herstory

For some reason I’m always drawn back to the church of St Margaret the Queen in Buxted. I visit everytime I’m down here, it’s a lovely 3 mile walk along the River Uck and then up through View Wood. The church is 800 years old, it has amongst its many attractions a yew tree in the cemetery which predates the birth of Christ and the grave of Wordsworth’s brother. It’s at the two graves in this photo where I always pause for a while - twin sisters who died within a few months of each other in 1907 at the age of 80. Did they choose the inscriptions? Did the second twin just give up and die after her sister passed away? What was it like for their mother (remembered on the adjacent grave) to give birth to twins in 1827?

Since we went to see “The Favourite” last night, I’ve thought more about who gets to tell women’s stories. Even more since reading this morning about how discovering blue pigment in the teeth of a female skeleton means that it was not just men who painted and wrote back in the day. https://edition.cnn.com/2019/01/09/health/medieval-woman-ultramarine-teeth-study/index.html

And then there is Margaret the Queen - who knows what kind of woman she really was? Remembered today as pious and saintly....although a short biography of her in Buxted church says that in Scotland under her influence “the Celtic tradition was steadily eroded and was gradually squeezed out” which makes me feel very uncomfortable.

I was going to end today’s blip with a link to the song which accompanies the credits to The Favourite - sheer genius to set one of my favourite Elton ballads to harpsichord music - but instead it has to be the song which ends “Hamilton” - Eliza singing “Who Lives, Who Dies, who Tells Your Story” - https://youtu.be/_gnypiKNaJE