Finally, here are the pictures of St. Albans that I took when I was on the walking tour last week. Just to give you a little historical background, St. Albans is about 22 miles outside of NW London, so it was an easy train ride for me! From Wikipedia: It was the first major town on the old Roman road Watling Street for travellers heading north and was previously the Roman city of Verulamium. After the Roman withdrawal, and prior to becoming known as St Albans, the town was called Verlamchester or Wæclingacaester. St. Albans is OLD and full of Roman relics, which was really interesting. There is a whole town built over the original city of Verulamium and all kinds of medieval drama went on, the details of which I cannot remember. But I do remember that St. Albans used to be the center for the manufacturing of straw hats. That doesn't seem to be the main focus of the town anymore, as we were surrounded by posh shops and restaurants that had nothing to do with straw hats.
We started out, as so many of our walks around England do, near a church yard. I hope that when I die, a big bush or tree grows out of my grave. We see a lot of that here, in the old graveyards. From death comes life.
The next two pictures are not that great, but their significance is that they are haunted houses in St. Albans. I've noticed that England has a lot of ghosts. The white house's ghost sweeps the stairwell, which, I think, wouldn't be that bad of a ghost to have around. The other house, is the former home of one of the leaders in straw hat making. He caught his butler stealing sips from his liquor cabinet and the butler was so mortified that he jumped out of the top window and fell to his death on the sidewalk below (right where all the ladies are standing). He still haunts the house and, actually, the door opened behind our tour guide while she was talking about all of this, but there was no one there. Wind or the ghost of the butler? You decide.
It's hard to see the writing on this door, but it says "Commit no Nuisance." Little signs like this are common in England and provide us with much entertainment. Jim is planning to put together a project that documents all the funny signs we have seen around England. One sign, in our neighborhood, says "Traffic calming efforts in effect." It sounds like therapy for the traffic, but really it's just speed bumps (which, by the way, they call "sleeping policemen.") The calming efforts in our neighborhood don't seem to work very well, as people just scrape right over them. The minis, especially, meet with disaster when they don't slow down for the sleeping policemen.
This is a famous clock tower, but I can't remember why
In all of the churchyards in England, there are yew trees, because back in the olden days, the young men of the towns and villages were responsible for providing protection. They did this with bows and arrows, which were made from the yews. The trouble with yews is that they have very poisonous berries on them. So, in order to keep the town's animals from eating the poisonous berries and dying a painful and unnecessary death, they put the yew trees in the churchyards, which had fences around them. This particular churchyard may have kept the animals from dying painful deaths, but, three men who dared to release the rabbits of a local Duke were hanged here and their bodies were left, by order of King Edward (aged 14),"to hang until the whites of their bones were showing." Nice young man.
In this picture, you can see how the eaves of the buildings have warped over time. It makes for a very creaky looking street.
In this picture, you can see a tile floor,the remains of a Roman home. Underneath the floor, they had an intricate heating system (water, I think?)
This is the oldest occupied pub in England--the Fighting Cocks! They changed the name to something like the Royal Lambs in the 19th century, because cock fighting was not PC, but then they changed it back for historical reasons.
And finally, some pictures of the St. Albans Abbey. When Henry the 8th decided to dissolve the Catholic church in England, he left the Abbey to the town, which was too large of a burden for the town to maintain, so the abbey started to crumble. One tower, in particular, started to blow in the wind and they figured out that, because the people of the abbey had been insistent about being buried as close to the alter as possible (as in, under the church), now that their coffins were decayed, the structure of the abbey was all askew, so the tower was very unstable. A local wealthy Lord suggested a competition between architects to fix the abbey and then joined the competition himself (and won,obviously, because he was paying for the renovations). He is the same man who designed the inner workings of Big Ben and he made changes to the abbey that, nowadays, shock medieval historians because it was just not the same style. Anyway, this modest man, also made sure that the angel looking over the front door of the abbey had his face. I didn't take a picture of that, but it was pretty funny.
Inside, the abbey is very ornate and very tall. While we were there, the organist was practicing and it was beautiful. I resisted the urge to buy a postcard documenting the falling out of the eyeballs of the swordsman who beheaded St. Alban (he was so stricken by what he did that his eyeballs fell out...I love the medieval times. Everything was so dramatic and violent). This picture is a part of the abbey, which has been turned into a boys' school. All the boys were lolling around in their school uniforms and looked quite preppy.
And, the front of the abbey, in all it's pseudo medieval glory!
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