Corpus Christi was yesterday, by the Julian calendar.
I spent a gloriously warm and sunny day at St Andrew's: I wouldn't be surprised if it turns out to be the only visit where I feel warm enough just in shorts and T shirt all day.
The church was smellier than usual – I think the warm weather had made the bat and bird detritis a little more aromatic, shall we say. I spent time writing on the laptop, taking photographs of the traces of a sunken path leading from the front porch to (nowadays) nowhere, and then it was lunchtime. And I was lucky enough to have the luxury of a lunch invitation.
Kay, a long-standing Wood Dalling resident with her husband David, has been following this blog. Some days ago she made contact via email and not only provided some very interesting new information but offered to lend me a special Wood Dalling book that had been compiled for the millennium. She also made the thoughtful offer of a stop-off for a cup of tea when next visiting the church as "it always strikes very cold in there" – true enough, as a rule! Kay and David both graduated from Norwich School of Art and Design in the mid-seventies, and David is Head of Art at the local high school. I got to meet Kay when she visited slash07 last Saturday, and we arranged that I would go and have lunch with her when doing my Corpus Christi stint. How lovely – she made me very welcome and has lent me lots of interesting things that have joined my growing 'to read as soon as possible' pile. It's a new friendship, made through this project, that I very much hope will continue beyond it.
Back at the church, I took photographs of poppyheads until the batteries in both my cameras went flat, and rubbed all the brasses. There are eleven pre-Reformation ones, but I had to do some of them in two sections to fit them onto my A3 sheets! This was more time-consuming than it sounds: well, the first task was to brush the above-mentioned wildlife evidence off each one. Luckily, I had remembered to bring a brush and dustpan!
Making the rubbings was intended as a practical task, as I hope to ask an expert in reading semi-illegible Latin to decipher them. But I discovered that photographs actually show the writing more clearly, so I'll probably send some of those. The rubbings are rather beautiful in their own right, though, and I'm getting some ideas about using them.
During my tea-break outside in the sunshine, a pied wagtail – one of my favourite birds – started strutting his stuff around the tower, the gravestones and the sunken path. Grabbing my video camera, I followed him (or her; hard to tell!) and shot some footage on impulse. I'm not sure what, if anything, it will lead to – but you never know when a pixilated pied wagtail may come in useful!
This has been a very different experience from Rogationtide. For one thing, I was on my own, with minimal prior planning or expectations. Corpus Christi was a festival of prime importance to medieval people and I knew I should include it, but its ultimate purpose was to celebrate the miracle of transubstantiation – ordinary bread being, at the same time, the real body of Christ although no change appeared to have taken place – and I knew I would have to find a way through this for myself that recognised the wonder felt by the people, and the celebration they shared, but working laterally so that I would be exploring something that meant something to me personally. I had a selection of equipment and materials on hand, but it truly was a case of 'seeing what happened' and where my thoughts/emotions took me. What I came away with was a lot of source material, ideas for a couple of things I would like to go back to do in the next day or two, and mental activity that will take some time to assimilate and start working with.
The afternoon flew and the early evening was even sunnier with a lovely light playing in the big church windows (no stained glass here). It was time to pack everything up, checking the underside of everything to see that I wasn't taking home more than I'd bargained for. And that was Corpus Christi.
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