A weekend at Land’s End

The other day, WordPress told me that Surrey Medieval had reached the ripe old age of two. Born on an uncomfortable leatherette sofa in a terraced house in Liverpool (that wasn’t meant to sound so graphic), I suppose if this blog was a child it would be toddling about and finding its voice now, which doesn’t sound all that far off the reality.

I’m not certain when the big day was exactly as I was preoccupied preparing for a short holiday down in far western Cornwall ahead of an operation I’m now laid up in bed recovering from. Basing ourselves in beautiful St Ives (see above), the “itinerary” took in the other two key sights/sites of the locale: Land’s End and St Michael’s Mount (no points for originality, but you try getting to Chysauster on public transport). I wasn’t thinking all that much about its medieval history but, as was inevitable, ended up finding out some interesting things and snapping some photographs that I thought would repay posting here.

Looking out for the fishermen of St Ives – the chapel of St Nicholas with the modern coastguard station in the background.

St Ives’ reputation precedes it, particularly its distinguished artistic lineage. Though we didn’t visit the Tate gallery, I did insist on a quick look around Barbara Hepworth’s exquisite studio and garden which are also in its care. We also made it up to the top of The Island, capped by the diminutive chapel dedicated to St Nicholas. Appropriately for a foundation dedicated to the patron saint of fisherman (and oodles of other groups besides), from the chapel we looked out over the fishing boats returning to harbour after a day out at sea. Keep a look out for more about Saint Nick on this site in the coming months as I get around to writing up last year’s presentation on the chancel of Compton church (and some of the realisations I’ve had in the months since).

The above photo tries and largely fails to capture the very distinctive landscape of the Land’s End peninsula, a patchwork of tiny granite-walled fields giving way to rough heather-clad hills. It’s unlike anything I’m familiar with, steeped in history, from standing stones to the ruinous engine houses of tin mines. Indeed, I seem to recall reading – probably in one of Brian Roberts and Stuart Wrathmell’s pioneering works on regional landscape categorisation – that it’s a landscape quite unlike anything else extant in England today.

The relative shoddiness of the above photo leads me to impart the following piece of advice – don’t sit on the upper deck of an open-top bus driving into the winds blowing straight off the Atlantic Ocean. They are relentless, nowhere more so than at Land’s End. It’s a funny place, where the raw beauty of land and sea meets British seaside schlockery. Mercifully the latter has been just about kept in check, the usual high prices much in evidence (£9.95 for a photograph with the very flimsy New York 3147 miles that way sign, anyone?) but little in the way of the stereotypical tack, that is unless you count the Arthur’s Quest experience narrated by Brian Blessed, which unsurprisingly was clearly audible from outside…

Brian Blessed’s voice – the only thing that can be heard above the roaring winds of Land’s End

The concept of sense of place, the way the inhabitants of and/or visitors to a particular place or area perceived what was around them and articulated this through various media, is to be encountered more and more in works in the sphere of landscape studies (see for instance last year’s Sense of Place in Anglo-Saxon England collection and the related website). There can be few place-names which encapsulate this more evidently than Land’s End. I had assumed that the name was of modern (by which I mean post-medieval) coinage, so was more than a little surprised to discover that it’s on record by 1337 – and earlier in the same century as Inglendesende, “England’s End”. What I find interesting is how it was determined to be the very end of the land rather than, say, Cape Cornwall a few miles to the north. Presumably this sort of thing was determined by sailors rather than landlubbers like me – I feel like a bear of very little brain all of a sudden.

Pilgrims – ok, people who weren’t willing to pay the normal entrance charge – on the way to St Michael’s Mount

Our sunny, if blustery, afternoon at Land’s End was followed the next day by a wet and still blustery date with St Michael’s Mount. We first caught sight of it the evening before, bathed in the golden light of a wonderful spring evening and, high tide aside, worried we’d missed a trick by leaving our visit until the next day. It turned out to be a shrewd move, since it happened to coincide with a day of free entrance to the castle, church and gardens PLUS assorted choirs, morris dancers and harpists…

Marazion’s best (check out the keyboard player and her dutiful umbrella holder)

There’s no disputing St Michael’s Mount is a very special place, a dream-like combination of castle, priory and mansion perched on top of a precipitous granite peak overlooking gardens and flower-filled woodlands running down to the shores of the island - I half expected one of the Lost polar bears to emerge from the undergrowth (appropriately, it’s Cornish name is Karrek Loos yn Koos, “grey rock in the woods”). The island has a rich history (and prehistory – part of a Bronze Age founder’s hoard, including an extraordinary buckle, is on display in the castle), with the first monastery perhaps being established there as long ago as the eighth century. It was gifted to the abbey of Mont Saint Michel at some point in the Conquest era (the online sources I’m lazily using differ as to whether this was the work of Edward the Confessor or a Norman successor), though the present priory church is an early fourteenth-century rebuild of a structure reputedly destroyed by an earthquake in 1275. On at least three of the four cardinal points of the priory-cum-castle complex stand chunky granite crosses, a means of delimiting (sacred) space that I haven’t come across in any other monastic sites I have visited – was this a “Celtic” practice? Or merely some much later imaginative landscape gardening?

The best surviving medieval fabric is to be found in what was the priory refectory, now known as the Chevy Chase room (timely since Community is jockeying to be my new favourite show on the box), intermixed with features in the “Strawberry Hill Gothic” style, of which I find myself a massive fan. There was a great storyteller in there at the time we shuffled through, too.

The Chevy Chase room with carved frieze showing scenes from the medieval poem, not ‘National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation’

St Michael’s Mount has been home to the St Aubyn family for countless generations. Over the years, scions of the family have picked up all sorts of nick-nacks, but I find it hard to believe any of them will be able to trump a piece of the coat Napoleon wore at Waterloo and a lock of his hair (what was it with locks of hair?), the sort of trinkets that would get everyone on the Antiques Roadshow all of aflutter.

So there you go, Cornwall is class. Proper job, as they say (and sing) way out west.

Tom Williamson has been busy

Sometime last week, an email appeared in my inbox with the subject title “Champion – The Making and Unmaking of…” Now I’m not one for sporting biographies (though a recent meeting with one leading academic has made me want to read the one about Eddy Merckx I espied at the top of one pile of books in his office) so this sliver of a title left me a tad confused. Reading the email itself cleared things up immediately. Its purpose was to advertise a new book, one whose title ends “…the English Midland Landscape”, written by Tom Williamson, Robert Liddiard and Tracey Partida. Here’s some more information about it and here, for no reason other than a bit of visual relief, is its front cover.

What surprised me was the presence of Tom Williamson’s name among the authors. Not because the subject matter is somehow different from his usual fare – quite the opposite in fact. For those who don’t know his work, Williamson has been one of the most active and imaginative researchers in the areas of English landscape and settlement development of the past 25 or so years, and has published a wealth of books and articles on the subject(s). My astonishment stems from the fact that he added to this corpus in quite substantial fashion in the form of a book – that’s another book – published just a little over two months ago. Environment, Society and Landscape in Early Medieval England is a monograph that pulls together many of the key themes and subjects of his research into medieval landscapes. You only have to read the introduction (as I did last night – I’ve picked at the rest of it over the past few weeks but have been too occupied with other things to devote my full attention to ploughing through it) to understand that Williamson’s standpoint is the same as it ever was, with the environment more often than not being the key factor in explaining the locations, forms and functions of settlements and open fields, meadows and grazing lands. It could be dubbed environmental determinism, a dirty term in some circles, and while parts of Williamson’s previous works have certainly come across like that, in truth there’s little to be gained by apportioning simple tags to his complex, multi-disciplinary discussions.

Both books aren’t cheap (if you want a cheaper intro to Williamson’s oeuvre try his Shaping Medieval Landscapes: Settlement, Society, Environment, which can be picked up for less than a tenner on Amazon) but, as my good friend, “Mr Cobham” himself, Dr David Taylor reasons, they will stand as key works in the field for decades to come. Think of them as investments, as I do with virtually every book I buy. I’m the Warren Buffett of medieval books.

The enduring lure of dressed blocks of stone

My first real love in medieval history and archaeology was ecclesiastical architecture. Time has passed and my tastes have shifted, to the point where I found it a little tricky to do justice to my reinterpretation of the early fabric of the church at Thursley (leading me into a spot of bother with one stuffy local historian), although my recent presentations on the churches of St Nicholas, Compton and St Martha’s have got me most of the way back to mental match fitness. Nevertheless, I have continued to see churches as much more than just a nave, a chancel and assorted other elements. What I love about them is encapsulated by Betjeman’s description of them as (and excuse me if I’m paraphrasing here) “England’s history wrought in glass, wood and stone”. One often-encountered, though easily-missed, embodiment of this is graffiti carved on the many stone, wooden or even glass surfaces found in them.

It was my visit to Winchester Cathedral last summer that first got me thinking about graffiti in ecclesiastical settings and the extent to which it contributes to – or detracts from – the historic patina of the buildings. Consider the following, Exhibit A if you like, which is somewhere at the eastern end of the cathedral:

Kids these days, eh? No respect for anything etc. etc. Well, perhaps you’d care to suspend judgement until you consider Exhibit B from very close by:

The works of Mel + Sam and the young (or maybe not so young?) Nicko may have been created 244 years apart, but the results are essentially the same and can hardly be said to mark a decline in moral standards – nor in the quality of the lettering of impromptu name carvings. Both add an additional facet to the architectural and social history of the cathedral, whose origins and purposes are inscrutable to a day tripper like me but which might be found through careful research.

Recent years have seen the spotlight turned on church graffiti (and that can be read in a literal sense) for the extraordinarily rich testimony it provides about the religious and secular activities/interests of both laity and clergy alike. Inspired by the hugely successful Norfolk Medieval Graffiti Survey, Surrey’s churches are being visited and recorded by the Surrey Medieval Graffiti Survey. Though its name may echo that of this here site, the SMGS is entirely unconnected to it, being the brainchild of Richard Neville, who gave a fascinating introductory talk on the project to the SyAS Medieval Studies Forum in late 2011. Things have progressed apace since then, with full or partial surveys conducted and reported at 17 churches as of mid-April 2013. What follows is not an attempt to steal a march on the SMGS by formally reporting graffiti from another Surrey church, rather to set down some thoughts on certain amateur “embellishments” to a part of one such building which fall within and outside of the stated temporal scope of the survey (that is, all graffiti of demonstrable or probable pre-1945 date).

Crosses, caricatures and the initials of persons forgotten – the western jamb of the south doorway of Peper Harow church

Yesterday, taking advantage of a glorious and near-cloudless spring day, I walked from home into Godalming. On the way, I passed through Peper Harow. I’ve written about the restoration and reopening of its church following a serious fire before but hadn’t been inside the church since then. Sadly/inevitably, the door was locked, but that gave me the chance to take a closer look at the south doorway. It’s the oldest surviving part of the church, a smallish portal formed of dressed blocks of clunch chalk and a smaller amount of local sandstone. On the basis of its plain design, the portal probably dates from the middle decades of the twelfth century when the first (stone) church was built. More to the point, it is covered in graffiti. I think I had spotted or at least read about the circular scratch dial on the east jamb of the doorway previously. As you can see from the photo below, it was very crudely realised, clearly without the use of a pair of dividers, making me wonder whether the concentric semicircles incised into the block below was commenced as a slightly more accomplished replacement – one that was aborted for some reason. (The SMGS website has an excellent discussion of why there are so many divider-drawn circular graffiti to be found in churches.)

Smaller in size but larger in number are crosses, which are to be found predominantly on the insides of the jambs rather than the “outward”, i.e. southward facing, surfaces of the constituent blocks. The presumption is that these are medieval (and pre-Reformation?) in origin but otherwise they are hard to date with any great exactitude. There are a couple of faint examples on the northern jamb of the fifteenth-century tower arch at Puttenham, though these are of a different design to the Peper Harow examples. It is interesting to note that they differ from the cross pommée, the types the SMGS adjudges to be the most common design in Surrey (they look more like the crux potent, if this extensive typology of heraldic crosses is anything to go by). Indeed, it might be noted that their design is not all that different to the letters and numerals of the earliest dated bit of graffiti on the doorway, an enigmatic inscription “I S 1731″ contained within a quadrilateral border. Could some of the crosses be the products of “folk” religious practices which lingered into the eighteenth century?

From the above there’s a considerable leap forward in time to the twentieth century and the graffiti that really captured my imagination. Two bits, one on each side of the doorway, are dated 1944; both appear to be the work of one W (B) Wood. According to the brilliant village website, Peper Harow House was used during the Second World War as the headquarters for the Royal Canadian Ordinance Corps – there’s a photo on the showing vehicles of the lined up on the parkland around the village ahead of D Day in June 1944. Did one of their number, having remained behind after the Normandy landings, decide to mark his presence at Peper Harow by carving his initials on the doorway, perhaps on the day of his departure so as to avoid any repercussions from committing an act of vandalism?

1944 was also the year in which the Peper Harow estate was broken up and sold at auction following the death of Earl Middleton. This led to the establishment of an approved school in the mansion a few years later, which was succeeded in 1970 by a noted juvenile therapeutic community founded by Melvyn Rose (a large part of my very early years were spent in Peper Harow, playing with friends from the local Playgroup whose parents worked in the community). The latter lasted until 1993, when it was closed following a fire started by one of the children, after which the mansion house was bought by a developer and converted into apartments. Grafitti on the doorway provide valuable reminders of the former existence of both educational institutions. A number include dates, mostly only a particular year, but in one wonderful case the dates of when a certain P. Maxwell came and left Peper Harow are given. Scarcely any less remarkable are the pencil-written graffiti which have survived erasure by rubber or whitewash, in one case since 1951 (see photo above).

However innocent and charming the more modern graffiti may appear, it should not be forgotten that they are reminders of very troubled young lives. It is perhaps for this reason that at least one of the larger inscriptions, made on the western impost of the door arch, has been filled in with what looks like Polyfilla and now is all but illegible. (Less defensible is the separate decision to fill the gnomon hole of the medieval scratch dial with mortar.)

It is fascinating to ruminate on the way(s) in which the graffiti which has been suffered to remain possesses an agency to invite others to scratch their names and so forth onto the surface of the stone (most exotically a 1977 visitor from Poland, and most recently in 2011, quite possibly when the church was still being restored after the 2007 fire). I would never dream of adding my name or initials to the fabric of an historic building (or any building for that matter) and, contradictory as it might seem in light of the above, I do not condone anyone doing so. However, for a multitude of different reasons, some individuals choose to leave their mark in this way. There is a certain irony that the graffiti left on the doorway at Peper Harow, whether they bespeak of a lingering or fleeting connection with the place, will almost certainly outlive these words you are reading. From the twelfth century to the twenty-first, there’s something enormously satisfying about what the south doorway at Peper Harow bears witness to. With the church having been given a new lease of life, here’s hoping it continues to act as an unofficial, material social history of the church, its village and parish.

More about coins and markets and the like

The interest shown in my recent piece about how the locations of seventh to ninth-century coin finds in Surrey can say more about the economy of the period (see my previous post) has been very gratifying and has more than repaid the late nights and occasional tearing out of hair that went into completing it. Although I stand by statement that I have written more or less all that the available evidence and my limited expertise permits, since completing it I have come across a couple of articles that offer sidelights on portions of my analysis which I concede are worthy of brief comment. As is customary, these are presented in an update page separate to the original essay which can be read by clicking here.

New work – Middle Anglo-Saxon trading networks in Surrey

When I was at middle school (it’s a Surrey thing, for children between the ages of 8 and 11), I had two friends who collected things. Terry collected keys and Tim collected coins. At the time it was keys that interested me more; certainly I was more than a little jealous when Terry persuaded Mr Parris the school caretaker to give him all of the old keys that fitted in locks long since replaced. Fast forward two decades and keys are more a source of frustration than fascination to me, being things I manage to forget or mislay on at least a weekly basis (though they always turn up in my duvet of all places). Coins, by contrast, nowadays are very much flavour of the month in my research, none more so than those minted, circulated and lost in the seventh, eighth and ninth centuries. I’d known about the importance of sceattas as they’re no longer allowed to be called for a few years, having encountered them for the first time when reading about mid-Anglo-Saxon trading networks and hierarchies with an eye on how they might be reflected in contemporary Old English place-naming practices. Not long after, I discovered the Portable Antiquities Scheme database, finds.org.uk, and was pleasantly surprised to discover that there were a healthy number of coins of the period recorded from across Surrey. Nevertheless, it took a new book, the widely-held belief that there’s not much evidence from the middle Anglo-Saxon centuries in Surrey and one epiphany in the middle of St James’ Park on the walk into work for me to calendar all the relevant data a couple of weeks ago (or at least as much as I could amass over the course of a weekend) and then assess it and finally offer a few suggestions about interesting, possibly significant facets of it.

Obverse of a Kentish proto-penny of circa 680×710 found at Effingham (PAS Unique ID SUR-A93665) http://finds.org.uk/database/artefacts/record/id/135675

The result of my endeavours, ‘Coins, cloth and Chertsey: towards an understanding of trade and trading networks in Surrey, circa 650-900′, is now at a point, after a week of various issues with WordPress, where I’m happy to advertise it for people to click through and read it. In fact, thanks to some judicious tag choices on Adademia.edu, it’s proved really rather popular already (albeit most people who viewed it that way were met with a version containing legion small and not-so small errors). Now numismatics is not my area of expertise, any more than some of the other subjects I have dared to write about here, so I hope it will be understood as an attempt by one person to offer a preliminary, partial analysis of the data from a number of different disciplinary perspectives (geography, history, toponymy). As much as there evidently is more work that can be done on the existing dataset, let alone on incorporating the evidence from new finds as and when they are reported and recorded, I feel I have done more or less as much as I am able to given my limited knowledge. Nonetheless, I welcome all comments and questions about what I have written to the usual address – surreymedieval.blog@gmail.com (thanks to Tony for his lengthy and thought-provoking email).

HAPPY Easter

It’s half past one in the morning and I’ve admitted defeat in trying to get something big finished that I’ve been working on more or less constantly since Good Friday morning (save for a few breaks such as an excursion to Richmond Park – so many deer!). It’s a corker, or at least a corker-in-the-making for the time being; check back tomorrow and I may be done. Before I turn in for the night, there are two or three great things I’d like to share with you via the medium of bullet points…

• First, and most topical, is a tidbit of scriptural information I gained from no less a figure than Lord Bragg. Something (perhaps years half-listening to ‘In Our Time’ and failing to take in everything that is being said) made me choose to keep watching his programme about Mary Magdalene – catch it while you can on iPlayer. It was a wise choice, since he cited a Bible reference (or rather references – it is to be found in the gospels of Mark and Luke) that is very relevant to my comparative work on “seven ditches” names/places. The verse(s) in question record how Mary had seven demons or devils expelled from her; this blog post I came across just now explains it in more detail. Indisputably an act of purification, moreover one involving the number seven, it corresponds to the explicit or implicit themes of a number of the other uses of the figure listed in my survey (which is here if you haven’t seen it already).
• Trawling the usual suspects, I came across the new look Kemble website and more to the point its brand new Announcements page where I spotted that Susan Kelly’s Charters of Chertsey Abbey is in effect next but one to be published in the Anglo-Saxon Charters series I have waxed lyrical about on more than one occasion and in more than one location on this site – take a look at my guide to the online resources available for studying charters as an intro. I’m way more excited about this than a 29-year old should be. Working on the premise that the preceding two-volume Charters of Christ Church, Canterbury will be published in the late spring (though my sole authority for this is Amazon), by my reckoning it may see the light of day before the year is out. It’s top of my Christmas list already.
• Finally, the other day I discovered I had series linked a BBC4 programme with the eye-catching title Pagans and Pilgrims: Britain’s Holiest Places. To keep myself entertained, nay awake, while I finished off this post, I watched the first two episodes and I was more than pleasantly surprised. The look and sound of it is indistinguishable from 1001 other BBC4 documentaries, all sweeping landscape panoramas and the occasional helicopter-shot flyover set to the sound of a string of midly-inappropriate classical favourites, before winding down to lingering shots of the presenter looking pensively into the middle distance. What really sets P&P apart is the watchability (well, my spellcheck recognises it as a word) of its presenter, Ifor ap Glyn. No clue what his background is, but his easiness in front of the camera is in marked contrast to the stuffiness which afflicted Robert Bartlett and his series The Normans, but is nevertheless underpinned by in-depth research (hence some of the more obscure places he visits) which is a world away from the brash gormlessness of, say, your average Countryfile presenter. I have two more episodes still to catch up on, and there are two more yet to be screened. Do yourself a favour and treat your eyes and mind to some meaty chunks of hour-long intelligent TV (also suitable for vegetarians).

It’s three in the morning. I really am done for tonight.

Tom Green, Lincolnshire and maybe a spot of prevarication on my part

I went into last weekend with the intention to post an “essay-in-24-hours” but one hangover and some bitterly cold weather later and I’d gone off the idea. Fast forward to sunday night and I was up to my eyeballs in something almost entirely unrelated. So now I have two half-finished pieces of writing on top of all the others at various stages of completion. While I get my act together and actually tick off something on my to-do list, may I recommend you check out the work of a cast-iron closer.

I first encountered Tom Green and his research on Lincolnshire at a Cambridge University day school back in 2011. Now Anglo-Saxon Lincolnshire is both a richly-evidenced and a well-studied thing, so to hear such a torrent of compelling new inter-disciplinary perspectives was a real treat. Happily, these can be read and enjoyed online. First port of call should be his Oxford DPhil thesis, ‘A re-evaluation of the evidence of Anglian-British interaction in the Lincoln region’, freely available via the Oxford University Research Archive. This was polished up into a monograph, Britons and Anglo-Saxons: Lincolnshire AD 400-650, published last year by the History of Lincolnshire Committee. I bought a copy last week but haven’t had the time to read more than a few pages of it (see preceding paragraph) – even without a hard copy, the internet gives you the opportunity to overtake me as the lion’s share of the book is available via Google Books. Green also has a formidable reputation in the realm of Arthurian history, and has published a book on the subject that by all accounts is the polar opposite of the half-baked hokum that dominates the genre (not to mention the medieval English history shelves of most bookshops). He also runs a cracking website, arthuriana.co.uk, on the same topic. In among the wealth of material is a journal article, ‘The British Kingdom of Lindsey’, which covers much the same ground as the above-mentioned thesis and book but more than merits a look nonetheless.

Ok, that’s me done. The next time you’ll hear from me will be on the subject of Anglo-Saxon coin distributions or the topography of hundreds and their meeting-places. Until then…