAN, first woman to train a Grand National winner (Corbiere, 1983), was born in HOBY, near Melton Mowbray, in 1946.
Born in Leicester
C.P. SNOW (1905–80), physicist and novelist, who coined the phrase ‘corridors of power’.
JOE ORTON (1933–67), playwright, whose black comedies included Entertaining Mr Sloane, Loot and What the Butler Saw.
GRAHAM CHAPMAN (1941–89), Monty Python actor and writer.
STEPHEN FREARS, film director (My Beautiful Launderette, 1985, The Queen, 2006), born 1941. In 1987 directed Prick Up Your Ears about fellow Leicesterarian Joe Orton.
SUE TOWNSEND, author, born 1946. Her Adrian Mole series was set in Leicester.
GARY LINEKER, England footballer, born 1960. Never sent off throughout his career, which began at Leicester City. Now TV presenter.
Pop group SHOWADDYWADDY were formed in Leicester in 1973. In 1976 they reached No. 1 with ‘Under the Moon of Love’.
Lincolnshire
A PRECIOUS PIECE OF ARCHITECTURE
∗ TALLEST BUILDING IN THE WORLD ∗ ANGEL CHOIR
∗ POLYGONAL PARLIAMENT ∗ AN OLD TOWN ∗ FIRST TANK ∗ AN ENGLISH ORDER ∗ A PRINCESS OF WALES
Lincoln’s High Bridge, England’s oldest bridge with houses.
LINCOLNSHIRE FOLK
John and Charles Wesley ∗ John Foxe ∗ Captain John Smith ∗ Frances Brooke ∗ Herbert Ingram ∗ George Boole ∗ Joan Plowright
∗ Tony Jacklin
Lincoln Cathedral
‘the most precious piece of architecture in England . . .’
JOHN RUSKIN
Few sights in England can take the breath away like the first glimpse of LINCOLN CATHEDRAL, its honey-coloured towers and long nave crowning the hilltop 200 ft (61 m) above the River Witham. The stupendous central tower, 271 ft (83 m) high, is THE HIGHEST CATHEDRAL TOWER IN EUROPE. How even more spectacular it must have looked when topped with THE HIGHEST SPIRE IN THE WORLD, 525 ft (160 m) tall, making Lincoln THE FIRST STRUCTURE EVER TO BE BUILT HIGHER THAN THE GREAT PYRAMID. For over 200 years, from when the spire was constructed at the end of the 13th century until it blew down in 1548, Lincoln Cathedral remained THE WORLD’S TALLEST BUILDING.
Lincoln Cathedral West Front
The first cathedral at Lincoln was begun by Remigius, England’s first Norman bishop, on the orders of William the Conqueror in 1072. Remigius moved his see to Lincoln from Dorchester in Oxfordshire and it grew to be the largest diocese in medieval England, with more monasteries than the rest of England put together. All but a portion of the great west front of Remigius’s cathedral was destroyed by an earthquake in 1185, and the new Bishop of Lincoln, Hugh of Avalon, began work on the magnificent Early English cathedral we see today. Bishop Hugh was one of the witnesses at the signing of Magna Carta in 1215, and the finest of the four surviving original copies belongs to Lincoln Cathedral and is kept in the castle.
The Angel Choir at Lincoln, so called from the many angel carvings around the arches, is considered to be the pinnacle of English Gothic architecture. It was created as a fitting shrine for Bishop Hugh, and became a place of pilgrimage almost equal to that of Thomas à Becket at Canterbury. High up on a pillar squats the scampish ‘LINCOLN IMP’, fashioned as a bit of fun by a medieval sculptor, and now a symbol of the city.
Lincoln is the second largest medieval English cathedral after York Minster. The 13th-century Chapter House, THE EARLIEST POLYGONAL CHAPTER HOUSE IN ENGLAND, contains a wooden chair where Edward I sat when he held a Parliament here in 1301. In 2005 the Chapter House stood in for the one at Westminster Abbey during the filming of the controversial The Da Vinci Code, as the authorities of the Abbey would not allow filming there.
Lincoln City
Lincoln was originally the Roman settlement of Lindum Colonia and retains two remarkable features from its Roman days. One is the NEWPORT ARCH, near the cathedral, THE OLDEST COMPLETE ARCH IN ENGLAND and THE ONLY ROMAN GATEWAY IN ENGLAND STILL IN USE BY TRAFFIC. The other is the FOSSDYKE NAVIGATION, built in the 3rd century to link the River Witham to the Trent, 11 miles (18 km) long and ENGLAND’S OLDEST CANAL.
After the Romans left, Lincoln became part of the Saxon province of Mercia and a small stone church was built within the Roman walls – the source of Lincoln’s claim to being England’s oldest recorded Saxon town. It then became an important town under the Danelaw, and in Norman times was the third largest city in England. Lincoln’s wealth came from wool and Lincoln cloth, especially the dyed ‘Lincoln green’, as worn by Robin Hood and his band of merry men.
Jew’s House
Running down from the cathedral is Steep Hill, on which can be found the 12th-century Norman House, one of the oldest English domestic buildings still in use, and the equally ancient Jew’s House, dating from the days when Lincoln was home to one of the most important Jewish communities in England.
Carrying the High Street across the River Witham is ENGLAND’S OLDEST BRIDGE WITH HOUSES ON IT, known as the HIGH BRIDGE or Glory Hole. The bridge was built in 1160 and the houses were added in 1540.
THE WORLD’S FIRST TANK was designed and developed in Lincoln, by William Foster & Co. Ltd. It first saw action at the Battle of Flers, in France in 1916. Tanks were developed in great secrecy under the auspices of the Navy Department, and experiments were carried out using huge empty water tanks normally associated with ship design, hence the project was codenamed ‘tank’ – and the name stuck.
Gilbert of Sempringham
SEMPRINGHAM, north of Bourne, was once a famous place, for here stood a mighty priory, first home of THE ONLY PURELY ENGLISH MONASTIC ORDER, THE GILBERTINE ORDER.
Their founder, Gilbert, was born in Sempringham in 1083, the son of a Norman knight. Unable to become a soldier because of a deformity, instead he became a priest, built a priory at his birthplace, and there founded the Gilbertine Order. It was a ‘double order’, open to both monks and nuns, and had two of everything so that the sexes could live separately within the same monastery – two dining-rooms, two dormitories and two cloisters.
The Gilbertine Order spread across England, inspired by the piety and saintliness of its founder Gilbert. He lived to be over 100, and by the time of his death there were 11 Gilbertine houses boasting 700 brothers and 1500 sisters. He was buried beneath the altar of his church, and his grave became a place of pilgrimage, visited even by ‘bad’ King John. Gilbert was canonised
in 1202.
Of the priory of Sempringham, once the size of a cathedral, there is nothing left. It was pulled down at the Dissolution of the Monasteries and now only the solitary Norman church of St Andrew’s, to which the priory was attached, remains, perched on a hillock amongst the potato fields, at the end of a cart track.
A Princess of Wales
In 1283 an infant child was brought to Sempringham, to be hidden away there for the rest of her life, lest she grew up to inspire rebellion against the might of the Plantagenet Kings of England. She was GWENLLIAN, daughter and heir of the last ruling Prince of Wales, Llywelyn ap Gruffudd. Llywelyn was killed in a skirmish with Edward I’s men at Cilmery on the Welsh border in December 1282, and Edward wanted to ensure that Llywelyn’s line would die with Gwenllian. Gwenllian was not just heir to the Welsh principality. Her maternal grandmother was Henry III’s sister Eleanor, giving Gwenllian a distant claim to the English throne, and Edward was taking no chances. Thus Gwenllian was committed to the care of the nuns of Sempringham, and here she died quietly in 1337 at the age of 54. She still lies beneath the soil at Sempringham, no one knows exactly where, and the Princess Gwenllian Society have erected a memorial on the site, marking the lonely burial place of THE LAST WELSH-BORN PRINCESS OF WALES.
St Andrew’s Church
Well, I never knew this
about
LINCOLNSHIRE FOLK
John and Charles Wesley
Set upon a low hill, with views across the rich farmland of North Lincolnshire, is the small, isolated market town of EPWORTH where, in 1696, Samuel and Susannah Wesley moved into the small thatch and plaster rectory where they would live for the next 38 years.
On 17 June 1703, their 15th child, John, was born in the Rectory. Four years later their last child Charles was born on 18 December 1707. Two boys whose influence would spread across the world, through preaching and music. But one of them almost didn’t survive.
John Wesley
One night in 1709, one of the children awoke to find her bed on fire, and great beams of burning wood falling from the ceiling. She roused the household and Samuel managed to shepherd the children, his sick wife and their nurse out into the garden, from where they watched the conflagration. Suddenly, to their horror, a tiny figure appeared at the bedroom window, silhouetted against the flames, waving and crying pitifully. In the confusion, five-year-old John had been left behind. The stairs were ablaze, the wooden building was all but consumed by fire and there seemed no hope when, all at once, two burly young men broke from the crowd of onlookers and ran towards the house. One of them climbed on the shoulders of the other, reached up and pulled the terrified infant through the window like, as John himself later put it, ‘a brand plucked from the burning’.
And so JOHN WESLEY, founder of the worldwide Methodist church, was rescued from the fire, an event that would come to serve for Methodists everywhere as a powerful illustration of salvation from the flames of Hell.
Within months the Rectory was rebuilt into the fine Georgian house we see there today, which is now a museum in the Wesley’s memory.
When John and Charles went to study at Oxford they formed the Oxford Holy Club, in 1729, where they and others would worship together and organise visits to the sick and those in prison. They ordered their lives and studies in such a regular and methodical fashion that the other students began to refer to them as those ‘Methodists’. The Holy Club was Charles’s idea, so he is considered to be the first Methodist, while John, the older brother, became the first leader of the Methodists.
In 1735 they both travelled as missionaries to the new colony of Georgia in America, an experience that opened their eyes to the harsher side of life, disease, squalor and poverty, and on their return to England they began to travel round the country preaching against unfairness, slavery and poor working conditions. Thousands would come and listen to them talk and thousands more would sing the hymns that Charles wrote – he composed over 6,000 hymns during his life. The evangelical revival inspired by the Wesleys helped to subdue in England the seeds of revolution that were beginning to tear apart many countries on the Continent.
Epworth Rectory
Charles died in 1788 and is buried in the churchyard of the parish church at Marylebone. John, more dedicated to Methodism, is buried in the chapel he built just outside the City of London, which is now the mother church of the Methodist faith.
John Wesley’s cry was ‘The world is my parish!’ and today there are some 70 million Methodists worldwide – the legacy of the boy snatched from the flames of a burning Lincolnshire rectory is great indeed.
The list of prominent Methodists includes five American Presidents to date, James Polk, Ulysses S. Grant, Rutherford Hayes, William McKinley and George W. Bush, as well as Vice-President Dick Cheney, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Bishop Muzorewa, former President of Zimbabwe and Chiang Kai-Shek, former President of Taiwan.
Born in Lincolnshire
JOHN FOXE (1517–87), author of The Book of Martyrs, an account of the persecution of English Protestants, was born in BOSTON.
CAPTAIN JOHN SMITH (1580–1631), founder of Jamestown, first permanent English settlement in America, first ‘Governor’ of Virginia, who coined the name ‘New England’, was born in WILLOUGHBY, near Alford.
FRANCES BROOKE (1724–89), author of the first novel in Canadian literature, The History of Emily Montague, was born in SLEAFORD.
HERBERT INGRAM (1811–60), founder of the first pictorial journal, the Illustrated London News, first published in 1842, was born in BOSTON.
GEORGE BOOLE (1815–64), philosopher and mathematician who invented Boolean algebra, upon which modern computer calculations are based, was born in LINCOLN.
JOAN PLOWRIGHT, actress and third wife of Sir Laurence Olivier, was born in BRIGG in 1929.
TONY JACKLIN, the only English golfer to be Open Champion and US Open Champion at the same time (1969–70), was born in SCUNTHORPE in 1944.
FISH FINGERS were first produced in England at GRIMSBY in 1955.
Middlesex
WORLD’S OLDEST FILM STUDIOS ∗ EALING COMEDIES
∗ THE LONGITUDE PROBLEM ∗ EARLY CARTOONIST
∗ G AND T
Alexandra Palace, the birthplace of BBC television.
MIDDLESEX FOLK
Matthew Arnold ∗ Evelyn Waugh ∗ Sir Alan Ayckbourn ∗ John Constable ∗ Arthur and Sylvia Llewelyn Davies ∗ Lord Joseph Lister
∗ Sir Charles Wyndham ∗ Francis James Barraud ∗ Marie Lloyd ∗ Nigel Balchin
Ealing Studios
EALING STUDIOS are THE OLDEST FILM STUDIOS IN THE WORLD. They were established in 1902 by Will Barker, who made silent movies there until, with the introduction of the ‘talkies’ in the 1920s, the studios were taken over by Associated Talking Pictures and rebuilt as the studios there today.
It was after the Second World War, in the late 1940s and early 50s, that Ealing Studios had their heyday, producing the classic ‘EALING COMEDIES’ for which they are famous. Since it was almost impossible to get hold of Hollywood films during the war, Ealing Studios had been forced to develop their own English brand of film-making, and the Ealing comedies built on this heritage, portraying England as a charming, rather quaint place, full of dogged characters battling to keep the country unsullied.
The films are consistently anti-authority and, rather like the novel 1984, which George Orwell was working on at that time, feature the struggles of the little man up against a faceless bureaucracy or corporate bullying. The films are feel-good fantasies that give expression to the ordinary Englishman’s dreams of rebellion, where pluck and ingenuity can win out over tyranny, rather as England herself had won out over the might of Germany.
These characteristics come to the fore in films such as Kind Hearts and Coronets, Passport to Pimlico and The Lavender Hill Mob, all of which were released in 1949 and made stars of actors such as Alec Guinness and Margaret Rutherford.
A coarser but equally funny example of this ve
ry English humour surfaced ten years later in the Carry On films, of which 30 were made at various locations between 1958 and 1978.
John Harrison
1693–1776
Buried in the churchyard of St John’s Church, HAMPSTEAD, is the horologist JOHN HARRISON, whose marine chronometer solved the ‘longitude problem’ – how to calculate the distance east or west a ship had sailed – which had baffled such luminaries as Galileo, Sir Isaac Newton and Edmond Halley.
Longitude is the angular distance from any meridian (in this case the Prime Meridian at Greenwich), and is vital in calculating a ship’s position at sea. Until Harrison’s clock, sailors had to rely on guesswork, and many had lost their lives as a result of mistaking where they were. Perhaps the most famous example occurred in 1707, when the fleet of Admiral Sir Clowdisley Shovell miscalculated its position and was wrecked off the Scilly Isles, with the loss of over 2,000 lives.
The principle behind the calculation of longitude is simple. For every 15 degrees travelled eastward the local time moves forward by one hour; for every 15 degrees travelled west it goes back by one hour. If you know the local time, and also the time at a fixed point (in this case Greenwich), then you can calculate your longitude. In those days, while it was easy enough to calculate the local time by using the sun and stars, the only way to tell the time at Greenwich was with a clock, and the only clocks that existed then were pendulum clocks, which were rendered useless by the motion of the sea.