Danskcolin: Thursday May 12th 2022

09:00 Lois is still in bed, so I try to snatch precious minutes to read a bit of Middle English poetry and try to understand it - what madness!!!!

I'm a member of Lynda's local U3A Middle English group, and tomorrow is the group's monthly meeting on zoom. Our current project is a 15th century poem, Sir Corneus, which apparently makes fun of "cuckolds" - men whose wives or mistresses were being unfaithful to them. Medieval poetry-readers couldn't get enough of poems about cuckolds it seems: what a crazy world they lived in those far-off times!!!! But then they didn't have television in those days did they, so I suppose you can understand it!

a typical medieval cuckold (right)...

an example of Cuckold Type 1: a cuckold in bed

...and here's another one (right) - this is a typical

example of the other type of cuckold (Type 2):

he's the one not in the bed this time, poor man haha!!!

Let's just hope Cuckold 2 doesn't decide to wield that nasty-looking cudgel, though. Don't do it, sir !!!

The English in the poem turns out to be not too bad - it's more or less understandable, which will save me a lot of time. Here's an excerpt as an example, interleaved with my own translation into Modern English.

It's all a little bit weird at the same time, but I suppose buttock-rubbing was part of what you did in those far-off days, and it was probably all part of life's rich pageant. But I'm not totally sure - perhaps we should be told?

In the poem King Arthur is holding a special evening for the known cuckolds at his court, which was a nice idea, and as a special concession the cuckolds all get to sit tonight at the only proper table in the palace - the so-called "table dormant".

Apparently, unless you were considered a so-called "VIP" in those far-off times, you weren't allowed to sit at the "table dormant", you had to sit at one of the makeshift tables that were really just some rubbish piece of wood slung on top of a trestle, which seems a bit mean to me. The King was apparently too cheap to provide proper tables for most of his courtiers, for which I have only one word: shabby, your Majesty!

10:00 Back to business - we're selling our house at the moment, and one of the nearby towns we could move to is Evesham, over the county boundary in Worcestershire. So Lois and I decide to take a drive over there this morning to see some of the bungalows we've seen for sale on line, six in all.

Bungalows are popular with old codgers like us, because they're one-storey, so you don't have to climb stairs, which is nice. We just look at the bungalows from the outside, and we get a feel for the neighbourhoods. We see a few old guys and some old crows around, which is nice - these are our people nowadays haha!

We take a few pictures to remind ourselves of the properties when we get home, and so that we don't start to muddle all the different bungalows up, which would defeat the object of today's excursion, to put it mildly!

These are The Adventures of Lois and Colin in Bungalow-land:

We do start to get a bit confused at one point, I have to say, so we take a break and have a quick lunch at a nearby garden centre, one we didn't know existed until today. We have a slice of quiche each and a pot of tea for two, which gives us two cups of tea each, which is refreshing.

we take a break and have a slice of quiche each with a pot

of tea for two at a nearby garden centre.

14:30 When we get back home, our neighbour Bob is outside working in his garage, so we take the opportunity to tell him how much money we're getting for the house, and to tell him who his neighbours will be if the current sale goes ahead. Both of these questions are are of acute interest to him - no doubt about that!

18:00 We have dinner, and for dessert we have a portion of one of the home-made Christmas puddings, from an Oxfordshire country recipe from Lois's great great grandmother, that Lois has got stashed away in the freezer. We're thinking it's maybe time to start running down the contents of our freezer, if we're going to be moving house in the next few months.

Christmas pudding and ice-cream in May

- what a nice idea haha!

20:00 We wind down by watching a programme in the new series "Great British History Hunters", which is all about Britain's amateur metal-detectors, and some of their recent discoveries.

This is the first programme that Lois and I have seen in this series. It's interesting that amateur metal-detectorists have now been fully accepted by the world of the "serious", academically qualified archaeologists - it's not that long ago that the metal detectors were looked on as potentially dangerous pariahs, who were going around wrecking potential new historical sites just to make a bit of money out of anything valuable they managed to turn up.

Not any more - and now there's a proper system organised for metal-detectors to take their finds to established research centres and museums for evaluation, which is nice.

It's also interesting in this series to get to know a bit more about the metal-detectorists themselves.

A woman called Sue stumbled on the grave of an Anglo-Saxon warlord in a field in Buckinghamshire, a man she nicknamed "Ned", and the grave was later fully excavated by a team of archaeologists from Reading University.

the grave of "Ned", an early Anglo-Saxon warlord,

that Sue found in a field in Buckinghamshire

"Ned" was a big man, 6' 2" tall, and though he had a bad leg he had really strong arms, and would probably still have been a powerful warrior, given that he probably fought on horseback. Many of the grave goods buried with him suggest Continental connections, and it's now thought that he was probably ruler of an early Anglo-Saxon mini-kingdom that historians previously knew nothing about.

Ned's leg problems were highlighted by the unusual way he was laid in this grave, and by the flattened bone in one of his legs compared to the other, as Sue discovers when she visits the lab at Reading where the man's remains had been examined.

amateur metal-detectorist Sue (left) visits the lab at

Reading University, where "Ned" and his leg had been examined

the centre of this map may have been the heart of Ned's

"mini-kingdom", that historians previously knew nothing about

Not all the things that amateur metal-detectorists find are interesting or valuable historical discoveries however, to put it mildly.

Amateur detectorists friends from Norfolk, Pat and Andy, are always turning up metal buttons from Victorian underwear.

Apparently farmers in Norfolk in the first half of the 19th century had the habit of taking their underwear and their wives' underwear, shredding them all up, and then digging them into the soil as a form of cheap fertilizer. And unfortunately, they didn't bother to take off the metal buttons - my god!

Well, farmers of Norfolk, I've only got one word for that - shabby!!!