The Minster took 242 years to build, from 1230 to 1472. Thus, twelve generations knew this cathedral only as a building site.
The Minster has a uniformed police force answerable to the Dean and Chapter of the Minster, not to the Chief Constable. This seems to make it the oldest continuously existing police force anywhere, just as Britain has a very long tradition of fighting ships loyal to the king.
The Time Patrol has an office in London in 1000 A.D. which sends material and clothes to Agents Everard and Whitcomb when they have to travel from the London office in 1894 to 464 A.D. It may be the office in 1000 A.D. that has oversight of the building and early history of the Minster, possibly delegating a small team, a temporal equivalent of the Minster police force, to counteract any potential interruptions to the more than two centuries of building work. It would be an easy matter for some accident or extra-temporal interference to halt the work, thus changing the subsequent history of England.
2 comments:
Good point. Intellectual history matters too, as Carl Furniss finds out in THE SORROWS OF ODIN THE GOTH.
Most influential works are part of a zeitgeist, but they in turn profoundly influence it, sometimes crystallizing trends already present, sometimes injecting new material, sometimes both.
An important symbol like York Minster undoubtedly shaped -minds- for many generations and those minds would affect how the world worked subsequently. Likewise with books, even more so as they spread further.
Malthus and THE WEALTH OF NATIONS were of their time, but they also shaped subsequent developments in thought. Remove either and the consequences would be as drastic as assassinating an influential political leader.
And the ideas of leaders are important too, not just their actions.
If you removed Gandhi, for example -- say someone in South Africa had shot him before WW1 -- and India would almost(*) certainly have become independent anyway, and probably at about the same time(**), but the manner in which the independence movement operated would have been unpredictably different, and the consequences would be large.
(*) almost because there might be butterfly effects on things like British entry into WW1
(**) ditto. If WW1 or WW2 came out differently, decolonization might be aborted. Not all that likely, but possible.
Kaor, Paul and Mr. Stirling!
Now that's interesting, that a BUILDING project like the construction of York Minster can affect and change history. I had never thought of that before. But it makes sense.
And what IF the British Empire had not broken up after WW II? Such as by India not becoming independent? Again, Stirling's THE PESHAWAR LANCERS comes to mind.
Sean
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