Thoughts on itinerary
I will start from the practical: the itinerary. If I am going to let a medieval city — not quite a city, but a cathedral precinct that keeps time the way a metronome keeps rhythm for an orchestra — rewire my thoughts about law and learning, I will plan for slow entry. Arrive in the morning. Walk the short climb from the market, feel the stones warm, and allow the cathedral towers and the moat around the Bishop's Palace to orient me. Vicar's Close first: a narrow medieval street where the houses face each other like students on a tutorial bench; then the Palace and its swans — a slow circuit past a moat thick with reflections, then sit and think. Bring a notebook. Bring Augustine. Bring Alcuin. Bring a curiosity about Charlemagne and the odd combination of laws, beekeeping, and food. And give myself time to listen for bells.
Arrival and first impressions: Vicar's Close
Vicar's Close feels like an answer to a law school corridor: ordered houses, a shared vocation, an architecture that presumes a community that studies and prays together. It's the oldest purely residential street in Europe that still looks and functions as it did for its original purpose. Walking it, I feel the historian's frisson — the quiet continuity — and the lawyer's attention to precedent. There is a conservatism to stone: it remembers its own constraints. That memory is fertile ground for thinking about Augustine's City of God, which my year of study keeps returning me to. Augustine wrote in an age of collapse, trying to name two cities: one oriented to earthly goods, power, and the ephemeral; the other oriented to God and eternity. Vicar's Close is a micro-city that both sustains earthly routines and gestures toward a higher communal purpose. Its very layout is a kind of social law, a set of living rules for how to be neighbors and clerics.
Bells and swans: the Bishop's Palace and its moat
Later, the bells of Wells roll over the market and across the green; bell-ringing there is not mere ornament but a civic speech-act. Bells announce time, warn of danger, call to worship, and shape a population's shared sense of now. The Bishop's Palace, with its moat and resident swans, reads like a pastoral stage set: swans preen on the water, ghosts almost, and the palace itself carries the weight of centuries of episcopal authority. The swans are a reminder that the pastoral and the juridical have always been entwined — bishops were simultaneously shepherds and judges. Augustine's pastoral theology emphasizes care for souls; the bishop's legal authority extends to the governance of land and people. Walking the embankment, I think of how law and pastoral care are supposed to aim at the flourishing of the flock.
Augustine's City of God: pastoral care and the law
Augustine composed City of God in the wake of Rome's sack, answering anxieties about divine justice and civic collapse. He distinguishes the earthly city, organized around love of self and earthly goods, from the city of God, organized around love of God. If I read Augustine as a law student might, he offers a moral grammar rather than a legal code: the desiring hearts that shape law, and the telos that law should serve. That year of study has taught me to read Augustine both as theologian and as a thinker about governance. He insists that legal institutions can be reoriented toward justice; but justice for Augustine is not merely equitable distribution or an abstract right but a restoration of ordered love.
This is the place where Ally's double sensibility — the litigator who parses statutes and the romantic who dreams of music and courtroom dramas — collapses into one. The cathedral bells sound like legal texts being read aloud: clauses, cadences, repeated phrases that form communal memory. In Wells those sounds feel ancient, but they also feel like the ongoing work of interpretation: what do we owe each other, how do we live together in ways that tolerate difference, and who does the law serve?
Alcuin: pedagogue, Latinist, curricular architect
From Augustine my thoughts slip to Alcuin, the Northumbrian scholar who helped shape Carolingian intellectual life. As a Latinate pedagogue and tutor to Charlemagne's court, Alcuin's mission was to revive learning. He wrote letters, crafted curricula, and argued that good governance depends on good education. Walking Vicar's Close, I imagine Alcuin arranging desks and dictating rules for monks who would copy texts and run schools. He insisted on literacy, correct Latin, and a shared textual culture — the ingredients of institutional coherence.
Alcuin's teaching was not ivory-tower; it was implicated in law and policy. Charlemagne's reforms depended on educated clerks who could draft capitularies and administer estates. The medieval curriculum Alcuin championed — grammar, rhetoric, logic, and the liberal arts — was the training ground for people who would become judges, pastors, and administrators. If Vicar's Close houses a community shaped by liturgy and learning, Alcuin would recognize its pedagogical logic. The stones and narrow passages map out an ethic: compactness, discipline, communal responsibility. It is a curriculum writ in architecture.
Charlemagne, capitularies, and the taste for beekeeping
Charlemagne appears in my mind not as an emperor in distant grandeur but as a hands-on reformer: issuing capitularies, urging agricultural improvement, and culturally sponsoring monastic life. Capitularies were royal ordinances, often written in short chapters (capitula) that regulated everything from clerical behavior to harvest schedules. In essence they are an early legal code — an attempt to impose uniform practice across a diverse realm. If Alcuin supplied the intellectual scaffolding, Charlemagne supplied the executive will to make law mean something on the ground.
And then there is the deliciously domestic detail I cannot resist: Charlemagne's apparent love of good food, horses, and even bees. Medieval courts prized honey as the principal sweetener, and beekeeping — apiculture — mattered for orchard productivity, immunities of monasteries, and local economies. The image of Charlemagne as an equestrian outdoorsman who also cared about agricultural practices and culinary pleasures humanizes a figure we otherwise treat as the abstract origin of law and empire. It reminds me that law is not only an instrument of power; it is also a set of embodied habits about how to till the land, feed people, and protect local livelihoods.
Legalese and law: from capitularies to contemporary statutes
Standing near the moat, watching a swan tilt its head at the bell-tower's shadow, I realize how legal forms reflect their times. Capitularies wrote rules in a mixed register: sometimes terse, sometimes pastoral, sometimes hortatory. Their language mediated between royal command and local custom. Fast-forward to modern legalese — its hairline precision, heavy clauses, and reference-laden prose — and the shift is striking. Yet the fundamental problems remain: how to make law intelligible to those it binds, how to craft rules that are firm yet flexible, how to balance central authority with local practices.
My year with Augustine taught me to see law as oriented toward moral ends; Alcuin and Charlemagne taught me how institutional reform attempts to shape behavior. The bells keep time; the capitularies keep order. Both must be interpreted. Law without interpreters is inert; interpreters without law yield chaos. As someone with 'university on her mind,' these lines intersect in an obvious way: the university trains interpreters — not only in law but in the deeper hermeneutics of social life.
University plans and the lure of academic life
Why do I (Ally, with briefs and billable hours behind me) imagine returning to university? Partly because places like Wells make visible a long continuum of learning that links Augustine's pastoral reflections, Alcuin's classrooms, and Charlemagne's legal reforms. University is an institutional attempt to preserve slow thinking. The courtroom rewards quick judgment under pressure; the lecture hall cultivates patient exegesis. In law school I learned to parse statutory text; in a medieval studies seminar I learn to parse motives and moral horizons. Both are needed.
In the slightly comic, slightly melancholy voice I often use internally, I imagine myself as a bridge. I would teach law students to value the rhetorical, theological, and agricultural contexts of legal texts. I would ask them to think about how a capitulary functioned in a village where honey was a currency of celebration and obligation, or how Augustine's sense of order might complicate modern rights-talk. In short: law without cultural literacy is blind.
Bell-ringing as interpretive practice
Back to the bells. Bell-ringing is procedural and communal. Change-ringing patterns require practice and a shared code: who pulls when, which sequence follows, how to avoid chaos. I think of legal procedure as similar. The best lawyers know not only the letter of the law but the practiced moves: the ritual of a hearing, the cadences of persuasion, the deference to precedent. Bell-ringers pass down patterns the way clerks and judges pass down interpretive habits. At Wells, the sound is both a communal conversation and a lesson in disciplined creativity.
Pastoral, pedagogy, and practicalities: tying Augustine, Alcuin, and Charlemagne together
Augustine supplies the moral telos — what the law might aim to cultivate in the human heart. Alcuin supplies the method — how to educate those who will enact and interpret law. Charlemagne supplies the scope — the administrative will to craft rules that actually reach villages and monasteries. Together they form a tripod. Standing in Wells, I see each tripod's leg mirrored: the cathedral's pastoral care embodies Augustine; the Close enacts Alcuin's pedagogical discipline; the Palace's legal vestiges recall Charlemagne's capitularies. The living swans and the bell rhythms make the abstractions bodily and audible.
Practical itinerary notes for a student or traveler
If you want to follow this itinerary yourself, here are explicit steps. Start early at the market to avoid crowds. Walk Vicar's Close slowly, imagining it as a classroom. Then cross toward the Palace and stand by the moat: listen, watch the swans, and notice how the water collects sound. Visit the cathedral: linger by the Chapter House and the cloisters. Take a short seminar reading: Augustine's City of God, one short book at a time; a selection of Alcuin's letters; a translation of a few capitularies. Bring questions that cross disciplines: what moral outcomes did these laws aim for? How did education support legal reform? When you return to campus or the courthouse, carry that interdisciplinary curiosity with you.
Concluding reflection: a law student learns to listen
My day in Wells ends with the bell-ringing fading into dusk and the swans settling on the moat like ellipses in a long sentence: pauses that invite reflection. The interdisciplinary year I have spent studying Augustine, Alcuin, and Charlemagne has been training in listening: to texts, to stones, to bells, and to local voices. Law is often framed as the shaping of behavior by force, or the adjudication of disputes. But law is also the fabrication of shared worlds — worlds that must be taught, reimagined, and tended.
Vicar's Close and the Bishop's Palace are more than tourist sites; they are living arguments about how community is sustained. Augustine would ask whether those communities orient us toward love of God or love of self. Alcuin would ask whether our educational habits allow us to read and write wisely. Charlemagne would ask whether our rules actually reach the ground and improve harvests, hives, and hearths. As I fold my notebook into my bag and leave, university on my mind, I feel less like a person choosing between law and some gentler scholarly life and more like someone who sees all these labors as a single vocation: the patient work of teaching people how to live together.
So my itinerary remains simple and precise: arrive early, listen closely, read slowly, and let the bells teach you how to speak. That is both a travel plan and a lesson plan for a legal life oriented by theology, pedagogy, and practice.