BBC Four’s Medieval Season (part 3)

Well it looks like the Medieval Season is drawing to a close as the number of programmes has dropped of considerably next week. The highlights so far for me have been Heist which I found to be very enjoyable with its dark humour and style based on Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. Crusades is the other series of programmes that I am finding to be both entertaining and informative, and it highlights just how much evil and wrong has been done by so called Christians in the name of God.

I think that the final high of this series is going to be Clarissa and the King’s Cookbook on Wednesday 7 May more details of which including a trailer can be seen here.

Anyway the viewing this week is as follows:

Sunday 27 April:

How to Build a Cathedral (8.00pm)
the great cathedrals were the wonders of the medieval world.

Many were the tallest structures on earth, the highest buildings created since the pyramids and until the Eiffel Tower; yet they were built without any of the technological aids of the modern world – with little more than set-square and dividers, ropes and pulleys, hammers and chisels.

The vision was to create a sense of heaven on earth and the medieval cathedral aspired to be nothing less than ‘the new Jerusalem’. Spectacular effects were achieved as this ambition was realised, leading to a revolution in design and a golden age for cathedral architecture in England.

Who were the people who built them? What drove them? And just how were they able to build with such stupendous skill, vision and ambition?

Architectural historian Jon Cannon, author of the recent acclaimed Cathedral, goes in search of the clues that shed light on how our medieval forebears were able to realise such bold ambition. From the fan vaulting at Gloucester to the stained glass at York, from the solid mass of Norwich to the soaring elegance of the Octagon at Ely, Jon climbs up above the stone vaulted ceilings, along the parapets, through the roof voids and down into the crypts of the greatest cathedrals to find out how – and why – it was done.

Monday 28 April:

Art of Eternity (7.30pm)
The Glory of Byzantium: Part of the medieval season. Andrew Graham-Dixon traces the roots of Christian art from ancient Rome to medieval France.

Thursday 1 May:

In Search of Medieval Britain (4/6 7.30pm)
Medieval art historian, Dr Alixe Bovey, uses the oldest surviving route map of Britain to make a series of journeys through Britain in the Middle Ages.

In Heartlands she explores the life of the commoner, discovers the origins of precedent in common law and uncovers the foundations of modern parliament in a bloody power struggle.

Inside the Medieval Mind (3/4. 9.00pm)
Our Medieval forebears believed they shared the world with the dead and angels and demons battled for control of human souls. As the church’s grip on our beliefs increased, men and women were dragged before religious courts. Thousands were killed in the name of God.

Search facility goes live

I took the search engine out of beta testing yesterday, and after some minor teething troubles, with some of the internal links on the results page, it has been rolled out across the site.

When searching the site there are two options, below the search box, for carrying out the search either to search for all words or to search for the exact phrase. As with Google, Yahoo, MSN Live etc the results only link to a page containing the search term, to speed up the location of the subject of your search it is advisable to use “ctrl + F” to find the results within that page. More information about the search engine behind the site can be found here.

Also yesterday I added the entries from the parish registers covering marriages for the period 1755 – 1769. For whatever reason there do not appear to be many marriages taking place at this period of time so in some cases there is only one or two marriages for a five year period.