A Gathering of Ghosts

by Karen Maitland

  Knights Hospitaller

  The order of the Knights of St John of Jerusalem, also known as Knights Hospitaller, originated in the founding of a hospital in Jerusalem in 1080, on the site where, according to legend, the angel Gabriel foretold the birth of St John the Baptist. It was established to provide care for poor, sick or injured pilgrims in the Holy Land. Hospitals in those days were not primarily places where the sick and injured were treated, although physicians and surgeons did work in them: they were principally intended to offer hospitality, a place where the elderly, the infirm, orphans, pilgrims and travellers could rest and be provided with safe shelter, good food and spiritual comfort.

  In 1099, when Jerusalem was captured by the Christians during the First Crusade, the Hospitallers became a religious and military order under its own charter, charged with caring for pilgrims and the poor, and defending the Holy Land. The establishment of the order was confirmed by a bull of Pope Paschal II in 1113, and the Hospitallers’ founder, Gérard, rapidly acquired territory and revenues for his order throughout Jerusalem, which became known as the Citramer, the heartland of the order. His successor, Raymond du Puy, established a Hospitaller infirmary near the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem and the care offered to pilgrims expanded into providing them with an armed escort, which soon grew into a serious fighting force.

  By the mid-twelfth century the order was divided into military knights and those who worked with the poor and sick. But it was still recognised by the Church as primarily a religious order and was exempt from tithes and from obedience to all secular and religious authorities, except the Pope. At the height of their power in the Holy Land, the order held seven major forts and 140 other estates in the area, the largest two being their base in Jerusalem and lands in Antioch.

  But by 1289, the Muslim forces were seizing more and more territory in the Holy Land, and in May 1291, the last remaining Christian stronghold of Acre fell, after a terrible month-long siege. The Hospitaller Knights evacuated to Cyprus, where they set up their base alongside the Templars with whom they had fought at Acre. But they became embroiled in the bitter politics of Cyprus, and Grand Master Guillaume de Villaret turned his sights on Rhodes as their new homeland, which strategically was much better situated.

  In 1306, Vignolo dei Vignoli entered into a pact with the Order of St John, offering the knights Rhodes, Kos and Leros in return for their help in securing his own lands in Rhodes. The Hospitallers made several attempts to take the island, eventually laying siege to Rhodes town, and in August 1309, it surrendered to them. Under their new grand master, Fulkes de Villaret, Rhodes became the new Citramer, where the knights had to adapt from being primarily a land-based fighting force to a navy, using their fleet of ships to fight the Turks. The order’s lands outside Rhodes, known collectively as the Outremer, were organised into Langues, or ‘Tongues’, with bases in Auvergne, Spain, England, France, Germany, Italy and Provence, each administered by a prior. But the number of Tongues and the location of their administrative centres in Europe changed frequently throughout the Middle Ages as political boundaries and alliances shifted.

  Since their foundation by Gérard, the members of the order had formed a fraternity of brothers and also sisters of the order. Both took the three monastic vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. All the members of the order, both male and female, wore black with a white cross until Pope Innocent IV ordered that the battle dress of the knights should be a red coat with a white cross. Anyone wishing to become a knight or sister had to be of noble or ‘gentle’ birth. Those wishing to join the order who were not of that rank became serving members. In addition, like all monasteries and nunneries, the priories of the order employed a number of lay servants, hired to do the hard manual work and wait on the knights and sisters.

  As had happened with the Knights Templar, the vast estates and wealth of the Knights Hospitaller gave rise to accusations that they were living in luxury rather than in obedience to their vow of poverty. Since the Pope was the protector of the order, and the otherwise powerful bishops had no authority over it, this resulted in many bitter conflicts between the order and the bishops of the various sees in which the Hospitallers had lands and priories. This being an age in which bishops maintained their own fighting men, both clergy and kings feared the wealth and military power of what they perceived to be an alien army in their midst, whose members owed no allegiance to anyone but the Pope, and when the Pope was in conflict with a particular bishop or king, the local authorities became distinctly nervous. Little wonder that some sought to crush the Hospitallers as they had the Templars.

  The order lost Rhodes in 1522, but in March 1530, Emperor Charles V of the Holy Roman Empire and Spain gave them as their base the barren rock they were to turn into the fertile island of Malta. For this they paid an annual rent of a falcon each year – the Maltese Falcon. From this base, they continued to harry the Turkish Ottoman Empire, so much so that in 1566, the sultan launched the Great Siege of Malta, which the knights broke after four months, founding a new capital Valetta, named for their grand master, Jean de la Valette. They remained there until 1798 when they were ousted by Napoleon. In 1834, they founded a new headquarters in Rome, but continued to be known as the Knights of Malta.

  Today, this Catholic order currently has around 13,500 members and 100,000 staff and volunteers, who work in hospitals all over the world. Thirty per cent of the members are now women, who are given the title ‘Dame’. The order of the Knights of Malta is really a state without a country. It has formal diplomatic relations with 106 countries and states, and they produce their own passports, licence plates and stamps.

  In 1540, during the Reformation in England, King Henry VIII confiscated the Hospitaller priories and land, including its headquarters in Clerkenwell. An attempt was made to revive the order under his daughter, the Catholic Queen Mary I, but it was lost again under the Protestant Queen Elizabeth I. But in 1858, during the reign of Queen Victoria, an order of the Knights Hospitaller, independent of Rome, was founded, which was known as the Venerable Order of the Hospital of St John of Jerusalem in the British Realm. A few decades later it was to oversee three charities – the very famous and familiar St John Ambulance Association (established 1878), St John Ambulance of Uniformed Men and Women (1888) and, returning at last to where the order first began, the Ophthalmic Hospital in Jerusalem (1882).

  The Goddess Brigid

  Brigid, Brigit or Brig, the exalted one, was a triple Celtic deity. She was goddess of poetry, spring, fertility, cattle and sacred wells, and she had two sisters, Brigid the blacksmith and Brigid the healer. Her festival was Imbolc, celebrated around 31 January/1 February, midway between the winter solstice and the spring equinox. The festival marked the transition between those months ruled by the crone of winter and those by the maiden of spring. It was celebrated by the lighting of sacred fires and the pouring of water. The goddess was the guardian of high places, such as tors, mountains and hill-forts. She was also strongly identified with cows, ewes and milk, which were of vital importance in Celtic society. In mythology, she is the creator of ‘keening’, which is first heard when she mourns her son slain in battle.

  Brideog – pronounced bree-jog – means little Brigid or young Brigid. At the Celtic feast of Imbolc, long lengths of rushes or straw were twisted into the rough image of a doll, which was dressed in white and decorated with leaves, stones or shells to represent the goddess Brigid. The brideog would be sprinkled with water taken from a Brigid’s Well, Bryde’s Well or Bride’s Well, and carried by unmarried girls in procession to a great feast where the goddess would be offered food, drink and fire, in gratitude for bringing them safely through winter, and asked to bring new life.

  With the coming of Christianity, the Celtic feast of Imbolc became the Eve of St Brigid’s Day, 31 January. On that night, unmarried women and girls would make a crib for the brideog and sit up with her. Young men would call and be offered food and drink, but had to treat the brideog as if sh
e was a saint and the women with great respect. Before the girls went to bed, the ash in the hearth would be raked smooth and each girl would lay out a cloth in front of it. In the morning, they would examine the ash and cloths for any sign that St Brigid had walked over them. If she had, it was a great blessing, and any girl whose cloth she had marked would be married within the year. On St Brigid’s Day itself, the brideog was carried from house to house by unmarried girls, who presented the head of each household with a St Brigid’s cross.

  Brigid’s Cross – a woven cross traditionally made on St Brigid’s Eve, 31 January, but originally associated with the Celtic goddess Brigid. It was woven from freshly pulled rushes. The newly made cross would be green, symbolising the coming of spring. The cross was woven in a sun-wise direction, and it is thought that in Celtic times it was intended to represent the sun and the hope that light and warmth would return after the cold and darkness of winter.

  Today there are many elaborate versions of this cross, but probably the oldest style was the three-armed cross, or triskele, which was hung in byres and cowsheds to protect the animals, for in Celtic society wealth was measured in cattle, not land. There are also six-band interlaced patterns, square patterns, and a cross in a circle. A Brigid cross made with a ‘binding knot’, which keeps out evil spirits, was usually woven and hung in the home on All Hallows’ Eve (Halloween).

  But after the coming of Christianity, when many of the legends about the goddess Brigid were transferred to the hagiography of the sixth-century Irish St Brigid, Abbess of Kildare, the abbess became credited with having woven the first Brigid’s Cross at the bedside of a dying chieftain. St Brigid’s four-armed version of the woven cross gradually became the one most commonly found hanging over doors or hearths in cottages, having first been taken to the church to be blessed by the priest. The ‘pagan’ triskele was not brought to be blessed by the Church, but it continues to be used in byres in some parts of Europe to this day.

  Brigid’s Mantle – There is a traditional Irish blessing, Faoi bhrat Bhríde sinn, ‘May you be covered by Bride’s mantle,’ and the old Gaelic title for Brigid was ‘Brigid of the Tribe of the Green Mantles’. The goddess was thought to weave a mantle of green on her loom and spread it over the earth, banishing winter, bringing spring, and protecting all those whose hearths it covered.

  When the goddess was transformed by the Church into a saint, the symbol of her mantle gave rise to a legend that St Brigid decided to build her monastery in Kildare, Leinster. She asked the King of Leinster to give her the land, but he refused. Brigid prayed, then begged him to grant her the amount of land that her mantle would cover. The King found her request so amusing that he foolishly agreed. Four virgin followers of St Brigid each grasped a corner of the cloak and walked away from each other. The cloak stretched as they walked until it covered the whole area St Brigid needed for the monastery with all its outbuildings. Awestruck, the King gave her the land. Brigid built her church near an ancient oak tree, sacred to the Druids, and close to a holy well, which was then dedicated to the saint.

  The cathedral of St Sauveur in Bruges, Belgium, today houses a holy relic in the form of a piece of woollen cloth, which is said to be part of St Brigid’s mantle and which is venerated on her saint’s day, 1 February. Measuring 21 by 25 inches, it is a dark crimson-violet. Tests carried out in 1936 showed that it was dyed with iron oxide. Cloth of a similar weave and dye has been found in early Bronze Age burials in Denmark and Ireland. However, similar home-spun weaves and dyes were still in use up to the sixteenth century, so this fragment may have been made much later than the sixth century.

  The earliest known record of this relic was written in 1347 and comes from the cathedral of St Donaas in Flanders. According to tradition, after the death of the Saxon King Harold at Hastings in 1066, his sister Gunhild fled to Flanders and presented this relic and her jewels to the Church there in gratitude for sheltering her. The piece of St Brigid’s mantle was removed from St Donaas before its destruction during the French Revolution.

  Dartmoor

  In 1182, the name recorded in official documents is Dertemora, meaning Moor in the Dart Valley. Moor comes from the Old English mor, meaning bog or swamp, and dart from the Celtic, meaning the river where oak trees grow. Since the whole of the river is unlikely to have been lined with oak trees, even in Celtic times, it suggests that the oak groves that grew along stretches of it were considered special or sacred. Groves of ancient dwarf oaks, such as the mysterious Wistman’s Wood, still survive on Dartmoor, their twisted branches hung with shaggy lichen, their gnarled roots growing over great moss-covered boulders.

  Glowing Moss

  Dartmoor is home to an increasingly rare luminous moss known locally as Goblin’s Gold, and in other parts of England as Elfin Gold, because people passing abandoned rabbit holes, caves and ancient stone huts would glimpse something shining like gold in the dark interior; when they reached in to grab it, they found themselves clutching only a handful of wet dirt.

  What they had seen was in fact a tiny, fragile, frond-like moss, Schistostega osmundacea. It forms dense mats covering the walls of caves or damp burrows, but grows to only around half an inch in height. It is found growing in caves, tunnels or in half-buried ruins where other plants can’t survive because only a very faint light penetrates. Seen against a dark background, the moss shines with a beautiful green-gold luminosity and under flash photography can appear a vivid electric blue.

  The luminous effect is due entirely to reflected light. The protonema of the moss have lens-shaped cells, which focus any available light on the chlorophyll granules. These absorb only the wavelengths of the light needed to photosynthesise, reflecting the rest of the light back towards its source, so the light seems to be radiating from the moss itself, which appears to glow. These ‘lens’ cells can move to within 45 degrees, to adjust to a shifting light, so that at times the glow from the moss appears to pulsate.

  One location where it could still be found at the time of writing was at Yellowmead, on Sheepstor, Dartmoor, in a man-made cave, known locally as a potato-cave, but which was probably once an old tinners’ tool store or stone bee-hive hut.

  Land Measurement and Acres

  By the fourteenth century, landholdings were recorded in acres and half-acres, not hides, as they had been in the Domesday Book. The word acre comes from Old English æcer meaning open field. An acre was roughly the amount of land a yoke, or two oxen, could plough in a day. But it was an estimated size used mainly for taxation and land sales rather than a measured area. In 1195, the monks of Thame exchanged two and a half acres of land for three and a half, but recorded that the second area was no bigger than the first.

  By 1250, acres were increasingly being measured using perches (long rods). An acre was deemed to be four perches by forty perches. But this didn’t clarify things much, because the perches themselves were not a standard length, varying from around 16.5 feet to 25.5 feet in different shires. This was a problem for anyone coming from another part of the country who was trying to assess the exact size and value of a landholding. A further complication was that, even in the same place, the length of perch used varied with the type of land being measured, so poor pasture or woodland would be measured with a longer perch than prime arable land, making an acre of woodland larger than an acre of arable land, so acre still really referred to the taxable value of the land rather than its actual size.

  The River’s Cry

  If you are walking along a lonely riverbank out on the moor on Dartmoor it can be quite unnerving suddenly to hear a wordless singing coming from it, which rises above the general noise of the rushing, gurgling water. On several occasions, I’ve thought there must be a radio playing somewhere even though there are plainly no cars or people about. The phenomenon is due to the granite rocks and pebbles in the water, which amplify and distort sound.

  When the River Dart is in full spate and this coincides with a north-westerly wind, a loud booming sound is sometimes
heard, known as the ‘river’s cry’. It was a long-held belief that the River Dart claimed a human heart in tribute every year and the ‘Dart’s Cry’ was the warning that one of those hearing it would shortly drown or die. Down through the centuries, there have been many tales of people hearing the cry, only to hurry home to news of an unexpected and tragic death in the family. But the river’s cry has also saved lives when those hearing the booming scrambled out of the river or off the rocks in fright, only to see a huge wall of water sweep past them, which would have carried them to their deaths.

  Pigseys

  Pigsey or pigsy is an old dialect word for a pixy, also called piskies, pisgies or pysgies. The earliest published version of The Three Little Pigs in 1853 comes from Dartmoor, and in this version the heroes are not three little pigs but three little pigseys or pixies. Throughout this novel, I have used the older dialect form, pigsey, to help separate the medieval concept of these dark, supernatural creatures from the jolly models of grinning pixies sitting on toadstools that we find in souvenir shops today.

  Pigseys were mythological little people, mostly invisible to humans, who lived hidden but parallel lives. In pre-Christian times, they were simply regarded as another race with magical powers, but with the coming of Christianity it came to be believed that they were the spirits of babies who had died before baptism and therefore could not enter Heaven, but nor could they go to Hell because they were too innocent. They were transformed into pigseys to live as close to humans as they could, though they could never speak to their families or show themselves. But in this form they could punish their neglectful parents by causing mischief and would also jealously torment their living siblings by pinching them black and blue at night.