St Augustine’s Parade

Liz Milner

A look at the contrasts between the modern Parade and the lives of the 12th century Augustian monks in the abbey that it is named after.

Further Info | Transcript | Credits

Further Info

This story was made on a two-day located digital storytelling workshop based at Watershed, led by Mobile Bristol in Aug 2005. Participants were artists invited through Watershed’s Photo Net email group. Themes tied in with various locations in and around the Centre of Bristol. The stories were created using Hewlett Packard iPaq portable computers and was supported by Bristol’s Museums, Galleries & Archives.

Transcript

This is St Augustine’s Parade. Why St Augustine?

If you look up the hill, away from the water, you can see Bristol Cathedral. This was once an abbey, founded in the twelfth century.

The monks wore black and were known as Augustinian Canons – Canon’s Road is just behind the Watershed. The Parade is named after the abbey.

[Church organ music]

As well as serving God, they also worked in the community and lived under the monastic rule of St Augustine. Some of these rules were about how the monks should behave when they went to do their work in the city. It’s curious to imagine how they would have managed today when they went down to the area we know as St Augustine’s Parade.

[Sound of buskers playing xylophone in the Parade]

“There should be nothing about your clothing to attract attention, besides you should not seek to please by your apparel but by a good life. Although your eyes may chance to rest on some woman or other, you must not fix your gaze on any woman. Seeing women when you go out is not forbidden, but it is sinful to desire them or to wish them to desire you, for it is not by tough or passionate feeling alone, but by one’s gaze that lustful desires mutually arise, and whoever fixes his gaze upon a woman and likes to have hers fixed upon him must not suppose that others do not see what he is doing, for it is on this point that fear of the Lord is recommended where it is written ‘An abomination to the Lord is he who fixes his gaze’.

Credits

All media not otherwise credited created by the story author, or permission obtained, used under copyright licence.