Three hands pass a story through the ages :
[Insert postcard summary text]
Their timeline
1926: ‘Tyke‘; a young Yorkshireman is gifted a copy of a pamphlet of queer prose by the older gent he works for. He, in turn, hand-stitches an extract from the pamphlet to a handkerchief and makes a sleeve to conceal them.
1889: Edmund Reginald Vane, restoring a liturgical book for a private collector, discovers verses of prose sealed within its boards. He has them privately printed as Pastoral Fragments.
13th Century: A Knights Templar priest-brother (at the Neusum ‘preceptory’ farmstead near Leeds) privately records what he witnesses, hears, and experiences himself — hidden where no one would think to look, in the binding of the preceptory’s own records.
Who wrote the prose?
There was a single hand behind at least four of the five pieces: Planctus Ignotus (his own lament), De Natura Rei (his record of a confession after a mill encounter), Fragmenta Vernalia (his deadpan record of three witnessed incidents), and Visitatio ad Ecclesiam Albam (his own account of an encounter with another priest). Opus Dimissum (the ploughman and goadsman) is not explicitly attributed but it’s broadly assumed it would be his too.
These are not an official confessor’s records. He’s writing privately, almost against his own discipline — “I cannot burn it. I cannot carry it alone any further.”
He’s the one person at the preceptory bound to hear what no one else can act on. His “answer I am required to give” is the orthodox one; but he goes on with how he gives himself latitude — demanding strikingly light penances. Tellingly he can’t burn what he’s written but neither could he have spoken it aloud to anyone; the planctus exists because both of those doors are closed to him.
His method is evident across the prose. Observation more than intervention. Records what he sees — a mill encounter, washing in a beck, shearing, sheltering from the storm and his own visit to the white-church. In Fragmenta Vernalia he doesn’t editorialise his record – the translator noted that he “could not detect, in the original, whether the author wished to condemn, to intervene, or something else entirely,”
Visitatio ad Ecclesiam Albam is different in kind from his other pieces — not a record of others, but his own encounter with the parish priest at Whitkirk, ending with the parish priest’s hand settling on his shoulder, “neither man moved.” This is the one piece where the watcher becomes, briefly, in the act.
Who translated and published the texts?
The 1873 fellowship for Edmund Reginald Vane was lost because of “a simple slip” — he acted on impulse one night, working late, with a research undergraduate. Not a sustained affair, not even necessarily premeditated — a single moment of being caught out. No prosecution (too messy, too embarrassing for the college), but the post evaporated quietly. His bitterness afterward runs in two directions at once: bitter at himself, for the carelessness of the slip; bitter at the world, for what he sees as a wildly disproportionate response to it. He never resolves which bitterness is larger. This duality is what gives the translation work its particular charge — he recognises something of himself in the manuscript, and translates it with more tenderness than scholarly distance, though the published apparatus never admits this.
The pamphlet states he found the verses by accident, sealed in the boards of a liturgical book from a dissolved Yorkshire estate, with no clean prior archive trail. This unverifiable origin suited him personally — he could make of the manuscript what he needed to, without a paper trail second-guessing his reading of it.
Pastoral Fragments first found its way into print in 1889 via the kind of network privately-printed homoerotic verse used at the time — small print runs, unnamed editors, the scholarly/pastoral framing used deliberately as cover. Readers who knew what they were looking at, knew. Real period parallels include Love in Earnest (John Gambril Nicholson, 1892), and the broader tradition of “recovered fragment” or “translation” framing as a safe vehicle.
Who made the sleeve?
– AI generated based on a prompt by the artist.
– AI generated based on a prompt by the artist.
Tyke’s a working-class Yorkshire-born lad, early 20s in age and currently employed as dresser to an older theatrical gentleman -relocated to London. It’s a part My Fair Lady / Eliza Doolittle dynamic, found and being shaped into a gentleman and by the time of this work he’s well on his way through that transition.
His part in the narrative is that he hand embroiders the actual presented artwork – the pamphlet’s sleeve.
His skills from a failed apprenticeship to a tailor is what, beyond his looks and charm, landed him the role with the gent. But, he is far from honed – his stitching is imperfect and clumsy — copying the lettering from the printed pamphlet.
His social transition leaves him with two registers at play: a borrowed theatrical polish — acquired from his adoptive world, performing “darling,” “frightfully,” the long looping aesthete sentence — overlaid on his Yorkshire foundations – which surfaces. more when something true slips through the performance. Plain, flat, dialect-marked sentences (nowt, t’fire, on t’farm, him who gave it me) appear exactly at the moments of real feeling, while the polish carries wit and some concealment.
His gent is around 50, theatrical, cultured, the one teaching/shaping him – but the submissive or ‘interverted’ one. The Tyke is his ‘trade’ – the husband in the relationship – even tho the gent bankrolls all this.
The pamphlet was bought “under the counter,” from a queer antiquarian bookseller on a visit to Harrogate. His ‘trigger’ interest in this document is having Ivanhoe read to him as a boy — plausible for a working-class Yorkshire child at the turn of the 20th century. Scott was standard popular/school fare by then. This is the seed of his fascination with knights and “men who kept their secrets under armour” — a boy’s adventure story that, unknowingly, primed him for what he’d grow into.
The photograph above was captured in Soho, by a street portrait photographer working the twilight of that trade. At this time the trade was being squeezed out by the rise of cheap home cameras like the Box Brownie.. Working theory, is the photographer may himself have been queer, using the photograph as pretext for approach — flattery, a way in. The lad recalls being on an errand when it was taken.
Unusually there’s no name on the print; potentially to avoid legal or blackmail scenarios. A pencil date is on the back – but no name. Whether a moment between the lad and his gent happened when the photograph was delivered is unknown — unresolved, in keeping with the project’s whole discipline of withholding.
Robustly built — broad-shouldered, the physique of mining or manual-labour stock rather than office or service work. Blond and handsome in an open, approachable way rather than refined. Wears well-maintained but visibly second-hand clothing — kept with care,.
Connections?
The lad could wonder whether his older gent might once have crossed paths with Vane himself, decades earlier, on one of the translator’s trips – maybe meeting Vane around the same age as Tyke is now.
Equally – he could be wondering if there is an ancestral link between his family and those on the Newsam preceptory
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Jon Eland 