Reading Test 02

|Part 1|

TEA TIMES

A The chances are that you have already drunk a cup or glass of tea today. Perhaps, you are sipping one as you read this. Tea, now an everyday beverage in many parts of the world, has over the centuries been an important part of rituals of hospitality both in the home and in wider society.

B Tea originated in China, and in Eastern Asia tea making and drinking ceremonies have been popular for centuries. Tea was first shipped to North Western Europe by English and Dutch maritime traders in the sixteenth century. At about the same time, a land route from the Far East, via Moscow, to Europe was opened up. Tea also figured in America’s bid for independence from British rule – the Boston Tea Party.

C As, over the last four hundred years, tea-leaves became available throughout much of Asia and Europe, the ways in which tea was drunk changed. The Chinese considered the quality of the leaves and the ways in which they were cured all important. People in other cultures added new ingredients besides tea-leaves and hot water. They drank tea with milk, sugar, spices like cinnamon and cardamom, and herbs such as mint or sage. The variations are endless. For example, in Western Sudan on the edge of the Sahara Desert, sesame oil is added to milky tea on cold mornings. In England tea, unlike coffee, acquired a reputation as a therapeutic drink that promoted health. Indeed, in European and Arab countries as well as in Persia and Russia, tea was praised for its restorative and health giving properties. One Dutch physician, Cornelius Blankaart, advised that to maintain health a minimum of eight to ten cups a day should be drunk, and that up to 50 to 100 daily cups could be consumed with safety.

D While European coffee houses were frequented by men discussing politics and closing business deals, respectable middle-class women stayed at home and held tea parties. When the price of tea fell in the nineteenth century poor people took up the drink with enthusiasm. Different grades and blends of tea were sold to suit every pocket.

E Throughout the world today, few religious groups object to tea drinking. In Islamic cultures, where drinking of alcohol is forbidden, tea and coffee consumption is an important part of social life. However, Seventh-Day Adventists, recognising the beverage as a drug containing the stimulant caffeine, frown upon the drinking of tea.

F Nomadic Bedouin are well known for traditions of hospitality in the desert. According to Middle Eastern tradition, guests are served both tea and coffee from pots kept ready on the fires of guest tents where men of the family and male visitors gather. Cups of ‘bitter’ cardamom coffee and glasses of sugared tea should be constantly refilled by the host.

G For over a thousand years, Arab traders have been bringing Islamic culture, including tea drinking, to northern and western Africa. Techniques of tea preparation and the ceremonial involved have been adapted. In West African countries, such as Senegal and The Gambia, it is fashionable for young men to gather in small groups to brew Chinese ‘gunpowder’ tea. The tea is boiled with large amounts of sugar for a long time.

H Tea drinking in India remains an important part of daily life. There, tea made entirely with milk is popular. ‘Chai’ is made by boiling milk and adding tea, sugar and some spices. This form of tea making has crossed the Indian Ocean and is also popular in East Africa, where tea is considered best when it is either very milky or made with water only. Curiously, this ‘milk or water’ formula has been carried over to the preparation of instant coffee, which is served in cafes as either black, or sprinkled on a cup of hot milk.

I In Britain, coffee drinking, particularly in the informal atmosphere of coffee shops, is currently in vogue. Yet, the convention of afternoon tea lingers. At conferences, it remains common practice to serve coffee in the morning and tea in the afternoon. Contemporary China, too, remains true to its long tradition. Delegates at conferences and seminars are served tea in cups with lids to keep the infusion hot. The cups are topped up throughout the proceedings. There are as yet no signs of coffee at such occasions.

|Part 2|

Tyes and Greens

There are a number of settlements in this part of East Anglia with names containing the word ‘tye’. The word is Anglo-Saxon in origin, and the Oxford English Dictionary quotes the earliest usage of the term as dating from 832. Essentially a ‘tye’ was a green, or a small area of open common land, usually sited away from the main village or settlement, perhaps at the junction of two or more routes. Local people and passing travellers had the right to pasture their horses, pigs and other farm animals on the tye.

In the Pebmarsh area there seem to have been five or six of these tyes, all, except one, at the margins of the parish. These marginal clearings are all away from the richer farming land close to the river, and, in the case of Cooks Green, Hayles Tye, and Dorking Tye, close to the edge of still existing fragments of ancient woodland. It seems likely then that, here, as elsewhere in East Anglia, medieval freemen were allowed to clear a small part of the forest and create a smallholding. Such unproductive forest land would, in any case, have been unattractive to the wealthy baronial or monastic landowners. Most of the land around Pebmarsh village belonged to Earls Colne Priory, a wealthy monastery about 10 kilometres to the south, and it may be that by the 13th and 14th centuries the tyes were maintained by tenant farmers paying rent to the Priory.

Hayles Tye seems to have got its name from a certain John Hayle who is documented in the 1380s, although there are records pointing to occupation of the site at a much earlier date. The name was still in use in 1500, and crops up again throughout the 16th and 17th centuries, usually in relation to the payment of taxes or tithes. At some point during the 18th century the name is changed to File’s Green, though no trace of an owner called File has been found. Also in the 18th century the original dwellings on the site disappeared. Much of this region was economically depressed during this period and the land and its dwellings may simply have been abandoned. Several farms were abandoned in the neighbouring village of Alphamstone, and the population dwindled so much that there was no money to support the fabric of the village church, which became very dilapidated. However, another possibility is that the buildings at File’s Green burnt down, fires being not infrequent at this time.

By 1817 the land was in the ownership of Charles Townsend of Ferriers Farm, and in 1821 he built two brick cottages on the site, each cottage occupied by two families of agricultural labourers. The structure of these cottages was very simple, just a two-storey rectangle divided in the centre by a large common chimney piece. Each dwelling had its own fireplace, but the two families seem to have shared a brick bread-oven which jutted out from the rear of the cottage. The outer wall of the bread-oven is still visible on the remaining cottage. The fireplaces themselves and the chimney structure appear to be older than the 1821 cottages and may have survived from the earlier dwellings. All traces of the common land had long disappeared, and the two cottages stood on a small plot of less than an acre where the labourers would have been able to grow a few vegetables and keep a few chickens or a pig. The bulk of their time was spent working at Ferriers farm.

Both cottages are clearly marked on maps of 1874, but by the end of the century one of them had gone. Again, the last years of the 19th century were a period of agricultural depression, and a number of smaller farms in the area were abandoned. Traces of one, Mosse’s Farm, still partly encircled by a very overgrown moat, may be seen less than a kilometre from File’s Green. It seems likely that, as the need for agricultural labour declined, one of the cottages fell into disuse, decayed and was eventually pulled down. Occasional fragments of rubble and brick still surface in the garden of the remaining cottage.

In 1933, this cottage was sold to the manager of the newly-opened gravel works to the north-west of Pebmarsh village. He converted these two dwellings into one. This, then, is the only remaining habitation on the site, and is called File’s Green Cottage.

|Part 3|

Haydn’s late quartets

By the time he came to write the String Quartets published as Opus 76 and Opus 77, Haydn was undoubtedly the most famous living composer in the whole of Europe. He had recently returned from the highly successful second visit to England, for which he had composed his last six symphonies, culminating in the brilliant and festive Drum Roll Symphony (No. 103) and London Symphony (No. 104). This is public music, full of high spirits, expansive gestures and orchestral surprises. Haydn knew how to please his audience. And in 1796, following his return to Vienna, he began work on his largest and most famous choral work, the oratorio, ‘The Creation’. In the succeeding years, till 1802, he was to write a series of other large scale religious choral works, including several masses. The oratorios and masses were also public works, employing large forces for dramatic effect, but warm and full of apparently spontaneous religious feeling. Yet at the same time he composed these 8 quartets, in terms of technical mastery and sheer musical invention the equal of the symphonies and choral works, but in their mood and emotional impact far removed, by turns introspective and detached, or full of passionate intensity.

Once again, as in the early 1770s when he appears to have been going through some kind of spiritual crisis, Haydn returned to the String Quartet as a means to accomplish a twofold aim: firstly to innovate musically in a genre free from public performance requirements or religious convention; secondly to express personal emotions or philosophy in a musical form that is intimate yet capable of great subtlety and complexity of meaning. The result is a series of quartets of astonishing structural, melodic, rhythmic and harmonic variety, inhabiting a shifting emotional world, where tension underlies surface brilliance and calm gives way to unease.

The six quartets of Opus 76 differ widely in character. The opening movement of No. 2 is tense and dramatic, while that of No 4 begins with the soaring long-breathed melody that has earned it the nickname of ‘The Sunrise’. The minuets too have moved a long way from the stately court dance of the mid-eighteenth century. The so-called ‘Witches Minuet’ of No. 2 is a strident canon, that of No. 6 is a fast one-in-a-bar movement anticipating the scherzos of Beethoven, while at the heart of No. 5 is a contrasting trio section which, far from being the customary relaxed variant of the surrounding minuet, flings itself into frenetic action and is gone. The finales are full of the energy and grace we associate with Haydn, but with far less conscious humour and more detachment than in earlier quartets.

But it is in the slow movements that Haydn is most innovative and most unsettling. In No. 1 the cello and the first violin embark on a series of brusque dialogues. No.4 is a subdued meditation based on the hushed opening chords. The slow movements of No.5 and No.6 are much looser in structure, the cello and viola setting off on solitary episodes of melodic and harmonic uncertainty. But there the similarity ends, for while No.5 is enigmatic, and predominantly dark in tone, the overlapping textures of its sister are full of light-filled intensity.

The Opus 76 quartets were published in 1799, when Haydn was well over 60 years old. Almost immediately he was commissioned to write another set by Prince Lobkowitz, a wealthy patron, who was later to become an important figure in Beethoven’s life. Two quartets only were completed and published as Opus 77 Nos 1 & 2 in 1802. But these are not the works of an old man whose powers are fading, or who simply consolidates ground already covered. Once again Haydn innovates. The opening movement of Opus 77 No.2 is as structurally complex and emotionally unsettling as anything he ever wrote, alternating between a laconic opening theme and a tense and threatening counter theme which comes to dominate the whole movement. Both quartets have fast scherzo-like ‘minutes’. The slow movement of No.1 is in traditional variation form, but stretches the form to the limit in order to accommodate widely contrasting textures and moods. The finale of No.2 is swept along by a seemingly inexhaustible stream of energy and inventiveness.

In fact, Haydn began a third quartet in this set, but never finished it, and the two completed movements were published in 1806 as Opus 103, his last published work. He was over 70, and clearly lacked the strength to continue composition. The two existing movements are a slow movement followed by a minuet. The slow movement has a quiet warmth, but it is the minuet that is remarkable. It is in true dance time, unlike the fast quasi-scherzos of the earlier quartets. But what a dance! In a sombre D minor Haydn unfolds an angular, ruthless little dance of death. The central trio section holds out a moment of consolation, and then the dance returns, sweeping on relentlessly to the final sudden up rush of sound. And then, after more than 40 years of composition the master falls silent.