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Church Of All Saints, Leighton Buzzard
All Saints Church, Leighton Buzzard, is the fine Early English parish church for the town of Leighton Buzzard in the English county of Bedfordshire. History The church is dedicated to All Saints and has a 190-foot spire and some outstanding medieval ironwork, graffiti and roofs, "aflutter" with carved angels gifted in the mid 15th century by Alice de la Pole, Countess of Suffolk and grand-daughter of the poet Geoffrey Chaucer. It has been described as the cathedral of South Bedfordshire (by the Bishop of St Albans at the re-hallowing ceremony on 7 May 1989) and is probably the finest church in the county (according to John Betjeman in Collins’ Guide to Parish Churches). Dating from 1277 it is the second church on the site. Such an old structure requires constant attention through its Preservation Trust. The Church was severely damaged by fire in 1985. The fire happened just as a restoration programme was nearing completion. It destroyed the chancel roof and severely damag ...
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England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Wales to its west and Scotland to its north. The Irish Sea lies northwest and the Celtic Sea to the southwest. It is separated from continental Europe by the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south. The country covers five-eighths of the island of Great Britain, which lies in the North Atlantic, and includes over 100 smaller islands, such as the Isles of Scilly and the Isle of Wight. The area now called England was first inhabited by modern humans during the Upper Paleolithic period, but takes its name from the Angles, a Germanic tribe deriving its name from the Anglia peninsula, who settled during the 5th and 6th centuries. England became a unified state in the 10th century and has had a significant cultural and legal impact on the wider world since the Age of Discovery, which began during the 15th century. The English language, the Anglican Church, and Eng ...
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Geoffrey Chaucer
Geoffrey Chaucer (; – 25 October 1400) was an English poet, author, and civil servant best known for ''The Canterbury Tales''. He has been called the "father of English literature", or, alternatively, the "father of English poetry". He was the first writer to be buried in what has since come to be called Poets' Corner, in Westminster Abbey. Chaucer also gained fame as a philosopher and astronomer, composing the scientific '' A Treatise on the Astrolabe'' for his 10-year-old son Lewis. He maintained a career in the civil service as a bureaucrat, courtier, diplomat, and member of parliament. Among Chaucer's many other works are '' The Book of the Duchess'', '' The House of Fame'', '' The Legend of Good Women'', and '' Troilus and Criseyde''. He is seen as crucial in legitimising the literary use of Middle English when the dominant literary languages in England were still Anglo-Norman French and Latin. Chaucer's contemporary Thomas Hoccleve hailed him as "the firste fy ...
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Harrison And Harrison
Harrison & Harrison Ltd is a British company that makes and restores pipe organs, based in Durham and established in Rochdale in 1861. It is well known for its work on instruments such as King's College, Cambridge, Westminster Abbey, and the Royal Festival Hall. History of the firm Thomas Harrison established an organ building company in 1861 in Rochdale, then moved to Durham in 1872. The company was moderately successful but did not achieve real success until 1896 when Thomas's sons Arthur and Harry took over. Harry designed the organs and Arthur proved to be a particularly gifted voicer, resulting in commissions for rebuilds of several great organs including Durham Cathedral, the Grand Organ at the Royal Albert Hall and new commissions including Westminster Abbey, and Rossall School (1925). Between 1890 and 1996 Harrisons was located on Cross Street (now Hawthorn Terrace), Durham in a former paper mill. The building is now called Harrison House. Arthur Harrison died in ...
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Chicksands Priory
Chicksands Priory is a former monastic house at Chicksands in Bedfordshire. History The Gilbertine priory of Chicksands was founded about 1152 by Rohese, Countess of Essex, and her second husband Payn de Beauchamp, Baron of Bedford. Payn and Rohese endowed the priory at its foundation with the church of Chicksands and other Bedfordshire lands. The priory was of the Gilbertine Order, a religious order formed by Gilbert of Sempringham (c. 1083–1189). It was only one of ten religious houses in England that housed both nuns and canons. By 1200 it was one of the largest and wealthiest Gilbertine houses. Fleeing the wrath of King Henry II after the Council of Northampton in 1164, Archbishop Thomas Becket is said to have spent a short time at Chicksands Priory on his way out of England. After the Dissolution of the Monasteries in the sixteenth century, the priory passed to the Snowe family and then in 1576 to the Osborne family, who owned it for almost 400 years. Chicksands was ...
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Fountains Abbey
Fountains Abbey is one of the largest and best preserved ruined Cistercian monasteries in England. It is located approximately south-west of Ripon in North Yorkshire, near to the village of Aldfield. Founded in 1132, the abbey operated for 407 years, becoming one of the wealthiest monasteries in England until its dissolution, by order of Henry VIII, in 1539. In 1983, Studley Royal Park including the ruins of Fountains Abbey was purchased by the National Trust. The abbey is maintained by English Heritage. Foundation After a dispute and riot in 1132 at the Benedictine house of St Mary's Abbey in York, 13 monks were expelled, among them Saint Robert of Newminster. They were taken under the protection of Thurstan, Archbishop of York, who provided them with land in the valley of the River Skell, a tributary of the Ure. The enclosed valley had all the natural features needed for the creation of a monastery, providing shelter from the weather, stone and timber for building, and ...
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St Albans Abbey
St Albans Cathedral, officially the Cathedral and Abbey Church of St Alban but often referred to locally as "the Abbey", is a Church of England cathedral in St Albans, England. Much of its architecture dates from Norman times. It ceased to be an abbey following its dissolution in the 16th century and became a cathedral in 1877. Although legally a cathedral church, it differs in certain particulars from most other cathedrals in England, being also used as a parish church, of which the dean is rector with the same powers, responsibilities and duties as that of any other parish. At 85 metres long, it has the longest nave of any cathedral in England. Probably founded in the 8th century, the present building is Norman or Romanesque architecture of the 11th century, with Gothic and 19th-century additions. Britain's first Christian martyr According to Bede, whose account of the saint's life is the most elaborate, Alban lived in Verulamium, some time during the 3rd or 4th ce ...
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Misericord
A misericord (sometimes named mercy seat, like the biblical object) is a small wooden structure formed on the underside of a folding seat in a church which, when the seat is folded up, is intended to act as a shelf to support a person in a partially standing position during long periods of prayer. Origins Prayers in the early medieval church at the daily divine offices (i.e. Matins, Lauds, Prime, Terce, Sext, None, Vespers, and Compline) were said standing with uplifted hands. The old or infirm could use crutches or, as time went on, a ''misericordia'' (literally "pity of the heart" to create an act of mercy). For these times of required standing, seating was constructed so that the seats could be turned up. However, the undersides sometimes had a small shelf, a misericord, allowing the user to lean against it, slightly reducing their discomfort. Like most other medieval woodwork in churches, they were usually skilfully carved and often show detailed scenes, despite being ...
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Corbel
In architecture, a corbel is a structural piece of stone, wood or metal jutting from a wall to carry a superincumbent weight, a type of bracket. A corbel is a solid piece of material in the wall, whereas a console is a piece applied to the structure. A piece of timber projecting in the same way was called a "tassel" or a "bragger" in England. The technique of corbelling, where rows of corbels deeply keyed inside a wall support a projecting wall or parapet, has been used since Neolithic (New Stone Age) times. It is common in medieval architecture and in the Scottish baronial style as well as in the vocabulary of classical architecture, such as the modillions of a Corinthian cornice. The corbel arch and corbel vault use the technique systematically to make openings in walls and to form ceilings. These are found in the early architecture of most cultures, from Eurasia to Pre-Columbian architecture. A console is more specifically an "S"-shaped scroll bracket in the classical ...
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John Betjeman
Sir John Betjeman (; 28 August 190619 May 1984) was an English poet, writer, and broadcaster. He was Poet Laureate from 1972 until his death. He was a founding member of The Victorian Society and a passionate defender of Victorian architecture, helping to save St Pancras railway station from demolition. He began his career as a journalist and ended it as one of the most popular British Poets Laureate and a much-loved figure on British television. Life Early life and education Betjeman was born John Betjemann. He was the son of a prosperous silverware maker of Dutch descent. His parents, Mabel (''née'' Dawson) and Ernest Betjemann, had a family firm at 34–42 Pentonville Road which manufactured the kind of ornamental household furniture and gadgets distinctive to Victorians. During the First World War the family name was changed to the less German-looking Betjeman. His father's forebears had actually come from the present day Netherlands more than a century earlier, set ...
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Alice De La Pole
Alice may refer to: * Alice (name), most often a feminine given name, but also used as a surname Literature * Alice (''Alice's Adventures in Wonderland''), a character in books by Lewis Carroll * ''Alice'' series, children's and teen books by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor * ''Alice'' (Hermann book), a 2009 short story collection by Judith Hermann Computers * Alice (computer chip), a graphics engine chip in the Amiga computer in 1992 * Alice (programming language), a functional programming language designed by the Programming Systems Lab at Saarland University * Alice (software), an object-oriented programming language and IDE developed at Carnegie Mellon * Alice mobile robot * Artificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity, an open-source chatterbot * Matra Alice, a home micro-computer marketed in France * Alice, a brand name used by Telecom Italia for internet and telephone services Video games * '' Alice: An Interactive Museum'', a 1991 adventure game * ''American McGee's Al ...
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Church Of England
The Church of England (C of E) is the established Christian church in England and the mother church of the international Anglican Communion. It traces its history to the Christian church recorded as existing in the Roman province of Britain by the 3rd century and to the 6th-century Gregorian mission to Kent led by Augustine of Canterbury. The English church renounced papal authority in 1534 when Henry VIII of England, Henry VIII failed to secure a papal annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon. The English Reformation accelerated under Edward VI of England, Edward VI's regents, before a brief Second Statute of Repeal, restoration of papal authority under Mary I of England, Queen Mary I and Philip II of Spain, King Philip. The Act of Supremacy 1558 renewed the breach, and the Elizabethan Settlement charted a course enabling the English church to describe itself as both English Reformation, Reformed and Catholicity, Catholic. In the earlier phase of the Eng ...
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