'Swa leaf on treowum'

Wynter wakeneth al my care,
Nou this leves waxeth bare;
Ofte I sike ant mourne sare
When hit cometh in my thoght
Of this worldes joie, hou hit goth al to noht.

Nou hit is, and nou hit nys,
Also hit ner nere, ywys;
That moni mon seith, soth hit ys:
Al goth bote Godes wille:
Alle we shule deye, thah us like ylle.

Al that gren me graueth grene,
Nou hit faleweth al by dene:
Jesu, help that hit be sene
Ant shild us from helle!
For y not whider y shal, ne hou longe her duelle.

The fourteenth-century poem, which I've posted here several times before, must be the most apt poem ever written for the last days of November. This would be a literal translation:

Winter awakens all my sorrow,
Now the leaves grow bare.
Often I sigh and mourn sorely
When it comes into my thoughts
Of this world's joy, how it all goes to nothing.

Now it is, and now it is not,
As if it had never been, truly.
What many people say, it is the truth:
All passes but God's will.
We all shall die, though it please us ill.

All the grass which grows up green,
Now it fades all together.
Jesu, help this to be understood,
And shield us from hell!
For I do not know where I shall go, nor how long I shall dwell here.

What cannot be conveyed in translation is the power of the untranslatable negatives, especially 'Nou hit is, and nou hit nys, / Also hit ner nere, ywys', and of some of the turns of language which belie the poem's apparant simplicity. Note especially the phrase waxeth bare: 'waxen' can just mean 'to become', but it usually means specifically to 'grow' (like the moon, which waxes and wanes). But when leaves fall, waxing bare, it's the opposite of growth; it's death and depletion.

Here's the poem in its manuscript, BL Harley MS. 2253, f.75:

The same manuscript also contains (along with many, many other things) the poem 'Now shrinketh rose', which offers another way of responding to the dying of the year. 'Winter wakeneth', despite (or perhaps because of) its brevity and simplicity, comes to my mind every year at this time. The first line calls to mind the association between winter and care which lies behind many evocations of this season in Anglo-Saxon poetry, especially The Wanderer's famous compound wintercearig (also close to untranslatable: 'winter-sorrowful', it means, perhaps 'as sorrowful as winter'). And the poem also evokes that favourite metaphor, life as leaf, which might remind long-term readers of the falling fallowing leaves and men from this post on Anglo-Saxon Autumns.



It's a strange and beautiful thing that the cycle of the year, to which poets have so often turned as a reminder that nothing in life is stable, is in fact one of the great constants in life. Every year November comes, and we turn to this poem and many others like it, and whatever may have changed in our own lives, still the leaves are falling and still poets are drawing the same lessons from them. Whether it's the Anglo-Saxon poets or the fourteenth-century ones or the many exquisite modern examples, poets have been saying this for ever and ever, yet it never grows old - that moni mon seith, soth hit ys. Change is the great constant. An Old English passage I quoted here last month muses on this paradox:

Ðu recst þæt gear and redst þurh þæt gewrixle þara feower tyda, þæt ys, lencten and sumer and herfest and winter; þara wrixlað ælc wyð oððer and hwerfiað, swa þat heora ægðer byð eft emne þat þæt hyt ær wæs, and þær þær hyt ær wes; and swa wrixlað eall tunglai and hwerfiað on þam ylcan wisan, and eft se and ea; on ða ylcan wisan hweorfiað ealle gesceafta. Wrixliað sume þa on oððer wyssan swa þat þa ylcan eft ne cumað þær ðær hy er weron, eallunga swa swa hy er weron, ac cumað oðre for hy, swa swa leaf on treowum, and æpla, græs, and wyrtan, and treoweu foraldiað and forseriað and cumað oððer, grenu wexað, and gearwað, and ripað; for þat hy eft onginnað searian.

You rule the year, and govern it through the turning of the four seasons, that is, spring and summer and autumn and winter. These change places, each with another, and turn so that each of them is again exactly what it was before, and where it was before; and likewise all stars turn and change in the same way, and the sea and rivers too. In this way all created things undergo change. But some change in another way, such that the same thing does not come again where it was before, or exactly as it was before, but another comes in its place; as leaves on the trees, and fruits, grass, and plants and trees grow old and dry, and others come, grow green, and reach maturity, and ripen, and with that begin again to wither.

Today is the last day of the liturgical year; tomorrow, Advent begins. As I delved today into my archive of Advent posts, preparing to bring them out again to meet the eyes of readers old and new, I was reminded of the many ways in which medieval writings on Advent encourage us to engage with time. They urge us to ready ourselves for the coming of an event which has already happened, thousands of years ago; and they direct us to look not just towards the immediate future, as we count down four weeks forwards into our own lives, but towards the eventual future, the Apocalypse, the end of all time. But even as we are thinking about time and change, we are enacting rituals we have gone through many times - hearing the same words, and taking delight in their familiar constancy. As we turn to the same poems every autumn, to learn from well-known words how to think about loss and change, so every Advent we turn to the same readings and songs. We are different, but they are the same; every year we bring different things to them, and take different things away. Because Advent begins the new year, on the first Sunday of Advent we turn the book back to the beginning and start again. You could spend a lifetime reading these texts and never get tired of finding new things in them - a yearly mystery and a yearly joy.

Why not begin with Ælfric's homily for the First Sunday of Advent? 'Þeos tid oð midne winter'

In Defence of 'Monks on the Make': Glastonbury, Lies, and Legends

'The tomb of King Arthur', BL Harley 1766, f. 219

A story has been going around the British media this past week, springing from some new archaeological research which has been conducted at Glastonbury Abbey. This research, a four-year project based at the University of Reading, sounds very interesting: it has explored the early history of a site which has long held a unique place in popular culture in this country, associated as it is with Arthurian legend and with an early, mythical origin for the British church. You can read about the research and some of its findings on the University of Reading website.

This is all great. But the way this story has been reported in the media this week has been troubling me, so I finally gave in to temptation and decided to blog about it. What I intend to do in this post is to look at how this story has been reported, to challenge some of the unquestioned assumptions which are apparent in that reporting, and to suggest some alternative ways in which one might think about medieval monasteries and the legends they told. I want to make it clear that in doing so I’m absolutely not making any criticism of the archaeologists, their research, or how they communicated it; I don’t know enough about the circumstances or the subject to do that, and I’m sure their work is exemplary. (I’m not an archaeologist, nor a specialist on Glastonbury; I also know how easily a message can get distorted as it passes through the hands of journalists and spreads on social media.) I’m not criticising anyone, really, and I don't think anything I say here will be of much interest to academics or specialists. This is for those of you non-specialists - I know lots of you read this blog! - who are interested in history but who can sometimes find the medieval church and its legends bizarre and off-putting.

The main criticism I’ve seen on social media about the way this story has been reported is that some of the reports have suggested that nobody knew – until now!!! – that the stories connecting King Arthur or Joseph of Arimathea to Glastonbury were myths. (I don’t believe the research is in fact claiming this.) ‘We already knew that’, many people have said – and yes, we certainly did. I suppose there probably are some people who really thought King Arthur was buried at Glastonbury, but I can’t say I’ve ever met one. But let’s put that to one side, because I don’t actually think that’s a big problem here.

The essential fact, on which this research has shed new light, is something many people have known for a long time: substantial parts of the legends associated with Glastonbury were invented in the twelfth century, by the monks, to bolster the prestige of the abbey. The monastery created physical ‘evidence’ to support these stories, in the form of supposed graves and a church built in a particular style, which accompanied texts produced at the abbey making similar claims. It seems that this new research has illuminated how and when that physical evidence was manufactured, and how it has misled some modern archaeologists in their study of the abbey. Interesting stuff. But in the reporting of this, the idea has somehow arisen that knowing how and when this evidence was manufactured means we know why. This is where things become more troublesome. The headlines tell their own story:

Glastonbury legend was 'fabricated by 12th century monks desperate to raise cash'

How Glastonbury Abbey's myths were invented by medieval monks on the make

How medieval monks spin-doctored Glastonbury King Arthur legends

Monks dreamt up myths of King Arthur and a visit by Jesus to raise money and lure pilgrims to Glastonbury, research says

Follow the links, and you'll see these stories contain some telling words and phrases: 'concocted', 'no more than a money-spinner to draw pilgrims', 'forged', 'the monks just made them up', 'doctored', 'taken in by the myths', etc. This pejorative language is very odd. What a lot of pious disapproval for a crime eight centuries old! And of course some commentators, and most of the comments on all these stories, have extrapolated from this that all religions, in every place and culture, are cynical scams to deprive ordinary people of their money and their peace. Ah, for the omniscience of an internet commentator...

Sticking, however, to the medieval, there are two things about this reporting which trouble me:

a) assuming that we know for sure the motive behind the monastery’s actions
b) passing moral judgement on that motive.

Only one possible motive is suggested in any of this reporting: the desire to raise money by attracting ('luring', says one report) pilgrims and visitors. This is, indeed, a very likely motive. Medieval monasteries, like every other kind of institution, needed money to live on. They had mouths to feed, taxes to pay, buildings to maintain, estates to run, and many other demands on their resources; monasteries had an economic and social importance in their communities for which it’s difficult to imagine any modern parallels, and in many areas they were the primary sources of education, healthcare, and support for the poor. Needing to raise money to fund these activities isn’t necessarily a noble or ignoble motive – it’s just what it is. Read some of these reports and you’d think the monks were raising money for the fun of rolling around in piles of gold like Scrooge McDuck; maybe some of them were, but I rather doubt it. So why use such language? I don’t know about you, but when I see a business selling its wares, a charity trying to raise money, or a school running a fundraiser I don’t think or talk in terms of these institutions being ‘on the make’ or ‘filling their coffers’. They’re raising money in order to do the things they do. It’s not a scam (although obviously it might be sometimes); it’s just life.

The moral judgement implied by terms such as ‘money-spinning’ must come, then, from the idea that these monks have deliberately and deceitfully distorted historical fact - 'forged', 'fabricated' and 'doctored' history - in order to raise their money. That’s one reading of the situation. Let me propose some others.

It was not uncommon for monasteries to create, or to enhance, legends about their own history. Glastonbury is an especially visible case, because it claimed such very early origins and such very famous burials, but it's not that unusual. It had form in the area of ‘just making things up’; the abbey was doing it earlier in the twelfth century as well, when the monks invented a different story (or ‘ran another scam’ if you prefer to see it that way), and claimed they had acquired the body of St Dunstan from his burial-place in Canterbury. They almost certainly hadn’t, and they probably deserved the scorn poured on them by a contemporary historian. (That historian, as chief custodian of Canterbury’s own legends, had a right to feel aggrieved by Glastonbury poaching the best of them; I’m not sure why 21st-century journalists seem to share his moral outrage!) You could see this as a sign of a monastery ‘on the make’, or as the act of a community in trouble, rather desperately trying to give itself a bit of security and power amid the turmoil of the twelfth century. The assumption that the driving force behind obtaining prestige in this way is solely financial is much too simplistic; there are other kinds of cultural and social power worth having besides 'cold hard cash'.

But it's reductive, too, to only talk about monasteries inventing legends from a desire for money, power, and influence. In this post about medieval translations of saints' relics, I discussed how such inventions often allowed communities in times of crisis to come to terms with their own history, to find a source of identity and unity in looking back at the past - to tell a story about their history which explained to themselves, and to others, who they were and what they were doing. There are few things more important, in creating a sense of communal identity, than having a strong sense of your roots. For all their power, monasteries could be vulnerable, and at times they didn't have much to defend themselves but their history, in whatever tangible or intangible form that might take - documents and charters, relics, or an association with a powerful saint no one would want to cross. Creating legends about such things, especially at moments of particular stress, is not just PR spin - it's self-preservation, perhaps as much psychological as material. When trouble came to a monastery, as it did to Glastonbury with the fire of 1184, monks might turn to their own legendary history as a source of - yes, of income, but also perhaps of reassurance, a reminder (to outsiders and to members of the community) of how long the abbey had endured and how it might still have a future. If your community, your home, which you knew to be a truly ancient and venerable institution, seemed to be in danger of collapsing around you, you too might well turn to a grand legend which offered the chance of survival. You might forge a charter in support of rights you knew you had but couldn't prove; you might decide it was no longer enough to say Glastonbury had a strong connection to St Dunstan (as it certainly did), and start to claim that it also had his body.

‘Just making something up’ in this context isn’t perhaps admirable, but it seems to me an entirely human response. It's also not simple dishonesty: monks in such situations might well have believed they were telling a small lie in service of a greater truth. Even today historians find - if you can believe it! - that when you communicate with the world beyond your community, you sometimes have to spin your story a little in the service of a higher good. Opinions will always vary on far you can go; today we expect historians to stop short of what we would consider outright forgery, but these questions are not always clear-cut. Such pressures can test even the most scrupulous historian: William of Malmesbury, commissioned to write about the history of Glastonbury in the late 1120s, seems to have found it impossible to come up with something which would simultaneously please his patrons and match what he knew to be true about English history. He failed, and the monks had to adapt his account to produce the history they wanted. Historians, even modern historians, face these pressures all the time; we might think ourselves above trying to please patrons, but academics nonetheless have to deal with being accountable to their funders or employers, and with 'selling' research to the public and the media. Many a medieval hagiographer would understand the challenges that brings.

This may explain why some monks might forge or fabricate history for other motives than sheer greed. But at Glastonbury, and with saints' legends in general, there's something much deeper going on. It's not really appropriate to talk in terms of forgery and faking; we are speaking about legends and myths, and if you approach such narratives as bad or dishonest history, rather than as literature, you will always underestimate their power. This is especially obvious with regard to Arthurian legend, because we can see for ourselves just how potent these myths are even today. In the twelfth century, the legend of King Arthur absolutely took off in England, and became hugely popular almost overnight. (Here's a fairly compact overview, and see also this and this page.) This coincided with an explosion in the volume and variety of historical texts being written in England, in Latin, French, and English, and in many of these texts Arthurian legend became incorporated into the narrative of the pre-Saxon history of Britain; from a strictly historical point of view this was largely spurious, but it was a moment of immense literary vitality and creativity. Not everybody was swept along with the fashion; there are some sceptical and scathing comments from twelfth-century historians about this apparently brand-new history. But these stories had huge appeal, and part of that appeal, we might speculate, was that they occupied an enchanting borderland between history and fantasy: they can be imagined taking place not in some faraway magical kingdom but in this country, on the very ground we walk on, yet so far in the past that they provide space for all kinds of invention.

Whatever the exact details of Glastonbury’s origins, there’s no doubt it really is ancient, and people go there, even today, in part because of the charm of antiquity, the sense of origins lost in the mists of time. The vagueness and the mistiness and the ‘maybe real, maybe not’ are part of its appeal to the imagination. Deliberately designing a church to look older than it is might well be a scam, but it might equally be an attempt at conveying an aura of ancientness, creating an atmosphere which helps your visitors to feel that this is a special, holy, and ancient place. (Note the difference between 'helps your visitors to feel' and 'tricks your visitors into thinking'.) It’s an entirely natural move to associate that specialness with the most popular historical legend of the day, one which was especially beloved by the aristocracy and the educated elite – the social world from which some monks came, and which most monks had to learn to negotiate to some degree. In that world, Arthurian legends were everywhere - and understanding them as legends, as literature, is key.

Legends are not lies. Fiction is not fraud. At root, these are stories, and the most important thing about a story – even a story about events which happened in the past – is not always whether it is true, as in, it actually happened. We all know this, don’t we? Telling a story which you know not to be true is not necessarily lying; whether we call an untrue story a 'lie' depends on all kinds of other factors, which we are quite capable of understanding in our everyday lives. It depends on your intention in telling it, the manner in which you tell it, the way you want your audience to receive it, and the way they actually receive it. If you invent a story which you know is not true, and you want your audience to believe it’s true, that might be what we would call a lie. (But even so, there are circumstances in which we would not consider it lying; when parents tell their children stories about Father Christmas, children believe them, but most people don’t call that 'lying'.) And if you invent a story which the audience won’t believe, which they will recognise as exactly that – a story – that’s not a lie. That’s fiction. It’s fiction even if it deals with history; it is quite possible to tell a story about history because you think it’s a good and powerful story, and not because you think every word of it actually happened.

There are all kinds of grey areas here, even in historical narratives, and medieval views on this were sometimes different from ours; not better or worse, not more or less fraudulent, but different. (The place and status of fiction and legend in twelfth-century histories in particular is a huge subject which I won’t try and summarise here.) So when you come up against a medieval legend which seems to you obviously untrue, pause for a second before you jump to the conclusion that the person who told it was either a liar or a fool. They may have been, but there are many other possibilities - and wouldn't it be fun to exercise a bit more imagination? Honestly, I’m just bored of reading news stories, and historical fiction, which repeat the old lazy story about cynical monks and credulous pilgrims, without making any imaginative attempt to move beyond the cliche. That’s an idea of how monks and pilgrims might have interacted – a modern myth, you might say – which has barely advanced one step in historical analysis from the anti-monastic rhetoric of the sixteenth century. As history, as journalism, and as fiction, it’s just dull, because it’s so limited and so uniform. It assumes that we not only know exactly how the monks (all monks, in every monastery) communicated their stories to visitors, but also how the visitors (all visitors, from every walk of life) received the stories they were told. And we just don’t. We never will. We can imagine all kinds of possibilities, but we don’t know for sure. We have some physical evidence, and we have texts, but that’s not everything – it’s the difference between seeing the set, props and script for a play, and watching it performed.

(Or, to be a little mischievous: it's the difference between reading the plans for the public engagement aspect of the Glastonbury Abbey project, and seeing what the media actually heard when the words 'cash' and 'monks' were mentioned in the same sentence...)

So we could imagine (as most writers seem to) a version of events where a credulous pilgrim comes to visit an abbey and a cynical monk, laughing up his sleeve, spins the pilgrim a ridiculous story, which ends up in the pilgrim gratefully pouring pursefuls of money into the monk’s waiting hands. But at the other extreme, we could also imagine a visitor, a bit bored and wanting a day out, coming to have a look at that new church people have been talking about; he asks about it, and hears a story about King Arthur which it’s quite clear the teller doesn’t really expect him to believe. (I’m imagining a playful telling, the way a friendly room-steward at a National Trust property might play up the story of the house’s resident ghost; you know and she knows that it’s probably just a story, but it’s still a fun thing to tell the visitors.) Or we could imagine an informed visitor who knows more about the abbey than its own monks do, bemusing them by enthusiasm for its legends (I’ve been in that role sometimes!). We could imagine a situation where a very keen monk really really believes in the story, and the visitors laugh, but not unkindly, at his naivety. Or a situation where both monk and visitor half-believe, half-doubt, but enjoy the story anyway. Or where both very sincerely, genuinely believe with all their hearts (because monks were capable of sincerity, you know). There are all kinds of things you can imagine, if you can step away from the cliche.

Any or all or none of these things might have happened. Just at Glastonbury, we’re talking about interactions between hundreds if not thousands of people, from royalty to the lowest classes of society, over the course of more than three centuries. How can you be so sure that you know what everyone was thinking, all that time? Telling stories is one of the most fundamental parts of human experience, and to dismiss all that as deception is just silly. Human beings, even in the supposedly credulous Middle Ages, are entirely capable of enjoying a story without knowing, or even caring, whether it's true or not. If we only told true stories, I don’t think life would be worth living; and if we were required to be 100% sure whether or not a story was true before we were allowed to tell or listen to it, an essential part of human communication would break down. Not only would we have no fiction, but we would not be able to repeat the kinds of stories we all tell, all the time, about our own lives – the kinds of stories which are rarely ever true in every detail but which knit communities together, help us to understand our own experiences, and let us imagine why things are as they are or how they could be better.

Legends are not lies. If you go to Glastonbury today – that strange yet wonderful town, rich in genuine antiquity and utter nonsense and everything in between – you will find some people who wholeheartedly believe in the myths. You’ll also find people who don’t believe in the myths at all, and don’t understand why anyone would want to. But the majority of people will probably fall somewhere between those extremes. They don’t really believe in everything they’ve heard about King Arthur or Joseph of Arimathea, but they like the stories; they enjoy thinking about them, and they get pleasure from being in a place associated with them. Maybe they like to imagine they could be true, but they wouldn’t necessarily like the stories more if they were; their value and their meaning are quite independent of their historical veracity. And to see objects and places which are said to be associated with these stories is a spur to the imagination, a pleasurable or even a moving experience. It contributes to the sense of a place which is special for a reason its visitors can’t, perhaps, quite define or articulate, but which is nonetheless valuable and powerful to them. To be in a special place makes them feel that life means something, that there is a reality beyond the drudgery of the everyday. There is nothing wrong with any of that.

There are so many kinds of desire at play in human behaviour, and most of all in the stories people tell. It might be the job of a historian to work out what truth, if any, lies behind those stories, but it is also our job to try and understand why and how they might be told. Passing moral judgement, busting myths, or gleefully discrediting ancient legends will only take you so far; it will never really help you understand why these legends had so much power. To do that, you have to allow for the role of stories in forming identities and building communities; for the diversity of ways in which people receive the stories they hear; for the place of imagination, play, and the pleasure of narrative. You have to allow for the fact that the past was different from the present, and that medieval writers did not always share our particular idea of what makes good academic history; they weren't wrong, or stupid, just different. Look around you, and you'll see that we all constantly use stories in thinking about the past, and especially in communicating it to others: the news reports I linked to at the beginning of this post are not simply reporting facts but telling a story, complete with motives for which we do not (and never will) have evidence. This story about 'monks on the make' 'filling their coffers' is one particular way of interpreting the evidence we have; it's a story about the medieval past which appeals to modern journalists and to many modern historians, in part because it fits with a certain narrative which for centuries dominated the study of history in Britain - medieval England mired in a corrupt, superstitious Dark Age before the dawning of Reformation light. The 'myth-busting' in fact just reinforces a very old myth. (The similarity in rhetoric between anti-Catholic Victorian historians and secularist Guardian journalists is really quite strange to see.) Often this goes hand-in-hand with a superior, not to say snobbish, attitude towards popular tradition and the gullibility of the general public, who are, it's assumed, too stupid to recognise a legend when they hear one.

But there are other ways to tell the story, based on the exact same evidence. I've suggested a few, and I'm sure you can think of others. If nothing else, we can pay attention to the language we use: what a difference it makes if instead of speaking of histories 'fabricated', 'concocted' and 'forged', we use the language of imagination, story-telling, and creativity.

St Hilda and Hidden Gold

St Hilda (Worcester Cathedral)

Today is the feast of St Hilda, abbess of Whitby, who died on 17 November 680. Born into a royal family in the north of England, Hilda entered religious life at the age of 33, and in 657 became the founding abbess of Whitby, a double monastery for men and women. She was famous for her wisdom and counsel, according to Bede, who was born in her lifetime and describes her in his Historia Ecclesiastica thus:

Bishop Aidan, and other religious men that knew her and loved her, frequently visited and diligently instructed her, because of her innate wisdom and inclination to the service of God... She undertook either to build or to arrange a monastery in the place called Streaneshalch [Whitby], which work she industriously performed; for she put this monastery under the same regular discipline as she had done the former; and taught there the strict observance of justice, piety, chastity, and other virtues, and particularly of peace and charity; so that, after the example of the primitive church, no person was there rich, and none poor, all being in common to all, and none having any property. Her prudence was so great, that not only indifferent persons, but even kings and princes, as occasion offered, asked and received her advice.

At this point Bede notes, as evidence of Hilda's wise leadership, that her monastery produced five men who went on to become bishops, including St John of Beverley.

Thus this servant of Christ, Abbess Hilda, whom all that knew her called Mother, for her singular piety and grace, was not only an example of good life, to those that lived in her monastery, but afforded occasion of amendment and salvation to many who lived at a distance, to whom the fame was brought of her industry and virtue... When she had governed this monastery many years, it pleased Him who has made such merciful provision for our salvation, to give her holy soul the trial of a long sickness, to the end that, according to the apostle's example, her virtue might be perfected in infirmity. Falling into a fever, she fell into a violent heat, and was afflicted with the same for six years continually; during all which time she never failed either to return thanks to her Maker, or publicly and privately to instruct the flock committed to her charge; for by her own example she admonished all persons to serve God dutifully in perfect health, and always to return thanks to Him in adversity, or bodily infirmity. In the seventh year of her sickness, the distemper turning inwards, she approached her last day, and about cock-crowing, having received the holy communion to further her on her way, and called together the servants of Christ that were within the same monastery, she admonished them to preserve evangelical peace among themselves, and with all others; and as she was making her speech, she joyfully saw death approaching, or if I may speak in the words of our Lord, passed from death to life.

Bede describes how two nuns who were especially close to Hilda had miraculous visions telling them of her death. He then goes on to tell the story of Cædmon, which should be dear to all lovers of English literature - you probably know it! The story goes that Cædmon was a cowherd living in the monastery at Whitby, whose job was to look after the animals. An unlearned man, he felt unable to join in with the others at feasts where everyone was expected to sing or perform poetry. (I wonder if the abbess used to sing at these feasts...) During one such occasion, Cædmon hid himself away in the cowshed in embarrassment. There, as he slept, a miraculous figure appeared to him, who addressed him by name and ordered him to sing. Cædmon protested that he couldn't, but his visitor taught him to sing of the creation of the world, to the praise of God, in words which were not his own. When he spoke of his dream the next morning he was taken to Hilda, so that the abbess might judge the story of his vision and the poem it produced. Recognising his gift, Hilda took control of Cædmon's future: she decreed that he should enter her monastery, and provided him with more subjects for his verse. Cædmon's short hymn has a claim to be the earliest recorded English poem, and Hilda's role as Cædmon's patron means that she played an influential, often forgotten part in the production of the earliest Christian poetry in English. Would we know about Cædmon at all, if not for Hilda?

St Hilda (Worcester Cathedral)

St Hilda's day seems as good a reason as any to post a short extract from an Old English poem which I've been meaning to post here for a while. It comes from a text which rejoices in the modern title 'Instructions for Christians', but it's much less dull than that title makes it sound. It provides counsel on how to live a virtuous and holy life, and is particularly concerned with the proper use of wealth and of learning; the two seem to be associated in the poet's mind, as the first lines of the extract below demonstrate. The poem survives in a twelfth-century manuscript, and therefore comes from the very end of the Anglo-Saxon period, a good five hundred years after Hilda. But that makes it all the more a reminder of the strength and endurance of the poetic tradition for which Cædmon's story is such a powerful origin-legend - five centuries of English poetry of the kind fostered in Mother Hilda's monastery, and it would still be another two centuries before the birth of the man who's today called 'the Father of English poetry'.

The text comes from Old English Short Poems: vol. I, Religious and Didactic, ed. Christopher A. Jones (Cambridge, Mass., 2012), pp. 143-4, but the translation's mine.

Se forholena cræft and forhyded gold
ne bið ællunga ungelice.
Betere bið þe dusige, gif he on breostum can
his unwisdom inne belucan,
þonne se snotere ðe symle wile
æt his heah-þearfe forhelan his wisdom.
Ac þu scealt gelome gelæran and tæcan,
ða hwile þe ðe mihtig Godd mægnes unne,
þe læs hit þe on ende eft gereowe
æfter dæg-rime, þonne þu hit gedon ne miht.
Onlær þinum bearne bysne goda,
and eac swa some eallum leoda;
þonne ðu geearnost ece blisse
and æfter þisse weorlda weorðscipe mycelne.
Se ðe leornunge longe fyligeð
halgum bocum her on worulde,
heo ðone gelæredon longe gebetað,
and þone unlærdan eac gelæreð.
Heo geeadmodað eghwylcne kyng,
swilce þone earman eac aræreð
and þa saula swa some geclensað
and þæt mod gedeþ mycle ðe bliðre.
And heo eac æþelne gedeð þone ðe ær ne wæs;
eac heo þrah-mælum þeowne gefreolsað.

Concealed skill and hidden gold
are not entirely unalike.
Better the fool, if he can in his heart
seal up his lack of wisdom,
than the wise man who ever wishes
to hide his wisdom in his greatest time of need.
But you should always be teaching and instructing
for as long as mighty God grants you strength,
that you may regret it the less in the end,
after the course of your days, when you can do so no longer.
Teach your children with a good example,
and all peoples likewise;
then you will earn eternal joy
and great honour after this world is past.
He who long follows learning
in holy books here in the world,
she [i.e. learning] will always be improving the learned
and instructing the unlearned.
She humbles every king;
so too she raises up the poor,
and souls she cleanses,
and makes the mind much the happier;
and she makes a man noble who was not so before,
and many times she sets the handmaid free.

('handmaid' isn't a very good translation, but the word þeowne here means 'a female servant'. As Bede notes in apology for his translation of Cædmon, 'verses, though never so well composed, cannot be literally translated out of one language into another without losing much of their beauty...').

I've been thinking a lot over the past few months about teaching, learning and wisdom more generally, and so this extract appealed to me when I encountered it a little while ago. For various reasons I've had particular cause to be grateful recently to the women who have taught me, and I've been considering the many forms women's teaching can take; and that's the main reason why I followed the grammatical gender of the Old English here (as I wouldn't normally do) and used the pronoun she, Old English heo, for the feminine noun leornung. This seems not inappropriate, since this passage (and the whole poem) is clearly influenced by the Biblical tradition of wisdom literature as well as by the native variety; and in that tradition, the Book of Proverbs for instance, Wisdom is spoken of as female.

Perhaps Bede's description of Hilda, too, draws on a traditional image of female wisdom as well as on the personal qualities of the abbess herself. Hilda is particularly a symbol of female learning for me, because I was an undergraduate at St Hilda's College in Oxford, which was founded in 1893 for the education of women and named for that wise abbess. Over the years St Hilda's has produced some outstanding female scholars, including - as befits the only Oxford college named for an Anglo-Saxon saint - several brilliant medievalists. When I was at St Hilda's it was still an all-female college, at the time Oxford's only remaining women's college. (It went mixed just after I left.) Coming from a mixed school, and associating single-sex education with fancy boarding schools very far out of my experience, I wasn't all that pleased to find myself at a women's college, and I didn't then think it had any particular advantages; but since leaving I've come to feel I didn't appreciate it properly. I didn't know then what a privilege it was to be taught almost exclusively by brilliant, articulate women, and surrounded by female students. There, no one cared you were a woman: you were a person, a student, and it was not in question that you had a right to be taught and a right to be taken seriously. When I left that undergraduate bubble and began to enter the wider world of academia, it was an adjustment to a culture where women were now a minority. I still had wonderful female teachers and mentors, the best anyone could ask for, but nonetheless it was quite a shock. I imagine that the effects of living in such a culture will be familiar to many of you reading this, academics or not - it manifests itself in more ways than one can count, and you gradually learn to recognise the signs. You learn what it's like not to be listened to when you talk, to be talked over, to be judged for how you look or sound as you say something rather than for the value of what you say; you get used to seeing women you respect belittled and badly treated, to being shown that there are people who don't want you in their seminar or their common room, to listening to supposedly intelligent men trying to flirt with you by pontificating on the stupidity of women ('oh no, I don't mean you; most women'). The formal structures of academia - peer review, conference Q&As, etc. - obligingly provide many platforms for men who are so inclined to privately or publicly scold women, especially women who are considerably junior to them. Fun, huh? It's easy to say that you just shouldn't let it get to you, and most of the time I didn't; I stood up for myself pretty well, and for others, too. But one incident did some tangible career damage to me a few months ago, in part because I let myself be talked over when it was especially important that I should be heard. I let myself be silenced by a bit of meaningless aggression, and the cost was a valuable career opportunity, a lot of miserable soul-searching, and serious loss of faith in my own work. I was surprised by the strength of my own reaction and by how difficult it was to shake it off; I already well knew, as I'm sure many of you do, how often women's voices are thus privately silenced, day after day, and how often the investment of much careful mentoring is thrown away by a few careless words. But there was one positive result: if anything good came from that experience, it was the reaction I received when I found my voice again and wrote about it here. A post I wrote here in the summer struck a chord with many women, who contacted me to say they had had similar experiences - several of them scholars I hugely respect, the kind of people I would have thought no one would dare try to silence.

It was that response, more than anything, which made me realise how fortunate I've been, all my life, to be taught and guided by women - and some men, too - who knew how to express themselves in clear, measured, and constructive ways. They knew how to give criticism which was intended to improve the quality of a piece of work, not to score points against the writer; they knew how to challenge ideas and to debate incisively without wasting energy on unnecessary aggression; they understood how to use their power and influence for good, and not for self-aggrandizement; they were prepared to be patient with ideas, and with people, which might need time to grow. They knew when it was important to listen rather than to talk, and how to amplify the voices of others rather than shouting them down. These wise people, these St Hildas, taught me how to teach and learn, by teaching me how to do both at the same time. Some of this teaching was formal, some informal - some hardly looked, from the outside, like teaching at all. Some of it came from very successful and brilliant women, some from women living 'hidden lives', who never sought what the world considers success. Their lives might have been hidden - but not their wisdom, their gold. They didn't allow themselves to be silenced, or bullied into hiding the good they knew they could do. Instead, they spent their gold in teaching, and their teaching took many forms. The results of such lives are so widely diffused that they may never be recognised or honoured as they ought to be; if you freely spend your gold rather than hoard it, you'll never grow wealthy yourself.  But the effects of influence can be immeasurable, the consequences unlooked-for, the rewards rich in ways not to be counted. Clarity of thought, patience, generosity, the conquest of self - these are not qualities of weakness but of immense strength and wisdom, of leadership and power. That's the learning which humbles the king, and raises up the poor - and teaches the poet to sing.

Ramsey the Rich

At the end of September I visited Ramsey, a small Fenland town which was once the site of a great medieval abbey. It's about thirty miles north-west of modern-day Cambridge, but 250 years before a university was founded there Ramsey was a centre of Anglo-Saxon learning, home to some extraordinary scholars and a famous library. In this post I'll show you some of the things I saw at Ramsey this autumn, interspersed with stories about the early history of the abbey.

The nickname 'Ramsey the rich' comes from a traditional little rhyme about the Fenland abbeys:

Ramsey, the rich of gold and of fee;
Thorney, the flower of the fen country,
Crowland, so courteous of meat and of drink,
Peterborough the proud, as all men do think.
And Sawtrey by the way that old abbey
Gave more alms in one day than all they.

Ramsey was indeed wealthy - at the time of the Dissolution it was the eighth richest abbey in England. There's little to show for that now. All that survives to visit of the abbey is the fifteenth-century gatehouse, which is in the care of the National Trust; apparently there are also some fragments built into the school which now occupies the site, and there's the parish church, which was originally built as the infirmary or guesthouse of the abbey. You can find out more about the buildings and the history of the abbey on this excellent website; I'll be concentrating mostly on Ramsey's tenth- and eleventh-century history, because that's what interests me.

Ramsey is a relatively modern foundation in Anglo-Saxon terms - by that I mean it was founded in the tenth century, which makes it a baby compared to the other Fenland abbeys. We know a great deal about its early history, because its founder was an especially interesting and prominent person: St Oswald, bishop of Worcester, Archbishop of York, and a member of the most intriguing Anglo-Danish family of tenth-century England. Oswald died in 992, and within ten years of his death a Vita S. Oswaldi had been composed, probably by Byrhtferth, a monk of Ramsey who was one of Anglo-Saxon England's greatest scholars. Byrhtferth's Vita gives a wealth of detail about Oswald's life, including the foundation of Ramsey, in which the saint took a close personal interest.

According to his hagiographer, Oswald was the grandson of a Danish Viking who had come to England in the ninth century in the army of Ivar and Ubbe, sons of Ragnar, most famous (in this part of England, anyway) as the killers of St Edmund of East Anglia. Oswald's grandfather was apparently one of the Danes who settled down in what became the Danelaw, and the interest Oswald took in this part of the country might suggest they had a connection to this region of eastern England. The first convert in the family - so the story goes - was the Viking's son, Oda. Against the opposition of his pagan father, Oda was given a Christian education and rose to become Archbishop of Canterbury under King Athelstan. (This is such a truth-is-stranger-than-fiction moment; who needs that pretty-boy semi-Dane in The Last Kingdom, when the real story of the Danes in England is so interesting!) Oda was at the king's side at the Battle of Brunanburh and miraculously repaired his broken sword; he was known as 'Oda se goda', Oda the Good, and after his death in 958 was venerated as a saint.

Oda undertook the education of his nephew, Oswald, and gave him a very good start in life: Oswald was educated at Fleury, a beacon of Benedictine monasticism and a great centre of learning. Byrhtferth says 'even if I had the eloquence of Homer, I could not record all the benefits Oda's kindness left to Oswald, both in his lifetime and after his death'. On his return to England, Oswald was swiftly appointed Bishop of Worcester, helped by the patronage of St Dunstan and his illustrious family connections (not just Oda but also another kinsman, with the Danish name Oscytel, who was Archbishop of York). This was in 961.

Oswald soon decided he wanted to found a monastery, and Byrhtferth says that King Edgar gave him three locations to choose from: St Albans, Ely, or Benfleet in Essex. Oswald went to inspect them, but couldn't make up his mind. Then Fate or Providence took a hand: in 965 he attended the funeral of an ealdorman and got talking with a man named Æthelwine, a member of a prominent East Anglian family. Æthelwine liked the idea of the monastery, but suggested that Oswald should found it on land belonging to him at Ramsey, an island in the Fens. And so he did.

He dedicated it to St Benedict - an unusual dedication for an English monastery at the time, and a clear legacy of his Fleury education. This was a time when many English monasteries were being refounded on stricter Benedictine lines (nearby Ely was refounded by St Æthelwold in 970), and it almost feels like the new foundation at Ramsey was intended to be Oswald's model monastery. He and Æthelwine endowed it with lands and books, and in 985-7 brought the scholar Abbo of Fleury to stay at Ramsey, where he occupied his time teaching the monks and writing (among other things) the first Passio of St Edmund. Byrhtferth was educated at Ramsey, and his extensive learning is a good testament to the kind of education available at the abbey; to judge from references in his works, it had apparently accumulated one of the largest libraries in England within a few decades of its foundation.

There's a reason I chose to post about Ramsey today, because 8 November is one of the abbey's birthdays. There are several significant dates in the early history of the abbey: 29 August, the day Oswald first visited Ramsey (the feast of the beheading of John the Baptist); 18 March, when the first stone was laid (the first day of the creation of the world); and the dedication of the church on 8 November 974. I don't know if there was a reason why 8 November was chosen, but the anniversary was remembered: a few years later, after a tower of the church had had to be rebuilt, it was rededicated on 8 November 991. So today is a good day to celebrate Ramsey, and its clever computistically-minded monks who shared my fondness for historical anniversaries ;)

Both Oswald and Æthelwine maintained a close relationship with Ramsey, and were regular visitors. Both died in the same year, 992; before their deaths a monk of Ramsey had a vision of the two towers of the church collapsing, a premonition of the loss of the abbey's chief supporters. Oswald died on 29 February and was buried at Worcester; Æthelwine was with the monks at Ramsey (just finishing Compline) when he heard the news. Æthelwine followed him on 24 April, and was buried here at Ramsey.

Since Byrhtferth was writing so soon after Oswald's death, he doesn't tell us what happened after c.1002. But he remained at Ramsey, teaching in the monastic school, and writing his own works of history and hagiography in famously ornate Latin. In February 1011 (as the dating in the text tells us) he was here writing his extraordinary Enchiridion. The Enchiridion, or 'Handboc', as he calls it, is a scientific manual written in English, which explains such learned matters as the construction of the calendar, poetry, metre, rhetoric, and the significance of numbers, and it contains some stunning diagrams. I love the thought of Byrhtferth working away at this, designing his diagrams and gathering materials from his sources, on a chilly February day on this little island in the Fens - this in a year when, as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle tells us, a Danish army had overrun all the counties between East Anglia and Oxford, as well as much of the land south of the Thames.

Apart from Byrhtferth's works, we have some wonderful narrative sources for the early history of Ramsey - bless those learned monks and their love of writing things down! There's the Chronicon Abbatiæ Rameseiensis, a history of the abbey compiled towards the end of the twelfth century and incorporating a great wealth of earlier material about the abbey's founders and benefactors. Written in part to defend the abbey's claims to its various lands, the Chronicle also tells stories about its abbots and monks, its patrons and its enemies, giving a vivid insight into the life of the abbey in this period. I encountered them first in a charming volume of Victorian scholarship called Ramsey Abbey, Its Rise and Fall, taken from the ‘Ramsey History or Chronicle’, and other reliable sources; also, an Account of the Manor and Parish since the ‘Dissolution’, compiled by John Wise and W. Mackreth Noble in 1882. This book is one of those beautifully old-fashioned, monumental works of local history which records every tradition going, whether plausible or not, and it's an absorbing read (if you like that sort of thing, which I do). Reading through these stories, their world becomes so entirely real and alive that it's a shock - even when you're prepared for it - to come to Ramsey, and find there's nothing left of it all but this:

The gatehouse is a fine ruin, with well-preserved stone-carving, but I don't have much to say about it; so let me just tell you some stories about the community who used to live here.

Rivalry with nearby Ely was a consistent feature of Ramsey's history in the medieval period. (You can imagine that Ely, which was three centuries older than Ramsey, just loved having a rival monastery founded on its doorstep.) The histories of both abbeys tell stories about contests between the monks - the most famous is perhaps the story (from Ely) that in 991, when the ealdorman Byrhtnoth and his men were on their way to fight the Danes at Maldon, they stopped at Ramsey and asked for hospitality. The monks offered Byrhtnoth food for himself and only seven of his men, but in reply, the Ely writer claims, "he is said to have made the elegantly phrased response: 'Let the lord Abbot know that I will not dine alone without the men you refer to, because I cannot fight alone without them'." So he went on to Ely, where they not only fed Byrhtnoth and his men but buried him in their church after he was killed in the battle which inspired one of the greatest Old English poems. The date of Ramsey's rededication on 8 November 991 stuck in my memory because I once encountered someone suggesting that The Battle of Maldon might have been composed or performed for that occasion, three months after the date of the battle, when many abbots and noblemen were gathered here for a feast. Well, you never know.

Certainly as the Danish Conquest got underway in 1013-16, the monks of Ramsey (along with other Fenland abbeys) put up some resistance to the invaders. Oswald was titular abbot of Ramsey until his death, and after him the community elected Eadnoth, a relative of Oswald's. Eadnoth became bishop of Dorchester in 1009, but was killed in battle against Cnut at Assandun in 1016, and Ramsey lost a lot of its friends that day - not only Eadnoth but also his successor as abbot, Wulfsige, and Æthelwine’s son, Æthelweard. The bodies of Æthelweard and Wulfsige were recovered by the monks of Ramsey and brought here for burial. They wanted to do the same for Eadnoth, but as they were returning to Ramsey with his body they stopped overnight at Ely. The monks of Ely insisted on keeping Eadnoth's body, and there were too few Ramsey monks to resist them - so Eadnoth was buried at Ely, where he still lies.

When Cnut became king shortly after Assandun, Ramsey must have looked to him like a hotbed of opposition. Tradition says that he planned to suppress the monastery altogether, but the abbot of Peterborough talked him out of it; instead he imposed an abbot of his choice, one Wythmann. The Ramsey monks were not pleased, and opposed Wythmann so vehemently that he resigned and left the country. Clearly the years 1016-20 were a stressful time for the monks of Ramsey. But after Wythmann's departure in 1020, Ramsey seems to have made it up with Cnut. It had a defender again: Æthelric, bishop of Dorchester, who had been educated at Ramsey and managed to get on well with the new king.

The Ramsey Chronicle has some lively stories about Æthelric's history with the abbey. One tells how when he was a child in the school at Ramsey, he and some other boys decided to try and ring the bells in the tower of the abbey church. They got into the tower and rang the bells so enthusiastically that they cracked one, and got into big trouble with the schoolmaster (it would be nice to think their master was Byrhtferth!).

The naughty boy grew up to be an influential bishop, and a good friend to his old school. It was Æthelric who persuaded Cnut to grant the relics of St Felix to Ramsey - a valuable possession, since Felix was the missionary saint who had converted East Anglia to Christianity in the seventh century, and was the first bishop of the East Angles. Felix's relics were preserved at Soham, but the shrine and community there had been destroyed in the ninth century, so the king gave permission for them to be removed to Ramsey. The Ramsey Chronicle memorably claims that when the Ramsey monks were sailing home with Felix's relics through the Fens they were pursued by the monks of Ely, also in a boat, eager to have the precious relics themselves. A miraculous fog descended, in which the Ely monks lost their way, and our Ramsey heroes were able to escape with the relics. (Since Soham is closer to Ely than it is to Ramsey you can see why the Ely monks might feel a little aggrieved! But perhaps it was revenge for Eadnoth.) Even the Ramsey chronicler who records this story expresses some doubts about its veracity - with engaging frankness, he says 'the reader is not required to believe the story, provided that he feels it to be certain that every part of the relics of St Felix were translated to the Church of Ramsey, and honourably deposited there'. Fair enough.

Another much later (and much more unlikely) story connects Cnut and Ramsey: local tradition in the sixteenth century claimed that Cnut kept a place near Ramsey at Bodsey for fishing, and that his children went from there to school at Peterborough. On one occasion the king’s children and servants were travelling by boat across Whittlesey Mere back to Ramsey, amusing themselves by singing on the voyage, when they were caught up in a sudden storm. The boat sank, and many were killed, including two of Cnut's sons. When Cnut heard of it, he decided to prevent such events in future, and had a ditch cut on the border between Huntingdonshire and Cambridgeshire, known as ‘Swordes-delf’ and ‘Knouts-delf’ or ‘Kings-delf’. Tradition said that his unfortunate sons were buried at Bodsey and 'their tomb-stone still exists in the south-east corner of the dining room of Bodsey House'. (So says Ramsey Abbey, Its Rise and Fall! I hardly need say there is no other record of these sons...)

There are also good stories in the Ramsey Chronicle which supposedly took place in Cnut's time, about how Bishop Æthelric acquired various lands for Ramsey. Two stories tell how Æthelric managed to barter estates from Danes who had settled in the area, who were leaving England because they were afraid the local people would kill them. (If true, very interesting.) Another tells how on one occasion, Cnut was travelling through the kingdom and Æthelric was accompanying him. They stopped in a certain place where there wasn't room for everyone to stay with the king, so Æthelric lodged with a Danish man. The Danish man got very drunk and made a bet with Æthelric: he said that he'd sell his estate to Æthelric, if the bishop could raise the purchase money by the very next morning. So Æthelric waited for his drunken host to fall asleep, and sent a messenger to Cnut. Cnut was interrupted in the middle of a game of chess, but he agreed to loan Æthelric the money, and he was able to buy the estate for Ramsey.

But the most memorable story concerns an estate obtained from a Danish man named Thurkill. It goes like this: Thurkill's wife died, leaving him with one son. He remarried, but his new wife was jealous of her husband's love for her stepson. She called in the services of a witch to made the father stop loving his child (as you do). The witch's spells were so successful that Thurkill rejected the boy, but this didn't satisfy the wife, who wanted her own children to be her husband's own heirs; so while Thurkill was away she murdered her stepson, and buried him in a meadow with the witch's help. When Thurkill returned, she told him the boy had just disappeared and couldn't be found. Thurkill believed her, and over time grew reconciled to the loss.

But after a while the witch grew very poor, and came asking Thurkill's wife for help. The woman refused her and drove her from the door (big mistake!), so the witch went to Bishop Æthelric and told him about the murder of the boy and concealment of the body. The bishop decided to investigate and summoned Thurkill and his wife to come to him, but Thurkill refused three times. At last the king had to order him to come, and to bring witnesses to a trial at the place where the child's body had been buried. The abbot of Ramsey was there, with some of his monks, and they brought with them some saints' relics. The bishop told the abbot and monks to place the relics on the child's grave.

In front of the whole crowd, Thurkill declared that he was entirely innocent - he had known nothing of the child's murder. And he was so sure of his wife's innocence that he swore an oath: he wrapped his hand in his long beard and said, 'O Bishop, as God permits me to glory in this beard, so my wife is clear and innocent of the crime imputed to her.' After saying this he took his hand away from his face, and the beard came away with it!

Everyone was amazed, and realised the wife must be guilty. Thurkill himself was dumbfounded. But his wife still denied the crime, so Æthelric ordered that the grave should be opened. The child's bones were brought out, and at the sight the wife broke down and confessed her guilt. Thurkill was so grateful to the bishop that he gave him part of the estate of Ellesworth, which Æthelric promptly bestowed on Ramsey Abbey. Which is why we know this story.

So... that happened. Busy times at Ramsey in the eleventh century, what with Danes and witches everywhere. Another highlight from this period concerns Ælfweard, a monk of Ramsey who was appointed Abbot of Evesham. He was a kinsman of Cnut's, and in 1040 (after the succession crisis which followed Cnut's death) he was entrusted with the mission of fetching Harthacnut and his mother Emma back from Flanders to rule in England. (On the journey there was a storm, but Ælfweard prayed to St Egwin of Evesham and was miraculously saved). He was an assiduous collector of relics, a praiseworthy but rather a dangerous occupation - he went too far when he purloined some relics from the shrine of St Osyth, and was punished with leprosy. He tried to go home to Evesham, but the monks there refused to let him in. So he came to Ramsey, where he was looked after until his death. In gratitude to Ramsey he bestowed on them his collection of relics, including the jawbone of St Egwin and the blood-stained cowl of St Ælfheah.

Oh, and one of the abbots in the eleventh century was murdered by his own servant, an Irish man he had rescued from a life of begging and brought to eat at his own table: one day, for some reason, he told the man to eat outside, and the man stabbed him. Personal as well as national tragedies form part of history at such a place as this.

I could tell more of these stories, but the last eleventh-century abbot who need concern us today is Æthelsige. (I'm really sorry they all have such similar names!) Æthelsige was a close associate of Harold Godwineson, and at the time of the Norman Conquest he was abbot of St Augustine's in Canterbury. Legend says that in 1066 Æthelsige had a vision telling him to warn Harold of a threatened invasion - and he was right to be worried, of course. He held on to his position in Canterbury for four years after the Conquest, but it must have been sticky. In 1070 Æthelsige left St Augustine’s and sailed for Denmark. Accounts differ as to the cause of his journey; some say he was sent on an embassy by William the Conqueror, others that he was forced to flee England because of his opposition to the Norman regime. In any case, Æthelsige didn't return to England until 1080, and then he went not to Canterbury but to Ramsey, where he became abbot. One story says that as he was returning he was caught in a terrible storm at sea (yes, another one). As all hope was vanishing, he had a vision of a bishop promising him he would return safely if he would introduce the celebration of the Feast of the Conception of the Virgin on December 8th. It had been celebrated on that date in late Anglo-Saxon England, but apparently suppressed after the Norman Conquest. Æthelsige said he would, and the storm was calmed. When he came to Ramsey, he introduced the feast on that date, and from Ramsey it spread to the rest of England. (So the story goes.)

I'd better not get onto the twelfth century, or we'll be here all day. But Ramsey's twelfth-century history was pretty stormy: in 1144 Geoffrey de Mandeville seized the abbey, turfed out the monks, and turned it into a castle during his rebellion against King Stephen. This so disturbed the peace of the abbey that blood poured from the walls of the church and cloister as a sign of God's anger. (The chronicler Henry of Huntingdon, a tenant of Ramsey, says he witnessed this himself.)

But it's very peaceful now. These heads on the gatehouse saw the abbey seized and destroyed in the sixteenth century, its stones carted off to build Cambridge colleges, its famous library scattered to the winds; but now they gaze down on a quiet green, a little apart from the busy town.

The tower of the parish church was built in the seventeenth century with stone taken from the abbey. The Ramsey Chronicle says the abbey church, which would have been on a much larger scale than this, had two towers.

Of course this is nothing compared to what the abbey would have been, but it's a nice church, and, importantly, open ('Open for Discovery', in fact!).

This was, as I said earlier, built in the twelfth century as an infirmary or guesthouse for the abbey, and converted into a parish church a century or so later. Apparently it would originally have been a hall with a chapel at the end (now the chancel) but it looks perfectly church-like now.

It's quite plain inside, but it has these elegant arches with restrained but lovely carving.

On that September morning it was full of light and shadow, and I had plenty of time to study the windows.

Long-term readers of this blog will know that I like finding depictions of medieval people in modern stained glass, and there are some good examples at Ramsey. I was surprised and pleased to find one of the founders, Æthelwine himself, here appearing under the name 'Duke Ailwyn'.

Note the ruins of the abbey behind his head:

Elsewhere is a window with three more figures of local importance:

The lady is Ely's St Etheldreda, of course:

Ely Cathedral is looking lovely behind her - apparently the old rivalry has passed away!

And St Felix:

I'd like to think this window shows the relics arriving at Ramsey after that race through the Fenland fogs...

The central figure is St Thomas Becket, to whom this church is dedicated:

A little bit of Canterbury in the Cambridgeshire fens.

Elsewhere in the church, there was this sweet little snapshot of Thomas' life!

Other medieval people to be seen here include Edward the Confessor, shown as part of a window on the theme of 'kings building temples'.

He's building Westminster Abbey, of course. If only some of his successors on the English throne had been more fond of building abbeys than of despoiling them!

Nice detail on the building in the background:

No sign of St Oswald, though.

The other windows are pleasing too, in a very different way - they are, unmistakeably, Morris & Co.

So some of the most beautiful things here are medievalism, if not medieval.

It's a lovely little church, complete in itself and well worth a visit; but it's impossible to be here and not feel a powerful sense of loss. 'Ramsey the rich' would have had such a splendid church - it would have been a rival (literally) to nearby Ely, which has one of the most breathtaking of England's medieval cathedrals. Ely's beauty is marked but not marred by the scars of Reformation violence; Ramsey's is just gone. What happened to all those books gathered by St Oswald and Abbo, or the library of Hebrew texts which Ramsey possessed in the later Middle Ages? One source says that in the fourteenth century Ramsey possessed 100 psalters; three survive. (Here's one.) I think it's time for your regularly-scheduled reminder: Ely Cathedral, with its stunning feats of art and engineering, and Ramsey Abbey, with its tradition of learning and scholarship, are medieval. So please don't use that word to mean 'barbaric'. It wasn't anyone 'medieval' who destroyed Ramsey's great library and smashed up Ely's exquisite carvings in the name of religion.

For various reasons, in the past few years I've visited several sites of what were once great abbey complexes, and they all have their own stories to tell about the way modern Britain manages to accommodate the traces (tangible and intangible) of the past. I've been to St Augustine's Abbey in Canterbury, now an English Heritage site with an entrance fee and guidebooks and the footprint of the abbey painstakingly marked out; Crowland, a dream of a ruin; Bury St Edmunds, a large and well-kept public park where children play on the graves of the abbots; Abingdon, where the stones of St Æthelwold's abbey are rearranged into tasteful Victorian follies; Peterborough, where the town has largely eaten up whatever remained of the monastery; and Reading, where the abbey's former precincts now contain modern skyscrapers more ghostly in their glittering emptiness, on the Saturday I was there, than any medieval ruin could be.

At all these places (and a few more) it's been pleasing to observe the signs of modern communities willing to take pride in, and take care of, a monastic heritage which can be challenging for 21st-century people to understand, let alone admire. I like medieval monks and find them infinitely sympathetic, but I understand why other people don't; it's easy for me to say 'the Anglo-Saxon monks who founded your church were amazing and you should be proud of that', much harder for the people who actually have to deal with crumbling stones, confusing sources, and competing demands on space and money. And yet more often than not you encounter at these places respect and fondness for the medieval monastic past, a willingness to take an imaginative leap of sympathy towards people whose lives were so different from our own. There are exceptions - another day I'll tell you what the information boards at Peterborough Cathedral, which I visited on the same day as Ramsey, assert about medieval relics and that dread word 'superstition'... But in general these places have given me hope. We don't have to idealise medieval monks, or denigrate them for their 'superstition' (a code-word for 'Catholicism', of course); they were just human beings, and Ramsey's history more than any other reminds me of that. These stories, from the touching to the tasteless to the absurd, are just the histories of human institutions, with all the good and bad that entails; and there's so much to learn about them from the stories they told. You can lose the buildings, but the stories remain; if Ramsey's rich in anything now, it's rich in people.