Vignettes of England
On a family trip to England to look at prospective universities, we visited Durham, in the country’s North East. The scenic town has a cathedral and a castle, both dating to the 11th century, opposite each other across a grassy quad. We went to the cathedral for a Good Friday service of the Passion. The castle, which since the 19th century has housed one of the colleges of Durham University, is open to tour groups, and we joined one, along with a friend from London who’d graduated from that college.
The tour guide explained that William the Conqueror had a problem when he tried to take control of the area, which isn’t far from Scotland. He sent an earl, who was promptly killed. The same thing happened two more times. Then the bishop offered to take over, provided he hold secular as well as religious authority. This began the regional rule of prince-bishops, who had the right to raise armies, levy taxes and mint their own currencies. They were virtually autonomous as long as they remained loyal to the king of England, an arrangement that lasted four centuries until Henry the Eighth asserted more control.
I contemplated what kind of man would rule effectively as prince-bishop, at their height of that position’s powers. This would not be a blustery Pete Hegseth–type, with “Deus Vult” tattooed on his bicep, I reasoned, as such a man would be a walking embarrassment. Rather, it would be someone like Anthony Bek (c. 1245–1311), known for his bravery and chastity. Bek (also spelled Beck or Beke) handled a tumultuous career with aplomb, pushing back against a king when necessary, even allegedly jailing a royal messenger.
In Oxford, we participated in the Palm Sunday procession at Christ Church, walking behind a donkey. Our great tour guide to the university, Leonor, took us to lunch at St. Edmund’s Hall, where her friend’s astrophotography hung on the cafeteria walls. Oxford, like Durham, is divided into multiple colleges, though at Durham that’s purely a residential arrangement, whereas at Oxford each college has its own professors and other instructors. We stayed in rooms at Oxford’s Exeter College; in Durham we stayed in St. Chad’s, one of the smaller colleges. The various colleges have distinctive cultures and environs, so seeing them is a good idea before attending these universities; at Oxford, you specify which college you’re applying for at the outset, albeit there’s a chance you’ll be accepted by a different one, while at Durham you choose a college only after acceptance by the university.
Taking the train back to London, I looked at edits of a piece I’d written about extraterrestrials. On an earlier leg, we visited the London School of Economics, and I asked a woman at the desk about the fact that Mick Jagger had gone there. He hadn’t graduated, however, as she noted.
“Uncontrolled immigration, without integration,” pronounced our Uber driver in London, when asked what’s the biggest challenge the UK faces. He was white. The country would be better off with five years of Donald Trump than Keir Starmer, he told us. Trump’s corruption didn’t faze him, because he’s hardly unique in that; you can track Nancy Pelosi’s stock investments on X, which people are doing and becoming rich, mimicking her insider trading. France has its problems, he said to my Paris-based sister, but England’s are worse.
Another driver, this one in a traditional black taxi, told us that Joe Biden “couldn’t tell the time of day,” so it had looked like Trump would be better, but this wasn’t the case. Trump had attacked Iran, a country that posed no threat to the US. He also suggested that University College London was a hotbed of student leftism, a sense we got as well from the “liberated zone” we saw, with some cardboard boxes and a Palestinian flag. The driver also mentioned that we were near Madame Tussaud’s, but couldn’t understand why people would pay to see wax figures, when he wouldn’t pay to meet the people they depicted.
At the British Museum, I made sure to see the Cyrus Cylinder, which I’d presumed would be larger than its roughly nine inches in length, but still was pleased by its inscription starting, “I am Cyrus, king of the world.” Cyrus the Great lived up to his name, not least because, as Iranian Nobel Peace Prize–winner and democracy activist Shirin Ebadi put it, he was “the very emperor who proclaimed at the pinnacle of power 2500 years ago that ‘he would not reign over the people if they did not wish it.’” And who “promised not to force any person to change his religion and faith and guaranteed freedom for all.”