Anglo-Saxon Attitudes (55 page)

But what of the general historical significance of the burial of Eorpwald? Here, I think, we must speak with the greatest circumspection. One, at least, we now know of the great disciples of Theodore, one of that great band of Missionaries, who completed and made sure of the conversion of our country to Christianity, had feet of clay. So much the existence of the wooden idol in Eorpwald's tomb merely allows us to say. This discovery, however, can say nothing to us that impairs the general picture which we have received from Bede. There is nothing here to lessen the impression of solidity which we have always seen in the work of Theodore, of Hadrian, and of Wilfrid, nothing to suggest that the work which was symbolized and sealed at the Synod of Whitby was other than complete. The backsliding, if indeed it can be fully called that, of Eorpwald has nothing in common with the wholesale apostasies that marked the earlier conversions of the Augustinian mission, with the defections of Essex and East Anglia, with King Redwald's setting of idols in the Church of God. Eorpwald's is a singular and peculiar case, and one for which his anonymous chronicler's mention of the charges of sorcery would have prepared us, had we not refused to countenance any evidence that was not comprised by Bede. The circumstances, too, of Eorpwald's life are exceptional. He came from a pagan people, a people who had already once apostatized. It is true that he received his training in a monastery, it is true that he was associated with the great Wilfrid in the conversion of the South Saxons, but he was never of the hard core of Theodore's disciples; we have no evidence that he received any training at Canterbury, let alone at Rome. Hadrian trusted him, it is true, and chose him to convert his own people, but there is nothing to suggest that Eorpwald's faith at that time was not a deep and noble one. He returned to his people and converted them and their king. We now can guess that in that conversion he fell into compromise and from compromise into sacrilege. It is a tragic and singular story of who knows what atavistic impulse working in a man of pagan background. Nevertheless, it is the story of an individual, a theme better suited to literature than history. Without other examples of such apostasy, we cannot even say that the forces of paganism in the late seventh century still had any real hold upon the converts of that age. We can only speak of one man, and that man a member of the most remote of all English kingdoms - the East Folk. The durable, deep conversion that Theodore brought from Rome, the conversion that ended paganism in this country until the coming of the Northmen, the conversion which at the Synod of Whitby decided that the English people should belong to the civilization of Europe, remains untouched by the strange circumstances of Eorpwald's burial. Nothing which is revolutionary for the historian in this discovery - not the unique discovery of an Anglian fertility god in English soil, not the unique discovery of a Christian tomb with pagan relics, and that the tomb of a bishop - has changed our general picture which has been given us by the brilliant sense of history, the steadfast truthfulness of Bede. The lesson of Melpham is a double one - the essential correctness of our historical knowledge only strengthened by exceptions to the rule and the need, for all our great debt to Bede, to be open to the flickering gleam thrown back on those dark times by the uncertain lights of late traditions.

Extract from 'The Making of England', by Professor Lionel Stokesay, C.B.E. (1930)

The qualities that Theodore's men brought with them from Rome were exactly those which England needed if she was going to become more than an eccentric fringe of the civilized world, a last gleam of half light before the darkness of uncharted waters. Theodore, Hadrian, Wilfrid, and their generation had gifts more valuable than the most precious spices or Mediterranean works of art to give to the disordered kingdoms of the Heptarchy. Courage they had in plenty, great zeal and singleness of purpose, but the Celtic missionaries had these, perhaps in greater, certainly not in less, degree. But the Roman missionaries had more: they had organizing ability and political sense and stern intellectual discipline. In these gifts they were the heirs of a Rome older than perhaps they realized; and it was with these gifts rather than with any superiority of argument about questions of tonsure or the date of Easter that they won the day at Whitby. With a sense of organization and with superior culture they brought this remote island into the civilized world, as two centuries later Alfred with the same qualities gave her her first real political unity.

Yet there will always be those for whom Aidan and Cuthbert will be more dear than Theodore and Wilfrid, and the rule of Columbanus more attractive than the rule of St Benedict. For them, the defeated Celts retreating to the Western Islands will always wear a romantic halo of lost causes, the glamour of the anchorite and the vagrant missionary, of dreamers to whom organization and political sense are as vanities beside individual holiness and the power of the Word. They will recognize, no doubt, that without the civilizing influence of Rome, England could never become great, but they will always look askance at the worldly wisdom, authoritarianism, the collective organization that came with it. These romantic souls, the adherents of the Celtic cause, the little Englanders among medieval historians, if one may call them so, will find comfort, if tragic comfort, perhaps, in the story of Eorpwald, Bishop of Sedwich.

It is a strange story, indeed, that of Eorpwald. The boy who so hated the dark gods of his people the East Folk that he dared the perils that beset wanderers in those lawless times to seek Christ among strangers. The man who ended his days a bishop, the converter of his own people to the Faith and who had yet returned to the dark gods he had once fled. We do not know the monastery in which he received his learning, but we may guess that he was a lover of intellectual discipline or Abbot Hadrian would not have favoured him, and of zeal and organizing ability or he would have been no companion of Wilfrid, and of culture or he could not have built the cathedral at Sedwich. Yet all his zeal, all his political sense, all his learning did not keep him from a compromise that led to apostasy. In the months after the excavation of his tomb I had leisure and inclination to speculate much on the discovery at which I had assisted and again and again it was the irony and the strangeness that struck me. How did the mind of this man work who was buried with the Cross and with a darker, more sinister deity? How did the tradition of his apostasy regarded as sorcery live on side by side with the tradition of his sanctity to be chronicled obscurely in the thirteenth century? The story has endless overtones, not the least strange of which is the removal of his coffin to Melpham, When the Northmen struck savagely at the land of the East Folk in 867, the priests, zealous for their beloved founder, carried Eorpwald's coffin and buried it secretly at Melpham. How terrified they would have been could they have stood with me on that marshy land on a warm July morning over one thousand years later and seen that their precious burden was a temple to the same unspeakable idol as was worshipped by the terrible barbarians from whom they were fleeing. Yet, when all is said and done, it is not against Eorpwald, the tragic failure of the Roman mission, that we have to set the attractive figures of Cuthbert and Aidan, but against Wilfrid, that statesmanlike figure of the success of Rome. Cuthbert with Aidan are but sweet sidetracks, as Eorpwald is a dark side-track; the highway runs from Theodore and Hadrian and Wilfrid through Boniface to Dunstan and Lanfranc, the broad track of ecclesiastical history.

Extract from the preface to 'The Passing of a Faith', by Dr Rose Lorimer, Ph.D., lecturer in Medieval History (1950)

(This work was refused by the University Presses, but was eventually published by a large commercial publisher of good reputation.)

The contents of this book, then, are controversial. To some readers, unable or unwilling to look beyond the account of England's conversion to Christianity, carefully fostered and imposed upon posterity by the victorious party in the great seventh-century struggle, the story presented here will seem impossible, and, no doubt, ridiculous. The closed mind, it is to be feared, is beyond the reach of argument. To it I cannot hope to speak. There is, however, another and, I trust, wider circle of readers who may pass from interest to conviction as they read the arguments I have assembled here. 'Yes,' I imagine they may say, 'you have convinced us that the cause of beauty, of civilization must have lain with the makers of the Book of Durrow and the Lindisfarne Gospel, with the patrons of Caedmon.' They will compare the stiff figures of the evangelists in the Lindisfarne gospels, the contributions of Roman Byzantine civilization, with the inspired free spirit of the abstract patterns in the same manuscript, the contributions of the defeated Celtic cause, and they will perhaps raise their eyebrows at the old reiterated parrot-cry that the triumph of Roman Christianity brought 'civilization' to our island. Again, perhaps, they will compare what we know of the characters of Wilfrid, Theodore, Hilda or of the Englishman who took the benefits of the spirit of Roman Christianity to Germany - Boniface - with the little alas! we know of Colman and Aidan, Columba, and Columbanus. 'Is there nothing,' they may ask, 'between the worldly accommodation, the "Statesmanship" of Lanfranc and the turbulent, intractable pride of Anselm or Thomas of Canterbury? These are Rome's contribution. Is there not also the proud gentleness, the meek determination that make the Celtic saints seem so wondrously near to the Gospel spirit? What has the Roman world of that day to offer that compares with Caedmon's song?'  But even those readers to whom conviction may come that the triumph of Rome on those Yorkshire moors in
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far from England's Salvation was an irreparable tragedy, will still perhaps say, 'Yes, you have convinced us that the human spirit lost much with the defeat of the Celts, but history is concerned with facts, with what was rather than with what might have been. Yours is a moving story, but is it worth telling?'

That view of history surely is not far from the one whose influence is presenting us with the terrible menace we face today. The inevitability of history, the grovelling before the face of power have not proved so beneficent to mankind that we need regard as so worthy the scholarship that is concerned with nothing but the victor's story. Truth surely must once again be the historian's goal. But now I think I hear another critic's voice - the facts known to us from that dark age, he says, are too few, too sparse to allow us to create new general pictures of that time, we must be content with small pieces of research, with the minutiae of Dark Age history until good fortune brings us some new fact to work upon. There, let me say, I entirely agree. It was for this reason that I devoted my time for twenty years to the editing of cartularies, the examination of the texts of Anglo-Saxon land grants and literary riddles.

But a far greater riddle than these had been passed by in what I can only call a conspiracy of silence and neglect. I refer to the discoveries made in the excavation of the tomb of Bishop Eorpwald, which are described in detail in this work. The excavation, made by the greatest medieval historian of our time, Lionel Stokesay, took place in 1912 when I was still at school. Yet as my work progressed I found to my increasing dismay that this extraordinary discovery received only the most casual mention in the works of my colleagues. In Father Lavenham's work on the Mission of Theodore it is not mentioned. Those familiar with the revelations of Roman Catholic 'scholarship' made by Dr Coulton, those familiar with Cardinal Gasquct's evasions, will not be surprised at this. The apostasy of the Missionary of the East Folk was an inconvenient discovery for the supporters of the 'civilizing' mission of the Roman Church; we need not be surprised therefore that Roman Catholic 'scholars' pass it over in silence. We are told so much of the slender hold of Celtic Christian teachers upon the Franks, of the failure of the Irish followers of Columbanus in Germany, we hear less of the backslidings among the Anglo-Saxons, a century earlier from King Redwald to Bishop Eorpwald, but then their faith was that of Rome from which backsliding does not exist. Roman Catholic 'scholarship', however, has been so much discredited, that we need not concern ourselves too much with its convenient vagaries. More serious, of course, is the timidity with which it has been treated by Protestant and non-Christian teachers. Rome's story even held the day with one of the discoverers of Bishop Eorpwald's tomb - Canon Portway, but then the canon, though an enthusiastic and able antiquarian, was a High Churchman for whom the authoritarianism of Rome was the essence of Christianity, the free and gentle spirit of Lindisfarne only an eccentric weakness. Even Lionel Stokesay, that great historian, the principal excavator at Melpham, speaks in
The Making of England
of Cuthbert and Aidan as 'sweet side-tracks' and minimizes the importance of his own great discovery. This is partly the modesty so often to be found in men of genius; nevertheless, it must be said that he conforms to the Roman view more than one could wish. I may say that in his last years Professor Stokesay often spoke to me in a very different vein - 'The discoveries at Melpham are either nothing or something far more important than we have dared to think,' he told me a few months before his death. His sympathy for the Celtic Church had grown with his changed views and had he lived St Cuthbert might well have been defended by a far worthier pen than mine. It was not to be, however, for, worn out with his valiant struggle for peace in the years that preceded the war, Lionel Stokesay died in 1940. The recent work of Dr Margaret Murray has given a new significance to the dual religion which stares at us from Eorpwald's tomb. I cannot follow Dr Murray in all her conclusions, but sufficient is proved surely to establish a deep-seated survival of the pagan fertility cults, of the old religion, of the royal sacrifice, to suggest that Eorpwald's worship of the old gods and the New God was to be a permanent feature of Christendom for many centuries. We need not look very far for the motives of those who have minimized its importance. ...