Buds

Look carefully at the photo…do you see them? Yes, the first ever flower buds from one of my apple tree seedlings! These were grown from apples collected in 2020 and germinated in 2021, so they are now three years old. I need to do an audit and empty out the pots of those that died over the winter but I must still have a good 50 saplings in pots dotted around the patio.

It’s unlikely that these flowers will produce fruit but it’s still very exciting to see one of the little trees take this step forward!

Seedling with first flower buds
The leftmost tree is the one with the buds – the one in a terracotta pot. Grown from a seed from a Gala apple
Seedlings by the pump
Seedlings at the back of the patio
Seedlings at the side of the patio
Seedlings in Froghaven
Seedlings by the path

A new Hnef

No, didn’t sneeze…my main Christmas present this year was a set of BEAUTIFUL handmade glass gaming pieces from Tillerman Beads. These are based on finds from grave 750 at the Viking-age town of Birka in Sweden and are about the fanciest gaming set you can have unless you’re going for carved ivory or gold (as in some sagas). I’ve long had a glass Hnef (the name given in Icelandic sagas to the centre piece) but it is machine-made and very regular. The pieces that accompany it are simple glass “pebbles” sold as pot toppers, which closely resemble some Roman pieces. This set is a much better match for the original finds.

Replica glass gaming pieces

The grave at Birka contained 8 dark pieces, 17 light ones. Al gave me 9 dark pieces and 17 light ones, which provides a spare of each colour if you are playing tablut, and also allows you to play merels or nine men’s morris. Tablut is the version of the game that Carl Linneus recorded and is played on a 9×9 board with 8 defenders, 16 attackers.

Ready for a game of “tablut”
Ready for a game of merels

If you’d like to know more about the game of “hnefatafl” (it has several names and variants) you can read my article about the possible origin of the name “Hnefatafl” and see the other replica glass “Hnef” on my website. And of course there are lots of web pages out there with information about the game

Wintery bits and bobs

Here are a few photos from the last month of things in and around Rumwoldstow. It’s the off season but it’s still always interesting to take a wander down and see what’s occurring!

A pony in the neighbours’ meadow, which is called Barton
(the meadow, not the pony)
Bird’s nest, recovered from the top of the pivot stone in the gatehouse
Pivot stone in the gatehouse!
Frost and flood in late November
Wild geese on the meadow to the north
Rainbow moon
It rained last night…the River Cherwell is about as high as I’ve seen it…all the lower part of the orchard is flooded and it’s raining again now!

Medlar jelly

Despite the general distractions of life, I managed to gather a fair proportion of the medlars, which by November were falling from the tree. The medlar is the only new tree so far to give a good crop of fruit. Most of the fruit trees were planted in 2018, so they’re five years old, and generally look healthy, and flower well, but are giving between “some” and “no” fruit (YES “Fairleigh” damson tree I AM looking at you).

I put the medlars in the utility room and within a couple of weeks they had “bletted” and were ready to eat / use. Raw medlars are good with cheese, but I don’t regularly eat a cheese course after dinner, so wanted to find some other way to use them.

The medlars are strangely attractive to ladybirds
The freshly gathered fruit – still firm and green in the middle, no good to eat yet

Medlars are tasty, but even once you’ve bletted them, they are not easy to eat; the pulp inside the “hip” is good, but there are plenty of seeds and fibrous bits. So this year, I tried boiling them medlars for syrup.

The medlars rise to the top as they cook, and can be squished with a spoon
Post squishing, the fruit sink down again…

I strained the juice overnight through muslin. It’s a shame to waste so much of the fruit pulp, but I just did not have the time or energy to separate pulp from skin, seeds and fibre this year. The juice didn’t look particularly promising, but I froze a box of it to use later for a flavoured mead, and made the rest into jelly.

8 lbs medlars and 11 pints water yielded about 6 pints of juice.

Medlar Jelly
  • 3 pints strained medlar juice
  • 3 lbs granulated sugar
  • Juice of 1 lemon
  • 1/2 bottle (125 ml) “Certo” apple pectin.

I boiled the jelly for a good hour and a half before it finally reached a setting point. This was much longer than I expected, as the Certo is meant to reduce cooking time and improve set. On initial tasting, I thought there was too much lemon juice, but actually it’s fine. The jelly gradually turned a very pleasing clear orangy colour, and has a delicate flavour. It’s a bit stickier than would be ideal because of the long boiling – it’s on the verge of turning into caramel – another time, maybe more Certo? For traditional jellies like blackberry, I use unripe apples in August / September, which are chock full of pectin. As the medlars aren’t ready to use until December, the apples are far too ripe to provide pectin.

The finished jelly, with two medlars that I left uncooked for their story value (and indeed gave to a friend a few weeks later)

The rest of the juice is in the freezer and I plan to try making a mead with honey, medlar juice and apples. This will be a longer term project!

Booth me up, baby

A monastery can never have too many outbuildings. Obviously! Al’s latest construction is something that was originally conceived as a log store with a working area in the middle, but it’s coming out as more of a generally useful covered space with good light.

Great use of an old pergola for the main frame
Pallet wood cladding
Al at work on the roof battens
Well placed to catch the afternoon sun
Too good for a wood store!

The Great Booth is not quite finished – Al is still collecting the last few extra-long pallets to break down for roof timbers – but doesn’t it look great?

Protecting the harvest

The heritage apple trees are still not producing much fruit and I’ve scoffed what there was. But the old Bramley in our garden has given us many fine apples. Last year, we stored a good number but the rats, not surprisingly, made a bee-line for them (surely you can’t have too many animals in a metaphor) and deprived us of several trays of good apples.

Al, being the hero that he is, has reinforced the apple store, which lives in one of the guard-rooms in the gatehouse, with wire mesh. This is of course not historically authentic! Vermin-proof food storage will have been a perennial problem, with grain stores raised on ‘mushrooms’, sealed pits and other strategies used with presumably varying degrees of success.

I almost filled the store with the best apples, as they should keep for longest. We still have a good number in the kitchen that need to be used up asap. Stewed apple for breakfast, crumble for supper…it’s a rough life.

Clearing up windfalls

Some of the Bramley apple harvest
Apples going in to store
Let’s hope the rats can’t open a bolt…

The lone Hambledon

The orchard continues to be a mystery to me…the apple and pear trees planted in 2018 are still not producing significant fruit. This year the pears flowered profusely, there were no late frosts, but nevertheless, the fruit that set all fell and we have no pears. The Wyken Pippin has a few apples, and the Hambledon Deux Ans produced one solitary apple – but it was large, much larger than its few fruit last year.

Reluctant to pick it before it ripened, I left it on the tree; the Hambledon is supposed to be a great keeper. But the other day, it had vanished off the bough, and I found it on the ground – fortunately intact. I therefore cut it up and ate it. Some of the flesh was already discolouring, so it clearly wasn’t a great apple and wouldn’t have kept any longer. But the flesh that was ok tasted nice; it’s been described as a cooking apple, and I found it a bit sweeter than a Bramley but quite tart.

What’s up with the trees? I don’t know. The mature eating apple tree in the orchard (variety unknown) has some excellent fruit but many small and malformed fruit. Is this a disease? Is it too warm in the winter? It’s not been a drought year, nor has it flooded, so it’s a mystery to me. I keep hoping that *next* year, the new pears and apples will start to produce.

In the meantime, there are many medlars!

At Oxford Castle

Just around the corner from St Frideswide’s monastery in Oxford, a small group of dedicated nuns met in September of 923 to wonder at illuminated manuscripts and marvel at Rumwoldstow’s most precious holy relic, the skull of the infant saint’s own faithful duck companion, Ducky.

Well actually we were part of a display at Oxford Castle, run by the Ulfhrafnar group in the Vikings society.

The nuns of Rumwoldstow marvelled at the manuscript work of the nun in black (she’s from a different monastery)
Abbess Cyneswithe opens the box containing Ducky’s actual skull
Sister Æscwynn, our magistra, accompanied by Sister Ælfrun working hard at her spinning
Dramatic shot of a horn-blowing youth

I actually spent most of the two-day display blathering on about board games, but it was fun to pose for a few choice scenes!

A Trewhiddle-style brooch from Marbury, Cheshire

You remember the COVID-19 lockdowns in the UK, back in 2020 – 2021? No? I guess you’re too young…well I won’t bore you with oldster ramblings about pulling together or wartime spirit or any of that rubbish and anyway by the time you read this sadly there will be new and worse crises. But honestly at the time it was rather a big deal and ONE of my challenges was to try to help people buy starter re-enactment kit when everything was closed. There were lots of good online shops and retailers doing mail order, but there seemed to be few offerings of good Anglo-Saxon jewellery, especially from the later, Christian period. Everyone wants to be a Viking. There were a few nice little disc brooches available but the selection was seriously limited, compared with reproductions of Viking finds.

Now scroll forward a couple of years…and there are some exciting new options available. I recently bought myself a super brooch about 5 cm across, based on a find acquired by the British Museum in 2020. The brooch is part of a hoard registered as 2020,8004.1-6 (BEP). The hoard was found at Marbury in Cheshire by Martin Tobitt and includes parts of a similar but slightly larger brooch.

The original disc brooch is made of cast openwork silver, inlaid with niello, and with five riveted bosses as extra decoration. The openwork design with stylised creatures is in the late Anglo-Saxon ‘Trewhiddle’ style and is dated to 9th or early 10 century CE.

Front of original brooch, British Museum object 2020,8004.1
Back of original brooch, British Museum object 2020,8004.1

I include extracts from the curator’s comments below:

…part of an expanding group of 9th century early-medieval brooches that are broadly characterised by their openwork, cross based form, often decorated with Trewhiddle-style decoration enhanced with the use of niello.

There are currently 15 examples known to the author, 12 of which are silver, the remaining being gilt copper-alloy. Most take the form of an expanded-armed cross with second cross set at 45 degrees; the three brooches described here are the first examples where the crosses are instead formed of concave-sided lozenges.

This brooch hoard fits with the pattern of deposition seen in the corpus of Type 16 brooches. For example other hoards with multiple brooches of this type include the Galloway Hoard (National Museum Scotland), the South Norfolk Hoard (Norwich Castle Museum), and the Beeston Tor hoard (British Museum). These brooches are usually found in the east of England. However, these three, and an example from Nannerch, Wales (PAS LVPL-30A793), and the Galloway hoard further north, now create an interesting North West group, perhaps suggestive Viking activity.

Non-destructive X-ray fluorescence analysis of the surface of brooch 1 and one the fragments, indicated silver contents of approximately 94-97%, the rest being mostly copper, with traces of other elements.

I find the curator’s comment about the items being usually found in the East of England confusing, as the style is named for a hoard from Trewhiddle in Cornwall which is as West as it gets in the UK!

I bought my replica from the wonderful Northern Traders in Spain. Their website includes a link to the original find – bless them! So I can add the brooch to my early 10th century outfit with confidence. Trewhiddle-style items have been found in a number of places including Abingdon, Cornwall (the eponymous Trewhiddle) and Norfolk (Pentney), so I’m happy that my abbess near the borders of Mercia and Wessex could have a fancy piece in this style.

These disc brooches generally have a fairly light-weight pin, as do the equal armed brooches, and I am not sure how good they would be at fastening a shoulder-slung rectangular cloak of heavy material; I think that penanular brooches are better for this purpose. However, the disc brooch is ideal for fastening a circular or semi-circular mantle, as worn by Anglo-Saxon women.

My replica is of copper alloy (bronze) and the five “bosses” have been glued or soldered on, not riveted. The bosses are lightly silver plated so the brooch closely resembles the current appearance of the original brooch; if I wanted to be super authentic I could silver plate the whole thing? But I like it fine as is, and it’s great to see a wider variety of Anglo-Saxon replicas for sale, most especially as this is a recent find with a recorded location!

Replica of the Marbury brooch, made by Northern Traders (front)
Back of the replica brooch

Open day, July 2023

It’s been a long time since Rumwoldstow opened its gates to visitors; we had an event planned for June of this year but PLAGUE STRUCK! (We finally got COVID-19). Fortunately we were blessed by St Rumwold and recovered relatively quickly, as these things go.

Our rebooked date was 22 July and the event was marred only by heavy rain and a train strike. A number of people came along despite the rain and we enjoyed a fire and barbecue supper in the gatehouse once our various guests had departed. Many thanks to those members of The Vikings who visited as peaceful traders and even brought their own awning to shelter from the persistent rain. Kudos to the fighters who trained with and demonstrated medieval weaponry out in the open.

Leif, a surprisingly friendly Viking warrior
Lots of re-enactors, and a few hardy visitors, sheltering from the rain
A tabula board, ignored as everyone is too busy making warm clothes!
Warriors in training
The Rumwoldstow gatehouse is a bit breezy but much better than no shelter
Local boy Tinky comes to check the work of the scribes