William Poole and chums make many new friends in the Cotswolds

There was a brilliant Oxford scholar in the 17th century called William Lloyd. When he was a boy, his father bashed Latin, Greek, and Hebrew into him in preparation for proper academic study, which he then commenced at Oriel at the ripe age of 11.

In later life, he was to produce a dictionary to accompany one of the first workable schemes for an artificial language, and he also published an explosive little book about the earliest Celtic churches, and how the Scots could not be trusted to discuss their own history.

I have been rereading this book of late, as it has all suddenly become rather topical.

Lloyd was destined for great things as a bishop, but it wasn’t all work and no play.

In the 1650s, he was working as a private tutor in Oxford. In late 1659, there appeared in town a Patriarch of the Orthodox Church, who with his exotic robes and his long beard rather impressed the local scholars, especially the defeated royalists, who hoped that this man, representative of an eastern church perhaps retaining some purity lost in the west, might bless the troubled Oxonians.

Several royalists indeed received a blessing from the Patriarch, and even the Presbyterians, who were in power in Oxford, were somewhat taken by this oriental visitor.

The whole thing was a put-up, a stunt organised by Lloyd as a joke. The ‘Patriarch’ was in fact a London merchant called Kinaston.

Royalists and Presbyterians alike were deeply put out, and Lloyd found it politic to go into hiding for a time.

Another piece of 17th-century dressing-up I encountered recently was the bizarre Cotswold Olympicks.

These were founded in 1612 by a lawyer called Robert Dover, and are still held annually on a hill in Chipping Campden.

I knew about these games primarily because in 1636 a book of poems was published in honour of the event, the Annalia Dubrensia (‘Dover’s Annals’), featuring a splendid woodcut title-page of the various sports to be had: wrestling, hare-coursing, throwing the hammer, Morris dancing, and standing on your head.

Most of this still happens, along with modern oddities such as shin-kicking and dwile-flonking. A gang of us pottered over this year to see what was what, bearing with us various musical instruments of destruction and a battered print-out of the 1636 poems.

There are some great names among the versifiers, such as my namesake, Walton Poole, and the unstoppable Shakerley Marmion of Wadham College.

There is also a ‘Francis Izod’, and the Izods must be very local to the area, as the graveyard of the church there is full of stones bearing the name. (There is also a gravestone to the church cat, which made my day.) We played some tunes outside a local pub, but I got the feeling the locals do ‘traditional’ there in the sense of the odd Morris dancer, and a stall selling overpriced jams.

It was a wonderful day: the most 17th-century moment was when a rubicund local, resplendent in his pink trousers, peered boozily at us odd Oxford types, and audibly muttered “bloody foreigners”

William Poole is a tutor in English and Fellow at New College. He is researching intellectual and scientific history