A hawk in a hall
I was saddened to hear of the death of Professor Vincent Gillespie earlier this year. Vincent (or Vince as he was affectionately known) was a brilliant medievalist and a truly exceptional teacher – and I was lucky enough to have been taught by him at university. My college asked people who knew him to email a tribute, so I thought I’d share what I wrote here.
Professor Gillespie was a wonderfully generous and supportive presence for me during my time at Oxford, and I have very many fond memories of him.
University is a strange environment for a teenager. You’re not fully formed at that age, and you’re trying out new ideas and ways of thinking, the way you might try on a new outfit. As such, some memories of my time at uni can make me cringe; I might suddenly remember something pretentious or naïve I said in a tutorial or an essay, the way I might regret some of the fashion decisions I made. And there were occasions where that naivety was painfully exposed.
But when I think of Vince, I have none of those feelings or memories. Because I think he understood how to talk to young people. He was extraordinarily knowledgeable and was able to impart that knowledge in such an easily understandable way, but he also knew that we were young, that we got things wrong, and that we were still finding our feet.
In my first year I really struggled with Old English, but I’m endlessly grateful for the way in which it felt like he saw something in me. So I never felt like I was being told off, or like I had failed – just that I was being allowed time and space to improve. Thanks to Vince’s encouragement, I really grew in confidence in my second and third years. I'm trying to think of a better word to describe this, but the tutorials I had with him on Middle English were truly mind-expanding. I remember leaving a session with him feeling that some chemical element of my brain had actually changed, that my perspective had shifted and made the world seem more expansive, interesting and alive. What more can you ask from a tutorial about The Canterbury Tales?
He had a way of making the ancient past come alive before your eyes. Whether it would be the beautiful, and very relaxing, way in which he read Old English aloud (often while smoking a pipe) – or the way in which he encouraged you to emotionally engage with the text. I remember him talking about the cries of seabirds in the poem ‘The Seafarer’ – the gulls, curlews and gannets. He asked us what all those sounds had in common. We racked our brains, trying to think of some clever symbolism or allusion that we might have missed, and he answered simply, ‘They all sound sad.’
As encouraging as he was, you had to meet him halfway. I never witnessed the legendary incident in first year where he dismissed an entire class for not having done the reading. And there were occasions where I sensed his disappointment. After reading one very rushed essay on the York Mystery Plays he said, ‘Perhaps it’s best that we draw a veil over this essay.’ But when he corrected you he would often do it in a kind and humorous way. When I mistakenly referred to Boethius as ‘she’, Vince interjected – ‘No… Boethius was all man.’ Also, and this is something that really stayed with me, I loved the way that he would often refer to or quote from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. To him, this was as valuable a contribution to the modern understanding of the medieval era as any academic text. There was no high and low culture, and this wasn’t a dry subject – this was living, breathing human literature.
After the York Mystery Plays incident, I worked extra hard on an essay on Chaucer. I felt that Vince sensed that I had something to prove and, thankfully, his hugely encouraging comments implied that I had more than made up for my previous misfire. His response to the essay was so kind, in a way that he really didn’t have to be, and it left a huge impression on me. I still have the printed out essay with his handwritten notes, and I think of it often.
The last time I was in touch with Vince was during lockdown. My friend John Robins, a comedian and broadcaster who was at St Anne’s at the same time as me, was putting together an online stand-up show. One of the producers tasked me with contacting John’s former tutors to get some ‘testimonials’ about John to read out on air. I immediately thought of Vince. I wrote to him (and I don’t think I’ve ever spent so long checking the spelling of an email) and he replied with a very generous, insightful and funny summary of John:
My abiding memory of John Robins is a long, lean streak of cheerfully sardonic and intellectual self defence, part of a group of whip-smart and challengingly sceptical undergraduates. Habitually wearing a teeshirt and jeans, he would arrive for tutorials or seminars wrapped in a superhero’s cape of mildly sarcastic self-effacement. But underneath it, he was a sensitive, perceptive and very acute reader. He was an intriguing blend of an outer shell of amused disdain and and inner core of profound emotional and intellectual engagement with texts across times and periods. One of the great indicators of a good literary critic is their capacity to really, passionately dislike some kinds of writing – sometimes to dislike whole centuries of writing – and to be able to explain why with insight and passion, often doing so with humour and polemical ridicule. John was unusually good at listening to the voices of the pages, even when he didn't like what he was hearing, and then being very funny about what was wrong with them. In essays John could patiently build exasperation and irritation over several pages. He was already learning how to shape sentences and paragraphs to sardonic effect. As his success in comedy has shown, he has an innately good ear for the rhythms of language and for the cumulative play of words. Who says the humanities have no future?
We ended that brief correspondence by suggesting we all meet up in Oxford once the lockdown was over. I really regret that we never followed up on those plans.
Professor Gillespie leaves behind an extraordinary legacy, not just of scholarship, but of countless young lives that have been immeasurably improved by his guidance and support. I feel lucky to have known him.
I’m struck by that line in Vince’s email: ‘Who says the humanities have no future?’ In a country where arts funding has been slashed and English literature courses have been dropped from universities, it makes me wonder (and fear) if we’ll ever see the likes of Vince again; academics who are able to devote their lives to a subject, no matter how niche or how distant from the modern world. The fruits of Vince’s devotion are evident in the generations of students he taught. Yes, we learnt how to parse lines of Old English and analyse the rhyme scheme of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (skills which sadly do not exactly set your CV alight), but by doing that we became better at writing, better at communicating, better at thinking. And that led us to learn about something deeper and harder to define: empathy and humanity (they’re called the humanities for a reason).
There are some much better written obituaries here and here, both of which rightly portray Vince as both a towering presence in medieval literature and as a warm, funny and kind man.
Something else I remembered since writing this… There’s a beautiful image that Vince once referred to in a tutorial which I often think of. I assume it’s from a medieval poem, or maybe it came from an earlier era. I could look it up but I quite like the half-remembered quality it has for me in my imagination. It went something like this: Life is like a hawk in a hall. I love it so much. The idea of a magnificent bird sailing out of the night, briefly gliding through the bright, clamorous hall before disappearing back into the unknowable dark is so vivid and profound. I love the way that not only does it communicate an idea so beautifully (the painful transience of life), but it also gives us a glimpse into the past; for a second we can imagine how other minds saw the world.
Strangely enough, a few days after drafting this post I was reading Wendy Erskine’s excellent new novel The Benefactors and I came across this line: ‘Who said that about life being like the flight of a sparrow through the baronial hall? She doesn’t know. It’s brief, though, that’s for sure.’ So I did end up Googling it, and discovered that it’s from who else but the Venerable Bede:
The present life of man upon earth, O King, seems to me in comparison with that time which is unknown to us like the swift flight of a sparrow through the mead-hall where you sit at supper in winter, with your Ealdormen and thanes, while the fire blazes in the midst and the hall is warmed, but the wintry storms of rain or snow are raging abroad. The sparrow, flying in at one door and immediately out at another, whilst he is within, is safe from the wintry tempest, but after a short space of fair weather, he immediately vanishes out of your sight, passing from winter to winter again. So this life of man appears for a little while, but of what is to follow or what went before we know nothing at all.
It’s strange how things change in your memory, isn’t it? I’ve always liked the alliteration of a hawk in a hall, maybe that’s why I misremembered it. But do you see how beautiful and profound old Bede was being here?
Anyway, I’ll leave you with a mesmerising piece of music, named after a work of 14th century Christian mysticism, an area in which Vince was an expert. I reckon he’d have loved it.
Wonderful memories, beautifully recalled.
Beautiful tribute.