20 Sunday in London and Hampton Court

Sunday morning on Kensington High Street in London is a very still place. At 7:00 it is still but by 8:30 it begins to stir. Yet the activity and sounds of the city are so much more relaxed than on the preceding days.


Penny and I had to make our way to the student hotel in order to catch the coach. Being our third day in the city we are confident we can make this trip without any hitches. We walk the half block to the bus stop and see our bus pulling away. This is not a problem as the next one will arrive in less than 15 minutes. We have time to sit and watch and listen to London.


As we wait for the bus I begin to realize that I am hearing music. It is very faint but it is the sound of a wood flute or horn. It sounds like one of the clarinet like flutes or a “recorder” that you played in grade school music. As I listen I quickly pick up on the redundancy of this music. The musician is playing the same 4 or 5 notes. The last note is over an octave higher than the preceding ones. It is played over and over. Gradually the volume begins to increase and I suddenly realize that the musician is COMING TOWARDS US! OK it wasn’t that scarey at 8:00 in the morning but it would have been really eerie at night.


As the sound of the pipe flute rose to a level to rival the more muted street sounds and since there were nearly silent moments in the sporadic Sunday city traffic, the music was very distinct as the man playing walked in to view. He came down a side street directly across from our bus stop and went into a news stand and stopped playing just at that moment.


I wonder about his story. It appeared obvious that he was trying to master the musical phrase but why? Was this “I have always wanted to learn to play this instrument and today is the day?” Was this an obsessive compulsive behavior? Or was this one of those subway musician “wantabes”. Although I do not think I saw or heard as many on this trip there were a lot of folks in the subway tunnels playing music with a hat laying out in front looking for tips. Some of them are very good playing show tunes or jazz. Others are just overly optimistic hoping for money when the music is just pitiful.


Occasionally we passed through the same station a couple of time in the same day and the resident musician may still be there. I noticed one such person was playing the same song both times. Coincidence? Or does the person have a one song repertoire? I guess you could probably get by learning just one song really well. The average audience time is about 15 seconds as people rush by to catch the train.


When we arrived at our student hotel stop we found a young couple who were asking about how much it would cost to get to a certain stop. We gave them our day passes that they could use for the rest of the day since we would no longer need them. They seemed very pleased.

We had some time before the bus was to leave so I walked over to Russell Square a small park and sat and watched the children and parents playing.





We boarded the bus to set off for Hampton Court and Gordon gave a wonderful mini-lecture on Hampton court.


The original house was built by Cardinal Woolsey who was the Archbishop under Henry VIII. Men of the church at that time were not always people who had as their primary motivation the service of God’s Kingdom. Some of them were in the profession to make money. This describes Woolsey. After accumulating great wealth Woolsey built this grand house in 1514.


Henry VIII wanted a divorce from his second wife Catherine (he received an annulment from the Pope to put away his first wife) to marry Anne Boleyn. Woolsey was unable to convince the Pope to grant Henry the divorce. This resulted in Woolsey falling out of favor with the King. Henry would likely have had Woolsey executed but Woolsey died of consumption before Henry could cut off his head. But the end result was that Henry absorbed Hampton House into the Royal Properties. It became Hampton Court.


We arrived at Hampton court and found the information booth that gives out the head sets for the audio tour. These are wonderful. Places and objects have numbers and you punch it in and someone tells you about the place.


Henry VIII lived well. The first places we went were the Kitchens. These are huge. They often had to feed 600 people every meal and that does not include the servants who also had to eat. Each day was an organizational achievement. Most people think that the King just magically got what he wanted including food. This was not true. They had to pay for all the things they consumed. We saw the offices of the accountants which overlooked the delivery area and someone had the job of checking what came in and then paying the bills.






All of this and the cooking was done behind the scenes. The King and Queen and all of the court never saw anything but the food magically appearing from behind the tapestries where a door was hidden.





Henry VIII and most other royal households often had several palaces around the country. They moved every few months or so. The reason may have been less political than it was practical. Imagine feeding as many as 800 to a 1000 people 2 or 3 meals a day. It would not take long to literally use up all the food resources in the surrounding area. So they moved to a new location.

Some Henry VIII food facts:

1. The Royal household ate mostly meat (perhaps as much as 85%) to show the visitors (both local subjects and foreign dignitaries) how much wealth and power they had. This is the same reason that the grand rooms were so grand. Just to show people what you had the power to do.

2. They probably ate very little chicken. Wild birds like pheasants would have been eaten but not chickens very often. The reason? It was a waste of resources. Old chickens are too tough to really enjoy. Young chickens are in the midst of their productive lives. If you kill a young hen you lose all of the eggs the hen would have laid most of which would be eaten but also the baby chicks would not be born and thus no new chickens.

3. Same thing with milk. People did not likely drink fresh milk because to do so would mean you consume the raw material used for making butter or cheese. With little means to keep things cool butter and cheese would last far longer than fresh milk.

4. They did drink lots of beer and Henry would have served a lot of wine. It was vintage wine imported from France. Vintage means made this year. It was described as new wine with a sharp taste. They evidently thought it was good.

Half of the building is from the time of Henry VIII and the other half was built some time later by William of Orange. He was a Dutch member of royalty who married Mary a member of the English royal family. Thus we have William and Mary and football. William became king because he was protestant and not Catholic like the former King Edward. After Henry VIII could not get a divorce from the Pope he started his own church in England and gave himself a divorce. Thus much of the country became protestant.

William was less rich than most of the former kings of England partly because he was always fighting wars with other countries. But when you are King you still have to keep up appearances at home and so he needed to remodel Hampton court. He wanted to tear down what Henry VIII (really Cromwell) had built but he did not have the money so he just added on to the building. (That reminds me of the Owens dynasty in Liberty). He did not bother trying to match the architectural styles He just stuck the new part on the side of the old house. It looks a bit out of place.

The Old Exterior




The New Exterior

The new part has large Greek columns party because William wanted to compare himself to the Greek gods. The building has telltale signs of his lack of money. One was the painted ceilings. The paintings are beautiful but evidently they were less costly than paying carvers to make wooden or stone cornices or the like. Another clue of insufficient funds was the marble facings on the interior doors. Beautiful stone imported from some far off land? On closer inspection it is wood that has been painted to look like marble. It was nice to know that even the great kings of England had to cut corners.

We had about half an hour left and we went out into the gardens surrounding the Palace. They have been beautifully restored to the plans that William and Mary had drawn. The gardens are lovely.

We thought we could exit the property from the gardens but at about 2:45 we discovered that the only exit is back through the house to the front. It was a 20 minute walk. It turns out to be a 14 minute sprint. We dashed back to the bus so as not to be late for the 3:00 departure. We did not mind waiting just a few minutes for some student but we sure did not want people waiting on us. We arrived at 2:59.

It was a lovely, fun and educational weekend. What more could you want? It was topped off by ending the evening back at Harlaxton in the Great Hall with our students singing praises to and talking with God.

Ray