Thursday 14 November 2013

Tudor Times

This week has been one of immersion in all things Tudor.  It started with a visit to the Mary Rose Museum, which was brilliant, one of the best museums I have ever visited.  The crew's personal artefacts were astonishing, especially considering they were over 500 years old.  It was a bit odd though, that the curators had put the skull of, say, the master carpenter, in a display cabinet along with his tools and clothes.  They repeated this idea with some of the other tradespeople and it made a slightly spooky scene.  You get all involved in looking at the jacket and tool bag and contents thereof, and then have the skull to consider.  It didn't really work as a concept.  I think the human remains deserve a different treatment (or should even have been left on the seabed to continue their eternal rest in peace).  One chilling item was the trepanning instrument, for those sailors brave enough to complain of a migraine, or of fits.  I am not convinced drilling a hole in someone's skull would cure a migraine.

The Victory was good to visit too, but with all these things, you wonder whether repeated conservation and replacement of bits and pieces mean that the ship isn't actually the original any more.  I felt a bit confused and spent some time pondering the broom question (whether changing first the brush, then the handle of a broom counts as having the same broom).

The Weald and Downland Museum was full of Tudor delights, including staff in full authentic dress (much of which was similar to the Mary Rose crew).  The houses were being warmed with fires and one kitchen was handing out samples of Tudor cuisine.  It was so inspiring, that as I write this, there is potage on the stove, bubbling away.

Tudor toilets are drafty:

  but the toilet in the car park in Portsmouth was rather good in comparison:
Some of the views in the houses looked like Dutch interiors:
Also this week I have sat in a Harrier Jump Jet (I think that's what it was) and driven on an F1 simulator.  I am not sure what a Tudor person would make of those.


1 comment:

RETA said...

Very interesting! Thanks for writing it down for us!

RETA@ http://evenhaazer.blogspot.com