Holy Men, Holy Books

Minehead has three fine churches. St Peter, on the quay, was converted from a 17th century former salt store in 1910. St Andrew, in the lower town, is an elegant Victorian design by G.E. Street (left). St Michael, on the hillside (where else?), is 14th century with an elaborate 15th century tower and serves the thatched village that crawls up to meet it. One of its treasures is an oak hutch-chest, carved with heraldry and a quaint calvary, given to the church by one of its vicars, Richard Fitzjames (1440-1522). Another is the 14th century illuminated Sarum rite missal he owned. This, after many wanderings, was presented in 1949 to the church and is now displayed in an illuminable wall-safe, right next to the oak chest that still serves as a piece of furniture.

Richard Fytz Jamys – as the board of former incumbents on the wall spells it – was a remarkable churchman. His father was from Redlynch in Somerset, his mother from East Lulworth in Dorset. He and his brother founded the Free School at Bruton. He became Prebendary of Taunton, Warden of Merton College, Oxford, Rector of Aller and Vicar of Minehead, and then like other Wessex folk before him (Dunstan springs to mind) went east. He was successively bishop of Rochester, Chichester and finally London and was buried in Old St Paul’s. As Bishop of Rochester, he helped welcome Catherine of Aragon to England in 1501 for her marriage to Prince Arthur.

The Fitzjames Missal was bequeathed to his successor at St Paul’s, Cuthbert Tunstall (1474-1559), whose handwriting is probably that to be found on the last page. Here was a man whose roots lay at the opposite end of the kingdom. Tunstall is a village in north Lancashire, Cuthbert the name of Northumbria’s greatest saint, whose shrine is nothing less than Durham Cathedral. (It is recorded that St Cuthbert appeared to King Alfred in a dream, a legend recalled at Wells, where the main parish church and a paper mill both take his name.) Cuthbert Tunstall was born in Yorkshire of a Lancashire family and travelled widely before taking up his London see. Not long afterwards, he exchanged it for the more important see of Durham, also becoming the first President of the revived Council of the North.

At Durham were preserved the treasures of St Cuthbert, a unique collection of items associated with the saint, who died in 687. It is difficult to think of any other figure from so early a date who can be understood through so many personal objects. Still to be seen at Durham are his portable altar and his pectoral cross, set with garnets, and an ivory comb that may also have been Cuddy’s own. His corporax, a linen cloth used in celebrating the Eucharist, was long cherished as the Holy Banner of St Cuthbert, carried into battle against the Scots and by those pilgrims of grace in 1536 who by querying the dissolution of the northern abbeys so incurred King Henry’s wrath. A framed account in St Cuthbert’s at Wells tells of the banner’s end when Dean Whittingham’s wife, the sister of Calvin, “did most despitefully burn the robe in the fire”.

One other item survives, not in Durham but in London. What may well be St Cuthbert’s own copy of the Gospel of St John. It is a small item, pocket-sized, and not to be confused with the great Lindisfarne Gospels, made after Cuthbert’s death and in his honour, which have also found their way to the wen. The book is still in its original 7th century decorated red goatskin binding, making it the oldest intact book of European origin. And now it’s for sale.

The sellers are the Jesuits, based at Stonyhurst College in Lancashire, who have owned the book since 1769. Since 1979 it has been on loan to the British Library, who are now trying to find the £9 million asking price. To raise interest among the Northumbrians, they have even conceded that they will lend the book to Durham for six months in the year. Not an ideal solution. A 1,300-year-old book deserves some rest if it’s not to deteriorate. Rest in Durham, with the rest of the treasures.

Just what does it have to do with London? And how did it get separated in the first place? Legally, or illegally? Now that digital copies can be made of all the great manuscripts, the case for gathering them together in one place has gone. It’s time to think again about context, about where such things fit as historical objects that tell a stirring tale. And that way, we may hope, subject to the right conditions for conservation and security, many, many communities will get the chance to provide their greatest past with a greater future.

Dis-traction

The West Somerset Railway is England’s longest heritage line, linking the busy resort of Minehead to the big trains at Taunton. Or almost. The track is intact to Taunton, which is how rail vehicles join and leave the WSR. But passengers have to find some other way to get to the start of the service at Bishops Lydeard (left), 6 miles north of Taunton by road. Daft. Absolutely. The WSR carries many more passengers today as a heritage line than it did under British Rail. But it could so easily be making a contribution to the real transport needs of the area. Who is responsible for this colossal lack of vision and why are they still in a job?

Back at the start of the month, I travelled on the line to Minehead, admiring the vast amount of work put in by the volunteers since the last train under BR auspices ran in 1971. Stations are themed to represent various GWR and BR period styles and a number house small museums. There’s even a Southern station at Washford – reactions from Paddington unprintable – accounted for by the presence of the Somerset & Dorset Railway Trust. There’ll be an opportunity for them to relocate to the real S&D in due course, naturally. Minehead was in a world of its own – the island of Sodor – as it played host to a ‘Thomas the Tank Engine’ day. I could have filled in my Junior Engineer’s Certificate and had it signed by the Fat Controller himself (above). But I can’t really spare the wall space.

Glastonbury Rediscovered

Post-excavation reporting is the Achilles’ heel of archæology. While the data recovered remain in private hands, or inside the diggers’ brains, the risk of loss is such that you might wish it had all been left in the ground for later. When Dr C.A. Ralegh Radford excavated Tintagel in the 1930's, he made careful notes but most were destroyed, still unpublished, in the Exeter blitz. After the war, he led several seasons of digging at Glastonbury Abbey but was still writing-up his findings in his nineties and died in 1999 with the work unfinished.

Fortunately, the papers were rescued for the National Monuments Record in Swindon and are now the subject of a trans-Wessex research project led by Reading University that will see the report published at last and placed on-line for all to view. Last week, the Abbey trustees hosted a symposium to report on progress. Experts gave guided tours of the ruins before those attending – several hundred people – crammed in to the Town Hall to be treated to presentations both scholarly and entertaining.

Sorting out the mess left by the 20th century diggers is only one part of the project. Complementary studies are also underway that will enable future excavations to be far more focused in their objectives. A surprising amount can be learnt from the stones themselves, both standing and fallen. Geology reveals economic relations with specific quarries, sculptural style links with other areas, while unexpected changes of pattern in the masonry can enable distinct campaigns of building to be highlighted. The pottery finds – tens of thousands of fragments – have been analysed and dated, some to the Roman/Saxon transition and earlier. Where the products of known kilns across the region can be identified, it is possible to reconstruct and map Glastonbury’s bulk-buying policies through the centuries leading up to dissolution.

Glastonbury is a geophysicist’s nightmare, with layer upon layer of building and rebuilding, punctuated with inaccessible areas where trees get in the way or ferrous objects like the visitor information plaques cast magnetic ‘shadows’ up to 7 metres wide. The best results from the recent survey are therefore obtainable away from the abbey church and among the domestic quarters. Some clearly indicate the ghostly outlines of features previously unsuspected and which will give plenty of food for thought for generations to come.

It is to be hoped that this project will mark the beginning and not the end of research into this precious and complex site. If so, then Glastonbury may acquire a reputation for serious scholarship to match its more dubious association with ‘New Age’ fantasy.

Looking Over Bath

Christmas and New Year have come and gone. For much of the time – at least mentally – seasonal cheer had to take second place to the quarterly rush to publish the Wessex Chronicle. To this issue I contributed a six-page article on William Beckford, Regency rake, Jamaican slave-owner and pioneer Goth, best known as the builder of the now-lost Fonthill Abbey in Wiltshire.

With Fonthill a victim of self-implosion in 1825, the result of structural recklessness, Wiltshire has little to show of Beckford’s mania for building tall. On the north side of Bath, Somerset can offer Beckford’s Tower on Lansdown Hill. A splendidly idiosyncratic place it is too, its museum a fine introduction to the man and his works, the restored ‘Belvidere’ at its summit furnished as it was when it was Beckford’s sitting-room (above).

Beckford’s Plan A, after selling Fonthill to retire to Bath, was to buy Prior Park, on the southern outskirts of the city, but the price wasn’t right. On the first Sunday of 2011 I was at Prior Park to enjoy the landscape garden, now managed by the National Trust, which is busy restoring its 18th century architectural features. The garden tumbles down the hill from the house to a lake with a Palladian-style bridge (below), scratched over with antique graffiti. Regency lads presumably used penknives in place of spray-cans and they made sure they carved the serifs properly too. They wouldn’t have wanted to seem less than gentlemen, after all.

Palladian bridges of this design are especially rare. The Prior Park bridge was built in 1755, a generation after the prototype, at Wilton House near Salisbury, completed in 1737, and its contemporary copy at Stowe in Buckinghamshire. The fourth and only other surviving example in the world is in Russia, at Tsarkoe Selo, near St Petersburg. There was a fifth, at Hagley Hall in Worcestershire, but that has been demolished.

Prior Park itself, now a school, commands a fine view over the city. And the city can look back. It was an inspired piece of advertising, built by the Cornishman Ralph Allen, one of the men who created Georgian Bath. He made his money in running a postal franchise – the previous time the Royal Mail was privatised – and then sank it into the mines from which Bath stone is extracted. (Strange but true – Bath stone is mined, not quarried, which has left a legacy of problems for ground stability only recently resolved.) Allen’s house was built of his product and meant to be seen by all who wished to imitate it on a more modest scale.

Set into one of the hillsides are the well-concealed remains of an ice-house which during the Second World War was fitted out for use by the British Resistance, should things have come to that. Bath was also one of five English cities hit in the Baedeker raids of 1942, when heritage was targeted in retaliation for damage done to the Hanseatic city of Lübeck. An eye for an eye doesn’t only leave the whole world blind, but with nothing much to look at either.