North East England Quotes

You see, because [Norfolk is] stuck out here on the east, on this hump jutting into the sea, it's not on the way to anywhere. People going north and south, they bypass it altogether. For that reason, it's a peaceful corner of England, rather nice. But it's also something of a lost corner.' Someone claimed after the lesson that Miss Emily had said Norfolk was England's 'lost corner' because that was were all the lost property found in the country ended up. Ruth said one evening, looking out at the sunset, that 'when we lost something precious, and we'd looked and looked and still couldn't find it, then we didn't have to be completely heartbroken. We still had that last bit of comfort, thinking one day, when we were grown up, and we were free to travel the country, we could always go and find it again in Norfolk.

The point is, there was a gap in Miss Emily's calendar collection: none of them had a single picture of Norfolk. I'd always wonder each lesson if this time she'd found a picture, but it was always the same. She'd wave her pointer over the map and say, as a sort of afterthought: 'And over here, we've got Norfolk. Very nice there.' Then, that particular time, I remember how she paused and drifted off into thought. Eventually she came out of her dream and tapped the map again. 'You see, because it's stuck out here on the east, on this hump jutting into the sea, it's not on the way to anywhere. People going north and south, they bypass it altogether. For that reason, it's a peaceful corner of England, rather nice. But it's also something of a lost corner.' Someone claimed after the lesson that Miss Emily had said Norfolk was England's 'lost corner' because that was were all the lost property found in the country ended up. Ruth said one evening, looking out at the sunset, that 'when we lost something precious, and we'd looked and looked and still couldn't find it, then we didn't have to be completely heartbroken. We still had that last bit of comfort, thinking one day, when we were grown up, and we were free to travel the country, we could always go and find it again in Norfolk.

In some parts of North-east England, a man would rather kill himself overtaking on a blind bend at seventy miles an hour than drive a hundred yards behind a woman.

Do not laugh! But once upon a time (my crest has long since fallen) I had a mind to make a body of more or less connected legend, ranging from the large and cosmogonic, to the level of romantic fairy-story – the larger founded on the lesser in contact with the earth, the lesser drawing splendour from the vast backcloths – which I could dedicate simply to: to England; to my country. It should possess the tone and quality that I desired, somewhat cool and clear, be redolent of our ‘air’ (the clime and soil of the North West, meaning Britain and the hither parts of Europe: not Italy or the Aegean, still less the East), and, while possessing (if I could achieve it) the fair elusive beauty that some call Celtic (though it is rarely found in genuine ancient Celtic things), it should be ‘high’, purged of the gross, and fit for the more adult mind of a land long now steeped in poetry. I would draw some of the great tales in fullness, and leave many only placed in the scheme, and sketched. The cycles should be linked to a majestic whole, and yet leave scope for other minds and hands, wielding paint and music and drama. Absurd. Of course, such an overweening purpose did not develop all at once. The mere stories were the thing. They arose in my mind as ‘given’ things, and as they came, separately, so too the links grew. An absorbing, though continually interrupted labour (especially since, even apart from the necessities of life, the mind would wing to the other pole and spend itself on the linguistics): yet always I had the sense of recording what was already ‘there’, somewhere: not of ‘inventing’. Of course, I made up and even wrote lots of other things (especially for my children). Some escaped from the grasp of this branching acquisitive theme, being ultimately and radically unrelated: Leaf by Niggle and Farmer Giles, for instance, the only two that have been printed. The Hobbit, which has much more essential life in it, was quite independently conceived: I did not know as I began it that it belonged. But it proved to be the discovery of the completion of the whole, its mode of descent to earth, and merging into ‘history’. As the high Legends of the beginning are supposed to look at things through Elvish minds, so the middle tale of the Hobbit takes a virtually human point of view – and the last tale blends them.

You see, because it’s stuck out here on the east, on this hump jutting into the sea, it’s not on the way to anywhere. People going north and south’ – she moved the pointer up and down – ‘they bypass it altogether. For that reason, it’s a peaceful corner of England, rather nice. But it’s also something of a lost corner.

The sky was clear - remarkably clear - and the twinkling of all the stars seemed to be but throbs of one body, timed by a common pulse. The North Star was directly in the winds eye, and since evening the Bear had swung round it outwardly to the east, till he was now at a right angle with the meridian. A difference of colour in the stars - oftener read of than seen in England - was really perceptible here. The sovereign brilliancy of Sirius pierced the eye with a steely glitter, the star called Capella was yellow, Aldebaran and Betelgueux shone with a fiery red.

Crossing my arms over my chest, I said, a little too heartily, “So this is the library.” There certainly couldn’t be any doubt on that score; never had a room so resembled popular preconception. The walls were paneled in rich, dark wood, although the finish had worn off the edges in spots, where books had scraped against the wood in passing one too many times. A whimsical iron staircase curved to the balcony, the steps narrowing into pie-shaped wedges that promised a broken neck to the unwary. I tilted my head back, dizzied by the sheer number of books, row upon row, more than the most devoted bibliophile could hope to consume in a lifetime of reading. In one corner, a pile of crumbling paperbacks—James Bond, I noticed, squinting sideways, in splashy seventies covers—struck a slightly incongruous note. I spotted a moldering pile of Country Life cheek by jowl with a complete set of Trevelyan’s History of England in the original Victorian bindings. The air was rich with the smell of decaying paper and old leather bindings. Downstairs, where I stood with Colin, the shelves made way for four tall windows, two to the east and two to the north, all hung with rich red draperies checked with blue, in the obverse of the red-flecked blue carpet. On the west wall, the bookshelves surrendered pride of place to a massive fireplace, topped with a carved hood to make Ivanhoe proud, and large enough to roast a serf. In short, the library was a Gothic fantasy.

Christianity spread across northern Europe more or less from west to east, slowly, but with greater speed after 950 or so. Ireland was first, in the fifth and sixth centuries; there followed Pictish Scotland, England and central Germany in the seventh century, Saxony – by force as we have seen – after Charlemagne’s conquests in the eighth, Bulgaria, Croatia and Moravia in the ninth, Bohemia in the tenth, Poland, Rus’ (covering parts of European Russia and Ukraine) and Denmark in the late tenth, Norway, Iceland and Hungary in the years around 1000, Sweden more slowly across the eleventh century.3 Only the far north-east of Europe was left out of this, the Baltic- and Finnish-speaking lands, the former of which would eventually, in the thirteenth century, turn into the only large and powerful pagan polity in medieval Europe, Lithuania, before its grand dukes went Christian as late as 1386–87.

The picture is nevertheless complicated in Britain – at home, if not in its former empire – and might provide some of the reasons why white people here sometimes find terms like ‘white supremacy’ and ‘white privilege’ either inapplicable to Britain or hard to understand. First, Britain never practised open white supremacy on domestic soil as it did in the colonies, so those of us who hail from the colonies have a different understanding of British racial governance, even if we were born here. Second, the most deprived and violent regions of Britain remain areas that are almost exclusively white, such as the rough parts of Glasgow, Belfast and north-east England, a subject to which we will return later. Can the white people who burned to death in Grenfell Tower along with the ‘ethnics’, or were crushed to death at Hillsborough and then demonised in the press as thieves, or the dead at Aberfan, be said to have had ‘white privilege’? I can totally see why this might at first seem absurd to some people. Especially in relation to Kensington and Chelsea, where the working-class Muslim population in the north of the borough so visible during the Grenfell fire contrasts sharply with another large population of Muslims in the south of the borough who hail from the Gulf states, and are rich enough for the paupers to know not to aim their hatred of Muslims at them as they drive up Kensington High Street in their Louis Vuitton-patterned Lamborghinis.

UKIP SHIPPING FORECAST by Nicholas Pegg After a UKIP councillor claimed widespread flooding in the UK was God’s punishment for allowing same-sex marriage, author/performer Nicholas Pegg wrote his own version of the Shipping Forecast. His recording went viral, receiving 250,000 hits in four days. ‘And now the shipping forecast issued by UKIP on Sunday the 19 January 2014 at 1200 UTC. There are warnings of gays in Viking, Forties, Cromarty, Southeast Iceland and Bongo Bongo land. The general synopsis at midday: Low intelligence expected, becoming Little England by midnight tonight. And now the area forecasts for the next 24 hours. Viking, North Utsire, South Utsire: south easterly gay seven to severe gay nine, occasionally bisexual. Showers – gay. Forties, Cromarty, Forth, Tyne, Dogger, Fisher: women veering southerly 4 or 5, losing their identity and becoming sluts. Rain – moderate or gay. German blight, immigration veering north – figures variable, becoming psychotic. Showers – gay. Humber, Thames, Dover, Wight, Portland, Plymouth: benefit tourism 98%, becoming variable – later slight, or imaginary. Showers – gay. Biscay, Trafalgar: warm, lingering nationalism. Kiss me Hardy, later becoming heterosexual – good. FitzRoy, Sole, Lundy, Fastnet, Irish Sea, Shannon, Rockall, Malin, Hebrides, Bailey: right or extreme right, veering racist 4 or 5, increasing to 5 to 7. Homophobic outburst – back-peddling westerly and becoming untenable. Showers – gay. Fair Isle, Faeroes, South East Iceland: powerbase decreasing, variable – becoming unelectable. Good. And that concludes the forecast.

Copulating Cats and Holy Men The Story of the Creation of the Book of Kells   In the year 791 A.D an Irish monk named Connachtach brought together a team of the finest calligraphers the world has ever seen, on the island of Iona, a sliver of limestone rock off the northwest coast of Scotland. They came from Northumbria in England, from Constantinople, from Italy and from Ireland. All of them had worked on other illuminated manuscripts. But Connachtach, eminent scribe and abbot of Iona, as he is described in contemporary annals, wanted from them the most richly ornamented book ever created by man’s hand. It was to be more beautiful than the great book of Lindisfarne: more beautiful than the gospel-books made at the court of Charlemagne: more beautiful than all the Korans of Persia. It would be known as the Book of Kells. Eighth century Europe was in a state of cultural meltdown. Since the end of the Pax Romana, three centuries earlier, warring tribes had decimated the continent. From the East the Ostrogoths had blundered into the spears of the Germanic tribes to be overrun, in their turn, by the Huns. Their western cousins, the Visigoths, plundered along a confident north- east, southwest axis from Spain to Cologne. The Vandals did what vandals do. As though that wasn't enough, a blunt-faced raggle-taggle band of pirates and pyromaniacs came looting and raping their way out of the freezing seas of the North. For a Viking there was no tomorrow, culture something you stuffed into a hemp sack; happiness, a warm sword. Wherever they went they extorted protection money: the Danegeld. Fighting drunk on a mixture of animist religion and aquavit they threatened to plunge the house of Europe into total darkness. The Book of Kells was to be a rainbow-bridge of light thrown across the abyss of the Dark Ages. Its colors were to burn until the end of time.   #

It was on the second Tuesday in January - WI night - that winter became a serious and dramatic matter, a cold, tiring, but exhilarating time, at least for the young, and a companionable time for all, when we were stranded, snowbound and sealed off in place and, it seemed, in time too, for the usual pattern of the day’s coming and going was halted. We had been in the town all day, and I had scarcely noticed the weather. But, by the time I put the car up the last, steep bit of hill, past Cuckoo Farm and Foxley Spinney, towards the village, the sky had gathered like a boil, and had an odd, sulphurous yellow gleam over iron grey. It was achingly cold, the wind coming north-east off the Fen made us cry. We ran down the steps and indoors, switched on the lamps and opened up the stove, made tea, shut out the weather, though we could still hear it; the wind made a thin, steely noise under doors and through all the cracks and crevices of the old house. But by six o’clock there had been one of those sudden changes. I opened the door to let in Hastings, the tabby cat, and sensed it at once. The wind dropped and died, everything was still and dark as coal, no moonlight, not a star showed through the cloud cover, and it was just a degree wamer. I could smell the approching snow. Everything waited.

Refresh Carpet Cleaning is a family carpet cleaning company that provides services in Peterlee and the entire North East of England. Refresh is a sister company to a very well knowing flooring store. With over 30 years of total experience in the flooring are carpet industry. No wonder Refresh can confidently say they are foremost experts when it comes to anything carpets. Including cleaning them.

We drove out of London, heading north through the East Midlands and across Yorkshire to Lancashire. I sat in the back with Monro wedged under my seat and slept on and off as a dozen counties went by. Every so often I woke up with the feeling that I was repeating parts of the journey. But then England is much the same all over, I suppose.

The summer before Cotton received his divinity degree, he left the relative security of Cambridge to begin his career. His first job was in Boston, one of Lincolnshire’s largest towns, located near the mouth of the Witham River where it meets the Wash, on the North Sea. Boston is set amid the vast, level, isolated land of the Fens, a marshy area extending over thirteen hundred square miles of the shires of East Anglia, Cambridge, Peterborough, and Lincoln, in eastern England. The parish of Boston was England’s largest, making it a plum assignment for a newly minted vicar. The town’s name is a shortened version of “Botolph’s Stone,” the medieval name for its earliest church, founded by Saint Botolph, an Anglo-Saxon monk, in the seventh century.

For the present-day inhabitants of England, it is the Anglo-Saxons who have generally been regarded as the ancestral English, whereas the Vikings are definitely them, not us. The English may have a sneaking admiration for their amoral and carefree existence, but apart from a few hotheads who claim they carry Viking blood, they are not really our ancestors. The English language, English laws, customs, and system of government, even the English countryside and villages, are somehow Anglo-Saxon and not North European or Scandinavian, despite the irony that the Angles and Saxons arrived from much the same area as the Danes, some 400 years earlier. It is still Ælfred who was the first king of England, and it was he who united the warring Anglo-Saxon kingdoms against the Viking invader. In 793 there were four Anglo Saxon kingdoms: East Anglia, Mercia, Wessex, and Northumbria; by 900 there was just one: Wessex.

For the present-day inhabitants of England, it is the Anglo-Saxons who have generally been regarded as the ancestral English, whereas the Vikings are definitely them, not us. The English may have a sneaking admiration for their amoral and carefree existence, but apart from a few hotheads who claim they carry Viking blood, they are not really our ancestors. The English language, English laws, customs, and system of government, even the English countryside and villages, are somehow Anglo-Saxon and not North European or Scandinavian, despite the irony that the Angles and Saxons arrived from much the same area as the Danes, some 400 years earlier. It is still Ælfred who was the first king of England, and it was he who united the warring Anglo-Saxon kingdoms against the Viking invader. In 793 there were four Anglo-Saxon kingdoms: East Anglia, Mercia, Wessex, and Northumbria; by 900 there was just one: Wessex.

If a navigator stands on the North Pole, the North Star will sit directly overhead at ninety degrees to the horizon in all directions. The top of the world is at ninety degrees latitude. On the equator, at zero degrees latitude, Polaris dances right on the horizon. So latitude can be directly determined by the angle between the polestar and the horizon. I will try to measure the angle of the North Star to the horizon to give me my latitude. Determining longitude is another matter entirely. To do so, the navigator equates arc with time. Each of the 360 degrees of the earth's circular belt line is divided into sixty minutes of arc. Each minute is one nautical mile—6076 feet. Since the earth spins once every twenty-four hours, the heavenly bodies pass over fifteen degrees of longitude every hour, or fifteen minutes of longitude every minute. Some astronomers in Greenwich, England, began and ended their demarcation of the globe by running the longitude line of zero degrees through their little town. Longitude can be calculated by comparing the time when a heavenly body appears overhead to the time when it would be over Greenwich. The difference in time is then converted to arc, which tells the observer how far east or west of Greenwich he is. Not until the advent of accurate timepieces was it possible to fix longitude.

Everything to the north and east of that line was ruled by men of Scandinavian descent.

Their homeland lay in the north German plains between the River Elbe to the east and the River Ems to the west in a region still known today as Niedersachsen (Lower Saxony).

The far more dependable Bede, writing from the monastery at Jarrow, completed his Ecclesiastical History of the English People in 731. It is thanks to him that we are able to differentiate between the three tribes of ‘barbarians’, namely Saxons, Angles and Jutes. According to Bede, Jutes from the Jutland peninsula of northern Denmark occupied Kent and the Isle of Wight, while Saxons from Saxony in north-west Germany settled in southern England. They eventually differentiated into the East Saxons, in Essex, the Mid-Saxons farther west (and remembered in the now vanished county of Middlesex) and the West Saxons of Wessex, which was much later divided into Hampshire, Wiltshire and Dorset. The Angles, originally located in Angeln in southern Denmark, between Saxony and Jutland, took over East Anglia, as well as the Midlands, which became Mercia, and Northumbria in the north-east.

ON A WARM, drowsy afternoon in early September, Ed Murrow, Vincent Sheean, and Ben Robertson, a correspondent for the New York newspaper PM, stopped at the edge of a field several miles south of London. The three had spent the day driving down the Thames estuary in Murrow’s Talbot Sunbeam roadster, enjoying the sun and looking for dogfights between Spitfires and Messerschmitts. Their search had been fruitless, and they stopped to buy apples from a farmer. Stretching out on the field to eat them, they drowsily listened to the chirp of crickets and buzzing of bees. The war seemed very far away. Within minutes, however, it returned with a vengeance. Hearing the harsh throb of aircraft engines, the Americans looked up at a sky filled with wave after wave of swastika-emblazoned bombers that clearly were not heading for their targets of previous days—the coastal defenses and RAF bases of southern England. Following the curve of the Thames, they were aimed straight at London. In minutes the sky over the capital was suffused with a fiery red glow; black smoke billowed up into a vast cloud that blanketed much of the horizon. When shrapnel from antiaircraft guns rained down around the American reporters, they dived into a nearby ditch, where, stunned, they watched the seemingly endless procession of enemy aircraft flying north. “London is burning. London is burning,” Robertson kept repeating. Returning to the city, they found flames sweeping through the East End, consuming dockyards, oil tanks, factories, overcrowded tenements, and everything else in their path. Hundreds of people had been killed, thousands injured or driven from their homes. Under a blood-red moon, women pushed prams piled high with their salvaged belongings. That horrific evening marked the beginning of the Blitz: from September 7 on, London would endure fifty-seven straight nights of relentless bombing. Until then, no other city in history had ever been subjected to such an onslaught. Warsaw and Rotterdam had been heavily bombed by the Germans early in the war, but not for the length of time of the assault on London. Although

The presence of the 14 Basques was a fairly accurate reflection of the region’s overwhelming influence on the early years of Spanish football. There are tales told, similar to those of the north-east of England, in which scouts in the region are forever hollering down holes in the ground, out of which would pop monstrous defenders, solid goalkeepers and prodigious goalscorers. In fact the Spanish talk of the cantera (quarry) from which good young ’uns emerge, hewn from the rock of their particular regions. The Basques have always had more cause to celebrate the philosophy of the cantera than most, due to their insistence, from the early years of the century, on using only local players in their teams. This policy is still carried on by Athletic Bilbao, courting controversy in certain circles because their approach has always been coloured by suggestions of Basque racial purity and xenophobia – predictably and strenuously denied by those who support the practice.

He is more circus master than either composer or pop star. He is the frontman of one of Britain’s best-loved bands of all time, co-creator of the world’s most successful virtual band and the creative force behind records, operas and loose-fit projects that evoke not just England but Africa, north and sub-Saharan, China, the Middle East and, perhaps most surprisingly of all, America. Like all pop and rock stars who manage to maintain a level of success over numerous generations, Albarn seems to need change to survive.

Perhaps the belief that the Indians were destined to vanish originated in early colonial times as a means of justifying the massacres of Indians by the Puritans. If, as the New England colonists believed, Indians were under a cosmic curse and in a state of rapid decline, killing a few was not really a criminal act and in some instances might actually be doing the Lord’s work. It was not all Thanksgiving dinners in those early days. No one questions that the Indian population in the East did decline precipitiously as whites settled the New England area. Many Ind­ians were killed, others hid in obscure places, and still other Indians moved west before the American Revolution. Many eastern Indians were allies of Great Britain in both the Revolution and the War of 1812. Believing they should not stay behind in the United States when their English friends fled to Canada after the Revolution, they left with the departing British troops, vanishing from the United States but remaining very much a part of things north of the border. The virtual disappearance of Indians east of the Mississippi can be traced directly to Andrew Jackson’s policy of removing the tribes of that region to Oklahoma and Kansas, not to some cosmic decree commanding their inevitable extinction. Even then only the largest and most threatening tribes were removed. Smaller tribal groups simply remained in the backwaters of the eastern United States where they had always lived.

In the east and north of England, Dobby or Dobbs is a common name for a brownie. This appears to be a first name, but as the form ‘a dobie’ also exists, it seems, like Puck, to be the term for a group that has turned into the name for an individual.

The window glass was cold as Jude touched his nose to its surface. He looked north over the centre of Tirana and drank in the thrill of the panorama. From a restaurant in the Sky Tower he could see down over the lush, green square of land criss-crossed with paths that was Rinia Park. He had arranged to meet Edona there at 3pm. To his left the apartment blocks clustered densely away to the horizon in colours of mustard, olive and denim blue. Ahead he could make out the rouge and yellow government ministry buildings on the edge of Skanderbeu Square, and the white needle of the Et’hem Bey Mosque. His eyes turned to the east past the black glass panelled Twin Towers and concrete Pyramid to the traffic flowing up the Gjergj Fishta Boulevard, where the harsh mid-day sunlight was glinting off car roofs and windscreens. Beyond that, through a haze of heat and light smog, Mount Dajti rose up to the blue, utterly cloudless sky. (From 'The Silencer').

The window glass was cold as Jude touched his nose to its surface. He looked north over the centre of Tirana and drank in the thrill of the panorama. From a restaurant in the Sky Tower he could see down over the lush, green square of land criss-crossed with paths that was Rinia Park. He had arranged to meet Edona there at 3pm. To his left the apartment blocks clustered densely away to the horizon in colours of mustard, olive and denim blue. Ahead he could make out the rouge and yellow government ministry buildings on the edge of Skanderbeu Square, and the white needle of the Et’hem Bey Mosque. His eyes turned to the east past the black glass panelled Twin Towers and concrete Pyramid to the traffic flowing up the Gjergj Fishta Boulevard, where the harsh mid-day sunlight was glinting off car roofs and windscreens. Beyond that, through a haze of heat and light smog, Mount Dajti rose up to the blue, utterly cloudless sky.

Edward IV’s ‘regional’ policy: The stimulus for this investigation was D.A.L. Morgan’s analysis of Edward IV’s second reign… Morgan proceeded to explain that this ‘territorial re-ordering’ was designed to cure disorder and lawlessness in the localities. Thus, Morgan suggested, Edward intended ‘the creation of an apanage’ for his second son, Richard, Duke of York, and that ‘by 1475 the plan was to endow him with a collection of lands in the East Midlands’. Also, the king ‘bent his efforts to making his elder son’s household at Ludlow the governing power in Wales and the West Midlands...and similarly to establishing his brother [Richard, Duke of] Gloucester as heir to the Neville lands and ruler of the North’. Furthermore ‘1474 saw the scheme pushed forward...and the beginning of an apanage endowment for the king’s stepson Thomas Grey [Marquess of Dorset] in the South-West’. Moreover, Edward’s ‘two leading household men were fitted in as the heads of further regional blocs’: his steward, Thomas, Lord Stanley, was ‘made undoubted ruler of Lancashire’, while ‘in Cheshire and north-east Wales also Stanley power was extended’ through Stanley’s brother, William; and the king’s chamberlain, William, Lord Hastings, ‘similarly emerged in 1474 as ruler of the North Midlands from Rockingham to the Peak’ (pp. 1–2). …the concept of Edward IV’s provincial policy raises much broader questions… whether this regional policy was planned or unintentional, and also as to whether its consequences were constructive or destructive. Furthermore, in a broader context, Edward’s scheme also suggests the importance of issues concerning the concept of regions, with potential implications for our study of politics and government in the localities, as well as questions regarding royal authority, governance, and the constitution, in general, in the later fifteenth century (p. 5). …This topic [Arbitration] is inseparable from the wider consideration of justice, and law and order, and these aspects could be the subject of substantial research in themselves; hence the remit of this study is specifically limited to questions of politics and governance. Arbitration of disputes may indicate a magnate’s influence and local standing, but this is, of course, not the only way in which to ascertain a magnate’s power in the localities: consideration of his estates, offices, and clientele reveals the extent to which his lordship pervaded local society (p. 8).

Most émigrés, lacking the resources to establish themselves in England, traveled to other British outposts in North America known only by maps and rumors. The most popular destination for loyalists in the deep South was East Florida, which grew from a population of 4,000 to 17,000 in a single year.105 Within a few months of their arrival, however, the émigrés learned that Great Britain had ceded East Florida to Spain in the peace settlement. Not wishing to become Spanish subjects, the vast majority decided to move on. About one-third returned to the United States, some creeping back to their former homes, most settling on the frontier or some other location where their prior loyalties would not be known. Many others, including Thomas Brown and Robert Cunningham, sailed for the Bahamas, with a plantation economy based upon slavery. Those who carried their slaves to Jamaica, ironically, wound up protesting the trade policies of the British Parliament, just as their rebel opponents had done. Southern loyalists without slaves and nowhere better to go headed north to Canada, but many did not take well to the cold, and they too petitioned the British government, claiming it was “altogether impossible . . . to clear the ground, and raise the necessaries of life, in a Climate to southern Constitutions inhospitable and Severe.”106 They would prefer, they said, to trade in their homesteads in Canada for a small piece of the Bahamas.

This is Northumbria, spanning Durham, Yorkshire, and Northumberland, the northernmost county in England. Here was once the frontier, the last place, where, in the second century, the Romans built their vast fortifications to hold back the Scots and the Picts: first Hadrian’s Wall, running from the banks of the Tyne in the east to the Solway Firth in the west; and later, in a fit of optimism – or arrogance – the more northerly Antonine Wall, from the Firth of Forth in the east to the Firth of Clyde in the west, before abandoning it in favor of a consolidation of the southern defenses. In time, the remains of the Antonine Wall will come to be referred to as the Devil’s Dyke, but by then the Romans will be long gone, their fortresses already falling into ruin, leaving the blood to dry, and the land to bear their scars. Because the land remembers. So the Romans depart, and chaos descends. The Angles invade from Germania, battling the natives and one another, before eventually forging two kingdoms, Northumbria and Mercia, only to see them fall to the Norsemen in the ninth century, who will themselves be defeated by the kings of Wessex. More blood, more scars. In 927 AD, Northumbria becomes part of Athelstan’s united England. In 1066 William the Conqueror lands with his Normans, and crushes the Northumbrian resistance to Norman rule. The Norman castles rise, but they, like the Romans and the Angles before, are forced to defend themselves against the Scots. They leave their dead at Alnwick and Redesdale, Tyndale and Otterburn. The land has a taste for blood now. More conflicts follow – the Wars of the Roses, the Rising in the North, the Civil War, the Jacobite rebellions – and the ground makes way for new bones, but the blood never really dries. Dig deep enough, expose the depths, and one might almost glimpse seams of red and white, like the strata of rock: blood and bone, over and over, the landscape infused by them, forever altered and forever changing. Because the killing never stops.

Feudalism existed in its most highly developed form in the north and east of what is now France, where by the fourteenth century it had come to be the rule that there was no land without its lord, where the feudal aristocracy was most sharply marked off from the rest of society, and where most of the peasants remained serfs into the thirteenth century. In some parts of Europe feudalism prevailed less universally and society was not divided so sharply into the two extremes of serfs at the bottom and feudal nobles at the top. In southern France, for instance, many landholders recognized no feudal lord and would not admit that their estates were fiefs. In Brittany serfdom had always been exceptional; in Normandy it early disappeared, and in both these provinces the word “fief” was applied to the free holdings of peasants as well as to the estates of nobles. In Germany powerful lords sometimes granted fiefs to their servile personal attendants, called ministeriales, and thus made knights out of serfs or slaves. Many features of feudalism were found in England before the Norman conquest, but William the Conqueror introduced it in a more developed state from the Continent.

Got you,” he heard someone murmur, looking over to see one of his team members—Nate Carson, a former Air Force pararescue jumper or “PJ”, as they were known—aim his index finger at the frozen image on the laptop screen, pantomiming getting off a shot. And so they had, or at least were as close to it as they had been in months, the big man thought as he laid down the yearbook, pushing his way past Carson as he made his way to the door of the tent. Their best intelligence on Hassan's location since their abortive raid in late March, having come through just the previous day. And now all they awaited was the all-clear from Washington. For the politicians to make up their mind, as ever. The desert heat of the Sinai struck him full in the face as he stepped through the flap. Dry, choking heat—impressive even by the standards of east Texas, where he'd spent the majority of his childhood, before leaving home at the age of 18 to join the Corps. Seemed like he'd been spending his life in the desert ever since, as the Marines—and now the Agency—sent him to one desolate waste after another. North Camp was located some twenty kilometers south of the Mediterranean and not far from the border with Israel—a six hundred plus-acre compound that served as a forward operating base for the Multinational Force & Observers, the international peacekeeping force based in the Sinai ever since the Camp David Accords of '78. And now, for their team—through some special dispensation obtained by the Agency's seventh floor. All of it so far above his pay grade as to be beyond his concern.

A fleet of oil tankers carried oil from the Gulf Coast around Florida and up the Eastern Seaboard to supply Eastern cities and for transshipment to England and Europe. With the German declaration of war in alliance with Japan on 11 December 1941, Germany sent a small submarine force under Admiral and U-boat Commander Karl Dönitz to attack the vulnerable tankers. Dönitz had asked for twelve submarines. Hitler, giving priority at that time to Mediterranean support of his campaign in North Africa, awarded the admiral only five. Dönitz chose the best crews, and in the six weeks between 11 January and 28 February 1942, his U-boats working the American East Coast attacked no fewer than seventy-four tankers, sinking forty-six of them and damaging sixteen more.55 The submarines escaped unscathed. “Our U-boats are operating close inshore along the coast of the United States of America,” Dönitz reported, “so that bathers and sometimes entire coastal cities are witness to the drama of war, whose visual climaxes are constituted by the red glorioles of blazing tankers.

Catawamteak,” meaning “the great landing,” is what the Abenaki Indians called the early settlement that became Rockland, Maine. Thomaston and Rockland can be bypassed by Route 90, an eight-mile shortcut which I frequently used as a midshipman, but our bus stayed on the main road and stopped to let passengers on and off in both places. At one time Rockland was part of Thomaston, called East Thomaston, but the two towns have long since separated, having very little in common. In the beginning, Rockland developed quickly because of shipbuilding and limestone production. It was, and still is, an important fishing port. Lobsters are the main export and the five-day Maine Lobster Festival is celebrated here annually. The red, three-story brick buildings lining the main street of Rockland, give it the image of an old working town. I have always been impressed by the appearance of these small towns, because to me this is what I had expected Maine to look like. When I first went through the center of Rockland on the bus, I was impressed by the obvious ties the community had with the sea. The fishing and lobster industry was evident by the number of commercial fishing and lobster boats. Rockland was, and still is, the commercial hub of the mid-coastal region of the state. The local radio station WRKD was an important source of local news and weather reports. This was also the radio station that opened each day’s broadcasting with Hal Lone Pine’s song, recorded on Toronto's Arc Records label: “There’s a winding lane on the Coast of Maine that is wound around my heart....” The United States Coast Guard still maintains a base in Rockland, which is reassuring to the families of those who go fishing out on the open waters of Penobscot Bay and the Gulf of Maine. Rockland remains the home of the Farnsworth Art Museum, which has an art gallery displaying paintings by Andrew Wyeth, as well as other New England artists. The Bay Point Hotel that was founded in 1889 had a compelling view of the breakwater and Penobscot Bay. The Victorian style hotel, later known as the Samoset Hotel, had seen better days by 1952 and was closed in 1969. On October 13, 1972, the four-story hotel caught fire in the dining area due to an undetermined cause. Fanned by 20-mile-an-hour north winds, the structure burned to the ground within an hour. However, five years later a new Samoset Resort was founded.

In England it took two hundred years after the Romans left before coins were used as money again. There were no mints at all east of the Rhine until Regensburg, and that mint produced very little.37

The monastic culture of the north was practically blotted out by the heathen Danes, and they brought to an end the Angle Kingdoms of Northumbria, Mercia, and East Anglia. They overran and occupied the entire north and east of England. But the Kingdom of Wessex in the southwest, which had already become the strongest Anglo-Saxon state under Egbert, was left to struggle successfully against the Danes under its gallant, learned, and truly Christian king, Alfred the Great. Alfred, who ruled from 871 to 901, united all the rest of England against the Danes, and reorganized the Saxon army and revived the navy. He drove the Danes out of Wessex and recovered London. A line drawn approximately from London to modern Liverpool was made the frontier between the West Saxon Kingdom and the Danelaw, as the territory where Danish customs and institutions prevailed was called. Under Alfred’s son and grandsons the Danelaw was gradually reconquered and all England united under one ruler. The Danes had done at least the one service of obliterating the petty kingdoms in the territory they had occupied; and Kent, Sussex, and a part of Mercia had forgotten their differences and accepted a West Saxon king in order to escape the Danes. The Danes also brought England into closer trade relations with the rest of Europe than before, and were more inclined to town life than the country-loving Anglo-Saxons. Their armor was a military improvement; and they brought in a large class of freemen to a land where, for a century or two before, the weak had been falling under the domination of the strong.