Word: edwin
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Because of its location in the temple of the Brahmins, WGBH is top-heavy with free talent. Recent shows included lectures by Pastor Martin Niemöller, Novelist Edwin (The Last Hurrah) O'Connor, Author-Ethnologist Oliver La Farge and Ambassador James B. Conant. British Labor Boss Hugh Gaitskell's three Harvard lectures on foreign policy were carried in full. Drama Critic Walter Kerr discussed contemporary theater with Playwright Arthur Miller. Harvard Law Professor Zechariah Chafee Jr. completed a 16-part series on the Constitution and human rights only a week before his death (TIME...
Hope-Taylor was guided to it by the Venerable Bede, whose history of early Britain (written in the 8th century) related that Edwin, a 7th century king of Northumbria, had a royal palace of sorts at Gefrin, which is now the small (six houses) village of Yeavering in the Cheviot Hills. No visible traces remained, but in 1951 Cambridge University made an air survey of the region. Pictures of a field of sprouting barley showed a vague rectangular shadow and a smaller, wedge-shaped...
...Working from these clues, Hope-Taylor concluded that the wedge-shaped area had been the site of a crude, roofless, theaterlike structure filled with wooden benches. Facing the benches was a dais protected from the weather by a screen of wickerwork daubed with clay. From this primitive rostrum King Edwin may have harangued his thegns. The benches where the thegns sat were probably arranged like a grandstand, the highest ones in the rear. At least, says Hope-Taylor, the rear benches were supported by thicker posts...
When King Edwin was not holding court in the theater, he was probably in the slightly more comfortable great hall next door. The hall measured 90 ft. by 45 ft. Charcoal fragments mixed with the earth showed that it must have been burned down at least once, and careful digging indicated that at least three halls had been built successively on the same site. Arson was standard practice in King Edwin's time...
...imagination than to historical fact. At Yeavering, Hope-Taylor found no trace of such gold-leaf splendors: only a few potsherds, knives, belt fittings, nails, loom weights and a single gold coin. But the finds date from the 7th century A.D.-and he feels reasonably sure that King Edwin really ruled from this barbaric palace. It may have been the actual hall where he was converted to Christianity. According to a legend repeated by the Venerable Bede, a pious thegn called his attention to a sparrow that flew into the hall in the dead of winter, lingered awhile...