This morning Ethan headed to Kensington for another meeting and I stuck around to plan my visits to Roman sites in London. I then went to meet with Ethan and take a stroll through Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park. As Ethan pointed out, if only we'd had this weather when visiting the palace a few days ago.
The weather was warm, but breezy as we walked around the Round Pond and headed through the gardens. We followed tree-lined paths to the Long Water, the portion of a serpentine lake in Kensington.
At the end of the Long Water, there is the Italian Garden, consisting of an Italianate building and a terrace with four fountains and flowering ponds. The garden was a present from Prince Albert to his wife, Queen Victoria. The walls are decorated with Vs and As.
The garden fell into disrepair and was most recently restored in 1991 and 2011. Work was done to repair damage to the structure, the stonework, and the ponds themselves. My favorite addition to the garden was little wooden ramps to ponds to help ducks and ducklings safely get in and out. The renovation was greatly helped by a grant from Tiffany & Co.
We followed the Serpentine Lake into Hyde Park and watched tourists boating around on the water. Although I've talked about seeing swans before, Ethan and I were both commenting on the wide variety of birds we've seen in London. At any one time, in Hyde Park, we could see eight or nine different species of birds. Many were introduced as gifts or representative specials from around the United Kingdom.
We took the tube from Hyde Park to St. Pancras and King's Cross so we could return to the British Library. The station was originally slotted for destruction in the 1960s, but was saved and painstakingly restored between 2001 and 2007. The station now serves domestic trains, but also international ones via the Chunnel. When we were in the station yesterday we saw trains headed to Paris, Brussels, and Amsterdam.
The train station opened in 1868 and around the same time a massive hotel was built as an attachment to the station. The Midland Grand Hotel had 300 rooms, each with gold leaf decorations and fireplaces, a grand staircase, hydraulic lifts, and many other top of the line features. The hotel went out of business in 1935 and was used as railway offices. After the 1980s, when the building failed safety regulations, it was left empty.
In 2011, the building reopened as the St. Pancras Renaissance Hotel. The renovations began in 2004, during the revamp of the train station. The new hotel contains 244 rooms, 2 restaurants, 2 bars, a health and leisure center, a ball room, 20 meeting and function rooms, and on the upper floors of the original building, 68 apartments.
Ethan and I grabbed lunch and then returned to the British Library. This time we had collected our proper documents and were able to register to use the reading rooms and collections. We both looked into manuscripts relating to our research. I was able to find a 17th century manuscript of Tacitus's De Vita et Moribus Iulii Agricolae, which follows the life of the man credited with Romanizing Britain.
The manuscript was quite simple: no cover, simple paper, and written in a brown ink. The entirety of the book was copied out on 36 pages, although text was only written on the lefthand side of pages and only on on the left page. (Please excuse the quality of the next three photos. I was unable to use my camera in the reading room and my phone's camera has damage to the lens, leaving big black dots in all the images.)
I think this may suggest that the righthand sides of the pages were being reserved for the owner's thoughts and commentary, but I may be wrong. The manuscript came from a larger collection, referred to as the Trumbull Papers, and I did not learn much about the larger collection. From what I could tell, the collection held a diverse collection of works and topics, so I'm not sure how Tacitus fit in.
Flipping through the pages, it was entertaining to catch the mistakes the scribe had made in copying out the text. Words were crossed out, added via carets, and squeezed in when forgotten. I even found one of the most classic scribal errors, which I believe is called a homeoteleuton. In the photo below, the word habebatur is crossed out and replaced by the correct word narrabatur. In the line above the word habebat appears and in the copying process, the scribe certainly skipped back a line and brought the earlier habebat below. Luckily, the mistake was caught and the meaning of the sentence wasn't changed in a very confusing way.
We didn't have as much time with our manuscripts as we would have liked, as the reading room closed at 5pm, but we left the library happy. We decided to head to the infamous Fleet Street for some meat pies. Ethan, who loves Sweeney Todd, had found a pie shop located between the supposed location of Todd's barbershop and Mrs. Lovett's pie shop. Ethan went for a pie and beer tasting dinner, which came with three of the restaurant's most popular pies and paired them with three different beers. I had a lamb pie with a red wine, rosemary, and mint sauce and a cider.
Overall, it was a successful day, filled with research, wandering, and good food.
Fun Fact #31: Meat pies have origins 11,500 years ago in the Neolithic Age. They were introduced to the Mediterranean by the Egyptians and were adapted by the Greeks. They then reached the British Isles through the Romans. So the Brits have the Romans to thank for one of their favorite national meals.
On the flip side, they also have the Romans to thank for the introduction of stinging nettles, so it's not all great.
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