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(1) In Wessex

The prospectus for this series of posts can be found here.

If you are fortunate in your travels, then things will not go as planned.  But don't fret it, and by all means, continue to plot your course.  I certainly do.  Just don't expect things to fall into place that way.  The unexpected is usually more interesting, and if nothing else, a needed reminder that we are not in control of everything, or really much of anything at all.  In this case, driving on the left in the U.K. is not a problem; nor is the steering wheel being on the right.  And I actually like roundabouts.  What I had forgotten, or perhaps not experienced to this degree twenty years ago, is the sheer intensity of the traffic in the south and southwest of the U.K.  (Driving in Wales and the North, however, is much less stressful.)  Simply put, there are too many people driving too many cars on too narrow roadways.

Rural England is as picturesque as you would imagine.  You really cannot savor the bucolic countryside, however, for you must watch for oncoming traffic, on a road only marginally wide enough for one vehicle, with another automobile right on your tail, and with no place to pull over for a view or a picture.  You just have to keep whizzing along.  And going through the middle of most every village drops your average time down to the 30 to 40 mph range.  Finally, it rains here.  A lot.  I arrived on Tuesday and first saw the sun on Sunday.  And so, I was forced to drastically prune my intensive itinerary from the very beginning.

As I outlined in the prospectus, my goal was to visit sites associated with the Britain--both Celtic and Saxon--that predated the Norman invasion of 1066.  For old Wessex, I believed my journey must start at the immense Brookwood Cemetery near Woking, on the western fringes of Greater London.  This will take a bit of explanation.  By the early 1850s, a booming London no longer had room to bury its dead.  Investors purchased a large acreage west of the city for the "London Necropolis." For that time, it was the largest cemetery in the world (and still the largest in the U. K.), complete with its own rail line into London.  Every day the train brought coffins and mourners from the city out to Brookwood.  The North Station serviced "Nonconformists" who were buried in the unconsecrated section, while the South Station serviced Anglicans.  For about 80 years, the train pulled out of Waterloo Station every day bound for Brookwood, which became the final earthly destination for paupers and for respectable Victorians alike.  By the 1920s, the cemetery was starting to fall out of favor, and the Nazi destruction of the railway in 1941 hastened its demise.  In time, the owners took bankruptcy.

Under new ownership, Brookwood is still a going concern, but nothing like it was in its heyday.  The cemetery resembles a slightly overgrown open forest, dotted with thousands of monuments.  Today it caters to what can only be called niche markets.  There are sections for most every ethnic group.  For example, if you are Latvian Catholic, there is a section set aside for you.  A very colorful Ismaili section is to the left of the main entrance.  And on it goes.  My goal was the Orthodox Christian section of the cemetery, adjacent to what had been the South Station and Mortuary Chapel.  For it is here, in an odd twist of history, that one finds the relics of King Edward, a Saxon king of the 10th century.

This monarch, more properly known as St. Edward the Martyr to Catholics and the Orthodox, was the oldest son of King Edgar the Peacemaker and his first wife Ethelflaeda, elected king by the Witan upon his father's death, despite being a youth of only thirteen.    England had been enjoying a period of relative strength following Alfred's consolidation of power under the House of Wessex.  Strong kings followed--Edward the Elder, Athelstan, Edgar--and now expectations rode high on the young king.  Edward was an upright and godly young man, well-regarded and on friendly terms with Bishop Dunstan and the monastic party.  While out hunting one day, he called on his step-mother Aelfthrith at Corfe Castle.  She met him at the gates, offering him a drink of wine, while giving the signal to one of her servants to stab him in the back.    Aelfthrith saw that her son Aethelred (as in the Unready) was elected king in Edward's place.  Aelfthrith had has body spirited away and buried without ceremony.

Edward suffered a cruel, unjust and untimely death, but he does not at first glance seem to be a likely saint.  Almost immediately, miracles were associated with him burial place.  The common people started referencing him as both Saint and Martyr.  Within two years, Bishop Dunstan had his remains removed to Shaftsbury Abbey, where his shrine soon became a popular pilgrimage site.

Edward's martyrdom is a useful lesson in how quickly things can go horribly wrong for both people and peoples, for this one calculated act of treachery has rippled down through England's history. The half-brother, Aethelred the Unready, proved to be a particularly ineffectual ruler, at a particularly inauspicious time.  And this usurper in time took a Norman wife, who gave birth to their son, Edward "the Confessor."   The latter--the James Buchanan of Saxon kings--diddled away the kingdom, for all practical purposes passing it off to his Norman cousin.  In some ways, St. Edward the Martyr has become a symbol of all that what lost by the Norman conquest.

Almost 600 years later, the shrine of St. Edward was demolished with all the others during the English Deformation.  Shaftsbury Abbey, line all the others, was given to one of Henry's cronies.  In the 1930s, the owner of the property, himself an amateur archaeologist, discovered the relics of St. Edward, underneath the site of the ruined shrine.  He sought a permanent home for the bones and offered to give them to any church if they would meet three conditions:  1.  that they be recognize as relics, 2. that a shrine be established for them, and 3. that his feast day be observed.  He chose the Russian Orthodox Church in Exile, as they were the only church that agreed to all of the terms, as well as the fact that it was thought they would be most similar to the church Edward would have known.  The church received title to the old South Station and Mortuary Chapel at Brookwood.  The Victorian chapel became an Orthodox church and shrine to St. Edward.  The section adjoining became an Orthodox graveyard.

And so, my project really began at the Shrine of St. Edward the Martyr, and the veneration of his relics there.  The monks have done a good job in adapting the Victorian era chapel into a warm and familiar Orthodox temple.  The interior is all stone and timber, making painted iconography difficult, even if there had been the money for it.  Instead, the interior is covered with hundreds of small icons, none larger than 8" by 10", many of them no doubt gifted to the monastery.  I arrived about midway through the Liturgy, and standing in the nave, with the countless icons all around me, I had a very real sense of being "surrounded by a cloud of witnesses."  It was the feast day of St. Irene and St. Ephrem the New of Nea Makri.  The shrine to St. Edward, containing the chest with his relics, is on the north side of the nave.

The four monastics were as friendly as could be.  The priest had a typically dry English humor.  As it was the feast day of St. Irene, they invited me to follow them to "the tombs" (the graveyard) where a blessing would be chanted over those with that name.  It was raining, but no matter.  As it turned out, there were six Irinas to be blessed.  Glancing at the tombstones, I noticed that two of them were princesses.  I did not recognize one, but I did recognize the princely family of Galitzen, or Golitsyn or Galitzine for the other.    I asked the deacon about her, and it turns out she was granddaughter of the last tsarist prime minister of Russia, shot by the Soviets in 1925 at age 75.  She lived in humble circumstances in London.  I also noted another name--Trollope.  I inquired, and sure enough, he was the great-great grandson of the author.  The monks sell these Orthodox burial plots, which helps support their monastery.  They also dig the graves with a backhoe parked nearby.  I was invited inside for coffee and breakfast.  I really needed to push on, but did stay for the coffee.  Fr. Sabas and I talked of many things--the Norman conquest, the Dissolution of the Monasteries, the English Civil War and the ensuing secularization of the nation, how we both thought Trollope a better write than Dickens, the Puritan influence on the American character, the American Revolution and the utter and complete travesty that was Mel Gibson's "The Patriot," etc. And while I know that many Orthodox make way too much of it, he did say that in his estimation, the English church before the Normans was the closest to Orthodoxy among Western Christendom.  Before I left, he loaded me down with icon cards, as well as an enormous book on Orthodox religious art through the centuries.  As many Orthodox readers already know, these monks have aligned themselves with what we would characterize as a schismatic group--as I'm sure they would also characterize us.  The subject never came up, and that is how it should be.

I had next planned to visit the Abbey Church of St. Mary and St. Aethelflaed at Romsey, the only one not demolished by Henry VIII.  The townspeople had already purchased it for their parish church.  Romsey is a 12th-century Normal structure, but the lower walls are Saxon, and it contains 2 remarkable stone crucifixion carvings from that earlier period.  One, a gift from King Edgar, is thought to exhibit Byzantine influences as well as seemingly incorporating elements of the Saxon Tree of Life (Yggdrasil).  The Abbey has interesting historical connections, as well.  The abbey was originally founded by King Edward the Elder for his daughter Aelflaed.  Later, King Edgar refounded it for his daughter Aethelflaed, the half-sister of King Edward the Martyr.  The siblings have a brother, Edmund, buried at Romsey.  But as it turned out, I was running behind schedule, it was raining, and I missed my exit.  So I had to pass on Romsey Abbey.

I pushed on to Wareham in Dorset, where I visited the Church of St. Martin-on-the-Walls, dating from the year 1030.  The small church was easy to find--literally being on the old wall around the city.  From the outside, the church has changed little in almost 1,000 years.  It is not the main church in the city, but after being reconsecrated in the 1930s, occasional services are conducted there.  About the time I arrived, a volunteer arrived and unlocked the church so I could enter.  I hesitate to complain, for she did let me inside.  But she is typical of a certain type of English woman of a certain age--thin, unadorned, straight shoulder-length hair, and nervously chatty.  I know she was trying to be informative, and I do appreciate that, but it was more the tone that annoyed me.  I suppose I have spent too much time in Georgia.  In the Caucasus, there is reverence inside churches, even those not in regular use.  Such are holy places and one does not enter them casually.  I have seen ruins of Georgian churches, both in that country and in Turkey, where visitors have lit small candles in the jagged, ruined walls, for even in that condition, the places are holy.  My English volunteer was rattling on about it as casually as one would an old barn or blacksmith shop.  I know that you cannot extrapolate from one experience and draw conclusions about an entire society (although that has never stopped me before), but I do believe her attitude is broadly typical of the English today.  They are proud of these historical structures, but they are just that, and only that--structures.

Like most English churches after the Reformation, the inside is whitewashed and sterile.  Preservationists had, however, exposed what lay underneath on the north side of the apse.  A faded mosaic depicted scenes from the life of St. Martin.  Where the whitewash to be removed throughout, who knows what might be revealed.  I recognize it for what it was--iconography (though crudely done in comparison to Georgian, much less other Orthodox cultures).  The English seem more comfortable with the term "wall paintings."

The volunteer pointed out another mural, painted in the 1600s, I believe, depicting the coats of arms of a number of English monarchs.  Above them was the word, Yahweh, which to press the point that the churches authority was rooted in the God of the Old Testament, and not, as the volunteer explained with a wrinkle in her nose, of that awful Roman Catholicism.  This later painting interested me not much at all.

Finally, the church of St. Martin contains an effigy of T. E. Lawrence.  He has always been a great favorite of mine after reading The Seven Pillars of Wisdom many years ago.  The volunteer gave a rambling account of how the effigy came to be here--as Lawrence is actually buried in a country churchyard not far away.  By this time we had two other visitors, and I exited with the excuse of going to take some exterior pictures.  I had seen enough.

From there, I continued on west into Devon, where I stopped at the Church of St. Candida (St. Wite) at Whitchurch Canonicorum.  This was not a Saxon church, but a later Norman structure. Its significance, however, is that it contains a complete shrine over the relics of St. Wite.  This church was a popular pilgrimage site for centuries.  During the Dissolution of the Monasteries under Henry VIII, these shrines to the saints were busted-up and destroyed all over England.  What was left of this sort of thing was demolished a 100 years later under Oliver Cromwell's regime.  The scope of destruction is hard to imagine, and is generally glossed-over in the triumphalist view of English Reformation history.  But over 90% of England's art was destroyed in a fevered frenzy of iconoclasm.  As efficient as the Cromwells were, both Thomas and Oliver, they somehow missed the shrine to St. Wite.  And so it alone remains.  I have never understood those who feel compelled to destroy a thing of beauty, whether it is a work of art, a tree, a hillside, an old building.  I just don't.  The church was locked up, so I was not able to view the shrine.  The churchyard contained several interesting Saxon crosses, however, and I spied a small statue of St. Wite just under the roof line.

I left old Wessex, and entered Dumnonia (Cornwall).  A couple of days later, I entered Wessex again, where I hoped to visit the grave of Evelyn Waugh, and the monument to Alfred the Great at Athelney.  The latter is a monument to Alfred's time there during England's dire struggle against the Danes.  Evelyn Waugh is not necessarily a favorite author of mine.  He did, however, write Black Mischief, one of the funniest novels I have ever read.  And there is a line from his Sword of Honour trilogy that has always stayed with me.  If I remember correctly, the female character Virginia was calling upon Guy's uncle, Peregrine Crouchback.  His butler ushered her into the library to await the elder Crouchback with the admonition (to the best of my memory), "There is plenty in here to interest one.  That is, if one is interested in things."  I have remembered that line of dialogue, for even at that time, I realized that it somewhat encapsulated my view of life.

I had to abandon both of these goals, however, when I left my luggage at an inn in north Cornwall.  The innkeeper called me when I was seventy miles down the road.  I doubled back, and the loss of close to three hours eliminated these stops.  In my initial foray into Wessex, however, I was able to do a drive-by on the Giant of Cerne Abbas.  This neolithic novelty at least proves that the English were not always reserved and unassuming.

Posted by John at 4:13 PM 4 comments: 

A Time to Travel I administer my last final today, and in five days time will be on a flight to places elsewhere. Being the son of my parents, I instinctively learned to hate pretense in all forms, and consequently try to be as low-key as possible about traveling, fully realizing that I am the fortunate beneficiary of particular circumstances in a particular period of time. That said, I have also consciously chosen this path and seen it through. My life is relatively uncluttered with much of the “stuff” of modernity--by and large just books in an old house, and a passport--no boat, no golf clubs, no guns, no hunting leases, no house full of electronic gadgetry, only one television, no ATV, and if I couldn’t make the point any clearer, I drive a Subaru. To be sure, I am painting with a broad judgmental brush here, but when I hear what others put out for those sorts of things, I smile inwardly when I compare it to the relatively small amount I spend on travel.

I also understand that there are some people who travel for leisure and relaxation. I simply do not understand this mentality. If you are tired, there is a bed at home with your name on it. No, travel should be something more substantial than indulging our hedonism. I travel to explore (literally to see what is over the next hill, whether it be in the next county or the next country); to learn; to feed my curiosity; to seek adventure; to watch and listen; to climb; to be silent; to get into binds and then figure your way out; and increasingly, to be in awe. And since 2003, my travels have largely taken on the nature of pilgrimages. This journey will be no different.

I plan to drive around rural England and Wales for about 11 days. After that, I will take the train across Europe to Romania, where I will do much the same thing for 9-10 days. I plan to stick to the out-of-the-way places, and studiously avoid anything that is suggestive of queues, tickets and tours. In England, of course, this means no cathedrals, castles or country houses, and probably anything managed by English Heritage. I’ll be traveling alone, which suits me just fine, and is probably for the best, as few people want to travel the way I do.

Other than to change planes at Heathrow, I have not been in the U.K. since 1996. Like many travelers before me, I caught “Eastern fever” and have not looked back. Since 2006, I have spent most of my overseas travel time poking around the Caucasus.

So, after all these years, why return to stolid old England? For starters, I sometimes feel like an unpaid, one-man tourist bureau for the Republic of Georgia. While this favored country of my heart entices me on many different levels, Georgia can also be very intense. Sensory overload is a real thing, and perhaps I just need a break. God willing, I’ll be back on track next year.

I take a long view of history, and of course this applies to church history as well. I plan to do a little compare-and-contrasting. The robust and visibly resurgent faith of the Georgian people resonates with me. They have their problems, to be sure, and the Georgian Orthodoxy is not without idiosyncrasies. But it is not romanticizing to acknowledge that the roots of Christianity run deep in their soil.  Even in the face of repeated invasions and subjugations, the faith has never departed that "broad and mellow land."  More unbiased observers might qualify this assertion somewhat, but I think the basic premise holds. The Orthodox Faith is alive and well on this eastern frontier of Christendom.

Were I to make a similar statement about the opposite historic frontier of Christendom—the British Isles--it would be met with widespread and much-deserved incredulity. There is no country on earth more choc-a-bloc with churches than Britain, yet they are often merely historical artifacts of a past with diminishing contemporary relevance. Often lovingly maintained and curated, many of these edifices are no longer the touchstones and beating heart of a living faith. At best, Christianity seems to be a faint whisper in the land. Clearly, I speak in broad terms, and individual situations may run counter to the overall trend.

The countless studies documenting the collapse of Christian belief in the U.K. all paint a bleak picture. Even nominal Christians are in the minority. The fact that the percentages are as high as they are is the result of African and Eastern European immigration. Native-born British who self-identify as Christians are a fast-diminishing demographic. In view of modern British history, one could posit that peace, prosperity and power are not necessarily the building blocks of a faith that will last the ages. I say this non-judgmentally, for American are fast on their heels. Our own de-Christianization--to the extent that we ever were such, in any meaningful sense, for it was always more proclaimed than practiced--is a fascinating spectacle to behold. In short, I want to spend some time in a post-Christian country where this is already the established order, if perchance to catch a glimpse of our own future.

And yet it was not always thus. As is often the case, I take a contrarian view of British history. The Whig View of History doesn’t hold much water with me. Working backwards in time, I think the Glorious Revolution was anything but. I find that the iconoclastic destruction unleashed by the English Civil War was as severe and unthinking as that of the French Revolution, or today’s Islamic fanaticism. The English Reformation under Henry the Horrible and Black Bess ripped the heart out of a traditional way of life—and according to one historian, "dug a deep ditch between England and her past."  The edifice they created in its wake--a bit of this and that--made for a great show, but has proven itself particularly ill-equipped to stand the test of time. Finally, in terms of cataclysmic consequences, I rate the tragedy of 1066 right up there with 1204 and 1453. Clearly, I take my historical cues from the likes of Eamon Duffy, Christopher Dawson, and J. R. R. Tolkien.

My view of the Normans is probably too colored by repeated viewings of The Lion in Winter. I take a dim view of the cursed Plantagenets and the Norman Conquest which spawned them. And it was just that—a conquering and a subjugation. Some important things were lost along the way, I think. One need not romanticize either the Celtic Britons or the Anglo-Saxons. The island before 1066--Wessex and Mercia and Wales (Gwynedd and Powys and Dyfed and Gwent) and Dumnonia and Kent and East Anglia and Northumbria (Deira and Bernica)--could be a brutal and treacherous place. And yet in its own way, it was a grand and glorious land, giving birth to a remarkably rich civilization emerging from the synthesis of native and invader. Even their treachery contained an element of nobility and honor, something the continental Normans could never quite pull off.

The history of “Dark Age” Britain--what I will call Old England--is well worth remembering. In a nutshell, my take on it runs something like this: The Britons of old--a Celtic culture encompassing Britain, Ireland and Brittany--survived the withdrawal of the Romans. The Christian faith hung on as well, in a form that was uniquely its own. The fall of the old order, however, unleashed an internecine struggle for supremacy among the tribes, laying the land wide open for the first invaders--the Angles, the Saxons and the Jutes from across the North Sea. They established their beachheads, and it was soon evident that they were in Britain to stay. Most natives (but importantly, not all) took refuge in their western redoubts--the Welsh kingdoms, Dumnonia (Cornwall), and Brittany.

This was the era of Arthur--not a mythical legend susceptible to Hollywood spin, but a real Welsh chieftain, whose place in a particular family and history is known. If the hagiography is to be believed (and I see no reason not to do so), his extended family almost single-handedly (re)evangelized Dumnonia and Brittany.

Despite the initial savagery, the Saxon invaders put down roots and intermarried with the natives. Christianity, while pushed back, was not obliterated. The arrival of missionaries from Rome in the late 7th-century aided in the re-Christianization of the land. In short order, something known as “English” began to take shape--a fusion of native Celtic and Saxon interloper. Even though Rome used all means to bring the English church into greater conformity, the faith in the Isles was still distinctly its own. One hallmark of this era--as in all Orthodox lands--was the abundance of local saints.

Arts and culture flourished--centered primarily in the Northumbrian monasteries, which was considered the great center of learning in the West, rather than Gaul. Kingdoms rose and fell, but five of the Saxon ones vied for preeminence: Northumbria, Mercia, East Anglia, Kent and Wessex. First Northumbria, then Mercia and finally Wessex took the lead. In the late 8th century, the first Viking raid occurred, and these Danish invaders proved even more fearsome than the Saxons had been. But like their predecessors, and despite the initial and sustained savagery, they settled down in the land, intermarried and became part of the “English” fabric. The house of Wessex battled the Vikings for many years, but finally gained a workable division of the island.

In 1066, an avoidable dynastic crisis allowed William of Normandy to press his claim to the vacant throne. With his victory at Hastings, everything changed. In the long run, the English did not become Norman, but rather the other way around. After the initial land-grab and disenfranchisement of the previous order, permanent changes were imposed by the new Norman overlords. The distinctly English church now became much more an extension of Gaul. The new bishops replaced the native saints with Continental figures; St. George replaced St. Edmund as the patron saint of England.

One result of this religious transformation was that the well of local saints dried up. Few new saints emerged, and the new Gaulist Catholic order discouraged it. And the 1066 date lines up conveniently close (if not a bit too convenient) to the accepted Catholic - Orthodox schism of 1054. There is a certain arbitrariness to using the 1066 cut-off date, but the fact remains that the saints of Anglo-Saxon England and before were also saints of the Orthodox faith. The question of saints after 1066 is a mute one, for their number is too few to even be a factor. Some might argue that I approve of one invasion (the Saxons) and disapprove of another (the Normans). Well, nobody ever said that the practice of historical interpretation was fair.

Under the new regime, many things changed, but on the local level, life often went on much as before, and the practices of the old English and Celtic Christians continued--most notably, their devotion to the saints. This continued on for centuries, until the tragedy of the English Reformation when the connection was finally cut. From this crucible, modern England emerged and started down the path to becoming “British.” Perhaps the obsession with money and real estate had its roots here as well. Something had clearly changed from before, however. I am seeking a glimpse of what went before, if perhaps I can make it out in my mind’s eye.

I want to seek out the relics of an once-enchanted land—in Wessex, Mercia, the Welsh kingdoms, Northumbria and East Anglia--the old Saxon churches, the stone crosses and the holy wells of the Celts and Anglo-Saxons prior to the Norman Conquest. “Then lived here saints that after were denied, By Norman lusts, then greed and faithless pride.” Churches were whitewashed, shrines stripped, and monasteries decommissioned. The sites become no less holy, however, simply because they’ve been forgotten, or worse, forsaken--"the parish has a saint’s name time cannot unfrock," and the “truth of Saints can never pass nor die.” To be sure, such a pilgrimage will have a different feel than in Georgia. But the saints who glorified and reflected Christ in their lives are alive, not dead, for as we are told, “I am the God of the living, not the dead.” The Cromwells --both Thomas and Oliver--did their worst, and it was very bad indeed, but the saints live on and their testimony continues.

Formerly, when men lived in the beauty and bounty of Earth, the reality of Heaven was very near; every brook and grove and hill was holy, and men out of their beauty and bounty built shrines so lovely that the spirits which inhabit Heaven came down and dwelt in them and were companions to men and women, and men listened to divine speech.

If I have learned one thing from my journey out of an intellectualized, interpretive, mental construct of faith--indeed, my own English heritage--it is that true holiness exists, and lingers on after the saints in places of worship and devotion. I hope to find my way to some of these “thin places” where I can reverence the saints of old, to remember the dead, and maybe in a small way keep these stories alive.

Of course, England is mostly the land of my forebearers. We’ve been in America for so long (and this story I largely know), that our antecedents on the other shore are only dimly understood. In my lineage there’s a Hessian soldier, a German Dunkard, a couple of Irish scoundrels (and the real thing--none of this Anglo-Irish or Scots-Irish), some Scottish hellions, and a Welshman or two. My surname (and the part of my family that I cling to above all the others) is supposedly Scottish, though the evidence suggests that they were more probably Saxons out of Bernicia, with roots in Lindesfarne itself. All that said, the vast majority of my DNA comes from the midlands and south of England. While in the Border regions, I do, however, plan to visit the non-juror church where my 6th-great grandfather and 5th-great grandfather were baptized in 1665 and 1686 respectively.

As for the Romanian leg of the trip, that needs no explanation.  Who doesn’t want to go to Romania? I crossed the Danube from Bulgaria into the country once, and that has whetted my appetite for more. As in England, my Orthodoxy will guide my explorations in Romania, and I hope to linger among the famous painted monasteries in Bucovina.

As these journeys may just be of some interest to a few, I hope to discipline myself to post something here as I go. We shall see.
Posted by John at 4:05 PM 13 comments: