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David Crouch 🏳️‍🌈

@dbcrouch.bsky.social
263 followers 104 following 558 posts

Medieval social history. VCH Editor East Yorkshire. Academician. Cardiffian exile. Hwntw Falch. Cymro yn Sir Efrog.

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David Crouch 🏳️‍🌈 @dbcrouch.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
A bit of a rarity, the brick south porch of St Edmunds Routh (Yorks ER). Pevsner & Neave say medieval. Early brick work in Hull and region is known so it is possible. But the similar brick porch at Millington proved datable to 1637 from parish warden’s accounts
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David Crouch 🏳️‍🌈 @dbcrouch.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
Here's an oddity which is difficult to account for, but maybe the font enthusiasts of Bsky can. The rather plain 13th-14th century font of Bubwith church (ER Yorks) has carved on 3 of its octagonal faces FONS DE BUBVID in a medieval script (maybe 15th century)
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David Crouch 🏳️‍🌈 @dbcrouch.bsky.social · 15/08/2026
An archival disaster to be compared with the destruction of the Irish Public Record Office in the Four Courts of Dublin in 1922. Thankfully Torre and other antiquarian colleagues partly mitigated the disaster preserving much medieval material
St Mary's Tower, York
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David Crouch 🏳️‍🌈 @dbcrouch.bsky.social · 15/08/2026
Today I begin my not infrequent searches though Bodl Libr ms Top Yorks b 14, James Torre's notes on the fragmentary remains of the archive of monastic charters the Council of the North laudably stored in St Mary's Tower, which was then blown up by a mine on 16 June 1644
folio 215v compiled in Torre's economical 4 column format
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David Crouch 🏳️‍🌈 @dbcrouch.bsky.social · 24/07/2026
And the most bonkers part is Lord Beaumont Hotham’s pseudo cadaver tomb with Four Virtues bearing up the ledger stone. A Gothick fantasy
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David Crouch 🏳️‍🌈 @dbcrouch.bsky.social · 24/07/2026
The perfectly bonkers estate church Lord Hotham built at South Dalton in and after 1861. A pocket cathedral to serve a village of around 400 souls
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David Crouch 🏳️‍🌈 @dbcrouch.bsky.social · 15/07/2026
Unsolicited blanket postal drop from local Tories. Sort of sad really. Beverley and Holderness stayed Tory (just) in 2024, and panic is clearly in the air. But the local branch has clearly not got the Kemi line (there is no climate change and the ECHR is a danger to our way of life).
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David Crouch 🏳️‍🌈 @dbcrouch.bsky.social · 23/06/2026
Here’s something unexpected. Cadw reckons the stone wall surrounding the old clas site of St Gybi above Holyhead is 4th century, the former circuit of a Saxon shore fort. Probably not the door, though. Glad I stayed the night
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David Crouch 🏳️‍🌈 @dbcrouch.bsky.social · 23/06/2026
Somehow it was a thing when I was a boy in Cardiff that we all had to be able to recite this piece of Victorian whimsy
Orsaf yn sîr Mon gyda enw ddoniol
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David Crouch 🏳️‍🌈 @dbcrouch.bsky.social · 05/06/2026
But there is a problem. The resurrected in 12th-century imagery are depicted as sexless, but the single naked figure has a penis. In fact its imagery echoes contemporary vision narratives of Purgatory or Hell with the naked male figure to one side occupying the place of the dreamer. 4/5
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David Crouch 🏳️‍🌈 @dbcrouch.bsky.social · 05/06/2026
Its eccentric imagery included an outer hood mould of tormented faces, crested by a keystone of a double horn, and on the southern end, a naked recumbent human figure. The inevitable temptation was therefore to conclude it depicted the General Resurrection and Last Judgement. 3/5
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David Crouch 🏳️‍🌈 @dbcrouch.bsky.social · 05/06/2026
The tower arch is an elaborately-carved mid 12th-century Romanesque creation of several orders, opening now into an early 20th-century tower space. It was once suggested that it was the original chancel arch (a suggestion rightly mocked by Pevsner). Excavation had revealed a 12th-century W. tower
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David Crouch 🏳️‍🌈 @dbcrouch.bsky.social · 05/06/2026
The church of St James, Nunburnholme (East Riding) may look a bit on the ordinary side but it houses several symbolic mysteries, such as the imagery of its famous Anglo-Scandinavian cross pillar. But VCH East Riding Vol XI (in press) had to deal with another, its eccentric tower arch. 1/5
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David Crouch 🏳️‍🌈 @dbcrouch.bsky.social · 29/05/2026
This is the wonderful and little-known chapel at Harswell, a DMV in the East Riding, sometime manorial chapel of the Silvain family, built within the surviving banks and ditches of the manorial precinct. Rebuilt 1871 using original materials. Still has an incumbent!
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David Crouch 🏳️‍🌈 @dbcrouch.bsky.social · 22/05/2026
The Metham cartulary I discovered and edited for YAHS Record series included a large number of otherwise unknown early Nun Monkton deeds
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David Crouch 🏳️‍🌈 @dbcrouch.bsky.social · 16/05/2026
Lovely sight. A pair of swans and a healthy brood of 5 cygnets, on the Barmston Drain south of Beverley Pastures
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David Crouch 🏳️‍🌈 @dbcrouch.bsky.social · 15/05/2026
Cartularies are for various reasons one of my enthusiasms. I must have read every English, Irish and Northern French example, and found one from the 15th century that had been lost. But the oddest of a very odd MS genre is right on my doorstep, the so-called Constable family cartulary.
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David Crouch 🏳️‍🌈 @dbcrouch.bsky.social · 27/03/2026
Yorkshire has a few such overcooked Romanesque restorations. St Helen Kilnwick Percy (1864) by the Atkinsons is just as sumptuous.
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David Crouch 🏳️‍🌈 @dbcrouch.bsky.social · 03/03/2026
A familiar sigh for drivers heading south down the A614 towards Howden and the M62. All Saints Church on its hill above Holme-on-Spalding Moor. VCH has now commenced work on the beacon district to which it gives its name. The hill we've found had a medieval name, 'Arnesnest' (the eagle's nest) .
The Arnesnest hill above Holme-on-Spalding Moor, which dominated the wetlands of the Foulness valley around it, and maybe was once the stalking ground of hunting eagles.  Image/INNES/2017
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David Crouch 🏳️‍🌈 @dbcrouch.bsky.social · 10/01/2026
Nice picture, and good to see. Recent work has established that the chapel was founded as a chantry early in the 13th century by a bailiff of Howden town. What remains is the medieval chancel. There is a rare damaged photo of the chapel as it was before part demolition in 1876.
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David Crouch 🏳️‍🌈 @dbcrouch.bsky.social · 18/09/2025
On Thursday, the remarkable north porch door of Kilnwick Percy church. The dilapidated church was reconstructed in an elaborate neo-Romanesque style in 1864–5 to designs by J.B. & W. Atkinson for Arthur Duncombe, and this door was shifted from the south side to the new north porch facing the Hall.
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David Crouch 🏳️‍🌈 @dbcrouch.bsky.social · 07/09/2025
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David Crouch 🏳️‍🌈 @dbcrouch.bsky.social · 07/09/2025
Not great but here are a couple of pics of the chancel arch against which it's been parked since the beginning of the 20th century (I think)
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David Crouch 🏳️‍🌈 @dbcrouch.bsky.social · 11/08/2025
Coming out this week, Lindy Grant's definitive revisionist biography of a Queen all too often obscured by literary and cultural myth.
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David Crouch 🏳️‍🌈 @dbcrouch.bsky.social · 28/03/2025
The Treasurer also had a fine moated Manor House at Bishop Wilton, next to the church of St Edith. It was quadrangular set in gardens. Only two arms of the moat now survives
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David Crouch 🏳️‍🌈 @dbcrouch.bsky.social · 10/03/2025
St Peter’s church Woodmansey. Pass it most days and this weekend the door was open. Neat little church of around 1896 built by the local manorial lord. The font’s the surprise. Genuinely 14thC. Pevsner says ‘where is it from?’. Good question Sir Nikolas
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David Crouch 🏳️‍🌈 @dbcrouch.bsky.social · 19/02/2025
Takes me back ...
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David Crouch 🏳️‍🌈 @dbcrouch.bsky.social · 19/01/2025
One result of Methodism's great age in 19th-century Yorkshire was the number of Wesleyan schools founded in its towns. Methodist children could thus escape the compulsory catechism and church attendance enforced by Anglican National Society Schools. This is the Pocklington Wesleyan School (1852)
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David Crouch 🏳️‍🌈 @dbcrouch.bsky.social · 17/01/2025
Graham Loud's new biography of Frederick is published on 1 February by Reaktion, and at the bargain price of £16.95. It's designed as an accessible teaching book rather than an academic 'door-stopper' as he puts it, which sets it apart from previous volumes. reaktionbooks.co.uk/work/frederi...
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David Crouch 🏳️‍🌈 @dbcrouch.bsky.social · 17/01/2025
I do love seals. This is Earl William's great seal, one of only two impressions (Wiltshire & Swindon HC, 9/15/6), now he too apologised for the 'wrong' seal on a letter (to Henry III) which he got his cousin and seneschal to seal *quoniam sigillum meum mecum non habui* (TNA, SC1/4/67)
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David Crouch 🏳️‍🌈 @dbcrouch.bsky.social · 28/12/2024
But does that mean that John had been born in Gillingham? Not really likely. In 1167-8 Queen Eleanor was in England, and resident from Michaelmas onwards in Winchester, while her husband was in Normandy. A designated wet nurse some fifty miles away makes the city the likely birth site. 7/9
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David Crouch 🏳️‍🌈 @dbcrouch.bsky.social · 28/12/2024
However that's the wrong Christmas. Now a 1212 inquest reports a certain William Baillebien held land at the gift of King John’s father ‘because he tended him [John] in his cradle’. Baillebien was keeper of Gillingham in Dorset and its forest, what ,ight this indicate about the birth? 5/9
St Mary's church at Gillingham Dorset, a royal manor and hunting lodge
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David Crouch 🏳️‍🌈 @dbcrouch.bsky.social · 28/12/2024
If we believe the passing comment of a canon of Laon in NW France that John was born ‘around the feast of St John’ and was given the name of the saint and evangelist as his quasi-godparent, then he was born around the 27 December, though that might have been his baptismal date not his birth. 3/9
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David Crouch 🏳️‍🌈 @dbcrouch.bsky.social · 28/12/2024
But one other source, John’s own clerk, Gerald of Wales, tells us that when he arrived in Ireland in April 1185 John was 17 years old. That would indicate 1167 is the correct date, and it would also match his known knighting in 1166, for which the customary age was 16. 2/9
The knightng of Edward the Black Prince, a more iconic knight than John, his great great grandfather
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David Crouch 🏳️‍🌈 @dbcrouch.bsky.social · 28/12/2024
When and where was King John born? When is more easy to say than where. The year was either 1166 or 1167, according to which Angevin historian you read. Ralph Diceto, Dean of London, said baldly it was 1166, but one copy of the work of the annalist Robert de Torigny, listed it under 1167. 1/9
Pierpont Morgan Libr M 75 fo 491
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David Crouch 🏳️‍🌈 @dbcrouch.bsky.social · 19/12/2024
How my city has changed in my absence. The old Customs House a footstool for a hotel chain. All in all though I don’t dislike the new streetscapes. And the preservation of the old shopping arcades is praiseworthy. Caerdydd am byth.
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David Crouch 🏳️‍🌈 @dbcrouch.bsky.social · 17/12/2024
Heading west up the Humber for London and Wales, and thinking about Roger of Howden’s 1194 voyage down the same stretch of water to pick up his transport for Marseille to seek out King Richard. He was carrying a small barrel of silver as a bribe. Me, just carrying Xmas presents for family
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David Crouch 🏳️‍🌈 @dbcrouch.bsky.social · 13/12/2024
Nancy. The Place Royale or Place Stanislas. Amazing city, like one giant Bridgerton set. That day there was a noisy anti-Front Nationale demo. The police were out in force.
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David Crouch 🏳️‍🌈 @dbcrouch.bsky.social · 04/12/2024
A wonderful piece of Yorkshire eccentricity at Beverley Beck lock. Its owner (and builder) tells me it has kitchen bedroom and shower below. Sadly, it does not submerge, which disappoints a lot of local kids.
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David Crouch 🏳️‍🌈 @dbcrouch.bsky.social · 02/12/2024
Aw, stuff modesty. Available from YAHS..
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David Crouch 🏳️‍🌈 @dbcrouch.bsky.social · 22/11/2024
A puzzle at Howden Minster This limestone structure up against the SE pier of the crossing long puzzled ecclesiologists. The heraldic decor is 14thC, so the period at least is clear. An altar? But it faces diagonally into the transept and has no incised crosses.
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David Crouch 🏳️‍🌈 @dbcrouch.bsky.social · 20/11/2024
The « Swallow’s Nest » organ at Metz cathedral (1529), meant to support the sung daily office in collegiate churches. Large English parish churches had something similar, though few if any survive other than in random documentary references
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David Crouch 🏳️‍🌈 @dbcrouch.bsky.social · 18/11/2024
The old bread shelf in St Anne’s Church in Dublin, a rare example of a surviving dole cabinet. The displayed loaves are now dummies, of wood.
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David Crouch 🏳️‍🌈 @dbcrouch.bsky.social · 15/11/2024
The world turns Martinmas at Beverley. The horse herd taken off medieval Figham Common to go into barns till their return at Ellenmas. Will miss them. A rhythm uninterrupted since the 14th century
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David Crouch 🏳️‍🌈 @dbcrouch.bsky.social · 10/11/2024
Sixty years after first crossing the River Ogmore by these stones, I tried it with septuagenarian vintage balance. Those jeans will never be the same. There is in fact a bridge only 400m north. Recommended.
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David Crouch 🏳️‍🌈 @dbcrouch.bsky.social · 10/11/2024
The amazing 14thC pulpit at St John Baptist Newton Nottage. The imagery of a Flagellation is not I hope a sarcastic comment directed by the parish at its preaching minister
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