Arrowhead of Chalk - a cautionary landmark

18
Arrowhead of Chalk
In which we put Geology to the best possible use
Lime from the chalk-hills on the far side of the River was an essential ingredient for the building of the
Cathedral – and evidence of mining has been confirmed, stretching back to Herbert's time. The little
natural promontory which bulges outward from the ridge, on which St Michael's Chapel was to sit, shows
distinct signs of having been shaped into a sharp “V” pointing straight along the Axis of the Cathedral, so
presumably, at the point when the decision was reached to alter the Line of the building, this may have
involved adjustments and re-cuttings all up the steep slope, as well as the shifting of the line of poles
which would have marked the Axis all the way from the brow of the hill, across the River and right into
the old market-place, Tombland.
B
ut now, after all, let us allow ourselves a little unprofessional buzz of excitement. Stand
with me once again with your back to the end-wall at the East of the Cathedral and face for a
second time that eastern ridge – modern Gas Hill and all the old remnants of Thorpe Wood as
it tumbles over the edge among victorian housing and sporadic industry down the steep
escarpment towards the River, invisible from here.
If for a dangerous instant we let ourselves slip back through time, a moment's dizziness
transports us to a skyline of almost unbroken woods – except where our old friend, Father
Time sits in flinty senility, poor fragmented St Michael staring like an old man's face out over
Norwich Town – for now we are of a certainty back in the Eighteenth Century, and the voice
of George Borrow directs us to look down below and to the right.
Do you see it? The great gashes of white chalk quarry gouged into the hill-side? What is
today called Rosary Road, gently climbing the slope towards its junction above Thorpe
Railway Station – why, once this road was known to folk as Chalk Hill. And Borrow nods
melodramatically, gesturing towards its lower slopes, to the grim hollow in the hills known as
Lollards Pit, where: “… many a saint of God has breathed his last beneath that white
precipice, midst flame and pitch; many a grisly procession has advanced… across the
old bridge towards the Lollards’ hole…” For once upon a time – specially under Bishop
Henry Despencer in the late 1300s – this was a place to dump all our civic and religious
inconveniences; and witches, heretics and religious enthusiasts (unspeakable Lollards!) were
tidily incinerated beneath these sheer walls of exposed chalk.
A little later, in the Nineteenth Century, it is said that the Rev. J.W.Hayes made a discovery
which lets us slip back much much further. He uncovered several substantial tunnels
burrowed into the hillside, two major ones roughly ten feet in both height and width
extending inwards to more than 120 feet, with several side-tunnels branching off at rightangles for more than 50 feet. These had evidently provided chalk for lime-burning which had
taken place in the vicinity, and had evidently been in more or less continuous use since the
Eleventh Century, when it seems pretty certain that Herbert had recognized the usefulness of
having abundant chalk right on his doorstep.
Treated chalk makes lime, lime makes mortar, and a Cathedral mops up plenty of that. So this
area just to the right of where St Michael's was once very visible on the ridge was the site
where the smoke of martyrs and industry had dispersed in the sky over Thorpe Wood during
the course of several centuries. Which means, of course, this was all taking place just below
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St Leonard's Priory – which stood either very dominantly also on the Ridge to the South of St
Michael's – or (as some would suggest) concealed more mutedly among the trees, its job to
service St Michael's, not to rival it.
Now let us strain fantasy to its limits, and wonder at this primal landscape, bereft of
development, with scarce a roof, not so much as a chimney, to interrupt the foliage – except
perhaps the grey-blue smoke of a forester's fire rising in the late-afternoon haze. Say,
September 1095. Here in the fore-ground the men stand round the pit where their interrupted
foundations lie beneath them, absorbing what they have just heard, glancing occasionally up
to where the Line cuts across the gentle slope of Cowholm Meadow down marshily to the
Wensum bank.
For there is, you see, a Line. It has been marked out with care, great poles of timber cut from
that same slope above the River, where the ground has been cleared in a wide swathe all the
way down the escarpment from brow to river-bank, directly opposite the axis of the
hypothetical Cathedral.
For there is, you see, an Axis. It has been marked out with care, timbers marking first the
Cathedral's Crossing, where the transepts will soon branch out to North and South, then the
altar of Holy Cross, near where the nave will begin, then the West Door at the far end of the
building, and, finally – St Michael's Cross itself, on the edge of Tombland, the Cautionary
Landmark. Pro bunda ad cautelam. Further to the West, who knows? The ground slopes up
into modern London Street, and our view is soon obscured. To the East, where our medieval
labourers are now turned with hunched shoulders, the line of the Axis points along the poles
towards the bald streak of hillside –
And it is All Wrong!
A sudden glint of captured sunlight dazzles. Someone is
flashing a glass from the ridge, a little to the left of the
clearing's middle. Behind them, a distant man has a
brazier ready lit just below the Standing Cross, and
suddenly St Michael vanishes in the smoke caused by the
damp cloth thrown over the charcoal. The glass flashes
again. From Ridge to Tombland, they are surveying the
Degree of Error. We must re-dig our pits, we must uproot
our poles, we must clear the underbrush and pick and
mattock away till we have shifted our spine to the North.
018.1 PLAN: Map of
hillside on East of River,
showing lime workings,
Lollards’ Pit and
promontory of St Michael.
For there is a Spine. We have already noticed it, a long
while back – as we stood gazing out over the City among
the sycamores – that V-shape still visible despite nine
centuries and abundant human restlessness and
underbrush. That V of modern health-and-safety railing
still marks where Herbert's Surveyor said, “Now!” when
they flashed the glass.
Then they took up their tools with a sigh, and began to
shape the gradient all over again, bringing its spinal ridge over to the right, carving at the
vertebral ground, till the Axis Line was sharper than the knobs between neck and pelvis, till
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the white began to show through where the bones were exposed, and the little natural
promontory on which St Michael's Chapel was to be reincarnated honed to an arrow-point all
the way down its steepness, indicating where to Cut-Along-the-Line.
Oh yes. The Axis was Meant beyond question. The hillside still thrums with that harp-string
connection, the melody of that cry, “Who is she that goes forth, rising like the morn,
beautiful as the moon, clear as the sun, terrible as the drawn up line of battle?"
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19
A Strange Convergence
In which we squint at a very queer angle
The two “Radial” chapels on either side of the old Lady Chapel have caused puzzlement to historians,
because, unlike the many other contemporary examples of cathedrals and churches with triplets of
chapels springing from the Eastern Apse, at Norwich the “Radials” do not radiate either diagonally
outwards or twisted round to face the East in parallel with the main Axis. Instead, they squint across the
“bow” of the Cathedral, their focuses converging towards a point beyond the East of the building. We
may, however, follow their imaginary diagonal lines still further outwards till they reach the line of the
Ridge – and then wonder whether once upon a time, just as the end of the Axis itself was marked by St
Michael's Chapel, perhaps these two might have pointed to the sites of vanished marker-buildings on the
Ridge. The Jesus Chapel (to the North) might easily have met its Marker on the South of the Ridge at
some Tower or Pinnacle of St Leonard's Priory. On high ground to the North no evidence is recognized –
though we may well speculate as to where exactly a rumoured Chapel was once sited long ago, known to
local people as the Chapel of St Catherine de Monte.
W
e are not done yet – as is pretty evident from the bulk of unturned pages ahead of
you. I guess, though, that for some readers who have persevered with me this far, we may
now be nearing the parting of the ways, and the remaining pages will remain clean and
closed, like the Ages yet to come.
Let me show you one more thing before we part. Let me
show you The Radial Chapels.
019.1 DRAWING:
Exterior of the Luke
Chapel.
The Radial Chapels do what their name describes: they
radiate, they sprout. In this sense the Axial Chapel is
“Radial” too, for the Apse of a Cathedral is nothing more
than a half-circle, whose radii may be conceived
externally, like an orangle flipped inside-out. For our
purposes, though, let us confine ourselves to stepping
either side of the Axis, to discover this Architect’s concept of Symmetry.
To North and South these complementary Chapels emerge each in a curious curl one to the
left, one to the right of the Axis. They are very self-contained, very tall, very queer.
Pevsner is not the only architectural historian to have found himself arrested by this
queerness. For a start, there is something intimidating about their sheer size – which is not
something you can hope to appreciate internally. From outside, though, one can see how
imposingly they rise two levels in height, these strangely distorted radiating excrescences;
and if we factor in a computer-graphic reconstruction
of the Axial Chapel at the bow-end, hooping out in its
horse-shoe, also steep, also double-height, the heaving
019.2 PLAN: Lay-out
cluster of triple-bulging masonry is quite a sight for the
of East end of Norwich
retrospective imagination. Once, long ago, in those
Cathedral.
first days when the Tower was but an idea in the mind
of the Architect, they stood alone rising from those
early foundations, strangely independent in their
isolation; it would have been a sight indeed to jolt the
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heart and awe the eye. Someone, sure enough,
perceived the Scheme in his intellect, and drove it
upwards into being.
019.3 PLAN: Diagram
of interior design of the
Luke Chapel.
It was not, though, the two-storey bulk of these Radial
side-chapels which caught Pevsner's attention – after
all, as tourists or worshipers we rarely stray to the
higher levels of the Cathedral, and very few of us ever
wander round to gawp at its exterior close-to. No –
Pevsner's reason for his passing curiosity (before, like all
others, turning away) was the sense you get when
standing in either the Jesus Chapel (North) or the St Luke
019.4 PLAN: Diagram
Chapel (South) that the walls curve and then re-curve
of lay-out of East end of
most peculiarly. To stand in one of these chapels has
Fécamp Priory.
something of the sensation about it of being inside a giant
human eye-ball. Circular in basic design, the pure curve is
interrupted at the Eastern end by a second imaginary
circle which suddenly presses the wall out into a window,
strong in morning light. Like a pupil.
Or like an exercise in Geometry (which was doubtless its starting-point), in which the
Mathematician took his compasses and drew his Large Circle, then shifted the compass-point
East to just beyond the outer edge and
described a second Circle, slightly smaller,
whose Circumference passed through the
019.5 PLAN: Comparative lay-outs of
Centre of the first. Pevsner hazards an
typical Apse with diagonal radial axes
interesting interpretation of the inter-related
and Apse with parallel East-oriented
functions of these two Circles: the larger
radial axes.
curve of the Western Nave is linked, says he,
with the small circle of holiness which is the
Sanctuary. So interlocked forever these two
perfect rings perform their arcane purpose to
eternity.
But we haven't yet reached the true strangeness here – which is this. Of the many cathedrals
constructed during the very active period of building in which Herbert was in his prime, a
large number did indeed share this habit of of multiple outgrowths – and from many a
Romanesque Apse sprouted triplet chapel configurations in abundant variety. It was quite the
fashion – and, sure enough, at Herbert's own mother-abbey of Fécamp, a fancy fusillade of
curves and rectangles fussed together in cubby-chapels. Here and elsewhere, though, the
commonest general practice was to face each attendant chapel diagonally outwards in the
direction most amenable to both geometry and aesthetics – which meant of course roughly
North-East and South-East. Here and there, a more determined pre-occupation with the
concept of East for its own sake drove architects to invent ingenious ways of swiveling their
radial chapels round so that they conformed with the strictures of symbolism – which
sometimes involved clever but rather tortured and strenuous design.
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But Norwich does something else. The Architect, doubtless under instruction from Herbert
Losinga, contrived not only to achieve East from a chapel whose natural disposition was at a
diagonal, but to push it beyond East. More than 9° beyond – on both sides. The result of this
is strange indeed: the North Chapel is skewed right
round to face just South of East and the South
Chapel faces just North of East. In effect the Radial
019.8 PLAN: Diagram of
Chapels of Norwich Cathedral are squinting.
If the Axis which we examined in the previous
chapter was reminiscent of the Surveyor's rule-andline, the Radial design begins to make the
Cathedral feel more like a camera. We are
encouraged to see not one Line but three – and
these, as we have seen, are not “radiating” outwards
as in other religious buildings, nor do they run
parallel. At Norwich, the Radial Axes of the Apse
converge.
Axis-Lines, demonstrating
Triangular calculations:
a) plan showing distances and
angles on the ground;
b) right-angle Triangle calculation
of position of “Cross-Over” point
of all 3 axes.
Let's do the Maths. Norwich Cathedral's alignment
is not due East (90°). It points in a more North-Easterly direction – let us say 75°. The degree
of difference between the Axis of 75° and the focal direction of each Radial is 9°44' beyond
what it would have been if it had been parallel – but let us call it 9° for simplicity. That means
that the North Chapel faces 84° (75° + 9°) and the South Chapel faces 66° (75° – 9°).
019.9 PLAN: Diagram
of East end of Church at
Mehun-sur-Yèvre
019.6 PLAN: Diagram
of Luke Chapel showing
Axis alignment.
The imaginary line which runs straight across the
Cathedral at right-angles to the Axis and which marks the
beginning of the curve we call the “Apse” is known to
Architects as the “Chord”, and at Norwich the Chord cuts
across the Cathedral very nearly in line with the
Westernmost point – the “back” wall – of each of the two
Radial Chapels, the point at which their slanted axes begin.
The distance between this point in the Jesus Chapel (North)
and the equivalent point in the Luke Chapel (South) is
30.5m. From this, a rough calculation would put the point
of convergence about 96.25m from the back-walls of the
Radial Chapels, or about 95m from the centre of the
Chord1. From here to the East end of the Regimental
Chapel is about 27m.
So the imaginary
Cross-Over, the Point
of Convergence of the
Cathedral Axis and its
two Radials, is around
68m from the Eastern-most point of the Cathedral – 68m
out in the direction of the River as we stand with our
1
019.7 PLAN: Diagram
of lay-out of Norwich
Cathedral showing
direction of axes.
We can calculate this distance by creating a Triangle from the junction of the Axis and the Chord, assessing the
missing measurements by reference to the properties of the Rightangle Triangle thus formed.
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backs to the East end of the Regimental Chapel, watching the sun rise. Invisibly ahead of us
the lines of Herbert Losinga’s three converging Axes meet and cross over, before fanning
outwards on their mysterious courses towards the raised horizon of the Ridge.
Now let's do the Architectural History. Professor Eric Fernie lingers with considerable
interest on this Radial Chapel aspect of Herbert's design – because it remains such a mystery
why he should ever have lighted on this complex formula and where he got it from. There is
only one other example
of such a design, says
Fernie, which pre-dates
Herbert's Cathedral,
and this is in the church
of a comparatively
019.10 PLAN: Diagram showing 3 lines of Axis fanning out to 3
insignificant town in
points on Thorpe Ridge: St James’s Hill, St Michael’s Chapel, St
central France, near
Leonard’s Priory.
Bourges, called
Mehun-sur-Yèvre. Its
ground-plan is strange
indeed – because at its
Eastern end it is
heavily and peculiarly
asymmetrical. Its South
Radial chapel and the
chapel on its Axis are each laid out in the simplest of curves (the South Radial predictably
South-East-ish in its focus and the Axial East-ish), though oddly this Axial chapel is not
centrally positioned in the East wall of the Church, but pressed Southwards by a weirdly
distorted North Radial Chapel.
This North Radial resembles Herbert's design in its theory – you can see the same “eyeball”
likeness – but in practice it seems more like a diseased and twisted caricature. In fact it is
screwed right round so that its “pupil” must face almost to the equivalent of South-East –
much further round than the Jesus Chapel in Norwich Cathedral.
In all this discussion and comparison, Professor Fernie's task is to describe, not to speculate,
so (along with other commentators) he highlights the oddity but suggests nothing besides the
possibility that perhaps the aesthetic effect was all that Herbert was after. Professors must
respect the boundary between ideas founded in stone and those which float in air. You and I,
however, are unconstrained by professional considerations and boundaries of expectation,
and therefore free to step over. So:
Now let's do the Logic. If (as we saw) Herbert's design had the Cathedral Axis (for reasons
we have not explored yet) terminating in the Chapel of St Michael, then doesn't it follow that
we should be prodding along that same Ridge of hillside for two other such Points of
Termination, one on either side? For I'm sure it has not escaped you that the Point of
Convergence, the Cross-Over of all three lines, cannot be the be-all and end-all. It wasn't for
the main Axis – that passed on to its pre-ordained terminus on the hill. Why shouldn’t the
Radials?
Well, in one direction we should have no problem at all in speculating on a worthy Terminus:
let's hazard the Line radiating from the North Chapel, having duly Crossed Over, spotlights
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some prominent feature of Herbert’s Priory of St Leonard. We can be as vague as we like
about this: so little is known about the exact lay-out of St Leonard's that it's safe enough to
hide in speculation. The Line falls well within the known boundaries of that Priory – and we
can securely dream up some pinnacle to pin the theory on. So much for the right-hand flank
of St Michael's –
right from our
view-point, as
we stand still
gazing up
dreamily from
019.11 MAP: showing relative positions of Ridge (highlighting St
below.
James’s Hill) and site of St William’s Chapel on Mousehold – indicating
too the extent of Pockthorpe.
On the left –
why, there's the
headland, the
spur of hillside,
on which the
victorian Prison
stands, a continuation of the same ridge, but beginning to curl round inwards in our direction.
Known on maps as St James's Hill, and on old charts flecked with windmills, it would be a
splendid site for a ruin! But as far as I know, nothing exists above ground – Have they
looked? – and no extant document links Herbert to any building there, either. St Mary
Magdalene's, Herbert's Lazar House, is too far round, hidden in a hollow, and the only other
detectable chapel, St William in the Woods, is half a mile off on the higher slopes of
Mousehold Heath.
Except.
Except for one confusing reference in an Eighteenth Century study of Norfolk history by
Francis Blomefield which refers to this St William's Chapel (said in the history of St Williamin-the-Wood to have been built after Herbert's time – in the second half of the Twelfth
Century) as having, on the contrary, simply replaced an existing Chapel dedicated to St
Catherine – referred to, in folk tradition, as St Catherine de Monte. Rumours of such a
building's existence leave us with this one possibility – rather a long shot, but let's posit it.
The site of St William's is well known, though (like St Michael's) neglected and smothered in
brambles. It lies deep in ancient woodland on comparatively level ground, and although its
location is comparatively high up on Mousehold Heath, it is nowhere near any obvious
escarpment or landscape feature which would make it seem prominently hilly. In-the-Woods
it most certainly is – but certainly not On-the-Mount.
However, if its predecessor was known as “de Monte” (as we are told locals remembered it
in the late 1700s and reported it to Blomefield), this surely suggests a more obviously hill-top
location. Blomefield himself mentions elsewhere in the same work (City of Norwich Chapter
42) that the profits of Lakenham Rectory were said to have funded a cell of monks at St
Catherine's Chapel on Muswold Hill. Besides, there is evidence that a location known as St
Catherine's Hill existed as late as Blomefield's own period: in 1821, we hear, the celebrated
traveller and discoverer of Egyptian antiquities, Mr Belzoni, visited Norwich, where he
visited one Jeremiah Ives Esq of St Catherine's Hill.
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Besides, the legend of St Catherine of Alexandria by long tradition links her with St Michael
in that she is conventionally associated with hill-top sites – for, when the Wheel of Torture
miraculously broke, her tormentors had to resort to decapitating her instead, whereupon
Angels are said to have borne her to God’s own mountain, Mount Sinai. From there her name
travelled to high sacred places across the Christian world – in particular to various English
sites, such as Christchurch in Dorset, St Catherine's Hill at Guildford, and most notably of all
the identically-named location close to the City of Winchester. Her veneration on High Places
in this country has been well established from an early date.
Now the site of St William-in-the-Wood (as it was called from early times) was within the
boundaries of the very substantial parish of Pockthorpe, which stretched from the wooded
uplands of Mousehold Heath, across St James's Hill and right up to the edge of the City
centre at Pockthorpe Gate, which was close to where the Puppet Theatre (old St James's
Church) stands these days.
Now consider this. Francis Blomefield's information was based partially on a very extensive
study of documentary evidence, but to a large extent depended too on what he could glean
from oral accounts. In this, his methods seem to have closely resembled those of
Bartholomew Cotton 500 years earlier: good historians listen to the old folk, on the grounds
that intelligent sifting may sooner or later yield the truth; the skill lies in dissolving the layers
which coat the raw article, thence to de-code it from its garbled form.
In the case of his snippet of information concerning St William-in-the-Wood, we would do
well to suspect a case of partial processing. What if Blomefield was not exactly mis-led, but
perhaps fed two shuffled traditions? Did there linger in extended memory not only
reminiscences of the rites of the Boy Martyr of Mousehold Heath, but also the blurred
recollection of a Chapel consecrated to St Catherine – on a prominent hill-top site and within
the bounds of Pockthorpe?
And, of course, we already know of the existence of just such a place. St James's Hill is both
these things – prominent to a fault, Pockthorpe’s most visible feature, a neat flourish of ridge
tucked invitingly into the escarpment frame of Herbert’s grand design. In the geography of
Norfolk, never big on altitude, a more appropriate site for Catherine de Monte can scarcely
be conceived of.
Can there be let or hindrance? St Catherine, St Leonard, St Michael – North, South and
Central, from Solstice to Solstice through both Equinoxes, the landscape was all set for
whatever three-pronged geo-psychic mesh our good Bishop had in mind to measure out the
Solar Year with. Though Guesswork’s all we’ve got to go on, let’s greet the Dawn with raised
heart and humble spirit for the old man’s sake. And if the Memory of Man has failed, let’s
take the only resort left to us.
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20
A Polar Tilt
In which it is demonstrated how the Year has four corners
The design of the East end of Norwich Cathedral is complicated, with its three focally-converging apsidal
chapels balanced in opposition to St Michael's Chapel on its Ridge – three fingers and one thumb. Such
complexity may encourage us to speculate frantically as to the Cathedral's intended function – perhaps as
an absorber of energies, spiritual or natural, in the manner of a “diviner” or in that of an electrical device
combining positive and negative elements with its straight “neutral” Axis. Less wild in surmise and more
grounded in existing evidence is the possibility that the design incorporates a Solar Calendar, in which the
focus of the two Radiating chapels coincides with the Sun's position at the solstices, with the Summer and
Winter Church festivals of John the Baptist (June) and Christmas (December) both having associations
with the dedications of these chapels; while the Equinoxes certainly bond St Mary and the Archangel
Michael together on two dramatic occasions – at the Annunciation (March) on the day the Shining Sword
implants the Seed in the Virgin, and at Michaelmas (September) when the Apocalypse is unleashed!
L
et’s speculate. Why not get it out of our system? Let's brazenly talk Energy, let's pick
over Chakras, Lemniscates and Analemmas. It’s time to get Geo-psychic.
Then when we've frightened away the Serious Historians and the Terminally Sane, we can
have this book all to ourselves, so we can cosily peel back the Bishop's long-concealed
Intentions and pore over their ingenious workings undisturbed.
Let's get prodding at shameless possibilities.
Statement One: “At Norwich, we have a
Christianized Kundalini.”
Kundalini is a Sanskrit term, signifying the Node020.1 PLAN: Diagram of
points in the Earth, the Chakras or energy-centres
Kundalini – 3 Lines radiating
which may be the cross-overs where two “waves”
from East end of Cathedral,
or currents of energy intersect. In its commonest
forming a “Node” where they
form, this energy is believed to follow nearlycross.
straight fissures or channels across the surface of
the Earth (or perhaps just over or under it), and is
analogous to Electricity, in that it has a Positive
(or Male) charge and a Negative (or Female)
charge which constantly twine and intertwine
round a dead-straight imaginary Line (the Earth charge) – rather like two snakes wound
together round a pole. And of course the technical term for two snakes intertwined round a
pole is Caduceus. The straight central “Line” does not exactly exist, but is the neutral “ghost”
averaging the alternating writhings of the Positive and Negative charges. The Nodes /
Chakras where these intercept are said to radiate energy in the static shapes resembling 4leafed clover leaves or petals, detectable with the use of a Divining Rod. The convergence of
Norwich Cathedral's central Axis with its two opposing Radials may encourage us to believe
that this mimics the old pattern, though (if so) formalized and spiritualized in its design. If
oriented towards the dawn, this would suggest an imbibing of the Sun's radiance, so we might
sense the flow of the current “backwards” down the building, from East to West – which
means that Norwich Cathedral was designed to absorb natural and “spiritual” charges,
including solar radiation.
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Statement Two: “The design at the East of
Norwich Cathedral reproduces a Divining
principle.”
020.2 PLAN: Diagram of East end of
A Divining Rod is the instrument used by
Cathedral demonstrating “Dowsing”
gifted and practised Dowsers (or Diviners),
principle + Dowsing-Rod.
who are sensitive to Earth currents, which the
Rod conveys through their arms as it is
grasped by its V-shaped handles. The most
common form of Rod has this V-shape, the
two tops of the V being its handles, and the
sharp point at its base extending outwards in
a single line or pointer – like a T with its top out-prongs pulled upwards into a V. Thus
Herbert's design at Norwich could be said to suggest this Dowsing pattern, with the two
angled axis-lines of the Radial Chapels as the Handles meeting the straight Neutral course of
the Axis, which represents the Pointer – which then “earths” at St Michael's Chapel. This is
made more interesting by the reciprocating V-shape of the
deliberately manipulated hillside, by which the natural
promontory of the Land of St Michael has been enhanced.
020.3 DRAWING:
The current from the Sky (St Michael) rushes down to
Caduceus – 2 Serpents
encounter or “neutralize” the current of the Earth (St
inter-twined on Rod.
Mary), each holding the other in stasis.
Statement Three: “Norwich Cathedral's lay-out
incorporates recognizable spiritual patterns.”
Let's look far afield. Oriental Wisdom has likewise two
aspects of C'hi energy: YIN (female / negative – “blue dragon of the low hills and valleys”)
and YANG (male / positive – “tiger in the high mountains”). The Worm Ourobouros
swallows its own tail, just as Norse myth depicts the gigantic Jormungand or Miđgarđsorm,
which envelops the whole World tail-in-mouth. In Ancient Israel, the two intertwined
serpents bring to mind Aaron's Rod, which transforms
into a Serpent when cast at Pharaoh's feet – the Hebrew
Caduceus. The two great Pillars in the Temple of
Solomon, with their curious spiral patterning,
019.9 PLAN: Diagram of
reminiscent of the caduceus theme, are named Jachin
East end of Church at Mehunon the right (Stability – “He will establish”) and Boaz
sur-Yèvre
on the left (Strength). Perhaps all these point to
universal patterns present in a new form at Norwich.
Statement Four: “Both in arcane theory and in
biological practice, the design at Norwich hints at
Humanity.”
The Human Body, say the Psychics, has a Right Side which is Male, represented by the
Pineal / Pingala “Serpent”, and a Left Side which is Female, represented by the Pituary / Ida
Serpent – and these Serpents converge on the forehead, forming the Third Eye.
Coincidentally, the Human Brain has two Hemispheres, a Right – which holds the key to
subconscious and “psychic” / intuitive thought, often seen as Female – and a Left – the seat
of the conscious, materialistic Self, more Male than otherwise. It is a striking feature that
these two Hemispheres “cross-over” in their functions, the Left influencing the right-side of
74
the body and the Right the left. A Cathedral is, after all, no less than the representation of the
Human Form in an attitude of sacrifice: Christ crucified, laid out horizontally on the Earth.
Well, that's enough of that. Can you imagine what an Eleventh Century Bishop would have
had to say about such larks? Why, we'd not have got so much as a quarter way through the
first item, I'll be bound. Alien – all utterly alien – and much of it teetering over the
boundaries of Blasphemy too.
Yet when it comes to boundaries, what do we know? To us the period of the Middle Normans
is as alien as the Moon – alien, pure no-man’s-land. Why, who are we to judge how far we
may go before Anathema takes us and we are hurled into Perdition? Bishop Herbert Losinga
thought and knew differently to us, and the fences of his mind followed forgotten borders.
So let us now proceed more cautiously to assert what we may say without igniting too much
tinder. Medieval ecclesiasts and modern historians can both be volatile.
Let us, therefore, examine the Four Corners of Herbert's Year.
Statement Five: “The design of Herbert's Temple reflects the Four Pointers of the Solar
Year.”
We have, you see, not three chapels, but four – for though St Michael's is bodily detached
from the Cathedral, spiritually it counts as integral to its design. In fact, in one aspect it is
more clearly defined than its siblings: there is no doubt at all about its dedication. We have St
Michael.
Next the Axial Chapel – which contained,
according to Cotton, an altar to St Saviour. Elsewhere it
is known as the Chapel of the Virgin or of St Mary or
simply the Lady Chapel. Again, I refer you to the
likelihood that the Axial Chapel (though now destroyed)
was built on two levels, as the Radial Chapels are, thus
providing for two altars at the very least (making
020.5 PLAN: Diagram of
allowances for those who are uncomfortable with the
East end of Cathedral,
idea of having more than one altar in each space). So,
showing the Quarter Days
following local testimony and general tradition, the Axial
and the respective
Chapel has one predominant dedication. We have St
Consecrations.
Mary.
The Radials are more contentious, but not by
much. So let us start with the less so: the South Radial,
now dedicated to St Luke. It was not always thus. From
the time of the Reformation it has held a two-fold role,
doubling as a parish church in place of abandoned St
Mary-in-the-Marsh. Yet even today the attentive tourist
will come away with the knowledge that St Luke's
Chapel formerly had a completely different consecration.
Once it was St John the Baptist's.
The North Radial has a much more complex and obscure history and has sparked
much debate and scholarly poring over the threadbare evidence. It is – and has been for
centuries – known as the “Jesus” Chapel, but such a dedication is not thought to originate
much before the middle period of the Middle Ages, and in any case we have information that
it was once called something quite different. From the earliest times, it appears to have been
75
called the Chapel of the Holy Martyrs. One particularly absorbing clue in this direction is to
be found in the late Twelfth Century manuscript The Life and Miracles of St William, which
tells how the boy “martyr” underwent several “translations” – that is, he was several times
dug up and re-interred – the final time being (according to this particular narrative) in a
chapel described as being to the North of the High Altar.
The antiquary M.R. James discusses this reference in some detail, finally locating
little St William's temporary “final” resting place as the most appropriately dedicated chapel
– this very same Chapel of the Holy Martyrs, that is the Luke Chapel as we know it: the boy
had been martyred, so this (argues James) is a decision which would have made sense. By
slightly selective reasoning, we might also suggest that this dedication would be even more
appropriate if we thought that the unnamed “Martyrs” could be defined more clearly as the
Holy Innocents, those earliest of martyrs in the Christian calendar, the babes slaughtered by
King Herod in the stead of Jesus, an atrocity which has its parallel in the manner in which St
William was thought to have met his death. The Christian proto-martyr is of course St
Stephen, stoned to death at the earliest point in Christian history. And then, of course, there is
Jesus.
Now this (roughly speaking) is how the Medieval Year went. Its spiritual heart was
Lunar, but its framework was Solar. We know the Lunar part well – it is called Easter, which
fluctuates to a different date each year because it is dependent on the timing of the Full
Moon. Let us look now at the less familiar Sun Cycle.
Actually, we know it well enough too – but by (mostly) different names. Our seasons
are marked out by the length of day and night. Thus we have the two Solstices – Shortest Day
(December 21st) and Longest Day (June 21st), Mid-Summer and Mid-Winter. In between
come the inevitable points in the year when day and night are poised equally – the Equinoxes
– the Vernal Equinox (March 21st) and the Autumnal Equinox (September 21st), the well-head
of Spring and the slow decline into Autumn. The Church's Year was marked out similarly
with the four great festivals known as the Quarter Days – the Feast of the Annunciation of the
Blessed Virgin Mary (25th March), the Feast of St John the Baptist (June 24th), the Feast of St
Michael and All Angels or Michaelmas (September 29th) and, of course, Christmas
(December 25th).
Now look with me at the Progress of Sun-rise. Each day it dawns a little further along
that Ridge opposite the Cathedral. If at the Annunciation on March 25th it aligns with St
Michael's Chapel, it will continue rising day after day from behind the hills more and more to
the North as Summer advances, until it reaches its Solstice at the Furthest North point on
John the Baptist's Day in June and then begin its long return journey to the South, re-passing
St Michael's in September, and coming to its Winter Solstice halt way to the South at
Christmas. And so on.
Consider the Consequences for Herbert's careful geometry. St John the Baptist's
Chapel is the South Radial, which squints aslant the Cathedral's bow and aims Northward at
the Ridge, to where we may guess the Summer Solstice lies – at the Feast of St John the
Baptist. With the North Radial, which slants its axial line Southward toward the Winter
Solstice point, Christmas links us not only with Jesus' own special day of Nativity, but also
the Feast of St Stephen, the Type of all martyrs, (26th December) and Holy Innocents Day
(27th December).
Of the greatest interest, though, is what befalls the Church on both the Equinoctial
holy days. Twice a year the Angel comes – St Michael with his blazing Sword; and specially
in Spring the medieval mind turns to the How? of that great Mystery of Immaculate
Conception. We must never disparage the Medieval Mind. It had a logic at its core which
demands respect. If (went the argument) the Virgin indeed conceived, then presumably there
was a Divine Conception of a kind which defies human understanding – but all the same, we
76
020.6
PLAN:
The Annunciation.
Diagram of East end of
Cathedral showing Sword
of St Michael penetrating
the Virgin’s Womb.
believe that Mary was truly human and therefore
followed the normal course of nature afterwards. When
Gabriel announced her miraculous conception, it was
thus taken that the announcement itself, the
“Annunciation”, marked the Moment – from which we
start counting. Nine months from late March takes us,
sure enough, to late December.
Each Equinox, of course, has its different Angel
– but the two by Herbert's time have seemed to blur –
perhaps into two functions of a single Spirit. So that by
the moment of that September dawn when God's
General comes streaming with his Angel Host, Herbert's
Temple angles us a foretaste of the Great and Terrible
day when the Book slams shut and the Sword comes
clear of its scabbard.
But now while the Time of Grace still extends its
kindly balm, here on this morning at the boundary of
March and April, let us stand high upstairs in this
vanished Chapel of the Lady at the moment when that
Other Sword penetrates and the Seed of our salvation is
planted in its warm cranny.
77
21
Rational Fractions
In which we wonder at the complexity of Mathematics
We may well speculate that the monks of Ramsey and of Norwich, surveying the successive sun-rises as
they did, would have been aware of the “8”-like “infinity” figure which methodical observation notes in
following the passage of the Sun as it traces its annual course in the sky. The centre of this horizontal 8
may well provide us with an explanation for Herbert’s interpretation of the “Equinox” points in his
division of the landscape. As for the business of the shift in the Cathedral's Axis, simple explanations like
poor weather conditions might of course account for this, but sky-watching and Church ceremonial
certainly went together, whatever the reason. The late Eleventh Century was distinguished particularly by
a re-discovery in the West of ancient Greek learning, specifically of Astronomy and Mathematics, but this
came at the price of mixing with sources mistrusted by European Christians – in particular, with
intellectually superior Jewish and Islamic influences. At Norwich, geometrical principles undoubtedly
determined architectural design, as well as hinting at spiritual and aesthetic preferences – as for example
in their dependence on such mathematical mysteries as the “irrationality” of the Square Root of 2.
N
ow I freely confess I am no
021.1 DRAWING: “Sunrise in
Northern Europe”.
Impression of Ridge beyond the
Cathedral with the Sun rising diagonally
southward up the sky.
Mathematician (as this chapter will prove
beyond doubt), but at least I'd recognize an
Analemma if I saw one. Not that that's ever
likely to happen. An Analemma is a purely
hypothetical pattern, and anyway no one could
possibly see it all at once. But I do seriously
wonder whether the monks of Norwich were
not engaged in constructing something very
like one in the closing years of the Eleventh
Century.
If you wish to follow in their footsteps, all you need do is set up a single pole, so that it stands
immovable in the ground, inert except for its one task, which is
to cast a shadow, like the Gnomon of a Sundial. And in effect
that is what it is – a Sundial. To be precise, the Greek word
021.2 DRAWING:
Analemma actually means the pedestal of the Sundial, but the
specific scientific use of the term gives it a special and rather
Upright Pole
sacred purpose: it is the annual course which the Sun inscribes
casting its shadow
in the sky, and (in the absence of a fixed camera) the purpose of
on the ground.
your Pole-inthe-ground is
to capture this
invisible solar
021.3 PLAN: “Analemma”.
message continuously broadcast across the
sky from one year's end to the next.
Twelve pegs in the ground marking out
a horizontal figure-of-Eight.
To record and transcribe this, you will need
to measure and mark the Gnomon's shadow
at regular intervals through the year and at
exactly the same time of day on each
occasion – say, noon – then bang a stake in
78
to mark where the end of the shadow falls. If you do this monthly, and have ended up with
your twelve pegs around the Gnomon, then you'll know what I mean. Herbert's astronomers
would certainly have recognized it. The shape before you on the grass will be the Analemma.
There it is, enigmatic and deeply significant, a recognizable but slightly alien Figure 8. Not
(you understand) that any literate person in Herbert's day would have been likely to
understand the meaning of an 8. For a start, the concept of “8” would have been conveyed by
the Roman “VIII”, and the Arabic symbol 8 would have looked alien indeed to any who had
not been nurtured in one particularly exotic location – a strangely remote cultural
environment far off on the watery western fringes of East Anglia. For at Ramsey Abbey,
curious symbols and a dangerous curiosity as to the meanings and workings of things was the
life-blood of the community of brothers there. And here at Norwich Father Herbert employed
those arts in such a practical undertaking as was truly to put them to the test.
For this was no ordinary 8. For one thing, it lay on its side – and for another, the left loop was
very much smaller than the right, which bulged out surprisingly. Whether the Community
recognized the causes of this (as we do) is impossible to know for certain, but we now
understand that the peculiarly asymmetrical shape of the Analemma is the product of a
combination of two aspects of our planet Earth's behaviour:
1 The Earth is tilted on its axis at an angle of 23.5° in relation to the plane of its Orbit
round the Sun.
2 This Orbit is not circular but elliptical.
In addition, the Sun's apparent course is affected by our
position in the Northern Hemisphere – and this accounts
021.4 PLAN:
for the elongation of the Figure pegged out on the grass.
“Lemniscate”.
But whatever the Brothers' grasp of these cosmological
A figure of Eight on its
causes, they would undoubtedly have recognized
something else, as no doubt you too will have done. This is
not just an Analemma; it is, unmistakably, a Lemniscate –
the Figure of Eternity – inscribed annually in the Sky, here
traced by joined-up dots in shadow-braille on the ground. I wonder seriously whether Herbert
de Losinga did not look at the unevenness of the Figure and shake his head at how
consistently the Heavens told the Parable of
God: we have the promised Forever, true – but
see foreshadowed in the hour-glass how Time
will one day run out. Three-quarters flown, and
counting!
Actually, I'd guess the brothers of Norwich
Priory were busy not just with this but with a
mixture of observations, one of which was
clearly to determine how the year's sunrises
synchronized with this Ridge of Thorpe Manor,
which had fallen into Herbert's lap like a giant
calculator. And true to his roots as one-time
Abbot of Ramsey, Bishop Herbert busied
himself here with his astronomical surveyors,
his scientists, his mathematicians, all hard at
79
021.5 PLAN: Position of the two
Equinox sun-rises on Ridge beyond
Cathedral.
work determining the lay-out of this vast Theodolite of a Temple. The Science of God was
the new learning of his age, and a virgin site was truly a gift of God – to a man with eyes to
see.
But we have in the Analemma much more than this great Symbol of Eternity before us. It is
quite possible that at Norwich it holds a special significance for Herbert’s understanding of
what we had before known simply as the Equinox; if so, it is revolutionary indeed. Earlier in
this discussion, we had entertained the notion (from practical experiment) that if one keeps
watch at dawn on St Michael’s Hill during the early days of April, then the Sun will be
witnessed rising over Herbert’s ruined Chapel
– and we had temporarily shrugged off the
apparent discrepancy of around 10 days to a
fortnight by referring to issues concerning the
021.6 PLAN: Analemma in sky
Medieval calendar. However, what I have not
above Ridge beyond Cathedral,
mentioned till now is the much more pressing
demonstrating how the Chapel stands in
matter of the sun-rise at the Autumn Equinox –
line with the centre of the “8” – on the
that is, St Michael and All Angels Day:
two relevant dates.
Michaelmas. If you try watching the dawn at
the appointed date – either 21st September
(Equinox) or the 29th (Michaelmas) – you’re in
for a disappointment. The Sun rises well to the
South of St Michael’s around these days. It is a
good three weeks beyond the Point of Alignment: we have arrived too late!
However, if you apply the Principle of the Analemma, you will find that in North-West
Europe the middle-point of the Figure-of-Eight with which the Sun invisibly marks out the
year, the Point of Cross-Over which it arrives at twice annually, differs by a significant
margin from the conventional days of the Equinox – which occur, of course, in late March
and in late September. Instead, the Analemma gives us points close to 12th April and 30th
August. There is, in short, a beautiful co-incidence between the Sun’s alignment down the
Axis, marked by the Chapel and the Cathedral roof-ridge, and the Cross-Point in the centre of
the celestial 8. Herbert’s Year may have had something of a different shape to it than that held
by unenlightened Christians. Moreover, we shall be encountering repeated echoes of those
two Circles of the Analemma – the Bigger and the Smaller – as we dig further.
Ancient Knowledge was seeping North and West all during the period of Ramsey’s early
foundation; in the work of the Egyptian astronomer Ptolemy (90-168AD), the Analemma
figures sure enough – and in unimaginably distant days the same phenomenon had been
identified under a quite different name, also Greek. The great scientific philosopher Eudoxus
of Cnidus (408-366BC) called it the Hippopede – that is the Horse-Fetter, or (as some
translate it) the Horse-Shoe. It is enough to make us glance with renewed interest at the
peculiar shapes chosen by Bishop Herbert for the design of his Axial Chapel with its horseshoe-like imprint in the ground – and at the double-circle design which characterizes the
over-bearing cross-eyed double-bulge of the Luke and Jesus Chapels.
But what of the whole vexed business of that apparent change of heart over the exact line of
the Axis, when the foundations of the Lady Chapel were suddenly shifted? Well, all we can
do here is to enter a fog of speculation. Perhaps it was indeed merely the Weather –
prolonged cloudiness might have wrought frustration on a programme of careful observation
at the crucial period when time was pressing on Herbert to proceed with his Project. What if
80
the early Springs of both 1094 and 1095 drove the astronomers to despair with dawn after
unbroken dawn, and just a disparate fuzz on the Horizon? And then 25th May 1096 – brilliant
day-break and mortified horror! But no – oh no. The
records are silent. We have a few marks on the ground –
fragments of ruined and forgotten chapels and tantalizing
021.7 DRAWING:
but undetailed passing references by Cotton and the like –
but nothing solid, nothing reliable. Some may even say,
Prior Walcher standing on
“What if the exact line of the Axis didn't really matter?
top of hill above Malvern
What if that wasn't the point at all? The original Scheme
Priory observing the
was altered, true enough, but perhaps the alignment of the
Moon.
Cathedral meant very little to Herbert Losinga and his
colleagues!”
There is no answer. What can we say? Speculation is its
own reward – so let us now ignore such voices, and pass on to some more established
likelihoods instead. First, why should religious centres like Ramsey and now Norwich take
any interest in subjects like Astronomy at all? Shall we assume that there was a recognition
that it was the Sky which established the landmark dates of the Year, and thus made the study
of the stars very much the Church's business? All-absorbing ceremonial, the monkish round
of procession and liturgy, focused the intellect unremittingly on the Solar Reckoning of such
feasts as the Quarter Days (and of course the Cross-Quarters as well – Candlemas, May Day,
Lammas, All Saints), and most controversial of all that great Lunar feast of Easter, whose
date was reckoned of such significance as to splinter the Church itself.
For instance. It is known that the astrologer Walcher, later Prior of Malvern, arrived in
England from Lorraine in the year 1091. He was remarkable for owning an astrolabe, an
inverted “globe” of the night sky, and he is known to have undertaken practical astronomical
research, observing a lunar eclipse while abroad in Italy
in 1091, and then comparing notes on his return to
England with a colleague who was able to supply him
with data which enabled him to determine the time
021.8 MAP: England,
difference between observations of the same celestial
showing relative positions of
event from two separate points on the Earth's surface.
Norwich and Hereford.
The following year, 1092, he himself is said to have
observed a similar eclipse in England. In the mind’s eye
we can see this reverend scientist observing the night
sky, as dark as the unpolluted age, perhaps even in his
early years from the Priory garden – or perhaps high up
upon North Hill, that substantial outcrop of the
Malverns which looms close above that ancient foundation, the whole land spread beneath:
now and for all his time as Prior (1120-35), Walcher measuring the heavens, peering East.
In this surprisingly enlightened undertaking of practical science it is thought that in later
years he may have been influenced by a Jewish refugee from Moslem persecution in Spain,
Petrus Alfonsus, who had converted to Christianity in 1109, escaping to England in 1110 and
becoming personal physician to King Henry I – and it seems more than possible that
Walcher's knowledge of Arab astronomy may have derived from him. Incidentally, Great
Malvern lies close on the eastern flank of Hereford, where Bishop Robert Losinga was
practising his own peculiar brand of scientific churchmanship until his death in 1095, so that
it is again possible (if Walcher were indeed already quartered at Malvern in the years before
81
his appointment as Prior there) that some sort of exchange may have taken place between the
two men over the 4-year period during which they overlapped.
In Herbert's case, we must resort to speculation once again. Herefordshire and Norfolk appear
impossibly far apart, of course, but the presence of this Petrus Alfonsus at King Henry's court
during the latter part of Herbert's career makes a meeting with such an eminent Outsider
highly likely, given Herbert's great familiarity with the royal Court and his sometimes close
association with the King and Queen.
As to Bishop Herbert's attitude to the Jews, this is wholly traditional in its standardized
bigotry whenever it bobs to the surface of his eloquence, as it does on three or four occasions
in his surviving sermons. Once he relates the story of a Jewish boy who entered a Christian
church on Easter Day and participated in the Holy Mass, whereupon when his outraged father
hears about it, he flings his son into a furnace –
from which he is rescued by the Christian
community, having been miraculously
protected from the flames by the Virgin Lady
and her Holy Child. A “most just vengeance”
021.9 MAP: Europe and
is then visited upon the heads of the Jews when
Mediterranean, showing direction of
the Christians hurl them into the same furnace,
foreign influences.
where they are burned to death. Elsewhere in
Herbert’s works, too, there crop up expressions
like perfidos iudeos and impii iudaei
(Perfidious! Impious!) indicating an inbuilt
theoretical prejudice, typical of the
contemporary outlook – but this need not close
the door on the necessary double-life lived by enlightened scholars of his age. Herbert would
almost undoubtedly have had dealings with so-called Strangers, and the fact is that a Jewish
community was in the process of establishing its ready usefulness in the new city of Norwich,
eventually to become so dangerously successful as to develop into a high-profile target for
envy and murderous hatred which was to come to a head in the year 1144.
Western Europe was in fact only just emerging from a profoundly unscientific age. It comes
as a shock, for instance, to realize how little was known as comparatively late as the first
quarter of the Eleventh Century. Mathematical knowledge familiar to the Greeks had been
lost for centuries. For example, Harold Smith in his study of the Architectural design of
Norwich Cathedral points out how correspondence between Ragimbold de Cologne and
Radolf de Liège in 1025 demonstrates an ignorance of the laws governing the angles in a
triangle and of quite basic geometrical theory contained in such early Classical works as
Plato's Timaeus. Rediscoveries of these principles via the Norman occupation of Sicily and,
most significantly of all, Moorish Spain (and later, maybe, through the invasion of the Holy
Land) brought back much of the old knowledge with a freshness which may go some way to
explaining the apparently sudden burst of intellectual activity in the later Eleventh Century.
Much of this had to do with translation – because during the previous two centuries or more
the Arab nations had been busy breaking down the frontiers of language in order to unlock
the hitherto inaccessible accomplishments of neighbouring cultures; so that at last the longneglected brilliance of Greek research and scientific progress gradually smuggled its way into
the mainstream, and then up by half-forbidden back paths into an unreceptive Europe. In the
Eleventh Century, Spain was the perilous spawning-pond of Islamic science, where shifty
82
Christians risked their souls playing with suspicious liberties of the mind and consorting with
Jews, Arabs and such-like.
021.11 PLAN: Triangle, Square,
Pentangle, Circle – all annotated.
The Arabs translated the Greeks, then rubbed
shoulders with the Jews, whose exiled status
spiced with sporadic persecution drove them
up into Europe's heart-lands, and thence on to
the remote shores of the British Isles and the
familiar coarse-skinned amorality of a
Norman ruling class.
So what do we have at Norwich, with or
without exotic influences? Well, Norwich
Cathedral is nothing if not Mathematical. We
have, for example, the oddity highlighted by Professor Fernie of the persistence of the angle
9º 44” – the angle by which both the Radial Chapels are off-set in their focus from the
direction of the main Axis, and (more jarringly) the disparity of the angle of the Bishop's
Palace from the true rectangular connection of the Transept with the main body of the Nave.
The Angle, Fernie suggests, must have had meaning – but what it is is beyond speculation. Or
at any rate risks speculation!
Both in Eric Fernie’s and in Harold Smith's surveys of architectural principles on display in
the Cathedral, we learn that there is in the Church's design
more than a hint of an awareness of platonic principles of
geometry, and the super-imposition of fundamental forms,
such as the Triangle (representing Fire, Air and Water),
021.12 PLAN:
the Square representing the fourth great element (the
Square with Diagonal,
Earth) and the Pentangle, signifying the whole Cosmos in
demonstrating the theory
relation to these four. The Golden Mean, the rectangle
of Root 2.
which holds the principle of human fulfilment, is perhaps
set against the mathematical enigma of Root 2, which
sings from every detail. This Square Root of Two, I am
informed, has (first) to do with the Ratio between the side
of a Square and the diagonal which cuts across it from
corner to corner. This too is “Golden”, the Golden Ratio. And like unto it is the Golden
Rectangle, all of which are balm to the human soul, transmitting subliminal pulses of Beauty.
021.10 PLAN:
Cathedral,
highlighting Radial
Chapels and
Palace, with
annotations of
coincidence of
angles.
Yet the Root of Two has its unsettling side, too, as we might
expect from this echo of the fruit of Paradise. The
Mathematician's ear is attuned to the arcane fact that this Ratio
of Ratios is ultimately “irrational” – that is, is inexplicably
irreducible to a satisfactory fraction; modern Maths
acknowledges that its decimal points go on for ever. Yet its
origin as the description of that most basic of forms, the
humble Square, makes its behaviour doubly unnerving and
beyond mortal logic. Root Two, Pi (that other great mystery at
the heart of the behaviour of Circles), Squares, Triangles, the
Persistence of Angle – the Architect of Norwich Cathedral had
nothing less than the rediscovery of Mathematics at his fingers'
ends, but above all he exudes a kind of unhinged ecstasy.
83
For Norwich Cathedral disquietingly combines the repetitive regularity of Romanesque form
with an Escher-like irrationality which whispers to our hearts, “Root Two, Root Two, Root
Two!” toying perversely with the divine pun of indivisibility.
84
22
Indivisible Triangles
In which an Archbishop proves adept at Long Division
In Geometry, the infinite multiplication of sides produces the ultimate mystic figure of the Circle – but if
we go in the opposite direction, diminishing from the four-Square Earth to the Triangle, we find ourselves
at the lowest point at which mortal eyes can distinguish a fully-formed two-dimensional Shape – at which
point we are in the realm of the three elements of Creation before Earth existed – a kind of primeval
Trinity. The debate over the nature of the theological Trinity was raging in Herbert's period, and
Archbishop Anselm was instrumental in the great Schism between the Eastern and Western Churches
over the origin of the Holy Spirit in the three-dimensional relationship of the Godhood. Herbert was of
course a proponent of the Western Church view that the Spirit emanates from the Son – Filioque – as well
as from the Father, and it is possible that wall-paintings re-discovered in a remote Norfolk church may be
evidence of the dissemination of such Trinitarian views in Herbert’s own episcopate. Certainly the lay-out
of the Cathedral itself hints at this interpretation more than a little, emphasizing in its design its original
dedication: the Church of the Holy and Undivided Trinity.
I
ndivisibility defines the nature of the Square (which is of course Earth), just as it does
when all straight edges are confounded in the Holy Mystery of the Circle. But if we were
(God help us) to proceed from the Square of our established knowledge to the unknowable
Circle, we would need first to multiply the four known sides upwards from stage to stage
towards the Infinite Unknown. So we should start with the Pentagon and from there – who
knows? The Hexagon? The Heptagon? And so polygonally on for ever, till with infinite
reproduction of straightnesses we achieved the Perfect Curve. Which of course is Never.
There is no circling the square, not in this life. Here there is no dividing the Indivisible.
So let us turn our backs on impossible conceits of reason, and attempt the Opposite instead.
Let us go backwards. Abandoning the endless construction of new sides, let us take our
humble Square, and try kicking out one of its four existing sides. Kicking out two, of course,
is not an option. That would leave us with (at best) a pair of compasses – useful enough to the
geometer, but no form at all if you seek completeness. So we must, it follows, do what we
have just done: we must whittle our Square down to Minus One and arrive at the Only
Possible Place, that fundament of all two-dimensional forms: The Triangle.
Fire, Air, Water – the pre-existing elements – the Let-There-Bes before solid ground appeared
and made Man possible. The priestly finger inscribes a Cross
in the air – from chin to solar plexus, from shoulder to
shoulder: “In the Name of the Father, and of the Son and of
022.1 PLAN:
the Holy Ghost.” The Holy Triangle – divide that if you can!
Series of Triangles,
with annotations
demonstrating
theological thinking.
The name – the proper, official name – of Norwich Cathedral
is found very early on in its history, in Herbert's Charter of
1101 ratified by King Henry and preserved in The First
Register by Bartholomew Cotton: “For the redemption of
my life and for the absolution of my sins,” intones Bishop
Herbert, “I am the first who have built at Norwich –
Ecclesiam – a Church which I have consecrated as the
head and mother Church (caput et matrem) of all the churches of Norfolk, in the name of
– in nomine Sancte et Individue Trinitatis – the Holy and Undivided Trinity.”
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So Norwich Cathedral has this official title: The Church of the Holy and Undivided Trinity. It
is not the only church or cathedral to be labeled with this dedication. Six or seven other
important religious buildings of this period share the name – but it has always seemed to me
to contain a touch of paranoia in its almost aggressively Trinitarian sentiment – particularly in
that word “undivided”. Undivided? The Trinity? As if anyone would ever dare to attempt –
or think – such a thing!
The fact is that Herbert and his generation were in the thick of an extraordinary debate, which
hinged on this: we cannot ask the direct question Who is God? – but we can do the next best
thing (and some of Herbert's contemporaries did): we can inquire instead How is God made
known to us?
It was a dangerous question, because it had about it the nature of a scientific inquiry. And
men of Science really wanted to know – so that advances in the understanding of the doctrine
of the Holy Trinity in the late Eleventh Century were akin to the sudden leaps of progress in
Quantum Physics in the early years of the Twentieth.
The Trinity is nowhere explicitly defined as such in Holy Scripture, but was inferred from it
from the earliest days of the Church. Its development provoked great excitement, controversy
and frequently anger – which is not so surprising since it represented nothing less than the
exploration of the Mind and Nature of God. God was Personal at a personal level, but He was
also recognized as the Ground of our Being – and as such the object of theological
speculation parallel in some respects to modern academic theses. The study of the nature of
God was objective, detached and scientific.
Yet there was a conflict here, in that such exploration, while it appealed to the natural
curiosity of the mind of man, had a perilous edge to it and was always limited to the holiest
and most acute brains. Men like St Anselm wore velvet gloves of personal sanctity to shield
them from the charge of meddling with the Prohibited Mysteries.
Italian by birth, Anselm was the highly intellectual and widely admired Abbot of Bec in
France, when he found himself, while on a visit to England, virtually press-ganged into
becoming candidate for the Archbishopric of Canterbury, which had lain vacant for several
years since the death of the great Archbishop Lanfranc. In fact, poor Anselm seems to have
found himself being used as a kind of ecclesiastical battering-ram by the English clergy
against the stubborn and avaricious King, William Rufus, who eventually gave way and
consented to Anselm's appointment – but only because he was (as he thought) mortally ill at
the time.
022.2
PLAN:
Analogy of River Nile with
definition of Holy Trinity.
After his recovery, it was a decision he lived on in
ruddy good health to regret. As representative of
Church (as against State) Anselm was that most
irritating of partners – a Man of Principle. He and the
King were for ever at loggerheads. At the port of
Hastings, you may remember, Herbert himself became
oddly tangled up in this tussle over the division of
authority when Rufus angrily sought to dismiss him.
On that occasion Archbishop Anselm and Bishop
Herbert stood together against the power of the State.
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William Rufus would probably not have given a fig
for the precise definition of the doctrine of the Holy
Trinity – but I think that for the moment we ought to
022.3 PLAN:
take an interest in it. Anselm's own thinking on this is
Triangle demonstrating
well known. His definition of the Trinity equates the
Herbert’s analogy of
Father with “Memory”, the Son with “Intelligence”,
Trinity: Voice, Man, Dove.
and the Holy Spirit with “Human Self-Awareness”,
and thence the capacity to Love; hence Memory +
Intelligence = Love. In the manner of his time, Anselm
produces an anology: the Holy Trinity, he says, can be
likened to the River Nile: the Father as the Spring or
Source of the River, the Son as the River itself and the Spirit as the Lake fed by the River.
There are times when one simply must deal in parables: there is no other way to convey the
unimaginable to the rational mind. Thus it is unsurprising to find Bishop Herbert echoing his
mentor when he too resorts to easily-grasped parallels when he delivers his Sermon on the
Epiphany of our Lord and uses the episode of Jesus's baptism in the River Jordan to highlight
the triangle of the three main features of this story: the Voice of God (“This is my beloved
Son!”), the Man (Jesus) and the Holy Spirit which descends on Him like a Dove. Herbert’s
Triangle is thus Vox, Homine, Columba.
However, if you thought the apparently vague and soft-edged nature of such analogies
suggests anything at all easy-going about late Eleventh Century thinking concerning the
Divine Nature, you'd be very far clear of the mark. Theology was a precise science – and the
doctrine of the Trinity contained a Paradox which men were prepared to die for. In case you
underestimate what I have just said, here is the beginning and the ending of the Athanasian
Creed on which the Western Church was founded:
Whosoever will be saved, before all things it is necessary that he hold the catholic faith. Which faith except
everyone do keep whole and undefiled, without doubt he shall perish everlastingly. And the catholic faith is
this: That we worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity, neither confounding the persons, nor dividing
the substance.
For there is one Person of the Father, another of the Son, and another of the Holy Spirit. But the godhead of
the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, is all one, the glory equal, the majesty co-eternal.
Such as the Father is, such is the Son, and such is the Holy Spirit. The Father uncreated, the Son uncreated,
and the Holy Spirit uncreated. The Father incomprehensible, the Son incomprehensible, and the Holy Spirit
incomprehensible.
The Father eternal, the Son eternal, and the Holy Spirit eternal. And yet they are not three eternals, but one
Eternal.
As also there are not three incomprehensibles, nor three uncreated, but one Uncreated, and one
Incomprehensible. So likewise….
And so on for several more paragraphs, rounded off with the concept of the Son as He is to be
conceived sitting in Glory:
He sits at the right hand of the Father, God Almighty, from whence He will come to judge the quick and the
dead. At His coming all men will rise again with their bodies and shall give account for their own works. And
they that have done good shall go into life everlasting; and they that have done evil into everlasting fire.
This is the catholic faith, which except a man believe faithfully, he cannot be saved.
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There were two other more familiar “creeds” – the Apostle's Creed and the Nicene Creed,
both of which are in common use in Christian churches today. But that great theologian St
Athanasius does begin to sound a little like a Quantum scientist in his peculiarly precise,
repetitive and hair-splitting logic.
Now the very concept of Paradox suggests a proposition which, as it were, “tricks” the mind
and plays with contradictions. The immortal Three bound together in this loving relationship
are not mere images for us to play with: they constitute the foundation of the Cosmos, they
are how things work – they Are. And everything else Is because of their interplay. Archbishop
Anselm would have told it you straight. God is Three Persons and yet One: One in Three and
Three in One. It is the conundrum of the Triangle.
That Herbert Losinga was in step with his master is suggested by a further reference which
appears in another Sermon of his On the Day of Pentecost, in which he stresses this
Singleness of the Trinity and makes this statement: “The Holy Ghost, the Paraclete, was
sent from the Father through the Son (a patre per filium missum esse paraclitum
spiritum)”. In making this point, he is voicing – perhaps with the precision of first-hand
recollection – the fateful speech which Anselm made when Pope Urban called the Council of
the Church together and assembled them all at Bari.
The town of Bari sits on the Adriatic coast just above the Heel of the Foot of Italy, only a
very short distance North of Monte Gargano. In 1098 all this part of Italy, and Sicily too, was
secure Norman territory, and with St Michael's Holy Mountain so close, I picture perhaps a
ceremony at the Cave of the Angel, followed by long
impassioned debate – for delegates of the Eastern
Church were there, and the prospect of a renewal of
fellowship after the fissure of centuries must have
tantalized.
022.4
PLAN:
It did not come off. We are told that Anselm spoke
Diagram demonstrating
persuasively, won the vote and sealed the division of the
Trinity definitions of
Church for ever: that was his achievement, and Herbert
Eastern Church versus
must have known of it. The thought, of course, arises:
Western Church.
Was Herbert there? Of his recorded foreign travels, there
are three visits which he is known to have paid to Rome;
of what goes unrecorded, we know nothing of course,
though that doesn't stop us suspecting. To what extent
was he at Anselm's side – actually, not just figuratively?
He appears to have fallen out with him at least
temporarily round about 1106 – but this meeting at Bari was in 1098. Did he sit with the
Archbishop on the Adriatic coast and hear the Schism lock with a great crack?
And all because of what sounds (to the modern ear) such a minor point – the sort of thing
which perhaps believers would do well to put agnostically on one side till the Great Day
when all such mental jarrings will be smoothed into harmony. So here it is – that Division of
divisions: the Filioque Debate.
It all hinges on how (not whether) we receive the Holy Spirit. Jesus Himself said we would,
but men want to know how! In that other great ritual Statement of Belief, the Nicene Creed, it
says that we believe in the Holy Ghost, and then (fatefully) goes on, sure enough, to define
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how. Where does the Spirit “proceed” from? Well, the Eastern Church says this: “who
proceeds from the Father” – but the Western Church says “who proceeds from the Father,
and from the Son” – Filio-que. The Eastern Church conceived the Holy Spirit as issuing from
the Father alone, thus separating the Paraclete (Holy Spirit) from the Saviour, each as
independent emanations from the Almighty. The Roman Church, on the other hand, bound
the Trinity in together, as it were with interconnected bonds of Oneness. It is altogether a
tighter definition.
Thus the dedication of Norwich Cathedral as the Church of the Holy and Undivided Trinity
underlines the cutting-edge devotion to this doctrine. Indivise – “undivided” is a word
pregnant with insistence: filioque! it barks – you cannot separate the interdependent sources
of our salvation! Herbert's own phrase was: a patre per filium missum esse paraclitum
spiritum – from the Father through the Son is sent the Holy Spirit. In this, it is the
expression per filium which clinches it and tells us
Herbert's footing.
022.5
DRAWING:
The Gnadenstuhl Image of
the Trinity from wall
painting at Houghton.
Per Filium.
There is, too, a relatively recent development which
allows us the luxury of a little justified guess-work.
In the middle years of the Twentieth Century, in a rural
area of West Norfolk, not far from Herbert's big new
Church of St Margaret and the Holy Virgins at King's
Lynn (Bishop's Lynn until Henry VIII's time), the little
village church of St Mary's, Houghton-on-the-Hill, lay in a roofless, half-ruinous condition.
During this time it was apparently used on and off for clandestine Satanic rites – which
prompted a group of outraged locals to rescue the building from decay and to restore it as far
as funds would allow. This restoration became suddenly famous when the extent of hitherto
concealed medieval wall-paintings was discovered, and excitement grew as it became clear
that some of these might be very early indeed, though exactly how early is still unclear. They
may originate from any period between the Ninth and mid-Twelfth Centuries.
The painting which caused the most stir among archaeologists and art historians throughout
Europe was on the East gable, and was clearly a depiction of the Trinity as the symbolic icon
known as the Gnadenstuhl or Mercy Seat / Throne of Grace, which highlights and binds
together into One the Three Persons of the Trinity. In the centre, Christ hangs crucified on the
Cross, while high above him the Father stands in an attitude of blessing; between them the
Holy Spirit hovers in the shape of a Dove above Christ's head. Two angels hold incense on
either side, underscoring the idea that the Three are the One God by alluding to the cherubim
over the ark of the Old Testament.
Despite its obscure rural setting, the discovery of almost certainly the earliest example of the
so-called Gnadenstuhl image, which was undoubtedly inspired by the pioneering work of
such theologians as Archbishop Anselm, leaves scholars wondering whether this helps to
confirm that it was originally at the Abbaye de la Trinité de Fécamp, where Herbert was Prior
in his early days, that this famous doctrinal symbol was originally developed. Fécamp was
already suspected as its place of origin before the Image fanned out throughout Europe, but
now there was what looked like a definite link.
89
Suddenly it became possible to conceive a clear scenario. Herbert's propagation of the
teaching of the Trinity both in his dedication of Norwich Cathedral and now it seemed in the
dissemination of this graphic propaganda through all the parishes of Norfolk connected it
back, through Herbert, to the Norman French Abbey of Fécamp.
Do not forget, either, that faintest of semi-heretical echoes from the earliest days of
Christianity, fossilized in that half-forgotten book, as good as lost, the Gospel of the Hebrews,
where Michael is defined as the Male side of Mary, and both are intertwined as symbols of
the working of the Spirit in the conception of the Holy Child. Michael and Mary are coidentified in the male-female principles of the same Spirit which Herbert's Temple blends
with the dawn, and channels down the Nave.
The Holy Spirit is the key to all Herbert's
calculations, almost to the extent of an
instinctive understanding of Electric Current.
The Positive Chapel is the South Radial, which
is Male; it harks back to the Old Testament via
022.6 PLAN:
its final Prophet, John the Baptist, foretold in
East end of Norwich Cathedral,
Malachi, and the Voice of the Father echoes
demonstrating the current-like
“Behold my Beloved Son!” The Negative
workings of the Undivided Trinity
Chapel is the North Radial, which is Female; it
design.
is built on the New Testament in its symbolism
of Nativity and Martyrdom, and rises newly
baptized from the River. The Axial Lady
Chapel and St Michael’s Chapel on the Hill
opposite are in effect the Earth Chapel and the
Sky Chapel, which are One, neither Man nor
Woman, but Dove-like, transcendent; they are St Mary's (out of the Marsh!) and St Michael's
(riding the Worm!), and through them the Spirit flows like the Eternal Jordan – proceeding
from the Father, and yes – Filio-Que.
Per filium.
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23
Immaculate Conception
In which we get to grips with the inner functions of the Trinity
During Herbert's period, the place of the Virgin Mary was undergoing a steady rise in popularity – which
is understandable on various levels. She is, for one thing, the Human component in the God-Man paradox
of the Incarnation, and thus intimately bound in with the concept of the Trinity. Her part in this of course
depended on her consent – and this aspect has been the cause of speculation that she may not have been
the first to be approached; others may have refused, and if so this may have had an influence on the
precise point in history in which the Incarnation took place. Herbert himself, as we are aware, was in no
way averse to similar speculations as to the ways of God and the nature of Time, and his personal
devotion to the person of Mary is testified to by his dream of the Virgin Lady who berates him for
intellectual slackness and by his fascination with the concept of the Perfect Man conceived within the
Womb of a Virgin – the Second Adam enclosed in the sacred “Cave” of Perfect Womanhood.
B
ut Mary is of course Womanhood. She is Feminine; she is Mother. She is the Second
Eve – Woman's Second Chance, just as Jesus Himself is Man's. Yet there is no Serpent in her
story, no temptation; just an Angel and a decision.
Consider the Annunciation as if it were an Interview (which, in a way, it was). Gabriel does
not exactly ask questions; it's not as if he tells Mary what's on offer and then asks, “Are you
up for it?”
Instead, he phrases the whole business as if it were a fait accompli – what will be will be –
but curiously, disquietingly worded: “The holy Thing which shall be born of thee shall be
called son of God” (St Luke 1.35 Authorized Version). Mary, we are told, is indeed disquieted
– but her only question is of the purely practical nature which lies at the heart of this great
mystery: “How can this be, seeing I have no husband?”
Here lies the Intelligence which stands just beyond the visible Universe – though Herbert
would never have considered calling it this – patiently waiting on a Woman's consent before
the Holy Thing can be conceived which might otherwise be beyond all human conception. It
is the only Patch to counteract the Virus contracted at Eden.
Mary doesn't say Yes – the word is never spoken between them. She answers by status.
“Behold,” she says in the old language, “the handmaid of the Lord.” I am His Servant –
which puts Mary on level ground with Gabriel, His
Messenger.
I am enchanted by the speculation of a Twentieth
023.1 DRAWING:
Century nun called Sister Penelope who did that
The Angel Gabriel greets
most perilous of things: she allowed her mind to
the kneeling Mary.
wander – in a manner, in fact, which to some extent
parallels the speculative thinking of Herbert and his
contemporaries. We are already very familiar with
the fact that Eleventh Century thinkers did indeed
discuss among themselves, “Why so long? How
long, O Lord, how long?” Herbert's interest was focused, as we know, on the End and the
Second Coming; Sister Penelope faced in the opposite direction – not about the future but
about the past – and wondered the same thing about the First Coming.
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Why, she asked, had it taken so long before the Messiah Jesus came? From the First Adam to
the Second – from the Fall of Man to the First Century AD was not simply an age, it was Five
Ages. Why? demands Sister Penelope. How could so long a spell have been allowed to
develop between the Disease and the Cure in Man's spiritual history? Perhaps, she
meditatively responds (and her answer chills as well as excites), perhaps because it had
indeed been intended to take place at an earlier time – perhaps much earlier – and something
went wrong. What if many years before, she speculates, the Choice was made, the Offer
delivered – but refused?
Because, you see, although Gabriel's message came in the form of prophecy, it was in the
truest sense an offer (“You have found favour with God”); it was genuinely dependent upon
Consent. Mary gave hers – but Sister Penelope inquires “Who, before Mary, may not have
shaken her head and turned it down? May there not have been another such Offer which
culminated in refusal? Or more than one? Perhaps several refusals? Free Will limits God as it
limits Man. And refusals go with privacy, unrecorded. Only the successful candidate is
officially announced. True History is the story of blank spaces more than it is of information.
Mary is a rarity, a pearl of great price: our knowledge of her comes precisely because she said
“the Handmaid of the Lord.” We'll never know who didn't.
Now for myself (having said that), I could never for
the life of me understand why Catholics should go
quite so doe-eyed over the Virgin Mother – so let us
consider for a moment the ease with which the
023.2 DRAWING:
Medieval Church fell prey to the worst excesses of
Eve standing below the
saccharine idolatry. Was it inevitable that Mary should
snake-enveloped Tree.
have developed into the glorious Virgin Queen that she
was certainly in the process of becoming by the midTwelfth Century, as we shall encounter her a mere
twenty years or so after Herbert's death? Why, even in
Herbert's own legacy, the strange dream which he
recounts in one of his letters in which a queenly Lady
cross-questions him about his role in the Church and rebukes him for taking too much delight
in Classic literature at the expense of Holy Writ, we can see all too clearly how already her
hold on the Christian sub-conscious is maturing towards the all-enveloping fixation it was
later to become. Why should this surprise us? Mary was, after all, the Human contributor to
the Incarnation of God, she was Eve born again. She was Us. How could we not recognize
her special place in our delivery?
Sister Penelope's friend C.S. Lewis, in his study of tendencies in Medieval thought, looked
beyond the excesses of this sudden and understandable surge in the popularity of the Cult of
the Virgin and the beginnings of Mariolatry. He saw this movement, for all its extremes, as
evidence of divine historical timing. Respect and devotion for Mary, he suggests, came just
in time to snuff out excesses of quite another sort to which Womankind has always been
vulnerable. The Virgin, says he, rescued her sex from being sidelined and objectified as
objects of lust and unpaid skivvies by a society tinged overmuch with arrogant masculinity –
which (as it happens) we shall glimpse in interesting profusion in the court of King William
Rufus.
As for men of Herbert's stamp – some of them quite newly celibate – we may well wonder at
92
the idealized concepts of femininity which emerge from the hothouse atmosphere of the
monastery. Human reproductive biology is a messy business, reads the sub-text. But left
untouched, sexual promise has its appeals! “Happy Bride joined to such a Man!”
(Remember Herbert's emotional outburst?) “Modesty flourishes and fruitfulness is
permitted. The house is filled with children, but virginity will remain intact.”
And the fact that the words of that great Architect King Solomon, who was as far from the
principles of celibacy in his private life as man can get, became an abiding favourite in
Norwich Priory must make us realize how potent a licence it represented – to be permitted
free access to a Holy Scripture purporting to transcribe the spiritual life into language of the
most intimate fleshliness. No wonder the Song of Songs was read with such avidity! Herbert
could never resist: Looking with expectant wonder on the hope of this Queen, He cries out:
“Who is this – beautiful as the Moon, clear as the Sun, terrible as the drawn-up line of
battle?” Indeed! Who does she think she is? The Queen of Sheba?
As for Mary, she held the heart of Western Christianity by its strings. And I have to admit that
I have just about managed to get my head round the logic of assigning a special place to
Mary, Queen of Heaven – though one must hastily add a proviso noting how all too readily
she came to be confused with the “Queen of faire Elfland” in medieval popular culture! She
is in herself a holy conundrum. The Medieval discovery of Mary hinged on the realization
(shared, I think, much later, by theologians like Sister Penelope) that as the fleshly part of the
Incarnation, she was indeed utterly unique. If the meaning of the Incarnation is that God
became Man in Jesus Christ, the Son, then although the Mother does not figure in the Holy
Trinity of Church doctrine, she comes so close to it in the hearts, shrines and statuary of
Catholic Europe that she inhabits a ghostly niche of adoration which somehow seems more
fulfillingly substantial than that unimaginable
Stranger to the Holy Family, the Paraclete or
Spirit.
Herbert Losinga is himself very explicit about this.
In his Sermon On the Assumption of the Blessed
Virgin Mary, he describes her vital function as
The Virgin in the Cave with her
having “encompassed a man in her womb”
womb as the Cave of Man –
(circumdedit virum in utero). “A new thing truly”
Russian doll-style.
(he goes on) “and a new thing which surpasseth
in power all other new things, when God, whose
coming the world cannot abide, neither can
anyone see Him and live, so entered the guestchamber of a mother's womb, that the gates of
her body knew not His entrance, and was so
borne in her, that the whole Godhead was in her, and so came forth, that the gate was
altogether shut after Him... And so the fountain was sealed with the seal of the whole
Trinity.”
023.3
DRAWING:
As elsewhere with Herbert, he epitomizes this “sealing up” with a quotation from that old
friend of his, the Canticles or Song of Solomon: Ortus conclusus fons signatus – “a garden
enclosed, a fountain sealed up.” The rise of popular acclaim for Mary, at the same period
characterized by a surge in interest as to the nature of the Holy Trinity, was no accident. In
another sermon, On the Purification of Mary, Herbert describes Mary coming forth suae
speluncae ergastulo – from the prison-house of her cave. Mary's womb is an enclosed
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paradise garden – a sort of inside-out Eden, because she undid the sin of Eve, whose curse
was the pain of child-bearing labour. The Song of Solomon was a celebration of womanhood
in a world where women had been condemned at the very source of history; Herbert (and
many others) appropriates this most human of conundrums as he glories in the Incarnation as
part of the doctrine of the Trinity.
Her womb is also spelunca – a cave, because it was in a cave that she gave birth – hence like
Russian dolls, the garden of paradise encloses, and holes in the earth enclose too, enclosing
and enclosing for ever, inside-outside.
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24
As Dew in April
In which Mother begets Son
We may, of course, be tempted to take Herbert's use of the “Cave” image rather more literally by making
a trip along the curved passageway of the Cathedral's Ambulatory, with its built-in illusion of gradual
descent underground, and imagining the impression which the vanished Lady Chapel would have had
upon us, with its horse-shoe, womb-like sense of enclosure. We need to allow ourselves to drift, too, into a
medieval frame of mind, in which we are filled with wonder at the beauty of God's Plan – even in the Fall
of Man, which paved the way for the coming of that most comforting of Presences, the Virgin Lady who
would enclose us round with a comfort both alluring and maternal – encompassing the needs of both
Father and Son.
S
o let us take Bishop Herbert at his word. Let us set out in search of Spelunca. Why not
see whether our Architect had not a more literal “Spelunca” in mind than Mary InsideOutside? Mary-in-the-Earth, perhaps – or (if the ground happens to be boggy) Mary-in-theMarsh?
As far as I know, there is only one place in Norwich Cathedral which can truly be described
as “underground” – and that is under a trap-door in the Regimental Chapel, where those
controversial foundations of the original Lady Chapel are kept exposed and available for
expert examination: as discoveries of real importance should be.
There is, however, one place in the Cathedral, a small distance further back from this extreme
East end, where it feels very much as if one is indeed descending into the bowels. The whole
of the Eastern Arm of the Cathedral is designed to house the Holy Place which is the
Presbytery (containing the High Altar and the Bishop's Throne). Wrapped around this
Sanctuary is a wide passageway, separate from the central section of the Church, and as it
curves round the East end giving access to the ghost of the Axial Chapel and to the Radial
Chapels, “Jesus” and “St Luke”. This passage
is called the Ambulatory, because it was
designed as a kind of Processional Way along
which solemn troops of worshippers and
pilgrims would have been allowed to walk on
024.1 PLAN:
special occasions.
Lay-out of passageway curving round
Eastern arm of Norwich Cathedral.
If you try it today, in the company of other
tourists, you should enter (as right-handed
instinct drives you) on the left side – that is,
on the North – and follow the passage
clockwise. Stop for a moment as you come
level with the Crossing, the “centre” of the
building where the East-West Axis crosses
the North-South arms of the Transepts, so that you are just to the left of what would in
Herbert's time have been the Tower. Here, where the Temple forms the Cross and all is
straight-edged and rectangular, you can see ahead of you where the Curve starts; the
Ambulatory leads slowly round to the right.
95
024.2
DRAWING:
Group of monks bearing
candles under a low arch.
But there's another thing – a kind of illusion, but not
quite. The ground – surely? – is falling. Certainly the
floor-level to your right (where the Presbytery begins)
is beginning to rise – but which is which? Do your
senses deceive? Start walking, and see. Now as we pass
beyond the Crossing, there can be no doubt: the floor of
the area to our right is now unmistakably higher than
we are, and it has a dark mysterious feeling down here
as the passage swings into the curve. But this sense of
downward half-claustrophobic unearthliness is greatly
enhanced by the fact that suddenly the vault above us
descends in an arch, shutting us in from above.
Listen to these words spoken not far from this spot by the Lord Herbert to the monks of the
Priory, early in the 1100s: “Behold all of you are carrying candles; and like faithful Simeon
ye bring a light into the Temple of the Lord; but it is in the candles of the hearts that God
delighteth, and in those hearts which are lightened by the true Light. The Virgin, the
Mother of Mercy, is present with you, who leadeth you as a chief of the singers in your
manner of life.” They are celebrating the moment when Mary came to the Temple after her
period of labour and child-birth for the ceremony of Purification. We do not know the year
when that shadowy flickering group stood together in this place long ago, but we do know the
date: February 2nd : Candlemas.
It might have been for all the world like one of those mystic pre-Christian rites of Mithras,
celebrated beneath low vaulting or in some place where Earth herself enclosed us – like a
Cave, an Unconsecrated Spelunca – for the Angel entered before we did! In remote antiquity,
torch-bearers stood to either side.
Norwich Cathedral burned tallow: candles cluster round its early history. Bring candles! urge
the Brothers, as if to fend off the gathering shades. Candles dominate that darkest of episodes
in the Cathedral's history, the murder of little St William – and here we are sure enough, a
matter of feet from the Jesus Chapel, which branches off to the left, to the North, just beyond
the arch from which we are emerging. See in imagination the small coffin before the Martyrs'
Altar, smell the incense and animal fat, hear the drip drip drip of melted wax. Inhale the
odour of lost innocence.
This Northern Aisle has the Feminine Charge in it, like a tube to the uterus. With every step
we retreat into the Womb. It is Negative – it draws inwards to the Sanctuary.
There is no Womb. We cannot escape the terrible truth that what Herbert's contemporaries
would have experienced here at this most sacred spot is denied to us. The Regimental Chapel
stands opposite the Reliquary Niche to the rear of the Bishop's Throne at the turn in this dark
Passage – but it is no substitute. The true Spelunca of Herbert's imagination has been stripped
away.
So let us enter, then, with closed eyes and open hearts, tasting in fancy the heart of the
Temple, the Altar of St Saviour. We come into the Sanctum of that deep-curved vanished
Womb. Where are we? Horse-shoed round with living flesh we absorb stillness. It is not SunRise yet on this Cross-Quarter day at the chilly dawn of the New Year. Light flickers, we are
walled round with living stone, our knees are on the flags, the Bishop prepares to celebrate
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the Mass in that Presence which is incarnate Virginity. No one has been here before, it is
untouched.
The Virgin, so the Bishop tells us, makes our souls wonder: who could She be who surpasses
in virtues and in merits even the dignity of angels? His Answer is bright and fearful as his
shining face: it is not the Bishop who speaks but the Holy Spirit: Who is she that cometh
forth as the morning rising, fair as the Moon, bright as the Sun, terrible as an army set in
array?
These words, gentle reader, come from Herbert's sermon
On the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, celebrated
at the other end of the year in Summer radiance, August
024.3 DIAGRAM:
15th. You may recognize them: they are the identical words
which sprang from the same Bishop Herbert in celebration
Demonstration of Medieval
of Queen Matilda's gift of Thorpe Manor to the Cathedral
Maternal Trinity.
in 1101. The Song of Songs was often on this great
Architect's lips – except then, when sealing his Charter,
“she that cometh forth” was surely the Church herself,
always feminine, the Felix Sponsa, the happy Bride of
Christ; now “she that cometh forth” is no less than the
Virgin Mary. Has one taken the place of the other? Or are
they both at some level inter-identified? The Virgin and the Church herself are one?
And if this is (in some sense) the case, doesn't it buoy up humble Man and draw us up into
that other inter-relationship: St Michael from the realm of Angels? Catholics still pray the old
Prayer:
Holy Mary, mother of God
Pray for us sinners
Now and at the hour of our death
Amen.
It is Mary's final Act of Mercy to all believers – but in this doesn't the function of the Motherof-God blur with that of that other Psychopomp, the Archangel Michael – the true Angel of
Death (in the best sense – and not to be confused with the Evil “Angel” Samael)? It is said
that Mary herself, having heard the Announcement of one Angel, years later escapes the
“hour of her death” through the intervention of a second, when Michael himself greets her for
the final time as “Great and Wonderful!” before leading her to Immortality, but in her case
dispensing with the usual passage through Death. She is thus one of the very few mortals who
have been “Assumed”.
But in so potent an Encounter, nothing could ever after remain the same. For though Michael
was the instrument of her Assumption, both the Heavenly Messenger and Queen Elect
underwent a mutual transformation, the qualities special to Michael merging by association
with those of the Virgin.
It is perhaps not altogether surprising that Mary came to be surrounded by a symbolism of
pure and terrifying goodness reminiscent of the Archangel's. The doctrine of her Immaculate
Conception saw to that, in that as the Second Eve she is necessarily unique in her freedom
from Original Sin. In this aspect, Mary stands in ancient symbol standing on the Moon,
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crushing the Serpent under her foot, with the Sun
behind her. Sometimes her head is circled with
the twelve stars of the Apocalypse. Sometimes
she contemplates herself in a mirror.
024.4
DRAWING:
Virgin Mary in medieval bedroom
with window showing spring morning
and door where the Father/Son is tiptoeing in.
Such was the devotion she inspired that she was
soon to awake a strangely perverse logic in
medieval mystical thought. The Fall of Man was,
unarguably, a catastrophic tragedy. But (goes the
later Fifteenth Century lyric) if the Apple had not
been taken, then it follows that there would have
been no necessity for the role of Mary – who
would not, therefore, ever have become “Hevene Quen” – so:
Blessëd be the tymë that appil takë was Therefore we mown singen 'Deo gratias!'
Most beautiful of all – but most perverse, and an extraordinary illustration of just how
curiously the medieval mind worked and reworked the mystery of this most complex doctrine
– is that fragrant petal As Dewe in April, the medieval lyric which has as its axis a most
curious blurring of the roles of Father and Son. The King of all kings, we hear, came silently,
tiptoe-quiet to his Mother's bour – because she had “chosen” Him! What a curious double
reversal! A Son slips noiselessly (“stille”) into his Mother's bedchamber – and all done to a
melodic backdrop of fresh Spring imagery – all is Aprille – grass grows, flowers open, sprays
of leaves unfurl, but who can hear the sound of growth?
He came al so still
There his mother was,
As dew in April
That falleth on the grass.
The Virgin Mary was an adornment of the Middle Ages, as well as an excess – and she was
the source of a cultural respect for Womankind and for Motherhood which sometimes sits
strangely with the self-imposed life of celibacy and single-sex incarceration one might have
associated with a Priory like the one attached to Norwich Cathedral.
But as for Herbert, his devotion to feminine figures – the phantoms of his dreams, his delight
in Queen Matilda's company, his association of virgin purity with female beauty – and the allpervading imagery of that extraordinary scriptural counter-weight, the Song of Songs, hints
otherwise.
And perhaps the thought may strike us that, as regards Motherhood, Herbert's own natural
mother remains entirely anonymous and unknown to us; though we can easily guess that her
mortal image may have laid down the basis for that Heavenly Mother he was so ready to
celebrate.
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25
Autumn Frost
In which Son begets Father
The subject of Herbert Losinga's father, Robert Losinga, is a very curious one indeed. It looks very much
as if it was in fact Ranulf Flambard who was the ruling power at the Abbey of New Minster at
Winchester, despite the claim that Robert was Abbot there for the final few years of his life. Ranulf had
the Abbey under his wing in the years preceding Robert's appointment, and when he died Ranulf
succeeded him as Abbot himself. In any case, the oddity of Herbert Losinga purchasing such an
appointment for his own father is a problem which will not go away. It smacks very much of one of those
conundrums of the Middle Ages, such as touched so playfully on subjects like the dual attraction of the
Virgin Mary to both Son and Father. Can Nepotism, too, operate successfully in both directions?
A
n absent Mother is an entirely forgivable accident of history; the fact that we know
nothing of Herbert's is neither his fault nor hers. We can extract whatever facets of the great
Bishop's character that we like in rebuilding its foundation on the maternal side. We can
guess whatever we like, within reason: she is a psychoanalyst's canvas.
But with his Father, no such luck. Of all the persistent mysteries obscuring the son Herbert,
Robert Losinga the father is probably the least pregnable of all. And what we do know,
coming as it does from the less penetrable earlier end of Herbert's career, has hints of disquiet
about it which may be entirely without foundation.
The fact is, Robert Losinga would have remained as entirely unknowable as Herbert's mother,
had he not put in a sudden and controversial appearance in what would turn out to be little
more than the last two years or so of his life. The factual evidence is hard to come by, but
from what one can gather they appear to be the following:
025.1
DRAWING:
Abbot and Bishop standing together
under archway. Second Bishop
(Herbert) standing aside in gesture of
welcome.
Abbot Riwallon of the Abbey of New Minster,
which stood hard by Bishop Walkelin’s
Cathedral of Winchester, died after 16 years'
service, in 1088; he had formerly held the post
of Prior at the Abbey of Mont St Michel on the
coast of Normandy. On his death, New Minster
Abbey was immediately seized by King William
II's agent, Ranulf Flambard – who was the most
prominent of that powerful triumvirate under the
King: Ranulf, Walkelin and Bigot.
As you know, King William's customary policy
was to spin out the process of succession to any vacant post for as long as was practical –
which often meant awaiting the highest bid, or so outraged ecclesiasts complained. At any
rate, vacant or filled, the King's exchequer stood to gain, and Flambard's duty was to see to it
that it did.
What happened at New Minster is not entirely clear from the records. It was certainly held to
be one of the worst cases of abuse from this period, because if you totted up the whole period
during which the State profited at the expense of the Church, it might come to as many as 12
99
years: 1088 – 1100, almost the entirety of
William Rufus's reign.
025.2
PLAN:
In effect, Flambard is likely to have been in overall charge for the whole of that long period –
Two Family Trees: Bishop
holding it first for nearly three years as a simple
Walkelin’s of Winchester and
Herbert Losinga’s.
vacancy, then putting in the hands of this “placeman”, Robert Losinga, from 1091 till Robert's
death in 1093 (though some suggest he may have
lived on till 1098), and finally acquiring it for
himself, becoming Abbot Ranulf most probably
in 1093, combining it with his many other duties
– as, among others, Chancellor and as Bishop of Durham. Only in 1100, on the death of
Rufus and on the accession of his brother King Henry, did Ranulf Flambard finally have his
grasp loosened in a sudden urgent campaign to clean up abuses, when he was succeeded by
Abbot Hugh, during whose time the Abbey was finally moved from beside the Cathedral at
Winchester to less cramped quarters at Hyde.
During Abbot Robert Losinga's tenancy, we hear rumours of resentment bubbling into
occasional fury; it was certainly not the healthiest of times at Winchester. It may not all have
been entirely Robert Losinga's fault, either. The central area of Winchester had for some
considerable time felt inconveniently cluttered, what with the royal palace and Treasury still
being based there and both the Old Minster and the New standing parallel to one another
hemmed in by a loop of the River Itchen, rumoured to have unhealthily stagnant properties.
The rebuilding of the Old Minster, the Cathedral itself, had been taking place over several
decades under the guiding hand, of course, of no less a person than Bishop Walkelin himself
– and as we shall later discover, he was no stranger to the incestuous power of Nepotism; he
had not the slightest problem with the old principle of keeping it in the family.
Which was, of course, half the point of the scandal. In the famous little satire we have already
encountered, it was indeed a scandal – monstrum – that a simonistical band of taint-fingered
clergy should turn God's Church into an avaricious den of thieves. If Simony was filthy
commerce, Nepotism was Incest Incarnate: “Scandal rears its ugly head in the Church –
genitore Losinga!” Now how do we translate that little gem? Genitore can mean “caused
by”, or “is the root of it” – or more plainly “engendered it”. Even – to allow its full range of
subtlety – “fathered / is the parent of it”: which (if you think about it) is almost as
paradoxically convoluted as the twisting-turning play on ideas we encountered in As Dewe in
Aprille. Losinga, it suggests, conceived a
monstrosity: he parented, he infected – this
double-headed chimera – this Son-Father
Simon of corruption! And of course the
025.3 DRAWING:
satirist places Son ahead of Father: Filius
est præsul, Pater abbas – the son is Bishop,
Abbot pushing a cart piled high with
the father Abbot! We all know – don't we? –
money-bags.
to whom Losinga more specifically refers.
Who sired whom? What an inside-outside
concept!
If you think about it, it is odd, isn't it? It
makes you wonder about the meaning of
100
Family and how we are to understand the word Losinga. It makes us speculate about
inheritance and wealth and who and how and where from and what for. Two thousand pieces
of ready silver is an eye-bulging wagon of cash to have at one's finger-tips. Proh dolor – For
Shame indeed!
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26
Touching Base
In which we appreciate home comforts
One Letter of Herbert's is specially interesting because in it he specifically refers to his father's death; it is
even more interesting because his correspondent was (like his father) called “Rodbert” and Herbert makes
play of this by jokingly putting himself in the same Father-Son context with this Rodbert, who appears to
have been an older Bishop living in London. Of the various Bishop Roberts available to us as possibilities
here, two of them are too young, being of Herbert's own generation. The third, Bishop Robert of
Hereford, was certainly of the right generation, and indeed is thought to have died in nearly the same
period as Herbert's father. Besides, history becomes even more puzzling here, because he shares the same
“sur-name” as Herbert and his father : Losinga. What are we supposed to think?
L
ike Chicken, like Egg. Herbert himself (when all was done and dusted) came to be
judged the perfect Father. “Here lies renowned Herbert!” boasts his tomb (though now long
gone): “by whom this Temple was built with great zeal and at no moderate cost.... A great
man was he...a foster-father to his flock.”
And how can we say that his father Robert wasn't revered as a model of paternalism and
mourned at his departure? We know for a fact that his son was a mourner – which I suppose
is a step in the right direction. In fact, the evidence for this appears in one of his own most
engagingly humorous and intriguing letters.
This is Letter XIX, addressed “To Rodbert” – and its date is unknown, as indeed is this
Rodbert's identity. It is clear, though, that Rodbert is not his father, because Herbert mentions
his actual father's death in the course of the letter, while at the same time flattering his
correspondent by describing him as a substitute
father. Indeed, he makes this reference twice in
the same Letter, the first time rather puzzlingly
in the extended letter-head: “To his Host and
026.1 DRAWING:
Potter Rodbert, Herbert his Guest and
Handiwork sendeth greeting”; then later more
Two Bishops seated at dining table in
explicitly: “You, my most hospitable bishop,
lavish Library. One, the older,
gestures towards his possessions.
compelled my lowly self to enter your house,
lodged me in your own chamber, and sated me
with an abundance of good things; so that, in
short, the father whom I buried some time ago
at Winchester, I have recently found, come to
life again in London.”
We know that Robert Losinga, Herbert's father, died only two years after his appointment as
Abbot of New Minster, Winchester – in 1093. Or possibly, according to a different source,
after seven years – in 1098. The whole episode is made specially indistinct by the close
proximity in Winchester of those twin vultures, Flambard and Walkelin. In any case, the
Letter to Rodbert was clearly written “some time” after one or other of these dates.
Secondly, Herbert addresses the unidentified Rodbert as “most hospitable Pontifex” –
Bishop. A Bishop with a household in London does not, of course, necessarily mean a Bishop
102
of London; the two actual London bishops in Herbert's time were called Maurice and
Richard, which would seem to rule them out. No – it may well have been a commonplace for
a Bishop from the provinces to have had living quarters in the capital, too. Both the King and
Archbishop Anselm needed the presence of the Spiritualty, often at short notice. The
possibilities would therefore seem to include Robert Bloet, Bishop of Lincoln, and Bishop
Robert Limesey of Chester and later of Coventry, an uncomfortably close colleague of
Herbert's. Both of these were contemporaries of Herbert himself as far as age was concerned.
And it is this which, to my mind, must exclude these men. Herbert's Letter is marked
throughout by a tone of playful respect, as of a younger man to a very good-humoured but
distinctly older; a third detail in this letter is that Herbert refers to Rodbert's house as if it had
become the Family Home, in that whatever was his (Rodbert's) was in a sense his (Herbert's):
“whatever met my eye bespoke the father, and nothing wore a strange or foreign look.”
This has the feel of a clear generation gap to it, and leads us in a most singular direction. For
it leaves, as far as I can see, only one further possibility.
In 1095 there died a very old hand, a highly respected and terrifyingly learned Bishop who
happened too to be named Robert. Robert Losinga, Bishop of Hereford. And yes – he did
indeed share both names with Herbert's father. And yes – he died round about the same period
as Abbot Robert Losinga of New Minster. So yes – he was of Herbert's father's generation,
and his episcopacy intersected with Herbert's for around four years during the period when,
as Bishop of Thetford, Herbert was finalizing the Transition to Norwich – 1091-95.
Let us now play shamelessly with the possibilities and prod at several Unlikelihoods in the
process. You may already be asking, “What if these two Roberts were not two, but one? Is it
not possible that Herbert's father was Bishop of Hereford?” I have no answer for this; if there
ever were evidence for an answer one way or the other, it is now
long gone. But the absence of specific reference to such a
relationship between two Bishops makes it perhaps less likely
than not.
026.2
DRAWING:
Line of Bishops
in a long queue
stretching into
the past.
However. Let us for the moment forget the Letter, and wonder
whether records of the “deaths” of either of these two old
gentlemen are to be relied on in detail. We would do well to be
cautious about being over-precise in such a blurry period and in
such a blurry place as (of all places) Winchester – under the subtle
sleight-of-hand of (who else?) Walkelin, that subtle weaver of
spiritual and temporal possibilities, that Equivocator of power.
What I mean is this. Herbert's father, old Robert Losinga, is kept
in the loop, clustered up almost to the point of claustrophobia
against the new-built walls of the Old Minster, Winchester
Cathedral. During the same period, the records have it that in
1095 Bishop Robert Losinga, builder of Hereford Cathedral, dies – and is succeeded by
young Gerard, who is on his way up in the Church. He is to be Bishop of Hereford for five
years – then to be elevated in 1100 to Archbishop of York. This Gerard is Walkelin's nephew.
They have it carved up between them, these men – so that both at Hereford and at Winchester
(and spread, too, like a delicate net of steel over all the wide country) distinctions of power
merge and blur; but those in the Inner Circle are the men who know, and even old men do
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well to share out the grass. What if Robert of Hereford had stepped quietly down and spent
his old age peacefully thinking his thoughts at Winchester, London's twin city of the power of
old Wessex? Robert of Hereford is known for strange thoughts, mystic knowledge, an interest
in the stars – and indeed was “Losinga” in every sense. Why should wise men not have their
time of leisure?
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27
Misappropriation
In which we vainly try to disentangle the Bishop's property
Various of Herbert's Letters contain a jokey material acquisitiveness: he is good at cajoling people into
lending him things, and at converting loans into gifts! We cannot, however, pin any particular wrongdoing onto him when it comes to accounting for the extraordinary sum of money he was able to lay his
hands on in order to acquire the Bishopric. On the other hand, we have to admit that Herbert was adept
at juggling distinctions between what property belonged to him as of right and what was owned by the
Church – but controlled by him through the power which he had bought simonistically. Certainly, various
glowing testimonials as to his personal generosity suggest that he was not without means, but the subject
of how such wealth came into his possession in the first place defeats us. If it was Family Money, how
come it was the son (Herbert) who committed Nepotism on behalf of his father (Robert)? This is not how
worldly business is meant to work!
A
ll of which, of course, solves nothing. Letter XIX remains as perplexing as ever. It sets
us a riddle, but reveals nothing.
Its ending does, however, tell us a little more about Herbert himself and his capacity for
deliberate cheek – and if nothing else it is entertaining to imagine the ecclesiastical snort it
provoked when first unsealed by Bishop Robert.
Continuing jauntily along its thank-you-for-a-lovely-time theme, and going on at length about
the virtues of Hospitality – it suddenly emerges that this Robert has not only showered
Herbert with gifts and favours – he's lent him a pony.
Lent him. “But as to your palfrey,” continues Bishop
Herbert, “I have long thought what I should do with
027.1 DRAWING:
him, whether I should follow in regard to him the
wish of your heart, or the bidding of your mouth? For
Bishop riding on a pony.
in your heart you wished that I should keep the
palfrey; with your mouth you bade me send him back.
Pretending then not to hear the momentary bidding
of your voice, I have discerned the secret intent of
your heart, and have made up my mind to obey that. I
have kept your palfrey; but the most righteous judge will restore him to thee one day in a
flowery plain, at that last great jubilee, when unto all men all that has been theirs shall be
restored.”
An indulgent father and a son not slow to take advantage: a merry family quip. This is,
besides, not the only occasion on which Herbert will make such a distinction between what is
Spoken and what is Intended - and the next such example will be anything but amusing.
From the evidence of another letter (Letter LIV), we know that Herbert had one brother
whose name began with G. This letter, addressed “To G., his only brother”, begins by getting
straight to the point: “I implore you with many entreaties that with your usual liberality you
would lend me the box-wood tablets..” which he then goes on to specify, ending (and we'll
leave his own words to condemn him!): “Do not fear my keeping them; for I do not care to
owe any man anything save love only, and the kind actions which are its fruits.” A jolly
105
enough tone certainly, but we cannot easily avoid the conclusion that our old friend had form.
There is plenty of reason for harping on this mildly materialistic playfulness in the Bishop,
because sure enough it sets us on a course which branches off at a more serious angle and
into an inevitable line of reasoning: here was a man who was to show himself a financial
wizard, a conjurer up of money, which was to spill out across Norfolk, not just to his own but
to the general good. Money may have been his downfall at the outset – but by the end few
were complaining.
Herbert himself was adept with Distinctions, so why do we not ask the question which really
burns? To what extent was Herbert's wealth his own? Clearly it could be said that in the latter
part of his career, he “came into” Church property and, of course, the Church Income which
King William himself had such an eye for. And, inevitably, the old saying holds good: “To
him who hath shall more be given.” Cash begets cash.
Now I think we can safely say that the bribe with which he simonized his way into the
Bishopric was unlikely to have been “Church” money brazenly purloined under the noses of
the ecclesiastical authorities; he was at that point the Abbot of Ramsey, and Ramsey Abbey
was a famously wealthy institution – but it would surely be speculating beyond reasonable
considerations to damn the whole Venture as based on daylight robbery. The contemporary
charge against Herbert was of Simony (and Nepotism) – but not Theft.
Let's hear it again:
Quid non speremus, si nummos possideamus? : What may we not hope for if we're able to
pay for it?
Omnia nummus habet : Money controls all things.
Ecclesiæ nummis venduntur : The Church can be bought for cash.
Nummis fit præsul et abba : Money appoints Bishop and Abbot.
The cry of anguished outrage is aimed fair and square against those who can get their hands
on ready money – and why would these bitter verses have refrained from throwing in
accusations of embezzlement for good measure if that had been suspected too?
No – we must for the present stick with the traditional view: Herbert (or Herbert's family) had
access to money. Directly or indirectly? If it was paid out of patrimonial funds, where exactly
did it derive from? Was it purely “foreign” money, as from a Norman family seeking
advancement? In which case any old Bishopric would have done. Or was it specifically
sourced from an existing East Anglian income? – which might imply motivation based on
local family ambitions, or a sense of achieving a “birth-right”.
To begin on firm ground we need to recapitulate: Bishop Herbert was certainly the First
Bishop of Norwich, formally arriving there in the year 1094. But before that he was Bishop
of Thetford (1091), and before that Abbot of Ramsey (c1087). Prior to that things get a bit
misty – whether he Came Over with the new King in 1087, or whether he was, in a sense,
Here Already who can tell? One thing's for sure, though: he had Family and Money, whether
Family money or money come by in some other way, no one can know with certainty –
though, if it came from the sweat of honest labour, however he'd have had the opportunity to
earn it only Goodness knows – for Rumour had it he'd been a cleric all his working life, first
a monk at the Abbey of Fécamp near the Channel coast in Normandy, then by swift stages to
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the post of Prior of that same famous establishment, second only to Bec.
Let's therefore consider in a little more detail that Family which clearly gave him enough
punch to launch him into social circles high enough to get him Noticed. Which, of course,
depended in part on the level of Social Mobility which one might have expected following
the Norman Conquest. For indeed for large swathes of the population on both sides of the
Channel, fate kept you tied to the same fields, roads, hedgerows, clustered hamlets familiar to
deep-ingrained grand-generations; but higher up the levels, it's amazing what a little
prosperity could do for the light-footed. Or fingered.
However achieved, though, there is certainly evidence of a kind for Herbert's independent
possession of property and wealth (at least after his father's death c1093). Right at the
beginning of the First Register, Bartholomew Cotton draws attention to this in the course of
listing the Bishop’s achievements: Hence it is that in the present little work I have proposed
to insert certain of the events of earlier times for the instruction of old and young: to wit,
who founded the Church of the Holy Trinity of Norwich; by whom and from whom the site
and place of the said church was procured; how he divided episcopal property from that
given by him.
So – that much was remembered clearly enough, even after 150 years: there were two distinct
categories of property at Norwich; Herbert had “divided episcopal property from that given
by him.” Right down to Cotton's time in the Thirteenth Century a very clear idea was
preserved as to the distinction between Herbert's personal wealth and his control of ancient
Church lands and property. A generous benefactor indeed! gifting the new diocese with his
sacrificial birth-right. Celibate in soul, this Bishop appears to have merged his heritage with
something infinitely more sacred and long-lasting. Who needs consider inheritance when the
offspring is an unseen posterity?
Or, depending how you see it, this very generous level of personal donation almost seems to
suggest that his legendary bribe initiated further investment: in some sense he knew it was
not a case of pouring in good money after bad.
The record of a number of property transactions which took place in the time of his AngloSaxon predecessor Bishop Athelmar makes use of a phrase which has caused some
controversy concerning Herbert's later holdings of certain lands both in and outside Norwich.
These properties were referred to a number of years back as being in the Bishop’s possession:
sed non de Episcopatu – but not through his right as Bishop. No conclusive decision can be
established simply by extending this intriguing detail to the case of Herbert, as to whether he
may have possessed independent means in his own right, particularly in Norwich.
In addition, we must not forget that the other end of the story of the Herbert Losinga Scandal
is all to do with Repentance and making up for the mis-use of money by donating it freely
and above board – almost certainly as part of the act of penance laid on him by Pope Urban
during Herbert's Confession of 1094 on his visit to Rome. His original Epitaph reinforces this
perception of extraordinary material generosity: “This temple,” it announces, “was founded
and built with great zeal, and at no moderate cost” – which I take as referring not just to
how expensive Norwich Cathedral was to build, but much more to the Founder's personal
extravagance.
There are also, of course, various personal letters from Herbert which hint at property owned
107
in his own right, and while there are still controversies over how much was felt to be
“owned” by a Bishop as of episcopal right, Herbert speaks of his various acts of conveyance
as if deriving from his own benevolence. A particularly interesting example (because it
suggests that the monks of Norwich Priory were not in the least inhibited about expressing
themselves freely) is one such Letter – clearly composed in a spirit of material compromise:
Herbert Bishop to the monks of the Holy Trinity. You frequently alleged to me that Thorp
was desirable for you and your use. And I bought it for myself and for you and the better
part I gave to you and the lesser part retained
for myself, which division I thought to be quite
necessary for the Church. For if the Bishop
possessed nothing at Norwich, his coming
027.2 DRAWING:
would be troublesome and a burden to you.
But it will be shameful for the Holy Man to
Bishop standing, one arm round the
despoil and devour your possessions, since he
shoulders of elderly Abbot.
himself should find all things at Norwich
pertaining to his own needs. But nevertheless,
to check your complaint I give to you in
exchange for the part of Thorp which I retain
my Manor of Gnatington... and the Church of
Thornham and the land of Thurston; also a
carucate of land at Geywood. I sign this donation with the Holy Cross and confirm it with
my seal. The seal † of Herbert Bishop.
Oh yes – when it came to it, Bishop Herbert was good at defining distinctions, and although it
may be true that between Fathers and Sons the dictum “What's yours is mine” might
sometimes have its advantages, on the whole he fully recognized that What is Yours and What
is Mine must often be held apart.
What is not in the least bit clear, though, is how strangely the original charge against Herbert
harped on the combined sins of Simony (which we can understand), and Nepotism (which,
we must confess, puzzles us). The act of bribing one's way in the world is easy to self-justify
and as common as muck and money; on the other hand, to buy one's father into worldly
advantage suggests a peculiar in-breeding of filial duty – which, while not unheard-of in
Norfolk, still leaves us staring askance at the second charge against Herbert Losinga: the
charge of Reverse Nepotism. Inside-outside.
108
28
Investiture
In which we place bets on God against Mammon
The Investiture Crisis, that great medieval power struggle between Church and State, was a Europe-wide
phenomenon in the time of Herbert, having as its spiritual centre a series of reforming Popes, culminating
in Gregory VII, and its geographical centre the area around the city of Liège. In particular it featured an
unseemly war between Pope Gregory (and later Pope Urban II) and his worldly and highly-compromised
opponent Anti-Pope Clement III. For most nations, including England, the central controversy boiled
down to the problem of Investiture – that is, the question of who had the right to appoint Bishops: the
Pope himself or the local ruler? And in England, William Rufus was living to regret the panic in which he
had agreed to the appointment of Anselm as Archbishop of Canterbury – for Anselm was a reformer
through and through. Herbert Losinga, caught in the cross-fire, became a sacrificial lamb indeed when he
visited Pope Urban, nominally at least, for the Absolution of his sins.
“W
hose head do you see on the coin?”
“Caesar's.”
“Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's; and unto God the things that are God's.”
is – as I remember it – roughly how the dialogue goes.
The Trouble was that back then in the days of the Master, the foetal Church owned nothing.
Money, property, monasteries, churches, hospitals, all the paraphernalia of that medieval
institution of the soul's welfare and the body's – none of it existed except in spiritual embryo.
The Messiah had side-stepped a divisive question about tax-paying and spiritual loyalties;
later the Issue, unresolved, would smoulder on to burn a hole in the fabric of society.
It would come to be known by that sonorous title, the Investiture Crisis, which raged at its
most destructive during the period of Herbert's lifetime. Its origins, though, went far further
back: the pressure was a long time in the building. There had been an influential circulation
of ideas of ecclesiastical reform for quite a while, stemming most recently from the energetic
Bishop of Liège, Wazo, whose ideas were boosted by support from Pope Gregory VI during
the 1040s; Wazo's efforts were praised, too, by Pope Leo IX (1049-54) – not perhaps without
a degree of self-interest, of course, as he and future popes would inevitably find themselves
fighting the Church's corner against powerful worldly interests.
028.1
It was a dangerous business, this
balancing-act between asserting the
dignity and spiritual authority of the
Church, while at the same time
subtly appeasing volatile characters
like William Rufus and his ilk with
the ropes of the state clenched
between whitened knuckles. What
must be upheld were the twin
principles of Church organization: a
Bishop's role should at all costs be
central; outside interference by
DRAWING:
An Archbishop and a King in furious conflict.
109
“lay” authorities must be discouraged. That was the long and short of it, a theme hammered
into shape over several centuries till it became a red-hot brand of righteousness.
A Bishop, of course, had his worldly loyalties: he must, said the Reformers, be faithful to his
King “de secularibus” – but to the Pope he owed loyalty and obedience “ecclesiasticus
ordo”. Ideally, this delicate balance was a thing of beauty and harmony, and the men who
dreamed it – men like Bishop Wazo and his colleagues, and in much earlier times by Pope
Stephen IX (939-42) and by Pope Nicholas II (1058-61) – often had one thing in common:
Liège.
Liège – this city and its surrounding area had a disproportionate influence in the propagation
of this ideal of Church and State harmonious. Modern Belgium – near the German border; 55
miles from Charleroi, 58 from Cologne, 22 from Aachen. Charlemagne country. Remember
Liège.
There was no avoiding the fall-out, though, when things went awry. Archbishop Anselm was
at eternal loggerheads with his worldly superior; the fact that King William Rufus was the
man who had had the power to appoint him in the first place was the nastiest and most basic
sticking-point in their relationship – and would inevitably end in tears. Rufus himself had
known of course that the whole thing was a dreadful mistake, but he was (we are told) so ill
at the time that it can't have seemed to have mattered too much that he was about to commit
himself to a Man of Principle who was bound – simply bound – to make a nuisance of
himself.
And of course he did. He immediately instituted a one-man campaign to bring to a head all
the abuses of (and to) the Church so that they could be consigned to oblivion once and for all.
Appointments of the Church must be by the Church (which meant seeking the direct approval
of Rome); Simony – no more Cash for Honours; Nepotism – keep it out of the Family;
Concubinage – no sexual partners; discipline and regulation – order and respect in the
Church. It was all of it a complete Head-ache and a Pain in the royal Neck. Rufus (now fully
recovered) chafed in retrospective regret. Too late: the Gregorian Reforms were on the boil.
This is a complicated business. How does one convey the state of confusion reigning in this
area in the last quarter of the Eleventh Century? Well, for a start, the phrase “Gregorian
reforms” is more than a touch confusing. You see, though the Reforms started (more or less)
in the time of Pope Gregory VI in the middle of the century, the real struggle was carried
through at enormous personal risk and great vigour by another Pope Gregory – St Gregory.
Gregory VII – Pope from 1073 to 1085. Hildebrand of Sovana by birth. A fighter in the cause
of purity and against corruption, pitted in a mammoth power-struggle against Guibert,
Archbishop of Ravenna, who is spectacularly everything you'd hope of a true villain: openly
simonistic and apparently unphased by financial corruption, he played the old game with the
powers of this World with a wink and a nod. His title as “Anti-Pope” is pure melodrama, and
richly deserved: he represented all the worst aspects of “realistic” intercourse with Mammon
and Herod.
His almost equally amoral stately counterpart was that ambitious megalomaniac the Emperor
Henry IV, whose power secured the dismissal of Pope Gregory VII at the Synod of Worms in
1076, supported by this Guibert as Anti-Pope Clement III, which title he finally achieved in
1080 – despite his excommunication by his rival, Gregory. The enthronement of Clement in
110
Rome in 1084 was the high-point of his career – after which his power (along with that of his
master Emperor Henry) slowly declined.
Well, what would you have done if you'd been in William Rufus's position? Given a choice
between two separate Popes with two quite different sets of values, would you have chosen
Gregory – and in effect given up your traditional right to appoint Church officials within the
bounds of your own Kingdom? or would you have clung to your long-held and timehonoured power with tooth-and-nail determination? If you'd been Rufus. What do you think?
The Right of Investiture was not to be surrendered without a soul's-brink tussle. And did
Archbishop Anselm put up a fight! No wonder Rufus hated him: no wonder the King was
seriously contemplating throwing in his and his country's lot with Clement – Anti-Pope or
not!
By 1094, things had moved on. Pope Gregory was dead, and now a new name was emerging.
We’ve encountered it already: Odo de Lagéry – Pope Urban II, who emerges eventually as
the next-but-one successor to Gregory, and it has already taken him an age to work his way
back through the political debris to his rightful headquarters in Rome. Anti-Pope Clement still
stalketh about seeking whom he may devour, but Emperor Henry is steadily dwindling. In
round about April 1094 Urban sets up in the Lateran Palace, ready in position for the collision
which is to take place.
We have already glanced over the original Story of Herbert Losinga's Conscience – how,
smitten, he braved the apoplectic King at Hastings and slipped away in one piece thanks to
the intervention of his Mentor, Anselm of Canterbury.
Anselm has only just been appointed, remember – and they've all just spent Christmas 1093
at Gloucester, no doubt attending a rather chilly celebration with King William, who is just
beginning to get the measure of his new spiritual counterpart. In February 1094, many of the
same party seem to be at Hastings, making
ready to accompany the King (or to see him
off) to Normandy.
Which is when the eruption takes place.
Herbert hasn't taken account of the King's
immediate plans and has hoped to sneak out
Two Popes in furious conflict.
unobserved – and illegally, because as we
know foreign journeys by Church
dignitaries need royal approval, and Rufus
would certainly never have approved of
what Herbert was up to. Herbert was on his
way to visit not Anti-Pope Clement, but
Pope Urban – who represented absolutely
everything most troublesome to the King, and most tailored-made to the mind-set of the new
Archbishop. No wonder the King hit the roof.
028.2
DRAWING:
Or perhaps what really takes place happens the other way round. Herbert returns from his
illegal journey to Rome to find himself intercepted by the King – which (of the two
scenarios) might make better sense to the likelihood of such unfortunate timing.
111
028.3
DRAWING:
Archbishop on Throne beckoning to a
subservient Bishop.
It makes no difference to the drive of the Story,
though. Can we not guess the gist of it? What do
you think? Right at the beginning of his tenure
as England's great reforming Archbishop –
gloriously mis-matched with England's most
notoriously amoral of monarchs – a human
sacrifice is made. Give me a Simoner, Give me a
Nepotist. Whom do we have? “Why, Herbert!”
beckons Father Anselm. “I've got a Mission for
you!”
112
29
Glosinga Losinga
In which the Bishop gets a name for himself
Although the consensus among modern historians is that Herbert was born at Exmes in Normandy and
that his family originated in Lotharingia, this was not always the received wisdom. Losinga may or may
not be a “sur-name” in the conventional sense – but he did share it with his father Robert. As for his place
of birth, an alternative tradition exists that he was in fact born at Hoxne in Suffolk – and his passionate
identification with East Anglia might indeed suggest more than a “career” interest. We cannot get away,
though, from the persistence of his “sur”-name, and how it links him with Lotharingia. In fact, this
association is sometimes used as a bludgeon with which to beat his reputation, as if it suggested something
shameful – so perhaps we should see the word “Losinga” more as a descriptive term (clearly to some
people, a term of abuse), rather than as suggestive of geographical origin.
S
omewhere in Normandy, not many miles to the South of Fécamp, there is an
unpronounceable village spelled Exmes. Here we must guess that the young Herbert grew up,
because Exmes is where Tradition assigns his birth – unless, that is, (says another, less
fashionable, Tradition) he grew up not in Normandy but in Suffolk, at the unspellable village
pronounced Hoxne. (Oh all right: Hox-en) which would put him much further off from
Fécamp, where he was apprenticed, but of course much closer to his later Stomping Ground
around Thetford and Norwich. Which in turn would have given him stronger motivation and
readier wealth if his family held estates in that part of the country – specially if suddenly and
unexpectedly the possession of a Very Large Sum of money became important in the Story.
Which it did.
029.1
MAP:
England and Continental Europe,
showing relative positions of Exmes,
Fécamp and Hoxne.
We have, truth be told, very little to go on. For a
young Suffolk lad from a well-to-do family to
have crossed the Channel so as to join himself as
a novice to a famous Norman-French Church
foundation would not have been such a
surprising thing – not in those free-flowing
continental times under the watchful eye of the
Duke of Normandy. And if he were hereditarily
from East Anglia, that would make him an Angle
by blood and not strictly a Norman – something
which might have become detectable in his
attitudes and actions later on, or so we might
guess.
Any help we might have hoped for from his name is hoped in vain. Herbert is perfectly good
Anglo-Saxon (“Bright warrior”) but a name commonly enough to be found on the Continent.
The complications involved in his surname are so great that they deserve more than a whole
section to themselves. Some sources, such as Batholomew Cotton never use the sur-name at
all. He is always, to them, Herbertus Episcopus or “the Lord Herbert”. It is as if the
appellation Losinga had never existed.
Yet Losinga is the name which he shares with his father Robert, which makes it more likely
to have been a family name passed on down the generations, and not just a nickname
113
signifying (once seriously suggested) a person in the habit of flattering and sucking up to his
superiors – as in “Glosinga-Losinga”.
His father, Robert, as we know, confuses things still further by sharing his entire name with
an almost exact contemporary, Robert Losinga, Bishop of Hereford. But this Hereford Robert
is referred to both as “Losinga” and “of Lorraine” (or, sometimes, “of Lotharingia”),
making him perhaps more accurately Robert of Lorraine – so that the theory most
enthusiastically supported by scholars is that Losinga is simply a geographical reference
indicating the provenance of possibly quite a number of families whose ancestors came from
that border-region of France and Germany, now Lorraine, but once of much greater
dimensions and known as Lotharingia.
To be specific, it was proposed a long time ago by the scholar Edward Milligen Beloe (1878)
that “Losinga” is the French word for “Lotharingia”, Latinized in its final syllable and
Normanized in its use of “s” (or sometimes “z”) because of (to the Normans) that
unpronounceable “th”, a distinctly Anglo-Saxon sound. And it is, I think, Beloe's proposed
etymology which has bedded in as the consensus view since then
But ultimately, as far as Herbert's name betrays his roots, it's all up in the air. An educated
guess might make him a Norman-French lad
with Lotharingian roots. But later events might
just raise the ghost of a suspicion.
029.2
DRAWING:
Before we get on to that, let us take a brief look
at the mid-victorian paper published by Rev
Two-headed Bishop – two Bishops
W.T. Spurdens, highlighting as he does various
merged into one.
aspects of this subject. Much of Spurdens'
argument is based on what now looks like a
basic misunderstanding – which is that he
ignored the existence of Herbert's immediate
predecessor, William Beaufeu / Belfago /
Galfagus, Bishop of Thetford 1085-c1090, who
lived, presided and died leaving few traces, besides a flurry of relatives and property
transactions. Therefore poor Spurdens spends much of his elegantly-argued article shuffling
together the identities of William Beaufeu and Herbert Losinga, as if they were one and the
same – which is indeed what he believed. Hence, he proceeds, “William Herbert” was the son
of “Robert Herbert”, the father being Herbert the Chaplain (Capellanus) and the son Herbert
the Bishop (Episcopus) – making Herbert the family sur-name. The whole thing gets into a
picturesque but absurd tangle.
Apart from this one understandable error – for William Beaufeu is shadowy indeed –
Spurdens is no fool. He illustrates pretty convincingly that other contentious tangle – over
whether Herbert had been born and brought up in England or in Normandy – though the
modern consensus would suggest that he came to the “wrong” conclusion over this too. In
essence, Spurdens was a supporter of the interpretation of events put forward by Bishop John
Bale (1495-1563) and other chroniclers that Herbert was: natus apud Esham in pago
Oxonensi in Sudvolgia – that is, in the Manor of Esham in the parish of Hoxne in Suffolk.
The opposing viewpoint, expressed in confusingly similar language by Gerald of Wales
(Giraldus Cambrensis 1146-1223), was that he was: natus apud Exmes in pago Oximensi in
114
Normannia – in the town of Exmes in the Oximenian district of Normandy. This was the
version historians like Bartholomew Cotton later prescribed to, and would seem on the face
of it to be the likelier version on the basis of the chronology of these traditions – Gerald of
Wales lived long before John Bale did, and might thus be better placed to judge. However,
the opinion that he was English by birth is fairly deep-rooted, and Spurdens points out that
John Bale was himself a Suffolk man, and ought to have known!
The possibility that Losinga might be echoed in the name Lake Lothing, which is the stretch
of water which lies between a significant bend in the River Waveney and the modern harbour
area at Lowestoft, has likewise been cast aside as a daft and rather desperate derivation –
though perhaps we're left with a hollow sense of unease at the glibness of consensus: it is too
easy to subscribe to the authority of numbers, when perhaps a voice crying in the wilderness
is the one most worth listening to.
After all, with Herbert, instinct may be our best guide: it is, I think, his sense of familiarity, of
absolute ownership, of being utterly at ease in his skin – in all that he wrote, in all that he
understood and in all that he set out to do – which feeds our instinctive hunch that Herbert the
Bishop of Norwich and of all Norfolk (God Willing of Suffolk too if he'd had his way!) was
marked with the sign of a man native-born – who was, in short, at home. Ambition drove
him, and when at length it left him washed up in such a Backwater as would come one
derisive day to define “Provincial”, it was as if he'd achieved what he'd desired all along. His
soul was in East Anglia.
Yet, persistently, this “Losinga” suffix apparently pulls quite the other way: “of Lotharingia”
– from foreign parts! The addition of “de” in some applications of this term – Herbert de
Losinga – likewise reinforces this and heads us still further in that direction. And yet, and yet!
Was he not also pelted with the word as if it were a form of abuse? – Monstrum genitore
Losinga! Was it, even, a kind of racial insult?
The hatred, the sheer sense of betrayal! The greatest of all nearly contemporary sources,
William of Malmesbury, while he commends Herbert for his example of Repentance, is
utterly remoreseless in his attack on the falsehood and hypocrisy of his earlier behaviour.
Hypocrisy! Remember now two things: how Archbishop Anselm, man of Principle, perpetual
irritant to all realistic common-sensical men-of-the-world, pain by ecclesiastical appointment
to the
the royal backside – how this Anselm had aligned himself with Pope Urban and the
Gregorian Reforms which were intent on sweeping away all the grubby old abuses and
affording no hiding-place to the comfort of homely compromise. And how, at the crucial
moment, right at the New Year of 1093-4, Anselm rubbed shoulders with his friend and
sacrificial lamb, Herbert of Thetford, who with his Sin heavy about him and the prospect of
full papal benediction and such an investiture as would put his appointment to the new See of
Norwich wholly beyond doubt, was all too ready to have himself broadcast as a Simoner to
all the Christian world. It was all too smooth, too ready-made for the common man to
stomach. Sin now – repent later!
One reason why the World so readily hurls the charge of Hypocrisy in the Church's face is
that often Repentance seems too easily accomplished, too glibly claimed (mere words!), to
reconcile Old Sin with the New Man. Now that this Herbert stands revealed for what he is,
he's anybody's coconut to shy at, repentant or no. How dare he claim to be so holier-than115
thou, he who was of Anselm's clean-up party?
It's enough to make anyone spit out the grimiest
term of contempt: “Lotharingian!”
029.3
DRAWING:
Bishop being abused by angry crowd.
Because, if you follow me here, Lotharingia
was certainly a place, yes, but – in common talk
– much more than just an exercise in
Geography. It was a concept, too. If you called
someone a Lotharingian, people knew exactly
what you were driving at.
116
30
Shadow Land
In which we enter a fairy kingdom
Lotharingia was in its material form a political and geographical convenience effected by the break-up of
the Carolingian Empire. As a centre of scholarship and spirituality it was to gain strength and influence
in the years preceding Herbert's time, spreading its inspiration deep into Anglo-Saxon England, where
Church reform and new spiritual rigour went hand in hand with scientific advance. Various cities in the
West Country were strongly infiltrated by “Lotharingian” attitudes and thought, as were the Fenland
Abbeys – Ramsey Abbey in particular, which was, we guess, the source of some of the intellectual and
architectural concepts which Herbert brought with him to Norwich.
T
he phantom kingdom of Lotharingia existed in solid form for a mere 14 years. It was a
tail-end, back-of-an-envelope scheme for disposing of an Empire which at its height had been
as poignantly romantic and transitory as King Arthur's Lyonesse. Charles the Great –
Charlemagne – shared with Arthur the properties of a regal snowball, accumulating Knights
and Quests, Power and Tragedy – all the legendary paraphernalia of nostalgic admiration. But
then inevitably from 814 onwards, after the Old Man's death came all the dismal worldly
business of division, negotiation and willing-away greatness like a bleak dust-sheet cast over
the rolled-up components of the Carolingian Empire, packed into storage and consigned to
the comfort of memory.
This was so long and contentious a process that it took several generations before the shape
of future Europe became anything like half recognizable. At the Treaty of Verdun (834),
Charles's Empire was divided into three main parts – the Kingdom of the East Franks, the
Kingdom of the West Franks, and in between the buffer zone which was the original
predecessor of Lotharingia, which stretched in an unsustainable strip down the middle of
Europe from the North Sea around Belgium all the way through to the Jura Mountains and
even (in its earliest form) tailing right down to Rome. Known as the Regnum Lotharii after its
ruler, Lothair I, eldest grandson of Charlemagne, it was hemmed in on both sides by Lothair's
dangerously powerful brothers, Louis the German to the East and Charles the Bald who held
the Frankish lands to the West. On Lothair's death in 855, his son Lothair II inherited what
was to become the Lotharingian heartland, from the Dutch and Belgian coast in the North and
running in an uneven strip down the Franco-German border. If you can find Liège on the
map, that will give you an idea of his geographical centre-point.
030.1
MAP:
England and Continental Europs,
showing names of Lotharingian
centres in both.
It was an impossible, preposterous dream of
worldly power, and on young Lothair's death at
the age of 34, sure enough all hope, ambition,
promise had dwindled into no more than a
flicker in time: nothing more than a protracted
divorce wrangle marks Lothair's short reign,
and his Kingdom vanished with him, pounced
on and devoured by his hungry uncles to either
side. Except, quite undeservedly, the memory of
King Lothair of Neither-Here-nor-There was to
become mysteriously preserved in a name:
Lorraine – which was to achieve a political
117
significance in its own right and far beyond its extent and acreage, subdividing itself,
confusingly, into Upper Lorraine to the South and Lower Lorraine to the North. To conceive a
picture of this, you have to see Europe upside-down – which is of course an apt enough
image.
More than that, its future was to make it a far more distinct and recognizable region than the
vagueness of its geographical boundaries promised. It was to produce scholars, scientists,
radical reformers, thinkers, astrologers, mathematicians, theologians – intellectual troublemakers of every description. The interplay of ideas sent electrical currents buzzing through
even the stodgier parts of Europe. Lotharingian cities like Liège, Metz, Cologne and Trèves
were hot-houses of radicalism and purification in which Christian organization and thought
distilled into galvanic action and shook the decaying Empire and Papacy into new life. Thus
much is recorded. You cannot deny Walcher of Malvern Abbey and Robert the Lotharingian
of Hereford. Ideas are infectious, and the men who propagate them cannot easily be
concealed.
This burst of intellectual life takes us far back into the Tenth Century and beyond, and even in
remote, provincial England the Influence was taking hold. Men like Adelard of Bath, a
contemporary of Walcher of Malvern, Duduc and Giso, both of Wells, and Leofric of Exeter
all testify to an extraordinary reform movement going on in the West Country. Up in the
North, the fate of another Walcher – this one the new Bishop of Durham in 1070 – tells a
more turbulent story: he was murdered during a
period of rebellion and upheaval in 1080, which
King William was to repress with
characteristically brutal decision.
030.2
DRAWING:
Clearly in England, the Norman Conquest itself
had a lot to do with facilitating this access to
Continental thought – but we must also consider
how surprisingly widespread it had become
before then. So as a first illustration of this, let
us consider the early career of the venerable
Abbo, Abbot of Fleury. What is he up to in the
distant 980s? Why, teaching Mathematics and
Astronomy at Ramsey Abbey, of course! And why not dwell for a brief moment on Byrhtferth
(author of Byrhtferth's Manual), who a few years later was to row the few miles from the
hillock of Thorney Abbey to the Isle of Ramsey, whence he became one of the most famous
scholars of King Ethelred's days? At Ramsey, both of them – both nearly a century before
Abbot Herbert Losinga dwelt there, hatching his plans.
Monastic astronomers gathered round
an astrolabe under a night sky full of
stars. One of them points upwards.
The Ramsey Scientific Compendium, with its beautifully detailed charting of the heavens and
of mathematical properties and geometrical formulae, bears witness to the advanced thinking,
understanding and open-mindedness which this Fenland centre of learning represented.
Remote and difficult to reach in its featureless setting – a vast inland sea of reed-beds and
boggy wilderness stretching as far as eye could see across the inner East – Ramsey lies
roughly centrally within a landscape triangle angled on Peterborough, Ely and Huntingdon.
Here monks and scholars fed on unbroken emptiness of space and sky, the threat of
interruption remote as the King in London. It was bleak and it was perfect.
So we ought to be alive to the extent of the knowledge which Herbert had access to through
118
the resources both of learned men and of the wealth of accumulated theory and information
stored in the Abbey Library. The Compendium itself was compiled in the early Twelfth
Century, during the period of construction at Norwich, and it is certainly worth beginning to
guess what Herbert brought with him in terms of know-how. We can be sure, for one thing,
that in this sense at least, he was not called Lotharingian for nothing.
119
31
Reason to the Dane
In which we discover the limits of seamanship
The advent of King Canute is much more than a minor interruption to the development of the English
nation from its Anglo-Saxon past. Canute himself is something of a puzzle, his reputation split two ways
between the “pagan” origins of his father's family and rumours of a Polish Catholic backround on his
mother's. The enduring legend of his “conversion” after the decisive Battle of Asandune, therefore, is
perhaps a little suspect – though his devotion to annual Fenland pilgrimage to Ely may indeed have
stemmed from an encounter with the relics of St Wendreda soon afterwards. His legacy may well go
deeper than is sometimes acknowledged, in that perhaps through him the English Church was brought
suddenly into contact with Lotharingian thinking. In this, we may very well glimpse in Canute himself the
secular source of this obscure revolution.
M
erie sungen ðe muneches binnen Ely,
Ða Cnut Ching reu ðer by;
Roweð, Cnihtes, noer ðe land,
And here we þes muneches sæng.
Merrily sang the monks of Ely
As King Canute came rowing by.
"Row closer to the shore, knights,
And let us hear these monks sing."
A Lesson in Forgotten History
You see, what had happened in the place which we call England was this: the original turmoil
of Little Kingdoms had (during the Sixth, Seventh and Eighth Centuries) resolved themselves
into what Historians call the Heptarchy – because there were Hept (Seven) dominant
Kingdoms (excluding other petty-states which came and went sporadically). These Seven
were: Northumbria, Mercia, East Anglia, Wessex, Essex,
Sussex and Kent.
031.1
MAP:
England, showing
the extent of the
Danelaw.
Then (to keep things simple) we were hit not once, but twice
by “Danes” (not all of them from Denmark). On the first
occasion, their effect was to sweep away East Anglia and
Northumbria, establishing that great vague land-mass known
as the Danelaw, with its most prominent centre at Yorvic
(York). The famous legend of the Death of King Edmund of
East Anglia (which we shall encounter later) marks for us this
great curtain which swept across and cast the Eastlands into
darkness.
In the South, the remaining Kingdoms were forced into a new homogenous form, under the
Royal Family of Wessex – the grandsons of Egbert the Great, King Ethelred I and his famous
younger brother – at first in alliance with the fading and damaged Kingdom of Mercia. And
then there was Alfred.
King Alfred died in 899 – and by then the Danish invasions were curtailed and at a stand-still,
and the fight-back launched. Alfred was only ever King of Wessex, though that incorporated
by now Sussex, Kent and possibly Essex (which had disappeared as a separate entity a long
time before). But all the little kingdoms were now to be superseded – for Alfred was followed
by a long period of good fortune for his country – good fortune in its leaders: King Edward
the Elder fought his way northwards, establishing forts to reinforce his conquest, so that by
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his death most of vanished Mercia was once more under Anglo-Saxon control. King
Athelstan followed, sweeping all before him – Dane, Celt and all desperate and unholy
alliances. Kind Edmund the Magnificent, and King Eadred fought and consolidated – till at
last England attained to its fabled Golden Age under King Edgar the Peaceable.
From that high-point, Englishmen looked back on the terrible trauma on the Danish Incursion
with some satisfaction. The agony had all been confined to the Ninth Century. The ReConquest had yielded them a golden treasure: Unification. England was at last England – one
country under Good King Edgar, the Lord of Plenty, distributing just laws and ruling
undisputed over both the racial stocks which now constituted his land: Englishmen and
Danes, alike and equal under the Law.
Now pull the zoom-switch outwards. That was (in brief) the History of England in the Tenth
Century – or at least the first three-quarters of the Tenth Century, for King Edgar was to die
in 975. Now, from up here in the sky, look down and see the ironical reversal, how Europe's
history and Britain's are ever at odds.
Charlemagne, the Father of Christendom, died in 814 – and with him died his far-flung
Empire, decaying in steady dissolution over the next five decades, leaving Frank divided
from Frank, and an ill-defined slick of good intentions ebbed on its Lotharingian sand-bank.
So that just as Europe declined and sank back into its composite parts, England accumulated,
found its heart, defined itself. Where the previous century, Offa of Mercia had in his
provincial aspiration looked up to that great Carolingian mainland, now Edgar reigned at
Westminster, equal to any ruling head across the sea.
Then Ethelred. Ill-advised, poorly-counseled, politically inept, unraedig – what-you-will.
Within thirty-five years, all this hard-fought nationhood swept away. Dane-geld – pay the
invaders to go away; huge humiliating taxes to pay for the loss of courage, the end of the
Fighting Spirit. For the “Danish” Incursion came not in one wave (remember?), but in two.
First time round we had Alfred, we had Edward, we had Athelstan; this second time, after
long decades of demoralized defeat, we had – not no hope at all, but one sudden glimmer, as
suddenly snuffed out. We had Edmund Ironside.
Tragic King Ethelred, long held disastrously in office, died in 1016, with a viking army led
by Swein Forkbeard baying over his demise, hungry for power, his moment come. Swein the
Father dies a timely death, leaving the field of No-Man's-Land to twin-rivals Cnut the Son –
and Edmund the Son, Ethelred's heir come suddenly of age, to act at last as his father
Ethelred should have long before. To fight.
The Battlefield is disputed but not nameless: Assandune, say the records – Ashington say
some historians, but no one knows for sure. The English host has the patient army of Faith at
its back – Bishops and Abbots assemble there to beseech, to pray, to beg: How long, O Lord,
How Long? The tale is soon told: the expected military support fails, Edmund loses for want
of reinforcement and (as his forefather Alfred knew how when sense dictated) fled. The
Bishops and Abbots fall prey, and bloody slaughter follows, for a Heathen Army is no
Respecter.
Then finally a little Cameo appears and for a moment warms the Christian heart – while
elsewhere a poisonous nastiness stains the story and blights expectation.
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Let us reverse the telling for a moment, for fear of a taste in the mouth. Edmund II – Ironside
- successor to Edmund the Magnificent, successor to forefather Alfred, remembers the old
saw about He Who Fights and Runs Away – no point in thoughtless bravery, uncalled-for
martyrdom. He means perhaps (under the guise of agreeing to Cnut's generous scheme for a
fresh Division of the Kingdom – “I'll take the North half and you'll take the South!”) to
retrench, as Alfred did, to hide perhaps in the
shadow of Glastonbury and then come on Cnut
unexpectedly, his hope new-born. We shall
never know what he had in mind. Instead,
030.2 DRAWING:
squatting in the privy anticipating how Fortune
King Canute stands victorious on the
turns her Wheel, Edmund is unaware that she
Field of Battle, peering into an open
already has him Marked Down. There is an
sarcophagus. Dead monks and
enemy in the trench beneath him, a little shit
Bishops lie all around.
with a prick, who runs his skewer up the
defenceless Hope of England.
And then there was one. On Ashington Field
Canute stands more alone in victory than he yet
knows, and stares at the looted Box which his men have brought him. What have the monks
carried with them in hope from Ely? It is, explains the trembling survivor, the box which
contains the mortal remains of a Holy Virgin Saint. It is St Wendreda's bones which they
carried all the way from Fenland. She was admired for her chastity, her goodness, her
humility, her patience. She believed – truly – in the Christian God. That moment (they say)
turned Canute's heart for ever. The pagan wolf became the respectful peace-maker, who
slipped into the borrowed robes of English kingship as if native to them. It is said that within
five years, Englishmen would have had no other King, even if a home-born alternative had
landed on the shingle.
Canute – Cnut – however you pronounce this exotic alien – is a surprise. Dazed, England
knuckles to and begins to hold its head up as it hasn't done since Peaceable Edgar's days far
decades ago. Now let me feed you some facts and half-facts about King Canute and try to
justify myself for having appeared to slip back so far into irrelevant time. Be patient. Hear me
out.
Canute is known wrongly for his headstrong folly and rightly for his steady wisdom. Never
for a moment did he believe the wind and waves would obey him; a realist in the powers of
Nature, Man and God, he knew the limitations of those who thought themselves all-powerful.
Canute believed in Nature and in God. Flattery needed to be exposed for what it was, so
when they said, “O King of Limitless Power!” Canute replied, “Oh yes?” and made them
watch.
What is most disputed about Canute is as to when he became a Christian. Some historians see
him as indeed the Pagan wolf he was once painted to be – till events (deaths of fathers, deaths
of kings) dropped fortune in his hands. The little Legend of St Wendreda's relics may be
figuratively accurate, whatever you believe about the facts.
You may be cynical, of course, and say that adopting Christianity was akin to marriage
alliances with powerful women – a canny way to effective strength and (perhaps) a worthy
enough ambition to be championed by a Virgin Peace-Maker. Peace must be paid for with
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coin of this Realm. And (I have to say) Canute did indeed “marry” tactically – twice: the
Lady Ælgifu (to keep the North happy) and King Ethelred's widow, Queen Emma (to secure
power twice-over). But then we must hand it to Canute: he seems to have had this knack of
turning politics into humanity, and if anyone was complaining, the sound of it doesn't reach
us.
Queen Emma was herself something of a special Trophy: she was not just England's familiar
Queen, you see – she was also sister to the Duke of Normandy (Do you hear the drum-beat
begin?). Duke Richard II sits snug within easy reach near the Norman coast at Fécamp (Have
we been here before?). So it makes sense not to upset powerful neighbours who may hold
dear dynastic considerations – like those dangerous puppies of former despots, Ethelred's
children, Alfred and Edward, half-brothers of dead King Edmund, both half-Norman, both of
the blood royal, both still living. Let's be cynical.
But on the other hand, consider this. Other historians say that Canute was half-Polish, his
mother being Eastern European, coming from an aristocratic family bearing the “Christian”name (that is, the Baptismal Name) of Landbert or Lambert – which was not in itself a Polish
word, but one which originated (if you get my drift) in Liège. St Landbert (died c 700) was a
favorite Lotharingian saint, brought East to Poland by missionaries from Lothair's Kingdom.
Canute had an uncle and a cousin who both bore the name Lambert.
Next time you're in Exeter, ask to be shown Bishop Leofric's Missal – and look at what's
written under the year 1035: Obitus Landberti piisimi regis: the “obituary” of the most pious
King Landbert. To some in the Church, the Baptismal Name was of more moment than one's
common name: to some Cnut had always been King Landbert the Pious. He bore the stamp of
Liège: he had Lotharingian written all over him!
There is, I have to say, something to be said for this odd-sounding theory. For one thing, it
accounts for the sudden influx into England of Lorrainers to influential Church positions,
strongly suggesting the King's deep admiration for Lotharingian scholarship. There were,
among others, Bishop Duduc and Bishop Hermann of Sherbourne, which was later to become
the diocese of Sarum, then Salisbury – and later in the early Eleventh Century, Athelard of
Liège himself became head of the College of Canons at Waltham Abbey, while Giso was
Bishop of Wells; and, in 1060, the city of Hereford begins to become specially worth
watching, with the pre-Conquest Bishop Walter of Lorraine, and his two successors, the first
of whom is, sure enough, Robert Losinga.
And what of the travels of the man himself, an Emperor no less, striving to hold Norway in
vassalship to Denmark (of which too he is King)? Cnut disappears from time to time on
poorly charted travels – sometimes North, no doubt, but South, also – deep South to Rome in
1027 and who knows where else? There is more than a whisper that he is no stranger to that
curious Region neither East nor West that streaks like a spill of ink down Dark Age Europe.
Cologne, the whisper goes. We've seen that viking-emperor-boy in sweet Cologne, would you
believe?
Oh yes. We may well be looking deep into the root system of England's entanglement with
that New Thinking of the Lotharingian kind, and maybe this was indeed at its deepest level
the true impact of the Second Danish Incursion, and perhaps indeed the price the nation paid.
How deep was Canute's faith and how he stumbled across it in the first place, I cannot say –
whether the bones in Wendreda's Box smote him into a state of pious wonder, or whether in
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some place of stone they steeped the infant king in holiness. But you cannot with ease deny
it: there's a strong enough case to suggest that for all his viking ways, a casual adventurer
turned monarch, Canute was a cradle-Christian.
And then there's that famous little flick of the shutter which leaves us with an image on the
retina: Knut King in a boat amid the reeds. “Roweð, Cnihtes, noer ðe land!” comes the
King's voice from the wilderness. And faint, impossibly faint, drifts the merry singing of
twilight monks across the water. We half-expect an arm to rise brandishing a Sword. It
comes, this fragment of poignant memory, from The Book of Ely: “When they were
approaching the land, the King rose up in the middle of his men...and raised his eyes
towards the Church which stood out at a distance raised high at the top of a rocky
eminence; he heard the sound of sweet music echoing on all sides.” Whereupon he
spontaneously composes the Song of which we have only the opening words. In English. The
scene is set deep in winter-time – for the King desires to partake in the service celebrating the
Purification of the Virgin – February 2nd. Candlemas.
This is no single fleeting visit: this is Cnut's regular practice: every year is the implication, at
least in intention – Ely on February 2nd. “Now it happened,” continues the Liber Eliensis, the
Book of Ely, “that on several occasions the King was unable to come to this festival
because of the excessive frost and ice, the marshes and meres being frozen all around.” But
Cnut is not to be swayed from his annual appointment: “groaning deeply and full of anxiety,
he trusted in the Lord God and took it into his head to travel all the way to Ely over the
mere from Soham in a wagon upon the ice.” In the Book of Wisdom it says (we are told)
“Love is strong as death” – for King Cnut's eyes are firmly fixed upon the blessed figure of
the Virgin Lady Etheldreda, the Mistress of Ely.
Wendreda, Etheldreda, Sexburga, Withburga – we shall meet the Virgins of the Fens in
strange circumstances to come – so keep them in mind. And do not forget that Canute the
Dane lived with this image in his brain, that in England's most desolate of wildernesses dwelt
Virgin Truth fated to lure the heart of the mid-European Lotharingian in him no less than the
Northern Viking.
Wendreda struck him into silence – and her bones lie revered in Canterbury, far from the big
skies of March and Ely; Etheldreda
beckoned him into annual liaison, and
far-off Exning bubbled healing waters
from its Well. There, amid the silence of
031.3 DRAWING:
Water-Land, History echoes both ways:
there St Ethelwold of Winchester in the
Oarsmen rowing King Canute in a boat across
far past raises his rod over one great
the Fens, with Ely Church on a high crag on top
Ceremony to bring rest to the Holy
of the Isle, monks singing in background.
Virgins, while at the other end of time
stands that Wizard Herbert Losinga,
robed in glory, he too with Rod in hand,
to earth sky and water into One.
So Cnut was drawn to Ely: it was as if
the monks who sacrificed themselves and their Relic at the Battle of Assandune and had
purposely laid bait for the inheriting Dane.
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And where (you ask) did this remarkable King choose to be buried in his turn, when in 1135
his time came round? Where his final resting-place? Why, can't you guess? Not of course at
Ely – that would have been too presumptuous by far – a King and a Dane amid the Virgins?
No – Canute was buried at his other favourite place: at Winchester, as befits a King.
Now there is some dispute as to which Winchester may have been the eventual choice, Old
Minster or New? Most say Old (following the ancient line of Kings), some say New
(following likewise in royal steps) – but even those who say Old have to admit that Cnut's
special devotion was to New Minster – where with Queen Emma he is depicted in the act of
donating a great Golden Cross to the Abbey, and where (they say) he was later to be
“translated”, though they are vague as to the precise date. An ossuary box bearing a muddle
of ancient lumber dumped in the shake-up of the Commonwealth Years is now held to contain
a jumble of old bones, and among the skeletal remains of sundry Bishops, Cnut’s remains
interleave with William Rufus’s, a criss-cross of bones, which seems to me rather hard on
Cnut. Whom we like.
Another who may have read his pedigree and been taken with the cut of his gib was also
attached, most inextricably, to New Minster – an old acquaintance of ours who will, in 55
years from Cnut's funeral, become Abbot under doubtful circumstances.
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32
Cross of Lorraine
In which we insulate ourselves against infection
The survival of some aspects of history and the loss of others is quite often no accident. What is “lost” is
often lost for a reason. This is specially applicable to the Lotharingian movement: while we are aware of
its duller aspects – Church reform, episcopal principles – its riskier side, particularly the more perilous
aspects of the Jewish and Islamic rediscovery of ancient Greek philosophy and scientific exploration, as
well as the sudden re-emergence of Mathematics and Astronomy as serious academic studies – all these
had to be treated with particular caution and, wherever possible insulated from suspicion with high
repute and holiness. Practical Astrology was, of course, particularly dangerous territory – especially
where foreknowledge of the future was implied, or apocalyptic prophecy indulged in.
T
he Lost Works of Herbert Losinga
De Prolixitate Temporum
De Fine Mundi
Constitutionum Monachorum
Herbertus de Septem Sacramentis
De Situ Terrae Jerosolymitanae
A Treatise on the Length of the Ages
A Treatise on the End of the World
A Book of Monastic Constitutions
A Letter Addressed to Anselm against Bad Priests
A Treatise by “Herbert” on the Seven Sacraments
[Kept at the Abbey of Cambron. Authorship uncertain.]
Of the Places of the Land of Jerusalem
[Authorship uncertain.]
Let's remember these titles for a moment once again.
In History, what is considered “lost” is sometimes as revealing as what has been preserved –
because when something goes missing, one may be driven into inquiring why. Was it simply
through fire, carelessness, forgetfulness and all the hundred memory-holes of passing time?
Or was there, perhaps, some reason why to remember was a less pressing consideration with
some things than with others?
Then there are those objects, documents, opinions, expectations – which have gone and have
left no trace at all. What right have we to speculate – when time has left not even a ghostly
negative of evidence? Are we on surer ground with a man like Herbert Losinga, who we may
argue has left enough of himself behind to give substance to an intelligent guess or two? But,
goes the counter-argument, if we do so, we poke about in ashes which have come to us
through countless invisible filters – through these fingers and through those – way down the
fleeting prejudice of ages.
Let us, however, be brave and take a risk – not with one man, but with a whole age and
culture. Let us now consider the “Lotharingian tradition”, not as a dry and distant Reforming
Movement, but as that energetic, dangerous driving-force which powered the Age. It was a
period alive to its responsibilities and with every awareness of how close to the wind it rode.
It wore its septic gloves with pride: only the bright and holy were to be trusted with it.
Lotharingian thought was always tinged with fear, because the men who pressed their
intellects up into God's Universe worked close against the pure fire of divine energy. If
Anselm asked Why Three in One? only his special sanctity preserved his sanity. To go blind
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or mad is the terrible forfeit of scholars reaching beyond their sphere and venturing where
they should not. Only the slightest sigh of the nervous daring of that perilous age has ever
reached us. How can we begin to share the feelings of those men who placed their
adventurous souls in trust, praying as they peeped that Mercy would indeed stand between as
they stared into the Sun?
How should the computations of the Lotharingian Movement not be “lost” to us? It
represented (beyond doubt) more than just an interest in Church organization. We have every
justification of suspecting it of having a strongly Apocalyptic character; there is evidence to
suggest that it was at the very least open-minded towards Astrology; certainly it took more
than a passing interest in Astronomy, Mathematics and Cosmic phenomena. It tiptoed along
the boundary of legitimacy, redefining Trespass at each trembling step. Alas for them! How
can you ever hope to guarantee the character of Scholarship? Soon we shall have to cast a
shuddering glance on Herbert's old friend, Archbishop Gerard of York, whose personal library
contained such books as were rumoured to be well over the border of what constituted
acceptable reading.
The ownership of Books in itself was enough to trigger suspicion. That to possess a copy of a
History of the World was enough to make the neighbours talk would perhaps make us smile
in these enlightened times – but Bishop Robert Losinga did, and there was no shortage of
032.1
DRAWING:
Hereford Cathedral on left with Bishop Robert observing the stars. A gap divides this scene from
another on the right, where monks are putting the finishing touches to Lincoln Cathedral.
raised eyebrows. The Marianus Scotus, of Irish Celtic origin (Mael Brigte), but with
continental associations linking it to such centres as Cologne, Mainz and Fulda, was a book
known to be in his possession; he it was (they say) who was responsible for spreading its
popularity and influence – encouraging a sense of historical context and forcing perspective
upon folk! We positively grin.
But the merriment dies on our lips as we hear how in 1092 this Robert of Lorraine stayed at
home in Hereford, snug on the remote Welsh borders, rather than join his fellow Bishops for
the inaugural celebrations at the newly completed Cathedral far off in inconvenient Lincoln,
where Bishop Remigius himself was preparing to officiate. Ah – it was not to be: why waste
energy on a journey you know to be pointless? Robert Losinga already possessed the fatal
Knowledge. The ceremony of dedication would not take place, because Remigius would be
unable to preside. Death comes to us all – but in this case Robert Losinga knew it
specifically, and in advance.
What troubles us along with our remote ancestors about this gift of Robert's of Historical
Perspective is that it appears to have enabled him to “see” both ways. He “knew” that
Remigius would die both before and after it happened. Nothing could surprise such a man. So
his matter-of-fact response is coolly practical: why bother? The Stars run forward and back,
read them who will. What can Man expect, placed with both feet in eternity?
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032.2
DIAGRAM:
Demonstation of
coincidence of Solar
and Lunar festivals:
Sun rises at the back
with Gabriel and Mary
at the Annunciation; in
front Christ hangs
crucified under the
Moon.
We know already – study the list above – how Herbert
Losinga harped, fascinated, on the prospect of the hourlyexpected but long-delayed End – and how History has filtered
away for us nearly all trace of his Eschatological studies. We
know how (too) with what mix of excited terror folk of all
kinds anticipated the Second Coming of Christ. Friday 25th
March 970 was a day long prepared for in Lotharingia, for the
Scholars had done their calculations, and everything was
settled. The date fitted.
Friday 25th March that year was (as in all years) the Feast of
the Annunciation. It never varies, because it is a Sun festival:
March 25th, whether a Friday or not, is always the date when
the Angel comes. Friday that particular year, however,
happened also to be Good Friday. The Spring Equinox had
fallen on or about 21st March (as always), and directly
afterwards fell the Full Moon – so Easter occurred on the earliest possible Sunday in the year.
Easter is, you understand, a Moon festival – and because the Sun and Moon operate on
different orbits and in different planes, such a collision is inevitable sooner or later.
Remember the words of our own Herbert: non cursu solis set cursu lunae.
Do you see the importance of this co-incidence? Of how Christ dies on the very day He was
conceived? It is to Christendom the ultimate paradox, the key to eternity, the turning-in of
Time upon itself. For underneath are the Everlasting Arms.
The Date came again (inevitably) in 1076, when Herbert was in his mid-twenties, then
nothing except for several near-misses: in 1096 and 1106 they may have held their breath,
when Easter itself clipped Annunciation. But nothing, nothing, nothing.
How do we know what they may not have achieved, these Dark Age Scholars come suddenly
blinking out into the light, half-fearful of the tools of their achievement – Muslim
Knowledge, Jewish Knowledge? Herbert himself was shamefaced about his love of Classical
works. It had a dangerous respectability, this Learning, jerking us suddenly backwards into
remote Greek Millennia, before Science and Knowledge died. No wonder the Mediaevals
came to see Paradise as standing far to our rear – and all modern endeavour a desperate
groping back into the Past!
And at Norwich, was not the lay-out of the new Cathedral a remarkable achievement? Do we
think we know what exactly it was which was achieved there? Around us sit scholars,
Englishers, Lorrainers, handing books to one another, nodding wisely, finger-in-page. Here is
Walcher, closely flanked in his Malvern lands by Robert's Hereford to the West, and brushing
against the Line which links Losinga to Losinga from East to West, for four years coepiscopal, Robert Losinga – Herbert Losinga. Here Bishop Robert leans out to his friend
Wulfstan of Worcester not far off, and lends him his Marianus. Wulfstan rides down to
watery Tewkesbury upon an ass. And lo! Here comes Osmund of Salisbury to hear his
colleagues consult upon the Stars and to contemplate the latest Theory of Angles.
What might they not achieve, these men new gifted with God's Knowledge, as they pass out
at last from deep Shadow?
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