921 – Page 2 – Rumwoldstow

Visits for Pandiona

We at Rumwoldstow celebrated the feast day of St Pandiona by welcoming a group of visitors. St Pandiona, likely an Irish princess, only died in 904 AD so may have been personally known to the nuns at Rumwoldstow in the year of 921; she was also associated with a well, not unlike our own dear St Rumwold. Anyway, I digress. These visitors were from a local re-enactment society, and spent the weekend doing crafts and getting weaponry into shape the better to defend us from Viking attacks.

One warrior practised with the sling, a simple yet highly effective weapon.

The next project was to complete three new shields; the handles and bosses had already been riveted on so we set to work edging them with leather. First step was to cut 5cm strips of leather and sew them into loops 4% smaller than the circumference of the shield.

We tried a couple of different ways of stitching the strips together so that they’d like flat. Tunnel stitching didn’t hold up well with this particular set of ingredients but the methods shown below were very successful.

The loops were soaked in cold water for an hour or two before being fitted to the shield rim.

After drying overnight, we drilled holes through leather and shield at about 2cm intervals and sewed the layers together with saddle stitch. The thread was a brown nylon thread because that’s what we had; artificial sinew would have been better.

Bonus abandoned wren’s nest found in the wood pile – the chicks will have long since flown.

We sewed in sections to fix the strip in place, and added an extra tab of leather to cover each join.

Completed shield, wielded with a single-handed spear made using a broken two-handed spear shaft and a new head.

Meanwhile, Brother Aethelwine made his habit and hood.

Rumwoldstow garden gave us nettles, sorrel leaves and white beetroot for our evening pottage

The local hedgehog (a juvenile) came to visit. Despite being out in the day, it looked healthy and lively so we left it alone.

We saw it, or an indistinguishable hedgehog, on another day in the orchard – it got about!

Orchard fruits – the first decent yield from the “Shropshire Prune” damson tree, and the first apples of any kind, “Wyken Pippin”, from the trees planted in 2018. The apples are small! Bigger than crabapples but much smaller than a modern commercial variety.

July jungles

As you can tell from the photos, the garden at Rumwoldstow has got away from me. Where are the energetic nuns and monks when we need them eh? But the plus side is lots of flowers for bees and butterflies.

Al busy working on a spear shaft. Look at the elecampane!

Brother Aethelwine took a turn at digging but it was TOO HOT

The Wyken Pippin to the right has some apples growing for the first year ever, but the Uvedale St Germain pear (left) and Hambledon Deux Ans (middle) did not set fruit, despite having plenty of flowers.

Looking up towards damson, plum, medlar and cherry (left to right)

Alas, very little fruit on the medlar this year

Can you see the plum? In fact there are plenty more lurking in the undergrowth; the Rivers Early Prolific is starting to live up to its name.

The first ever plum from the Rivers Early Prolific! Small but tasty

Rachel’s rowan, self seeded from Kennington in Oxford, is just about keeping pace with the grass. Planted out this year.

I think the quince tree is in there somewhere? No fruit this year, in fact I didn’t see any flowers either. But the tree is growing.

Lots of habitat for white butterflies and small beasts generally

Looking back into Rumwoldstow from the orchard

Returning to the elecampane, it appears to be a plant with many medicinal uses and also an edible potherb known to the Celts and Romans. It was known as ‘elfwort’. The roots can be candied or used as a flavouring; they contain up to 44% inulin, a naturally occurring polysaccharide that humans do not digest well. The leaves are apparently bitter but edible, preferably cooked; I have not yet tried this! Medically, it appears to be extra good for lung function and coughs, which is of particular interest in these days of COVID-19. Of immediate benefit is the fact that the bees are all over it.

I put in the two elecampane plants last year, and this is the first year they have flowered. I had no idea how vast they would be!

Flood and well

April was a drought; May was a series of rainy days! The apples, pears, damsons and plum have all flowered. The pears seem to have lost almost all their fruit, perhaps due to the frost, but the apples run a bit later and are still in fairly full flower, and the frosts *seem* to be over, fingers crossed. At present there are damsons and plums growing – better than last year when I harvested exactly one damson! The quince and medlar have yet to flower. The orchard is super full of cow parsley and looks very pretty.

The orchard in the (finally) merry month of May

The cloister garden is a bit of a jungle, but I’ve started to weed out the central area and moved some things around. I originally planted three sorrels, trying to fill the space, but they are monsters and not pretty. So I’ve moved two great clumps into my regular garden and have put in their place some of the self-seeded cornflowers and viola tricolor that I weeded out. The madonna lilies are looking good, and I have hopes that the elecampane will flower this year (didn’t last year).

Yeah, the borage is not shown to be authentic, there’s no Anglo-Saxon word known for it. But it self seeded, the bees love it and it’s gorgeous!

I have planted some things in the “old Roman well”. Sadly only one of them (the veronica) is native but the blue flag iris is a generally European-looking thing, and the Saururus cernuus “Lizard’s tail” is one of the few plants in the shop that looked like it might cope with the situation and poke its head above the parapet in due course. Al put some scraps of pond liner on the base of the pond bucket, then concrete blocks on top, to allow the plant pots to be put in at a sensible (not too deep) level.

And we had flooding! In May! It looks different to the winter because the dock in in full growth, but there was plenty of depth for my trusty and beloved coracle. This time, I took my phone out with me, wrapped in a double layer of ziplock bags, and took some snaps from out on the water. Amazingly, I didn’t even get bitten by flies…

One day I will try to carry the Bootle-bumtrinket over the bridge and explore the far meadow…but not today.

Al waiting to steady the boat as I get out

Bonus apple seedlings

I spent the last week on pilgrimage to the North, staying in the Viking village at Murton Park. It was a wonderful escape from everyday life and was topped off by the discovery of apple seedlings sprouting in the area around the old apple tree behind the site of the recently-burned-down forge. I rescued a good number of them, and have added them to my apple tree stash. One seedling is a second-year survivor, which has been chopped off at some point but is sprouting well. Of the rest, four look pretty good, and three very feeble. The parent tree was badly damaged by the fire but is sprouting on one side.

In the round pot, a seedling from the tree-behind-the-forge that is in its second year. In the square pots, sundry new seedlings scavenged from the Village Brown (originating from the same tree)

On my return home, I found that one of my Braeburn pips has sprouted, which brings me back up to three after one of last year’s seedlings mysteriously died. The seed came from a pack of six apples that I bought in April from Morrisons, and unlike the first batch they are from the UK.

Braeburn pip newly planted with the root sprout in the ground.

Five Gala seedlings now split into individual pots

The wintry feel of April

After six months of rain over the winter, followed by a few days of blissful warm sunshine, we’ve returned to icy blasts of north wind and drought conditions. All the trees in the orchard are alive, except for the old (probably Victoria) plum which had to be removed last year because it had silverleaf fungus right down into the roots.

Last year, most of the trees lost their fruit due to May frosts. Will the current frosts be early enough that the trees won’t mind? Only the plum and damsons are really in flower yet.

Everything is pretty shaggy, or as we like to call it, “nature friendly” ahem

Left to right; Louise Bonne of Jersey Pear, Wyken Pippin apple, and Uvedale’s St Germain pear all getting ready to flower

The Hambledon Deux Ans apple tree is still tiny after having been munched by cows in 2018. But it’s now taller than its protective frame, at last, and fixing to flower.

In the frames, the Fairleigh damson foreground, preparing to flower properly for the first time, and the Portugal quince, coming into leaf but not flowering yet.

The old apple tree, which we’ve been pruning each year since the wall of leilandii was taken down and it’s now almost a proper fruit tree! And to the right, the new quince again.

In the protective fence, the native black polar tree is way taller than me now.

In the protective frames, left to right, Shropshire Prune damson, Rivers Early Prolific plum, Nottingham medlar and finally the cherry tree from Morrisons, planted by the previous owners. The damson and plum are starting to flower; the medlar is coming into leaf.

Spring cleaning in the garden

A sunny morning tempted me out to tidy up some of the mess that the garden became over the winter. Everything was very shaggy and overgrown, with dead flowerheads and lots of mess.

The northernmost bed was great for growing vegetables, and the authentic herbs which I planted in there too have taken up too much space. So I moved the tansy down into the main garden, in place of a marigold (annual).

To the right of the transplanted tansy you can see the madonna lillies, which I planted as bulbs late last year. They all came up but looked a bit feeble. I’m very pleased to see them looking so stout this year!

You can also see the garlic bulbs, again planted very late and the only one I dug up hadn’t grown much, so I left them all in place. I have no idea whether this will give me a harvest later in the year, but I’m told garlic helps to keep aphids off roses, and it’s a good authentic plant so I’m happy to let them do their thing. The sorrel is up already and I need to start harvesting it asap. I discovered last year just how big it gets when left to itself, and I think I should probably move at least one of the three sorrel plants to a bed in the main garden.

The iris Germanica are all doing well, as is the fennel

Everything looks much better now I’ve done some preliminary cutting back and weeding, but the ‘path’s are in desperate need of more weeding. The northern bed is ready to be raked over and have seeds planted, which is exciting!

Ninety apple seedlings

At current count, I have 90 little apple seedlings, including the three Braeburn pippins from last year, which may or may not have made it through the winter. The new seedlings are still very tiny; I have moved them outdoors so they can get more light and air than the kitchen windowsill can provide, but am putting them in the unheated greenhouse overnight. The weather isn’t frosty but they still might not like the unaccustomed chill. Yes, that means lots of to-ing and fro-ing with pots, twice a day! I think they are also not up to withstanding torrential rain yet, they need to get more developed.

Apples are dicotyledons, meaning two seed leaves. However several of the seedlings have three, meaning they are mutants I guess. I have no idea if this will correlate with apple quality, but will have to mark the tricots so that I can find out in due course.

So far they all look much the same, though perhaps the Gala are skinnier and taller.

Back row: two pots of Discovery. Middle row: Egremont Russett. Front row; a seed from the tree behind the forge at Murton Park (Yorkshire Museum of Farming).

Back two rows: apples from Scotland described as “cox like”. Middle row: one Gala at the left, then two pots of alleged Cox from Aynho at the right. Front row: Gala.

A second seed from the “Hauksby forge” tree has germinated, it is in solitary state in the kitchen as it has not yet started to grow above the ground. There are another dozen in a tub which may yet germinate. But otherwise, I’m done! This is the trees!

Saxon Loo Roll

We really couldn’t buy any other brand for the toilet at Rumwoldstow.

Russet, Cox and Discovery

The apple seeds are germinating like anything! I now have three or four boxes with five seeds each of the Gala apples, which have proved especially keen to get going. There are at least 10 more that need planting up – but every trip to the garden to put soil in pots is a bit of a big deal while it’s so cold! I’m managing to nip out and fill about two pots a day.

The Egremont Russets started to germinate a few days after being taken out of the fridge, so around 5th February, and I have got about 15 seeds in total germinated – pretty much all the ones I’d collected, which is an impressive rate. The Cox-like apples that I took from a doorstep in the nearby village of Aynho, and the Cox-like apples my friend Emma brought me from Scotland, are also sprouting and I have a couple of pots of those. The Discovery apples have also got going. Only the apples taken from the tree behind the forge at the Yorkshire Museum of Farming have yet to germinate. These are the ones that I was most doubtful of – the apples were picked very early in August, and the seeds at that time were soft and pale green. I kept the apples for a month or so and the last ones I ate had developed dark brown seeds. I still have hopes of them, after all they’ve only been out of the fridge for a week.

Apples are of course fully hardy, but it seems harsh to put them out right now with daytime temperatures around freezing, which is why they are lining up on the window sill for the time being.

The flooded meadow is now partly frozen over, thin ice that would not support a well-grown cat, but it’s quite dramatic when the sun is shining and the snow settling on the ice.

I don’t think the ice would be good for my coracle!

Quill

One of my historical re-enactment societies ran an online workshop on how to make and use a quill pen. With the help of kindly neighbours I scrounged up lovely white goose feathers for people, and had a go myself.

Freya showed us authentically made books, parchment, pen, penknife, ink and pigments, before guiding us in making our own pens. We also referred to this very useful online guide to making quill pens, with bonus cat.

The right-hand page is where I started, with huge letters, then I cut the nib finer.

I’m pretty chuffed with how I did! I had no real expectation of being able to make something usable on my first go, but by following Freya’s instructions carefully and taking my time, I made a genuine, functional pen and wrote some Anglo-Saxon texts. To practice writing, Freya provided a selection of quotes from the Old English poem known as Maxims II which I found curiously reminiscent of Hávamál in style.

Maxims II is a collection of statements about the world and how it works – from the social order to the weather, from the habits of different animals to the works of God. Probably written down in the mid 11 th century. It is found on two pages of the manuscript known as Cotton MS Tiberius B I (f.115r-v) and you can see it in magnificent high resolution here: http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/Viewer.aspx?ref=cotton_ms_tiberius_b_i_f112r

You can also find the transliterated OE text in a free ebook of the Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records from the University of Oxford Text Archive, which is where the transliterations here have been copied from: https://ota.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/repository/xmlui/handle/20.500.12024/3009

These are the maxims I tried to write:

ellen sceal on eorle . ecg sceal wið hell
me . hilde gebidan
Courage must be in the noble warrior, blade must be against helmet, be in battle.

draca sceal on hlæwe . frod, frætwum wlanc.
The dragon must be in the barrow, wise, magnificent (proud?) with treasures

wulf sceal on bearowe . earm anhaga.
the wolf must be in the forest, wretched loner,

tungol sceal on heofenum . beorhte scinan . swa him bebead meotud.
The star must be in heaven, (must) shine brightly, as God ordered it.

Is seo forðgesceaft . digol and dyrne . drihten ana wat
The shape of the future is obscure and hidden, the Lord only knows (it).

fyrd sceal ætsomne . tírfæstra getrum.
The army must stay together, a troop of glory-firm (men).

Writing with a quill is an extremely physical process, so it’s very easy to lose track of where you are in a word – or sentence. I also tried my hand at marginalia.