The Anathemata
The Lady of the Pool (continued)
And after a bit—his left hand was under my head, captain, and with his right that did embrace me,1 he touched, his palm open, the courses of the wall, the back of his hand to the freestone face—as if he marked the holy ’Vangelium for a clerk to kiss,2 as if he read the wall, captain, and says: Augusta . . . Augusta Trinobantum; and then asks, You was Essex bred? No, I said, I were reared on the Surrey side though native within Aldgate.3 Sanfairyanna he says and goes straight on: When I were a young man in France impressed for service in Artois an’ drafted to Ordnance, an ingeniator out o’ Burgundy, but a Breton b’ birth, tells me that at Augustodunum, the great works there, was, in times far far back, reared of men, like those of my mob, from Kent, and how from the provinces of this island came the best artists in those days.4
David Jones notes
1 Cf.
‘ . . . quia amore langueo
Laeva ejus sub capite meo
et dextera illius amplexabitur me.’
Song of Songs II, 5-6.
2 At the commencement of the Gospel it is the business of the assistant to mark the passage to be read by the minister. This he does by placing the tips of his fingers, his palm open and upwards, at the initial words of that passage. At the conclusion of the Gospel the minister kisses the open book.
3 Ammianus Marcellinus, in the fourth century, says of London, that though it was called by the ancients Londinium, it was in his day called ‘Augusta’.
Londinium was honoured with the title of Augusta in the age of Theodosius the Great and it was Augusta of the Trinobantes, that is to say it remained the capital of the people of Essex and Middlesex as well as being the chief city of Britain. The Essex connection survived the Anglo-Saxon conquest, as Bede, writing in 700, and as an Englishman, explicitly states that London is a town of the people of Essex.
4 Eumenius, a rhetorician writing in Augustodunum (Autun in Burgundy) in the late third century, says that for the repairing of that city, masons were brought from the Provinces of Britain because skilled workmen were to be had there in large numbers.
additional notes
DJ note 1: ‘[Stay me with flagons, comfort me with apples:] for I am sick of love. His left hand is under my head, and his right hand doth embrace me’.
a When the British Tommy arrived in France to fight in the First World War, he was presented with a language he struggled to make sense of. What he did to the pronunciation of French and Belgian place names is a wonder, such as turning Ypres into Wipers. He picked up a lot of French expressions, but he changed them into something that sounded English. This was the fate of ça ne fait rien, ‘it doesn’t matter’, which became a British Army catchphrase in that war as an expression of resigned –or cynical– acceptance of some state of affairs, usually brought about by bungling officers.
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