An Audience with an Elephant (14 page)

So what if it was already there when the missionaries came to pagan Mercia? Could this building have been — as a Saxon poet wrote of a ruin so incredible he could think of no other origin for it — the work of giants? What if out of the twilight of Roman Britain just one building survived, not as a ruin but adapted and maintained so that it was still there, and in use, a millenium and a half later?

There was so little to go on. There was the statement of Hugo Candidus, a monk of Peterborough, writing in the twelfth century, that Brixworth was one of the daughter houses of Peterborough. He implied that as such its date would be late seventh century: even perhaps, as the guide books now claim, around
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68. If that is true, then this is the oldest complete church in Britain. It is certainly the grandest. One architectural historian had no doubts. Brixworth, wrote Sir Alfred Clapham in 1930, was the most imposing architectural memorial surviving north of the Alps in the seventh century. But why was it so grand?

Horace Phillips has been a parishioner here since the fifties, a retired lecturer who occasionally acts as a guide for the curious. His tours, as he admits, consist of questions to which the only answers would be conjecture. Mr Phillips does not conjecture. ‘Why was it here? Why was it so prominent so that it could be seen from all horizons?’ Like jesting Pilate, he does not stay for an answer. ‘All we know,’ murmured Mr Phillips, ‘is that we are driven further and further back by the evidence.’

Whenever a new heating system was installed or new drainage works carried out, questions like these formed in the minds of men staring into the turned earth. There were no answers, for the open-cast iron ore diggings of the late nineteenth century destroyed the archaeological evidence around the church.

But for the last ten years a committee under the chairmanship of Rosemary Cramp, Professor of Saxon Archaeology at Durham, has been conducting a co-ordinated programme of research. Whenever a bit of plaster came off the walls they descended on it like crows, brooded a parishioner. When a new vicarage was built ten years ago they dug trenches; but as far as the church itself was concerned, they had to content themselves with a stone-by-stone survey.

Until last year. Then when a new drainage system was installed, they dug for the first time in the foundations of the church itself. The dating of what they have found may determine the age of Brixworth once and for all.

David Parsons, Senior Lecturer in Adult Education at the University of Leicester, is co-ordinator of research for the project. He summarised what has been discovered so far. The survey of the walls has led to an identification of 40 different types of stone. There is brick and, even, granite, and Mr Parsons is inclined to believe that some ancient building was plundered. The Jewry Wall in Leicester, as he points out, one of the few bits of Roman wall left standing, looks very much like the side wall at Brixworth.

‘But where the building was that was plundered is one of the problems we have to solve. I know it looks like a basilica, but that could partly be the common inheritance of Rome and partly the use of Roman building materials. But we would need a context for it actually to be a Roman building. What was such a great palatial hall doing here? If it had to do with the administration of justice, then why was it here? If you could find a Roman town, yes. What worries us is the lack of context.’

The excavation of the old vicarage showed evidence of a ditch in which burials had occurred. Radio carbon dating of bone indicated a date in the late seventh or eighth century, so it was possible that they had stumbled on the edge of an Anglo-Saxon monastic cemetery. But another dating, this time of what was believed to be the remains of a scaffolding pole high in the south wall of the church, was more startling. This, at the level of the clerestory, was found to be ninth century.

Now before this nobody had doubted that the windows high in the nave were part of the original foundation. If this was so, then the church could not be seventh century. But there were other indications, like the remains of the great triple arcade which the Reverend Charles Watkins found separating nave and choir, which had only been found in the seventh century in this country. So Parsons was forced back on the theory that the clerestory was not initially there.

He now envisages a strange building in terms of what we have come to regard as a church, which had no tower but ended in a large porch or narthex at the west end. In the nave there were a series of arcades leading into what might have been small side chapels. The present dig has allowed access to the foundations of these for the first time, and it is on the dating of materials found there that the future history of the church could turn.

Mr Parsons suspects a ninth century foundation, though he is hedging his bets, for such a dating would really upset the applecart. And even a series of consistent dates will not unravel some of the riddles. There is the grand staircase leading to the room above the nave. That, as Mr Parsons says, argues for some great patron. Could it have been a Mercian king? Brixworth is in the heartland of Mercia. In the late seventh century Weedon Bee, some 5 miles away, was the seat of Wulphere, the Mercian King, and the royal family had a deeply religious strain; two of Wulphere’s successors resigned to become monks. Saxon royalty did not do that when the going was good.

There is also some tradition of a royal connection, for the church was still in the King’s hands at Domesday. So could that great patron have been the greatest Mercian king of all, the late eighth-century Offa? Mr Parsons dreams of finding some kind of palace nearby, which could bear out another traditional belief, that the relic found is the larynx bone of St Boniface, the eighth-century English missionary to the Germans, who murdered him in
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754. It is known that another relic of St Boniface was given to Westminster in the late eighth century. The donor was Offa of Mercia.

It would all make sense if some connection could be found. The irony is that at the centre of all the speculation is an English parish church, not a cathedral; not a ruin, but a working parish church. It is not on the tourist routes and the coaches do not call. Its congregation, for the most part, remains oblivious to the comings and goings of archaeologists, and there are no elaborate tombs to bring the brass rubbers. There is not even an organ; just a piano through which a piece of the roof once fell.

But then it needs none of these things. The South Door is Norman, twelfth-century, and anywhere else would be one of the most remarkable features of a church, indexed reverently in the guidebook. Not here. Above this door, walled up and shadowy, are the remains of a much taller arch, much older, much grander. There is a side chapel built by a fourteenth-century lord of the manor. ‘Simon Curteis who built this aisle lies here; he also greatly embellished this chapel . . . Whoso will pray for his soul shall have 140 days pardon.’ He needs your prayers for the sheer cheek of what he had caused to be built.

For this is the old, old place.

Last of England’s Village Voices

VILLAGE IN ENGLAND
is a strange place now. The old families, their names in the churchyard and on the war memorial, are leaving. There is no work for them on the land and nowhere they can afford to live; and the young commuting professionals have come, to unbrick a few inglenooks and move on. So, suddenly, this is a place without continuity, and when that goes, folklore and a known past follow; the village becomes thin as a film set, mysterious as a railway terminus. All you can hope for is that, as in the Dark Ages, someone will see to it that something endures.

Such men have always existed. Three hundred years ago there was John Aubrey salvaging manuscripts and memories, anything which would allow men to see the footprints leading up to them. ‘These remains are like fragments of a shipwreck that, after the revolution of so many years and governments, have escaped the teeth of time and (which is more dangerous) the teeth of mistaken zeal.’ In our time there is Mr George Freeston of Blisworth in Northamptonshire, 90 years old this year. He was born in the village and has left it only once: when the government invited him to make war on Germany. He used to be the taxi driver, his father the undertaker, so nothing moved in Blisworth, or stopped moving, without their knowledge.

George has recorded everything: its squires, parsons, ghosts, schoolmasters, adulterers; its changing jobs (of 2,000 people, perhaps 20 now work on the land); the closing of the station, the coming of the by-pass and of strangers to the housing estate. Even a man whose photograph he unearths with the pride of a millionaire showing off his Monet. ‘He was the last around here to be employed to bit lambs’ tails off.’ One room in his cottage is filled from floor to ceiling with boxes marked ‘Canal’, ‘Parsons’, ‘Home Guard’.

Someone said of John Aubrey that he would break his neck in his enthusiasm for new facts. When navvies, in the interest of tourism, virtually rebuilt the canal tunnel under Blisworth Hill, George, then in his middle seventies, splashed through the mud after them, photographed their machinery, counted the pints they drank at night, and noted the arrival in suspenders of a kissogram grandmother from Milton Keynes. When the by-pass came, George, then nearing 80, was up all night to watch a sectioned bridge being assembled.

Like Aubrey again, he has found little time for authorship; ‘I now set down things as if they tumbled out of a sack. They will be of some use to such as love antiquities and natural history.’ George has the same rueful attitude. ‘I ought to have written it down long ago. It should be written down, though I’d need three secretaries, a housekeeper, and another 50 years. But it’ll all be here for people to find.’ When he held an exhibition of local history in the church, there were television crews and coach tours, and so many signatures in the visits’ book that a new volume had to be started. Yet everything for the exhibition came out of the one small cottage. ‘I can see he’s got it all out,’ said an old lady, ‘What worries me is how he’s going to get it all back in again.

It cannot help but have its comic side. When a man lavishes as much attention on a village as a college of arms would on an imperial house, the village sees itself in a new light. They do not throw things away in Blisworth now; they bring George the stuffed owls their grandfathers shot, their old wedding photographs and wills. Last week a man brought his 1966 MOT certificate. ‘I think it’s time you had this,’ he said, handling it as though it were Magna Carta.

History has called on Blisworth. There was Domesday, when the commissioners found a mill (which survived in various forms until 1921); there was Bosworth, when the squire chose the wrong side. The canal tunnel was the most important piece of civil engineering in the early nineteenth century, linking the canals of North and South, so that the Industrial Revolution floated through the village. Its canal port was the busiest in the Midlands, its railway station the crossroads of the region, and they even found iron ore there in 1852. Blisworth should have become an important town, but it all passed by; all of it.

The village is just a line of old houses along two roads now; that and the new estate which has doubled the population. There is just one local employer, the abbatoir down the Northampton Road with a staff of 200. And to residents and motorists the village would just be somewhere on the way to somewhere else were it not for one thing: Mr George Freeston lives in Blisworth.

The novelist J.L. Carr introduced me to George ten years ago, remarking that I should never again need to invent anything for the newspapers. There were two houses worth seeing in the county, he said. One was the Duke of Buccleuch’s Boughton, the other was George Freeston’s cottage. On balance, he found George Freeston’s the more fascinating.

It used to be three cottages, each with one room up and one down, the upstairs reached by a trapdoor through which George once fell. Because of the rising tide of objects, which meant that on occasion he could not find his bed, he has been obliged to move into the loft, installing stairs he built himself, with a balustrade made out of an old coffin bier. In time, all things get used. You come to the house through a garden, past sheep’s skulls and old tombstones, bronze busts of Gladstone and Disraeli, fossils and moletraps, a slate cattle trough, and a 6-foot thermometer which used to stand outside the last village butcher’s shop.

George has kept notes on the old butcher’s reactions to his first wireless set. ‘Mine says it’s going to rain, what does yours say?’ The butcher became an enthusiastic relayer of the national news. ‘This financier, know what he did? He stepped out of an airyplane over the Channel and drowned hisself. And know what he had with him in the plane? He had two shorthorn typists.’ George has kept everything.

In the tiny art gallery that is his porch, there are oil paintings of the last train to stop at Blisworth; of the village before the trains, before the car, in snow, in evening sunlight; a military chest belonging to a squire who broke his neck out hunting; a tiller from one of the last commercial narrowboats; a 3-foot pair of tweezers that turns out to have been used to pull up thistles.