Grape Lane, Whitby, and the Collecting of Gropecunts

I have a thing for place names, and collect some of the more interesting ones by visiting them. One of my favourite subsections relates to trades.  There was a time we were more straightforward, and our language was salty and earthy and salt of the earthy, and just as there were Shambles, and Milk Streets, and Silver Streets, and Wine Streets, there were also Gropecunt Lanes.

The first Gropecunt in my collection comes from my home city of Bristol. Nelson Street in Bristol, once called Haulier's Lane. And before that, Grope Lane. And before that - in the time of topographer, William Wyrcestre, who measured the city in 1480 - Gropecunt Lane. 

Another early specimen was Parsons Street in Banbury, where I lived in 1990.  It bore this name as early as 1410, but 77 years previously, had been known as Gropecunt Lane. 

For connoisseurs of Gropecunts, the mention of a Grove Street or Lane is like the ringing of a bell is to Pavlov's dogs. And indeed, if we wander a little deeper into Oxford's past, we soon discover that on John Speed's map of 1605, Magpie Lane, aka Grove Street, is Grope - or Grape - Lane.  And when we go back to the 13th century, we find ourselves in Gropecuntelane.  

This street sign in Union Street, Wells does most of the explaining itself. 

'Known as Grope Lane in medieval times, altered to Grove Lane by 1821 and changed to Union Street in 1834.' 

Except that it was actually known as Gropecuntelane in the 13th and 14th centuries.

In nearby Glastonbury, the area to the right of 14th century St Benedict's Church - now St Benedict's Close - was recorded as Grope Lane in 1425 and Gropecunte Lane in 1290. 

In Norwich, Opie Street near the Castle, described as a turpis vicus in 1333, was in 1305 called Gropekuntelane.

In fact, there are two examples in Norwich. The dual carriageway, Grapes Hill, was, after trade moved outside the city walls, known as Gropecunte Hill. 

 I was very pleased the week before last to be able to add a new lane to my collection: namely, Grape Lane, Whitby, the former home of Captain James Cook, who lodged in a property there whilst serving his apprenticeship. 

Not a lot of documentary evidence, apparently, but the suggestion that it is the street formerly known as Grapcunt Lane. 

PS. For an amusing take on changing sensibilities around street names, take a look at the kerfuffle around the attempt to change the name of Tickle Cock Bridge in Castleford, Yorkshire.  

The Biggening Skies

With Son the Elder deposited at the seond day of Robot Wars events, my partner and I set out for the Norfolk coast.  After all, if you are this close to the edge of the country, you might as well continue until you can go no further.  'Anyhow, I've heard East Cromer is really nice,' said my partner.  A little later on, however, he decided that he might be thinking of East Coker.  'Well, my mate Steve definitely said Cromer's worth a visit,' he persisted. 

First, though, there were a couple of churches I wanted to stop at, although things didn't go quite to plan, as when tasked with directing us to Little Witchingham, the sat nav dropped us in the middle of nowhere - in fact, I began to wonder if the witches had bewitched the village away.  In the end I had to resort to reading a signpost.  Crikey.

Then there it was - St Faith's - no longer in regular use (owing to a lack of same?) and in the care of the Churches Conservation Trust.  And open!

And what a church, covered in wall paintings dating from the middle of the 14th century.  And to think they were almost lost for ever, having been discovered only in the 1970s when the church was in a ruinous state and earmarked for demolition.  

 

  

Not all of the South Wall appears to have been painted, but Eve Baker, the art historian who discovered the murals, believes that it had been prepared for painting and that something had intervened to stop it happening, almost certainly the Black Death of 1348.   

Outside I was still keeping an eye out for one of those bigenning skies and I wasn't going to go home till I saw one.  This at least was a start ... 

and this not a bad continuation ...

BUT there was something wrong with the qualitative flatness of the place.  I'd been expecting somewhere like the Somerset Levels, where the roads are raised and called causeways, and every winter the land remembers the implications of its name and floods.  But Norfolk - or at least this part of it - is quite bumpy, with hillocks and rises.  Not really flat at all.

Then I realised what was bothering me.  In Somerset your eye runs over the terrain until it hits a range of hills - the Mendips, the Poldens, the Quantocks, the Brendons, the Blackdowns - which accentuate the flatness of the low-lying land, whilst in Norfolk there are no ranges of hills.  It is a different sort of flat, and therein, I'd wager, lie the bigenning skies.  

Relieved, I drove on to Thurgarton, our next stop which boasts a towerless thatched church.  All Saints did once have a tower which fell in the 1880s.  The church was eventually abandoned altogether and only rescued in the 1980s, again thanks to the Churches Conservation Trust. 

Outside there was a pleasingly chubby cherub flanked by two toothsome skulls ... 

and inside a series of carved mediaeval bench ends.  Here's a man (a huntsman or wild man?) creeping up on two dogs fighting ... 

... a liony creature and a man playing the bagpipe, though the bag bit has been lost ... 

... a creature - possibly a gryphon? - holding a man's head in his paws and a dragon ...

... a rather more convincing elephant and castle, than the one I saw in the Choir at Chester Cathedral ... 

There were also some fragmentary Elizabethan texts on the walls.  (Not everyone was impressed by the litany that is the Ten Commandments.)

  

My favourite things were the sense of space you get - always a feature of Conservation Trust Churches which are stripped of all clutter - and the amazing hammerbeam chancel roof, which put me in mind of the final section of Seamus Heaney's sequence, Lightenings.

The annals say: when the monks of Clonmacnoise

Were all at prayers inside the oratory

A ship appeared above them in the air.

The anchor dragged along behind so deep

It hooked itself into the altar rails

And then, as the big hull rocked to a standstill,

A crewman shinned and grappled down the rope

And struggled to release it. But in vain.

'This man can't bear our life here and will drown,'

The abbot said, 'unless we help him.' So

They did, the freed ship sailed, and the man climbed back

Out of the marvellous as he had known it.

  

Outside big skies were filled with sea gulls as a tractor ploughed the stubble.  We headed on to Cromer.  

Apparently the artist Algernon Swinburne visited Cromer in 1880 and said that it was 'an esplanady sort of place' ... 

... and in 1892 Oscar Wilde claimed he found Cromer 'excellent for writing, golf better'.  We struggled to find a decent pub. 

The colours, however, were gorgeous ... 

  

... and the skies, yes, the skies were very big indeed.  

Cold Plum Porridge

I've always seen East Anglia as a sort of giant Forest of Dean - somewhere you have to plan to visit as it's too far out of the way to pass on the off-chance - and as this weekend was the first opportunity I'd had of going, I was very excited -in fact, I think I was expecting it to come straight out of a fable.  As soon as we'd passed the turn off to Cambridge I started keeping an eye out for its famous flatness and enormous skies, and got quite carried away by the signpost to Swaffham (even if I couldn't quite remember the story of the pedlar in its entirety), but in fact, the small partI saw turned out to be more pleasant and attractive that anything else ... and a long bloody drive away!

Anyhow, here are some photos of Norwich.

The River Wensum

Wobbliness

More wobbliness

Wobbliness in Tombland (above and below)

Samson and Hercules in a nice mixing of mythologies

Detail, the Ethelbert Gate, built in 1316 after the original Church was burnt down during a riot in 1272.

The Cathedral exterior

The nave of the Cathedral

The Choir

The bronze 14th century Pelican lectern which escaped the Reformation and was found buried in the Bishop's Garden, apparently

Looking towards the apse

An effigy believed to be of St Felix, believed to date from 1100

The best graffiti with serifs I've ever seen ... :-)

All you that do this place pass bye

Remember death for you will dye.

As you are now even so was I

And as I am so shall you be.

Thomas Gooding here do staye

Wayting for God's judgement day.

Epitaph of Thomas Gooding, who died in 1627 and was buried vertically, apparently so that he could spring up and be first into heaven.

Glass door etched with lines from T S. Eliot's 'Burnt Norton' (Four Quartets):

‘Reach out to the silence

at the still point of the turning world.

Except for the still point

there would be no dance.

Love is itself unmoving

only the cause and end of movement

timeless.’

View through the Choir

A Dementor   An Angel

The current copper font, formerly a vessel in which toffee was made in the local Rowntrees factory

14th century roof boss in the Cloisters

Elm Hill at dusk

The Art Nouveau Royal Arcade

Labour In Vain Yard

Opie Street, formerly Gropecuntelane (1305) 

and Turpis Vicus (1333)

Norwich Castle