What Were the Well-Chapels?

The first day of my break on Monday was significantly spent reading about early Christian baptisteries! Unable to do much work on the history of Anglo-catholicism in Surrey (though I have in fact able to visit a couple of churches this week) and rather itching for an alternative project I was thinking about some aspects of the story of holy wells in Dorset, which led me in the direction of well-chapels in Cornwall and elsewhere and why those very distinctive buildings were so different from what we find in ‘English’ England. Going along my bookshelf I realised I’d completely forgotten about Ian Thompson’s short 2008 work Early Hermit Sites and Well Chapels, which covers this territory, and that sent me off on a trajectory which eventually included the Burghal Hidage and the early history of Dorchester, and the letters of Cassiodorus!

Ian Thompson’s argument is alluded to in the earlier book he wrote with his wife Frances, The Water of Life: Springs and wells of mainland Britain (2004), but the booklet elaborates it fully. What he defines as well-chapels, buildings deliberately constructed to contain holy springs and channels of water, are few in number (8 definite and ten probable sites), limited in geographical spread (to Wales, Cornwall, Ireland, and areas of England subject to Celtic influence), and mysterious in purpose. Noting that no explanation seems to suffice for all the features of these buildings, he ends up arguing that their true origin lies in sacred and symbolic geography – that well-chapels in this narrow sense are attempts to express the prophet Ezekiel’s vision of the ideal Temple. In chapter 47 of his prophecy, Ezekiel is shown by his angel guide the Temple in the renewed Jerusalem, through which a river flows, south of the altar, and eventually entering the Dead Sea, making it into fresh water teeming with fish. Building on a reference to prayers being said for a good fishing catch at the weir associated with St Trillo’s Chapel in north Wales, Mr Thompson speculates that this was also part of the purpose of the chapels – to bless and render more fruitful the rivers into which their waters flow.

This ingenious case is one I find hard to support. Christian churches don’t replicate the Temple: the whole point of Christianity is that the Temple has been replaced by the one who it existed to foreshadow, namely Jesus of Nazareth. In a later vision than Ezekiel’s, that of St John the Divine in the Revelation (which Mr Thompson also cites) the heavenly Jerusalem, the image of the new creation, has no Temple, because God is immediately present there; the ‘river of life as bright as crystal’ flows through its streets, and that may well have some relevance to the architecture of these structures but not necessarily to the details of their orientation. Mr Thompson has to explain the variations in the chapels’ arrangements by different interpretations of Ezekiel, rather than what seems to me the obvious conclusion that the explanation lies elsewhere completely.

These buildings have traditionally, if imprecisely, been described as ‘baptisteries’, and I still think that is what they are: remnants of forms of evangelisation in these parts of the British Isles which relied on individuals – the ‘Cornish Saints’ who are often no more than names – setting up informal worship centres which included a farmstead and a place to baptise converts, developing in many cases to a proper chapel where mass could be said; some became parish churches, some dwindled into overdeveloped well-houses, and some fell to ruin. Whether the water runs through them, adjoins them, or is at some distance, doesn’t seem very important.

Cornwall may have been part of the Empire, but Romanitas meant little west of the Tamar, and not much on that side of the Severn either. Whereas in the rest of the Roman world villas and houses, from Chedworth in Gloucestershire to Dura Europos in Syria, formed the infrastructure for Roman Christianity, in which baptismal pools were either adapted from baths or nymphaea or constructed anew, there wasn’t much of that available in Cornwall. Purpose-built baptisteries of course were grander affairs; in about 313 the Emperor Constantine gave the residence of his wife Fausta’s family, the Laterani, to Pope Miltiades, and just over a century later Pope Sergius built the Lateran Baptistery there, utilising the spring which used to supply the family palace. Then there’s the baptistery associated with the gigantic basilican church at Lechaion in Greece; I can’t see from any of the reports where its water came from, but while you might have filled the tank at the Dura Europos church by hand, you wouldn’t have wanted to do that at Lechaion: it would have taken half a day, and there must have been a natural source. Our tiny Cornish buildings are the remote cousins of these huge structures.

But well-chapels in other parts of ‘England’ aren’t. Different settlement patterns and a more centralised model of secular authority under the kings of Wessex led to entirely separate models of ecclesiastical development. We can guess that a lot of Cornish chapels (most of which are lost) predated their parish churches, while in England east of the Tamar they are almost always later. That means that chapels linked to springs at Spreacombe in Devon or Littlebourne in Kent have an entirely different origin: manorial, in those instances. I am not so sure about the case that first got me thinking about this, Evershot in Dorset, where St John’s Well, source of the River Frome, is just a hundred yards away from the church which once bore the same dedication and which, despite its size and the size of Evershot itself, was just a chapel of Frome St Quintin parish until the 1970s. I think that may be pretty old, perhaps something more on the Cornish model.

On Monday I got home having put in a big order for books from newly-reopened Waterstones in Hornington, and on reading about these abstruse matters realised I had to add another to the list: Elizabeth Rees’s 2020 tome Early Christianity in South-west Britain, which promises to shed light on all these questions. There are even two holy wells on the cover, St Levan’s at St Levan and the Nun’s Well at Pelynt!

But my picture is neither of those: it’s the cistern at the well-chapel at Madron in Cornwall, which I first saw in 1989. Ian Thompson insists it can’t be a baptismal font because it doesn’t drain to earth, which strikes me as spurious though it certainly can’t have been all that easy to use. The Holy Well itself is a little distance away, and, as many writers have pointed out, is very, very hard to get to. When I saw it its loose stonework had been knocked about by cows and the bog was so deep I was in danger of losing my boots, and stood a bit away to take a photo, full of admiration for those brave souls who had got close enough to hang their clouties from the trees around.

Vindicated!

I was sure I'd spotted a blackcap in the garden the other day, but it was too far away to be entirely sure - yesterday, though, it made it abundantly clear, a female bird drinking from and then washing in the bird bath (just as well it was that way around, dirty little thing). 

I don't remember ever seeing blackcaps in my younger days and apparently they are now well on the way to being permanent residents in southern Britain. The British people's strange predilection for feeding garden birds has made it possible for what were almost always summer visitors dependent on lots of insects being around to spend the whole year here. In fact, some scientists speculate, the bird is well on the way to separating into two distinct species, one which resides permanently in the UK, and the other continuing to winter in warmer areas such as Spain. I confess I never put out food for the birds (it seems very odd to me for humans to grow food for birds when without human damage to the ecosystem (including growing bird food) there would be plenty to sustain sensible populations of birds in the first place!) but I imagine 'my' blackcap must be eating elsewhere and then dropping by at the Rectory for a wash!

We Interrupt This Programme

'I quite liked the man until about three hours ago, but now I don't mind if I never hear about him again', my mother told me about 6pm yesterday, 'and I'll be very annoyed if they don't show the final of Masterchef', which of course they didn't. She is not the only person I have heard about making the same comment regarding the return of normal TV service, and I have to say when Radio 4 broadcast an old episode of Great Lives yesterday evening and it turned out to be about Mary Anning (a clever gay girl in a peak bonnet picking fossils! It doesn't get better than that. OK, well, she may not have been gay) I almost cheered. I don't dislike the late Duke of Edinburgh particularly but it was a huge relief to hear about someone different after six hours of the same thing over and over again.

Meanwhile the Establishment (including, I strongly get the impression, a lot of clergy) is hugely enjoying itself with protocol and speaking-for-the-nation stuff, and normally sensible souls can be found saying daft things. 'I always wondered', said Simon Schama on the wireless, 'why he volunteered to join this establishment and sacrifice so much. It was, I think, because he thought so much of Britain'. The great historian didn't seem to believe - and nobody else on the programme corrected him* - that it might have had something to do with the fact that young Lt Philip Mountbatten had fallen in love with the heir to the British throne and thus accepted what came with it. But I wonder whether the British people is not quite where the Establishment thinks it is. I rather suspect the British people doesn't regard the death of Prince Philip as the epoch-making event that it is supposed to, certainly not worth postponing the final of Masterchef for. In Swanvale Halt, I have heard absolutely nothing about it at the Co-Op or the café. The Diocese advised churches to have lots of spare candles available, but here, Rick the verger, who commemorates the death of anyone famous, printed off a set of Wikipedia pages about HRH and sat in the church all day, and the only person who came in to light candles was Selina. She always lights candles for her relatives but is increasingly unclear whether they are alive or dead, and certainly doesn't really know which day it is. It isn't indifference, as I think people definitely care about the situation the Queen is left in, thinking, surely, of their own bereavements; it isn't hostility. It's simply not regarding the Forth Bridge event as that much more important, say, than the death of Albert down the road who didn't quite make it to 100 and who they spoke to a couple of times and wasn't he a character. 

The Diocese has suggested we change the altar hangings to purple, which we are not doing: as my friend Cara in Emwood put it, 'the last time I looked, Jesus was still alive'. Instead our republican mayor and her republican husband our senior churchwarden will come to church and she will read a short Bible passage and light a candle while Rick will toll the bell and I will attempt to record the scene for posterity. I wasn't really a republican at midday yesterday but now I think I probably am, too.

London Bridge will of course be a different scale of event, even I will concede that. It really will mark the passage of an epoch. But even then, I wonder whether the national mood will really be grief, as the Establishment will imagine, rather than a stoic awareness of time sweeping all its sons (and daughters, and those who identify as neither) away, a sense that from that point on we will have to conceive of ourselves differently. They will misread things, as a way of imagining that they matter more than they do.

(* But said show did furnish one wonderful quote from a journalist who stated 'I have refused to watch The Crown on the grounds that I am still upset at Matt Smith leaving Dr Who')

Escape to Dorset

Like everyone else I haven't been very far lately so sitting with my mum in her garden (well, she sat inside the conservatory) and then a walk with my sister and her family around Sandbanks today was a profound and much-missed pleasure. I was tempted by an ice-cream which I thought would be a bit like a Cornetto, as it appeared to operate on the same principle, but proved to be a deadlier concoction of sugars than I was expecting. The lifeguards were out despite the chilly sunlight and there were indeed some hardy souls braving the water.

I've mentioned before the swift turnover of buildings in this part of Dorset, and how many of them seem to want to ape what the builders think Art Deco architecture looks like. This apartment building, though, nos.72-74 Banks Road, is one of the more successful: I couldn't believe it was genuine to the Art Deco period - how would I have missed it? - and it proves to date only from 2008, but it doesn't look at all unreasonable compared to some of the concoctions you sometimes see around the Poole basin. I wonder what it's like inside.

Institutionalised

When the Archbishop of York was just beginning his episcopal career, he came to St Stephen's House for our Founder's Day and virtually had to be shown how to wear a mitre by the sacristans. It was his very first appointment after his unexpected elevation to the position of Bishop of Reading subsequent to the atrocious mess over the non-appointment of Jeffrey John, and his complete lack of preparation for the role into which he had been propelled was refreshing in a bishop. He had not, like Cosmo Lang waiting to become Archbishop of Canterbury, been practising his episcopal signature long before. He spent several years writing little books on prayer and that sort of thing. Now, as we know, he feels he needs a 'Chief of Staff' on a salary of £90K p/a. The pay is, the Archbishop's office stresses, on a par with that of equivalent positions in the charity sector, and I'm sure this is true; the bigger question is whether one is needed when previous Archbishops have survived without. The much-ridiculed job description, which sounds a bit like the slave who was deputed to stand in the chariot of a Roman general at his Triumph to whisper in his ear 'remember, thou art but mortal', doesn't give a clue what this functionary will actually do to earn that salary. Presumably the Archbishop already has a PA and the Diocese of York has HR support and a diocesan secretary; it's hard to see what else a Christian organisation needs. 

The Church of England draws its standards and expectations from the secular world in just the way we know it shouldn't, but always has. Stephen Cottrell the vicar of St Wilfrid's Chichester in 1988 might have boggled at what Stephen Cottrell the Archbishop of York in 2021 thinks is unexceptionable: but over the intervening years he has become part of an institution with its own momentum, its own norms and models, which use the highly-wrought language of religion but which are structurally no different from those of an indifferent and, truth be told, slightly old-fashioned commercial enterprise. 

I might well have followed the same progress were it me. The sad truth is that we all tell ourselves we're individuals, and that we, if no one else, will resist the norms of the organisations we find ourselves part of; but we don't. For the most part we're all sucked in, assimilated, absorb the attitudes and outlooks of those around us. 

There are a lot of illustrations of this lately. The recent Government-sponsored report on Racial and Ethnic Disparities provided one: its definition of 'institutional racism' was very strange, and as far as I remember reversed completely the one I was used to. I thought that 'institutional racism' - going back to the MacPherson report in 1999 - was a way of describing the unequal outcomes which remain even when explicit discrimination is removed from laws and rules, and when nobody explicitly intends discriminatory results. Of course if you define institutional racism as explicit discrimination, you're unlikely to find it, because that's against the law. The conclusion was naive if nothing else. 

The dreadful speechifying at the anti-Policing Bill demo I attended on Easter Day was the usual sort of stuff you expect at student demonstrations and not very different from the fare served up at Oxford in the 1980s. I looked across at the few police officers monitoring what we doing and thought their main concern was almost certainly getting home on time rather than oppressing minorities. But the point is that the best of us, the kindest and most public-spirited and most generous-minded, are subtly beaten by the institutions we belong to into the shape they are accustomed to, however much we flatter ourselves we won't be. I represent an institution that's been around for two thousand years, and it has done great good and great evil, so I know. Institutions require rules and law to bind us to the better angels of our nature, and without them the world, the flesh and the Devil take over: and don't forget it. 

Easter Contrasts

Last year I courted disaster doing the Easter Vigil on my own at home: this time there was a handful of us observing the proper rites at the church. Things that went wrong included the Paschal Candle, whose wax motifs I managed to break and which doesn't quite fit in the holder unlike every other 2"-diameter candle we've ever bought, but the fire, which is easily the most hazardous element of the whole proceedings, was lit and then extinguished without adverse incident. We had over 60 souls at the main service, more than at any time in a year, and for them it didn't matter that halfway through Bill Gates decided to send my laptop a message, thus diverting its attention from livestreaming the liturgy. Oh well.

Rounding off the day's activity (apart from Vespers) was a protest against the Policing Bill in Guildford. It wasn't a big protest, and I was glad to see someone from Hornington Extinction Rebellion, another person, at least, who could remember the last millennium as the crowd contained more teenagers than I've seen together for a long time. The speeches, once we stopped, were awful and it was a relief not to be able to hear most of them. Almost enough to make you sympathise with Priti Patel, but not quite. 

Meanwhile St Catherine's Chapel was at its Romantic best against the blue. Happy Easter!

Time Present and Time Past

The three hours of the Maundy Thursday vigil always seems to pass quicker than three hours should. By this time I was unaccountably weary and my ability to enter into the sufferings of Christ in Gethsemane was very limited; I had brought along a book about George Herbert to read but couldn't manage more than a page, and was in little mood for more scripture. Once upon a time I would try and pray through my whole list of personal intercessions, bringing my friends and family into the Garden, to be with the Lord as he readied himself for the ordeal to come, but mustering up the concentration is harder than that sounds. Now I just visualise them, as they are, rather than do anything with them. Mostly, my mind wanders, occasionally pulled back to our Lord. I manage by getting up and having a stretch every hour or so.

I've always had the feeling, near-blasphemous though it sounds, that at this moment you are not so much praying with Jesus as for him, that he will indeed have what he needs to take the Via Dolorosa. Perhaps it isn't so fanciful: perhaps the prayers of the faithful and less-faithful, all down the centuries, have indeed been some help to our brother and champion. 

Swanvale Halt was mostly quiet. A young woman came in and sat at the back of the church, tearful: 'just the usual rubbish', she told me when I asked. Another crying female voice went along the path outside at one point, but its owner was gone by the time I arrived. The village was silent as I went up the hill with Marion and her family, the last vigil-keepers that night - within the church, at least.