When we think about the importance of people in our lives, especially in our professional lives, it is easy to fall back on the quantifiable: lists of shared publications, projects edited, conferences organized and attended, and the many other formal moments of connection and recognition that punctuate the life and the CV of a working academic. But more so than career history, or publications, or awards won, or accolades collected, what really matters, and what one remembers, are experiences shared, ideas exchanged, opportunities enjoyed, places visited, and time spent. This is the vital matter that structures and strengthens the ties that bind in the intellectual life and reminds us that our field is not made up of journals and books, publications and conference papers, but of people in all their manifold glory and complexity. At the heart of my own story of connection, both professional and personal, lies Elizabeth Archibald, someone who I have been happy to call a friend, a colleague, a mentor, and an inspiration for more than twenty years. My task in this closing note of celebration is to give voice to the collective appreciation for, and debt to, Elizabeth that so many Arthurian scholars have. This story is just one of many such connections that place Elizabeth at the centre of English medieval studies, enmeshed in the unquantifiable yet vital connective tissue that brings forth new generations of medievalists of all stripes, knitting together the intergenerational and ever-renewing community that defines our field.

Bristol, half a lifetime ago

My own story of Elizabeth, which began in Bristol some twenty or so years ago, is just one in a sea of such stories. Over her career Elizabeth has helped guide entire generations of students in the universities at which she worked – in Victoria, Bristol, and Durham – and also in the field more broadly. The pastoral role of faculty in graduate school is one of those intangible qualities that adds so much to experiences and outcomes, and I hold myself extremely lucky to have been in the right place and at the right time to benefit.

In November 1609, the privy council responded to an unusual request: a petition to recognise Moses Faw and his family as ex-Gypsies. Six months previously, parliament had passed the ‘Act anent the Egiptians’, a law permanently banishing all Gypsies from the realm under pain of death. Petitioning the council, Faw praised the act as ‘worthelie set doun’ against the ‘infamous thevis’ who, ‘undir the counterfute name of Egiptianis’, had committed ‘sa mony villanyis in the cuntrey’. He suggested that the act was not intended to be used against ‘honnest, lauchfull, and trew personis’ such as himself, whose ‘birth, educatioun, and residence’ had been in Scotland, and who had withdrawn from the ‘infamous societie’ of Gypsies and disdained their ‘thevishe forme of doing’. Rather, Faw declared his wish to ‘spend the rest of his dayis’ in Scotland as ‘a quiet, modest, trew, and humble subject’. The council assented to the request, and granted a licence exempting Moses Faw and his family from the act.

Less than three years later, Moses Faw and three of his kinsmen – David, Robert, and John Faw – had been arrested, tried, and executed. They became the first individuals to be prosecuted under the ‘Act anent the Egiptians’ by a justiciary court, their crime that of being ‘known’ Gypsies. According to the privy council, Faw and other ‘counterfoote lymmaris callit the Egiptianis’ had found shelter in Selkirkshire, where they were suspected of committing robbery and other crimes, unchecked by local magistrates. Following his arrest, Moses Faw once again petitioned the council, arguing that he and his family were the only Gypsies licensed to live and travel in Scotland, and complaining that he had been apprehended at the instigation ‘of the Egiptianis that callis them selvis Bailzeis [Baillies]’. In fact, the king's advocate and privy council had been attempting to arrest Faw and his kinsmen for at least three months, and over the course of their trial in Edinburgh Moses Faw was found to have been ‘in companie and societie with the Egiptianis’, breaking the terms of his licence. All four men were sentenced to death by hanging.

The case of Moses Faw encapsulates the paradoxical position of Gypsies in Scotland under James VI. From 1573 onwards, they were subjected to a slew of repressive legislation and proclamations that sought to stigmatise and curtail their way of life, culminating in the 1609 ‘Act anent the Egiptians’.

This volume presents a collection of documents concerning the 1953 east coast sea floods, prepared by P.J.O. (John) Trist, who was employed by the National Agricultural Advisory Service (NAAS) of the Ministry of Agriculture (MAF) as county advisory officer (CAO) for East Suffolk from 1946 until his retirement in 1971. Following the 1953 sea floods, Trist planned and organised the recovery of agricultural land in East Suffolk. In June of that year, he was awarded officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in recognition of his ‘services during the recent floods in the Eastern Counties’.

In 1962 the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAFF) compiled an internal report on the effects of the 1953 sea floods on agriculture, prepared by a working party set up by the main advisory committee on sea flooded land. Written in two parts, the report first discusses the disaster: the impact on agricultural land, emergency measures, and government assistance for farming. The second part records the work undertaken to measure, monitor, and mitigate the effects of sea flooding and to restore land to productivity. The report (which was not in public circulation) is the only record for agriculture that covers all six counties that were significantly affected by the 1953 floods.

Trist was a prominent member of the working party responsible for that report. He wrote the first part and he collated national statistics for livestock and farm stock losses, and for acreages of flooded agricultural land. By way of introduction, he described the storm that disturbed the state of the sea and caused the unprecedented surge tide in 1953. He wrote that:

On the evening of Friday 30 January 1953 a fresh strong wind was blowing in the North but somewhat to the North East & rivermen saw to their moorings in the Deben. By 8 a.m. Saturday 31st the wind had swung to North West and was strong. It blew all day and afternoon, intensity increased in strong spasms, by dark there was a roaring gale which kept up its intensity. I went to a hide for pigeons – it had blown down I put it up & it blew on top of me! Gale persisted in increasing force all night with terrific gusts reaching a crescendo like a jet fighter hurtling to earth in a dive. Walls shuddered and window frame shook. High tide in the Deben between 12 – 1 a.m. – I slept. On morning of March 1st, I looked out of bedroom window & the river had approached over Novacastria to within 200 yards of our house. I could see the flood in the Pettistree Hall marsh. The roads were littered with branches. I went down to the river by the sandy lane to the side of the old harbour – debris was 6’ above normal high tide mark. At 11.30 a.m., with still 2 hours before the p.m. high tide about 1.40 p.m., the water was only 2’ below top of Wallers marsh wall with 6’ in the marsh (the tide eventually stayed in the river all day). Flood on marsh & on fields of Cross Farm & Parkers – this was the small local picture – on the beach, houses flooded & timber & boats of Nunn's yard all in a muddle.

Later the paperman arrived with news from Martlesham – it struck there at the bridge in the darkness of early morning. Flood over the road between the Lion & the cottages beyond the P.O. One began to imagine what might have happened up the coast – but I did not guess the magnitude of the disaster until more news came to me over the phone!

[new page]

(See new record on back of this page)

February 1st/2nd – The gale – see notes in green book.

Monday 2 February

Staff on survey & assessed 20,000 acres.

At Beccles NFU dinner at Lowestoft in the evening – the previous year whilst attending this dinner at this time I was called away to the fire at Fern Hill.

In late medieval Europe, preachers and healers repeatedly called upon Christ the Divine Physician, Christus medicus, to treat both body and soul. Sermons, medical texts, devotional works and healing charms used medical imagery associated with Christ's life to invoke his mission of preaching and healing as described in Matthew 9. 35: ‘Jesus went about all the cities and towns, teaching in their synagogues, preaching the gospel of the kingdom and healing every disease and infirmity.’ Yet the concept of an orator healing an audience, just as a physician cures a patient, was prominent before the birth of Christ in Hebrew traditions as well as in the ancient cult of Asclepius, which preceded and then co-existed with early Christianity. Several scholars have connected the Christian concept of the cura animarum, or care of the soul, to Hellenistic ‘psychagogy’, in which philosophers looked to cater to the intellectual, spiritual and moral growth of their audiences. The medieval Christus medicus tradition extended psychagogy to include the care of the soul in an eschatological framework under which the body and soul were contingent on states of illness and health, vices and virtues, sin and absolution.

St Augustine of Hippo (d. 430) is often cited as the most important progenitor and innovator of Christus medicus imagery, as he outlined a scheme of spiritual health based on medicine and the functioning of the body. His medical theology did not apply solely to the individual, but also to collective understandings of the Church and humanity. When the Church functioned as intended, it was akin to a body in a state of perfect health, but Augustine explained that the entire world, from the west to the east, was a giant patient that had been corrupted by sin:

THE BOYCE PAPERS, EDITED by Sue Bradbury and published by Boydell & Brewer in 2019, made accessible to students and scholars for the first time the letters and diaries of the Boyce family artists: Joanna Mary Boyce, George Price Boyce and Henry Tanworth Wells. These cover the period 1850 to 1861 in detail and have already provided the artists’ remarkable personal stories, retold in Sue Bradbury's Joanna, George and Henry: A Pre-Raphaelite Tale of Art, Love and Friendship. Interwoven with that drama, there is a wealth of material which sheds light on the artistic world of the time and on artistic methods and concerns from whether pigments ‘fly’ to the perpetual search for patrons or buyers. The protagonists’ diaries and letters illuminate both their work as painters and other roles they played within the art world. Joanna Boyce was an art critic; her forthright pieces on major French, British and international exhibitions appeared in the newly founded Saturday Review. George Boyce formed an extensive and important art collection, dispersed on his death in 1897.3 Henry Wells contributed to the running of the Royal Academy of Arts, most notably as Deputy President in 1895, during Frederick Leighton's absence due to illness.

THE BOYCE FAMILY ARTISTS AND THE ART SCENE OF THE 1840S TO 1860S

Joanna and George's father, George John Boyce was a successful businessman – a pawnbroker and wine merchant, though in later years he described himself as a silversmith. He provided his children with considerable financial means, a pleasant home in London – the family residence by the time of Joanna's birth being a villa in Maida Vale – and a high standard of education, in private boarding schools. He built up a wide circle of contacts in the cultural and artistic world and had liberal views, allowing his children to choose their own careers and positively encouraging their early interest in art. For instance, it was Joanna and George's father, ‘a man of a most kindly and affectionate disposition’, who took them sketching in Wales in 1849 and Joanna to view art in Paris in 1852.

At the same time that theologians in Central Europe were campaigning for frequent communion to heal the soul, Wycliffites in England were sceptical of the power of the Eucharist. Although John Wyclif was not connected to Jan Milič and his followers, he exploited the same grass roots approach to affective piety among the laity and his theology had a similarly profound impact on later proceedings at the councils of Constance and Basel. Wyclif stressed the ways in which the laity were healed through the pastoral duties of the preacher. Preaching was, for Wyclif, a penitential act in which Christ the ‘summus medicus’ cured the wounds of sin. Yet Wyclif argued that each member of the clergy resembled an incompetent surgeon who wounded (leserit) those he was entrusted to heal, harming congregations with tales ‘contra scripturam’ of no moral fortitude. Wyclif relays such a fictitious tale that he heard from a preacher:

Christus chirurgus, Christ the Divine Surgeon, performs open-heart surgery in this narrative, where the Eucharist enters the chest of the patient and cures his bodily illness. The emphasis the patient places on the fact that his infirmity is physical, accentuates that this was not a spiritual metaphor, but an act of surgery in which the host entered his body. Wyclif 's objection to the priest’s exemplum did not pertain to its medical component, but rather to its use for deception. The priest boasted, ‘the mouth fabricated that pretty little lie.’ Wyclif endorsed using an exemplum as a ‘preco vel ancilla’ [herald or handmaiden] to Scripture that encouraged devotion and helped congregations to digest God’s words, but he opposed the lie of the anecdote.

This study began with St Augustine's image of a giant patient lying across the entire world waiting for Christus medicus to attend to him. During the Great Western Schism, a time when multiple dissident movements emerged, the image must have seemed more fitting than ever. Not only did the Church have to deal with an unprecedented crisis at its head with multiple popes competing for control, but dissidents from England and Bohemia were threatening the principles on which the laity and lower clergy engaged with Scripture, preaching and the sacraments. By the time that the Council of Constance met, the disease and injuries caused to the body of the Church were especially overbearing for those that sought a resolution to the Schism. The invocations of the Divine Physician were intensified at this council and later at Basel, where Christ was invoked both to sever heretics and to return his body of the Church to health.

But the story did not begin with dissidence. Within hospitals for the sick poor, Mary the divine nurse was a model of care and protection for nuns and canonesses to emulate. Her portrayal in devotional texts encouraged new ways for the nurses to treat their patients’ physical and spiritual needs. At least, this was the ideal of those that campaigned for hospital reform. The reality was far less idyllic, as hospitals throughout Europe suffered from a lack of funding and chronic mismanagement. Some reforms resulted in the establishment of genuinely charitable institutions, but most hospitals remained run down and neglected. Still, the charitable mission of the nursing canonesses in Leicester was one example among many of an ideal attitude to hospital care and devotion. These nurses and the devotional texts written for hospital audiences were not intentionally seeking to align themselves with grass-roots religious movements or to open up new ways of engaging with religious practices in society more generally.