In 1992 HilaryKilpatrick remarked that ‘twenty years ago the Arabic novelwas regarded as practically synonymous with the Egyptiannovel’ (‘The Egyptian Novel from Zaynab to 1980’: 223).Though novel production had by 1992 become firmly rooted inmost Arab countries the ‘relatively longer history of thegenre’ in Egypt ‘enable[d] its different stages ofdevelopment to be distinguished and studied more easily thanis the case in countries where it has had a life of only twoor three decades’. Judging from several recent novels, a newstage in that development is taking place. The DemocracySpring, or ‘the Arab Spring’, that stretched roughly fromDecember 2010 to mid-2012 and seemed to cross many bordersalmost at the same time has unsurprisingly become apersistent focus for Egyptian novelists, and they areoffering the most cohesive set of responses to thatstartling turn in contemporary Arab history. Their creativespectrum of reflections on the initial hopes and ultimatedisillusionment range from ongoing defiance and hope, to aresigned acceptance, echoing Alphonse Karr's infamous quip:‘plus ça change, plus c'est la mêmechose’. Formalistically this range of responseshas expressed itself in self-deprecating wit, demonstrablein Nael Eltoukhy's Women of Karantina;surrealist abstraction and universalist imagery in BasmaAbdel Aziz's The Queue; a despairingdystopic vision of a relentlessly brutal future in MohammedRabie's Otared; and a personalphilosophical reflection on the nature of change and stasis,in Yasmine El Rashidi's Chronicle of a LastSummer. Only when such very different works areread together can one appreciate the complex psychologicalupheaval that is very much alive in Egyptian – and Arabic –society. For these writers, time itself becomes a centralcharacter, suggesting authors who seek in their craft anominal agency over a series of traumas that remain beyondpersonal control. El Rashidi is most traditional, creating aprotagonist writing as a memoirist who remembers herchildhood and traces her history up to the present.

The Royal Navy was active in the Mediterranean for almost three and a half centuries, from the first expedition to combat the activities of the Algerian corsairs to the final humiliation of the Suez crisis. In fact, of course, it continued with occasional forays into the Mediterranean after 1956, including intervening in Libya in 2012 in order to assist the overthrow of a particularly unsavoury dictator and rescuing desperate refugees from Africa afterwards; and if one counts the Levant Company's ships as representative of the English kingdom from 1580, it had also been present in the sea for forty years before the Algerian expedition of 1620.

For much of that time the British naval presence in the Mediterranean was only occasional in strength, and otherwise minimal. Only in major wars, and not always then, did the Royal Navy arrive in the Mediterranean in real strength. The earliest cases were the contrasted presence of the armed ships of the Levant Company and the English privateers/pirates who infested the sea and bothered the Venetians. Both of these were a mix of private and public enterprise: privateers were licensed by the English government until the peace of 1604, but they slipped into piracy when out of the government's view, and became openly piratical once the Spanish war ended; the Levant Company operated as a near independent arm of the English state, and its ships were deliberately sizeable and well-armed because of the threat posed by corsairs, privateers, and pirates. Both of these groups were privately financed; it is difficult to separate public and private participation.

This may be considered the earliest phase of the English naval presence, one of essentially private naval actions, but with significant input by the English state. The increased threat of the corsairs (whose capabilities were enhanced by English and other European skills), after about 1600 coalesced into their widespread activity, throughout the Mediterranean and into the Atlantic. The suppression of this threat was the object of successive naval expeditions from 1620 to the 1680s. These anti-corsair campaigns constitute the second phase of British naval involvement, a series of intermittent campaigns directed at the corsairs, with only limited success, lasting until the 1680s.

Moussa Diagana

Moussa Diagana was born in 1946 in the small, relatively isolated town of M'Bout in southern Mauritania. On finishing school he first became a teacher in Nouadhibou, the country's second largest city, before going on to study in the capital, at the University of Nouakchott. Diagana was an exceptional student who progressed to Tunisia for his master's degree (1972-1976) before taking a doctorate in the sociology of development at the University of Paris 1 (1977-1980). An occasional playwright, who has been made Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres de la R.publique fran.aise, Diagana from 1989 earned his living working for the United Nations Development Programme, mostly in Mali, before more recently moving to the UN Office for Project Services running programmes in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

La Lénde du Wagadu vue par Sia Yatabéré (The Legend of Wagadu as Seen by Sia Yatabere) was Diagana's second play – his first, the unpublished Le mariage contrarié (The Thwarted Marriage) dating back to 1968. La Légende was written at a time when amateur theatre was becoming enormously popular in the Mauritanian capital. Formal drama, as opposed to rich indigenous oral and performance forms, had been first brought to Mauritania, as to so many other European colonies, via colonial schools. The first Mauritanian play was written only in the 1950s, just a few years before the country voted for independence from France in 1960. Early plays focused on promoting communism and pan-Arab nationalism but, with little state support, theatre was slow to grow. However, in the 1980s and early 1990s a new crop of enthusiastic theatre makers and audiences emerged in the capital. More than a dozen new non-professional companies were established in this period, popular plays regularly sold out, the government built a national theatre and for the first time made a limited investment in theatre training (Rubin, 1999).

This was the context in which Moussa Diagana wrote his 1988 success, staged first by the Dijon-based Franco-Mauritanian company, Theatre de l'Espour, with help from the French Cultural Institute and directed by the French actor and director Patrick La Mauff.

From the late eleventh and into the twelfth centuries the area stretching from the Lune and the Tees to the Clyde and the Forth underwent a revolution in its ecclesiastical organisation in ways that can be seen as the effects of both a process of transformation initiated by the elite at diocesan level and fundamental changes in religiosity. The promotion of saints’ cults, for instance, was integral to the rise and consolidation of dioceses, yet at the same time a manifestation of religious sentiment at all levels of society. The foundation of reformed monastic houses, characteristic of the period in this region and in Europe as a whole, was the product of high-level, high-status patronage that arose from complex religious, cultural, political and social motives; at the same time, it embraced the aspirations of lesser benefactors and recruits to the monastic life, and engineered a transformation in economic activities and landholding. This chapter uses such themes to investigate commonalities and differences in experience on both sides of the Anglo-Scottish Border.

The diocesan framework

Around the year 1000 there was only one diocese that lay fully within the area bounded by the Tees and the Forth, and it had been in existence for only a few years. This was Durham, which owed its rise to prominence – as the centre of both the diocese and a cult – to the presence of St Cuthbert. This great Northumbrian saint, the bishop of Lindisfarne who died in 687, had progressed to sanctity through the merits of his life, his miracles and his uncorrupt body, which was first revealed to be in that state eleven years after his death. The island monastery of Lindisfarne had remained his resting place until 875 when the ‘congregation of St Cuthbert’ – the custodians of his body and his cult – began a series of wanderings which culminated 120 years later in 995 with their settlement at Durham. The community kept alive the idea of the bishopric and preserved records of Cuthbert's lands and his miracles. Durham was, indeed, seen as the successor of Lindisfarne; and, as such, its rights in theory if not in practice stretched right across to the west coast. Durham could make claims to wide territories, but otherwise the diocese as yet lacked form and cohesion.

‘He that hath ears to hear, let him hear.’ Few gospel passages seem more fitting as a sermon text than Luke 8:8, which introduces the parable of the sower, for the seed that falls on stony or on fertile ground is the word of God. Towards the end of the fifteenth century, John Alcock based an elegant and distinctive sermon at Paul's Cross on that text. Bishop Alcock's sermon was conceptually rich. A complex analogy between the Church and secular government provided the unifying idea. Specifically, the sermon made play on the king's chancery and its productions: Christ's injunctions were likened to royal proclamations, to both of which pronouncements Alcock's audience should listen attentively. The legal privileges that officers in chancery enjoyed were paralleled in those privileges that clergymen ought to have been enjoying. Magna Carta, the sermon insisted, guaranteed all ecclesiastical liberties to which the Church laid claim. This argument is not the sermon's only interesting feature. Conceivably, Alcock's address provides the sole surviving example of a sermon preached at Paul's Cross in the late fifteenth century; certainly, it was one of the very first sermons to have been printed. Such a noteworthy sermon deserves full discussion. The first half of this article considers the preacher, his pulpit and the sermon's printing. The second half explores the sermon's content in the context of relations between clergy and laity and between Church and state.

John Alcock had risen to prominence as a Yorkist civil servant: he had graduated from chancery to the bishopric of Rochester in 1472, served two unfortunate princes of Wales (Edward V and Arthur), twice deputised as chancellor in the 1470s, and briefly held the same position at the start of Henry VII's reign until the return of John Morton, whom he succeeded as bishop of Ely in October 1486. We know of some other occasions on which Alcock preached. At his installation as bishop of Worcester in 1476, he delivered a sermon, as was conventional, on the gospel Ego sum pastor bonus. He preached at the opening of parliament in 1472 and in 1485. During Henry VII's first progress in May 1486, Alcock gave ‘a bref and a fructifull sermonde’ in his cathedral of Worcester and also at Gloucester and Bristol, expounding the papal bull confirming the king's title. Alcock was esteemed for his preaching.

When the Reverend Josiah Forshall and Sir Frederic Madden published the first complete edition of the Wycliffite Bible in 1850, the format they adopted, in which parallel columns allowed for comparison between an earlier version of the text and a later one, encouraged scholars to pursue a range of questions about the movement's translation practices. This arrangement was of particular interest with respect to the shift from a syntactically inflexible early version of the Bible to a more supple and fluent late version. Whereas the early version carries Latin word order and syntax over into English, the late version eschews exact transposition, striving instead for a translation more accessible to the lay reader – what Wycliffites repeatedly call the “open” biblical text. The idea of scriptural openness or intelligibility is most recognizable, perhaps, in connection to Jerome, who defended his choice to correct the Latin Bible in such a way that it would convey the sense derived from Hebrew and Greek originals. Wyclif, though not a biblical translator like Jerome, shared with patristic writers the conviction that the word of God was not confined to any one language, and therefore that biblical translation was possible so long as the translator captured the divinely intended sense of obscure words and passages. In fact, he had gone further than Jerome, whose attempts to recover what he called the hebraica veritas suggested a clear hierarchy among the tres linguae sacrae (Hebrew, Greek, and Latin).

The inhabitants of late-medieval south Wales had access to a wide range of native and imported forms of monumental commemoration. The nature of this supply was of course important in shaping fundamental aspects of the region's commemorative culture, but just as crucial was the influence of the demand end of the market, and it is to the patrons of monuments that we must now turn. What kinds of people commissioned and were commemorated by sepulchral monuments in south Wales? How did their status and background dictate the appearance of their monuments? How did the character of this group change over the period, and how did this in turn affect the region's monumental landscape?

Written evidence of the process of commissioning monuments in Wales during this period is scanty. There are no surviving contracts as there are for a small number of English tombs, but a handful of testamentary requests have come to light. As wills are rarely fulsome sources of evidence for the patronage of monuments it is not surprising that these examples are not very forthcoming about the process of ordering a monument, but they at least give us some sense of the social classes that were interested in doing so and, to some extent, the form of monument that was required. The lack of satisfactory written evidence is ultimately of little concern to the focus of this chapter, however, as the monuments are themselves sufficient witnesses to the status, and frequently the identity, of those they commemorate. This is not to say that they are foolproof in this respect. As chapter five will demonstrate, monuments were sometimes designed to obscure or enhance the truth about their subjects rather than lay it bare, while the identity of the patrons of many of the surviving anonymous cross slabs must remain lost to us.

In order to analyse the nature of the patronal group commissioning monuments in south Wales it is necessary first to return to the break-down of monument types outlined in chapter one. Graph 3 (above) indicates the numbers of monuments known to have been erected to clerics, ‘knights’, women and civilian males throughout the period, as well as the small number of others which are either of indeterminate type or depict pilgrims or cadavers.

Musa IdrisOkpanachi, an Associate Professor of English at theDepartment of English, Federal University, Dutse, Jigawastate, has authored three collections of poems: TheEaters of the Living (2007), From theMargins of Paradise (2012), and Musicof the Dead (2016). Dark, haunting images ofblood, corpses, and cemetery recur in his poetry, apparentlydepicting the regularity of death in his country. Byutilizing satiric and hyperbolic elements, limpid dictioninterspersed with sepulchral images, Okpanachi uncovers thedegeneration usually indicative of postcolonial failure. Itis this persistent degeneration in Nigeria that animatesOkpanachi's preoccupation with funereal imagery.

His latestpoetry collection, Music of the Dead, ismade up of 72 poems. It opens with ‘A Long Silence’, a prosepoem which presents in dense rhythm a montage of uncannyscenes of ‘an age stranger than time and chameleon’ (1). Inthis strange age, the news of people dying is so common, butthe causes of their deaths might seem ludicrous were it notstrange. Due to the commonness of death in the land, thepoet laments that ‘the graveyards are full; the country is acemetery in the hands of the dead’ (2). The poem prefacesthe kind of grim imagery one will mainly come across in thecollection – imagery that induces anything but hope andcheer.

The sequence ofpoems in ‘Dogs and Angels 1-111’ narrate the manifestationsof ‘gallows’, ‘nooses’, ‘graves’, ‘houses ablaze’,‘cemetery’ etc., (9-12). ‘The Forerunner’ portrays theruler's perversity which leaves behind a trail of death(18), while the poem ‘Sharks’ is shot through with grislyimages:

The theme ofdeath finds more resonance in ‘Black Flower’, a poemrecounting the ‘seasons of massacre’ (28). In ‘The Hawkersof Blood’, the poet comments on the sense of viletriumphalism exhibited by killers who boast that they areheirs of the ‘primitive gods of war’ and delight ‘incelebration of death’ (76). The scenes depicted in this poemevoke the devastation wrought in certain parts of Nigeria byBoko Haram, an Islamist terrorist group.

On 1 May 1503, Thomas Savage, the archbishop of York, and Thomas Magnus, his secretary, held an inquisition into the state of the Forest of Pickering, in north Yorkshire. They were required to investigate a protracted dispute between two local gentlemen, Sir Richard Cholmeley, the master forester of Pickering, and Sir Roger Hastings, whose ancestors traditionally had held that office as far back as the thirteenth century. Hastings alleged that Cholmeley and his servants had ‘made, don, [and] suffered great wast in the seid Forests & parks, bothe [to the] wods & deere … which wilbe to the distruccion of the seid wods & game except remedy by yor wysedom be therfor provided’. Cholmeley denied that any such waste and destruction had taken place. The investigators Savage and Magnus initially found the matter difficult to decide, because they could not find reliable witnesses on either side: the officers in charge of the everyday administration of the Forest, whom they asked to testify, also happened to be Hastings's servants and were thus, as Magnus wrote in the inquisition return, ‘not … good lovers to the said Sir Richarde’. Unable to winnow out the truth from the obstructive locals, then, Savage and Magnus decided to take direct action. ‘Being perfitely enformed’ that the Forest had a circumference of about 60 miles, they took eight people ‘and went sodenly into the said foreste’. Within just two hours, their searches brought them between 140 and 160 red deer, and around 500 fallow deer, ‘and soe we avewed thaym at the same sodeyn assemble … and as to the distruccion of woddes we canne not fynde [it] in any wise’. Cholmeley was vindicated, and was subsequently entrusted with managing another royal hunting park in Yorkshire, at Raskelf.

Those relatively few historians who have studied the Forests in late-medieval England, like Sir Roger Hastings before them, have decried the waste and destruction of their governance and administration during this period. The first modern account of Forest law, by G.J. Turner for a Selden Society volume of the early twentieth century, stated that ‘after 1301 the whole forest administration was from various causes in a state of decay’. Since then, similar comments, invoking ‘weakness’, ‘decline’, ‘decay’, ‘chaos’, or ‘desuetude’, and even ‘effeteness’ have been made by almost every subsequent historian who has investigated the subject.