Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination

by Peter Ackroyd

  In a drama of the Crucifixion the “pinners” or nail-makers re-enact all the physical details of Christ’s suffering—“He weyes a wikkid weght”—in comic corporeal re-enactment of the mystery. It will often be remarked, in this study, how the most ostensibly tragic and comic episodes are thoroughly intermingled in English drama and English fiction; here lies one of the explanations. When the fifteenth-century recluse Julian of Norwich saw the face of the devil, “the color was rede like the tilestone whan it is new brent . . . his here was rode as rust.” Red was also the colour conventionally attributed to the hair of Herod and of Judas. So the more vivid the material of physical description, the more intense becomes the spiritual experience. Thus again in Julian’s revelations, “the blewhede [blue] of the clothing betokinith his stedfastnes.”

  This equivalence between the material and the ideal can lead to irony as well as pathos, parody as much as melancholy; in a world where certain sacred truths are accepted without question, then parody and irony themselves become necessary devices. The great historian of the Middle Ages Johan Huizinga remarked “that the line of demarcation between seriousness and pretence was never less clear than in the medieval period”;3 it is a temperamental characteristic which has never entirely deserted what might be called the Catholic imagination. It has been said that Chaucer’s fabliaux, in The Canterbury Tales , suggest that “men’s lives are seen as burlesque re-enactments of sacred prototypes.”4 But this equivalence might also encourage a sense of completeness or wholeness. In the ceremonies of Corpus Christi, when the sacrament was carried down the principal streets with banners and crosses in attendance, wreathed in smoke and attended by joyful chanters, the physical communion of the faithful was joined in spirit to the heavenly community. The ritual then became a social and cultural performance, a form of outdoor theatre not unlike the mystery plays when the crucifix rather than the eucharist was carried through the streets of England’s towns. This had been the message of St. Augustine: the religion of the urban centres demanded an audience, just like that of the theatre, where a “secret sympathy” is shared.

  There is another connection with the English imagination, also, in the context of “the rhetoric of performance and the performance of rhetoric,”5 whether in the debate poems of Chaucer or the declamations of Tudor drama. We cannot at this date, in other words, separate an English sensibility from a Catholic sensibility. The world of miracles and marvels is still alive in Shakespeare’s late plays.

  What else might be expected from a Catholic sensibility? The delight in splendour is of course related to the intoxication with the marvellous, but resplendent pomp and display were also the means of celebrating the hierarchy and order of the universe. If the people of England gazed heavenward, and looked up at the night sky filled with light and harmony, they believed that they were looking inward not outward; the pattern of the heavens then became a paradigm for the orders of significance upon the earth, whether orders of interpretation, orders of human rank, orders of dream, or orders of perception. This is of some importance to the writer and artist, since the concept of personality was not far advanced; just as the personal sinfulness of a priest made no difference to his power upon the altar, so unique or individual perception was less important than the corpus of approved and acquired knowledge. Authenticity was more significant than individuality or originality, so we may expect an art or a literature that rests upon things already known and understood. It is the essential reason why Pope translated Homer and William Morris translated Beowulf, why Tennyson modelled his verse upon Arthurian epic and why Alfred translated Boethius and Augustine. If in one aspect we describe the English imagination as antiquarian in instinct, animated by the delight in the past, then it is important to see how a predominantly Catholic culture and sensibility may still dwell within it.

  It is a nice point indeed to settle rival instincts and rival claims. There was an English Catholicism, with its rituals and its own local saints, but the Roman declarations at the Synod of Whitby and the arrival of Norman abbots steadily diminished its power; the names of its saints linger in Cornwall and Northumbria, but their shrines and relics have long gone. Nevertheless ecclesiastical historians have outlined a particular form of English spirituality which renders it distinct. It has been described as one of earnest practicality combined with a certain strain of optimism; it also manifests a native common sense and instinct for compromise. Its hermits and anchorites, so much a part of medieval life, illustrate both a tendency towards individualism and a distaste for regimentation or excessive display. The spiritual pragmatism may have begun with Alcuin, who, at the court of Charlemagne, wrote out manuals of practical conduct for the Christian layman; but it was perhaps best summarised by Robert of Bridlington who wrote that priests ought also “to plough, sow, reap, mow hay with a sickle, and make a haystack.”6 It has been called the via media of English spirituality. As William of Malmesbury put it, “Best is ever mete,” or moderation in all things. This, too, has been described as a “distinctively English manifestation” 7 of “saving sanity and discretion.” It is perhaps the reason for the relative failure of the Carthusians in England, with their obsessive dedication to silence and penance. There had also been a movement away from excessive clericalism, and the medieval English priest was characteristically a comic figure lambasted for greed, drunkenness and lechery.

  There has never been in England a tradition of theological speculation, in the manner of an Augustine or an Aquinas, or of devotional concepts divorced from practice; the nearest equivalents to the great “summa theologica” of European Catholicism are the short handbooks for English contemplatives or anchorites. It is of some significance that these treatises were always directed towards individuals and were concerned with the exigencies of the solitary life; they were not monastic productions or authoritarian edicts. They were instruments of personal direction, in other words, and were “intensely English in that they combine unimpeachable orthodoxy with individualism.”8 The piety of the English was by no means a morbid piety; there has been no Savonarola or Luther but instead Wycliff and Tyndale. Pelagius refused to countenance the orthodox belief that humankind had inherited the primal guilt of Adam and that “original sin” thereby damned the world to perdition without the intervention of divine grace; he was a thoroughly English heretic. The affective devotion of the English has also been free of lachrymose or penitential excesses; the manuals of prayer consistently invoke the Incarnation rather than the Passion. It is an aspect of what has been called English optimism which, in native tragi-comic fashion, runs beside English melancholy. It is manifested in the benevolent expression upon the statues in Wells Cathedral and in the belief of Julian of Norwich that “al manner of thyng shal be wele.” In the images of Spain and Italy the Holy Virgin is seen as a figure in tears; in England she is characteristically represented as the loving mother of the divine babe. It has been described as the difference of “the clear lines of English perpendicular against both the baroque and the whitewashed shed.”9

  It would be wrong to suggest, however, that English Catholicism represents an independent version of European Catholicism; the fact that the great monastic orders, the Benedictines and the Cistercians, flourished all over England would disprove any such simple statement. The Dominican and Franciscan friars also helped to create the large body of English lyric, both sacred and secular, as well as a variety of English texts; among the great Franciscans can be numbered, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries respectively, Roger Bacon and William of Ockham. All of them, too, wrote in Latin for a European community of scholars. Nevertheless, it has often been maintained that their sensibility was of a distinct and distinctive English kind. Thus Ockham believed that “all knowledge is derived from experience,” 10 an argument which anticipates in an uncanny way the English predilection for empiricism, or logical positivism, or whatever term is used for a principled but pragmatic attitude towards all metaphysical speculation. Roger Bacon, too, has often been s
een as the forerunner of his more famous namesake, Francis Bacon, in his emphasis on the importance of scientific method in intellectual enquiry. So we have the paradox of a distinctively English sensibility working within, and gaining strength from, a European and Latin tradition of learning. When we read also that in the twelfth century English architecture and painting represented “a great, at moments supreme, exponent of a European style”, 11 the question of influence and identity becomes a difficult one.

  If there is such a thing as a native cast of thought it can properly be understood only in the context of a broadly European sensibility. There was a great movement of “humanism” in the twelfth century, for example, but the most significant contribution which England made to the new learning was historical and practical in nature. Has this not become a familiar theme? The great strength of English learning was of course monastic learning, but from the English religious houses came tens of thousands of charters, annals and chronicles. Matthew Paris, who died in the middle of the thirteenth century, wrote a history of his monastery as well as a universal history entitled Chronica Majora . There is no English Aquinas, whose scholasticism rose into the empyrean, but rather John of Salisbury, whose books were concerned with the art of government. The English writers were well versed in patristic texts and in classical literature but they applied their learning to administrative and diplomatic affairs. As R. W. Southern wrote in his Medieval Humanism, this “mixture of philosophical interest and practical familiarity”12 was unique to twelfth-century England. He compares their work to that of Jeremy Bentham and Walter Bagehot in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and traces a distinct native sensibility in this preoccupation with the art of government. We may draw a similar conclusion about the career of Sir Thomas More, a great humanist and companion of Erasmus who became a courtier and a statesman rather than a philosopher or a theologian. He was an English European. The English imagination, and the English sensibility, emerged out of both collusion and collision with European exempla.great movement of “humanism” in the twelfth century, for example, but the most significant contribution which England made to the new learning was historical and practical in nature. Has this not become a familiar theme? The great strength of English learning was of course monastic learning, but from the English religious houses came tens of thousands of charters, annals and chronicles. Matthew Paris, who died in the middle of the thirteenth century, wrote a history of his monastery as well as a universal history entitled Chronica Majora . There is no English Aquinas, whose scholasticism rose into the empyrean, but rather John of Salisbury, whose books were concerned with the art of government. The English writers were well versed in patristic texts and in classical literature but they applied their learning to administrative and diplomatic affairs. As R. W. Southern wrote in his Medieval Humanism, this “mixture of philosophical interest and practical familiarity” 12 was unique to twelfth-century England. He compares their work to that of Jeremy Bentham and Walter Bagehot in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and traces a distinct native sensibility in this preoccupation with the art of government. We may draw a similar conclusion about the career of Sir Thomas More, a great humanist and companion of Erasmus who became a courtier and a statesman rather than a philosopher or a theologian. He was an English European. The English imagination, and the English sensibility, emerged out of both collusion and collision with European exempla.

  The Chapter House of Wells Cathedral

  CHAPTER 18

  Old Stone

  The new rulers of England knew that there was power in stone. The cathedrals of Worcester, Canterbury, Winchester and Norwich were all completed or at least consecrated by the end of the eleventh century; St. Paul’s, Durham and Chichester were in the process of being built, as were Ely and Gloucester. The cathedral of Old Sarum had been completed by 1092. In the twelfth century the cathedral of Lincoln was being erected, and Wells begun. But this was also the century of the monastic foundations, many of them with abbeys as large and as grand as any cathedral. It has been estimated that there were approximately six hundred of these communities in England, with sixty-nine in Yorkshire and fifty-one in Lincolnshire. These monastic foundations colonised the land about them, with pastures and sheep-walks, so it can truly be said that they helped to create the landscape of England. Of the thousands of parish churches, many acquired spires so that the glory of faith aspired from the land to the sky. In the thirteenth century Salisbury and Westminster were raised in the Gothic style, while the great west front of Wells Cathedral was fashioned with its painted tableaux and gilded statuary gleaming like the gate of heaven itself.

  When Julian of Norwich believed that she was dying her parish priest held a cross before her face saying, “I have browte thee the image of thy maker and saviour. Louke thereupon and comfort thee therewith.” It is a characteristic medieval scene, but the abbeys and cathedrals of England fulfilled the same purpose as the crucifix before the dying woman. The faithful saw them and were comforted.

  Over four centuries the styles altered according to different modes of perception, with the broad movement of change from Romanesque to Gothic classified into the somewhat arbitrary divisions of Early English, Decorated and Perpendicular; but the statement of power and glory remained the same. Perpendicular has been described as a purely native architecture, without parallel in continental Europe, but in truth the central characteristics of English churches persist through time. The native predilection for patterning, and the delight in flat wall surfaces, have already been suggested as aspects of English taste; the combination of ingenious or elaborate surface decoration with blankness and evenness might offer interesting material to those who study the pathology of nations. But the English cathedrals are also noticeable for their emphasis upon the horizontal rather than the vertical; their naves tend to be longer than their counterparts elsewhere, and their vaults lower, thus giving the impression of “common-sense stability”1 which might otherwise be interpreted as solidity or dignity. They might have been fashioned by the architects of Stonehenge, so massively do they dwell and endure upon the land. Another historian has noted that “the English national style is not elegantly Gothic . . . but sturdily plain and matter of fact.”2

  They are a complete statement of artistic intent, therefore, and as a result the architecture of England has been used as a metaphor for its music and literature. Fifteenth-century English music, for example, has been characterised as “the distribution of masses of sound in order to provide effective contrasts, the development of harmonic thinking, and the cultivation of a highly decorative superstructure”3 in the manner of Perpendicular building. C. S. Lewis compared the model of certain medieval books to that of “cathedrals where work of many different periods mixed.” 4 He names Chaucer and Malory in this context, both of them creating narratives which seem to grow incrementally and to expand according to some organic principle rather than to a well-defined logic of organisation. It has often been remarked how the structure of English cathedrals is comprised of discrete parts; presbyteries and chapels and transepts are added without any attempt at uniformity in their arrangement, so that different styles and different periods can be observed side by side. Lincoln Cathedral, for example, has been described as “a building with a series of projections stepping out at right angles to the principal axis.” This strangely fluent and harmonious development “is characteristic not only of Lincoln but of the English Gothic in general” and is “in sharp contrast to the French Gothic cathedrals.”5 There is no logic or authoritarian code evinced here, but a kind of inspired practicality; it might be called the aesthetics of pragmatism, if indeed any aesthetic can be adduced from it. The conservatism of English architecture has often been discussed, but it is the conservatism of organic form—literally the need to conserve itself as it develops according to its own laws of being. That is why it is also such a natural expression of native aptitude and sensibility.

  If these churches are instinct with the
spirit of place, then they may come alive. One thirteenth-century poet wrote of the “head” and “eyes” of the church while the roof rears up “as if it were conversing with the winged birds, spreading out broad wings, and like a flying creature striking against the clouds.”6 The cathedral may also adopt the shape of other organic forms. The beginning of this history was concerned with the tree worship of the ancient Britons, and it is perhaps appropriate that the long naves of the English cathedrals have been compared to avenues of trees. Sculpted out of stone are the leaves of vine and ivy, oak and wild apple, hawthorn and maple. At Southwell, Canterbury and Christ Church Cathedral in Oxford, among other sacred places, are to be found carved effigies of the Green Man or “Jack in the Green” with foliage curling out of his mouth and head; Jack is the tree spirit invoked in ancient ritual.

  The green men are in fact only one of a number of pagan devices fashioned out of stone in the corners and recesses of cathedrals, like old spirits banished into the darkness. You cannot see them until you venture almost too close to them. Then you may notice fauns and satyrs, goats and dragons, carved upon bosses; there are capitals filled with the wild gaiety which seems to characterise one aspect of the medieval spirit. There are also scenes of matchless detail; a man with toothache holds open his mouth in pain in Wells Cathedral and a farmer belabours a thief with a pitchfork. In Beverley a man carries his scolding wife in a wheelbarrow, and a fox is hanged by geese; in Manchester a hare grills a huntsman over a fire, and at Blackburn a fox preaches to a congregation of hens. These scenes are conceived in a native spirit of mockery; if humour and pathos can be effortlessly mingled in English drama and fiction, so the sacred and the profane are deemed to be natural companions. It is a question of not adopting any one emotion, or manner, too seriously or for too long.