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8 min read

England’s oldest surviving municipal seal

In the sealed charter of 1191, Oxford donated the island of Midney or Medley (‘with all those things pertaining to it…’) to the Church and Canons of St Mary, Oseney. It was the final episode in a decades-long spat with the Priory of St Frideswide about the right to occupy the island, probably now known as Fiddler’s Island, and to charge rent for its use. The charter and the seal are on display in the Museum of Oxford.

It’s a small matter, but the significance of the charter, carrying the Common Seal of Oxford, is the assertion of municipal [1] identity and authority – and among the earliest of its kind that has survived (Exeter’s has been dated to around 1180).

A contentious path

In 1147 the citizens of Oxford had made the original gift to the friendly Abbey, conferring perpetual use of the land for an annual fee of half a mark [2]. The charter for this gift carried the personal seal of Alderman William de Chesney (who was also a baron and the City’s Governor) at a time when there was no common seal for the citizens of Oxford (though they describe themselves as a ‘commune’ – in the old sense of a formal and legal assembly of citizens).

However, in 1139, by command of King Stephen, the island had already been handed over to St Frideswide’s, as compensation for the loss of revenue after the forced removal of their market stalls from the centre of the town. Appeals to King Stephen and the Archbishop of Canterbury by the citizens of Oxford, various royal interventions, and some humiliating concessions by Oxford, resulted in 1191, in a royal writ returning Midney/Medley to St Frideswide’s, but allowing citizens to rent it for eight shillings a year [3] (an increase from the previous annual rent of 6s. 8d.). Those concessions were formalized in a charter, carrying the (now lost) common seal of the citizenry. The basis of the authority for this seal is not clear, but evidently St Frideswide’s accepted its legality.

To say Mexico City is a great place to experience art would be a substantial understatement. Not only has it produced one of the world’s most beloved painters, Frida Kahlo, but it has consistently stood at the forefront of various international art movements for more than a century.

But the city’s artistic standing — as well as that of Mexico in general — suffers from misapprehensions derived largely from the region’s rather notorious reputation. At best it’s often considered a destination that offers little more than beaches and booze and, at worst, it’s assumed to be too dangerous to visit, great art notwithstanding.

Having spent most of the the past six years living in Mexico City and the rest of the country, I can report that both assertions are inaccurate. While the country has undoubtedly suffered issues with crime, Mexico is safe for visitors, with Mexico City in particular undergoing rapid shifts in recent decades to become a safer and ever-more artistically vibrant city. The city overflows with an artistic abundance that stacks up against any other great art city of the world. To that end, here’s a selection of the city’s standout art experiences, from its most renowned museums to under-the-radar spots that only locals know to visit.

4 min read

Morris’ manufacturing legacy continues

Off of the Oxford Ring Road sits an array of white and grey cubic structures, whizzed past every day by workers starting their days, perhaps sparing a glimpse for the creatively placed MINI Cooper on the roof, posing pompously next to a billboard of itself. A sharp contrast to the architectural grandeur that is found just a few miles down the same road, it can be easily overlooked that this site has an immense history in its own right. In 1876, the Oxford Military College opened on these grounds taking cadets as young as 13 from the UK and British colonies around the world. Funded by Prince George, Duke of Cambridge, buildings were purchased from the Cowley Middle Class School and were expanded upon (although most of the said expansions have since been demolished) while colonial scholarships were set up, likely to attract colonial children to a life of military service in their overseas British territories. The college’s prestige, however, was short-lived as it was driven to bankruptcy in 1896, only 20 years after its opening. The stock of the British automobile, meanwhile, was exploding. Today the leading manufacturing employer in the county, assembling more than a thousand cars a day, and the head of a pyramid of factories (to engine manufacturer Plant Hams Hall, and body pressing manufacturer Plant Swindon), the property’s industrial beginnings trace to 1912 when the town community of Oxford scored a minor victory over that of the prevailing gown.

Taking inspiration from the assembly lines of Henry Ford in the United States, a rather successful engineer and bicycle repairman William Morris purchased the college lot to move into automobile production, starting with his recent design, the “bullnose” Morris Oxford. Finding some success amid a market dominated by less expensive American vehicles, the demand for British cars after wartime grew exponentially and WRM Motors Ltd. was exceedingly cheerful to pitch in. From 1919 to 1925, car production of William Morris’s cars rose from 400 a year to 56,000 a year, requiring massive expansion to other locations across England, and to the original factory in Cowley, new railroads to accommodate workers’ commutes. It was around this time that Morris Motors overtook Ford as the UK’s largest automobile manufacturer, moving Morris clearly into the national spotlight as a titan of industry.

With the Second World War looming the Oxford plant, as recommended by the government, expanded its facilities to accommodate the production and repair of aeroplanes. The de Havilland DH.82 Tiger Moth was a very popular model manufactured here, bought by the Royal Air Force for training pilots recently joined. As time progressed, the company’s founder became more authoritarian with his control over the company, refusing other key members shares of the business and refusing to adapt to new and necessary market techniques to keep up with competitors. In 1952 Morris Motors merged with the Austin Motor Company to form the British Motor Corporation, which Morris headed for a year before his retirement. From 1966 to 2000, the company to which the plant belonged went through a long series of acquisitions, mergers, restructurings and renamings, from the British Motor Holdings through British Leyland and the Rover Group to British Aerospace and BMW, which despite selling the Rover Group in 2001, kept the site to produce their new MINI line.

To prepare for this change, a large part of the factory was demolished and the land sold to be incorporated into the Oxford Business Park, now office space to the global headquarters of Oxfam, the European headquarters of Harley-Davidson, and major outposts for Royal Mail and HM Revenue and Customs. Next to these, the renovated Oxford plant now assembles about 1,000 cars a day (one every 67 seconds) and employs over 3,700 employees. BMW’s declaration that MINI will be the first of their brands to become fully electric starts with Oxford, as does their strategy to reduce emissions from all plants by 80 percent by 2030. It seems that 108 years later, this old and ugly factory, still often called “Morris’s”, strives for history yet.

4 min read

Unexpected connections to the past from volunteer Olivia

When I moved into my college accommodation this year, ready to start my final year at university, I was intrigued to find a plaque above the doorway, to one ‘H. Huggard’, with ‘Gallipoli 1915’ inscribed below it. I was immediately drawn to find out more – to develop this man’s story, and his connection to my room, into more than just a small plaque. This led further to an investigation into the university during the war, and the role that the city played in the ‘War to End All Wars’.

Hewitt Huggard was born on 5th August 1889, the eldest son of Reverend Richard Huggard, MBE, and Frances Marion Huggard (née Lloyd), in Tuam, county Galway. His family then moved to Dublin, before returning to Reverend Huggard’s town of birth, Dungannon, and then St John’s Vicarage, Barnsley. He attended Bronsgrove School between 1904 and 1908, before taking a second-class degree in History at Merton College in 1911, and enlisting in August of 1914. With the war starting on 28th July, this makes him one of the earliest to sign up; we can imagine that he would have felt eager to do his duty for his country. Hewitt then served in Egypt before being sent to Gallipoli. He was then reported wounded and missing during an attack on Tekke Tepe Ridge, at Suvla Bay, on 9th August 1915. He was later confirmed dead, at the age of just 26. He is commemorated on the Helles Memorial at Turkey (Panel 52-55), as well as the Dungannon war memorial in County Tyrone, the Roll of Honour in the East Yorkshire Regimental Chapel, Beverly Minster, Yorkshire, and on Merton College’s War Memorial. Unfortunately for the Huggard family, Hewitt’s brother Lewis was also killed in the war; they are not the only family to have lost multiple members in the conflict, as attested by the matching surnames on war memorials all over the country.

However, Hewitt was not acting in isolation; he was one of many students of the University who joined up (by 1918, virtually all fellows were in uniform and the student population in residence was reduced to just 12% of the pre-war total), and Oxford locals joined the forces in droves. As well as this, the city saw less obvious changes including the production of around 2000 mine sinkers a week by the Morris factory, and the 9th Duke of Marlborough speaking in the House of Lords about the loss of labourers to the forces, and the idea of bringing women in to replace them (as well as digging up the flowerbeds and lawns of Blenheim for vegetables and crops!). For those less actively engaged in the war, the effects were no less noted. The letters of Violet Bonfiglioli, an Oxford resident during the war years, reveal what life was like for her family in the city at the time: her son Owen, at just 17, was conscripted and sent to France; she was harassed in the street for handing out pacifist leaflets; noted soldiers drilling in the parks, and the city gull of hospitals and wounded soldiers. One of the things that many struggled with, understandably, was the lack of food: Mrs Bonfiglioli described getting to the shops before 8am and arriving to a queue of around 100 people! While it should not be surprising, in such an old building, to know that my predecessors would have been involved in such world-encompassing events as World War I, to come face-to-face with a name made the connection, and the history of the building, much more personal.

You can read more about Oxford’s war efforts during 20th century here.

The bright side of America’s political polarization and neverending crises may be that it has provided ample creative fodder for painter Eric Fischl.

Fischl, who has been making and showing figurative paintings since the ‘70s, has become a self-fashioned bard of American decline.

In recent years, he has hewed to the news cycle: Shortly after Trump took office, he posted a painting to Facebook, fresh off the easel, that showed a boy curled into a fetal position wrapped in the American flag. Art critic Jerry Saltz said, at the time, that the work made him as though he “had fallen through a trapdoor into an infected field of American fissures formed by the election.”

During the fall of 2020, after six months of the COVID-19 pandemic, Fischl showed a series called, “Meditations on Melancholia,” more flag-wrapped figures, and a hula-hooping nude.

With this year’s midterm elections looming in November, Fischl unveiled his latest series, Towards the End of an Astonishing Beauty: An Elegy to Sag Harbor, and Thus America, last week at Skarstedt Gallery. The work leans heavily on the idyllic Hamptons town of Sag Harbor, where Fischl has lived for decades, as a backdrop for a grotesque and sympathetic parade of American every-men and -women.

The New York Times has reported on the passing of Hilary Mantel. Mantel, 70, died from a stroke on Thursday.

The British author, two-time winner of the Booker Prize, was a prolific author of literature, including historical fiction, personal memoirs, and short stories. She authored Wolf Hall (Booker Prize winner), Bring Up the Bodies (Booker Prize winner), The Mirror and the Light (Booker Prize longlist), and published a collection of essays, entitled Mantel Pieces: Royal Bodies and Other Writing from the London Review of Books, among many other works.

Find more on Hilary Mantel and her work here.

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The Headlines

OPENING THE TREASURE CHEST. That’s how the New York Times describes its preview of Paul Allen’s storied art collection, which will head to auction this fall at Christie’s New York. More than 150 of them will be sold and are expected to bring in over $1 billion, as we learned last month. But at last, we know more about which works the ultra-wealthy can bid on, like  Georges Seurat ’s 1888 Les Poseuses, Ensemble (Petite version), which features a section of his famed painting A Sunday on La Grande Jatte. That work is expected to sell for more than $100 million, as is van Gogh’s Verger avec cyprès, one of five works by the post-Impressionist still in private hands and a rarely exhibited piece. A Klimt could sell for over $90 million, or more than double what Allen paid for it in 2006. It’s a collection filled with art historical gems. 

ARTISTS SUPPORTING ARTISTS. The Guardian reports that artist Tracey Emin, who made her name as a Y.B.A. back in the ’80s, will soon auction her painting Like a Cloud of Blood to benefit a residency program for emerging artists that she is creating in Margate, England. To be sold by Christie’s next month, the work is expected to fetch £700,000 ($775,000). Fashion designer and sometimes-curator Duro Olowu has organized another exhibition, this time for octogenarian artist Robert Earl Paige, who was a member of AfriCOBRA and identifies as a “a doodler, a tinker, and a dabbler.” The show is on view at Salon 94 Design in the Lower East Side until October 29. And finally, Hilarie M. Sheets has a close look at a group of artists who were formerly incarcerated, including Jesse Krimes, Russell Craig, and Jared Owens , who have supported each other as they established their now closely watched art careers. 

The Digest

Marcus, Luke, Pete and Andy revel in more Nations League nonsense, as Kevin de Bruyne remains bored out of his mind and John McGinn’s memory foam mattress grabs a great win for Scotland.

We also toast the departures of Charlie Adam and the FIFA game (Ted Lasso’s idiotic appearance not withstanding) and we wonder how Gareth Southgate can turn the barge around - starting with tonight's clash against Italy.

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This week, PEN America released a report on the current state of book bans in the USA. The report discusses the 50+ “parents’ rights” groups operating across the country, both on the national and local levels, and how these groups are responsible or connected to at least half of the book bans that have taken place since July 2021. But who are these groups? Where are they located?

PEN’s report lays out and links to several stories about various groups, including this box exploring some of the nationally-organized groups.

Read the report, particularly this section, to get a sense of what ideas these groups are formed around. For the most part, it’s not just book bans. It’s the broader issue of “parental rights,” which became a movement in 2020 with parents demanding that schools “reopen” during the pandemic (the language here matters, as schools were open but operating virtually). The movement shifted in 2021 to demand that their children be unmasked in schools, and thereafter/simultaneously, to demanding oversight and say in curriculum and materials made available to students in schools.

The database linked here is not comprehensive, but represents a look at the groups who have been connected with or directly linked to book bans or challenges (or other curriculum changes under the guise of “parental rights”). Some are more active than others, and some have changed their names, consolidated, or otherwise reworked their structures even since this list was complied. Some are parent groups and others are political action groups. Many of the groups are linked to either their Facebook or website presence. Not all states are represented, which does not mean there are not groups in those states. There are not national groups or their affiliated chapters included; PEN outlines those nicely above, and the embedded Tweet above shows, in gold, where the biggest organization currently has active chapters.