Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination

by Peter Ackroyd

  This is nowhere more evident than in the grotesque miniatures which obtrude in the margins of sacred books; they are known as “babooneries” and according to Nikolaus Pevsner in The Englishness of English Art they represent a wholly native convention—“if one tries to trace the baboonery to its source,” he wrote, “one finds that it originated in England.”7 It is a remarkable, but not unexpected, fact. In 1383 Wycliff denounced “peyntings and babwyneries,” and in The House of Fame Chaucer celebrated “subtil compassinges . . . Babewynnes and pynacles.” There are monkeys disporting themselves in the margins of illuminated psalters, and on the top of a page illustrating the Passion of Christ are two medieval wrestlers; villagers are fighting “pick-a-back” among a Jesse Tree, while on the Beatus page of the Gorleston psalter ten rabbits solemnly and decorously conduct a funeral complete with candles and crucifix. A duck is taken off by a fox, with the word “queck” issuing from its beak, and there was a vogue for depicting men with wooden legs (a vogue which Charles Dickens would adopt at a later date). These “grotesques,” often described as “hideous,” appeared at the end of the twelfth century but spread rapidly in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The secular mind may even be tempted to conclude that the real artistic interest is to be found in the margins rather than in the illuminations themselves. They are marked by bizarre medieval humour, the visual equivalent of Thomas More’s verses on farting and eating excrement, but they are also characterised by an informality and liveliness that seem decidedly English in spirit; the love of fantastic detail, too, animates them as well as a passion for fine or delicate outline. This celebration of the grotesque and the ridiculous of course resides in what one art historian has described as the “strangely English spirit that sets comic relief even in a tragedy,”8 but perhaps it also represents defiance of a divine order which consigns humankind to misery in this world and possible damnation in the next. In a world of illness, pain and epidemic plague, what other response is there but mad laughter?

  The provenance of many babooneries is taken to be London, and that locality emphasises the fact that illumination was now a secular rather than monastic art; part of the craft guild was reserved for “lymenours,” professional artists pursuing their trade in workshops or as part of itinerant groups which toured the country. Three or four artists gathered together, like masons, and set up shop wherever they were required; it is likely, also, that each individual contributed a different skill to the enterprise so that the illuminated page was the product of several hands. This may in turn account in part for the secular appearance of the babooneries themselves, not the least of which depict scenes of ordinary medieval life with that attention to intimate and familiar domestic detail which plays so large a part in the English imagination. Henry Fielding described it well when he extolled the “exactest copying of Nature” in his fiction, and John Dryden expressed an admiration or affection for the “distorted face and antic gestures.” Hume remarked that “if we copy life the strokes must be strong and remarkable.”9 So in medieval miniatures we see workmen clambering up ladders, farmers ploughing, boys leaping and women dancing.

  A great deal of attention is paid to foxes and geese, hens and rabbits; this might be ascribed to the notorious English fondness for animals (which is perhaps a means of displacing fondness for each other), but there may be other sources. Human senses and familiar sins were often given animal shape or “bestiarized,” where the sow becomes gluttony and the fox covetousness, and this form of caricature has left a lasting inheritance. In eighteenth-century satirical prints the Duke of Cumberland was depicted as an ox, and the Duke of Newcastle became a goose; Henry Fox was necessarily portrayed as a fox, and James Boswell as a lecherous monkey. In masquerades in the early decades of that century, also, guests were dressed “some, in the shape of Monkeys and Baboons, others, of Bears, Asses, Cormorants, and Owls.” There seems to be some primitive force at work.

  There are other medieval patterns implicit in later English productions. One historian has noted that in the manuscript illuminations there is no essential concern with “human experience, human drama and emotion.” 10 There may be spectacle and crowded action, but there is no interiority of feeling; the outline, rather than the three-dimensional figure, is presented only. But these are precisely the criticisms aimed by contemporaries at Fielding and Dickens, at Smollett and Sterne. It seems to be a native fault, if fault it be, that attention is often reserved for the surface.

  “Babooneries” or miniature domestic scenes arrayed in the margins of the illuminations often act as a kind of frame around the sacred text. A Chaucerian critic has in turn concluded that “the frame” of The Canterbury Tales “gives us that strong sense of real life that the poem affords.”11 In a fifteenth-century Book of Hours the central figures, of Virgin and Child and worshipper, are depicted in grandiose but stiff formal attitudes; the frame around it, however, is replete with human life and activity as a pilgrimage makes its way.

  The transpositions from illumination to text are natural and inevitable. In 1250 the artists working upon the murals in the queen’s “low room” at Westminster requested a copy of the Gests of Antioch in order to illustrate scenes from it. In turn the devisers or creators of the medieval drama directly copied scenes and images from wall-paintings, stained-glass windows and roof-bosses. In a Catholic culture certain visual icons or exempla are universally recognised, and can inform every mode of art. The illustration of a royal pageant, dated 1514, shows the principal guests with costumes and attitudes taken from the stages of the “cycle drama” of Chester or York. In a culture of spectacle, the appropriate costume or uniform will be displayed. The scene of “Christ among the Doctors” is depicted in manuscript and stained glass, with the child in a seat raised higher than the doctors themselves; there is a stage direction to the same effect in a miracle play, where “they lead Jesus into their midst and make him sit in a higher seat, while they themselves sit in lower ones.” It is possible that after this movement the players remained still for a moment, forming a silent tableau as if they had become carved or painted figures. English Catholic culture was mediated through these images. In the roof-bosses of the English churches Herod “is shown contorted with rage, his legs grotesquely crossed,”12 while the same character is depicted in the Coventry mysteries in the same posture as a sign of “crossed” or thwarted human energy. These cycle plays conducted their audience through the history of the universe, from Creation to Doom, but that sacred chronology was also depicted in the wall-paintings and stained glass of the churches. It was the unifying myth, the grand context for the creation of art and literature alike. And it survives still. Stanley Spencer’s twentieth-century paintings The Resurrection in Cookham Churchyard and The Resurrection of the Soldiers, where all emerge at the sound of the final trumpet, seem to derive from medieval images of the Apocalypse; the same artist’s Christ delivered to the Peopleand The Crucifixion , with the leering faces of the workmen putting the hammer to Christ’s nails, might be a detailed transcription of a scene from one of the medieval mysteries. Spencer was an English artist filled both with a mysterious sense of place and with an encompassing vision that accommodates a medieval as well as a modern sensibility. “When I see anything,” he once wrote, “I see everything.” In this context it is perhaps interesting to note that “he found it very important to paint what is in the extreme foreground. . . . It seemed to him all wrong to start at an arbitrary plane say 10 feet distance rather than at the nearest plane in one’s line of vision.” 13 He recaptures, or retrieves, an essentially medieval painterly vision.

  CHAPTER 19

  Part of the Territory

  It is not surprising,” Walter Oakeshott wrote in The Sequence of Me-dieval Art, “that East Anglia should in the fourteenth century have been the center of artistic production in England.” 1 Another historian emphasised “the predominance of East Anglia over all other regional theatrical traditions in late medieval England.” 2 A unique form of “tail-rh
yme stanza” has been located in romances derived from that region. The two greatest female writers of the fourteenth century, Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe, both came from East Anglia. So there exists a pattern of activity, which at a later date manifested itself in the “Norwich School” of painting.

  Its two principal counties, Norfolk and Suffolk, are named after the North Folk and South Folk of the Anglo-Saxons but the topographical boundaries of those tribes are uncertain; we may also include parts of Cambridgeshire and Essex in what was the most fertile and, excluding London, the most densely populated region of the country. East Anglia was to a certain extent isolated from the rest of England by its fens. Its commerce with Europe flourished, however, since it was open to all the trade routes of northern Europe and the Netherlands; the wool trade prospered, in particular, as the emergence of the great “wool churches” of Long Melford and Lavenham may testify. Another topographical aspect lent a particular tone to the area. There were few great “manors” but instead a large number of villages and towns filled with merchants and a farming population. In turn this seems to have created, or helped to create, what has been described as an “economically precocious and religiously radical area.” 3 The area was radical in more than one sense, however; anti-monarchical in tendency, it gravitated towards parliament or the barons rather than to the king. It possessed a flourishing merchant economy, “involved in a capitalist and cash-marketing system,”4 and out of it sprang a distinctively local art and literature.

  The illuminations of what has come to be known as the “East Anglian School” are of an unmatched liveliness of outline. Whether the subject-matter is taken from bestiaries or literary romances, Bibles or lives of the saints, they are all domesticated within a native idiom which combines naturalism with grotesquerie. There are East Anglian daisies in abundance and, in the Luttrell psalter, domestic scenes which might almost illustrate a novel by Samuel Richardson. The influences of northern Europe have been assimilated, but they have also been coarsened and simplified. They have turned native, in other words.

  The burgeoning of religious theatre in East Anglia was primarily due to the commercial success of the region. There were many monasteries and many great churches but, equally significantly, there were more than one hundred East Anglian areas where dramatic performances were conducted. Just as the illuminations of the “East Anglian School” were characterised by a diversity of influences and sources, so one historian of medieval theatre has described East Anglian drama as possessing “a richness and diversity of theatrical practices unmatched in any other region of the country.” 5 On the basis of vocabulary and dialect several individual plays can be traced to their source in East Anglia, among them The Castle of Perseverance and The Killing of the Children. Characteristically these dramas were highly local affairs, run by individual parishes and performed for local profit. (One of them, at Snettisham, was known as a “Rockefeste” in anticipation of later festivals.) Just as grotesques and writhing figures play so large a part in East Anglian books, so East Anglian drama can be recognised by its emphasis on spectacle and by its general theatrical effectiveness; the characteristics are those of ribaldry, grotesquerie and “shameless manipulation of audience sympathy.”6 It is a local art within an international context.

  Julian of Norwich can also be placed in this unique setting. She was known as “the Recluse atte Norwyche,” and was born towards the close of 1342. It seems likely that she inhabited a cell outside the church of St. Julian, near the center of Norwich, which belonged to the Benedictine nuns of Carrow. The rest of her life is known only through her own words. In her thirty-fourth year, at her mother’s house, she lay close to death; on the seventh night of her agony, after the priest had placed the crucifix before her face, she was granted sixteen “shewings” or revelations within two nights. It is believed that, after this pilgrimage of the spirit, she entered the Benedictine community as a recluse or devoted laywoman. Then, out of her epiphanies, came her reflections in Revelations of Divine Love. She wrote in an East Anglian dialect, with northern additions, and her writing possesses a local savour. She vividly describes the drops of blood upon Christ’s face, which “were like to the scale of heryng in the spreadeing on the forehead”; his dying body was “lyke a dry borde” and he was hanging “in the eyr as men hang a cloth to drye.” When the devil appears to her “anon a lyte smoke came in the dore with a grete hete and a foule stinke.” These powerful images might have come directly out of East Anglian drama; when Julian declares, “Methought I would have beene that time with Mary Magdalene,” at the Crucifixion, she may be recalling her experience of watching the dramatic and sensational Passion plays of her neighbourhood. When she describes how “halfe the face” was covered with “drie blode,” she might have been watching a theatrical scene. She is granted a vision of a very English St. John of Beverley as if he were “an hende neybor,” a dear neighbour, and of course the actors in the liturgical drama were in a literal sense neighbours and acquaintances.

  The spiritual dimension of life on earth could not be better exemplified. When she confirms that she studied the pains of Christ as they were depicted in painting or in stained glass, a particular quality of art or theatre can be seen to inform a particular kind of devotion; indeed, in any just analysis, art and devotion cannot be separated. This, also, is part of the Catholic inheritance of England.

  Just as the art of East Anglia is derived from many different sources, English and European, so in turn the lineaments of Julian of Norwich’s piety have been traced to European spiritual mentors such as St. Bernard and St. Catherine of Siena, St. Thomas Aquinas and William of St. Thierry. Yet it has been said that “Julian perfectly expresses the English spiritual tradition” because “she combines all the strands of our patristic lineage into something new.”7 It is the characteristic English procedure of assimilation and change, expressing itself in what has been described as Julian’s native cheerfulness and common sense; her “optimism” and her “prudence” are “inherent in all English spirituality.” Her methods are practical and her metaphors pragmatic; the penitent must labour as does the gardener, “delvyn and dykyn, swinkin and sweten, and turne the earth upsodowne.” Thus she rejects “the tight juridical categories of scholastic moral theology, and the exaggerated penitential rigours of the Franciscans,”8 arriving at a wholly English and East Anglian compromise.

  Another native of that region has added significantly to England’s religious history. Margery Kempe came from Bishop’s Lynn in Norfolk, and was a contemporary of Julian of Norwich, whom she once visited for spiritual consolation. Her father had five times been mayor of this prosperous “wool” town, and her husband was elected its chamberlain in 1394. She was an East Anglian woman of wealth and competence, who tried her hand at both brewing and milling; yet The Book of Margery Kempe is primarily concerned with her spiritual and visionary experiences in which she encountered, and conversed with, Christ himself. The experience of the Passion would overwhelm her “sumtyme in the cherch, sumtyme in the strete, sumtyme in the chaumbre, sumtyme in the felde,” so that East Anglia becomes the site of eternity. But if Julian of Norwich was influenced by continental theology, Margery Kempe was in more literal fashion affected by continental travellers. Lynn was the port to which pilgrims came from Scandinavia and Europe, on their way to the sacred sites of England. Hers is again a local, and universal, story; Margery Kempe, very much the literal-minded daughter of East Anglian devotion, was able also to witness the details and forms of continental piety and, within certain limits, to adopt them. She knew the people of “Deuchlond” and a friend, Alan of Lynn, had already indexed the works of St. Bridget of Sweden. Yet once more, in native fashion, she mingles the ideal with the real, the sacred with the profane, with an almost Chaucerian eye for significant detail. Her career as a brewer did not flourish “for, whan the ale was as fayr standyng undyr berm as any man mygth se, sodenly the berm wold fallyn down”; the froth, in other and more modern terms, would go fl
at. When she asked a man to have sexual intercourse with her he replied that “he had levar ben hewyn as smal as flesch to the pott!” This matter-of-fact dialect could be effortlessly turned to spiritual matters. Jesus came to her in vision and informed her that she would be “etyn and knawen of the pepul of the world as any raton knawyth the stokfysch.” Sometimes the voices of those people of the world can be heard. “I wold thu wer in Smythfeld,” one London woman told her, “and I wold beryn a fagot to bren the wyth.” The same vivid detail, seen in the margins of the psalteries or on the scaffolds of liturgical plays, animates Margery Kempe’s East Anglian account of her visionary experiences.

  Out of that native soil sprang other writers and artists, among them John Skelton of Diss, whose rough and exuberant “Skeltonics” became once more influential in the twentieth century:

  To wryte or to indyte, Eyther for delyte Or elles for despite

  John Lydgate of Suffolk was the most prolific and popular poet of the fifteenth century; there are writers such as John Bale, Gabriel Harvey and Nicholas Udall who together emphasise the fact that no other region of the country “could boast of so many prominent, identifiable, bookish figures.”9

  So in the fourteenth, fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries the seal had been set on the prolificity and variety of East Anglia in illumination, drama and literature. Some may interpret that superiority in terms of wealth; where mercantile profit leads, the arts will follow. Yet others have discerned a local passion. One historian of art has concluded that the “flat expanses” and “rolling outlines” and “wide skies” of East Anglia “have had a curiously powerful hold on the English creative intellect and have been a striking stimulus to it.”10 It might even be remarked here that “flatness” of surface and the bounding outline have also been the defining characteristics of English art; it is as if the landscape itself adopted the form of the English imagination.