Misuses of History

Usually I try to avoid getting into arguments with anyone online as there is rarely any point. If I am tempted on the LiberFaciorum holy wells list to which I belong it tends to be because someone has said that they’ve found a shapeless stone that they think looks like the Great Goddess in a churchyard which proves that this Victorian church was a site of pagan worship going back 5 ½ million years or something. Ms V was a different matter.

It all started with an innocent post someone made about St Augustine’s Well at Cerne and the legends associated with it. There is longstanding confusion about this well, which in the past has been identified with the Silver Well where St Edwold set up the hermitage which, according to Cerne’s own hagiographers, was the origin of the Abbey itself, some four miles or so away. This is the sort of thing that actually happened in Eastern Christian monasticism, so it isn’t completely off-the-wall. I mentioned this in case people didn’t know about it. That was when Ms V arrived, and commented:

Archaeologists doubt there was ever an Anglo-Saxon church (or Anglo-Saxon anything) at Cerne. No archaeological remains have been found nor are there any records. St Edwold's Church Stockwood is 15th century, restored in the 17th century, so it's likely his legend was invented quite late (perhaps to help with church fundraising?) at the time when antiquarianism was hitting its stride.

Now this is Dorset, so I am concerned to get things right in my own mind. I and others raised the fact that Cerne Abbey appears in Domesday book and St Edwold is mentioned in William of Malmesbury’s Gesta Pontificum which was written about 1125, so very much earlier than even the 15th century. Ms V batted this away:

Nope, Cerne's "endowments" feature in Domesday. Historians are somewhat cautious about the entry, preferring 'there may have been an abbey at the time of Domesday' since there is no other record. The reason of course is the foundation charter, backdated like so many 12th century charters.

I couldn’t quite believe that someone who appeared to know what they were talking about, or wanted others to think they did, seemed seriously to be arguing that Cerne Abbey didn’t exist in 1086 when Domesday Book explicitly refers to it (the standard text mentions the ‘monks’ of Cerne and the Exon Domesday has a reference to the ‘Abbot’), and that the apparent endowments of the abbey are a different thing from the abbey itself. I mentioned the first Abbot of Cerne, Aelfric, who moved to Eynsham in 1005, and referred to the ‘monastic revival’ under St Dunstan and St Ethelwold which resulted in the founding or re-founding of a slew of abbeys between about 950 and 990. Ms V countered:

What 'monastic revival'? Perhaps you're referring to the period from 1075 until 1225 when English monastic houses were being founded at a rate faster than at any other comparable time in history. … Aelfric was written about by nineteenth century historians but was first published by sixteenth century antiquarians. It's hard to find any contemporary support for your thesis about his time at Cerne.

After a bit more banter about Domesday and what is in it, Ms V went on:

Yes, Cerne Abbey had acquired an impressive array of landholdings by 1086, a mere two decades after the Norman Conquest. It's clear that religious houses were being established at this time as I already said, the eleventh century is the great age of monastic foundations.

Having stated Cerne Abbey probably didn’t exist at the time of the Domesday survey, she was now referring to its ‘impressive landholdings’, and her earlier description of the monastic upsurge of ‘1075-1225’ becomes ‘the eleventh century’. I abandoned the struggle at that point, having worked out what Ms V’s argument was and that I didn’t seriously need to be concerned with it. But in reply to a list member a bit later she came up with another not-entirely-uncontroversial statement:

All we have to go on are "histories" written several centuries later by antiquarians peregrinating around. They had to create a native English church with no discernible debt to Rome and they did a brilliant job.

Against my own better judgement I asked what she meant. What she meant was

The forging of a native church history was required when an English church was established in the sixteenth century, one that would emphasise a disconnect with Rome. … No actual evidence has ever been found of a Celtic monastery. I'm trying to find out if physical remains of an Anglo-Saxon monastery exist anywhere. Archaeological reports tend to fudge their findings … How to account for the archaeological lacuna?

I brought up the case of Monkwearmouth. Ms V rubbished the archaeological data, saying the great Rosemary Cramp had herself described the results of her dig as ‘woefully inconclusive’. The only evidence of the ‘purported monastery’ at Wearmouth was documentary, she argued, and therefore not to be trusted: just ‘antiquarians peregrinating around’.

Was my entire view of the development of the Anglo-Saxon Church wrong? I felt slightly as though I was going nuts. A little Googling revealed perfectly well-attested monastic remains at such sites as Bath, Glastonbury, Hartlepool and Lyminge as well as Wearmouth. Rosemary Cramp might have used the words ‘woefully inconclusive’ about her excavations at Wearmouth but in her colossal summary of the work there for English Heritage she has an entire chapter about ‘The Anglo-Saxon monastic buildings’. It seems disingenuous to use her authority to undermine her own conclusions. I wonder whether Ms V is simply a sophisticated species of troll.

It is possible to argue against all this evidence. That what appear to be monastic buildings aren’t; that inscriptions referring to monks and nuns don’t; that single-sex cemeteries from certain archaeological strata aren’t monastic, but something else. But to do so you really should come up with an explanation for what the ‘something else’ might be, and also attack the documentary evidence convincingly, given that documents and archaeology seem to corroborate each other so often.

Gentle reader, be clear about this: there is no Anglo-Saxon monastery whose existence is as well-attested as Monkwearmouth. That’s because England’s first historian, Bede, was a monk there, and it’s where he wrote The History of the English Church and People. He refers to his home abbey, and many others, frequently. He wrote a more detailed, separate account of its early abbots, all of whom he had met. To dispose of all this evidence, you have to argue that the manuscripts of Bede’s books are later forgeries attached to his name (not that there is much evidence of his name apart from his books): but there are at least seven manuscripts or parts of manuscripts of the History dated to the 8th century, and two more from the 9th. Can we really believe there was someone sat in a study in Tudor England churning out this level of forgery, good enough to deceive modern palaeographers? Given that the study of palaeography relies on comparative analysis of manuscripts whose dates are known, to dismiss Bede’s History you have to argue further that the whole corpus of Anglo-Saxon documentation is fake, and that when archaeologists have dug stuff up which appears to suggest the existence of monasteries, they’re being deceived by the texts into seeing what isn’t there. I call this (and phenomena like it, such as Holocaust denial or arguing that the Emperor Constantine wrote the Bible) ‘irrational scepticism’.

Archaeologists do make mistakes. One notorious example is the Dark Age Celtic monastery Ralegh Radford believed he had uncovered on Tintagel Island in Cornwall in the 1930s. Radford was a great man, but he was wrong about that, and sadly maintained those wrong conclusions long after everyone else had decided he’d been mistaken. Tintagel still appears marked as an ‘important monastery’ on a map of Dark Age Britain in Donald Matthews’s Atlas of Medieval Europe published in 1983 – a copy is on my bookshelves – so that error was a long time a-dying. But it’s worth noticing that there is no documentary reference to a religious house at Tintagel; what deceived Ralegh Radford was what he saw and his own romanticism (an occupational hazard for an archaeologist), unshaped by any expectations generated by texts. The texts, in their silence, were right, and I suspect they are right about Monkwearmouth, Jarrow, Bath, Glastonbury, Lyminge, and so on, and so on – and even about lowly Cerne Abbas.