Vanished Religious Orders of the British Archipelago by Fairfax Rearwind

St Chrysostoms in Derbyshire: thanks to the Church Times

Title: Vanished Religious Orders of the British Archipelago 

Author: Fairfax Rearwind

Publisher: Not known 

Source book: The Woman Who Died a Lot by Jasper Fforde (Thursday Next #7)

Yes, yet another fictional book plucked from Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next chronicles. The Woman Who Died a Lot is chock a block with fictional books.

The extract included here begins “The Brotherhood of Perpetual Defenestration were a small order of pious monks who threw themselves out of their abbey windows twice a day following prayers. The reason for this curious custom is not recorded, but the order supplied stuntmen to the theatre and film industry for over seven decades. A popular tourist attraction for over three centuries, the brotherhood might be with us still but for a poorly conceived move to the eighth storey of a town building, and the order was extinguished in under an hour.”

Oh dear. That is extremely unfortunate. I do question the motives of whoever counselled the move to a high rise building.

This is obviously a fascinating subject, and I would love to read more of Fairfax Rearwind’s book. There must be other, just as fascinating, religious orders. Sadly….not possible.

And in other matters, when I read about the infamous Defenestration of Prague (1618), I was terribly disappointed to learn that the unfortunate people thrown out of the window of Prague Castle landed softly on a pile of rubbish or a dung hill or something (or were saved by angels) and lived to tell the tale. You might suppose that at the very least you would need an unfortunate death to set off the Thirty Years War.

However, earlier defenestrations were successful, and indeed in recent years it seems to have come back into fashion in Russia. Oh dear.

Canna Rhu Church, Inner Hebrides: thanks to Dixe Wills/AA Publishing via The Daily Mail