A Bicycle Is a Time Machine

If you are a real historian, you may have heard of Odo of Bayeux. I certainly never have until this evening. The unerring canon that is Wikipedia says he is "likely" the man who commissioned the tapestry. Certainly he was the half-brother of William of Normandy, and became William's administrator of his new colony, and Earl of Kent. Eventually they clashed and he was imprisoned but, for a while, he was a power in the land

I started cycling around our area during the Covid lockdowns, as an aid to maintaining my mental health. I remember thinking that the deserted roads and quiet villages in the mixed farming lands of South Warwickshire felt like the 1950s might have been (I'm not quite old enough to remember!) Today's route took me even further back. The broken road that brought me to this point crossed open grazing land with few hedges - it was easy to see it as pre-Enclosure common ground. This picture combines classic parkland pasture under mature trees with a view of the parish church and manor house. How many centuries are we winding back? Three? Four? Five? 

I was slightly disappointed to find that the church is a mid-19th century replacement of the original 13th century building. The manor house is slightly older, but still in the same century. So the buildings may be relatively recent, but the atmosphere is thick with mediaeval ghosts. The patina of modernity over the landscape feels thin and fragile

Odo, of course, is much further back, but all this was once his too. Domesday book records that it had been the property of one 'Leofgeat'. His fate
Is not recorded, but the records state that his lands "passed to" Odo. What a coy phrase to smooth over enforced, colonial dispossession. I doubt that he ever came here. Odo eventually died of natural causes on his way to 'holy' war with Islamic people in Palestine; he is buried in Palermo, on Sicily. Over nine centuries of history seem very lightly buried