It’s the morning so here’s a poem for you to be unsettled by………

 

Dark Is This Gift From The Stars

 

Dark is the hour

when it is ripe for disobedience.

 

Dark is the path

when you are summoned,

to discard external authority

and discover your own voice of devilish initiative.

 

Dark is the step down

into forbidden kingdoms,

where no law or monarch rules.

 

Dark is this gift.

 

You are under nobody’s orders

with wings unclipped,

and determined in your vagrancy

by a voice from within that speaks not as convention measures.

 

Born before your birth

in the great darkness of a million stars,

this one chose you,

so only you can descend to awaken its pre-natal flame.

 

A secret fame,

the holy devil invites you to claim.

 

Robin Collins (myself Robin Collins myself) 2017

Speaking the word ‘Elves’ these days tends to induce an automatic association with Lord of the Rings. Old Mr Tolkien of course was mining the rich seams of the Anglo Saxon world where the existence of ‘elfin’ was taken for granted, alongside the other non-human races we have now partioned to fantasy namely ‘dragons’ ‘giants’ ‘black dogs’ and ‘goblins’. The Anglo Saxons or the English of times of old experienced their lands, its hills, fields, springs and woods as infested with whole races of supernatural beings. Chief among them were the elfin who came in several different kinds: wood elfin, moor elfin, hill elfin, water elfin and field elfin. The elfin were often possessed of a dangerous unearthly beauty that for men to glimpse would be to drive them mad and often this madness would lead them to trying to take the elfin female for a wife with inevitable fatal folktale consquences for him (it is interesting that it is always men and not women who glimpse the elfin and become doomed to love them, but perhaps women know better not to go looking in the first place).

Elfin certainly had malevolent powers to the Old English and could inflict sickness. They were on the other hand very beautiful and wondrous. There are words in the Old English lexicon that were used once like ‘alfshine’ to describe somebody being particularly pretty or lovely, literally they had the ‘elf-shine’. There was the condition when you were ‘alf struck’ or shot by elf bolts and this led to the word ‘stroke’ whereby you were possessed and taken captive in elf land. When you had hiccups these were caused by elfin, and sickness had a word that associated it with elfin powers. There’s many old English names that used ‘Alf’ at the beginning like Alfred, to describe the child having some special quality given by the elfin.  The elfin were often responsible for tying elf knots in your hair at night, and yet they could also grant kings and ordinary folk with powers. But curiously in English place names I have yet to find anywhere describing elfin. Yet what you do find is the common ‘puck’ or ‘puca’ in odd places usually describing a ‘hole’ ‘pit’ or ‘well’ as being haunted by the aforementioned puca. This was a goblin who frequented marshy places or hollows. Folk experienced being ‘puck-ledden’ off the path by mysterious bobbing orbs of light (the same as Will O’Wisps) only to find themselves bogged down in a marsh. The race of puck seems to inhabit a different place in Old English mind to the elfin. These goblins were not ever beautiful, but they had endless capacity for leading people off the path into unwelcome, unwholesome places such as marshes (on that note Stroud was anciently a marsh, hence Puckshole in the Paganhill area). From puck we can go onto the ‘shucca’ that became ‘shuck’ or ‘shock’ which is kind of demon usually used for the black hound ‘shuck’ that is found in East Anglian folk stories.

You see we really don’t know or have much control over the world we live in. We are surrounded by beings capricious and vastly greater than our human race. They dwell on a level of existence that means they are capable of moving in and out space and time. Yet unfortunately we attract their attention, and indeed they rather find our souls somewhat fun to play with.

On that note I leave you to scream.

Lypiatt in Stroud is divided between Nether and Upper Lypiatt. The name is from Old English and literally describes ‘a Leap Gate’ which is a gate that deer are supposed to leap over, not for purposes of fun or sport I add, but because the gate would have been part of an enclosured area of woodland in which deer were only allowed to go in and out. These deer were being purposefully managed in this way for hunting. The English Saxon nobility hunted deer and boar as likewise later did the Norman elite. But whereas the Normans carved out huge areas of land into exclusive ‘forests’ or into smaller ‘chases’ for their highly managed hunting culture, the Saxons did not. It is seems though they developed some kind of small scale hunting park based around the ‘Leap Gate’ where deer could be contained and managed through these enclosed areas of woodland pasture within larger woods. Hunting for the Norman aristocracy was a well defined culture and indeed it was one of the main ways they impressed themselves on and thereby oppressed the English peasantry, most of all by creating hunt forests and chases that were all owned by the crown (including every single deer) a situation never before encountered by the English.  Lypiatt in Stroud was a large wood that once stretched from Toadsmore to Stroud hill.  The area known now as the Heavens would been part of Nether Lypiatt and Upper Lypiatt nudging up towards Bisley.  Much of what is now Stroud was wooded until the cloth making industry began to attract in a flow of skilled professional weavers many of  Flemish blood. As the cloth industry grew the woods of Lypiatt would have shrunk as land was opened up for making mills and the people needed to work in the cloth making processes (spinners, weavers, carders, dare I say more) were attracted to live here. Lypiatt though before it was called Lypiatt in the Roman era has revealed that there were villa residences of some kind built there. Tantalising fragments of that time tell us that the Romano-British were using and living in pre-Lypiatt Lypiatt. That’s another gate to leap over though. History seems to glimmer for a moment before sinking away into oblivion when all those who remembered it are no more. Maybe one day nobody will remember the mills and Flemish weavers of Stroud.

I find monotheistic religion a strange thing to go for. The idea of there being only one god, and no other gods must not come naturally to us. When you step out there in the world how could you concieve of it as being the sole creation of one over arching all-knowing and all-powerful god? I find it strange that the sheer plurality and diversity found in our universe could be the workings of only one divine being. It seems a rather poor conception of the world to deny the old pagan gods that reflect the abundant creativity and manifold origins of life, and hand all the credit over one central godhead (with a tellingly patriarchal beard).

We can see with the rise of monotheistic religion the emergence of heavily centralised and male-dominated empires those power is distributed between urban cities. I’m talking about Roman civilization of course, because there had been other centralised, male orientated city states before in the east but never before one that covered so much of western and eastern europe. The monotheism I am familiar with is Christianity.  It is clear that the theology of Christianity with a centralised one powerful god ruling over a hierarchical creation, reflects the world as the Romans cemented it revolving about an emperor-figure. Monotheism echoes a socially stratified, top-down, model of that kind of civillization. Power is dispensed from upon high down to the lowly mortals. Heaven becomes more important than the Earth, and the human body becomes sinful as heaven becomes ever more gilded. The realm of God in the end becomes the all encompassing point, and the Earth turns to a shadowy realm where we fell from paradise. I see this as moving men and women away from being connected with their own innate spark of divinity to becoming the subordinates to the God who makes our freedom a sin. The mono-God like an emperor needs us to be obedient and self-denying. If we carry on believing that we live in a world of many gods that just makes a mockery of his absolute power. It is interesting to note that monotheism comes with coercion to turn more people into believers. Force and fear, big centralised civillizations, it is a strange thing for humans to want to do when they have shown to make only a few people better off.

I could venture on to say more about the monotheistic idea of God for no doubt it is likely more complex than merely worshipping a deified ideal of a patriarchial emperor. But the developments in history around the end of the classical period and the beginning of the medieval period laid the foundations in western europe for this kind of God whose authority and power is what Christendoms kings and emperors were believed to be conduits of, just as Romes caesars were thought to be. In the minds of the people inhabiting the Middle Ages everything they saw around them had its uncorrupted source in the Word of God. They had abandoned the old gods which I would call indigineous. it is this ursurping of the indigineous by the forces of ‘civillization’ with its military and bureaucratic machine, is how the plantation in peoples minds of accepting a distant, enthroned ruler makes it possible for Gods to become one God (and only one right kind of faith, with only one right way of accessing him above). It think it is has been interesting to see how this takes power away from people and puts it in the hands of the ‘specialists’  with their titles. We don’t really need this anymore. Grasp the spark!

It is one of the most remarkable things we take for granted that what we call our history is really only a very small record of a far deeper history that is the pre-agriculutral penumbra to our little agricultural surburb in time. All of our history except this little bit that began with agriculture of course was never written down as apparently no writing existed at that point. We evolved in that ancient time for the tracking of deer, elk, mammoth and other megafauna over vast expanses of post glacial tundra and grasslands. Our single most important technology in that time was flint and fire. The face of the Earth was different then to how we know it. There were ages when the glaciers rolled down and locked great areas of western Europe under the deafening chill of ice, and ages when the ice withdrew and the melting ice released virgin lands. We were a wandering kind shifting with the migrations of the herd animals we were sustained by, and turning with the seasons. What language we spoke then I do not know. I always find it gives an insightful context to who we are and how we are, when you remember we have lived for most of our ‘sub-history’ as nomadic hunter gatherers. The central fire would have been at the heart of their world, where beyond its flickering light resonated lands full of animals, many of which are now extinct. There is what we call art from the paleolithic in caves in France, and Cresswell Crags Derbyshire. You feel these people were so deeply in touch with their world, and had to be to survive, that the ‘cave art’ ripples with its ochre aurochs and wild horses as if they are breathing in that space. It is extraordinary to think that we know so little of our history, and what we do know we only know a scrap. The further you go back the more we step into a realm of dreams and visions, we cannot ever grasp our deep ancestors of another deeper age. Here we are then with megafauna lurking in our unconscious, and the stars blazing over tiny tribal encampments where glows fire in the eyes of men, women and children.

It appears I have been committing more creative madness with words, here’s what I wrote this morning the prologue to one of my other novels somewhere in progress.

The door opened to a dimly lit room and in walked a man with a smell of sulphur and cinnamon about him. He was clad darkly and in a fashion about two hundred years out of date. To the other man sitting at the chair behind the heavy cedarwood desk he seemed distinctly sophisticated and suave in an antiquidated way. Yet he had a air of mild danger about him that meant he could not relax. His name was Blake Infernal.
‘Issac Simpkins or Zak, good evening how can I be of service?’ Blake Infernal said smoothly with a twinkling smile as he sat down. Oddly his chair made no sound as he moved it.
‘I’m up to my chin in shit I need your help’ Zak said with a bleak expression on his face.
‘Well, well I’m not surprised Zak, you do have a way of making the ordure rise’ Blake laced his fingers together in a bridge of glinting rings encrusted with garnets and diamonds.
‘I’m going to lose John my son cos I’m not looking after him his school has contacted social services, but I can’t lose him he’s all I got in life that gives me something….I’ve got nothin’ much ‘cept my John’ Zak’s bleakness had given way to bald desperation.
‘You know how my services work Zak, what would you be paying with this evening: Soul? Secrets? or your Death?’ Blake had leaned forwards slightly casting a shadow over the desk. His eyes glimmered.
Zak seemed to squirm for a moment in his chair, and he twitched a glance away from Blakes fixing eyes as if a rabbit caught by a stoat.
‘Ok, ok, right, I know how it works Mr. Infernal’ he said swallowing his nerves, ‘Suppose I gotta tell somebody my secrets one day’
‘A good decision Mr. Simpkins sign here you know the drill’
Blake pushed forwards a piece of paper. The paper had words inked with a penmanship unsual for Zak’s time, but not for Blake Infernals.
They said: I Issac Simpkins hereby declare myself in service to Blake Infernal and Company in payment of which I forfeit…….. (please fill in as appropiate for your circumstances this evening)
Zak took the pen, his fingers clasping about its smouldering ruby tinted surface and slowly began to scratch with the nib into the space: my secrets. When he’d finished and put the pen back, Blake Infernals hand was there waiting for him to shake it.
‘You will hear from me soon Mr. Simpkins’ his hand seemed to crush his own within its bear-like grip. Blake gave him one last smile that could charm the skin off a snake. Before he knew it Zak was leaving that dimly lit room, his brow covered in sweat despite the cold. He kept his eyes ahead and did not think about what he’d just done.

(Robin Myself Robin reserves all and wholly forever and forever the creative rights to this piece of wordsmithery, or ye shall be smited)

Good heavens it’s me again! I have been writing on and off what is now quite a well built up novel (unfinished I add) set in the turbulent and frightening time of the 870’s in what is to become England after King Alfred begins to call the kingdoms of Mercia, Northumberland, and Wessex ‘Angla Land’ home of the ‘Angle Kynn’ or English. The Danes have arrived in a huge army the Anglo Saxon chronicle calls the ‘Heathen Army’. The Danes are also called the Northmen. They are what we know as the Vikings. The English though of the time probably didn’t use that word much, for them they called these seaborne raiders ‘Danes’ ‘Northmen’ ‘Heathens’ and ‘we’ll all going to be killed if we stand around watching the big men with axes’. The Saxon English did not care if they were from Norway, Denmark, or Frisia, they were all Danes and Northmen coming to pillage and enslave them. The Heathen Army’s arrival though marked a change from the increasing raids that were striking Englands coast in the 800’s. This was an invading force who then set about toppling the kings of East Anglia, Northumberland and Mercia.

It was Wessex though which held its ground under King Alfred who after finally defeating the army set the border of the Danelaw where the kingdoms taken by the Northmen lay and Wessex. The Danes or the Vikings were a powerful world shaking force in that time which came to be known as the Viking Age. On their longships they rowed down to the Black Sea to found what would be Russian, and set up trading outposts like Kiev. They surged out on the waves fearlessly facing the unknown and thirsty for the riches of lands beyond their icy shores. Ireland, Scotland, England, France, Byzantium, Greenland, the Vikings had a force of turning up almost anywhere and making the world suddenly pivot on their actions. For England they were the fire that forged what would become our nation, and brought Wessex to its ascendancy as the one great Saxon kingdom that would rule over the rest with one king until the coming of the Normans. The Vikings changed our history and got under our skin.

In case you were wondering I have a name for this novel I am writing that I lifted appropiately from Norse mythology, ‘Age of Cloven Shields’. With shields broken our lands defences fail, and the flood of Northmen pour in. I think the most interesting and important things happen to us when our defences fail and we are opened to new influences. The second name for the novel is ‘Wolf Maiden’ which alludes to the main character. In Norse mythology we learn of Fenris Wolf (one of the monstrous offspring begat between Loki and the giantess Angrboda) and how when his magic chain fails to hold him back at Ragnarok he will escape and all hell is let loose, with Odin having himself eaten by Fenris. Wolves and broken shields this is England of the Vikings.

Spillmans Road on Rodborough is my home. Spillmans was the name of the Spilemon family whose origins here can be found in official documents going back to the 1200’s.  The Spilemons were described by the Custumal of the Manor of Minchinhampton as holding lands by sergeantry. In the Norman hierachy of England ‘Sergeant’ is a Latin term meaning originally a professional foot soldier. I believe a sergeant later came to mean a man who had a position in a village similar to a bailiff, who were like land managers. The Spilemons were certainly among the upper peasant classes when first mentioned. They were tenants on the Manor of Minchinhampton which Rodborough was part of, and the whole estate since the Normans came was under the ownership of the Abbess of Caen in Normandy who skimmed the revenue off its lands into their cofffer.

A bit later on in the 1400’s the Spilemons are found again in documents now owning the mill at the bottom of Rodborough by the river Fome called Lodgemore. Back then it was a fulling mill called after the old name used for this stretch of the Frome, Higher Lademoor. Just below Higher Lademoor Mill is what is now the Fromehall Mill, called then Nether Lademoor. Fromehall Mill (Nether Lademoor) was according to more venerable documents was the oldest of the mills by the 1400’s.  I think it is likely Fromehall Mill may have been there before the Normans. The English Saxons were using the Cotswolds for the raising of sheep for their wool, as the uplands had been in the Roman era. Minchinhampton and Avening had recorded in the Domesday Book as possessing many mills down in the valley, and it seems they were possibly grinding wheat flour but perhaps were fulling cloth. Villages along the upper Frome like Frampton Mansell and Sapperton are all well sited to take advantage of the water flow and like Avening and Minchinhampton were just next to the Cotswold uplands where the sheep whose valuable fleece was being grown on the rich limestone grasslands.

The Spilemons were already living in a landscape where the economy of raising sheep for their wool was long established with the Saxon English, and the processing of the fleece into finer cloth I would not be surprised was already happening to some degree. In the centuries from 1500 onwards the Stroud Valleys would become increasingly exploited for all the stages of making the fine cloth it would become famous for. This long laboured over cloth of course was only for the wealthy of those times, after all it was a luxury product hence the arduous process of getting it to its quality where the sweat and tears of dozens of poor cottage workers had gone into its creation. The Spilemons family built up their wealth through acquiring land in the Manor of Minchinhampton primarily through the conduit of marrying offspring to other local families with titles and lands. They became owners of Lodgemoor Mill (Higher Lademoor) which carried out fulling (also done manually called ‘Walking’ see the place names around, like Walkley Hill (clearing or meadow of the walkers) and Walkley Wood in Nailsworth).

Towards the end of the 1400’s the Spilemon family had no more male heirs but they had Maud daughter of John the third John of the Spilemons (they seem to have run out of imagination regarding male names, one reason I prefer the Saxon English is they have far more interesting names than the Norman English). I’d like to know more about Maud Spilemon. She was duly married off to another last in the line of an local family of importance: the De Rodboroughs of Senkley (note: Senkley is St. Chloe these days in Amberley). The production of male heirs though was not going well and the Maud and Edmund were given Margery, who later was married to the Paynes. There ends the Spilemon line. But their house on what would become Spillmans Court Rd remained owned by Richard Payne, with Lodgemoor Mill run by his tenants the Merrets. Spillmans Court itself no longer exists, it’s last owners were a nurseryman of the Victorian era when the decaying house was burnt. But the family name stretching back hundreds of years ago remains imprinted on this side of Rodborough, where Spillmans became the name of three streets going in layers of brick uphill and Spillmans Pitch the most evil slope in Stroud. I’d like to have somewhere named up here after Maud Spillmans the last of the Spilemons. We could do with a ‘Maud’s Pitch’ or a ‘Maud’s End’?

I spend much time reading about history (particularly before 1066, and anywhere that interests me in the ill-lighted early middle ages) and listening to a sub-narrative about the invisibility of women in history. The visibility of the ruling classes, the supposedly great and leading figureheads of kings are shown to be the shapers of history. Where was ‘England’ first born in any sense as a coherent nation? Refer to King Alfred. Why are the ruling classes, and the important men given so much of our attention in history? Why are women largely omitted and only found if you go and look for them under the stodgy layers of king lists? Their invisibility is very suggestive of the kind of history we have been writing and focussing on. It leaves us with the impression the only way things can happen is by being forceful, competitive and a bully.  But where has that got us?

I was struck while watching a recent film (Tawai) by Bruce Parry at the Seed Festival (hawkwood College) on the weekend, about the question at the core of it: how can we as a human race find a new way of relating to the world? He brought up the left and right brain spheres, and how agricultural civillizations tend to place importance on the left side: the part that has created hierarchial societies around competitive, wealth hoarding, property obsessed, elite classes. The left side helps us to think in a piece-by-piece mode, and to take control of our environment. But we have come to the place where we now are emphasising all the importance on only the left side, as our civillization is in the processing of destroying itself due to this left-side blinkeredness. It is the right side of the brain though that works with the world in a completely different but complementary way. But that right brain sphere like the invisibility of women in history has been gradually suppressed. As we have raised kings and big men into historical upness, so we have seen a world that say’s louder and louder to follow the head, not the heart. The right brain has a quality to it that is feminine, there is a connective, whole-picture, co-operative, and more trusting of the body’s knowledge thing going on with the right brain. It works on a deeper level. we have moved away from a more embodied world thinking to a floating head world thinking. It also is paralleled with how the Earth as a living entity has become more and more invisible. We have reached the place where we can deny her any self determined intelligence (she needs our help to do anything). But this choice now has shown us its terrible cost.

I suspect if we started making history from the ‘invisible’ side we’d realise that it wasn’t what we’ve been taught about. A history from the right brain would show us to listen more to the heart. This isn’t about being a soppy pile of feelings. It is about protecting, caring and celebrating because you love.  We cannot go on making the left-side brain the tyrant king of our lives.  We know where that has got us.