Death-Defying Cistercians?

Posted on 24th July 2014 by howardwilliams

Buildwas Abbey, Shropshire

Re-posted from Howard’s Archaeodeath blog. In the Past in its Place project we are exploring how memories are located in cathedrals, ancient habitations and the wider landscape. Here, I muse over how the dispersal of tombs and memorials, and the heritage management of the ruins of Cistercian monasteries, is more than a casual ‘forgetting’ of the dead, but an overt dimension of heritage interpretation with its focusing on the religious and economic life of medieval monks that downplays the dynamic relationships between patrons and abbeys in which memory was key.

I recently visited Buildwas Abbey, Shropshire, a site managed by English Heritage and staffed that day by one of its most friendly of employees. Beside the River Severn, this is a perfect ruin of a 12th-century Cistercian house, suppressed in 1536 and adapted into a secular mansion.

It is truly a ‘perfect ruin’, together with woodland walks down to the river. It was a great stop-off en route back from Oxfordshire to North Wales. For me this was a real nostalgia visit, since I last went there as a kid myself. Here are some general pictures of this superb ruin with the neatly trimmed grass that typifies EH sites.

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Cremation Switchback and the Churchyard

Posted on 24th July 2014 by howardwilliams

Pennant Melangell church

This is re-posted from Howard Williams’s Archaeodeath blog.

Recently I posted about a visit to Pennant Melangell and the shrine of St Melangell. Well, it must be said that this is a fascinating site for its church and internal memorials, but even more so for its churchyard.

18th-century graves: Pennant Melangell

Many urban,suburban and large rural churchyards (whether in use or abandoned) have very complex patterns of memorialisation with multiple foci to them. In such environments, the bodies of the dead compete with each other, jostling down the generations within the restrictions of limited space. From the 19th century in particular, some churchyards bear signs of a new trend of expansion rather than reuse.

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Iconoclasm in the Rear View Mirror

Posted on 23rd July 2014 by Philip

As the lyricist Jim Steinman once observed, “Objects in the Rear View Mirror May Appear Closer Than They Are.” When it comes to actual mirrors, of course, the opposite is the case: objects in the mirror are closer than they appear. But when it comes to the memory of iconoclasm in sacred spaces such as cathedrals, Steinman had a valid point. Consider the case of Bishop John Grandisson’s tomb in Exeter Cathedral.

Grandisson died in 1369 and was buried in St Radegund’s chapel, which he had himself audaciously inserted into the west entrance of the Cathedral. It seems likely that he was represented in effigy, gazing up at the image of Christ that adorns the chapel ceiling (much as his predecessor Walter de Stapledon does in his canopied tomb in the north aisle). Grandisson’s tomb does not survive, but when exactly it disappeared remains unclear.

In the closing years of the sixteenth century, the Exeter historian John Hooker recorded that Grandisson’s “tombe was of late pulled up, the ashes scattered abroad, and the bones bestowed no man knoweth where.” Some historians have taken the word “late” to indicate that the opening of the tomb occurred in the reign of Queen Elizabeth (in spite of her edict against precisely this sort of desecration). But is this necessarily the case? After all, Shakespeare in the 1590s refers to the monasteries dissolved in the 1530s as “bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang” (Sonnet 73). For aficionados of nostalgia, like Shakespeare and perhaps like Hooker, such losses are always recent or “late,” even if they occurred some decades before the writer’s birth. Given how frequent the desecration of medieval tombs was in the 1530s and 40s (and given the specific resemblance between Hooker’s account of what happened to Grandisson and reports of the destruction of Becket’s shrine and the scattering of his ashes in 1538), the likelihood is that Hooker was referring to events that took place fifty or sixty years before at the height of the Reformation?

Whether or not Hooker fell prey to the Rear View Mirror Effect in this case, subsequent writers clearly did. Writing in 1630, Thomas Westcote recorded that Bishop Grandisson “was taken up shrouded in lead, not long since, the lead melted, and the chapel defaced.” In 1677, Richard Izacke complained that “his tomb was of late ransack’d by sacrilegious hands; his leaden coffin (in hope of a prey) taken up, the ashes scattered about, and his bones thrown, I know not where.” Izacke was writing of an event that had occurred at least 90years in the past, and more probably something closer to 140. His insistence that the opening of the tomb was a “late” event led later writers to suppose that the desecration occurred in the Civil War. Thus, in the eighteenth century, John Jones, followed by Richard Polwhele, reports that Grandisson’s “tomb was broken open and ransacked by the myrmidons of Oliver Cromwell, the coffin taken up, and his remains scattered and lost.”

The fact that Izacke could describe the ransacking of the tomb as a “late” event does not prove that it happened in the Civil War era (though if we did not have Hooker and Westcote as prior witnesses, we might assume so). By the same token, the fact that Hooker uses the word “late” should not lead us to conclude that Grandisson’s tomb was opened in the 1590s. The most interesting question is not when the tomb was actually dismantled, but why writers should persist in describing events that were increasingly distant in time as if they had happened only the other day.

Grace Darling

Posted on 15th July 2014 by howardwilliams

Grace Horsley Darling by Thomas Musgrave Joy. Reproduced from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Darling

Grace Horsley Darling (1815-42) is one of the Victorian era’s premier heroines and her story is well told by the website dedicated to her memory. Grace was born in a cottage next to St Aidan’s Church, Bamburgh, Northumberland.

She grew up a lighthouse keeper’s daughter upon Brownsman Island, one of the Farne Islands. Adept at sea and familiar with seabirds and island life, she then moved aged 10 into the newly built Longstone Lighthouse in 1825.

On 7th September 1838, she observed the wreck and survivors of the Forfarshire and subsequently rowed with her father in a storm to their rescue. Grace was a young woman who lived a relatively isolated life who through her heroism became a worldwide early Victorian celebrity.

The Victorian obsession with this female celebrity (including fascination from clergy as well as laypeople) was replete with Christian spiritual allusions connecting her residence and acts and the deeds and habitations of the early saints Aidan and Cutbhert who inhabited the Farne Islands. Grace also embodied the adventurous romance of the sublime isolation and dangers of this maritime environment.

Yet the affinity for Grace manifest itself in the deeply, material and corporeal one desire to possess her body. People wrote fan mail to Grace, wished to kiss the paper and post it back, send locks of her hair, asking her to appear at public events as a ‘token’ and almost as an living saintly icon. People travelled to see her and there was a desire to have her act of bravery depicted by artists. Also, portraits of this lady were taken and widely distributed. Grace embodied the virtues of English Christian virginal womanhood. Whether it was the pressure of her fame alone, Grace died only four years later, aged only 26, on 20th October 1842. Perhaps she was hounded to an early grave by her public exposure; near her end she was fearful of imagined eyes watching her. Still, she was ultimately diagnosed with tuberculosis and died from that condition.

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Lindisfarne Stones

Posted on 15th July 2014 by howardwilliams

Re-posted from Archaeodeath

This is my fourth and final comment about a short visit to Lindisfarne. The principal reason for my visit was to view the early medieval stone sculpture in the visitor centre and priory. Strip away the archaeological excavations elsewhere on Holy Island, strip away the historical record, the vast majority of the material evidence that this had been an important monastic foundation of the seventh to ninth centuries AD comes from the collection of Anglo-Saxon sculpted stones discovered in and around the priory. It is a fabulous and varied collection as one might expect. I have already mentioned the Petting Stone. In the priory itself is a cross-base with serpentine crosses on its front.

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Commemoration at Lindisfarne Priory

Posted on 15th July 2014 by howardwilliams

Re-posted from Archaeodeath

As a place of worship and pilgrimage, with St Mary’s church and churchyard right next to the priory ruins, and given the long-standing associated with the absent saintly dead in the form of Aidan and Cuthbert, it is hardly surprising that death and memory are interwoven with the site of Lindisfarne Priory’s ruins. I have mused over the landscape and seascape context and the heritage interpretation of the famous Viking raid, but what of death and commemoration in the English Heritage site of Lindisfarne Priory and its environs? Even a brief consideration of this topic reveals the complexity of what is memorialised and what is not; where memorialisation has historically been allowed, and where it is not.

The ruins are a marvel in themselves, already one of my favourite sets of Romanesque and Gothic monastic ruins before I even got there. I loved the patina of the windblown sandstone and the fabulous columns of the nave, so reminiscent of Durham Cathedral. Here are some standard photos for your viewing pleasure.

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Lindisfarne

Posted on 10th July 2014 by howardwilliams

Lindisfarne Priory from the Heugh

Re-posted from Archaeodeath.

Recently, for the first time in my adult life, I had the opportunity to visit the premier medieval site of Lindisfarne. This is a site of key historic and archaeological importance for understanding the Anglo-Saxon church, its origins, development and diversity. It was here that Aidan established the earliest Christian monastic foundation in the kingdom of Northumbria. His founder status was superseded to a large extent by the cult of St Cuthbert, but forgotten he was not. Lindisfarne is also famous for being subject to one of the earliest, and certainly the most famous of Norse raids, in AD 793. Following a decline (or abandonment) of the site during the tenth century, the Benedictine priory was a focus of monastic life and pilgrimage to the cenotaph of Cuthbert’s original grave and to St Cuthbert’s Isle – the site of his hermit’s cell – through the Middle Ages. The monastery survived until Henry VIII’s suppression of the monasteries.

The English Heritage commissioned artist’s impression of the Anglo-Saxon monastic site

I couldn’t stay long on the island, but I can only enthuse about the striking landscape and seascape, appreciable even from a short visit. The first thing to note is the striking topography of the island itself, joined as it is by a tidal causeway to the mainland. Dunes constitute much of the north of the island, leaving a relatively small and protected area of habitable ground. The Anglo-Saxon monastery was located beside a natural harbour on the sheltered southern shore.

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Poem of the Week: ‘Periwinks, Periwinkle!’

Posted on 8th July 2014 by Philip

Lately I’ve been browsing among dusty books of epitaphs…. An appropriate kind of reading for a project on “Speaking with the Dead,” you might well say, but in fact not half as melancholy as it sounds. Collections of epitaphs and old inscriptions were published, pirated and republished regularly in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. These collections tend to juxtapose actual inscriptions for the great and good in churches and cathedrals with highly dubious (and disparaging) epitaphs for drunkards and ne’er-do-wells. Their attraction clearly has much to do with the mingling of high and low, ornate and plain, true and fictive, “serious and facetious” (to quote the subtitle of Churchyard Gleanings, 1826).

You can’t get a feel for the contents of these collections from a single extract, but this one from A Collection of Epitaphs and Monumental Inscriptions (1806) gives a taste of what drew readers to these compilations.

CHICHESTER CATHEDRAL

This stone was erected, by her fellow-citizens, to the memory of

ELIZABETH ATKINSON,

An industrious woman. She died Jan. the 1st, 1786, aged 77 years.

PERIWINKS, periwinkle,
Was ever her cry;
She labour’d to live,
Poor and honest to die.
At the last day again,
How her old eyes will twinkle;
For no more will she cry,
Periwinks, periwinkle!

Ye rich, to virtuous want rejoicing give;
Ye poor, by her example learn to live.

[This epitaph seems to have been inscribed on a stone in the cathedral churchyard, rather than within the walls. It does not survive.]

Poem of the Week: Gibson’s “Yeavering Bell”

Posted on 1st July 2014 by Philip

Following up on Howard’s observations about the visibility or invisibility of the sun behind Yeavering Bell from the vantage point of Ad Gefrin, a short poem by the Northumberland poet Wilfrid Wilson Gibson (from his collection Whin, published 1918):

Just to see the rain
Sweeping over Yeavering Bell
Once again!

Just to see again,
Light break over Yeavering Bell
After rain.

Short and sweet — six lines, twenty-two words — but laden with memory, nostalgia, loss.

Maelmin

Posted on 30th June 2014 by howardwilliams

The Maelmin Heritage Trail

Ok, I thought of the strained pun on the ‘The Postman Always Rings Twice’ and now I have absolutely no idea how this relates to this blog posting. This is the beauty of having no editor and no anonymous referees: I need not explain myself to anyone! If you can overcome this disappointment, please read on…

Boards by the entrance outline the history of the RAF site

The landscape around Millfield, Northumberland is a rich archaeological landscape spanning from the Mesolithic to modern era. Having visited Yeavering/Ad Gefrin, Bamburgh and Lindisfarne the previous day, I went back to the Millfield basin to ascend Yeavering Bell. En route, I stopped off very early morning to walk around the Maelmin Heritage Trail on the edge of Millfield. Here I encountered something very different from the other sites.

Millfield henge monument

The Anglo-Saxon palace site of Maelmin was the successor to Ad Gefrin. Never excavated, aerial photographs revealed a elaborate complex of timber halls, enclosures and burial sites comparable to Yeavering and Thirlings. Excavations of two Neolithic henges at Millfield also found secondary early Anglo-Saxon inhumation graves reusing these ancient monuments. Again it is unclear the full duration of the site without extensive excavations but close by lower-status Anglo-Saxon settlements at Cheviot Quarry (published in the Archaeological Journal) and other sites reveal the broader pattern of early medieval settlement around the Millfield basin.

The woods

As with Ad Gefrin, the Maelmin Heritage Trail faces the stark challenge of communicating a rich archaeological landscape in which there is almost nothing to see above ground for the visitor. The heritage trail originally had three reconstructions (two extant) and a massive dose of heritage boards set within a plot of land managed as a mix grassland and woodland.

Early morning views over the Millfield basin from the Maelmin Heritage Trail

The visitor to the site begins with a car parking area and three heritage boards giving details of the wartime history of the site as an RAF airfield for training pilots. There is a memorial stone upon which are the names of those – mostly of the RAF and RCAF – who lost their lives between 1942 and 1946 at the facility.

The ‘Dark Age house’

An introductory heritage board gives details of the archaeological landscape. One then embarks on a time trail moving through a broadly anti-clockwise route through thick grass and then through the wood and back to the car park through the grass again. Board after board gives informative details of the local landscape, the chronological narrative: Mesolithic, early Neolithic, late Neolithic, Bronze Age, Iron Age, Roman, end of Roman Britain, the ‘revival of the Britons’, the early Anglo-Saxons, the conversion of the Northumbrian kingdom to Christianity.

Sneaking a peak inside the Dark Age house

There are additional boards explaining details within the periods, about the three reconstructions: the Mesolithic hut (no longer extant), the Neolithic henge and the ‘Dark Age house’ and the excavations at Cheviot Quarry and the sites of Maelmin and Thirlings.

The henge is interesting, with ditches, banks and upright timber posts, it does indeed give a sense of how these monuments might have looked.

Henge posts in early morning light

The ‘Dark Age’ house was locked, but sneaking a peak through the door, one got a sense of a relatively small and stark interior, but inevitably it sits without a context unlike the ‘settlement’ arrangements elsewhere like West Stow and Bede’s World.

A further set of heritage boards explores the preferable climate of the Millfield basin, the formation of the landscape, the hydrology of the basin, woodlands, animals and birdlife.

Anal graffiti

Three things struck me about this heritage site

The volume of boards, and the two reconstructions, do create a palpable sense of archaeology and landscape in a relatively small space. Given the lack of public accessible land in the immediate environs, this was a great foci for anyone interested in the heritage of the area, and works in this regard far better than Bamburgh, Lindisfarne or Ad Gefrin
The information is accurate in general terms, but incredibly conventional and stylised, particularly notable (to me) in the proto-historic and early historic boards which advocate a simple migrationist framework for the emergence of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom. To be fair though, this is what happens everywhere in this region it seems: Lindisfarne even had the Dad’s Army style map with arrows showing the migration routes of the Anglo-Saxon tribes. For crying out loud!
It is not unusual for the same artist to be responsible for the images, creating a coherence to the displays, creating a shared theme. Despite the perpetuation of stereotypes of dress and body proportions (all men had massive muscles, all women had massive breasts: at least in prehistory, then women and men both get far more boring and better clothed), at least it was a rare attempt to introduce a Carry On style humour into British heritage sites. At least that was my view. At most other sites you are really not expected to laugh at other heritage sites, and where humour is used, it is in infantile attempts to engage kids. For me, this worked well and created memorable images and information.

Empty – no leaflets 🙁

So despite the absence of any ‘real’ archaeology, the Maelmin Heritage Trail tries its best. There were no leaflets to take away and one typo on the main introduction board has been angrily daubed with rectifying graffiti. Still, on the whole, this gets my tentative thumbs up.

As for the pun? Answers on a postcard to: Maelmin Heritage Trail Pun Competition, Millfield, Northumberland. Although perhaps, at a site where two henges were excavated, this is a site with two rings…

I’m really not sure what the archaeological basis for any of this is, but still, a nice idea.

I like this so much. Lovely chamber grave with wand-wielding priestess (I think) and the march of the Angles out of Bamburgh heading for glory…

How Maelmin may have looked. Still, ‘royal town’ really does give the wrong impression to the visitor.

Edwin getting hitched and Paulinus batpising people in the River Glen. ‘Flowering of Anglo-British Culture’: nice phrase but I think Northumbria was not more or less ‘Anglo-British’ than anywhere else in lowland Britain.