In the Land of Giants

by Adams, Max;

  I rode south, now, to the edge of Northumbria and the banks of the Humber, an immense arm of the North Sea that penetrates forty miles inland before it can be crossed by any conventional road, at Boothferry on the River Ouse. I ran out of road at Brough, formerly the Roman fort of Petuaria which both guarded seaborne traffic and acted as a ferry station for the crossing to Lindsey during and after the Empire. Snowy squalls blustered out of an uncompromising, flat north-west horizon. The wind-ripped river seemed impossibly wide, its currents impassable, the blue and white polka-dot sky overwhelmingly massive, bleach-cleaned and rough-shiny. Only a super-giant might conceive of a means of crossing this ocean of rivers dry-shod.

  I sped over the Humber suspension bridge (free to motorcycles), fighting to keep the bike upright, freezing, hardly daring to contemplate the big blue eastwards view towards Hull, Spurn Head and the open sea. Landing in a strange country, a new world, I parked the bike on a nameless street in Barton-upon-Humber and took shelter in a café where I was restored by bacon, scrambled eggs and tea. Fortified, I set out to find Barton’s famous church. St Peter’s is a marvellous expression of Anglo-Saxon self-confidence. The first church on the site was not built until the tenth century; the tower and its unusual bolted-on baptistery are original, and stood on part of a mound or spur which might just have been an ancient burial place. Decorative stone pilaster arcades, one stacked above the other and pierced by later round and angular arched windows, give the tower an exaggerated sense of height and create an exterior illusion of interior, of lordly secular power. They are skeuomorphs, copied from wooden models which might be ecclesiastical or secular.

  The history of the site is intriguing: the church stands close to what was a sub-circular manorial earthwork enclosure, with a much earlier cemetery in the vicinity. The archaeologist Richard Morris raises the intriguing possibility that the church tower might have doubled as the fortified house of a thegn. St Peter’s is a redundant church, the most completely excavated in Britain. It was also shut (English Heritage again), so I couldn’t nose around inside and see its complexities for myself. Bob Sydes, who was part of the excavation team under Warwick Rodwell in the 1970s and who excavated many of the burials, had told me the previous night that several of the inhumations were accompanied by hazel wands (a distinctly pagan feature); one, in addition, by a ham bone which must thoughtfully have been provided as a meal for the occupant’s onward journey.

  BARTON

  I tracked west to pick up the Roman road opposite Brough at Winteringham on the Humber’s southern shore. These are the flatlands of north-west Lindsey, a continuation of the Vale of York; so the road, now Ermine Street, aims like a slingshot due south for Lincoln, untroubled for the most part by cross-grained hills or rivers. A couple of miles off it, on either side, are settlements bearing recognisably pre-Conquest names: Brigg, Snitterby, Hibaldstow, Willoughton. But it is striking that so few existing villages lie along the route. The reason for this stand-offish relationship with the Roman road is that it lies on a chalk ridge; a little further west chalk joins clay, the land falls away and a line of life-giving springs shadows the road. To the east, villages, farms and hamlets line the edge of the lowland peat. I stopped at one of the few substantial villages on the route: Broughton, where a pre-Conquest church has a tower built in herringbone masonry with an external, cylindrical stair turret and a round-arched doorway. The scattering of names ending in –by was a reminder that I had entered the lands of the Danelaw, whose southern boundary ran roughly along the River Lea from the Thames at London and then north-west along Watling Street. These were lands ruled by Danish kings for two generations from the late ninth century following a treaty between Alfred of Wessex and Guthrum, leader of one of the Viking armies.

  The uncompromising line of the Roman road now unrolled like a tape measure for mile after mesmeric mile until Scampton, where it has been forced to make way for the runway from which the Dambuster squadron (617) took off in May 1943. RAF Scampton is now the home of the Red Arrows. Here, too, a branch road leaves Ermine Street and heads north-west to join the Great North Road near Bawtry (site of King Æthelfrith’s epic defeat by King Rædwald in 617 (see page 133) where it crosses the River Idle. I turned off and took a break at Stow, where the magnificent Saxon minster church, currently undergoing restoration, stood shorn of its windows and deeply shadowed behind flapping plastic tarpaulins. The chancel, incidentally, is decorated with a very rare carving of what appears to be a Viking longship; but in the terribly dim light I could hardly make it out.

  I stopped close to the cathedral at Lincoln, visible for miles around on its hill at the end of the long Jurassic ridge on which Ermine Street runs, looking down on the River Witham and surrounded by a jumble of cobbled medieval streets full of shoppers and tourists. A number of very early churches stood in or close to the former Roman colonia. One of these churches, excavated at St Paul-in-the-Bail, adjacent to the castle, was built close to the forum. It may be the church constructed by Bishop Paulinus in about 630 after his conversion of the city’s reeve, one Blæcca; if so, Paulinus seems to have been tapping consciously into the site’s Roman heritage, just as he did at York; there is a suspicion, in fact, that St Paul-in-the-bail might have been built on the foundations of a Roman church.

  There must have been independent kings of Lindsey, but their genealogies survive only in semi-historical form and by Bede’s day the Lindisfaran had been absorbed into Northumbria, later to be transferred to Mercian overlordship. In the, perhaps, seventh-century Tribal Hidage, Lindisfarona was assessed at seven thousand hides, the same tributary value as the kingdoms of the East and South Saxons. Very little serious attention has been paid by historians to the extraordinary and obvious similarity of the name Lindisfarona and Lindisfarne; was the latter an Anglian bridgehead in northern British territory founded by a warrior band from Lindsey? At any rate, by the end of the ninth century Lincoln had become one of the Five Boroughs of the Danelaw.86

  York already seemed a long way behind. Heavy early afternoon traffic slowed me almost to walking pace. South of Lincoln the survival of the original road, cluttered with later settlement, is patchy; sometimes it is no more than a muddy track; I still had miles to travel, so I took the modern A15 to Sleaford; then to Bourne, strong and gusty side winds making it difficult to control the bike at times. Passing through a coppiced wood gave me a short respite. I briefly rejoined the Roman road where it becomes King Street, then cut across fen country to Market Deeping, skirting the sprawl of Peterborough. In low golden sunlight, dazzled by the intermittent flashing shadows of pollard willows lining the banks of massive straight-cut drains, I stopped briefly at Crowland, a small island in the fens where St Guthlac built a hermitage in the late seventh century and where a later, famous chronicle was kept by the abbey’s monks. Dusk was accompanied by glimpses of egrets, buzzards and a red kite.

  I had no time for contemplation: a long day on the bike had chilled me and it was nearly dark when I made my destination: Bluntisham in Huntingdonshire, where my sister Sophie and her husband Roger made the weary traveller very welcome. Family chat; pointing out my route on a map; a bike check for brake oil, tyre pressures, lights and chain lube. Next morning, early, with the air still cool and breezy but in sunshine and with the promise of a warmer day, I edged back into the slipstream of the imperial road network on Ermine Street at Godmanchester (Durovigutum), just south of Huntingdon. Gradually the ruler-drawn road rose away from a flat land of fens, drains and sedges, over a distance of twenty miles, a day’s travel for the pedestrian, towards the eastern rump of the Chiltern Hills at Royston. I stopped at a very friendly market café for coffee, got my bearings and, leaving the Roman road, edged up onto the scarp for a view back across Cambridgeshire and Bedfordshire. I parked next to a small woodland on the north-facing crest, as close as I could get to the point where Roman road meets prehistoric highway: the Icknield Way, which had travelled all the way from Wiltshire on its route to Norfolk; a road older than th
e Romans and cited as one of the great royal roads of medieval England. For a moment I had trouble discriminating between a cluster of Neolithic and Bronze Age burial mounds and the grassy-banked bunkers of a local golf course, until I got my eye in. Several historians have raised the possibility that Claudius’s, Agricola’s, Hadrian’s and other Roman routes through Britain replaced existing originals, refining and rationalising them. In some cases that must be true; in others, the Romans drove entirely new lines through the landscape to connect arterial roads, adapting where they could but unafraid to float a new trail across bog, ascend steep hills and remove obstacles as they saw fit. There must, surely, have been many hundreds and thousands of customary trails—few of them, however, as substantial and long-running as Icknield—which underlie England’s staggering profusion of public rights of way that still charm those who bother to walk them and which must bemuse the foreigner, as they occasionally do the more liberated nation of the Scots—who may roam where they please at home.

  The Icknield Way continues north-east from Royston, from where it was used as the line for the Roman road towards Newmarket. A mile or so before it reaches the home of horse racing it is crossed by the imposing line of the Devil’s Dyke, the most substantial of all Dark Age earthworks before the time of King Offa. Current opinion is that it was built by the indigenous Britons of the fifth century to demarcate or defend their lands from encroaching raiders or settlers to the north-east. If so, it is an impressive monument to the organisational skills of a people derided by Gildas as incapable of resisting foreign invasion.

  After a small contemplative break I cut south-west, not far from the line of the Icknield Way which weaves along the natural contours of the chalk ridge among farms, villages and towns. Past Baldock (my favourite English place name—it derives from the Old French Baudac, meaning Baghdad, and was named in commemoration of the Mesopotamian city by the crusading Knights Templars who founded it in the twelfth century), where Icknield Way and Great North Road cross; then for a while, almost lost among the leafy back lanes and sensuous folds of Hertfordshire’s Chiltern hundreds,87 I passed a pleasant, contemplative morning. I emerged about lunchtime in St Albans on Watling Street—the old A5 whose acquaintance I had made on foot in a seemingly earlier age at Telford and Shrewsbury.

  In my late teens I dug with Roman archaeologist and mosaic expert David Neal at the site of a prosperous native settlement and Roman villa, Gorhambury, a couple of miles outside St Albans on the road out from Verulamium; this was an old hunting ground. Verulamium, whose sprawling ruins lie across the River Ver from the hill on which the abbey and town sit, was founded on an older settlement of the powerful Catuvellauni tribe. By the end of the fourth century it boasted a theatre to go with its basilica and forum. Alban was a British martyr of the third or fourth century, persecuted under one or other imperial clampdowns on Christianity. The Gaulish bishop Germanus visited his martyrium in about 429; Gildas confirmed Verulamium as its site in the sixth century. Bede recognised it in his day as an important place of pilgrimage.

  The mostly Norman abbey, with its distinctly Continental painted round arches and huge nave, almost a hundred yards long, sits in a fine place and may have been built over the site of Alban’s martyrial church. Alban’s cult was successful—he is one of only three named Christian martyrs in Roman Britain and the only one to have spawned a grand shrine and cathedral church. Intriguingly, lower down the hill in the old Roman town the parish church of St Michael’s appears to have been built on top of an earlier basilica-type structure; Christian citizens of the fourth and fifth centuries lived in more tolerant times.

  It was time to put some miles on the clock. The M25, palisading London in a mad four-lane fury of impatience, gives the provincial an idea of what the British peasant must have thought stepping onto the metalled roads of the Empire, caught up in the whirling white water of a canyon with no choice but to go for it pell mell and hope for the best. The biker needs to make his presence felt, look big and keep an eye like a hawk’s on the stampeding migration to which he has inadvertently tied his fate. At some point I was aware of a narrow steel and concrete bridge with pedestrians dawdling across it whizzing above my head, an echo of my own earlier and saner route through Epping Forest; then we were through a chute, a short section of tunnel above which I had emerged from the forest into Epping itself. I crossed the Thames at Dartford, stopped at a petrol station for fuel and a short sanity break, then followed the unrecognisable route of Chaucer’s pilgrims—what was once the A2, towards Rochester and the Medway and running parallel with Watling Street. Rochester, the former Roman town of Durobrivae, was the seat of England’s second bishop, Justus, after Augustine at Canterbury. It marks the boundary between East and West Kent, ancient separate kingdoms.

  I emerged from the conglomerations of Chatham and Gillingham, passed through Sittingbourne and found myself riding through a quiescent winter garden landscape of oast houses, orchards, hop fields and quaint roadside pubs. The land is densely occupied, fertile, giving of nature’s fruits. It is striking that this route, rather than repelling settlement as I had found elsewhere, attracts it. Pilgrims, traders and diplomats travelling between London and the coast have always been good business; one imagines a string of roadside hostelries, shops, stalls and markets dipping in and out of existence, morphing between overtly secular, religious and mystical.

  Just before the town of Faversham a small brown sign pointing to a field caught my speeding eye. At the next roundabout I doubled back, parked the bike and walked across a flint-strewn chalky brown ploughed field to where a ruined flint and brick building stood, a small copse of bare trees as backdrop. This at first unprepossessing structure is one of a handful of Early Medieval churches in Britain proven to be constructed on the ruins of a Roman mausoleum. St Albans abbey may have begun in this way. Was a notable Roman holy man or martyr buried here? Known as Stone-by-Faversham, it is a really remarkable survival. The word ‘stone’ may denote more than the very obvious fact of its construction. Elsewhere it seems to echo the knowledge that the Giants had built in stone in days long gone; that stone was a special, magical material (like ink and vellum) whose secrets were lost to Dark Age builders. The flint and red Roman brick walls of the earlier structure have been exposed and defined by excavation; now green ferns clinging to the mortar add a decorative garnish and in the low sunlight they glowed with earthy colours, silver grey flint glistening against terracotta brick.

  From Faversham I took a line towards the north Kent coast. At Reculver (Regulbium), as at Bradwell-on-Sea in Essex, a former Roman coastal fort became the site of an important early church. In this case, erosion has left the massive twin towers at Reculver perching perilously on a cliff; no art of man could have contrived a more dramatic ruin, Gothic in nature’s inspiration, Romanesque in execution. The sea was a perfect azure, sparkling in afternoon sunshine, the odd container ship or fishing boat floating on horizon’s haze and the breeze swirling through skeletal arch and ruined nave. The church was a minster foundation, originally of 669. The immensely tall towers were spared destruction in later centuries by an edict of the Admiralty who declared it a navigation aid. Richard Morris has suggested that the original church may have played a role, perhaps with a beacon and smaller tower, as a lookout or lighthouse, watching trade pass up or down the estuary. But looking on the map I realised that its location is more special than that of any old coastal fort. It once sat at the mouth of the Wantsum Channel, which separated the Isle of Thanet from the rest of Kent. I rode across its much reduced, canalised channel, barely eight feet wide, without realising. When I got to the small village of Sarre, I stopped on a road still called Sarre Wall, once a causeway that joined the Roman road between here and Canterbury, to have a better look at both the Wantsum and the map. This was once shoreline; now it looks out onto flat fields bordered by drains cut through old peat. A bridge stood here before the channel silted up in the late Medieval period. In the nineteenth century an ancient buria
l ground was excavated close by. Grave goods included many exotic objects, and a number of sets of merchants’ balances.

  That got me thinking about St Augustine who, when his mission arrived in 597, was told by Æthelberht of Kent to wait on Thanet while he, the king, considered Pope Gregory’s petition and the party’s bona fides. Æthelberht had a Frankish Christian queen, Bertha, so he ought to have had some idea of what he was in for; even so, he was concerned to find out what these missionaries were up to. He was at first suspicious of some devilry. In the cast list of Early Medieval travellers they must qualify as either merchants or warriors come as an embassy from another great king. No uninvited traders.

  These men had travelled all the way from the Bishop of Rome. They had impressive credentials, carried written documents which the king would not have been able to read, so Liudhard, his queen’s personal priest, may have acted as go-between and translator. The key to the account we have from Bede is that the king made Augustine wait on Thanet, where prospective merchants set themselves up—one thinks again of Brian Roberts’ idea of the caravanserai, camped on neutral territory on the edge of the king’s lands. Here he could decide whether to admit them or not. The Wantsum, with Reculver guarding its northern seaward mouth, was his vallum, his physical and psychological border. Eventually Æthelberht let Augustine and his mission come to the court at Canterbury (Durovernum), where Roman buildings (not just a church, but parts of the theatre) still stood. Allowing Augustine to preach and convert, the king subsequently gave him lands ‘suitable to his rank’. In other words, he accepted that the socially anomalous Augustine was of warrior rank, but not aiming to fight him for the kingdom (little did he know).

  Sarre, then, and Thanet in general, had special significance in the Early Medieval landscape, as a frontier zone. I tried, as I stood on the sadly diminished banks of the Wantsum, to imagine a broad river with busy ferry boats crossing, the settlements on the island bustling with all sorts of travellers, hangers-on, traders, sailors, vendors and craftsmen, all living a liminal life and mostly hoping to be allowed to cross into the king’s lands and make their petitions to him. Social and cultural tensions must have made this backwater a lively place. I thought of ports that I have visited: Boston, Mahon, Syracuse, Rotterdam: exciting, marginal places. The Wantsum Channel began to look like Hadrian’s Wall in my mind’s eye—a landscape of edges and edginess.