Rees begins by looking at the evidence for early Christianity in the core area of what became Anglo-Saxon Wessex – Dorset, Somerset, Wiltshire and Gloucestershire – examining Roman villas and possible early monastic sites, then sweeping down westwards into Cornwall with a few concluding details of the Channel Islands, the Life of St Samson of Dol forming the pivot between these two. And what emerges most strongly, perhaps, from the book is just how different from each other the experiences of these regions were: the River Tamar really did form a distinct dividing line between two markedly separate Dark Age cultural worlds, and although you can find elements of each in the other – there are big oval Celtic churchyards in Somerset, and Roman sites in Cornwall – they are very much not the model. In most of England, Christianity seems to have been grafted onto the superstructure of sub-Roman Britain, its villa estates and road network; Rees cites the many examples we know, several of which are of course from Dorset, of villas being adapted for Christian worship or the remains of Roman civilisation being used as a framework for Christian institutions. In Cornwall, contrastingly, the Roman sites are coastal trading stations and military settings rather than housesteads, and early Christian establishments fitted instead into a shifting landscape of small monastic sites and individual holy people living alongside farms in a far less ordered pattern.
The Life of St Samson probably dates to the seventh century
based on earlier materials, so it predates Bede’s Life of St Cuthbert, at least
in part; it’s the earliest depiction we have of the existence of a Christian
holy person in western Britain, and shows how unstructured it could be. At
various times in his life, Samson was a monk, abbot, bishop, hermit, and wandering
sage, moving repeatedly back and forth between these categories. It isn’t even
very clear how he became a bishop: he was Abbot of Caldey for 18 years, then
spent a while as a hermit before being drafted in as Abbot of Llanilltud Fawr,
and acquired a pointy hat (metaphorically; it wouldn’t have been that pointy in
the 6th century) some time around then. Samson was the very
archetype of the wandering bishop-monk who travelled from South Wales to
Cornwall and then to Brittany, interacting with other holy people, family
members who often became church-founders themselves, and the nobility, and his story makes clear how these three areas were highly interconnected, in some ways a single domain, with far more links between them than any had with the regions to their east. It
exemplifies the processes at work, and the nature of early Christianity in
Cornwall.
Everywhere Samson went, there were holy wells: springs rose
miraculously in his hermitage sites, including one at ‘Samson’s fort’, his
retreat after he left Caldey, a location which is now unidentifiable. But although
Elizabeth Rees mentions lots of wells, the book gives no clear idea of how they
may have fitted into the processes she’s describing. Were they baptismal
springs hallowed for (or by) the evangelisation of a district; were they the
water supplies for hermits or monasteries, later sanctified by tradition; or a
bit of both? What’s the relationship between the numerous small chapels of the Cornish
religious landscape, and the parish system? How did the structures,
institutions and methods of the Dark Age Church differ either side of the
Tamar? In her very final couple of paragraphs Sister Elizabeth delivers, basically,
a review of the entire work: ‘a survey, but not a synthesis … [because] the
pre-Saxon evidence is fragmentary’; fair enough, but a synthesis is exactly what we want.
Have a look at Rees’s summary of what we know about the
possible monastic site of St-Antony-in-Meneage in Cornwall. This appears to be
a foundation of a local holy man, Entenin; its well is mentioned in the first
book on holy wells I ever bought, John Meyrick’s A Pilgrim’s Guide to the
Holy Wells of Cornwall from 1982, though he doesn’t include what Rees says is St Entenin’s
other well at Ventoninney in Probus parish. A fortified site showing continuity
from the Iron Age to sub-Roman times is just half a mile away. Rees catalogues
all this. But how does it fit into Cornwall as a whole? What’s the sequence of
events here, and elsewhere? The role of a historian is precisely to make good guesses
based on what we know.
The book has the odd mistake – Rees describes and gives a photo
of St Carantoc’s Well at Crantock, saying that ‘its beehive-shaped top, a later
addition, has now been removed’, which is news to everyone I’ve asked including
people who saw it a couple of weeks ago – and the occasional weird digression.
The account of the Bodmin Gospels and the manumission of slaves recorded in it
does shed some light on the functioning of a late Saxon monastery, but the discourse
on Cornish bagpiping in the section on Davidstow is quite the most bizarre
byway I think I’ve ever seen in an academic work. Unfortunately the reverend
author herself died recently so she isn’t around to ask what her thinking was.
So, in short, I may keep on thinking about minsters,
well-chapels, and wandering bishops. We haven’t got the bottom of this matter
yet.
No comments:
Post a Comment