Friday, 27 February 2015

The Cromwellian Green Man

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This is the carving on the lintel over the main door of the parish church in Berwick upon Tweed. It is an example of the type of figure known as a 'green man', that is, a man's face surrounded by foliage. These are apparently quite common on churches, much to the delight of Neo-Pagans who see them as an indication of the survival of pre-Christian belief long after Europe was nominally Christianised.

This one is evidently little known, judging by the fact that all the Google results for 'green man Berwick' were about a pub called The Green Man in Berwick Street, London.  The thing that always seems strange to me about it is that Berwick church is an extremely rare example of a church built during the Cromwellian period, that is the decade or so between the execution of King Charles I in 1649 and the restoration of the monarchy under Charles II in 1660 when hard-line Reformed Christianity was the power in the land. The original design of Holy Trinity church conformed to strict puritan principles: no steeple, no bells, no stained glass, no altar. Graven images of any kind were anathema to these strict Protestants. So why then put a Green Man over the door ??

I have found a great little website that explains all things to do with Green Men. It suggests many interpretations: that such images may have been purely decorative, with no remembered symbolic significance; that they may have been identified with the devil and placed over church doorways as a warning to worshippers; that they may have been perceived as Christian because of the tradition that the cross on which Jesus was crucified was made from wood from a tree descended from the Tree of Knowledge that was the downfall of Adam and Eve; and of course that they really were a lovingly retained symbol of folk practices related to the cycle of the seasons.

During my four years as a rather mature research student I went to a lot of conferences on religious studies, and developed a love-hate relationship with the modern pagans who attended them in quantities. Most of them were very pleasant and interesting people and I sometimes miss them. On the other hand the shiny-eyed enthusiasms and sweeping unscholarly statements that some of them were prone to frequently exasperated me, and put me off taking an interest in pre-Christian religions for a long time. I have now mellowed somewhat, and am prepared to take pagan survivals seriously again, though I still have issues with anything involving the 'collective unconscious'.

In fact I have mellowed so much that I have just re-read my old Pelican of  Gods and Myths of Northern Europe, a classic work by H.R.Ellis Davidson, born Hilda Ellis in 1914 and far removed from the scholar-practitioners who abound in academia nowadays, but very sympathetic to the loyal followers of Odin and Thor who witnessed the replacement of their ancient faith by Christianity. By the time I had finished this book I was quite convinced that the centrality of the crucifixion in the iconography of European Christianity has a lot to do with the centrality of the story of Odin hanging on a tree in order to acquire mystical wisdom in the faith which it slowly and with difficulty replaced. There are Old English poems whose imagery blends the two traditions of cross and tree almost inseparably.

So I am now open to suggestions about ancient symbols of foliage too.  I do have a nagging feeling that the use of this symbol on a church built on such severe puritan principles may weaken the argument that it was a genuine pagan survival and reinforce the view that it was intended to be either purely decorative or actively diabolic. Unless of course it was put up at a later date as an ostentatiously anti-puritan gesture. I think I need to do some more research. But I'm sure that lots of readers will be keen to help me with that.





Monday, 26 January 2015

Challenging Weather at Craster

Discovering that it is possible to digitalise transparencies has opened up a whole new world of possibilities for blogging. I'm posting this old 35 mm slide just because it's such a great picture. It shows the harbour at Craster on a stormy day with the waves breaking impressively over the wall.

Definitely the kind of day when the emergency services put out stern warnings against standing on the harbour wall just to gawp at the view, but no committed photographer has ever cared much for health and safety. Certainly the one who took this, my late father John Housby, never did and nor did his camera club buddies. I have a photo of him gleefully standing on a cliff edge on the wrong side of a sign that says 'danger, do not go beyond this point', taken by one of the said camera club buddies. Maybe I'll digitalise and post that one some day.

Craster is a small fishing village in north Northumberland. It did not have a harbour at all until the family in the local 'big house', who have the same name as the village, had this one built as an act of philanthropy in the early years of the 20th century. Imagine what it was like having to launch a fishing coble straight out into the open sea. Challenging.  The village has its own history site here.

In the distance on the left side of the picture is Dunstanburgh Castle, a ruin so picturesque that it has become the greatest visual cliche in Northumberland and has accordingly been banished from my blog, but I'm prepared to let it just sneak into the corner like this. As I related in my post on interesting local place names, the name Craster is derived, according to Stan Beckensall's handy guide, from the Old English craw-ceastre, meaning a fort inhabited by crows. Looking along to the ruined castle it still seems a very apt name.  During my childhood visits to Craster we always had a cuppa in a local cafe called The Choughs. According to the RSPB website, the chough is indeed a bird of the crow family but it is no longer found on the north-east coast. Shame.

I used a section of this photo for the cover image of my first attempt at writing fiction to self-publish. I wanted to have a go at evoking the feeling of a small coastal village when the summer tourists have gone and the winter storms have arrived, and I ended up writing a short story set in a fictional village that is a cross between Craster and Seahouses. That has been quite well received and I am now working on publishing more short stories. I'll put the link on this blog when it's live.



Wednesday, 17 December 2014

The Kilted Magi

A very Happy Christmas to all my readers!

For my Christmas post this year I have something a bit different for you. This is a photo of a sculpture in the parish church of Kirknewton, a small village in North Northumberland. (I should confess that it was taken by my late father and not by myself.) You can see that the modern plaster on the wall has been carefully shaped around the figures to preserve this very old relief carving of the Adoration of the Magi.

It is recognisably a depiction of the Three Wise Men bringing gifts to the Baby Jesus, who sits in his mother's lap. The detail that makes it so interesting is that the Wise Men are wearing, not trousers, nor anything known to have been worn in first century Persia where they reportedly came from, but the type of garments that the local congregation here in the English-Scottish Borders were apparently familiar with, now usually referred to as kilts. Every serious book on the history of Scotland that I've read says that our modern idea of a kilt is mostly a Victorian invention and that the Scottish Highlanders in centuries past simply wore a piece of plaid cloth loosely wrapped around themselves. This sculpture seems to provide evidence that similar styles of dress were adopted by men further south as well.

The work probably dates from the 12th century, according to the great Nikolaus Pevsner. The Northumberland volume of the 1950s 'Queen's England' series refers to it vaguely as 'Norman'. Both of them describe it as artistically very crude, which may be true but is kind of missing the point about why it's so appealing. It is a powerful image from the history of Christianity in Northern Europe.






Sunday, 16 November 2014

Noah's Flood: Once Again Topical

It has been raining a lot recently. I mean, a lot. On days when the rain never stops living on a river estuary loses some of its appeal. All I can see is water in every direction – water in the river, water on the ground, water in the sky. Water dripping off my sleeves in the library and making the books soggy. Water making the garden path so slippy that I skidded when fetching the wheely-bin back in and would have fallen if the bin hadn’t acted as a handy zimmer-frame.

I have started taking climate change more seriously recently, partly because there seems to be no doubt that the winters are warmer and wetter than they were when I was a child. There is something to be said for having less snow, but constant rain is not much fun either. It is a commonplace on days like this to joke that perhaps we should be building an ark. So when I came across this picture while sorting out my old photos, I thought, Hmm ... Maybe there is some useful knowledge to be gleaned from this.

The photo shows a performance of the Benjamin Britten opera Noah’s Flood, or rather, Noye’s Fludde, staged in St Michael’s church, Alnwick, in the late 1960s, starring the great bass-baritone Owen Brannigan as Noah and your correspondent as a mouse. That’s me at the far right of the front row, with the plaits. All the other mice have kept their masks in the correct position and are behaving in a suitably mouse-like fashion, while I seem to have tilted mine back, the better to stare at the audience. I remember that I was sulking about not being cast as one of the cool animals. Everybody wanted to be a giraffe or an elephant, who had impressive papier-mache heads and not just a rubbish mask. You may also have noticed that there are more than two mice. Basically, any member of the Sunday School who hadn’t succeeded in being cast as a decent two-by-two animal was pacified by being allowed to be a mouse. This was justified on the grounds that any bodged-up wooden ship would have been full of mice anyway without needing to march them aboard in pairs. We had to scurry up the aisle of the church at the back end of the procession into the ark, squeaking 'Eek eek!'  Darling, the indignity of it all.

Apart from my papier-mache envy, the only thing I can now recall about this performance is how much my arms ached. The conclusion of the first half of the show was a stirring rendition by the entire cast, mice included, of Eternal Father, Strong to Save, a hymn traditionally sung by seafarers and those who love them that implores God to protect ‘those in peril on the sea’. To add to the dramatic effect we all had to hold out our hands in an attitude of supplication for the entire hymn. Mr Brannigan was naturally a consummate professional and stood rock steady throughout, but some of the animals were distinctly wobbly well before the end.

In addition to his career in classical music, Owen Brannigan became well known for his recordings of traditional folk songs from Northumberland and Tyneside. We used to have one of them in the house when I was a child. I really must try to track them down in digital form. I only discovered recently that Owen Brannigan was born in Annitsford, then a small village in the south of Northumberland but now incorporated into Cramlington New Town, and sang in the church choir there as a boy.  A dear friend of mine who died much too young is buried in the churchyard at Annitsford. It always makes me happy to find such connections in my life.


Sunday, 26 October 2014

Halloween Grumbles

I am not ashamed to admit that I am one of those shoppers who like to have a good rummage in the ‘reduced to clear’ section of the supermarket every time I go there. You never know what you may find. Yesterday evening I found a toffee apple for 6p and happily regressed to my sticky childhood. There was a whole pile of them in the clearance. And yesterday was the 25th October. Toffee coated apples are traditionally consumed at Halloween, which is still nearly a week away. Why are the supermarkets stocking festival goodies so far in advance of the relevant festival that they end up being reduced to clear a week before the date anybody would be expected to buy them?  For years now it has been possible to buy a Christmas cake with a ‘best before’ date well in advance of Christmas. What on earth is the point of this?

I have something of a bee in my bonnet about the modern Americanised celebration of Halloween. Not because I have a knee-jerk antagonism to anything American, but because it has obliterated the indigenous ways of marking the festival in the British Isles. Some Brits don’t believe we ever celebrated Halloween before we were introduced to pumpkins by Hollywood. (Most British shops sell pumpkins only in October and I am convinced that many Brits haven’t realised that they can be eaten as food and not just used for making lanterns.)

I used to be a loyal viewer of the Late Review show on BBC 2. A few years back, it unexpectedly hosted an argument on this subject between Tom Paulin, Irish poet, and Tony Parsons, London novelist. Tony insisted that nobody in these islands had ever heard of Halloween until the American version arrived here. Tom told him forcefully that he was wrong, he had celebrated it in Ireland as a child. Tony said this was nonsense. Tom went red in the face with rage and looked as if he might be about to stand up and throw a punch. The presenter sitting between them hastily moved the discussion along. I was sitting on the sofa in just as great a rage as Tom Paulin.

When I was a child in the 1960s we made Halloween lanterns out of turnips. Yes, turnips. I have been greeted with such incredulity by Southern Brits and Americans when I tell them this that I had almost started to doubt my own memory. So I was delighted to come across this confirmation, in the book Northumbrian Heritage by Nancy Ridley. Writing in 1968, Nancy describes it as an old custom that lingers on in remote areas.

“Not only does tradition survive but old customs have in many cases managed to withstand the realistic attitudes of the youth of today.  In some rural areas of Northumberland Hallow E’en is still celebrated.  ‘Dooking’ (ducking) for apples is one, and some children make lanterns out of a hollow turnip; two holes representing the eyes, a mouth and a nose are carved and the lighted candle placed inside the turnip shell, a handle of string is attached and these turnip lanterns have a terrifying appearance when carried swinging through the dark.”

In 1968 I was seven and at the peak of my own turnip carving endeavours. Not really being trusted with a sharp knife at that age, I only made a few token scoop-outs after my parents had done the hard graft. This probably explains why the pumpkins came into it. The emigrants to North America from Britain and Ireland presumably took both the custom and the turnips with them, but finding that the New World offered them a vegetable so much softer and easier to carve, took the easy option. 

The other thing I regret is the loss of any real sense that Halloween is frightening because it is a festival of the dead and a time when the ‘veil between the worlds’ is more permeable than usual.  I take this seriously because of the year when Halloween fell in between my father's death and his funeral, and consequently all those children roaming around dressed as skeletons seriously creeped me out. But apart from me, the Wiccans and neo-pagans are now the only people who observe it as a solemn event.

However, here in the UK the change of the clocks onto winter time takes place only a few days before 31st October - this year, it was today. At latitude 56 o N that heralds three months of having to travel home from work in the dark, and the primal sense of dread with which we face this prospect, especially in rural areas with no artificial street lighting, is something that links us with our pagan ancestors. 

Thursday, 9 October 2014

Some Interesting Northumberland Place Names

Here are the covers of two books about the origins of the place names of Northumberland. The first one, with the title that you might be wary of searching for online these days, was published in 1970 by Oriel press, a Newcastle based publisher who produced a number of very good books on local history. The second is by Stan Beckensall, a Northumberland scholar and writer best known for his work on the prehistoric rock carvings of the area (possible subject of a future blog post). It has been revised and reprinted since, but I like having the 1975 original, no. 63 in the series of Northern History booklets produced by the Frank Graham press.  Here are a few examples of the contents.

 GOODWIFE HOT  Of course you now want to know the origin of this remarkable name. Watson relates that it is one of a group of Celtic camps or hill forts in an area of Redesdale, another being called Garret Hot, and says the modern name is likely to be a corruption of an original Celtic name, now lost. He also speculates though that it may be an anglicised reference to a fertility goddess, of whom he also reckons to have found traces in the folkloric figure of the Old Wife.  Beckensall does not include this name at all. Any readers who know if this matter has been cleared up since 1970, please get in touch.

BERWICK  The home territory of this blog. Every book I have ever looked at gives the derivation of the name as bere-wich, a barley farm. An especially scholarly one I looked at in the reference room of the National Library of Scotland offered the additional fact that wick or wich often referred to a smaller farm outlying from a large farm. That sounds likely in our case, and is more satisfactory than the often seen shorthand version that tells us a wick was any kind of settlement.  A local amateur historian once bent my ear at length with his theory that in the case of Berwick the wick comes from the Scandinavian for ‘bay’. It is true that the Icelandic vik means ‘bay’ (the name Reykavik apparently means ‘smoky bay’, thus incidentally explaining why the Scots say that a chimney ‘reeks’), but this cannot be the derivation of any of the inland –wicks in this area, and in any case, the most striking geographical fact about Berwick is that it stands on an estuary, not a bay. I also possess a Directory of Northumberland from 1855, and that offers the theory that the name was originally Aberwick, from the Celtic aber meaning the mouth of  a river. When I toured the local Masonic Hall last month as part of the Heritage Open Doors weekend, I noticed that they use the name Aberwicke on one of their mysterious commemorative boards. (‘I’m not allowed to explain everything to you, but we like old versions of names’.) This derivation seems to have entirely gone out of favour, but it does have some plausibility.

CAMBOIS  A village in the south-east corner of the county, best known for the amusement afforded to Northumbrians when visitors pronounce its name as if it were French.  It is actually pronounced as if the b were not there, which originally it wasn’t. Both of these books say it is derived from the Old Celtic kambo, meaning crooked, cf. Irish camus and Welsh cemmaes, and that the most likely feature in the vicinity to be described as crooked is the bay on which it stands. The name is seen in the form Cammes in the year 1050, according to Beckensall. Watson says that the modern spelling is probably due to the French speaking clerks who arrived after the Norman conquest, and comments that the name is a fine illustration of the importance of taking local pronunciation as the primary source for place names, since they have been handed down entirely by oral transmission.

CRASTER  A fishing village in the northern part of the county, where we often went for the day when I was little.  Beckensall says the name is derived from the Old English crawe-ceastre, a fort inhabited by crows. It is found in the form Craucestre in the year 1242. There is a seabird called the chough which is a member of the crow family. There was a long established cafe in the village called The Choughs, but as far as I know they never exploited this fascinating piece of etymology for the benefit of their business.

HEBRON   In the days when I regularly took the bus between Alnwick and Newcastle I used to pass a signpost to this hamlet, and wearing my other hat as someone who has studied the Middle East, it always intrigued me. It seems that the name has no connection to the West Bank town called Hebron by the Israelis. Beckensall says that it comes from hea-byrgen, a high barrow or burial mound, and is the same name as Hepburn and Hebburn.  This last is an area of Tyneside, and during the period in the 1980s when Belinda Carlisle had a record in the charts called ‘Heaven is a place on earth’, Geordies liked to sing, ‘Hebburn is a place on earth’. Can’t really argue with that.

I hope you have found the above interesting. Perhaps in the future I will publish a few more examples.


Monday, 29 September 2014

Orkney: Debatable Islands

This is the cover of a guidebook to the Orkney islands published in the 1930s. My uncle bought it while serving in the Orkneys during WWII.  He sent it to his parents as a present, writing in the front “from your loving son serving with the RAF in these lonely islands, June 1944”.  I have screwed up my eyes many times trying to decide whether that word is ‘lonely’ or ‘lovely’, and am still not certain. Either would be appropriate, but the former seems more likely to be the adjective of choice of a young conscript missing his home. 

That was the only contact any of my family have ever had with Orkney – I am ashamed to confess that I have never been there. One of my relatives in New Zealand is convinced that the original bearers of the surname Housby came from Denmark via Orkney and that there is some sort of ancestral estate of ours in the islands, but more reliable scholarship tells us that most –by Danish surnames entered Britain via Yorkshire, and in any case, my uncle had plenty of time to look around in 1944, and I think he would have mentioned it if he had stumbled across a swathe of acreage bearing his own name.

This blog is, of course, about the area on either side of the Scottish-English border, but now that I have had time to digest the results of the indyref in more detail, I have realised that the Orkneys have something in common with the Scottish Borders. Both local authority areas returned a No vote of 67% in the referendum, a much more decisive No Thanks to independence than in the rest of Scotland. 

The result overall, when votes from the whole of Scotland were combined, was 55%  for No, but that disguises some sizeable local variations. The now much criticised opinion poll that showed 51% for Yes was actually an under-estimate of the vote in Glasgow, which voted  nearly 54% for Yes. Glasgow itself and the two adjacent authorities, plus Dundee on the opposite coast, were the only areas to return a majority Yes vote, which is a pretty clear indication that it is the former heartlands of the labour movement, now struggling with de-industrialisation, that have given up on the Labour party and sought salvation in independence.

The decisive rejection of independence in the Borders is in accordance with the anecdotal impression I had formed, and is what you would expect from the region whose daily life would have been most seriously disrupted by the appearance of an international frontier on its doorstep. It may in fact be more noteworthy that 33% of voters still thought it was worth risking this inconvenience. But why should the Orcadians have shown themselves equally averse to the prospect of an independent Scotland? 

In their case, it seems to be because they do not consider themselves to be really part of Scotland at all and do not wish to become even more dependent on it.  The Orkney islands used to belong to Norway but were ceded to Scotland in 1468 as part of the dowry when the daughter of King Christian 1, who ruled both Norway and Denmark, married King James III of Scotland.  Princess Margaret’s royal dad was short of ready cash so pledged both the Orkney and Shetland (64% for No) islands in lieu. According to this 1930s book, the islands are still technically ‘pawned’ and may be redeemed by Norway at any time, but "Orkney folk know which side their bread is buttered and so prefer to stay with Scotland". Hmm. That was before Norway accumulated a whopping sovereign wealth fund from oil revenues. 

The Orkney and Shetland islands are still even more strongly Scandinavian in language and culture than the northern mainland of Scotland and quite a lot of their inhabitants would apparently like Norway to redeem its pledge. There are also reports that some Orcadians are now demanding a referendum of their own on becoming completely independent. Berwick upon Tweed, of course, used to belong to Scotland but was conquered by England. A lot of its residents think it would be better off going back to Scotland or even becoming independent. The population of the Borough of Berwick is only slightly smaller than that of the Orkney islands. Maybe we could work out some sort of deal whereby Berwick is returned to Scotland while Orkney is returned to Norway?