St. Bruno of Cologne and the Carthusians in England

I have often posted about the Carthusian Order and its English Reformation martyrs on this blog. Today we celebrate the feast of the order's founder, St. Bruno of Cologne:

Born in Cologne around 1030, he begins studying at the school of the Cathedral of Reims at an early age. Made a "doctor", Canon of the Cathedral Chapter, he is made the Rector of the University in 1056. He was one of the most remarkable scholars and teacher of his time "a prudent man whose word was rich in meaning."

He finds himself less and less at ease in a city where scandal has little affect towards the clergy and the Bishop himself. After having fought, not without success, against this disorder, Bruno feels the desire of a life more completely given to God alone.

After an attempt at a solitary life of short duration, he enters the region of Grenoble, of which the Bishop, the future Saint Hugues, offers him a solitary site in the mountains of his diocese. In June 1084, the Bishop himself leads Bruno and six of his companions in the primitive valley of Chartreuse, where the Order eventually gets its name from. They build a hermitage, consisting of a few log cabins opening towards a gallery which allows them access to the communal areas of the community -- church, refectory, and chapter room -- without having to suffer too much from intemperate conditions.

After six years of a pleasant solitary life, Bruno is called by Pope Urban II to the service of the Holy See. Not thinking of being able to continue without him, his community first thinks of separating, but it allows itself to be convinced to follow in the life that he first formed. Advisor to the Pope, Bruno is ill at ease a the Pontifical Court. He only lives in Rome for a few short months. With the Pope's blessing, he establishes a new hermitage in the forests of Calabria, in the south of Italy, with a few new companions. There he dies 6 October 1101.

Pope St. John Paul II wrote a message to the "Superior General of the Carthusian Order and to all members of the Carthusian family" in 2001 in celebration of the nine hundredth anniversary of St. Bruno's death:

While the members of the Carthusian family celebrate the ninth centenary of the death of their Founder, with them I give thanks to God who raised up in his Church the eminent and always relevant person, St Bruno. With a fervent prayer, appreciating your witness of fidelity to the See of Peter, I gladly share the joy of the Carthusian Order which has a master of the spiritual life in this "very good and incomparable father". On 6 October 1101, "on fire with divine love", Bruno left "the fleeting shadows of the world" to reach definitively the "eternal delights" (cf. Letter to Ralph, n. 13). The brothers of the Hermitage of Santa Maria della Torre in Calabria, to whom he had given much affection, could not doubt that this dies natalis would have inaugurated a singular spiritual adventure, which still today produces abundant fruit for the Church and for the world.

Bruno was a witness to the cultural and religious upheaval that shook Europe at its dawn and an architect in the reform that the Church wanted to realize in the face of internal difficulties. After having been an esteemed teacher, Bruno felt the call to consecrate himself to the one good that is God himself. "Is there anything so good as God? Is there any other good except God alone? Thus the holy soul that perceives this good, its incomparable brightness, its splendour, its beauty, burns with the flame of heavenly love and cries out: "My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When shall I come and behold the face of God!'" (Letter to Ralph, n. 15). The radical character of the thirst impelled Bruno, in patient listening to the Spirit, to invent an eremitic lifestyle with his first companions, where everything favours the response to the call of Christ who, in all times, chooses men "to lead them into solitude and unite himself to them in an intimate love" (Statutes of the Carthusian Order). With this choice of "life in the desert" Bruno invited the whole ecclesial community "never to lose sight of the supreme vocation, which is to be always with the Lord" (Vita consecrata, n. 7).

Bruno, who could forget "his" project to answer the requests of the Pope, manifests his lively sense of the Church. Aware that the journey on the way to holiness cannot be conceived without obedience to the Church, he shows us that true life in the following of Christ means putting ourselves in his hands, expressing in self-abandon a surplus of love. He always maintained a similar attitude in joy and constant praise. His brothers noticed that "his face was always radiant with joy and his words modest. With a father's strength, he knew how to show the sensibility of a mother" (Introduction to the funeral parchment dedicated to St Bruno). These delicate words of the funeral parchment express the fruitfulness of a life dedicated to contemplation of the Face of Christ, the source of apostolic efficacy and of fraternal charity. May the sons and daughters of St Bruno, after their father's example, continue untiringly to contemplate Christ, thus mounting "a holy and persevering guard, awaiting the return of their Teacher to open to him as soon as he knocks" (Letter to Ralph, n. 4); this is an encouraging appeal so that all Christians remain vigilant in prayer in order to receive their Lord!

I note this on the website for the Carthusian order, headquartered in Switzerland: "Liturgical celebration does not have any pastoral intent. This explains why those outside the Order are not admitted to participate at the offices or the Mass celebrated in the churches of our monasteries. Because of our call to solitude, visits are limited to the family members of the monk (2 days a year) and to those who feel called to our life, whom we call retreatants." 

(Note also how much Thomas Cromwell, Thomas Audley, at al, were interrupting the solitude of the Carthusians as they continued to encourage them to take the required oaths, interrupting their studies and their way of life, constantly intruding upon their retreat from the world.)

Yet as Pope St. John Paul II commented in 2001, that solitude and separation serves the Body of Christ:

How can we doubt for even an instant that a similar expression of pure love can give an extraordinary missionary effectiveness to the Carthusian life? In the withdrawal of monasteries and in the solitude of the cells, patiently and silently, the Carthusians weave the nuptial garment of the Church, "prepared as a bride adorned for her husband" (Apoc 21,2). They present the world to God daily and invite all humanity to the wedding feast of the Lamb. The celebration of the Eucharistic sacrifice is the source and summit of the life in the desert. It conforms to the very being of Christ those who abandon themselves to love, so that they may make visible the Saviour's presence and action in the world, for the salvation of the world and the joy of the Church.

Before their dissolution in 1540 after the martyrdoms of six priors and several monks and brothers, there were nine (9) main Charterhouses. The English Heritage website offers this explanation for their growth in the Medieval era:

In 1346 one of Edward III’s captains in his wars with France, Sir Nicholas de Cantilupe, founded a third charterhouse, at Beauvale in Nottinghamshire. This marked the beginning of a vogue for the order in England. The trauma of the Black Death of 1348–9 and subsequent plagues drew a demoralised population to support the Carthusians, whose piety and devoutness were held in high regard.

In 1371 Sir Walter Mauny, another of Edward III’s captains – encouraged by John Luscote, prior of Hinton – founded the London Charterhouse on the site of a plague cemetery. It became an important focus of piety for well-to-do Londoners, who could endow individual monk’s cells. Other charterhouses soon followed suit – Hull in 1377, Coventry in 1381, Axholme in 1397–8, Mount Grace in 1398, and finally the royal charterhouse of Sheen in 1415.

In every case the founder came from the highest levels of society. The monks, too, came from the literate upper levels of society. Some transferred from other monastic orders, while others began their religious careers as chaplains to important landowners.

There is one Charterhouse in England today: St. Hugh at Parkminster. It was founded in 1873 and the house originally had monks from two closed houses from the Continent to accommodate. Their site includes a gift shop, with this book about the Beauvale martyrs of the English Reformation.

New Museum at Rievaulx Abbey

English Heritage just opened a new museum at Rievaulx Abbey, one of the great Cistercian monasteries of England, and the media are covering it with the theme of what Henry VIII's commissioners left behind as they ransacked the suppressed abbey. From the BBC:

Artefacts from an abbey destroyed by Henry VIII have gone on display for the first time in nearly 500 years.

The items at Rievaulx Abbey, near Helmsley, North Yorkshire, are being displayed following a £1.8m redevelopment by English Heritage.

Objects on display include a half-tonne lead bar stamped with Henry's emblem which is all that remains of the abbey's roofs and windows.

Rievaulx Abbey was destroyed by royal command in 1538.

Other exhibits include medieval stone carvings, chess pieces and gold coins that tell the story of the first Cistercian abbey in the north of England.

Dr Michael Carter, for English Heritage, said: "Rievaulx Abbey is one of the most important abbeys in England and the setting one of the most beautiful.

"It was a place of huge spiritual significance for the country and one utterly transformed by dramatic upheavals under Henry VIII."

The Telegraph story explains the significance of that lead bar:

It is all that remains of the abbey’s roof and windows, melted down and stamped as crown property, ready to add to the haul from the site.

Instead it remained were it was left for centuries until eventually being found under a pile of fallen rubble.

Historians believe it may have been trapped when the commissioners, in their haste to extract anything of value, caused part of the building to fall buring (sic) their haul beneath.

The Guardian describes the collapse of the tower:

It may have been the work of stripping the abbey of anything saleable – tomb ornaments, altar slabs, good timbers, metal, windows, cut stone – which destabilised the whole structure. The tower collapsed into the nave, burying the salvaged material that had been stacked up for removal, and the stretch of medieval tile paving beneath it. . . .

“There were no skeletons in the rubble so we think the collapse must have happened overnight,” said curator Susan Harrison. “It must have happened literally the night before they were going to take it all away, because it was all found stacked up neatly just inside the door, ready to be moved out.”

The Daily Mail has a great photo post as two Cistercian monks visit their order's great abbey's ruins:

These ghostly pictures show monks returning to the derelict ruins of an abbey 500 years after it was pulled down by Henry VIII.

The men can be seen walking around the grounds of Rievaulx Abbey, near Helmsley in North Yorkshire, which was once one of the richest and most spiritually significant abbeys in England - before it was destroyed on the orders of the king and Thomas Cromwell in 1538.

The crumbling ruins - which were visited by Father Joseph and Brother Bernard - stand out as they sit against the leafy background of the North York Moors.

The Cistercian monks read from a 500-year-old prayer book as they wondered (sic) around the shell of the ancient building.

St. Aelred of Rievaulx, pray for us! St. Waldef of Melrose, pray for us!

Image credit, under CC license from Wikipedia.

History Today vs. English Heritage: "The DARK Ages"

The English Heritage Society referred to the period from 400 to 1066 A.D. as "the Dark Ages" at an exhibit at Tintagel Castle, and one of the writers at History Today doesn't like it:

The term ‘Dark Ages’ found a foothold in the 17th and 18th centuries, with historians like Edward Gibbon writing about the ‘darkness’ of the period, and reached its peak in the mid-19th century as, with a fervent belief in the dawn of a modern age, a growing Empire needed to build a dark past from which to emerge. The Dark Ages cling to Victorian ideals.

As a concept it is steeped in intellectual and cultural superiority used to dismiss the early Middle Ages as a period of ‘intellectual darkness’ before the Renaissance. In fact, we know far more about late Anglo-Saxon England than we do about Roman Britain.

The phrase feeds into a romanticised view of the period: lost to the mists of time, savage and lawless. But that could not be further from the truth. We might not have the overwhelming wealth of materials of later periods but enough survives to see the extent of their intellectual and cultural development. Pre-Conquest England was not without law, culture and politics.

Not to mention the anti-Catholic aspect of the nomenclature.

English Heritage defends its choice of term:

When considering how to refer to the period of time between c.400 - 1066 in our interpretation at Tintagel Castle, and other historic sites in our care, English Heritage carefully considered a number of factors, in full understanding of the conflict and confusion that the term 'Dark Ages' can create. We considered a number of alternatives all of which ultimately also proved to be problematic.

In relation to the interpretation scheme at Tintagel Castle, the terms 'post-Roman' and 'pre-Saxon' are difficult, particularly in the context of Cornish history. More scholarly names such as 'late Antiquity', 'migration period' or 'early Christian' are all potentially problematic for the general public. 'Early medieval' or 'early Middle Ages' is perhaps the most suitable, but we have found that these terms are popularly associated with the period around 1066 and the Normans; potentially confusing at a site such as Tintagel which also has medieval buildings.

Just label the period: c.400 to 1066 A.D. and leave off the descriptive. I think it's disingenuous for English Heritage to pretend that "the Dark Ages" is not a pejorative term. This site reflects the usual interpretation of the term "the Dark Ages" as an age of superstition, which equals religious faith:

Despite the religious conflicts, the period of the Dark Ages was seen as an age of faith. Men and women sought after God; some through the staid rituals of the Catholic Church, others in more Orthodox forms of worship. Intellectuals view religion in any form as, itself, a type of “darkness.” These thinkers assert that those who followed religious beliefs lied to themselves, creating a false reality. They were dominated by emotions, not fact. Religion was seen as contrary to rationality and reason, thus the move towards enlightenment -- a move away from “darkness.” Science and reason gained ascendancy, progressing steadily during and after the Reformation and Age of Enlightenment.

To some extent, the period of the Dark Ages remains obscure to modern onlookers. The tumult of the era, its religious conflict and denigration, and debatable time period all work together to shroud the period in diminished light.

The early Italian Renaissance poet Petrarch is usually credited with ascribing the term to the period after the Fall of Rome until his contemporary age's rediscovery of classical language and literature:

It is generally accepted that the term was invented by Petrarch in the 1330s. Writing of those who had come before him, he said that "amidst the errors there shone forth men of genius, no less keen were their eyes, although they were surrounded by darkness and dense gloom" (Mommsen, 1942). Christian writers had traditional metaphors of "light versus darkness" to describe "good versus evil." Petrarch was the first to co-opt the metaphor and give it secular meaning by reversing its application. Classical Antiquity, so long considered the "dark age" for its lack of Christianity, was now seen by Petrarch as the age of "light" because of its cultural achievements, while Petrarch's time, lacking such cultural achievements, was now seen as the age of darkness.

Why did Petrarch call it an age of darkness? Petrarch spent much of his time traveling through Europe rediscovering and republishing the classic Latin and Greek texts. He wanted to restore the classical Latin language to its former purity. Humanists saw the preceding nine hundred year period as a time of stagnation. They saw history unfolding not along the religious outline of St. Augustine's Six Ages of the World (from Adam to Noah, from Noah to Abraham, from Abraham to David, from David to the exile of the Hebrews in Babylon, from the return to the time of Jesus, the Christian era) but in cultural (or secular) terms, through the progressive developments of Classical ideals, literature, and art.

Petrarch wrote that history had had two periods: the Classic period of the Romans and Greeks, followed by a time of darkness, in which he saw himself as still living. Humanists believed one day the Roman Empire would rise again and restore Classic cultural purity. The concept of the European Dark Ages thus began as an ideological campaign by humanists to promote Classical culture, and was therefore not a neutral historical analysis. It was invented to express disapproval of one period in time, and the promotion of another. [Emphasis added!]

Mount Grace and The Lady Chapel

Of course it makes sense that when English Heritage posts information about 10 women from that country's history with connections to its various properties and attractions, some former monasteries or friaries would be mentioned. In this post from earlier this year (in March), the author starts with St. Hilda of Whitby--so that brings up Whitby Abbey; then Margery Kempe with her connection to Hailes Abbey AND Mount Grace Priory in Yorkshire. The article concludes with the life of Gertrude Bell and Mount Grace Priory again:

Our rundown ends with a woman who maybe ‘made it happen’ more than anybody else in the list, but will soon lose her claim to being ‘lesser-known’ thanks to two new films, Queen of the Desert, starring Nicole Kidman . . . and a documentary, Letters from Baghdad. After a fairly conventional upper class upbringing in County Durham, London, and then at Oxford University – with frequent country house weekends at her grandfather’s house, Mount Grace Priory – Gertrude Bell embarked on the travels that would occupy her extraordinary life. After long periods in Bucharest and Tehran, two round-the-world trips, and a number of unprecedented mountaineering expeditions, Bell became obsessed with the Middle East. Years of cultural immersion, writing and archaeological study alongside figures including T.E. Lawrence (of Arabia) followed, before she was recruited by British Intelligence during the First World War. Her expertise, and Lawrence’s, exerted a huge influence on British policy in the region, and both were invited to help determine the boundaries of the British mandate and the fates of nascent states such as Iraq in the aftermath of the war.

In addition to being one of the architects of its eventual borders, Bell became a powerful force in Iraqi politics; she could even be described as its kingmaker when her preferred choice, Faisal, was crowned King of Iraq in August 1921. Her focus soon returned to archaeology, however, and she became Honorary Director of Antiquities in Iraq, establishing its National Museum. It opened shortly before her death, in 1926. She has been described as ‘one of the few representatives of His Majesty’s Government remembered by the Arabs with anything resembling affection’.

Mount Grace Priory was a Carthusian house dedicated to the House of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary and St. Nicholas and founded by Thomas Holland, the First Duke of Surrey, in 1398. Mount Grace was well known for its preservation of great works of English spirituality.

Like the Carthusians of the Charterhouse of London and its priories at Beauvale and Epworth/ Axholme, some of the hermit monks at Mount Grace refused to take Henry VIII's Oath of Succession and thus were imprisoned by Henry. When the last prior at Mount Grace submitted the priory to Thomas Cromwell, Henry's Vice-Regent in spiritual matters, the hermit monks were released.

Where once there were nine Carthusian houses in England (two in Somerset--Witham and Hinton; two in Yorkshire--Kingston upon Hull and Mount Grace, Coventry in Warwickshire, Sheen in Surrey, Beauvale in Nottinghamshire, Epworth in Lincolnshire and the Charterhouse in London), now there is only one: St. Hugh's Charterhouse, Parkminster, West Sussex. The first Carthusian Charterhouse in England was founded by King Henry II in reparation for the murder of St Thomas a Becket. Just remember, the Carthusians were never, ever accused of any violations of their rule: they were exemplars of the monastic/hermetic vocation and Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell DESTROYED THEM ANYWAY! Yes, those capital letters are well earned: I am shouting on the internet.

After Emancipation in 1829 and the Restoration of the Hierarchy in 1850, the order returned to England in 1873.

From Mount Grace Priory, the separate Lady Chapel survived:

In 1515 a former Franciscan, Thomas Parkinson, entered the hermitage at the Lady Chapel, provided for by Katharine of Aragon, after whom the hotel in Osmotherley is named. He appears to have remained there until the dissolution of Mount Grace Priory in 1539. At that time the lands and buildings of the Priory passed into the possession of Sir James Strangways. Meanwhile, John Wilson, the last Prior of Mount Grace, was granted a pension and given the Lady Chapel in perpetuity. Following a brief period of exile during the reign of Edward VI, he returned to England with the accession of Queen Mary and entered the restored Charterhouse at Sheen, where he died. It is thought that by this time the chapel was unroofed and in ruins. However, it appears that a member of the Wilson family continued to hold the Lady Chapel and a Wilson was caught on pilgrimage there in 1611.

Despite the ruinous state, the Lady Chapel continued to attract pilgrims to a degree that alarmed the authorities in York, and on the eve of Little Lady Day, 7 September 1614, sixteen people were arrested and subsequently confessed to having prayed at the chapel.

Among those visiting the Lady Chapel were sisters of the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary, come to pray for their foundress, Mary Ward, who was gravely ill. Upon her recovery, she too made a pilgrimage to the chapel in thanksgiving. At the time one of the Sisters wrote: ‘The Chapel is to this day a [p]lace of great devotion, where many graces are granted, though so destroyed as only four walls remain without roof or cover; and… exposed to great winds. Yet there you shall find Catholics praying together for hours.’ Other pilgrims visiting the shrine during the Civil War period included the Jesuit priest John Robinson, who, three months after narrowly escaping the death penalty for a second time, wrote of returning ‘from a celebrated chapel of the Immaculate Virgin in the county of York’. This second escape, when actually on the scaffold, was the result of an order of Parliament bringing to an end the death penalty ‘for religion alone’.

The Age of Plunder and Roche Abbey

A facebook friend posted this from the English Heritage blog:

On 23 June 1538, Abbot Henry Cundall of Roche Abbey in South Yorkshire and his 17 monks gathered in their chapter house to surrender their abbey to the king’s commissioners. Roche was one of the many larger religious houses which ‘voluntarily’ surrendered that year, in the course of Henry VIII’s Suppression of the Monasteries.

The monks, cast out of their comfortable abbey with small pensions, had to make the most of what they had.

Each monk had been given the cell in which he slept, ‘wherein there was nothing of value save his bed and apparel’. One monk tried to sell his cell door for two pennies, ‘which was worth more than five shillings’. But the potential buyer refused, ‘for he was a young man, unmarried, and in need of neither a house nor a door’.

The source for these details was a priest, Michael Sherbrook, rector of Wickersley, who wrote an account of the suppression of Roche abbey in the 1590's. He gathered anecdotal evidence that the monks and the abbey were not despised in any way--pillaging the abbey was nothing personal:

Sherbrook wondered whether such an orgy of devastation was a product of hostility towards the Roche monks. It was strange, he thought, that ‘even such persons were content to spoil them, that seemed not two days before to allow their religion, and do great worship and reverence at their Mattins, Masses and other service, and all other their doings’. So he pressed his father, who had also been present, to explain:

For the better proof of this my saying, I demanded of my father, which had bought part of the timber of the church, and all the timber in the steeple, with the bell frame, with other his partners therein … whether he thought well of the religious persons and of the religion then used?

And he told me Yea: For said he, ‘I did see no cause to the contrary.’

‘Well,’ said I, ‘then how came it to pass you was so ready to destroy and spoil the thing you thought well of?’

‘What should I have done?’ said he. ‘Might I not as well as others have some profit of the spoil of the abbey? For I did see all would away; and therefore I did as others did.’

That reminded me of what W.G. Hoskins wrote about the Dissolution of the Monasteries in The Age of Plunder: The England of Henry VIII, 1500-1547:

"In these matters the only true god is Mammon. The sixteenth century showed it abundantly in every decade. Catholic or Protestant, what did it matter when Mammon was sitting in the seat of power?"

More about survivors of Roche Abbey's suppression here.

BBC History Talks and Festivals in July and October

Two upcoming events:

History Live! hosted by the English Heritage Society at Kellmarsh Hall in Northamptonshire features a BBC History Magazine Lecture Tent with many important scholars and interesting topics, including several on English Reformation era topics. For example:

~Elizabeth I: The Queen's Two Bodies

Anna Whitelock will look at the life of Queen Elizabeth I, as both a public and a private person.

About the speaker: Anna Whitelock is a senior lecturer in early modern history at Royal Holloway, University of London. She is also a popular historical author, and her latest book Elizabeth's Bedfellows: An Intimate History of the Queen's Court is published in May.

and  

~Scars on the Landscape: Encountering the Dissolution of the Monasteries

By examining some of those places one can visit today, Suzannah Lipscomb will explore the extraordinary impact of Henry VIII's suppression of the monasteries. She will draw out the poignant insights that remaining sites can give us into the enormous extent of the Tudor devastation.

About the speaker: Suzannah Lipscomb is a historian and broadcaster who specialises in the Tudor period. She is Senior Lecturer and Convenor for History at New College of the Humanities. Her most recent book is A Visitor's Companion to Tudor England.

History Live! is scheduled for Saturday and Sunday, 20-21 July.

The BBC History Magazine is hosting its own festival, the BBC History Weekend in Malmesbury, Wiltshire:

This autumn sees the launch of the very first BBC History Magazine weekend festival, in the ancient hilltop town of Malmesbury in Wiltshire. It is the oldest borough in England, with a charter given by Alfred the Great in 880. It’s also the burial place of Æthelstan, grandson of Alfred and the first king of all England, and the abbey that houses his tomb is Malmesbury’s crowning glory. In 1000 AD, Eilmer the flying monk had an early attempt at aviation from the Abbey’s tower (it failed; he broke his legs), and in the churchyard is buried one Hannah Twynnoy, famously eaten by a tiger in the town in 1703. The 17th-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes was born in Malmesbury, so it’s an ideal venue for a history festival.

More than 20 top-name historians will be speaking over the course of the weekend in two lecture rooms in Malmesbury’s Town Hall. There will be a fully-stocked history bookshop, courtesy of Waterstones Cirencester, within the Town Hall for the duration of the festival, where our speakers will be signing books.

Speakers range from Leanda de Lisle to Alison Weir, from Dan Jones to Helen Castor, Linda Porter and Michael Wood, and topics they will discuss are most wide-ranging.

Malmesbury Abbey is now an Anglican parish church, but of course it was a monastery before the Dissolution of the Monasteries by Henry VIII. It was founded in the 7th century as a Benedictine monastery and King Athelstan is bured there. This event is scheduled for October 25 through 27.

An Appreciation of Elgar and "Englishness"

From The Walsingham Society's blog comes this appreciation of two English artists by James Patrick:

Beneath their defense of beauty lay themes that gave their art its power. There was a reliance upon tradition in a way that presaged Eliot”s “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” which is to say that in the work of each the past lived in the present, transformed by a new moment of creativity. “Both Elgar and Strauss (like Brahms and in contrast to Wagner) acknowledged the weight of history and mirrored some degree of awe for the traditions of composition…. Despite recent efforts to construe Elgar as a modernist innovator, he remained within the framework of ideas, conflicts, forms and vocabulary of the late nineteenth century.”10 [endnotes in the the blog post] Voysey’s houses, the house that loves the ground, with its great sheltering roof, looking always as though it should be thatched, its white cast walls, the reminiscence of Tudor half-timbering, recapitulated in a new, subtly modern key the past of English domestic architecture.

Elgar’s music from the first was understood as expressing something authentic about the modern English character, landscape, and self-image. “Because the gesture, rhetoric and sonority he fashioned have come to locate the unique power, intensity, confidence, and refinement of the English, Elgar’s music has retained its role as an embodiment of Englishness.”11 His critics sometimes deprecated his music as expressions of jingoism, the nonsensical neologism descriptive of the perfervid patriotism that beset the nation in the shadow of the Great War, but the imperial swagger was pride in England and its past more than pride in imperial success.12 Critics have noted that in Elgar’s music at its most assertive what one sometimes hears is a sub-theme reflecting something of Kipling’s “Recessional,” a muted acceptance of an all-too-transitory glory.13 Voysey’s architecture was, obviously, rooted in what he conceived to be the national architecture of Tudor England, informed by a love for Pugin and Ruskin and by what the Ruskinian tradition considered the Gothic principle that buildings grow from the inside.

Few great composers are tied to a national heritage as tightly as was Elgar, whose works sing of a great nation, possessed of a heroic past (Froissart, The Black Knight, 1892), and of a great empire at its zenith, when the domination of the oceans by Great Britain and its government of a quarter of the globe seemed as solid as Everest. When the Pomp and Circumstance March in D Major, “Land of Hope and Glory,” was premiered in London on 22 October 1901 the crowd roared for an encore, and to restore order the conductor, Henry Wood, played it again; it has ever after been a kind of second national anthem.14 The great marches themselves were another sign of Elgar’s ability to use the tradition: “I did not see why the ordinary quick march should not be treated on a large scale, in the way that the waltz, the slow march, and even the polka have been treated by the great composers.”15 Elgar provided the setting for the coronation of George V in 1911 and the British empire Exhibition of 1924, for which he produced the Empire March and the Pageant of England. In that year he was appointed Master of the King’s Musick and in 1931 was created a baronet, Sir Edward of Broadheath. There was pride in the imperial bloom, but the love affair was with everything English. Elgar preferred that the very names of instruments reflect their English past— hautboy rather than oboe—, and Voysey would write, “Instead of studying the five orders of architecture, we had far better study the five orders of Englishmen.”16

I am not familiar with Charles Voysey, but according to wikipedia, he was:

an English architect and furniture and textile designer. Voysey's early work was as a designer of wallpapers, fabrics and furnishings in a simple Arts and Crafts style, but he is renowned as the architect of a number of notable country houses. He was one of the first people to understand and appreciate the significance of industrial design. He has been considered one of the pioneers of Modern Architecture, a notion which he rejected. His English domestic architecture draws heavily on vernacular rather than academic tradition, influenced by the ideas of Herbert Tudor Buckland (1869–1951) and Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin (1812–1852).

There is an organization with a web page devoted to his life and work: The C.F.A. Voysey Society.

Your Own Personal Tour of an Historic Building

Elizabeth Chadwick, an author of historical fiction set in Medieval England, offers this post on the English Historical Fiction Authors blog about a personal tour she received of the Palace of Westminster. Since she writes about William Wallace, she was attuned to certain things during the tour:

A little while ago, A reader called Mike Pinchen wrote to me to say he'd been enjoying the novels about William Marshal. He also told me that he worked as an usher for Black Rod's department at the House of Lords and that should I ever wish for a bespoke guided tour of the Palace of Westminster, he would be delighted to show me round. How could I refuse? What a wonderful and unique opportunity. I accepted with alacrity and delight. Thank you Mike. What gave the invitation that extra frisson is that 800 years ago, John Marshal - hero of my novel A Place Beyond Courage, was in charge of the King's ushers, and the Marshal always carried a rod of office when on official business. We also know the name of two of the ushers from John Marshal's time - Bonhomme and Ralf. What a connection down the centuries. It gives me a feeling of warmth and pride and security to know that the job still exists. I guess that's what experiencing roots and continuity does for you.

She describes visiting the House of Commons, Westminster Hall, the undercroft chapel, (more images here from another source on flicker) and the House of Lords, and provides photographs of the areas where photography was allowed. It's a very worthwhile post.

Reading it led me to consider what I would really pay attention to and be meditating on when given a personal tour of the Palace of Westminster. In Westminster Hall I would certainly want to find the marker on the floor designating St. Thomas More's trial, but would also remember St. John Fisher and many others tried and convicted there, some later led to martyrdom on Tower Hill or at Tyburn Tree. St. Mary's Undercroft looks absolutely gorgeous and I would enjoy the Gothic glories there, while in the House of Commons again, I would think, not of William Marshal, but of Thomas More withstanding Thomas Cardinal Wosley, or of Charles I entering the House of Commons to arrest certain members of that house who had already fled. Visiting the chapel in the undercroft would also call to mind the Gunpowder Plot and Guy Fawkes's capture while checking on the gunpowder stored in the undercroft to plow up the Houses of Parliament; today is the anniversary of the trials in 1606 of the surviving conspirators in Westminster Hall. Found guilty of treason, they were scheduled to be executed the last two days of January, two cold midwinter mornings.

What would you want to see in the Houses of Parliament? What other historic building would you want to tour with a personal guide?

Devotion, Destruction, and the English "Deformation"

The Wall Street Journal featured this online article by Barrymore Laurence Scherer, whom I used to hear make presentations during the Texaco Sponsored Met Opera broadcasts, about an exhibition of medieval alabasters at the Princeton University Art Museum--with a definite connection to the English Deformation, I mean English Reformation:

Medieval luxury came in various materials and forms, alabaster carvings among them, and a new show at the Princeton University Art Museum reveals the intimate beauty and expressiveness of this art. "Object of Devotion" highlights a selection of 60 Medieval English alabaster panels and freestanding sculptures from the vast collection of London's Victoria & Albert Museum. Touring for the first time in North America, these carvings of holy figures and narrative scenes were produced for churches, royal chapels and domestic altars in England and exported to the Continent. And they represent an English industry that thrived from about 1350 to 1530, after which the Protestant Reformation's ban on religious imagery, combined with the Dissolution of the Monasteries in England by King Henry VIII, not only ended the demand for such works but also led to their outright destruction.

According to the museum website:

The dates of the sculptures range from ca. 1370 through 1530, when the Protestant Reformation put an end to the creation of new religious art.

The exhibition draws attention to the “alabastermen,” specialists in the English Midlands, around Nottingham, who sculpted the stone mined there, prized for its high quality. The subjects were chosen to appeal to churchmen, aristocrats, and wealthy non-aristocratic patrons. The relatively small works were assembled to form entire altarpieces recounting the lives of Christ and the Virgin Mary, or used as devotional works dedicated to the most revered saints. The exhibition examines the working methods of the sculptors, the exportation of much of their work to the European continent, and the stylistic evolution and different levels of quality of the sculptures. Object of Devotion also chronicles the abrupt end of the alabaster-carving tradition in England at the time of the Reformation, when works in English churches were defaced or destroyed during outbursts of Protestant iconoclasm and the alabastermen sold off their stock in continental Europe.

Mr. Barrymore Laurence Scherer (I love that name!) likes the exhibition, which will be travelling on after Princeton:

Admittedly, the rendering of the figures may appear somewhat stiff and naive compared to contemporaneous Italian work by Lorenzo Ghiberti, Donatello and others, yet within their formulas these alabasters often reveal remarkable visual imagination. A panel representing "The Ascension of Christ into Heaven" (c. 1380-1400) features a group of astonished apostles gazing upward as Christ, represented only by his bare feet and lower part of his robe, ascends like the tail of a rocket into a stylized cloud. Similarly, a vigorous "St. Christopher" (c. 1450-80) fords a stream, his toes protruding from the carved band representing the flowing water. While the panel's overall linear carving suggests the crisp style of Albrecht Dürer's woodcuts a few decades later, the simplified planes of the saint's head, torso and drapery seem to anticipate the streamlined neo-classicism of Art Deco half a millennium in the future.

These works often convey considerable human emotion as well, especially those pieces inspired by themes taken not from the Bible but from such popular compendia of saintly lore as Jacobus de Voragine's "The Golden Legend," compiled in the late 13th century. For instance, in a panel of "The Beheading of St. Catherine" carved between 1450 and 1470, the figure of the blindfolded saint is brutally thrust downward toward the chopping block by the executioner's foot, yet the gentleness with which she seems to feel her way is heartrending, recalling the groping for the block of the tender, blindfolded figure in Paul Delaroche's Romantic painting of "The Execution of Lady Jane Grey," one of the 19th-century favorites in London's National Gallery.

Throughout, the exhibition conveys a lively sense of religious belief amongst the people and within the clergy in late-Medieval England while vividly revealing the sophistication of life and commerce that flourished on the sea-girt isle before, during and after the Wars of the Roses.

In addition to the show itself is the beautifully illustrated exhibition catalog, including essays by several eminent scholars in the field and full-page images of the individual works, which deserves to become a popular reference book on this genre of Medieval art.

So, Henry VIII, in addition to plundering the monasteries, executing some of the greatest men in his country, destroyed a livelihood. That fact fits well the picture drawn by W.G. Hoskins in The Age of Plunder.

Eleanor of Castile and the Eleanor Crosses

When Edward I's consort Eleanor of Castile died on November 28, 1290, the royal couple were travelling near Lincoln. After her body was transported from Lincoln to Westminster, Edward I had crosses set up along the stages of that journey. Twelve crosses marked the twelve stops--at Lincoln, Grantham, Stamford, Geddington, Northampton, Stony Stratford, Woburn, Dunstable, St. Albans, Waltham, Westcheap, and Charing. This site provides a great deal of detail, including a map and several images, of the Eleanor Crosses.

Some of the Eleanor Crosses were destroyed during the English Civil War by Parliamentary troops, and the crosses that stand today are often nineteenth century reconstructions. The English Heritage organization offers this website on the Geddington cross. The image of the Northamption cross is sourced here.