Team captain Siya Kolisi arrives in South Africa carrying the Ellis Webb Trophy, from Wikimedia Commons.
On Saturday 2 November the ‘Springboks’, South Africa’s national rugby team, won the world cup in the final game against England. There has been a much-reported twitter storm in response to one of the Springbok players, Faf de Klerk, celebrating in the changing room, wearing only his briefs (bearing the colours of the national flag) and a baseball cap covering his golden locks. A broad British response has been that, especially with Prince Harry present, this was a gesture of unnecessary humiliation directed against England.
A more significant moment that has escaped international public came when, after the cup was presented to team captain Siya Kolisi, another team-member, Mboneni Mbonambi, danced up to him and they shared a few steps. What may have appeared to be a spontaneous outburst of energetic joy for just a few seconds actually signified a sense of identity for the South African nation, and resonates with their previous world cup win in 1995, a year after the country finally overcame apartheid and white minority rule.
Royal Death and Burial: Reading Abbey in Context
by Prof. Lindy Grant
Paul Sandby, Abbey Gateway, painted in 1808, from Wikimedia Commons. The original is in Reading Museum.
It takes a real effort of the imagination to see the past glory of Reading Abbey, founded in 1121 by King Henry I of England as his intended burial house, in the battered remains surviving today. But Reading Abbey was one of the great monastic institutions of Europe in the middle ages, an intellectual and cultural powerhouse, with a magnificent church and richly decorated monastic buildings, a great library (King John kept his books there), and international connections.
Reading’s monks were drawn from the order of Cluny, linking the abbey into the wider Cluniac network, to which so many great churchmen belonged, among them several popes. Its most prized relic, given by the Empress Matilda, the daughter of the founder, was the hand of St James of Compostela, the Apostle to Spain, so that Reading joined an elite group of medieval religious institutions possessing remains of the Apostles of Christ.
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