BleakChesneyWold

                                                       A Minor Masterpiece    Recently heard the carol   Remember Oh Thou Man  performed by Eliza Carthy and Jon Boden during their excellent concert at Worthing Assembly Rooms on 13th December 2025.  The audience were reminded that the carol singers in the opening chapters of  Thomas Hardy's  Under The Greenwood Tree or The Mellstock Quire A Rural Painting of the Dutch School   trudge through the snow on Christmas Eve night  to Farmer Shiner's house. They serenade the old grump with the carol Remember Oh Thou Man accompanied by some loud instrument playing.   Also appears on the duos's CD  Glad Christmas Comes  (2023 ) with notes by Jon Boden, who advises "It is this song that is selected as their preferred weapon for waki...

                             The Thomas Hardy Connection?                                     Image: courtesy of  Shire Hall Museum (Dorchester) and Folio Creative (photographer) . Thomas Hardy 'Tess of the d'Urbevilles' (1891)  ends with the its tragic heroine being hanged for the murder of Alex d'Urbeville, a former lover. Hardy did not depict the trial or the execution of Tess in the novel, a black flag is hoisted above the prison at Wintoncester ( Winchester)  to show that the deed was done in the very last pages of the book. We learn that ' Justice' was done, and the President of the Immortals, ....had ended his sport with Tess.  At the age of 16,Hardy was a witness to the hanging of (Elizabeth) Martha Brown on 9th August 1856, who had been tried at the law court in Dorchester on 21st July 1856 and f...