In the Land of Giants

by Adams, Max;

  Close to Sarre, a mile or so east along the edge of Thanet where it looks south over flat, peaty reclaimed marshes, once open water, I came to Minster-in-Thanet, formerly the capital of the island when, perhaps, it was its own small tributary kingdom, like the Rodings in Essex; and where a large parish church stands not far from the site of a seventh-century monastery. A venerable yew tree grew in its churchyard; all was peaceful and quiet; all very English. The church was shut.

  At the far south-east end of the old Wantsum channel, now the outflow of the River Stour, lies a twin of the fort at Reculver: Richborough (Rutupiae), the bridgehead for Claudius’s invasion fleet in AD 43, subsequently a civilian settlement converted to use as a fort of the Saxon Shore in the late third century. It now lies inland, beached like a stranded whale, irrelevant. Across the marshes on the Thanet side lies Ebbsfleet, traditionally the site of Augustine’s original landing in 597 and once the site of a tidal mill. I briefly worked at Richborough for Pete Wilson when his Central Excavation Unit team was doing the rounds of Kent in 1985. Central Unit, as it was known, was the provisional wing of what had begun as a department of the Ministry of Works, then became the Historic Buildings and Monuments Commission and is now known as English Heritage. It was a good way to keep one’s hand in at some interesting sites, even if the trenches were small interventions in advance of drain-digging or new car parks. As it happens, before our arrival another team had been looking at a hexagonal stone structure elsewhere the fort. It looked very much like an early font; and stone foundations excavated many years ago in the north-east quarter of the fort are now thought to represent the remains of a church with stone footings and a timber superstructure. So it seems that a late Roman church stood here. Richborough is also where the Roman road network begins and ends. I had run my Roman road race.

  Except, that is, for a visit to Canterbury itself. I stayed overnight near Sandwich with my aunt Karen Crofts—strategically placed relatives are a boon for the traveller, to be sure—then, an early-morning’s ride along the first Roman road in Britain: its exact route, oddly, is not known and the modern road that completes it is far from straight. I made the same mistake as I had at Faversham, missing a small sign to St Martin’s church a quarter of a mile outside the city walls. At nine in the morning it was shut; a sign promised it would open at eleven. I parked the bike up nearer to the city, opposite the entrance to St Augustine’s Abbey. My heart sank: English Heritage—closed until spring. Cutting my losses I walked through the old city gates and stood outside the fortress-like precinct of the great medieval cathedral. At £10.50 to get in, I thought better of a tour of Thomas Becket’s shrine, which I have in any case seen before. What interested me about the setting was that, first, it lies along a line of churches that includes the abbey and St Martin’s and second, that it is more like a castle than a cathedral, absolutely unapproachable except through either city walls or the mass of houses and shops that surround it. It is a religious citadel of spiritual princes; a Vatican.

  The alignment echoes a frequent Roman pattern of roads and the cemeteries that grew up alongside them outside towns in the Empire. St Albans may be an analogous setting; there are many examples on the Continent. Where cemeteries and mausolea stood, some of them attracted the burials of martyrs or early Christian holy men. When, later, the shrines were marked by churches, the original cemeteries became Christian graveyards or were buried; only the churches survive above ground to mark that relict, funerary landscape.

  I wandered outside the walls again. In a small garden, perhaps on the site of houses bombed during the war, stood bronze statues of King Æthelberht and his queen, original patrons of the Gregorian mission of 597. Tracking back to the car park I found, to my surprise and relief, that someone had opened the gates to the abbey; even if the museum and shop were shut, I could take a look at the ruins. At the west end stood the original church of Sts Peter and Paul, founded by Augustine and Æthelberht. The later abbey was built just to the east of it over the remains of a monastery founded by, and to house the relics of, Augustine and the members of his mission who became bishops or archbishops after him. Here too are the resting places of kings of Kent, including Wihtred (c.670–725) whose law code defined the relationship between king and church and the status of the traveller. The later structures: a crypt, now open to the sky; towering nave and choir walls; the abbey precincts, standing ruined among green lawns studded with plaques, telling the visitor what to look at. Towards the east end of the precinct are the stunted remains of a third church, St Pancras, which several scholars believe to be another late Roman foundation above a mausoleum or special grave, and still on the line of the road to Richborough.

  KING ÆTHELBERHT

  At eleven o’clock sharp the doors of St Martin’s opened. I was its first visitor that day, so I had the company of Ruth Matthews, the guide, to myself. I had already seen the outside: the walls are fashioned, as they are at Stone-by-Faversham, of flint and red Roman brick and tile, in sometimes decorative string courses, sometimes in apparently random patterns. They tell of a complicated structural history: one can make out blocked doorways and windows and the odd reused inscription. Inside, much later plaster has been removed to show various stages of refurbishment and redesign. The western chancel appears to be the oldest structure still standing, identified in part by a hard pink mortar that looks very Roman and whose mysteries were unknown in the Early Medieval period, unless Augustine brought specialists with him. St Martin’s claims to be the oldest church in continuous use in the English-speaking world. But the shape and size, the feel and sensibility are those of a basilica; the inspiration is Roman. Bede says that Bertha (whose father was a ruler at Tours) and her priest Liudhard worshipped in a church dedicated to St Martin of Tours which had been built ‘while the Romans were still in Britain’. This is the prime candidate to match that historical evidence; its claims are reinforced by the nineteenth-century excavation of a hoard of metalwork that included a gold medallion bearing the name, in reverse, of none other than Liudhard.88 Whether, in fact, it was a Roman Christian church still standing and refurbished, or a new church built on an ancient mausoleum, like St Pancras or Stone-by-Faversham, is still debated. At any rate Ruth and I had a proper chinwag debating this and that point as she showed me the church’s key features, glad, I hoped, to encounter a visitor who at least knew his Bede. For my part I had wanted to see this church in the flesh ever since Richard Morris introduced us to it in my undergraduate days. To be shown round arguably the oldest church in England by such an expert and passionate guide was a considerable privilege, a grand end point.

  Interlude Newcastle to Jarrow

  Heroes of the Revolution—fences—industrial decline and revival—Segedunum and Wallsend—last ferry—South Shields—Jarrow church—Bede—miner’s lamp—Jarrow marchers

  THE LAST LEG of my journey from Birdoswald, where the Dark Ages began, to Jarrow, where Bede first lifted the veil on those obscure centuries, started with a walk across Newcastle’s Swing Bridge in the company of an old friend, Dan Elliott. A decade ago we made a film together called Heroes of the Revolution, for which we travelled from one of Durham’s oldest coalfields down to the Tyne and then along it to the sea. Dan’s cinematic, unsentimental directorial eye made me see the past as a new sort of narrative: situated in the present, constructed from images rather than words, allowing the story to emerge as a dialogue with the viewer. So I asked him to walk with me, from his flat in Gateshead, to Jarrow and to share his perspective on a much earlier cast of heroes. Dan is a native of these parts, knows them better than I do; and neither of us had walked this route before.

  The Quayside, now thinly peopled but once crowded with wharfs and shipping, carried us beneath the green steel arches of the Tyne Bridge along a promenade that features Law Courts, solicitors’ offices and trendy eateries; on the south side the shiny Sage concert hall, Baltic Art Gallery (converted from a flour mill) and college flats reflected the sky back at us from their gl
ass walls; only the low, functional outline of a Royal Naval Reserve establishment and its single grey patrol boat tied alongside are reminders of a maritime past.

  The tilting Millennium footbridge, the last to cross the Tyne before it encounters the sea, and a paragon of engineering elegance, completes a set of seven bridges over the river. It is an overconstructed, superhuman landscape. But we found the quietness of the river, overlooked mostly by expensive flats with plantless, lifeless balconies, too eerie. Urban rivers need to be busy. With little to look at except an unchanging, endless set of railings, we fell to talking of our latest projects, travels and favourite places. Dan spends much of his time in Berlin, whose own Dark Age boasts a wall, or the fragmentary remains of a wall, that really was designed to keep people out. That discussion led to the Middle East and its tribal conflicts (more walls) and thence to the tribal kingdoms of our own Early Medieval world of warlords, fanatics and religious propaganda.

  At some point we came to realise that the modern route along the river is all about fences: gated housing complexes, culs de sac leading to defunct factories with no way through for the traveller on foot; whole sections of the river blocked off by new developments stalled for lack of funds. The land is deserted; the riverside inaccessible, emasculated, the river abandoned. A marina seemed to offer visual excitement: particoloured boats shone bright in the sun; masts pricked the sky and the groan and creak of buoys and fenders made a change from the generic background drone of distant traffic; but there was nobody about and all the signs seemed to ward off the curious.

  A little further along, on a northern reach of the river, we began to see signs of life after death: offshore oil-servicing industries; plant-hire compounds; small engineering firms; cable manufacturers with ships moored alongside. Then cranes; not the famous Walker cranes of the vast Swan Hunter shipyard (where we had filmed in its last, sad days) whence the Ark Royal was launched; those are gone, sold off or scrapped. Just off Wallsend High Street (whose name rather speaks for itself) we passed the tidy ruins of Segedunum, the Wall-supplying and terminating Roman fort, looking not quite so incongruous in a post-industrial land as it might. It could be a bomb site cleaned up. We had a beer and a sandwich in an encouragingly ordinary working pub at Willington Quay, then found ourselves forced to make a wide detour around the giant-swallowing entrances to the twin Tyne Tunnels that take the A19 beneath the river to emerge in Jarrow. We were channelled through a grassy business park with rigid, laid paths, token benches, easy-maintenance borders and cycle lanes. It’s a creepy landscape, overdesigned, inorganic and inhuman, a stage set existing more in the imagination of town planners than in the lives of people. Close by is the entrance to a Victorian pedestrian tunnel that connects Wallsend with Jarrow, but it has been shut for maintenance these last couple of years and may never reopen; so we were forced to make another diversion, this time around the North Sea Ferry Terminal, before an improvised navigation brought us to North Shields and a more modest ferry, connecting the town with South Shields on the other side of the river. We passed a truncated row of terraces, all boarded up bar one or two recalcitrant residents. I look at such things as an archaeologist: abandonment and scavenging behaviour being the stuff of which the material past is made; Dan looked at them as a potential film set for one of his melancholic tales of real life. Either way, they fascinate: lives lived; families moved on; memories fading.

  Tynemouth, site of a monastery in Bede’s day and perhaps earlier, lay a mile further on towards the north-east. Even I remember the jumble of wharves and bonded warehouses that once lined the river here before they were levelled for housing projects that never materialised. There is something enriching to the eye and imagination about communities that develop organically; grand plans are often inhuman in scale; like Hadrian’s project or Newcastle’s 1960s T. Dan Smith-inspired concrete high-rises. We came back down to the river at North Shields, which boasts a working fish quay, is resilient enough to be a lively place still and is connected to the rest of Tyneside not just by its long-lived ferry boats but by the Metro rail system, an arterial route that nevertheless distances the river even further from people’s lives. It seemed odd to cross the Tyne on a boat: this is the very last passenger ferry on the river but, I am glad to say, much used and cherished by workers, families and trippers; a pleasantly communal experience after so much walking through a land abandoned by people and governments.

  The short distance from South Shields to Jarrow took us through an older landscape of small manufactories; smaller shops; Methodist chapels; terraces of houses, their front doors flush with the pavement; women with prams and elderly couples carrying small shopping bags; then around the vast complex of the Tyne Dock, a million-car car park waiting to take Nissan’s polished beasts of burden across the world. Dan and I are fascinated by these human, often neglected landscapes of everyday survival, labour and unknowable relations. Past and present are constructed from unglamoured lives; their familiarity can blind us to their intrinsic narrative riches.

  Immediately west of the Tyne Docks, squeezed between the filthy sewage-rich mud-flat channel of Jarrow Slake and an oil depot, lies Bede’s church: St Paul’s, Jarrow. Its survival—having perhaps been looted during a Viking raid in 794 (if the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle’s ‘Donemutha’ is indeed Jarrow), abandoned after further attacks in 874 or 875, refounded two hundred and eighty years later, dissolved by Henry VIII and later cared for by Victorian antiquarians—is a small miracle. It contains the oldest surviving stained glass in Britain; small fragments, it is true, but they stand as an unmistakeable metaphor for a new light shining. A recent ground-penetrating radar survey has shown that a crypt might yet survive intact below the floor of the existing chancel.

  A Latin dedication stone records that a church was built here in the year 685 by Abbot Ceolfrith on land donated by the unlucky King Ecgfrith:

  DEDICATIO BASILICAE SCI PAULI VIIII KLMAI

  ANNO XV ECFRIDIREG

  CEOLFRIDI ABBEIUS DEMQ

  Q. ECCLES DO AUCTORE

  CONDITORIS ANNO IIII

  The dedication of the basilica of St. Paul

  on the 9th day before the Kalends of May

  In the 15th year of King Ecfrid;

  and in the 4th [year] of abbot Ceolfrid, founder,

  by the guidance of God, of the same church

  The monastery, begun in 682 and supported by the king’s grant of forty hides of land, was built by twenty-two brethren, half of them tonsured monks; the early Northumbrian monastic foundations emphasised the virtues of manual labour and strict poverty, the value of individual spirituality within a common enterprise. The church, one of that new generation of permanent stone structures paralleled at Ripon and Hexham, would have been furnished by gifts from its patrons, including the king who personally marked out the site of the altar. Windows aside, it would have been lit by torches and by lamps in hanging bowls; the altar, as Eddius’s testimony says of Ripon, decorated with jewels, ornate psalm books and rich cloths. The monks, in contrast, lived in austere cells, poorly lit if at all and probably unheated. The monastery was carefully sited at the mouth of the River Don (now a shadow of its former self); on the east side, now subsumed by the unending Nissan car park, a royal township may have lain, later recorded as Portus Ecgfridi—Ecgfrith’s harbour.

  Jarrow is a twin of St Peter’s in Wearmouth, built some five miles to the south and eleven years earlier by Benedict Biscop, scholar, mentor and intrepid traveller: they were ‘one monastery in two places’. Between them, in the year 716, they supported six hundred monks. Bede (673–735) spent his entire life here, his outstanding scholarship one of the fruits of a mature intellectual church and of Biscop’s libraries, which themselves were borne out of the new relationship between landholding rights and patronage. Jarrow’s scriptorium, part of a substantial complex centred on two churches and their burial ground, and whose remains were excavated by Rosemary Cramp’s team in the 1960s and 1970s, produced three of the great bibles of Ea
rly Medieval Europe—a stunning expression of hybrid Latin, Anglo-Irish and British cultures reflected in the art and literature of the Golden Age of Northumbria. That cultural hybridisation speaks for Britain’s patchwork of linguistic, spiritual, material and genetic regions and localities, its exuberant mongrel races. Rosemary Cramp (now Dame Rosemary, Emeritus Professor of Archaeology at Durham University) makes the striking point that the dimensions of this structure are ‘interestingly comparable with the large secular halls of the period’.89 The whole resembles a township, a suitable residence for the highest level of nobility from whose ranks the abbots and abbesses of this Golden Age were recruited. Fragmentary hints of a monastic vallum were traced during the excavations, but have not yet been proven.

  Close by, the open-air museum at Bede’s World has recreated the sort of landscape that might have been familiar to Bede: the modest hall of a minor thegn; a sunken-floored building perhaps used to store grain; the stalls, sties and pens of a small farm complete with grunting pig-boar hybrids, native oxen and vegetable plot. A reconstruction of the enigmatic ‘grandstand’ which in Edwin’s and Oswald’s day stood at Yeavering at the northern edge of the Cheviots has recently been added, and a museum celebrates both the spiritual and cultural heritage of Bede’s Northumbria in its transition from a self-doubting post-Roman world of fragile realities to one of self-confidence with an idea of a rational state looking to the future.