by Adams, Max;
JARROW
From Northumbria, Benedict Biscop made the pilgrimage to Rome, not just to honour the saints and martyrs but to gather fragments of knowledge that he might bring home to seed Northumbria’s new age of learning. His second journey there was a book-buying expedition. On his third trip he accompanied Theodore of Tarsus, one of Canterbury’s great archbishops and an impressive scholar, back to Britain. In later years Ceolfrith, resigning his abbacy at Jarrow, also travelled to Rome, taking with him one of three pandects, or complete bibles, as a gift for the Pope. He did not survive that last journey; but the Codex Amiatinus, now in Florence, did: it is a worthy monument to that half-forgotten cultural landscape. Bede himself hardly travelled at all; but his many important works, not least of them books on time and geography, were copied and distributed across Europe, seeding in their turn an age of scholarship which brought the light of intellectual reason—albeit ecclesiastically uncompromising—to Europe and was paralleled by a later great age of Arab scholarship in the south.
Dan and I filmed inside the church in 2004; but not because of Bede or the Early Middle Ages. We wanted to record Jarrow’s small but significant part in a later enlightenment. On a window sill in the nave of the church sits a miner’s safety lamp. In May 1812 a terrible explosion in a local pit killed ninety-two men and boys. The then vicar of Jarrow, the historian John Hodgson, was instrumental in the formation of a Society for the Prevention of Accidents in Coal Mines, which commissioned the Cornish chemist and inventor Humphry Davy to construct a lamp which would cast a safe light underground. The idea and technology of industrial safety was another Jarrow export, eleven hundred years after it enjoyed its first industrial revolution.
Tragically, Jarrow’s most famous crusaders, the two hundred and seven marchers, accompanied by their local MP, Ellen Wilkinson, who set off from here to walk to London in 1936 to beg for help during the Depression, were discouraged by the Labour Party and the trades unions, ignored by government (Stanley Baldwin refused to meet them) and spurned by the nation’s capital; their scant reward for a three-hundred-mile journey on foot a pound each for the train fare home. The last of those extraordinary ambulists, Con Shields, died in 2013 aged ninety-three.
Dan and I also took the train home: a modest two pounds seventy for the dozen or so stops to Gateshead that completed the circle of a short walk through two millennia.
§ CHAPTER NINE
Midwinter: York to Whitby
Augustinian mission—Eburacum and Eoforwic—Anglian tower—York Minster—Edwin and Constantine —old times—Stamford Bridge—Thixendale—Wharram Percy—ancient farmers of the Wolds—Grimston’s font—Malton—Deira and Derwent—West Heslerton Anglian settlement—Pickering—Lastingham—geography of monastic power—North York Moors—Danby Dale Vikings—midwinter’s day—Whitby—synod—days as dark as night
NORTH YORK MOORS
IN THE DARKEST days of winter I took a short trip through space and time: eighty miles and forty years, from York to Whitby; from 627 to 664: following the northern English from pagan wannabe Romans through the birth pangs of conversion to a Christian state integrated with Europe for the first time in two hundred and fifty years.
English narrative history begins with a convenient date: 597, the year when Pope Gregory sent his mission to the Angles and Saxons, led by St Augustine. That mission, derailed comprehensively by Augustine’s faux pas with the indigenous British church (see pages 86–7) and stalled on its metropolitan launchpad by the apostasy of its patron kings in Kent, Essex and East Anglia, hung by a thread after its first quarter century. In the year 617, twenty years after the mission’s arrival, there was no Christian state among the Anglo-Saxons. Canterbury’s then archbishop all but packed his bags and set off for Rome; his two bishops fled to the Continent. The British church, as Bede tells us, made no attempt at all to convert the pagan English (he may not be telling us the whole truth, but that’s another story). The two peoples were, if we believe the historical propaganda, sworn enemies.
Archbishop Laurence, admonished for his cowardice both by the Pope in Rome and by a visionary dream in which he was scourged, changed his mind: he rallied, and succeeded in converting Eadbald, the apostate king of Kent whose father Æthelberht had indulged, then sponsored, Augustine.
Enter stage-left Eadbald’s sister, Æthelburh, and her priest, Paulinus, a survivor of the original mission. Kentish princesses were a valuable political commodity: savvy, educated, sophisticated; in marriage they bought kudos and the rewards of alliance with the traditionally senior kingdom of the English. When Edwin of Deira slew his brother-in-law Æthelfrith at the great battle on the River Idle in 617 and became overlord of the northern Anglian kingdoms, Æthelburh was a natural choice as his queen. Negotiations were opened with the convert Eadbald, who insisted, however, that Edwin undergo baptism and a Christian marriage ceremony (a form, if you like, of political submission). Edwin demurred until such time as his own political position in Northumbria was secure. For a few years he was busy expanding his realms through conquest and tribute, reconstructing dormant networks of patronage and forging new ones. He subdued the Isles of Man and Anglesey and took tribute from them, acquiring huge political capital in the process.
The time came when he had to decide his own and his people’s spiritual and political future. But one imagines a deeply conservative aristocracy, suspicious of what must have seemed the inflexibility and fanaticism of the monotheistic Christian faith and concerned at how its adoption might affect their lines of patronage. Pagan priests and churchmen were competitors for the attention and generosity of their secular lord. Edwin’s decision was delayed; more years passed.
Bede constructs the story of Edwin’s conversion as a series of providential, semi-miraculous tales through which it is possible to glimpse complex political and personal motivations, even angst; but the critical, precipitating event seems to have been a double trauma. At Easter 626 an assassin came to Edwin’s court from the king of the West Saxons. He killed Edwin’s bodyguard, a thegn named Lilla, with a murderous thrust from a sword tipped with poison; the same blow penetrated the king’s flesh and he lay ill for some time before recovering. That same night his Kentish queen gave birth (perhaps prematurely) to a daughter. Edwin promised Paulinus and his queen, Æthelburh, that should he successfully wreak revenge on the West Saxons he would undergo conversion and offer his new daughter, Eanflæd, to the church. A year later, having slain five West Saxon warlords in the course of a punitive campaign, he was baptised in York: the first Christian king of the Northumbrians. Over the next year the warrior elites of Deira and Bernicia followed suit, enthusiastically or otherwise.
York is almost painfully familiar to me. I spent my undergraduate years here and know its streets and buildings, names and ways. Leaving the station on a morning that barely emerged from twilight, and crossing the river, I found myself walking almost thoughtlessly through streets thronged with Christmas shoppers and lined with associations from my own past. Here was the manhole through which, as students, we were allowed to enter the bizarre world of the Roman city’s sewage system; there, I remember, I dug as a volunteer on an emergency excavation ahead of building works. On Parliament Street I looked in vain for a landmark that goes unnoticed by most tourists: two Regency buildings leaning away from one another because they sit astride the Roman city wall many feet beneath. Eventually I got my eye in; the gap has been filled and painted over.
In the gardens of the Yorkshire Museum I paid a visit to two upstanding monuments: the indomitable Multangular Tower, with its striking courses of red brick, built probably in the reign of Emperor Constantine (306–37) and perhaps under his personal supervision (he was practising for a larger project on the shores of the Bosphorus); then to a more secret, intimate, tragic structure, in an out-of-the-way shadow of the medieval stone ramparts: the Anglian tower. It is a much more modest, stunted affair made of scavenged, undressed stone with a low, round-arched doorway, now fenced off to dete
r drug-users from entering. Its original height is unknown. It may have been built in the reign of Edwin as he set about reconstructing the defunct Roman city for his new capital; if so, it is the only monumental structure to survive above ground from any Northumbrian secular power of the seventh century: evidence of Edwin’s imperial Roman fantasies, perhaps. After about 900 it was buried beneath the earth ramparts of Viking Yorvik. It has a dark secret, darker even than the miserable cold, leaden day when I remade its acquaintance. Excavating it in July 1970, archaeologist Jeff Radley was killed when the earth walls of his trench collapsed and buried him. This was the archaeologist’s nightmare in the days before steel shoring became mandatory in excavations below four feet deep. The plaque which once commemorated him has been removed. As a teenager I allowed myself to be persuaded to descend into a slit trench fifteen feet deep, unshored, in the shadow of another great church, the cathedral at Orléans. The thought makes me shudder. The only thing holding that trench together was the city’s Roman wall, still standing, buried almost to the full depth of the hole.
Almost for the sake of it, I made a partial circuit of York’s walls, themselves a patchwork construct of Roman and medieval pride and insecurity, and of Victorian nostalgia. The city’s roofscape, beneath which it is in a constant flux of shifting businesses and populations, was unchanged: orange pantiles, jagged roof lines, soft red and brown brick, a Giant’s Causeway of individual buildings and lives as it has been for a thousand years and more. I remembered the tropes that first-time visitors to York are treated to: that a Scotsman may be shot by a bow and arrow if caught within the city walls after dark; that here the streets are called gates, the gates are called bars and the bars are called pubs. York can sometimes seem too self-consciously like a theme park; but its roots are sunk very deep and from them grows a tree, a national sense of continuity.
I paid my respects to the Minster, which sits directly above the principia of the Roman legionary fortress built very nearly two thousand years ago. The vast church survives through a combination of luck and determination. In 1829 the ranting Methodist schizophrenic Jonathan Martin (brother of the apocalyptic painter John), attempted to burn it down and very nearly succeeded. In 1984, when I was living just up the road in Bootham, a lightning strike caused another conflagration, this time in the south transept. In its undercroft, excavated in emergency so that engineers could shore up the sagging piles of its colossal gothic superstructure in the 1970s, are Roman walls, now much tidied up; artefacts from two millennia of accumulating rubbish; and a story of engineering triumphs and disasters. On a small ceramic slab is scrawled a chi-rho, the early Christian symbol of sacrifice. It became fashionable during the fourth century after Constantine, declared Emperor here in 306, used it on his army’s shields in battle. He proclaimed a policy of religious freedom, including toleration of Christianity, in 313 in the so-called Edict of Milan.
Edwin of Northumbria, under instruction from his priest, then bishop, Paulinus (incidentally the first man in our history to have a pen portrait written, so that we actually know what he looked like: dark, saturnine and with a pronounced hawk-like nose) is likely to have been coached in the story of Constantine’s journey to enlightenment through victory in the Battle of the Milvian Bridge in 312. Even before his conversion, perhaps, Edwin began, self-consciously, to model his own kingship in imitation of an idea of empire provided by that legendary forebear and by his queen, bigging up the political and spiritual advantages of buying into Roman orthodoxy. Somewhere on the Minster green, just to the north of the medieval cathedral, Paulinus constructed a wooden church in which the king and his children were baptised among the ruined columns and paved streets of the former legionary headquarters, surrounded by the works of the Giants.
At the beginning of Edwin’s reign there can have been no functioning civic society in this once grand, northernmost city of the Empire. A garrison without soldiers, fortress without a commander, Eburacum was conquered not by barbarians but by the forces of nature and the failure of its engineers to combat rising water levels—or perhaps just their apathy. It straddles the River Ouse at the centre of the Vale of York, a great flat, low-lying glacial plain that has always been prone to flooding and was particularly vulnerable during the cool, wet centuries of the mid-first millennium. The Ouse (a Brythonic name) drains the waters of the Pennine Rivers Nidd, Swale and Ure at the head of Humber’s watershed. I well remember being cut off on its south side during the extraordinary winter of 1981/2, when the Ouse flooded to record heights (16 feet 7 inches above normal) and then froze. People walked across the ice; some fool rode a motorbike beneath one of the bridges. We huddled by a pathetic gas fire in our squalid student flat in Bishophill, not many yards above the chaos of the inundated riverbank.
After an afternoon’s tramping around old haunts I reminisced about that time over dinner with archaeologist and friend Mark Whyman, with whom I’d shared that flat. Bishophill, somewhat swankier now than it was in our day, sits in what was once the Roman colonia: a plantation of retired legionary veterans designed to imprint the frontier zone with a small but significant outpost of the mother city; to remind the new citizens that their sponsors and overlords were the greatest military power in the world. In my mind’s eye I pictured another walled colony, Derry/Londonderry, in the seventeenth century, and conjured up a much vaguer idea of New Delhi or one of those enormous American overseas military bases (Diego Garcia; Bagram?) that are or were miniaturised states of the Union.
We fell to talking about York (by then called Eoforwic) in Edwin’s day. Mark is a veteran of excavations at Fishergate, where a later seventh-century emporium sprang up in the decades after Edwin refounded it as a royal centre. At his death a stone church, constructed under the supervision of Paulinus and Æthelburh, remained unfinished, to be completed by his rival and successor Oswald. Bishop and queen fled south in fear of the new regime. One gets the feeling that life crept back to York, slowly, over decades. Its greatness as a city was not restored until it became capital of another kingdom, ruled over by Vikings in the ninth and tenth centuries when merchants and craftspeople, evidenced by the celebrated Coppergate excavations of the 1970s and 1980s, forged a critical mass of expertise and energy equal to anything engineered by their Anglo-Saxon antagonists.
ANGLIAN TOWER
After dinner and a beer I got my maps out and we pored over landscapes of our youth, when we lived our undergraduate summers digging: at Wharram Percy, high in the Wolds; at West Heslerton on the edge of the Vale of Pickering (when I wasn’t in Dorset. . . or Hertfordshire). It seemed, looking back, that we must also have spent most of our term-time weekends on field trips in the back of our professor Philip Rahtz’s Land Rover or in the company of other lecturers, steeping ourselves in a culture of fieldwork, of vernacular and church architecture, the rhyme and metre of road, lane, field, boundary and standing stone. We graduated, semi-fluent, in the language of landscape. I wonder, thinking of it, whether that itinerant excavators’ lifestyle before, during and after university had not set me on the road to periodic nomadism, to a perpetual desire not to go back but always to look to the next horizon. Maybe that’s why spending time in York makes me feel uneasy. Reminiscence is a record with a B-side.
On a morning of inexpressibly dismal murk, I set out from Colliergate clothed against rain and wind. Automatically, almost, I turned right into Goodramgate, noticing the presence or absence of pubs or cafés once frequented where I had met so-and-so that time, had said something stupid or laughed like a drain with mates. Out of the city, then, through Monk Bar, where a model shop has stood since well before my time. I passed a small development of houses and flats on Monkgate, new since my day; and I had to think for a moment to get my bearings, until I realised that this was where, in 1983, I worked through the winter on an excavation, supervising unemployed youths in work experience while attempting to salvage the medieval archaeology of the suburbs. Mud, ice and good craic are what I remember.
Across t
he River Foss I navigated the suburban roads of Layerthorpe (a Viking name, the Thorp element denoting a village or farm), Heworth and Tang Hall, with the school run, almost the last of the year, in full swing. This was new territory for me: no memories of this part of town where the houses are too comfortable for students to afford. I found the end of Bad Bargain Lane (which would have made a great address for rack-rent student flats) and, despite the discouraging name, followed it out into the flat, washed-out fields of Osbaldwick (Old English: Osbald’s farm) and across the A64, the road to Scarborough and the North Sea.
I cut across country through back lanes whose right-angle turns were a dead giveaway to old country routes diverted by the process of enclosure; but the names—Holtby (a Danish village in a small wood), Warthill (a lookout point) and Gate Helmsley (the road at Hemele’s island) speak of its Early Medieval past. The English live among Dark Age landscapes in Dark Age villages. The road in question, when I came upon it, was Roman, and it heads not for the sea but directly up onto the Yorkshire Wolds. Before that it must cross the River Derwent at Stamford Bridge, where I took shelter from squally, biting rain and treated myself to a warming coffee and a bun. Stamford Bridge is one of those evocative locations that summons images of Britain’s violent, epic history. Here, in the late summer of 1066, King Harold Godwinson of England fought the Norwegian army of Harald Hardrada, one of the legendary warrior lords of the Viking Age.