Under Another Sky

by Charlotte Higgins

  As well as enjoying the health-giving properties of the waters, visitors to Bath might also have rather less respectable experiences. According to a salacious soft-porn tome called A Step to the Bath, anonymously published in 1700, the town was both ‘a Valley of Pleasure, yet a sink of Iniquity’. The author described first his journey from London, en route seducing a fellow coach passenger (‘I lay’d her down on Nature’s Carpet, and made bold with Mother Earth for a Boulster’). This activity caused him certain discomforts on the onward journey: ‘Nor would I advise any who have been Sufferers in Venus sports, to Adventure the Fatigue of Coach to the Bath, least it dis-joint a Member or Two.’ Once installed, he provided an unpleasantly graphic picture of those taking the cure – for syphilis, it seems – in the King’s Bath: ‘In a Corner was an Old Fornicator hanging by the Rings, Loaded with Rotten Humidity; Hard by him was a Buxom Dame, Cleansing her Nunquam Satis from Mercurial Dregs, and the remains of Roman Vitriol. Another, half-covered in Sear-Cloth, had more Sores than Lazarus, doing Pennance for the Sins of Her Youth … At the Pump was several a Drenching their Gullets, and Gormandizing the Reaking Liquor wholesale.’ A satire after Juvenal’s own sclerotic heart.

  Since these heady days, Bath has been in a state of more or less genteel decline, punctuated by little peaks and troughs in its fortunes. When Jan Morris wrote about the town in 1974, she thought of it as ‘hangdog’, and on its way to ruin: ‘There are houses never rebuilt since the blitz, or awaiting, year after year, planning permission or builders’ cash. There are abandoned churches up for sale. Through the cracks of stately flagstone tufts of grass spring through, and sometimes the corner of a garden, the elbow of an alley, is choked with creeper and bramble, as though a civilization has retreated here, and the weeds are taking over.’ Occasionally, Morris wrote, she fantasised about Bath’s ‘crescents peeling and unkempt under a philistine dictatorship, or forcibly converted into workers’ holiday homes, and … the last of the admirals’ widows scrubbing the floors of ideological museums’. But the town is seeing better days now, firmly established as smart, and as a place where overseas tourists go, on the little British grand tour that also takes in London, Oxford, York and Edinburgh. The Roman baths are paying their way, a major attraction. Bath is revived by the regenerative powers of the hot-water springs, just as it always has been.

  The Royal Crescent and the Circus – two of the great Palladian set pieces of the city – were laid out by the architect John Wood, and finished off by his son, also called John Wood. The elder Wood was the most important of the Georgian improvers of Bath: he set the tone in the town for ever after, but he was thwarted in his grander designs. In 1725, he ‘proposed to make a grand Place of Assembly, to be called the Royal Forum of Bath; another Place, no less magnificent, for the Exhibition of Sports, to be called the Grand Circus; and a third Place, of equal State with either of the former, for the Practice of medicinal Exercises, to be called the Imperial Gymnasium of the City, from a Work of that Kind, taking its Rise at first in Bath, during the time of the Roman Emperors’. The Circus is the only element of this grandiloquent piece of town planning that was realised, though it is doubtful whether it has ever been used for the ‘Exhibition of Sports’. Wood, when he made his extravagant proposals, was about twenty-one years old.

  With his schemes for imperial gymnasia and his talk of emperors, Wood was playing up to the city’s Roman past. The temple of Sulis-Minerva had not yet in fact been discovered – that happened during the rebuilding of the Pump Room in 1790, well after Wood’s death in 1754. But Bath was known to have Roman origins: as far back as the sixteenth century, antiquary John Leland had noted that ‘There be divers notable antiquitees of the toune in hominum memoria engravid in stone that yet be sene yn the walles of Bathe.’ He carefully transcribed some of the inscriptions on these tombstones, noting that they seemed to have been recycled into the town walls, rather than originally placed there. Later, William Camden noted, with typical penetration, that ‘where the said Cathedrall Church now standeth, there was in ancient time, as the report goeth, a temple consecrated to Minerva’. He was not very many metres off target. The ‘report’, in all likelihood, was a passage from the third- or fourth-century Roman author Gaius Julius Solinus. His work Collectanea rerum mirabilium, A Collection of Marvels, had mentioned prodigious springs in Britain consecrated to the goddess: Aquae Sulis clearly had a reputation in antiquity that spread far beyond Britain. In 1727 – a couple of years after Wood had laid out his original proposals – workmen digging a sewer in Stall Street found a bronze head of Minerva: it is now one of the great objects of the Roman baths museum.

  Wood’s aim, however, was much broader than a simple desire to re-create the glories of the Roman city. He laid out the theoretical basis for his designs in his Essay Towards a Description of Bath, as masterful a piece of entertaining fairy tale, tortured logic, hard-headed architectural sales pitch and pure gossip as has ever been produced. It is remarkable that the result of this kind of thinking was what Angela Carter described as Bath’s ‘lucid and serene’ streets, for the tone of Wood’s book is quite the reverse. He even included a lurid account of the suicide of one of his tenants, one Sylvia, who hanged herself by a girdle ‘of Silver Thread’ owing him ‘two and fifty Pounds three Shillings and four Pence for Rent’. The antiquary Roger Gale wrote to his friend Stukeley that A Description was ‘a silly pack of stuff, collected together from our fabulous historians, & where their fictions or traditions are not sufficient to support his fancys, he never wants falsitys of his own invention to supply their defect’, which is a fair review, but does not get across the fact that it is also an oddly enjoyable read.

  Wood began by reasserting the mythical foundation story of Bath. In Geoffrey of Monmouth’s The History of the Kings of Britain, in which the seeds of the story first appeared, the city was said to have been established by Bladud, father of Lear and descendant of the Trojan exile Brutus. This Bladud ‘encouraged necromancy throughout the kingdom of Britain’, according to Geoffrey, and, like Daedalus, constructed himself a pair of wings. But the experiment went wrong, and he was dashed to pieces on the temple of Apollo in Trinovantum, the city that would eventually become London. Over time, the story was elaborated. Bladud, as a youth, so the expanded story went, contracted leprosy, and was exiled from the royal court. He became a swineherd. One day his pigs went astray. At length he found a sow wallowing in some hot springs, from which she emerged cured of all her ailments. Bladud too immersed himself in the waters, and his leprosy vanished. He returned to the court and in due course became king. Around the muddy spot where he had been cured he built Bath. By the time Wood was a young man, this medieval story was already regarded as nonsense – though as it happens, Geoffrey of Monmouth’s claim that Bladud founded Bath in ‘around 863 BC’ is stated as fact in the brochure for the Thermae spa.

  Wood took the myth of Bladud, and, through some tortuous chronological comparisons with the Bible and classical history, adjusted Bath’s foundation date from 863 to 483 BC. He also shifted the whole of Geoffrey’s geography to the south-west. When Geoffrey talked of the Thames, he must have meant the Tamar, argued Wood. Trinovantum, where Bladud died, was clearly not in the south-east of England, as Geoffrey claimed, for the exiles could not have been ‘skipping from one remote Part of the Island to another with a Handful of People and carrying New Troy into Middlesex’. Rather, it was Bath that was Trinovantum. (Geoffrey himself must have been drawing on a garbled memory of the ancient British tribe, mentioned in various classical texts, of the Trinovantes, who inhabited parts of Essex and Suffolk.)

  The account became yet more involved. Wood claimed that Bladud was one and the same person as a figure of classical myth, Abaris, who flew about upon a sacred arrow ‘in the Air over Rivers and Lakes, Forests and Mountains’. This character’s existence, and airborne adventuring, were doubted even on his first literary outing in Herodotus’s Histories, in the fifth century BC. But Wood ran away with the idea: Aba
ris/Bladud was ‘received in Greece as the known Priest of Apollo’, he decided. Furthermore, he restored the temple of Apollo at Delphi, consorted with Pythagoras, and very likely communicated the heliocentric model of the universe to Zoroaster. On his return to Britain, he established the priesthood of the Druids: ‘King Bladud appears manifestly to have been their Founder, and to have made Bath their Metropolitan Seat; and part of what he taught them was first communicated to him by the great Pythagoras.’

  Wood was not alone in developing a great interest in the Druids, an order of Celtic religious men of Britain and Gaul, known only through their brief mention in a handful of classical texts. The geographer Strabo wrote of their undertaking human sacrifice inside a ‘wicker man’; Caesar and Diodorus Siculus described them as powerful religious figures, diviners of the future. The Romans, easy-going when it came to tolerating and appropriating others’ religions, drew the line at both human sacrifice and anything with a whiff about it of organised resistance to Rome. In Suetonius’s biography of Claudius, the Druidic religion was called ‘dreadful and savage’ – the emperor abolished its practice in Gaul, noted the writer. In Tacitus, Druids are mentioned as a focus for British resistance against Roman rule: Suetonius Paulinus was attempting to put down a Druid-orchestrated rebellion when Boudica struck. From the seventeenth century onwards, antiquaries such as John Aubrey and the Irish philosopher John Toland speculated that megalithic monuments including Stonehenge and Avebury were Druidic. (The architect Inigo Jones was in the minority when he argued that they were Roman.) That the Druids were connected to such monuments was, perhaps, not an entirely unreasonable stab in the dark when a biblical chronology for world history was still broadly accepted, before the archaeological system of Stone, Bronze and Iron Ages had been developed, when all there was to go on for prehistory were scant details about the Celts in classical authors. A wiser head than Wood’s (the eighteenth-century antiquary Robert Sibbald) thought that prehistoric flint arrowheads were elf-bolts let loose from the heavens by fairies. William Stukeley was particularly notorious for his obsession with the Druids, even devising a temple in his vicarage garden, at its centre an ‘antient appletree oregrown with sacred misletoe’.

  Wood’s enthusiasm for the Druids impelled him to survey the stone circles at Stanton Drew, near Bath. He did this in the teeth of superstitious opposition from the locals, who warned that everyone who had previously attempted to measure these still poorly understood monuments had been ‘struck dead upon the Spot, or with such an Illness as soon carried them off’. Surviving the encounter with the monument, he found the main stone circle (through a bit of jiggery-pokery) to be not only the precise diameter of the Pantheon in Rome, but also, when taken together with other standing stones in the vicinity, to ‘form a perfect Model of the Pythagorean System of the Planetary World’. Stanton Drew was, concluded Wood, nothing less than a university for Druids. Bath and Stanton Drew had been ‘founded by one and the same Person, and for the same Purposes, to wit, to cure the Diseases of the People, to honour the Gods, and to instruct Mankind in the Liberal Sciences’.

  Though it is hard to synthesise Wood’s ideas – contradictory and mercurial as they are – another of his works, The Origin of Building, brings some of these notions into the realm of what he felt he was doing architecturally. Like many of the intellectuals, architects and artists of the early eighteenth century (including, for example, Stukeley), Wood was a Freemason. One of Freemasonry’s tenets was that the principles of true architecture had originated among the Jews. These principles, including the three classical orders, were then bequeathed to the Greeks. As Wood explained in The Origin of Building, it was the pillars of Moses’s tabernacle that ‘furnish’d the various Sorts of Building necessary for Man; as the Strong, the Mean, and the Delicate; and which, in Process of Time, were ranked under the Name of Order, with Grecian Names; to wit, Dorick, Jonick, and Corinthian’. In turn, according to the Freemasons, these principles passed to the Romans, and at length to the peoples whom the Romans had conquered. The Romans, wrote James Anderson in The Constitutions of the Free-Masons, ‘communicated their Cunning to the northern and western Parts of Europe, which had grown barbarous before the Roman conquest’. Thinking of Britain’s henges and standing stones, he also allowed that the ancient Britons might have produced ‘a few Remains of good Masonry’ before the Romans appeared. The keystone of Wood’s shaky argument was to take Anderson’s hint about ‘a few Remains of good Masonry’ and claim that the ancient Britons, in particular the Druids, had directly inherited true architecture from its Jewish source, bypassing the Greeks and Romans. ‘If we were to scrutinize all the Works of the Druids, we shou’d find them to have been copied from the Works of the Jews,’ he asserted. They ‘bespeak a Parent of more Antiquity than the Romans’.

  How does this theorising manifest itself in the streets of Bath? In the vast spaces of the Circus, each facade is decorated with the three orders of classical architecture, Doric, Ionic and Corinthian – the orders that Wood believed had adorned Moses’s tabernacle, and had been disseminated by the Jews. The Circus is, very obviously, meant to be Bath’s Roman Colosseum. But it is also a stone circle, its form and dimensions echoing the measurements Wood took during his survey of Stanton Drew. The frieze of the Doric entablature is decorated with hundreds of pictorial emblems, some of which – a hand reaching from the clouds holding a pair of compasses, for example – are overtly Masonic. And so Wood’s masterpiece, generally supposed to contain all the neoclassical virtues of harmony, elegance and balance, is in fact a magnificently demented mingling of disparate thought-experiments, a glorious piece of architecture ‘built brilliantly on theoretical foundations of some absurdity’, as his biographers have put it. The Circus aims to re-create the glories of the Roman empire. But it also aims to be a specifically British, ancient architecture, echoing a megalithic monument and, in turn, casting back to Solomon’s temple itself.

  When I visited the Roman baths, I spoke to Romans. This was the claim: that history would ‘come to life’. At the side of the great open-air pool now lurk costumed interpreters – each named for a real character mentioned on one of the Roman inscriptions found here. I met Flavia Tiberina: the wife, she said, of Gaius from the procurator’s office in Londinium. She was wearing a high halo of a Flavian-period hairdo, just like the coiffure of one of the most striking carved heads from the museum. We talked about make-up, the plucking of her underarm hair (‘Do you know, I actually think the slave enjoyed it’) and the farewell dinner she was expected to enjoy that evening (‘There will be dormice’). The interpreter was very good at what she did, and I enjoyed talking to her. The exercise seemed to be about finding that we had things in common. Beauty routines, dinner – if not the minutiae of the methods or the specifics of the menu. I was being invited to believe not only that the costumed interpreters were behaving like Romans – but that Romans behaved like costumed interpreters: friendly, unthreatening, familiar. I couldn’t help feeling, as Flavia Tiberina and I chatted, that there were other stories that might be buried in the stones at Bath, stranger and more frightening ones. God knows what religious observances, rituals and sacrifices took place here. We did not discuss L. Marcius Memor, up to his elbows in animal gore. Nor the uncanny tin mask of a man’s bearded face found in the sacred spring, perhaps (who knows) an emblem carried aloft in some ritual procession.

  The sacred spring has borne many secrets. In 1978, a young girl died of amoebic meningitis after swimming in the waters. In the ensuing investigation, the pools were all drained, including the King’s Bath – the medieval structure, topped with a seventeenth-century balustrade and statue of Bladud, that can be seen during a visit to the Pump Room or Roman baths today. Archaeologist Barry Cunliffe took the opportunity to excavate beneath the medieval bath, down into the Romans’ sacred spring. As well as a number of beautiful carved intaglios from rings, his team found seventy-eight curse tablets. These are small, unprepossessing sheets of lead, many of which h
ad been rolled into little sausages, just a few centimetres long, before being cast into the spring. They are incised with writing so faint and fragmentary that the untrained eye could easily miss it: it is indecipherable except by those expert in the sloping strokes of the hands known as old and new Roman cursive. The texts are appeals to the goddess of the spring to punish those who have done you wrong – the person who has stolen your blanket, your ring, your cloak, your money. The thing to do was to get the wording just right, as in a legal contract, so the goddess could not catch you out on a technicality. One tablet asks for the return of six silver coins from whomever has stolen them, ‘whether pagan or Christian, whosoever, whether man or woman, whether boy or girl, whether slave or free’. No loopholes. This is the first occurrence of the word ‘Christian’ in any British inscription. The petitioner, Annianus, helpfully provided a list of suspects, a poem in itself: ‘Postumianus, Pisso, Locinna, Alauna, Materna, Gunsula, Candidina, Euticius, Peregrinus, Latinus, Senicianus, Avitianus, Victor, Scotius, Aessicunia, Paltucca, Calliopis, Celerianus.’