by Mary Malloy
“Why do you love her books so much?” Kate asked.
“She’s smart and funny,” Lizzie answered. “And so are her characters. Sometimes she is so sarcastic that I completely misread her the first time around. When I first got Pride and Prejudice from my mom for my thirteenth birthday I instantly related to Elizabeth Bennet. It would have taken a dozen Nancy Drews to compete with her.”
“I liked Nancy’s friend George, though,” Kate interjected.
Lizzie continued with her rhapsody, discussing Jane Austen’s insightful social commentary. “Mostly though,” she said, finishing, “she’s fun. I approach rereading her novels as I approach visiting with much-loved friends, and I am sorry each and every time I turn the final page.”
“That ought to be on her tombstone!” Kate said. “And I really did think George should have been the star of the Nancy Drew Books.”
They turned to look at the rest of the church. Winchester Cathedral had neither the elegant simple grandeur of Salisbury, nor the stylistic purity of Wells, but it was crammed with interesting stuff and there was a lot to look at. The first church on the site, which came to be known as “Old Minster,” was built in 648. In 971 the remains of St. Swithun, a local bishop who died in 862, were transferred into it.
By all accounts Swithun was a humble man who had requested a humble grave in the churchyard; the violent midsummer storm that accompanied the transfer of his relics into the more opulent resting place was seen as a sign of his displeasure. The notoriety gained from the storm, which lasted for forty days, and the miracles that began to occur at his new tomb, created a powerful magnet for pilgrims.
The movement of Swithun’s relics from one place to another defined subsequent building projects around Winchester Cathedral. After the Norman Invasion, a new and grander church was laid out, and in 1079 construction began so close to Old Minster that the building of the new church and the demolition of the old occurred almost simultaneously. Major additions were made in each of the next five centuries, the most dramatic being the total transformation of the nave between 1350 and 1410, during the period when the Weaver made her pilgrimage there.
In 1476 a grand new shrine was built to hold the relics of St. Swithun, and for sixty-two years it occupied the central place in the town of Winchester, until the raiders from the Commission for the Destruction of Shrines swooped in to destroy it.
“Those guys did a hell of a lot of damage, didn’t they?” Kate said, reading from the guidebook she had purchased when they entered the church.
“Our particular venture seems almost designed to highlight that,” Lizzie said in response. “All the things the Weaver traveled to see were swept away by those same guys. It is very hard not to think of them as just a band of violent criminals.”
When they reached the place where the old shrine had stood, they saw that a simple new shrine had been constructed in 1962, eleven hundred years after Swithun’s death.
“No bones, of course,” Lizzie said.
“Not here,” Kate said, “but there are some other very interesting bones left in the Cathedral.”
She led Lizzie to an area behind the choir of the Cathedral, where an elaborate wrought-iron screen enclosed an area referred to in the guide as the presbytery.
“Look up,” Kate said.
Around the top of the screen were a number of elaborate chests, carved in wood and covered with gilding. Each had a shield and crown carved on the lid.
“Those are the bones of the Anglo-Saxon kings and queens,” Kate whispered. “Apparently, Winchester was the capital of the Anglo Saxon kingdom of Wessex, and many of the Anglo-Saxon kings and queens, as well as the Danish invader Canute and his wife Emma, are deposited here.”
“When were those put up there?” Lizzie asked.
Kate looked in the guide. “1525.”
“So they were here when St. Swithun’s shrine was destroyed. I wonder how they escaped being vandalized?”
“Maybe the vandals couldn’t reach them,” Kate said logically. She continued to read from the guidebook. “Emma was the queen to two kings. The first was the Anglo-Saxon Ethelred the Unready, who had apparently murdered his brother to take the throne from him.”
Lizzie interrupted to tell her that she knew of the victim, Edward the Martyr, whose gravesite she had visited at the ruins of Shaftesbury Abbey.
“Her second husband was the Viking Canute, whose bones are in one of those boxes. His father apparently booted Ethelred off the throne for a year or so in 1013. Ethelred managed to be king again for another couple of years only to have Canute succeed him to both the crown and his wife.”
“I wonder if she was just the pawn of the men, or if she had any choice in all this?” Lizzie mused. “The theme of the importance of marrying to maintain position is so persistent we still find it in Jane Austen.”
“Don’t kid yourself Lizzie, we still find it today.”
“Goodness gracious Kate! You are channeling Jackie!”
“Well I have learned some things in the years I’ve spent with the two of you.”
“Anything else I should know about Emma before we go outside and sing a verse of ‘Winchester Cathedral You’re Bringing Me Down?’”
“She had a son with Ethelred, called Edward the Confessor—though I’m just going to assume that that last part got added some time after infancy. He was the last English monarch crowned here. He is the one who moved the government to London and he built his own church, Westminster Abbey, where all subsequent coronations have taken place.”
“I’m pretty sure he’s still buried there,” Lizzie said.
Out on the vast lawn they found bricks that marked the outline of the “Old Minster,” and Lizzie burst into song.
Winchester Cathedral, start ringing your bell,
I did something awful, dum dum I’m in hell.
“Those aren’t the words!” Kate said.
“It’s a long time since I’ve sung the Herman’s Hermits repertoire,” Lizzie said defensively
“I don’t think that was Herman’s Hermits,” Kate said. She began to sing “I’m Henry the Eighth I Am,” but like Lizzie, could only remember the words of the chorus and half a verse.
“Oh that’s much more effective,” Lizzie said. “Can we agree to end our musical tribute to Winchester?”
They stopped into a nearby pub to order their end-of-the-day cider. Lizzie checked her phone and found a text message from Jackie.
“I have news,” it said. “Call me instantly!”
Lizzie stepped outside to call and Jackie answered before the first ring was completed.
“Where are you?” she demanded.
“Winchester,” Lizzie answered.
“Good,” Jackie said. “I hoped you’d still be there. I have made an appointment for you tomorrow morning at nine o’clock to meet with the librarian at Winchester Cathedral. Her name is Jenny Carroll.” She paused for a moment. “Lizzie, they have a manuscript!”
“What kind of manuscript?”
“An illuminated manuscript,” Jackie said. The excitement in her voice popped through Lizzie’s cell phone. “An illuminated hagiography of Thomas Becket, given to Winchester Cathedral by the Weaver!”
“It survived?”
“Yes!” Jackie practically shouted. “The library there was somehow left intact when everything else was destroyed.”
In her excitement, Lizzie couldn’t think of anything to say.
“Is that not fucking awesome?” Jackie screamed.
“Yes it is! It is fucking awesome!” Lizzie repeated. “Sometimes your descriptive powers are completely right.”
“Some profuse thanks are in order,” Jackie said.
“I wish you were here so that I could deliver them in person.”
“Me too. Are you and Kate having a great time?”
“We are.”
“Is she as much fun as I am?”
“Of course not. You know you are my favorite friend!”
&nb
sp; “Hey!” Kate said at her side. She had come out to see what Jackie had to report.
Lizzie winked at her.
“There’s another thing,” Jackie said, “but I haven’t completely tracked it down yet. There might have been a chalice of some sort at Shaftesbury that had the Weaver’s mark on it, but the inventory isn’t clear.”
“Any way to know for sure?”
“I’m hoping that if it survives in some collection it can be traced by the mark, but I’m still working on it.”
“You are absolutely the best!” Lizzie said. “And I owe you something wonderful for this.”
“Convince Alison to let me write about that collection of Chaucer editions.”
“Already done. You can get started on it at any time.”
Lizzie decided to wait until she had seen the manuscript to tell Alison about it, but felt almost a dizziness from the excitement of Jackie’s discoveries: two more gifts to add to the Weaver’s legacy!
The next morning they found Jenny Carroll waiting for them with a manuscript box.
“Your friend, Ms. Harrigan, is very persuasive,” she said. “She tracked me down at home on the holiday and convinced me to come here early this morning to get this manuscript ready for you.”
“We understand completely,” Kate said sympathetically. “We run our lives at her command.”
Lizzie found that her hands were trembling with excitement as she put on a pair of latex gloves and reached for the box.
“May I?” she asked.
“Of course,” Jenny said, nodding.
The book had a vellum binding, mottled yellow and curling at the edges. Inside were about twenty additional sheets of vellum, covered with a Latin script in black ink. At the beginning of each page the capital letter was filled with a tiny picture, and decorative leaves and vines ran down the left edge of the pages. Lizzie instantly recognized the pattern from the tapestry; it was the same design she thought might be on the carved stone pillow of the Bishop de la Marchia monument in Wells.
She struggled through the old Latin, but the story of Becket’s life and death was clear. On the last page was a picture of the shrine, very similar to the one that had been in the stained glass window in Salisbury, but vibrantly colored. Reds and blues were still brilliant after six centuries, and details had been highlighted with real gold, pressed onto the page. Beneath the shrine, in a handwriting different from the text, was inscribed, “Thys ys my gyffte,” followed by the familiar AW monogram.
“I can’t tell you how exciting this is,” Lizzie said, looking up at Jenny Carroll. “I know who commissioned this work to be given to the Cathedral. This last line is in her hand, and this is her mark.” She explained the project to Jenny, describing the journal and bringing out the pictures of the tapestry, and of the window in Salisbury that she had received from Nora Stanley.
When the images of the shrine from the manuscript before her and the drawing of the window that had been in Salisbury were compared, the resemblance was clear.
“I’m surprised the researchers working on the Becket shrine didn’t use this manuscript,” Kate said. “It’s really better than the others for showing details of the shrine.”
“I’m sorry to have to admit that this manuscript was not cataloged very well,” Jenny explained. “They wouldn’t have found it through a standard search. We recently had our catalog cards from the 1950s digitized and put online, but there were no details about these illustrations. The most prominent feature mentioned was the AW monogram—which is how your friend found it.”
Lizzie studied the side-by-side images of the shrine. “Look at this,” she pointed out to her companions. “Though these are in three different media and by three different artists, if we count this manuscript, the stained glass window, and the reproduction of the window in the pen drawing, it is obvious that the original source was the same. The details and proportions are identical in every way.” She talked as she observed, going back and forth from one image to the other and from the top of the shrine to the bottom.
“You can actually see individual gifts placed upon the shrine cover,” Jenny said, pointing to the tiny gilt jewels painted with remarkable detail.
“And details of the fabric. . . .” Lizzie stopped talking when she realized that the pattern of the fabric that wrapped the bones of Becket was made up of alternating mitres and monograms in gold against a brilliant scarlet background.
“Ha ha!” she said eagerly, almost shouting with enthusiasm. “Look at this. She has designed a fabric specifically for the purpose of wrapping the bones and it has her monogram incorporated into the design!”
“What is that other thing?” Jenny asked.
“It’s the bishop’s hat,” Kate said, “just like on the stiles of the Clarendon Way.”
“Indeed it is,” Lizzie said elatedly. “It’s the mitre of the archbishop. Oh dear Lord, I can’t believe how fucking awesome this is!” She immediately turned to Jenny Carroll and apologized for her language, but the librarian, caught up in the excitement of the discovery, simply waved her hand to indicate it wasn’t a problem.
“I must call Alison and Jackie,” Lizzie said to Kate, “and I must get some pictures, if that’s okay.” She turned to Jenny.
“As long as you don’t plan to publish them,” Jenny answered.
“We will definitely want to include this manuscript in our upcoming book, but we can arrange for permissions and for a professional photographer to take the pictures at a later time. For now, I just want some reference shots.”
With Jenny’s permission, Lizzie used the camera on her cell phone to take a photograph of each page of the manuscript, with several showing the details of the shrine and the fabric that wrapped the bones.
When they had thanked Jenny and left the archive Lizzie was practically skipping with delight. “Could anything possibly top that?” she said happily.
“Well I understand that the Round Table is also here in Winchester,” Kate said, “in case you still need a King Arthur fix.” She had procured a guide to the town and was reading from it.
“What else?”
“Hyde Abbey, the place where the Saxon King Alfred the Great was buried, though his bones were destroyed by those same marauders who smashed up everything else.”
“He wasn’t a saint. Why did they need to bust up his remains?”
“According to this, Thomas Wriothesley, who was in charge of the abbey’s dissolution, wrote to Henry VIII that he intended to ‘sweep away all the rotten bones that be called relics; which we may not omit, lest it be thought that we came more for the treasure than for the avoiding of the abomination of idolatry.’ They also destroyed the head of St. Valentine, which had been given to the Abbey by Queen Emma.”
“I am still astonished that kings and saints both came to the same end,” Lizzie said. “But I’m glad that this Thomas Wriothesley was able to prove by rifling through the bones of Alfred the Great that he wasn’t just in the business of looting churches for their treasure!”
“The road then?”
“The Old Road! I read most of the Belloc book last night, by the way, and it will be a good guide for us in the next few days. Thanks for it; he is the antithesis of Wainwright!”
“Alfred the not-so-great Wainwright?”
“Yes, perfect! Let us leave him behind in Winchester too!”
Chapter 27
Hilaire Belloc’s The Old Road was a perfect guide for the two friends, interested as they were in history and technology. When Belloc set off on his pilgrimage in the first decade of the twentieth century, he had a theory about roads that he wanted to test. His reasoning on how to find the oldest road—the pilgrim’s trail—was largely common sense: sharp corners on the path were to him suspicious, one should pass through the most ancient villages, and no one of sense would choose to walk through marshy ground.
He made a distinction between two kinds of ancient path: those built upon the chalk ridge, like the one Kate and Lizzie h
ad been traveling on since Broad Chalke, and those built by the Romans which, because labor was cheap, ran arrow-straight up and down hills and across streams, never seeking the easy route or the natural ford. Many of the modern motorways followed those Roman roads.
Even before Belloc, nineteenth-century antiquarians in England had been interested in some sort of a “Pilgrim’s Way” between Winchester and Canterbury, and over time it even came to be included on the Ordnance Survey maps.
“There are, of course, more than these options,” Kate said as they compared Belloc’s path to the one marked on the map.
Lizzie agreed. “If we were going directly from Winchester to Canterbury, I would absolutely follow Belloc, because I like his theory of the road, but the Weaver went to London, and both of these paths bypass it.” She studied the map. “We have to head north someplace near Guildford, and from London I want to follow the path described by Chaucer, which follows the ancient Roman road from the coast.”
“This pilgrim’s path on the map looks nicer to walk,” Kate said. “It is along something called the ‘North Down Way,’ which looks to be very rural, while the coastal route follows the major motorway through a built-up area.”
“I’m sure you don’t regret that you will have left me by then.”
“I will regret it when I have left, but I am prepared to enjoy the time we still have,” Kate said philosophically. “Belloc gives us two choices to leave Winchester, the main road or the ‘Nun’s Walk.’”
“Well that is no choice at all,” Lizzie said. “The Nun’s Walk!”
The path went along the Itchen River and through a landscape that the English called a water meadow. The stream was filled with watercress and the water barely moved, except where it was stirred by enormous swans. Nesting coots were visible in the grasses along the riverbed, and baby ducks lazed through the water behind their mothers.
At Kings Worthy, the two women stopped at the local pub, the Coach and Horses, for lunch and cider and pondered the path to the next village, Martyr Worthy.