So the Templars–according to the new information that’s just come to light–were found not guilty of heresy, but guilty of parking in a loading zone or something. The Knights Templar, as everyone who has suffered through The Da Vinci Code knows, are often said to have been custodians of the Holy Grail. “Disentangling fact and fiction about them is difficult,” says the BBC, somehow failing to add that most of the difficulty comes from peddlers of fiction passing off their wares as fact.

But it will be a bit less difficult now that the Chinon Parchment is published. Granted, it’s in a limited-edition facsimile that’s worth more than my car, but it’s still out there now. This is exciting news for historians, but not necessarily for the peddlers of fiction. Oh, who am I kidding? They’re probably already writing new books about how the Chinon Parchemt proves everything they’ve ever said about Mary Magdalene and the little green men from the flying cigars.

Still, it’s always exciting when an important historical document comes to light. For centuries it was miscatalogued, lost in a box somewhere in the Vatican’s secret archive. I have the same problem with my books, so I sympathize with the archivists. It’s not easy keeping track of twenty years or so of accumulation. I can imagine what a mess it must be after you’ve been collecting books for twenty centuries.

We’re celebrating Mary Magdalene today, who’s certainly worth celebrating. More than a dozen people are counted as “apostles” in the Bible, but there’s only one “apostle to the apostles”: the woman Christ chose out of all his followers to carry the message that he had risen.

Of course, Mary Magdalene has a big place in revisionist Grail-as-bloodline lore as the wife of Christ who bore his son, and thus was the real Holy Grail. The people who hold this theory, like Dan Brown for instance (one of the wonderful things about all this Harry Potter hoopla is that nobody has to talk about Dan Brown anymore), tell us that the evil Church establishment slandered Mary Magdalene by calling her a former prostitute and so on. It certainly is true that tradition identified–and perhaps misidentified–her as a former prostitute, but was that a slander? If you think it was, you don’t understand much about Christianity, and especially early Christianity.

If the early Christians allowed themselves any pride at all, it was usually in the contrast between their former lives and the lives they led as Christians. Paul called himself the greatest of sinners, and he had some right to the title. There were plenty of murderers walking around, but Paul had made it his business to murder people specifically because they were followers of Christ. He still carried with him the memory of watching Stephen die–Stephen the first martyr, whose death Paul had specifically approved of.

So if Mary Magdalene escaped from sin to become a saint, that was no slander: it was the highest possible praise one Christian could give another. As for the supposed attempt of the Church to suppress the memory of Mary Magdalene, a brief survey of the enormous number of medieval churches dedicated to her quickly pops that balloon. After Mary the Mother of Jesus, it would be hard to find a more popular saint, or one whose cult was more enthusiastically encouraged by that nasty old patriarchal establishment. (We talked a little about that more than a year ago.)

So happy Mary Magdalene day, everyone, and don’t be afraid to celebrate it in a perfectly orthodox way. How should we celebrate? Oh, I know: we could imitate her example and bring the good news of Christ’s resurrection to tired old Christians who are sinking into despair! Or we could have cookies.

Here we have two maps from Green’s Short History of the English People, and taken together they illustrate something that isn’t always obvious when we read the histories of England.

The first map shows Britain in the middle of the English conquest. The English have taken the eastern parts of the island, leaving the British desperately clinging to the west and still dreaming (not unreasonably) of taking back the rest.

The second map shows the English in control of more of the island, but the Britons (or Welsh, as the English would call them) still hold much of western Britain; and, though it might seem optimistic, we can still imagine them dreaming of one day ruling over the English, if not expelling them altogether. West Wales is shrunk to about half its size, but it’s still there. (A dialect of the old British language would be spoken in pockets of Cornwall up into the 1600s).

Now, these two maps are about two hundred years apart. The Dark Ages are so dim that those two hundred years usually take up no more than two or three pages in our history books. But two hundred years is a very long time.

Think for a moment how the world has changed since 1807. Steam power catapults us across the countryside at a mile a minute; the telegraph brings news instantly from across the continent; coal gas turns night into day in all our cities with its brilliant light. There may have been even more surprising changes, but I don’t read the newspapers much anymore.

The first eruption of the English was swift and devastating; in one campaign they destroyed the lingering Roman civilization on the island of Britain. But they could not hold the whole island: the Britons regrouped, and after that the conquest was a matter of an inch at a time. Almost as often the British took back an inch here or there.

You can say all that in words, but sometimes nothing conveys an idea better than a good map.