Leap Years

Comedians Peter Cook (L) and Dudley Moore rehearsing their "Leaping Nuns" sketch for Cook's Revue "Rustle of Spring" at the Phoenix Theatre in London.

David Horspool reviews The History of England: Volume One: Foundation by Peter Ackroyd:

Ackroyd intersperses his narrative with shorter thematic chapters, which take up subjects from children’s toys to climate, from the growth of towns to the diet of commoners and kings. Here his unerring sense of the extraordinary or the emblematic is allowed full rein. In a chapter on customs, he simply notes how arbitrary many were, “of inexplicable mystery . . . . If a whale was stranded on the coast near Chichester, it belonged to the bishop except the tongue, which was taken to the king; if a whale landed anywhere else along the shore of his diocese, the bishop was permitted only the right flipper”. Elsewhere he informs us that kings liked their whale tongues “either boiled with peas or roasted”.

Discussing the foundation of the University of Oxford, he homes in on the fact that the institution’s authority derives from a document drawn up to establish lines of jurisdiction after a murder by a student and judicial revenge on his companions (who were hanged). Several times, he points out the medieval proclivity for “leaping about”, which seems to have differed in some unknown way from dancing or sport.