Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination

by Peter Ackroyd

  from our troupes I straid, To gaze vpon a ruinous Monasterie, And as I earnestly did fixe mine eye, Vpon the wasted building suddainely . . .

  And in Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi Antonio claims that

  I do love these ancient ruines: We do never tread upon them, but we sette Our foot upon some reverend history

  The prospect of ruined walls seems to provoke some inward delight and to release some natural fervour. We are greedy for times past. Consider Byron drinking wine out of a monk’s skull in the ruined quarters of his ancestral dwelling, Newstead Abbey, where “Thy yawning arch betokens slow decay.” Shelley composed Prometheus Unbound among the ruins of the Baths of Caracalla and among scenes of “sublime and lovely desolation.” Edward Gibbon conceived his Decline and Fall within the broken Capitol. Fatalism and melancholy are here mingled in characteristic fashion, but some pleasure may also be derived from the prospect of destruction and extinction; it is part of the curious English love affair with death itself, as if only that quietus can effectively destroy feeling. When this is conflated with an admiration for all things antique, then a rich mixture indeed is being concocted.

  It may help to elucidate the mysteries of the native passion for artificial ruins, which was known throughout Europe to be a particularly English obsession. Picturesque ruins, constructed out of brick or painted on canvas, were first recommended in Batty Langley’s New Principles of Gardening published in 1728; the enthusiasm spread so rapidly that forty years later there were books concerned with the principles of their composition. “In wild and romantic scenes,” Thomas Whateley wrote, “may be introduced a ruined stone bridge, of which some arches may still be left standing.” Lord Kames in Elements of Criticism (1762) remarked that these melancholy objects manifested “the triumph of time over strength,” which might be described as a characteristically Anglo-Saxon sentiment. Kames also suggested that their effect was picturesque since “each of the emotions is most sensibly felt by being contrasted with the other”; this in turn might be considered a sufficiently native expression of that familiar appetite for heterogeneity and variety.

  Classical ruins were agreed to be delightful, especially if adorned with ivy and judiciously arranged cracks, but it was believed that ancient British monuments were more suitable in an English landscape as “an object to be seen at a distance, rude and large, and in character agreeable to a wide view.” There is a curious atavism at work here, manifested also in the desire to re-create thirteenth-century castles in the grounds of eighteenth-century stately homes. “Mr. Lyttleton,” the poet and landscape gardener William Shenstone wrote, “has near finish’d one side of his castle. It consists of one entire Tow’r, and three stumps of Tow’rs, with a ruin’d Wall betwixt them.” Shenstone himself assisted Bishop Percy in his collection of ancient British poetry, which demonstrates, perhaps, the ubiquity of these antiquarian restorations. Horace Walpole said of Lyttleton’s edifice that “it has the true rust of the Baron’s wars” but, since its window tracings were taken from a minor thirteenth-century abbey at Halesowen, the nostalgia felt for the past was not unmixed with a certain delight in vandalism.

  The Anglo-Saxon word “aergod” means literally “as good as the beginning,” and thus the most excellent or the very best. It is the antiquarian temper in miniature. The Anglo-Saxons themselves cultivated antiquarianism in a refined and learned spirit, and indeed the past of the Anglo-Saxon imagination was much more elaborate and more intense than any current model. To them, history was of pressing social and religious significance, and began at the moment of Creation. It was deeper and darker than our own misty sense of origin. King Alfred engaged enthusiastically in historical research, and his imagination ranged like an eagle over the kingdoms of the past. Bede loved to write of “earthworks and walls, of ruined churches.” 3 The yearning for ruins is of long duration.

  The English landscape itself seems to harbour ruins as if in an embrace, but their cultivation may also be an aspect of English melancholy. In the Anglo-Saxon poem “The Wanderer,” there is an invocation of the ruined walls which are “standing beaten by the wind and covered with rime. . . . He then who in a spirit of meditation has pondered over this ruin and who with an understanding heart probes the mystery of our life down to its depths. . . . How that time passed away, grown shadowy under the canopy of night as though it had never been!” Another Anglo-Saxon poem is an elegy upon the same theme, and has been entitled “The Ruin”; it is the harbinger of a flood of English writing devoted to the power of old stone.

  In the early Middle Ages, too, there was a consciousness of what one literary historian has described as “the fierce glory of the past”;4 it is evident in the romances as well as in the histories, in verse as well as prose chronicle. That past was seen as better and brighter than the present, furnishing examples of liberty and heroism all too manifestly absent from a contemporary England. The Arthurian romances, which many of the English imbibed as children, were a token of this lost inheritance. Yet here, too, there is an arresting connection. Is it not possible that this longing for the past was in part a longing for childhood itself? From this latent infantilism, too, may spring all the exuberance and violence of the early English character.

  The conventions of antiquarianism were continued in verse history, monastic compilations, chronicles such as the Gesta Regum Anglorum and Historia Novella, as well as in the millions of charters prepared by scribes throughout the medieval period. Yet it was really only in the sixteenth century that antiquarianism became a recognised or at least recognisable pursuit, which as a result obtained institutional status. In 1586 the Society of Antiquarians was formed, with several distinguished members meeting regularly to read papers on various aspects of England’s history. Tudor scholars were obsessed with genealogy and historiography, partly as a way of confirming contemporary dynastic politics within the myths and legends of the country and partly as a way of reclaiming the past in imminent danger of destruction at the hands of the religious reformers.

  John Leland, who flourished in the first half of the sixteenth century, was the first Englishman to style himself an “Antiquarian” and thus can lay claim to being the begetter of what became a significant national pursuit. He was educated at St. Paul’s School and at Cambridge, after which he studied for several years in Paris; the Erasmian humanism which he imbibed in his earlier years was, therefore, amplified by his studies in the texts of the ancients. But his antiquarianism itself was of specifically native growth. He became a royal librarian and, in 1533, was commissioned by Henry VIII “to peruse and diligently to serche at the libraries of monasteries and collegies of this yowre noble reaulme, to the intente that the monuments of auncient writers as welle of other nations, as of this your owne province mighte be brought owte of deadely darkenes to lyvely lighte.” So he embarked upon a long journey across the realm, searching for ancient works which “lay secretely yn corners” of old libraries and scriptoria. It is quite clear, from his notes and written records, that his passion for antique learning was matched only by his fascinated preoccupation both with the landscape of England and with the myths that sprang from it. In an account of the library of Glastonbury Abbey, Leland remarks that he “paid my respects to the deity of the place.” In his Itinerary Leland divined the nature of English place, and bequeathed to the nation a tradition of sacred topography which has never wholly been lost; it is perhaps appropriate that, on his gravestone, his name is spelt Leyland in anticipation of the “leylines” later traced across the English soil. In the words of one commentator, he became “the forerunner of every travel writer on the subject of England from Defoe and Cobbett to H. V. Morton, Arthur Mee and Pevsner.” 5

  But the understanding of place was only one aspect of Leland’s endeavours. As he makes plain in his published work The Laboriouse Journey and Serche for Englandes Antiquitees, he was intent upon reclaiming and recovering the relics of the history of this island, and was in the process able “to herald the establishment of a ne
w kind of scholarship.” 6 He was passionately concerned with “all the remains of most sacred antiquity,” while “the mere sight of the most ancient books took over my mind with an awe or stupor of some kind.” Among those books were the histories and chronicles compiled by the great scholars of the past. The antiquarian met his peers and colleagues in the course of his grand pursuit, and became aware of the longevity of historical enquiry in England. It was his good fortune to enter these libraries just two or three years before their destruction and dispersal at the time of the Reformation. This was a period when monasteries and convents were plundered by the agents of Thomas Cromwell, and when abbeys and other old foundations were destroyed for reasons of avarice and in order to signal the power of Henry VIII over the religious life of the nation. It was an act of wholesale devastation.

  That is why ruins have always had an especial significance in England, where they are a visible token of an ancient civilisation extirpated in the early sixteenth century. The landscape of England was considered to be “haunted with strange intimations from shadowy vanished worlds,” while ruined abbeys and monasteries, abandoned chapels and hermitages, were the shipwrecks of an old storm. “Amidst the gloom arose the ruins of an abbey,” William Gilpin wrote, “. . . a profusion of rich Gothic workmanship.” This was another meaning of “Gothic” itself, as a synonym for a lost Catholic past. It might have sinister implications, since in “Gothic” novels of the eighteenth century dark nuns and murderous monks pass by night, but the term was often touched with veneration and nostalgia. There has always been an organic need among the English to connect the present and the past, and the forced disassociation from a thousand years of Catholic history provoked in some a profound unease.

  John Leland himself was perhaps the last man ever to touch or scrutinise in situ the texts of what is now a lost and forgotten inheritance. He saved some of the books, but most of the material was destroyed, “some to serve theyr iakes [toilets], some to scoure theyr candelstyckes & some they sent over the see to the bokebynders, not in small nombre, but at tymes whole shyppes full, to the wonderynge of the foren nacyons.”

  It is something of a paradox that the English, who of all nations used to pay homage to their past and to what Leland called “examples of extraordinarily wonderful antiquity,” should also be the most willing to efface and destroy that past; the vandalism of the Victorian developers in the 1880s, and of urban developers in the 1970s, testifies to that contrast. Yet it is not so difficult to elucidate. The power of the past lies beneath consciousness itself, and is so strong that the most invasive forces of destruction cannot necessarily efface it. It has also been argued that if antiquity is deeply embedded in place and in time, then extant physical memorials are not necessary.

  Leland himself became insane, and was for two years in the care of his brother until he died; whether that insanity was produced by the spectacle of dissolution, and by the looting of all that he treasured, is an open question.

  He was succeeded in his antiquarian zeal by a number of Tudor historians and topographers, among them John Stow, William Camden, John Bale and Sir Henry Savile. In the sixteenth century there was a great demand for a national historiography as noble as national history itself. Bale asked for “some learned Englishman . . . to set forth the English chronicles in their right shape.” It was recalled that Henry VII had “complained much of our histories of England, and that the English nation, which is inferior to none in honourable actions, should be surpassed by all in leaving the memory of them to posterity.” Antiquarianism could then be associated with national pride, and with the humanist demand for a return to “sources” and clarity of style; certain antiquarians were also concerned to revive the memory of the primitive English Church as a way of claiming spiritual legitimacy for England outside the jurisdiction of Rome. But the pure spirit of enquiry still remained the principal agent within the endless chronicles of the sixteenth century.

  John Stow of London, however, can bear the title of Leland’s worthy successor. He was born in 1525, the son of a tallow chandler in Threadneedle Street; although he practised as a tailor for a while, his true passions were antiquarian. His first published work was an edition of Chaucer, that great exemplar of “ancient” English, before he embarked upon the systematic exposition of the old urban and national chronicles. In one of his earlier volumes, A Summarie of Englyshe Chronicles, he wrote that “it is now eight years since I, seeing the confused order of our late English Chronicles, and the ignorant handling of ancient affairs, leaving mine own particular gains, consecrated myself to the search of our famous antiquities.” But his claim to enduring fame must lie with his comprehensive and elaborate Survey of London, published in 1598 as both a celebration and a memorial. It records the antiquities and monuments of the city, ward by ward, as well as local features and particular buildings. In a sense it captures the essence of English antiquarianism, which is conveyed in the notation and description of place. His Survey was successively edited and corrected by Munday, Dyson and Strype, who themselves celebrated London as “birthplace and breeder to us.”

  This passionate attachment to one area is of the essence of antiquarianism. Stow loved London and spent much of his time wandering among its new buildings as well as its ruins which “cost many a weary mile’s travel, many a hard-earned penny and pound, and many a cold winter’s night study.” Yet in this pursuit he noted buried walls and old halls, ruinated tenements and luxurious lodgings, tennis courts and warehouses, each of which he attempted to date; his was an enormous undertaking, and every English historian owes him a debt. Yet his greatest achievement, perhaps, was to lend antiquarianism a local habitation. In his reports upon areas of narrow lanes or of monuments to local worthies he divines the genius loci —“now there is no such void place for willows to grow, more than the churchyard, wherein do grow some high ash trees. . . . The antiquities be these, first in Stayning Lane, of old time so called, as may be supposed, of painter-stainers dwelling there.”

  His near contemporary William Camden had a similar reverence for the antiquity of place; his Britannia was published in 1568 with the purpose of restoring “Britain to its antiquities and its antiquities to Britain” by undertaking a survey of each county. The pursuit is known as chorography—the writing of place—and seems particularly suited to the English imagination. Camden himself helped to establish the Society of Antiquarians, which lent institutional coherence to a presiding national passion. The antiquarians characteristically delivered in English rather than in Latin their papers on local topography and customs, on charters and chronicles, on tombs and monuments, on laws and genealogy. The linguistic bond between the nation and its inhabitants was thereby asserted. It has been suggested that antiquarianism itself sprang from changes in land ownership, so that new families and new gentry might be ennobled by their location in county history rather than in medieval chronicle; but the study of the society was wider ranging, embracing the interrelationship and historical interaction between the land and its people. At a later date antiquarians were generally acknowledged to be radical in intent, establishing, for example, the nature of pristine English “liberties,” but even at this early juncture there was a marked hostility to antiquarian research from the court; James I effectively closed down the society. By concentrating upon the land and its people, antiquarians were deemed to be anti-monarchical in tendency; this in turn suggests once more that the English imagination itself may be of implicitly egalitarian temper.

  The antiquarian publications of the seventeenth century follow broadly in the tradition established by Leland, Stow and Camden; Elias Ashmole’s Institutions, Laws and Ceremonies of the Order of the Garter, William Dugdale’s Origines Judicales and Robert Plot’s Natural History of Oxfordshire took antiquarian methods into different areas. In the “epistle” to his Parochial AntiquitiesWhite Kennet remarked that “I cannot but congratulate the present Age, that a genius to our National Antiquities seems now to invigorate a great many Lovers
of their Country.” As one historian of seventeenth-century literature has remarked, “Antiquarianism had undoubtedly become endemical in learned circles, and the utter devotion with which it was often pursued sometimes suggests that seventeenth-century fanaticism was emerging again in a new and more benign form.” 7

  Yet the rigour of such studies faded by degrees into a form of imaginative antiquarianism. Inigo Jones, on surveying the monoliths of Stonehenge, pronounced them to be of Roman origin; he was no doubt encouraged in this belief by the classical ambience of his masques for the early seventeenth-century court. John Aubrey was always of an antiquarian disposition; he studied old stones and collected evidence of folklore, all in the service of an overwhelming passion for the past. His contemporary the antiquarian Anthony à Wood described him as “a pretender to antiquities . . . a shiftless person, roving and magotie-headed, and sometimes little better than crased . . . being exceedingly credulous, would stuff his many letters sent to A.W. 8 with fooleries and misinformations.” But in that sense Aubrey was the very model of an English antiquary; he was exactly the sort of person whom Goethe derided, but who has added immeasurably to the English capacity for nostalgic scholarship. His knowledge was capacious but piecemeal, and was transmitted in random notes or jottings. “I have not leisure,” he wrote in typically English fashion, “to heighten my Stile.” He had a native fascination for biographical detail, too, and his Minutes of Lives combines erudition and scandal in an unmethodical digest.

  The full movement of fanciful or romantic antiquarianism, however, manifested itself in the eighteenth century as the precursor or harbinger of what has become known as “romanticism.” The most celebrated and influential antiquarian study of the eighteenth century was undoubtedly Bishop Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, published in 1765; its three volumes created the “ballad industry,” which was to have so powerful an effect for the next two hundred years, and reintroduced the Arthurian myths into English discourse. The titles of many of the ballads, rescued and often “improved” by Percy, are indicative: “King Arthur and King Cornwall” vies with “Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborne,” while “Hugh Spencer’s Feats in France” lies alongside “Durham Field.” Percy’s collection also inaugurated a revision of English poetic history.