More

I've noticed that there is a new (or new to me) more button on Google Maps UK which allows allows you to display geo tagged Wikipedia articles and Panoramia photos.

These selections don't persist on an embedded map, but you can see them on a link.

Here's one centred on the office which includes the Wikipedia articel on Merton Priory that I originally wrote and tagged, as well as this photo of the water wheel which is better than mine. The willow is gone now I'm sorry to say.

The Ghost of Merton Abbey

Could Edmund Herierd, prior on the cusp of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, be the ghost we have been looking for?

Merton, like other houses following the Augustinian rule, was subject to episcopal jurisdiction and open to diocesan visitation.

Towards the end of 1304 a visitation of the priory during the voidance of the see of Winchester was held by the Archbishop of Canterbury, when various irregularities were alleged against the prior, Edmund Herierd.

Eventually, in consequence of these charges, the prior, whilst vehemently protesting his innocence, was compelled to resign on 25 September 1305. Permission was granted him to occupy rooms within the priory suitable for himself and any one member of the house whom he might choose to live with him; he was also assigned a squire of the body and a servant to attend on him, with a suitable allowance for each. (fn. 82)

The Bishop of Winchester notified the vacancy to the king, as patron, and licence was granted to elect a successor. The chapter met on 1 December, but could not agree, some voting for the re-election of the late prior and the rest making choice of William de Brokesburn. Apparently the numbers for each were equal, and a double return was made to the bishop, who endeavoured to bring about a compromise, but without success, and on 3 December certified their proceedings to the king. (fn. 83)

Edward I. issued a mandate to the bishop to provide a head for the priory of Merton 'out of the bosom of that church,' in order to settle the discords that had arisen since the cession of Prior Herierd. By the king's ordinance the elected persons came before the bishop, and of their own free will renounced all right they might claim from their election; but the proctors of the parties elected not having come with power of renunciation or of submitting to the bishop's ordinance, the bishop dismissed the elected persons. Thereupon the sub-prior and convent unanimously consented to the provision of a prior by the bishop if the royal assent were given. (fn. 84) The bishop's choice fell upon Geoffrey de Alkemondbury, one of the canons, and to him the temporalities were restored on 6 March 1305-6. (fn. 85)

During these proceedings the ex-prior endeavoured to strengthen his party among the canons by lavish entertainment and bringing counter-charges against his opponents, with the result that he was reduced to the position of an ordinary canon, and ordered to spend the remainder of his days with his brethren in the cloister. (fn. 86)

From: 'Houses of Austin canons: Priory of St Mary of Merton', A History of the County of Surrey: Volume 2 (1967), pp. 94-102. URL: http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.asp?compid=37817. Date accessed: 03 August 2007.

"Reduced to the position of an ordinary canon, and ordered to spend the remainder of his days with his brethren in the cloister" he wanders the site to this day, unable to find peace until his bones are laid in the Chapter House; the right and proper resting place due a prior.


Prior, the title of which he was stripped by calumny, collusion and deceit.

Odds and Ends

The Profit Burglar and I went to the launch of Dave Saxby's book in the Chapter House after work yesterday, an event which - with Gatsbyesque elan - he didn't actually attend himself.

Thence, fortified with a take away from the reliable Colliers Wood Tandoori, back to my gaff to set up a Media Center PC under the TV. The main reason for this is that Paul has finished a first pass at the program to play "backed up" DVDs that I trailed here, but it has also struck me that it will be no bad idea to have a computer in that slot domestically with the BBC due to launch its Interactive Media Player later this month.

Though we could fine tune the interface, Paul's software works a treat for navigating and viewing content. It struck me this morning as I was walking to work, that if I set up a version of it that catalogued only the New Ninja Bomber's DVDs, and moved the XBOX 360 to his room he could have pushbotton access to all his favourites with the XBOX talking to the PC via Microsoft's Media Extender technology. This will require a network upgrade of some sort. Probably best to get a gigabit hub and run a Cat 5 cable between the ground and first floor.

I also took the opportunity once we were set up to navigate the Media Center Guide to More4 at 8pm on Sunday and set it to record The West Wing, now and for the rest of the run. I missed "Ways and Means" in series 3 a couple of weeks ago to add to these omissions, but with any luck I shouldn't miss any more.

After a posterior, a priory

I bumped into Dave Saxby yesterday, and learned that his magnum opus on Merton Priory is finally at the printers, so 256 pages of illustrated meaty goodness concerning the church complex that dominated this area until Henry VIII beat up on it, will soon be available for you to own.

Click on the image for more details.

In Excelsis Geo

The Merton Abbey page in Wikipedia has been updated by a bot which tagged it with a message saying:

This apparently location-related article appears to lack geographic
coordinates
You can help by adding them. Please don't be overly precise.

So I've pinpointed the location on Google Maps, and generated the Wikipedia code on World Wind, then updated the page.

The coordinates are rendered on the Wikipedia page as a link that takes you to this Wikimedia page which in turn plugs the location into all sorts of resources on the net.

There is definitely a lot of interesting stuff going on in the general area of geo-tagging.

Manuel II Palaiologos

I was reflecting morosely over the weekend that the unseemly fracas about the Pope's address at the University of Regensberg was probably created, never mind exacerbated, by the default agit-prop setting of the goonish mainstream media.

The putative hive mind of the internet hasn't put much meat on the bones either. I checked out the Wikipedia page for Manuel II Palaiologos - the Christian Emperor whose quoted words sparked the "crisis". Admittedly it has been updated 53 times over the last few days, but as you can see from this comparison not a lot of valuable information has been forthcoming.

The discussion page is a little more useful. For me, it is evocative of both place and historical context to learn that:

Manuel was begging Henry IV of England for a new crusade to save Constanople from the besieging Turks, when a message arrived with the news that Tamerlane's (Timor's) Mongol army had badly defeated the Turks, thus saving Constantinople.

Henry IV held his Privy Council at Merton Priory in 1407, probably in the very Chapter House (a stone's throw from where I'm sitting) that Paul is bringing to the infosphere.

Small world.

Merton Priory

I am back in Wales visiting the family with my five year old this week so blogging will be light.

My colleague Paul is burning the midnight oil for Colliers Wood producing a 3D model of the ancient and lost Merton Priory.

He's blogging the development at http://mertonPriory.coraider.com/ to help us collaborate with local experts.

Facts and Factions

On March 1st, Wikipedia, the online interactive encyclopedia, hit the million-articles mark, with an entry on Jordanhill, a railway station in suburban Glasgow. Its author, Ewan MacDonald, posted a single sentence about the station at 11 P.M., local time.

There is a good article in the New Yorker about the history and status of, plus the controversy that continues to rage around, Wikipedia. (Read the whole piece here.)

This has naturally sent me back to look at the modest Wikipedia page that I created about Merton Priory in April last year. Fifteen months later the page remains modest, but it is on version twenty so it is being edited every few weeks.

Speaking of Merton Priory, Paul has constructed a 3D virtual model of it in Google Sketch Up and we've been invited to a Merton Priory Trust Steering Group meeting early in August to show it off and see if it may be of any use to them.

Building it up has certainly raised some questions on Paul's mind about the orientation of the building so it will be good to have a chin wag with some real experts.

Higher Mind

I've written before (here and here) about the long vanished Merton Priory in whose grounds our offices would have stood.

It turns out that it was consecrated on May 3, 1117, so I just missed its 888th anniversary yesterday. I always find it strange as I am walking to work to imagine that there was once a church as big as Westminster Abbey on the same site as , and of approximately the same dimensions, as the enormous Sainsbury's SavaCentre that has been thrown up there now.

Henry VIII's men demolished it in 1538 as part of the dissolution of the monasteries. When you consider that Henry VIII was pretty much a contemporary of Michelangelo it really is sickening to imagine how much of our heritage was lost in the Reformation.

The Taliban's dynamiting of the Bamiyan Buddhas seems to me to be a modern desecration on the same sort of scale as what once happened in the view from my window.

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P.S. Googling around for something fun to write about the numerology of the 888th anniversary of the consecration I have come across an embarrassment of riches.

In the Greek mysteries, the number 888 represented the "Higher Mind." The Greek variation of "Jesus," "Iesous," equals 888. The number 666 represented the "Mortal Mind." In the New Testament, 666 is called the number of "the Beast."

Which is at least vaguely diverting, but how about the following for any techies out there:

Http = 8 + 400 + 400 + 80 = 888, the number of Christ. Messiah = 888 in ancient Hebrew/Mesopotamian numerology. The internet is a false Christ. The world wide web confirms this, as www = 666.

You can read the whole batty thing at http://www.wizardofeyez.com/666.html.

I am off to record myself saying Tim Berners Lee and then play it backwards.

Wikipedia: Merton Priory

Wikipedia is a Web-based, free-content encyclopedia, which is written collaboratively by volunteers. It consists of 195 independent language editions sponsored by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its purpose is to create and distribute, worldwide, a free encyclopedia in as many languages as possible. Wikipedia is one of the most popular reference sites on the Web receiving around 50 million hits per day.

Wikipedia contains approximately 1.5 million articles, more than 500,000 of which are in its English language edition.

After being surprised to find a Wikipedia entry for Colliers Wood last week that mentioned Merton Priory I decided to create an entry for the Abbey. (I assume that the Abbey and the Prioiry are one and the same thing).

My new entry is at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merton_Priory. Creating it was piece of cake.

I put a paragraph or so in that included internal links to Adrian IV etc. and edited the Colliers Wood entry to include a link to my new page. Since I did that someone else has come along and added the categories Merton and Abbeys in England.

All in all Wikipedia is very impressive. I must find out more about it.

It will be interesting to see if anyone else takes it upon themselves to improve the page I added. We have arranged to visit the Chapter House on Wednesday lunchtime so I may be able to update it myself after that.

Browsing the connections from Saint Thomas � Becket to the Priory to Walter de Merton to Merton College Oxford to T. S. Eliot, makes me think it would be fun to see Murder in the Cathedral in the Colour House Theatre on the site here.

The English Pope

Our offices in Merton Abbey Mills are on a site where a knight called Gilbert (who was granted the estate by Henry I in 1114) founded an Augustinian priory in 1117 at the point where the old Roman road crossed the River Wandle.

The stories of the Priory and the site are fascinating. One of the Abbey's many claims to fame is that it was the alma mater of Nicholas Brakespeare, who is known to history as Adrian IV, the only English man ever to become Pope.

Adrian's most controversial act was a bull that allowed Henry II of England to annex Ireland to his kingdom. "...[S]trive to imbue that people with good morals, and bring it to pass, as well through yourself as through those whom you know from their faith, doctrine, and course of life to be fit for such a work, that the church may there be adorned, the Christian religion planted and made to grow, and the things which pertain to the honor of God and to salvation be so ordered that you may merit to obtain an abundant and lasting reward from God, and on earth a name glorious throughout the ages," he wrote the king. ........ The pope based his authority on the Donation of Constantine, which was later shown to be a forgery. Although a few scholars deny that Adrian issued the troubling bull, the evidence is convincing that he did.

Strange how actions reverberate through history. The "Donation of Ireland" was around 1155 and 850 years later the dispute is still going strong.