Plans for modern monstrosity in venerable cathedral’s forecourt

MORE BAD NEWS from Chartres. Fresh from the completion of a controversial and much criticised renovation of the ancient cathedral’s interior, le Salon Beige reports the city has unveiled plans to tear up the parvis in front of the cathedral and replace it with a modernist “interpretation centre”.

The original parvis (or forecourt) was much smaller than the one we know today. Between 1866 and 1905 the majority of the block of buildings in front of the cathedral, including most of the old Hôtel-Dieu, were demolished to give a wider view of the cathedral’s west façade and its “Royal Portals”.

After the war various plans to tart the place up were made and variously foundered — from a modest alignment of trees in the 1970s to Patrick Berger’s plan for an International Medieval Centre. More recently the gravelly space was unsuccessfully “improved” by the addition of boxes of shrubbery placed in a formation that, jarringly, fails to align with the portals of the cathedral.

The proposed “interpretation centre” designed by Michel Cantal-Dupart — at a projected cost of €23.5 million — destroys the gentle ascent to the cathedral and indeed reverses it. At a projected cost of €23.5 million, a giant slab juts apart as if displaced by an earthquake. The paying tourist is invited down into its infernal belly while others prat about on the slab’s upwardly angled roof, ideal for gawking at the newly commodified beauty of this medieval cathedral. It is practically designed for Instagramming, rather than reflection and contemplation.

As you would imagine, reaction has been strong. Michel Janva, writing at le Salon Beige, says the project “plans to imprison the cathedral” and “will disappoint not only pilgrims on their arrival, but also inhabitants and tourists”.

In the Tribune de l’Art, Didier Rykner is damning: “All this is purely and simply grotesque.” The sides of the centre, he points out, will be glazed to allow in natural light, but this will both interfere with multimedia displays and be bad for the conservation of fragile works of art. “This architecture, which looks vaguely like that of a parking lot, is frighteningly mediocre, and this in front of one of the most beautiful cathedrals of the world.”

Rykner attributes blame for the “megalomaniac and hollow project, expensive and stupid” at the doors of the mayor of Chartres, Jean-Pierre Gorges, who he argues has allowed much of the rest of the city’s artistic and architectural heritage to go to rot while devoting resources to this pharaonic endeavour.

Having walked from Paris to Chartres myself I can imagine how much this proposal will injure the experience for pilgrims. After three days on the road, to arrive at Chartres, stand in the parvis, and gaze up at this work of beauty, devotion, and love for the Blessed Virgin is a profound experience. If constructed, this plan would deprive at least a generation or two from having this experience. (But only a generation or two, for it is simply unimaginable to think this building will not be demolished in the fullness of time.)

Chartres is part of the patrimony of all Europe and one of the most important sites in the whole world. For it to be reduced to the plaything of some momentary mayor is a crime. With any luck, the good citizens of Chartres, of France, and of the world will put a stop to this monstrosity. (more…)

A full decade before Ireland joined the E.E.C., cartoonist J.M. McCarthy filed this vision of the Irish capital’s cosmopolitan future in a 1962 issue of Dublin Opinion.

The scene is Henry Street — renamed “Henri” of course — leading up to Nelson’s Pillar in O’Connell Street and the wags show dear old dirty Dublin transformed into a polyglot European capital.

Advertisements and shop signs are in every language (except Irish), the Gardaí have adopted a képi as their headgear, the currency is the “common mark”, and a stylish young woman with bare arms steals the show and sets the tone.

The European Economic Community finally admitted Ireland as a member in 1973, by which time Nelson had be blown up and Dublin Opinion ceased publication.

Areas shaded in orange are the counties of New York with Dutch-influenced flags

Natives and outsiders alike are often surprised when it’s pointed out just quite how much New York continues to be influenced by its Dutch foundation to this day, even though Dutch rule ended in the seventeenth century.

Previously I explored a number of local or regional flags in the state of New York that show signs of Dutch influence: those of the cities of New York and Albany, the Boroughs of Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Queens, and the counties of Westchester, Nassau, and Orange.

I’ve since found a few more counties to add to our survey of Dutch flags in the Empire State.

Dutchess County

One of the original counties of New York established in 1683, Dutchess retains the archaic spelling of Mary of Modena’s title while she was Duchess of York. Appropriately for a county that was until very recently largely agricultural, the county seal depicts a sheaf and plough, and sits on the county’s flag with its horizontal tricolour of orange, white, and blue.

Ulster County

Across the Hudson from Dutchess County is Ulster, another of New York’s first counties. Its handsome seal features an early farmer wielding a sickle in front of a sheaf and a farmhouse, with the year of the county’s erection proudly included. The Dutch had begun to trade here as early as 1614, and the village of Wiltwijck was given municipal status by Peter Stuyvesant in 1663. Wiltwijck became Kingston in 1669 and remains a very handsome town today.

Schenectady County

The county of Schenectady is of later origin, 1809, and became industrialised in the latter half of the nineteenth century — the General Electric Company was founded here in 1892. Like Ulster and Dutchess, the county flag is just the seal displayed on an orange-white-blue tricolour.

The seal is a relatively boring depicting of crossed swords combined with the scales of justice, but on the flag it is depicted with a locomotive, canal boat, broomhead, and lightning bolt and atom.

by Andrew Cusack (Weekly Standard, 13 September 2010)

This book is the first major overview and exploration of the art of the clandestine Roman Catholic churches in the Netherlands. It is not a study of paintings so much as a history in which art is like the evidence in a detective story, or perhaps even the characters in a play. It might seem extraordinary that there was a place for large-scale Catholic art during the Dutch Republic: Pre-Reformation churches had been confiscated and were being used for Calvinist services, while priests offered the Mass secretly in makeshift accommodations. Eventually a bargain between Dutch Catholics and the civil authorities emerged, trading Catholic nonprovocation in exchange for private toleration of the practice of the faith. Catholics began to purchase properties which, for all outward appearances, maintained the look of ordinary residences but whose interiors were transformed into resplendent chapels and churches.

Xander van Eck provides verbal portraits (often accompanied by contemporaneous painted ones) of several of the important clerics of the Dutch church during this period: Sasbout Vosmeer, the Delft priest influenced by St. Charles Borromeo; Philippus Rovenus, the vicar-apostolic who placed greater emphasis on clandestine parishes having specially dedicated churches, even while they kept an outward unecclesiastical appearance; and Leonardus Marius, the priest who promoted devotion to the 14th-century Eucharistic “Miracle of Amsterdam.” Marius was of such prominence that, after his death, shopkeepers rented out places on their awnings for punters to view his funeral procession. Van Eck includes a handful of amusing asides, such as the expulsion of the Jesuits from the Netherlands as a result of their constant discord with the secular clergy. Mass continued to be offered at the Jesuit church of De Krijtberg in Amsterdam “in the profoundest secrecy” — thus creating a clandestine church within a clandestine church!

The role of the clergy in sustaining the Dutch Church is unsurprising, but it is instructive to learn how instrumental laity were to keeping alive the light of Catholic faith in the Netherlands at the time. Clandestine churches relied on the generosity of Catholic families. Prominent families often provided their own kin as consecrated virgins who brought large dowries into the church, or as priests with suitable inheritances to maintain or endow clandestine parishes. The clandestine church of ’t Hart in Amsterdam, built by the merchant Jan Hartman for his son studying for the priesthood, is still open today as the Amstelkring Museum and Chapel of “Our Lord in the Attic.”

While van Eck explores the extent to which Dutch art from the period followed European norms, an emphasis on the particularity of the art of the clandestine church is to be expected. The sheer volume of art produced during this period — for just three Amsterdam churches alone there were 16 altarpieces — is partly explained by the phenomenon of “rotating altarpieces.” The paintings above the altar would be changed according to the feast or season — a practice sometimes seen in Flanders or parts of Germany but never nearly so widespread as in the Netherlands proper.

Constrained as clandestine churches were on the narrow plots typical of Dutch cities, there was no room for side chapels that might include the large funerary monuments prominent families would construct. This left altarpieces as the most convenient way for munificent Catholics to provide art for their churches: Rotating the altarpieces provided a handy way of displaying numerous commissions rather than just the donation of whoever had been generous most recently, and the themes of these commissions tended to vary in appropriateness to different feasts and seasons.

Some found fault with this method: Jean-Baptiste Descamps, visiting Antwerp in 1769, complained that the most interesting altarpieces were not permanently displayed and were more likely to be damaged in the process of being moved so often.

While the accomplishment and ingenuity of Dutch Catholics in keeping their faith during the Republic was striking, the ill-defined administrative structure of the persecuted church allowed conflicts between clerics to thrive, and doctrinal disputes emerged and festered. The disputes over Jansenism that swept over France and the Netherlands, for example, only exacerbated the administrative problems of the clandestine church. Like their Calvinist compatriots, the Jansenists tended to frown on indulgences, the veneration of saints, recital of the rosary, and private acts of worship, putting greater emphasis on the Scriptures and a more rigorous asceticism. As van Eck points out, this difference in emphasis was not exclusive to the Jansenists, but their novelty (and their heresy) was in preaching the exclusivity of their approach above all others.

Numerous vicars-apostolic had written to Rome arguing for the re-establishment of the episcopacy in the Netherlands to solve the disputes over authority, but their appeals fell on deaf ears. In 1723 a large portion of the Jansenist clergy reinstituted the episcopacy by electing an archbishop of Utrecht from their number — and were subsequently excommunicated, splitting the clandestine church and its clergy in two. (This excommunicated rump united with the opponents of papal infallibility in the following century to form a body that still calls itself the Old Catholic Church.)

When one looks at all this glorious art, not to mention the lives and pious ingenuity of the persecuted, it’s difficult not to feel a little poorer, considering the fruits of our churches in an ostensibly free era. Why does the church today commission painters who are either mediocre or trendy — or both? Artists like Hans Laagland and Leonard Porter show that good art — good liturgical art, even — is possible today, but commissions from the church for traditional artists are sadly few.

Image: Daniel Bizka

Few statues in Ireland are as dramatic as that of Edward Carson at Stormont. The unionist leader is depicted in amidst an oratorical flourish, doubtless in one of his speeches to mass meetings condemning home rule.

In the 1910s as the rebirth of an Irish parliament looked more likely, Carson took up the cause of fighting home rule on behalf of Ireland’s large Protestant minority who feared Catholic domination. When the anti-home rulers realised the cause was losing, they retreated from Irish unionism to Ulster unionism. If home rule was to be granted, Ulster must be exempted. In the end this meant home rule was granted to a parliament covering two-thirds of the Irish province of Ulster — six counties that would henceforth be known as Northern Ireland.

“His larger than life-size statue,” one historian wrote, “erected in his own lifetime in front of the Northern Ireland parliament at Stormont, symbolizes the widely held perception that Northern Ireland is Carson’s creation.”

This is of course the great irony, given that Edward Carson was a Dublin boy through and through. While instrumental in ensuring northeastern Ireland’s exemption from an Irish parliament, Carson actually had little to do with the entity thereby created. When offered the premiership of Northern Ireland he declined it on the grounds of having no real connection with the place.

Craig, not Carson, is the true father of Northern Ireland; he imbued the new statelet with a sense of bigotry and tribal hatred that Carson lacked. The Dubliner urged Ulster’s new leaders to treat the province’s Catholics well.

“We used to say that we could not trust an Irish parliament in Dublin to do justice to the Protestant minority,” Carson said. “Let us take care that that reproach can no longer be made against your parliament, and from the outset let them see that the Catholic minority have nothing to fear from a Protestant majority.”

Alas, it became apparent to Carson that discrimination and inequality were becoming in-built within Northern Ireland’s government, from the Parliament at Stormont down to the lowest forms of local government. He confided to a Catholic friend in London that rather than being an integral part of the United Kingdom, Northern Ireland was turning into “a second-class dominion”.

After partition Carson was created a British judge and accordingly ennobled. (Disappointingly the plaque on his Dublin birthplace next to Conradh na Gaeilge refers to him by the incorrect style of ‘Lord Edward Carson’.) He settled at Clever Court near Minster-in-Thanet, Kent, and never lived in his native Ireland again.

Nonetheless he was held in awe and reverence by the Protestant Unionists of Ulster, who commissioned the striking statue by Leonard Stanford Merrifield that stands in front of Parliament Buildings, Stormont — now home to the Northern Ireland Assembly. It was unveiled by Craig, by then ennobled as Lord Craigavon, while Carson was alive and present in July 1932, joined by a crowd of 40,000 well-wishers.

Carson died in 1935 and was given the rare honour of a state funeral. HMS Broke brought his Union-Jack-draped coffin back to Ireland — albeit to Belfast — and he was interred in the Anglican Cathedral of St Anne. Northern Ireland claimed him even in his final burial: soil from each of its six counties was scattered on his coffin when laid to rest in the tomb.

Still his statue stands at Stormont, gesturing stridently as if to challenge an entire province — a province he by his own description had little to do with. Calls for it to be removed emanate occasionally from typically boring quarters and have so far been rebuffed — wisely. Carson, unlike many of those who cherished his memory, was an honourable man, and it is a pity it took so long for the Protestants of Ulster to heed the advice of their confrère from Dublin.

As by now you are all well aware, today is the feast of Saint Nicholas, the patron-saint of New York. His patronship (patroonship?) over the Big Apple and the Empire State date to our Dutch forefathers of old – real founding fathers like Minuit, van Rensselaer, and Stuyvesant, not those troublesome Bostonians and Virginians who started all that revolution business.

Despite being Protestants of the most wicked and foul variety, the New Amsterdammers and Hudson Valley Dutch maintained their pious devotion to the Wonder-working Bishop of Myra and kept his feast with great solemnity.

After New Netherland came into the hands of the British (and was re-named after our last Catholic king) the holiday continued to be celebrated by the Dutch part of the population, and was greatly popularised in the early nineteenth century by the publication of a curious volume entitled A History of New York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty which purported to be by one Diedrich Knickerbocker.

In fact it was by Washington Irving, the first American writer to make a living off his pen, who did much to popularise St Nicholas Day in New York as well as to revive the celebration of Christmas across the young United States.

While, aside from hearing Mass and curling up with a clay pipe and a volume of Irving (being obsessive, I have two complete sets) here are a few links that shed some light on New York’s heavenly protector.

Previously: Saint Nicholas (Index)

dolos, pl. dolosse

Visitors to the seaside and frequenters of port cities will be familiar with those oddly shaped concrete forms which are dropped together to form breakwaters and prevent erosion.

It turns out that they have a name of Afrikaans origin: dolos (plural dolosse).

‘Dolos’ is believed to be a contraction of ‘dollen os’, the name for the children’s toy of knucklebones or jacks. This particular shape was invented by Aubrey Kruger and Eric Mowbray Merrifield to rebuild the revetments of East London’s artificial harbours following the great storm of 1963.

Kruger fashioned a smaller version of the shape to show his idea to Merrifield, and legend has it that Kruger’s father visited them on the quayside and asked Wat speel julle met die dolos? (‘What are you playing at with the jack?’) The name stuck.

In 2016 the South African Mint released a two-rand ‘crown’ coin depicting the dolos as a tribute to this example of South African ingenuity.

(more…)

Stiff & Trevillion’s 40 Beak Street in London

Beak Street in London is teeming with turquoise iridescence since the completion of a new office building by the architectural firm of Stiff & Trevillion earlier this year. A joint project between property investment companies Landcap and Enstar, Number 40 Beak Street has been purchased for £40 million by Damien Hirst — the canny businessman who sells dead animals in formaldehyde glass boxes. The over-27,000-square-foot building will serve as the primary London studio for Hirst and headquarters for his company, Science (UK) Ltd, in addition to housing a restaurant at ground level.

Five storeys tall, 40 Beak Street features a number of roof terraces in addition to cornice work designed by Hertfordshire-based artist Lee Simmons. The glazed bricks — “hand dipped” the architects tell us — make for a welcome change from the omnipresence of metal and glass on one end of the spectrum and cheap monotone brick on the other.

The PR hype makes much of bringing a bit of artistic and creative edge back into Soho, a neighbourhood whose final glory days have been depicted in a much-praised book by the Telegraph’s Christopher Howse. We’re not so sure.

Hype aside, 40 Beak Street is an excellent addition to the London landscape and the designers are to be commended for their fine eye for detail. Someone at Stiff & Trevillion knows what they’re doing.

(more…)

In recent rambles I came upon an old article from the Spectator in which the late and much-praised Richard West reported from Stellenbosch — “this old and incomparably beautiful town in a valley of vineyards” — on the Sunday after the Dutch Reformed Church renounced apartheid in 1986.

“The students here seem to be confident, cheerful, enthusiastic and full of fun,” West wrote. “Half of them seem to be in love, holding hands and gazing adoringly into each other’s eyes.”

As I walked over the university lawn, I turned at the hoot of a horn, and saw that it came from a motor-bike cop, who wanted to get the attention of and wave to a friend. Small children were paddling in the brook that runs by an avenue of old oaks. Bigger children, spotlessly dressed, went smiling off to their Sunday school, while their elders went to the mother church, where there has been a congregation since 1684. The present building, begun in 1715 and renovated during the 19th century, now has a peculiar boomerang shape so that if you are sitting near one of the ends, you cannot see or hear what is going on at the other side. The church cannot compete in appearance with some of the houses of Stellenbosch, which justify Ruskin’s remark that ‘the only contribution to domestic architecture for centuries was made by the Dutch at the Cape’.

The congregation who filled the church was impeccably dressed, the men all wearing coats and ties, though most women were hatless with summer dresses of normal length at the arms and legs, instead of the 17th-century garb one tends to associate with Calvinism. The congregation has little to do except sing the metrical psalms. The prayers are said by the minister, who devotes much if not most of the hour-long service to giving his sermon. …

Stellenbosch University, which was where apartheid began, is now working to dismantle the system. Whereas the English universities are stuck in the stale polemics of 20 years ago, the Afrikaners are bubbling with radical new ideas. Whereas foreigners once read Afrikaans papers ‘to learn what they were thinking’, it is now essential to read them to find any thinking at all. The two best English newspapers are edited by Afrikaners. The Afrikaners still believe in the future. …

Mr West died in 2015 but it would be fascinating to see what he would make of the Eikestad these days.

The Metropolitan Borough of Holborn was the smallest borough of London both in geography and population so perhaps it’s not surprising that its town hall was a pretty but rather humble affair. The civic pride and municipal pomposity for which this realm was once renowned are nowhere on show in this handsome building which, but for a few details, could easily be mistaken for a hotel, office building, or private residences.

Holborn Town Hall was built in stages, with the public library on the left-hand side completed in 1894 by the Holborn District Board of Works to a design by Isaacs. With the erection of the borough in 1900, a town hall was needed, and the central and right-hand sections of the building were added between 1906 and 1908 by the architects Hall & Warwick.

In 1965 the borough was merged with St Pancras to form the new London Borough of Camden. It was decided to consolidate the civic government at St Pancras Town Hall, to which the local government union members objected. To placate their ire, a bar for the use of employees was erected atop the annexe being added to the Camden (ex St Pancras) Town Hall — quickly nicknamed ‘the White Elephant bar’.

Though long sold off and converted into office space, the arms of the old borough of Holborn still grace the first floor balcony.

Before the age of the skyscrapers, New York’s church spires dominated the horizon and dwarfed their neighbours just like in the medieval towns and cities of the old world — as this photo from the 1900s shows.

Here St Patrick’s Cathedral holds court, with the St. Nicholas Collegiate Reformed Protestant Dutch Church poking up a few blocks down Fifth Avenue.

Slightly north on that same boulevard sits the grand renaissance palazzo of the University Club, with the spire of the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church poking up behind it.

This intriguing little island in New York Harbour has always held something of a fascination for me — viz. articles previous on the subject. Aside from its interesting history there is the matter of the complete lack of foresight in ending its military use as well as the failure to imagine a future use suitable to its history and, if the word is not hyperbole, majesty.

Gothamist recently featured a new peek inside some of the abandoned buildings on Governors Island, a mere selection of which are reproduced here. (more…)

(more…)

By all accounts last Sunday’s Rosary on the Coast was a resounding success. The initiative started out in Poland, where last year thousands of Catholics gathered at the nation’s borders and coastline to pray for the salvation of Poland and the world. Then a month later Ireland joined in with a Rosary on the Coast for Life and Faith, encircling the country in prayer.

Last Sunday, Great Britain got in on the action, and for three countries which have suffered centuries of Protestant domination it seems we have done rather well on these shores. Thousands of people from every variety of ethnicity, class, background, and experience gathered to pray the Rosary “for the spiritual wellbeing of our nations” (as the organisers put it).

The Rosary on the Coast was organised by lay people but supported by the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster as well as many other bishops and of course priests, many of whom accompanied and led in prayer the lay-organised groups around Britain. The rectors of the three national Marian shrines at Walsingham in England, Carfin in Scotland, and Cardigan in Wales all gave their backing and encouragement to the initiative.

Experience has taught me not to be surprised by the success of such ventures. I remember when the Cardinal renewed the consecration of England & Wales to the Immaculate Heart of Mary (with the visit of the Fatima visionaries’ relics). I didn’t have plans to go but friends were driving in from the West Country for it so I thought I’d meet up with them beforehand and go along.

We tried to get in but the doors of the cathedral were shut and a crowd waiting outside – it turned out the church was packed to the gills with the faithful. A pint later we tried again and they had just reopened the doors and let us in. Every bit of the mother church of the diocese was crammed with people, from Filipino maids to peers of the realm. Pews, aisles, side chapels – there was barely room to move. Priests were hearing confessions and the service was ongoing. We’re so used to being an embattled minority that sometimes we forget that we’re still the biggest show in town.

The good people at the Catholic Herald have collected a variety of photos from around the country, of which just a small sample are presented here. (more…)

Pursuant to my post of John Bartlestone’s photographs of City Hall, I came across this photo the other day and it reminded me that this is still one of my favourite rooms in all New York. There’s something about that particular shade of green. I previously wrote about this suite of three rooms in 2006.

The above photo is by Ramin Talaie while below, in 2010, Mayor Bloomberg inspects a city flag being sent to a New Yorker serving in Afghanistan as reported by the Daily News.

The late & much-missed New York Sun also reported on the portraits hanging in City Hall in 2008.

The interior of Eton’s chapel has changed markedly over the past hundred or so years, mostly so thanks to the rediscovery of the priceless medieval wall paintings which had been hidden for centuries by the choir stalls. Painted in the Flemish style in 1479–87, they were whitewashed over by the college barber in 1560 on orders from the wicked new Protestant authorities who had taken over this Catholic school.

The wall paintings were rediscovered in 1847 but it wasn’t until 1923 that the stall canopies in the photograph above were permanently removed, allowing the medieval paintings to be cleaned, restored, and permanently viewed.

In addition to this, in the 1880s (after this photograph was taken) the Great Organ was installed in the broad entrance arch between the narthex and the body of the chapel. The Victorians very handsomely painted it in the medieval fashion and it fits in rather well.

More recently, most of the stained glass was blown out by a German bomb landing in the adjacent Upper School in 1940. A decade later, deathwatch beetles claimed the wooden roof, which was then replaced by fan vaulting (of stone-fronted concrete) in line with the original intentions of Eton’s holy founder, King Henry VI.

What the Practice of ‘Pricking the Lites’ Tells Us About Territorial Division in Anglo-Saxon England

As cheekily noted by Ned Donovan on his Twitter feed, HM the Q has recently engaged in the old practice of ‘pricking the lites’ to appoint High Sheriffs for the three ceremonial counties of Lancashire, Greater Manchester, and Merseyside. But in order to know what ‘pricking the lites’ is it’s worth looking at the territorial division of Anglo-Saxon England and the old offices that emerged therefrom.

In those days, the land was divided into hides, a hide being the amount of land on which a family lived and supported itself. Ten hides together were known as a tithing, and ten tithings were collectively a hundred.

As hundreds go, the best-known today are the Chiltern Hundreds because of the parliamentary role they play. Members of Parliament are not allowed to resign, but nor are they allowed to hold an office of profit under the Crown.

So whenever an MP wants to resign, he or she is appointed Crown Steward and Bailiff of the three Chiltern Hundreds of Stoke, Desborough, and Burnham and, having accepted such office, is deemed to have disqualified themselves from continuing to sit in the House of Commons. (The Manor of Northstead is also used alternately with the Chiltern Hundreds.)

Anyhow, each hundred was supervised by a constable, and groups of hundreds were collected into shires. Each shire was overseen by an earl, of whom the French equivalent is a count, so after the Normans turned up shires became more often known as counties. These now divvy up territory across the English-speaking world, from Kenya to California.

Each level of these Anglo-Saxon divisions had a relevant court for decision-making, and the officer who administered or enforced these decisions was known as the reeve. Amongst these titles – town-reeve and reeve of the manor, etc. – there was the shire-reeve, or sheriff as it was contracted.

In the 1970s, for reasons unknown to me, all the sheriffs in England & Wales were elevated to high shrievalties.

Every February or March, a parchment is prepared for the Queen in her capacity as Duke of Lancaster with three names of candidates for high sheriff in the three current ceremonial counties covered by the old duchy. This parchment is known as the lites (a cognate of ‘list’, I believe).

At a meeting of the Privy Council, the Queen takes a silver bodkin and pricks the parchment next to the name of the candidate she chooses to be high sheriff. In practice, this is always the first name on the list, and customarily the following names move up a notch and serve in later years.

A similar process takes place for the Duke of Cornwall to appoint their high sherriff but without the aid of the Privy Council.

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