The Tale of the Tailor and the Three Dead Kings

BY DAN JONES (PUBLISHED BY HEAD OF ZEUS 2021)

I’vealways had quite a lively sense of things at Byland Abbey since, during my studies in Rome, I discovered an entry in the college guestbook by a monk of Byland of the 1490s.

But the eyes of my Year 8 Latin set were like soup plates when I read them this adapted short story (it takes exactly the 50 minutes of one lesson to read out loud) taken from a collection of medieval tales of late fourteenth and early fifteenth century Byland Abbey. Firstly, they were delighted to discover that monks had written ghost stories into the blank pages of their own Latin textbooks some 600 years ago. And then, whilst one or two boys and girls could make sense of the Byland reference - their noses pressed to the windows of their coaches along the Byland/Wass road back from sports fixtures – they were all stunned into rapt silence when I began to read to them:

De mirabili certatione inter spiritum et viuentem in tempore regis Ricardi secundi. Dicitur quod quidam scissor cognomine Snawball (sic) equitando remeauit ad domum suam in ampilforth quadam nocte de Gillyng…

One year, a few winters back, in those dark days before King Richard II, (d.1400) was put from the throne and starved in his cell till he died, Snowball (protagonist) the tailor was riding home on the road from Gilling to Ampleforth. [trans. & retold by Dan Jones 2020]

Latinists amongst the readership will spot straight away the retelling. But I don’t know that it’s lost much at all in the adaptation. This is a great story and, like so many, has grown in the telling. Whilst Danish sounding builders perched in the scaffolding on York Minster don’t quite find a home in the Latin original or possibly a home in the imaginations of our history starved young, nevertheless, Ampilforth, Gillyng, Pikering, Eborum (York), Hogge Beck, are thrilling enough local references. Fat, thin, warty and money grabbing priests were a vivid delight to Year 8, and familiar (to the boys and girls) religious references mixed in with magic spells and conjuring up ghoulish creatures of the night seemed only to confirm my students’ suspicions of what monks really get up to off-timetable.

Dan Jones introduces the text and his re-telling:

“Most of the stories have an explicitly Christian flavour, with lost souls helped to pass through the afterlife after atoning for some earthly sin… What is clear, though, is that the stories are closer to reportage than polished homilies: they are folk tales, circulated by the ordinary people who live around Byland Abbey…

“Most of the stories are short, often just a few lines long. Without exception, they are weird. But one of them, the Snowball story, which is the second recorded and the longest by far, is a late-medieval humdinger.” (Introduction)

“Most of the stories are short, often just a few lines long. Without exception, they are weird. But one of them, the Snowball story, which is the second recorded and the longest by far, is a late-medieval humdinger.” (Introduction)

I won’t say more to spoil the surprise, but I think alongside every Amplefordian’s bookshelf copy of the Holy Rule, should sit a copy of The Tale of the Tailor and the Three Dead Kings.

I won’t say more to spoil the surprise, but I think alongside every Amplefordian’s bookshelf copy of the Holy Rule, should sit a copy of The Tale of the Tailor and the Three Dead Kings.

Ambrose Henley OSB Nov 2022

Ambrose Henley OSB Nov 2022

The opening lines of manuscript (Ampleforth and Gilling underlined in red):

The opening lines of manuscript (Ampleforth and Gilling underlined in red):

Review by Major-General Sir Sebastian John Lechmere Roberts, KCVO, OBE (J72) of The Making of the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985, A Memoir by David Goodall (W50). Edited by Frank Sheridan.

Published in 2021 by the National University of Ireland

REVIEW BY MAJOR-GENERAL SIR SEBASTIAN JOHN LECHMERE ROBERTS, KCVO, OBE (J72) OF

Goodall (W50)

EDITED BY FRANK SHERIDAN

PUBLISHED IN 2021 BY THE NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF IRELAND

“The great Gaels of Ireland Are the men that God made mad, For all their wars are merry, And all their songs are sad.”

Tomany who have taken part in the quest for peace in Ireland down the years, GK Chesterton’s quatrain has a certain ring of truth: even between the closest neighbours in an era of globalisation, there is still a profound mismatch between Anglo and Irish perspectives on history (and indeed life itself), which goes some way to explaining the misunderstandings that have bedevilled that quest. In common with the rest of the Roman world, the English have their imperial conquerors (and the missionaries and monks who followed them) to thank for a long-established rational and logical approach to life that dominates their public dealings. For the Gaels of Ireland, almost alone in western Europe, history and life remained much more the province of poetry and song and blood.

Hot blood and cold logic is not a formula for easy agreement.

Early in David Goodall’s fascinating Memoir of the Making of the Anglo-Irish Agreement (finely edited by Frank Sheridan and published by the National University of Ireland) he acknowledges that there was a fundamental difference between the Irish and British (English?) approaches from the very start of the negotiations, when the Irish Ambassador in London floated the idea of agreeing first a set of principles as the framework for determining the practical measures required to achieve their joint objectives. Goodall records that this held no attraction whatever for Mrs Thatcher or any others on the British side, who all believed that such an abstract approach would be a waste of effort: they wanted to concentrate on concrete measures. It is striking that by the end of the negotiation, when he summarised the Agreement in a minute to Anthony Acland, his boss at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, what he and his interlocutors had so assiduously achieved was indeed a framework for reconciliation, not a set of actual measures.

In a world accustomed to measuring everything, in which Management Agreements define relationships and Key Performance Indicators mark them, this is a timely reminder that making peace is never a matter of the instant gratification people have come to expect in lives lived so much on-line. It is telling that when he first wrote down this memoir, at Ampleforth between 1992 and 1998, Goodall concluded that he did not want then to assess its significance with the benefit of hindsight. He recorded instead what he thought at the time, contained in a minute to Antony Acland, then Permanent Under-Secretary at the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office on 9 December 1985:

“As both governments have emphasised, the Agreement is not a solution to the Irish problem: it is intended to create a framework within which, once the dust has settled, both communities in Northern Ireland can feel secure and reconciliation between them may become possible. Judged objectively, it neither blocks Irish unification nor represents a step down the “slippery slope” towards it: but adjusts the Anglo-Irish geometry so as to take some account of the uniqueness of the relationship between the two parts of the island of Ireland and between both parts of Ireland and Britain. In the Secretary of State’s (Geoffrey Howe’s) phrase, that is probably as much as can be done “for this generation”. ”

Years later, in 2010, in an article published in the Dublin Review of Books, Goodall did allow himself the benefit of hindsight:

“The anger and resentment of the unionist community was understandable, if mistaken; and the fierceness of their reaction blunted any positive impact the Agreement might have had in the short term on inter-community relations. But the fact that it was concluded solely between the two governments, and that none of the political parties was a party to it, turned out to be its strength. The Sunningdale Agreement had collapsed mainly because it depended on the unionists’ willingness to operate it, and the unionist leaders had walked away from it under pressure from their own people. The 1985 Agreement could only have collapsed if one or other government had walked away from it, and neither of them did. As a result, it remained in force long enough to change the political chemistry in the North and oblige all the political parties – even in the end Sinn Fein –reluctantly and privately to realise that it would not go away unless and until they could jointly agree on a mutually acceptable alternative.”

The significance of time and the engagement of governments, and not political parties, are both lessons of enormous importance: to give voice to every political party ensures little but delay and dilution (and to admit some and not others invites worse); and though giving time (time for reflection, for argument, for understanding) takes time, it is essential for the dialectic (thesis, antithesis, synthesis) of agreement. And changing hearts does takes generations, even after shattering defeats. It takes change in the broader circumstances too, and here it is noteworthy that the wider context lies beyond not only David Goodall’s purpose in his memoir, but is also left outside the scope of the other illuminating essays which complete the book. Only Michael Lillis, Goodall’s principal Irish interlocutor, touches (elegantly but very lightly) on the fundamental importance of wider events in the commentary he co-authored with Goodall, “Edging Towards Peace”. In it he quotes the French historian Pierre Joannon (Histoire de l’Irelande et des Irlandais” (Paris, 2006)), himself quoting James Joyce: “ce que je veux faire par mes écrits, c’est européaniser l’Irlande et irlandiser l’Europe” Lillis praises Joannon’s “continental European perspective which persistently broadens the context of Irish history beyond the cauldron of Anglo-Irish claustrophobia”.

War is raging in Ukraine as I write. The world cries out for peace, and negotiators try desperately to make it, with a speed unknown in earlier times, hastened by means of communication that enflame as much as douse. Demands that “something must be done” are more widespread, strident and urgent than ever before; David Goodall’s memoir of assiduous peacemaking is a timely reminder that making and sustaining peace is a never-ending duty of mankind, demanding the unceasing efforts of people of goodwill, and the acceptance that it requires giving as well as taking. It also depends on negotiators who have the humanity, skill and forbearance – and time - that governments and electorates almost inevitably lack. For belligerents at war, compromise may seem unthinkable; but to make peace it is essential, for it depends on all parties having what in War and Peace Tolstoy called a golden bridge: a way to a future of hope and self-respect. As Goodall himself put it in his 2010 essay “An Agreement worth remembering”, republished in this volume alongside Michael Lillis’s:

“Looking back on the negotiations at a distance of nearly twenty-five years, I am struck by how important a part was played in producing a positive result, first by mutual trust between the negotiators and then by the two governments sticking to what had been agreed, even though neither was satisfied with it. As it happened, shortly after the Agreement was signed, I was posted to India, where I found that the long-running dispute with Pakistan over Kashmir had striking similarities with the Northern Ireland problem. Both disputes had deep historical roots and arose from the partition of a territory (the island of Ireland and the Indian sub-continent) which was previously under a single jurisdiction. Both sets of troubles arose from antipathy between two communities who defined themselves by their religious allegiance (in Kashmir, Hindu and Muslim). Both involved one of those communities (the Muslims in Kashmir) being left on the side of the border with which they did not identify in religious and cultural terms, separated from those with whom they did; and in both cases the country across the border effectively laid claim to the territory concerned.

Given these similarities, the Kashmir dispute seemed to cry out for a peaceful settlement on lines similar to those adumbrated in the 1985 Hillsborough Agreement and filled out in the Good Friday Agreement of 1998. I found many people in both India and Pakistan interested in such a possibility and keen to understand how it was being realised in negotiations between Dublin and London. But what was missing, and is sadly still missing in the sub-continent, were the key ingredients of mutual trust, together with stable governments on either side willing – and able – to ride out the ensuing turbulence. The 1985 Agreement and its successors exemplify the fact that Britain and Ireland in recent years have been fortunate in both respects.”

David Goodall’s own achievement, as well as the truth of his words, is tellingly summarised by the principal architect of the subsequent Good Friday Agreement, Jonathan Powell:

“Talking is not an easy option and it often doesn’t succeed the first time. Martti Ahtisaari says of his negotiations on Aceh, ‘There had been time to think through earlier failures. History matters and time itself is important for weighing up options and opportunities.’ The eventual success of the Good Friday Agreement was built on the failures of the Sunningdale Agreement of 1973, of Margaret Thatcher’s Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985, and of John Major’s 1993 Downing Street Declaration. Seamus Mallon, the leader of the moderate Catholic SDLP, described the Good Friday Agreement as ‘Sunningdale for slow learners’ because it contained many of the same provisions on power-sharing as had the Sunningdale Agreement twenty-five years earlier; but his joke misses the point that successful peace agreements are built gradually on the back of previous failed efforts.” (Jonathan Powell, “Talking to Terrorists – How to end armed conflicts” Bodley Head 2014).

We must all remember this – and pray for negotiators like David Goodall.

Sebastian Roberts died 9th March, 2023, aged 68. May he rest in peace.

REVIEW BY BERNARD BUNTING (E76) OF