On 25 November 1186, Becket appeared in a vision to Brother Andrew John. In this vision (recorded in detail by Gervase) the martyr bade the monk rise from his bed and follow him into the tower next to the choir. There, Andrew John was shown a large Catherine wheel hurling blue flame. Andrew John asked the name of the man who was leading him. Becket replied, ‘I am Thomas your archbishop, who for this church and in this church suffered martyrdom.’ Withdrawing from the wheel, Andrew John saw Baldwin approaching the phenomenon. Taking three swords and leaning on each in turn to test their strength, the archbishop summoned Prior Honorius. On his arrival, Baldwin said to him ‘I wish to destroy this new work [the recent renovations to the cathedral in honour of Becket], and for this purpose I have made this wheel, but without you I cannot move it.’ The dismayed prior obeyed the archbishop and summoned the other monks to help him. Andrew John begged Becket to intervene. The saint drew his sword, inscribed with letters of gold, and suddenly the archbishop vanished. Becket gave his sword to Andrew John, showing him the inscription ‘Gladius beati Petri apostoli’. He ordered Andrew John to present the sword to Honorius who should use it to destroy the Catherine wheel. Reluctant to disturb the prior, Andrew John had the vision three times before he finally spoke of it. According to Gervase, the Catherine wheel was interpreted by Honorius as symbolic of the new church that Baldwin planned to build as well as a representation of the destruction of the convent if Baldwin's plan was to proceed. The prior interpreted the sword as representing the process of appeal to Rome. Just as St Peter had attempted to protect Christ with his sword, so would the successors of Peter protect the monks with their spiritual weapons.

According to the vision, it was Baldwin's desire to destroy the cathedral convent, and the blessed martyr's wish that the monks resist with all their strength. The depiction of the Hackington church as a Catherine wheel is significant, since the wheel was a device of torture, or execution, to which the victim would be tied so that their bones might be shattered. This was the method by which Emperor Maxentius had hoped to execute St Catherine.

THE PRE-EMINENT political force in Zambian society from independence in 1964 to 1991 was the United National Independence Party (UNIP) led by its founder, President Kenneth Kaunda. UNIP's dominance of national politics was first highlighted in two competitive multi-party elections: one at the close of the colonial period in January 1964 when the party won an outright majority, and the other in 1968 when it increased its support across the country. UNIP consolidated its political hegemony in December 1972 when Kaunda declared Zambia a one-party state. This declaration ushered in a second and longer phase of UNIP's formal grip on power that ended only in 1991 when a popular uprising, spearheaded by a newly formed opposition party named the Movement for Multiparty Democracy (MMD), saw the reintroduction of multi-party politics and the subsequent defeat of Kaunda and his nationalist movement.

It should not be assumed that the one-party state was monolithic. General elections, which were competitive especially at parliamentary level, were held in 1973, 1978, 1983, and 1988. The first two of these have been the subject of detailed research by scholars of Zambian political history. The latter two, in contrast, have not, and are important because they took place after UNIP removed the unpopular restriction that had previously limited the number of candidates who could run for election to the National Assembly to three per constituency. In instances where there were more than three prospective candidates in a constituency, primary elections were held to determine the finalists. Although prospective candidates still had to apply to the party's Central Committee for adoption, the abolition of the primary elections paved the way for greater voter choice and more open electoral contests. Studying electoral contests in this greatly altered political environment can yield significant insights into our understanding of the workings of one-party participatory democracy.

Moreover, the 1983 and 1988 elections are of particular interest to this chapter because they occurred after Sata, who went on to become one of the key political actors in the one-party state until its demise, made his formal entry into Zambian mainstream politics in 1981. He ran for parliamentary office in both elections, defeating nine other contestants including an incumbent Member of Parliament (MP) in the first election before being re-elected five years later.

THE PERIOD between 1953 and 1964, generally described by researchers working on Zambia as the late-colonial era, was dominated by the rapid expansion of the colonial state and the push for better wages on the industrial Copperbelt. It also witnessed the intensification of the drive towards independence, led initially by the African National Congress (ANC) and later by the United National Independence Party (UNIP). This phase of Zambian history is important because it coincides with Michael Sata's migration from Northern Province to the Copperbelt, where he began work as a constable in the colonial police – a role that put him in direct conflict with African nationalists – before joining the trade union movement on the eve of independence in 1964.

In trekking to the Copperbelt, Sata followed well-trodden labour migration routes that had been established in the 1920s. By the 1950s, thousands of Africans had travelled between Northern Province and the Copperbelt and back again. Thus, at this time, Sata was one body in a great human tide. As well as being the economic powerhouse of the country, the Copperbelt also represented a training ground for political education for many Africans. A variety of prominent figures who were actively involved in the labour movement during the terminal stages of colonial rule subsequently took up leading political roles in the post-independence era. Despite the striking continuities between these eras, including the individual actors whose careers cut across these divides, few studies on Zambian history bridge the late-colonial and post-colonial periods. Most historical works take 1964 as either the end point or the start point. This may be due to researchers seeing the date of Zambia's achievement of formal independence as a historical demarcation that needs no additional justification. By drawing such a divide, however, they miss the connections in the subjects and interactions of relationships that cut across the transition, and the result is the production of a chopped-up national history that fails to capture narratives of continuity, such as how late-colonial influences manifest in the politics of the post-colonial period.

The letters in this calendar all concern the dispute between the monks and Archbishops Baldwin and Hubert Walter. The majority appear in the Canterbury letter collection. I have given the page numbers for these letters in Stubbs’ edition as well as folio references to the Lambeth manuscript. References to additional letters are to the printed versions when applicable or to the originals. Where there are extant duplicates, they have been mentioned in the contents column, although the list is by no means exhaustive.

When Biddy and Bill Cash saw a tumbledown, brick-built Jacobean manor house on a list of ‘Threatened Houses of Architectural Interest’ in June 1970, they couldn't resist the urge to investigate further. Bill was thirty-one and making his way in a career as a lawyer. Their son, William, had been born four years earlier, and Biddy and Bill liked the idea of establishing roots by means of a place in the country. On their first visit to Upton Cressett in Shropshire they found a completely derelict ruin. Pigs roamed freely around the wood-panelled rooms of the main house. The previous tenant, a farmer, had left behind the detritus of piles of grain and abandoned farm equipment. “It was a hot day,” Bill later remembered, “the ground floor stank like a summer farmyard. There was chicken and pig manure everywhere.” But there was to be no turning back. Biddy and Bill had fallen in love. William, their son, now explains that “my par-ents had become afflicted with that most British and expensive of diseases: the ‘dream’ of finding an old English manor house and restoring it, the more of an overgrown ruin beyond hope, the better.”

The family moved in and began the slow and painstaking task of restoring the property. None of it was easy. Bill decided that the best option, as a way of keeping control of budgets, was to renovate one room at a time, and never to spend more than a few hundred pounds per room. Plaster was repaired and painted white. Floors and roofs were made good. Biddy and Bill spent as much time as they could there, supervising builders when they weren't doing the work themselves. It was the saving of Upton Cressett. As William now says, “if a buyer or leaseholder hadn't been found, the house might have been yet another to fall victim to the wreckers’ ball as a way of avoiding a costly Conservation Order.” Instead, Bill applied his detailed understanding of the law of listed properties to the business of his own restoration work. Bill shared his expertise by preparing a “Manual of Legislation Affecting Historic Buildings and the National Heritage” for the HHA in 1976.

The alarms started clanging at 2:30am that Sunday morning. Each of the volunteer firemen in the village had a bell fitted in their house, to alert them to when they were needed at the station. In a rush, Barry Heaton got himself ready; within minutes he was out of the front door and running to join his crewmates at the fire station on Debden Road. Eric Byford was already there, having switched on the station lights and started up the communications equipment. Barry heaved open the metal concertina doors and started to put on his gear.

At first, Barry couldn't believe it when Eric shouted that the fire was at Shortgrove Hall. Shortgrove was a constant backdrop to village life. Built in 1684 for Giles Dent, it stood at the top of a hill to the north of the village, reached through ornate iron gates and across a classically designed bridge over the river Cam. The house was now empty, the Butler family having sold it a few years earlier to a Mr Geoffrey Allen. Barry remembered that Mr Allen lived at Duddenhoe End and had not yet moved in to Shortgrove. It must be a false alarm, surely?

It wasn’t. “We drove through the main gates past the Lodge and over the old bridge”, Barry later remembered, “and then in front of us, between the oak trees, was a scene we shall never forget.” The entire house was ablaze, and it was serious. “On every storey flames were pouring out of every window, with very little smoke.” Arthur Butler, the son of the previous owners, was staying that evening at his parents’ new house in the grounds of Shortgrove Hall. He vividly recalled the conflagration: “A huge ball of flame was shooting out of the front door and was curling upwards and backwards over the roof. The heat was intense, but the really terrifying thing was the noise of the flames – like two express trains passing simultaneously through a station.”

Immediately the fire crews set to work, connecting the hoses to the water mains. As well as Barry Heaton and Eric Byford, up to sixty firemen and a dozen pumps were called to the house from across north-west Essex and east Hertfordshire, from Thaxted, Stansted, Bishop's Stortford, and Harlow.

Below are short biographies of the main individuals involved in the dispute from 1184–1200. Names have been taken from the Canterbury letters and Gervase's Chronica. Individuals not alive at the time of the dispute, such as Thomas Becket, have not been included. When an individual was both a cardinal and a pope during the period, he is to be found under his papal name. At the end of each entry there are references to additional sources about the person which have not been directly referred to in the text.

Aaron, Monk of Canterbury

Aaron's name first occurs in 1187, when he was sent with conventual letters to be delivered to Archbishop Baldwin (Ep. Cant., 67 (no.80)]. He appears several times as an envoy to negotiate with the archbishop or the king (ibid., 67 (no.80), 292 (no.307), 315–17 (no.329)). On at least one occasion, May 1189, Baldwin refused to accept Aaron as a negotiator for the convent, suggesting Aaron was a prominent instigator of the convent's intransigence (ibid., 292 (no.307)). According to Ralph of Coggeshall, Aaron appeared in November 1190, where he was acting as a confessor of the monks, and Baldwin made his confession to one of them shortly before his death. This suggests that Aaron made the trip to the Holy Land as part of Baldwin’ entourage (Coggeshall, Chronica, 1576; Greatrex, Biographical Register, 66).

Alan, Third Prior of Canterbury

Alan appears as the third prior in 1189. At the beginning of August, Archbishop Baldwin summoned Alan and the other conventual obedientiaries to demand the deposition of Subprior Geoffrey and John of Bremble (Ep. Cant., 298–300 (no.314)). He was left in charge of the community at Canterbury in August 1189 (after the death of Prior Honorius), when Subprior Geoffrey went abroad to continue the monks’ appeal against the archbishop. In September, Alan received a letter from the subprior exhorting him to stand firm in the face of the archbishop's schemes at Lambeth (ibid., 307–8 (no.323); Greatrex, Biographical Register, 70).

Alexander of Dover, Monk of Canterbury

Occurs 1187–9. In September 1187, Alexander was one of several monks who appeared before the king in Normandy to explain the convent's case against Baldwin, returning early to Canterbury due to illness (Ep. Cant., 94–6 (no.121)).

One index of the revival in fortunes of privately owned country houses from the mid-1970s was the sharp fall after this point in the number of houses being offered to the National Trust. Those mansion properties that are nowadays held ‘in trust for the nation’ by either of the UK's National Trusts are mainly legacies of the post-war slump in country house fortunes in the 1940s and 1950s. Compared to this earlier phase of growth, relatively few mansion properties have been acquired by either of the Trusts since the conditions for country house owners improved so markedly after the finance acts of 1975 and 1976.

Perhaps we should not be so surprised by this. In many ways the high period of country house acquisition by the National Trust, from the 1940s to the early 1970s, was an aberration from its founding mission. When the Trust was established in 1895, its focus was not so much on houses, or even on built heritage more generally, but on land and landscape. The social housing cam-paigner Octavia Hill is often presented as the Trust's founding spirit, given the missionary zeal with which she pursued her energetic campaigns to improve the lives of the poorest in society. Yet at the very heart of the National Trust was an idea about legal rights to property and ownership, which was wholly original, indeed radical, in its conception. For this, the Trust's founding chairman, the lawyer Robert Hunter, deserved full intellectual credit.

The ability to hold land in trust was not itself original. Such concepts dated back to the Middle Ages, developed, it was said, to ensure that the estates of crusading knights were protected during their long periods of absence. Houses and estates might be placed into trust in situations where an heir inherited before his majority, or where the owner was incapacitated because of illness or some other misfortune. Trustees for estates took responsibility for the property and sought to manage it not for personal gain but in the interests of beneficiaries. Landed estates could be further bound by the practice of entail, where an owner was cast as merely a temporary custodian, holding property on behalf of as-yet-unborn heirs.

EDWARDIAN MUSIC. WHAT IMMEDIATELY springs to mind? Perhaps a stiff-collared Elgar and the confident swagger of Pomp and Circumstance, the splendour and authority of British tradition? Or perhaps a saucy music hall turn, a vanished world of idealised working-class culture, recalled through a nostalgic lens? Or – yet another rosy image – perhaps the folksongs and May dances of rural Merrie England?

It's all too easy to map music onto pre-conceptions of a glitteringly opulent age: the sunlit hedonism of society balls and country house weekends, that orderly society so soon to be shattered by the cataclysm of World War 1. Osbert Sitwell painted just such a picture of the role of music in the lives of pleasure-seeking Londoners in ‘the sweet and carefree atmosphere’ before the war: ‘An air of gaiety, unusual in northern climates, prevailed. Music flowed with the lightness and flash of water under the striped awnings and from the balconies… Night by night, during the summers of 1913 and ‘14, the entertainments grew in number and magnificence. One band in a house was no longer enough, there must be two, three even.’

But as historians have increasingly emphasised, the Edwardian was also a period of tumultuous social upheaval. The birth pangs of the labour movement and the marches of women suffragists were only the most visible signs of a country hurtling into modernity, sometimes painfully. At home, a constitutional crisis around 1910 clipped the wings of the landed aristocracy. Abroad, Britain's precarious empire was equally humiliated by the Second Boer War (1899–1902) and threatened by German technology and expansionism.

Music was also in transition. Far-reaching changes in British society were reflected in an ever-widening availability across social classes – while London's pivotal position internationally led to its becoming one of the centres of the new musical world. Reflecting ‘a ramshackle and amorphous society, characterised by a myriad contradictory trends and opinions’, Edwardian music often seems uncertain in direction, as well as extraordinarily diverse. It's partly this kaleidoscope that gives the period its fascination. And, if modern Britain was born in the early years of the twentieth century, this was certainly the case with regard to music as well.

A mostly instrumental long-player record that took its inspiration from the English landscape dominated the album charts in October 1974, and in the week of the opening of the V&A's Destruction of the Country House exhibition. Hergest Ridge was Mike Oldfield's follow-up to the phenomenally successful Tubular Bells, his bestselling debut of 1973. The sleeve of Hergest Ridge featured an aerial shot of the titular landscape feature: a distinctively shaped hill outside Kington in Herefordshire, close to the Welsh border. Oldfield had retreated here, to a house called The Beacon, as a way of coping with his sudden fame and public profile as well as to draw inspiration for his music.

A mile or two from Hergest Ridge, and therefore just off the edge of the aerial photograph on the sleeve of the record, was an equally distinctive country house and garden. Hergest Croft had suffered the depredations of wartime requisition after it was converted to a boarding school for girls. Nevertheless, it had narrowly escaped a listing in the catalogue for the Destruction show, and the family had resumed residence in 1953. In a clear case of nominative determinism, the Banks family made their money in banking (as well as in industry and the law). But successive generations of the family were also keen on banking of a more physical kind: building up the embanked surroundings of their house through plantings of trees and shrubs. William Hartland Banks married Dorothy Alford, daughter of the dean of Canterbury and, like her husband, a talented natural scientist. Together they first laid out the gardens at Hergest Croft in 1895, around the time that the house had been built to a fashionable arts and crafts design. The gardens became known for their exotics and other distinctive plantings: azaleas, cedars, rhododendrons, maples, and birches. The trees planted after the war by William and Dorothy's son Dick Banks, an industrialist and director of ICI, now have national collection status.

Dick's eldest son, Lawrence, made a career in banking, but also had a passionate interest in gardening. The two sides of his life were combined when he became treasurer of the Royal Horticultural Society.

In the conclusion to his introduction of the Canterbury letters, Stubbs condemned the monks for their resistance to the archbishop, stating that the ‘Hackington and Lambeth foundations may be regarded as the last attempt to utilise the property of the monasteries before the Reformation’. For him, the case was never tried on its merits and the monks are condemned for wasting the church's resources on appeals to Rome. In his opinion, the archbishop's plan was a good one. It would have:

This disparaging and anti-papal viewpoint is primarily due to Stubbs's Protestant faith rather than an objective assessment of the conflict. Irrespective of whether the proposed foundation was the last attempt to utilise monastic property, the monks were not wrong to resist the archbishops’ plans. They were not fighting for themselves, but to preserve the convent's rights and privileges for future generations; appealing to Rome was the only method they had. Endowing a new collegiate church was unlikely to free up parochial endowments for their ‘natural purpose’ but would simply have created a new source of patronage for the archbishops. Clearly, the metropolitans felt they needed this extra resource to have persisted in their efforts for almost fifteen years. However, after the final settlement in 1200, Hubert dropped the scheme. He never built a Premonstratensian house at Lambeth, nor did he get permission to build a secular college.

Stubbs is correct in claiming that the Canterbury case was never tried on its merits, if he considers the merits to be what the new church could achieve, such as a regular source of income for scholars and secular clergy who engaged in archiepiscopal administration. But this is not what the dispute was about; rather it concerned the impact the new church would have on the community at Canterbury. The monks feared it would ruin them, and they were probably right. Baldwin was clearly building his new church in honour of Becket and believed his plan was a continuation of the martyr's proposal, left unfinished due to his murder.

Easter weekend is normally one of the busiest for those country houses that open as attractions. Places that target family groups will often advertise special events, such as Easter egg hunts or cream teas. If the weather is kind – which cannot be guaranteed for an event that could in theory fall as early as late March – then large crowds can normally be expected. Mothers’ Day can also be another occasion that brings out lots of groups, to visit gardens or to enjoy a family meal. Mothers’ Day on Sunday 22 March 2020, however, was an unusually muted affair. A few days earlier, the British prime minister had announced that cafes, restaurants, and pubs must close their doors because of the growing numbers of cases of a new coronavirus, Covid-19. A day later, on Monday 23 March, large parts of the economy ground to a halt as the first government-mandated nationwide lockdown was announced.

At the time, most hoped that such measures might only be needed for a matter of weeks. Things did not quite turn out this way. Three national lockdowns followed, each lasting several months. The period from March 2020 to early 2023 saw an unprecedented level of state intrusion into private life and activity. All sectors of the economy suffered, but the hospitality and attractions sectors were hit harder than most. Every time new public health measures were introduced in response to sudden surges in case numbers, social events such as wedding celebrations were hit with especially tight controls. At one point, the only type of wedding that could take place involved no more than six people, with no celebratory event of any kind afterwards. Symbolising the effect such measures had, the British monarch was photographed attending the funeral service of her late husband in 2021, sitting alone and isolated in the pews of the chapel at Windsor Castle.

Those country houses that depended for their income on wedding events, or on income from tourist visits, faced horrendous business conditions. Although the government moved swiftly to provide emergency incomes for millions of workers now no longer able to work, the medium- to longer-term financial outlook was bleak.