I am confused. I'm writing this on Sunday the second of June as news of MPs and Peers allegedly caught with their hands in the till floods the airwaves. Add to this the report of an extramarital affair which will 'rock the government' and the fact that the Deputy Speaker stands accused of rape and I begin to worry about what happened to old fashioned politics. Nobody has been found guilty of anything but these waves of accusation and rumour crash against the walls of an already beleaguered Downing Street. What are we to make of it all?
I'm a realist, some would say a cynic and it all seems to me to be too much of a coincidence that this flood of allegations has happened so suddenly. I don't normally subscribe to conspiracy theories but this has all the hallmarks of concerted action against the Prime Minister at a time when he is already under attack from within his own party accused of losing control of Parliament. My advice to him is to look close to home if he wants the source. If this is the case, it is a disgrace. At a time when we are beset with a financial crisis and millions of electors are suffering it's natural to think that our paid representatives should be concentrating on really important matters of governance rather than indulging in party politics. We deserve better than this rising tide of innuendo and sleaze.
Luckily there are subjects which do not cause me confusion! I was asked a question this week about people keeping time in the days when their were no affordable clocks and watches. Of course from earliest times they had light and dark and if the sun was visible, a rough guide to time. Time-keeping became more important once Christianity was established. Even in the earliest churches there was a set liturgy of services that had to be said at definite times during the day and these were signalled by a bell. As churches developed this bell became larger and hung outside the church so that it could alert the surrounding population of the need to pray. I'm almost certain we had a church in Barlick by about the seventh century but we don't know if or when it had a bell. When the Cistercian monks built our new church at Gill in 1157 it probably had a single bell and when the tower was added in 1524 almost certainly more than one bell. The ringing of this bell or bells to mark the liturgy of the hours, the daily offices of prayer which were the main duty of the priest, marked the passage of time and gave a form of timekeeping to whoever heard them.
This was fine until the Reformation of the late 16th century when the ringing of church bells was banned and this posed a problem for the priest. More next week.
An early Saxon church in Wiltshire with a turret for one bell.
