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March 2021 March 2021

loved it when he stood there with a cat filter on telling the judge he was there and chancel’s south wall. A third
he was not a cat. survival is the fine doorway
within the south porch, with its
Honey told me that the talk in their village was all about vaccinations. Who When
and where? What vaccine? It is the one thing they all have in common now. broad, point-topped trefoil
It’s all, my owner and her friends talk about on zoom. My owner went two days and carved plant design in the
ago. She went to Wareham Hospital and had the Biontec Pfizer jab and seemed spandrels. These three features
to meet half of Bere Regis down there. It was a village social! have, doubtless, over the
centuries, been removed,
I overheard her telling her zoom mates restored and replaced in new-
that she thought she had mislaid her built walls, but their shapes and
glasses in Tescos. She had taken them mouldings put them firmly
off, as they had steamed up with the back in the early 13th century,
mask, and then couldn’t find them. She high point of the Early English
searched the shopping, the bags, re- style.
traced her steps and was just getting a
bit panicky and spoke to the security Inside, the eye is caught at once by the lumpy, glinting turbulence of carved
guard, who very gently pointed out that wooden bench-ends: flowers and leaves, beads and bands, swirls and swathes
she was still wearing them on her head! and splaying inflorescences, some linenfold panels and, on the eastmost bench of
Going Ga Ga!! Some days you wake the north aisle, an inscription explaining ‘These seatys were made in the yere of
up and you don’t know what day of our Lord God MCCCCCXLVII. The tyme of Thomas Lylinton, vicar of this Cherche’.
the week it is. Weekdays, weekends all (The Roman numerals for the year 1547 would normally be MDXLVII). Lylinton, or
the same. The week for her is Lillington, had been a monk of Cerne Abbey, which had owned the Affpuddle
punctuated by TV programmes and estate since Saxon times. The abbot appointed him vicar in 1534, the year made
ominous by Henry VIII’s Act of Supremacy, whereby he created himself supreme
zoom sessions, for me its days out with
the Dog walker. head of the Church of England.
For several years the heads of the great rolled – Thomas More’s, Anne Boleyn’s,
The other night walking back home the Thomas Cromwell’s. Colour, incense, sound, idols, some furniture were excluded
street was full of people clapping and
cheering for the life of Captain Sir Tom from the church. Chancels, considered chambers of Romish hocus-pocus, were
Moore, our Covid hero, it was just like blocked off. The English bible and prayer book came in, frightening simple souls
last year when we clapped for the NHS. since Latin sounded to the rustic ear both inscrutable and just right. From 1539 the
He was a remarkable man. monasteries went, Cerne Abbey and about 3000 others, sold off to highest bidders
or useful favourites. Sir Oliver Laurence bought Affpuddle. But Lillington,
The News has been full of the impeachment of Donald Trump. Virus infections and remarkably, was still vicar in 1552, commissioning these carvings while the
deaths are falling and the debate is looking ahead to the end of Lockdown. A Reformation shook the land. He may have ordered the pulpit and its carvings too,
road map is being announced next week and it is hoped children will go back to though most of Dorset’s carved pulpits have come down from the early 17th
school in March. My owner has been making Marmalade with Blood Oranges. I century. (Not many pre-Reformation rural churches have pulpits at all. It was
have been for walks down the river walk and Affpuddle picnic area. We are Protestantism which made the sermon central to the service). The roundels on the
hoping we can meet up outside for walks but until then we have to just get on carved pulpit panels contain in four cases the symbols of the Evangelists, all given
with it. At least we are better off than most, there is always some one or wings, and in the fifth a pelican, revered for its supposed Christian virtue in giving
somewhere worse off. its own blood to restore its young to life. The human figures above, often wrongly
said to be the Evangelists, are a puzzle. One looks like a crowned king, three
I share a birthday with William Barnes so will celebrate my 12 Birthday next week
th
with him. I won’t get venison casserole, probably dog’s dinner like every other others half-monk half-clown, and the fifth a wild man, possibly John the Baptist.
day. The Laurence family may be assumed to have given the church its dedication to
St Laurence, a 3rd century Roman priest who, told to hand over his church’s
Jenny Stone
treasures, gathered the local poor and presented them. For this, naturally, he was

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