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January 2005

Parish History Episode 45

The Vulgar Tongue, The Simple Faith

By the middle of the Fourteenth Century, the development of lay offices, such as that of churchwarden, had, as we saw in last month’s “Signpost”, begun to develop, and such laymen had gained increasing influence over the administration and the finances of the parish churches. These developments were accompanied by the growth of the “vulgar tongue” - that is, the English language, and other modern lan-guages - and by apparent changes in the common man’s understanding of religion, with perhaps a shift of emphasis from the observance of the Sacraments to a possibly more “spiritual”, and more personal, approach to God.

This might sound like the rise of a lazier, more congenial, religiosity. After all, it is more convenient to sit around, and contemplate the Infinite (or to claim to be doing that) than to get up on a cold morning, and trudge through the rain to hear Mass. But the keenness shown by many (probably chiefly the “middle classes” and the “respectable poor”), in Houghton and other parishes, to hire masons and glaziers to beautify their churches is in itself a token of a new interest shown by relatively ill- -educated men and women in spiritual matters, and in art and decoration. A further token of this new spirit can be seen in the revival of vernacular literature that took place at this time, the middle and late years of the Fourteenth Century.

Since the final ending of “the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle”, with its account of the bloody Twelfth-Century civil wars between Stephen and Matilda, and the mysterious “history”, or collection of legends, chiefly tales about King Arthur, put together by a monk called Layamon around 1200, written English had, for over a century, almost disappeared. The language of the Church and of education had been Latin, and that of the Royal Court and the Law, and to quite an extent of the peerage and baronage of England, had been French. But by the early years of the Fourteenth Century a few texts in English had begun to appear: love lyrics and courting songs (“Sumer is icumen in - Lhude sing cuckoo!”); a few vernacular prayers and carols (“Lullay, lullay, littel child…”); heroic border ballads (“God send wor land deliverance frae’ iv’ry reiving, roaring Scot”); and prose works, with common-sense advice about home and farm management.

More serious writing in English began to appear in the years after the Black Death, and much of it, influenced no doubt by the recent appalling mortality, concerned the things of God, and the soul’s relationship with God. Much of it was anonymous, but as there was no standard form of written English, we can generally guess, by the use of dialect words, what part of England the writer came from. Little of it comes from London, and perhaps there was an axis running from Rome through Avignon and Paris to London, along which Latin learning still predominated, and the “vulgar tongue” was still regarded as, well, vulgar.

The most influential writing, in English, that survives from this period is probably “the Cloud of Unknowing”, which insists on the impossibility of knowing aught of God by human reasoning, because of the “cloud of unknowing” which lies between us and Heaven, and which can only be pierced, intuitively, by “the Sharp Dart of Love”. The anonymous author (probably from the English Midlands) gives directions for contemplative prayer and worship, but not for life-style.

Other classics of this period, however, do concern themselves with the life of the worshipper. Highly influential in its time was the “Ancren Riwle”, a devotional manual written by another Midlander for a small community of nuns, of no known order. The author recommends the life of the hermit or anchorite to them, and describes how, by isolation, a woman, or a man, can grow closer to God.

The most prolific writer of this century, however, was Richard Rolle, a Yorkshireman, who wrote in the earlier part of the century. He had considered, at one time, joining the Franciscan order, but had rejected the idea in favour of becoming a Solitary. He dwelt in the Yorkshire woods, and poured out a flood of devotional classics, which seem to have particularly influenced a community of Cistercian nuns at Hampole. He died in 1349, apparently smitten by the Plague, in spite of his isolation.

After Rolle’s death, another writer, Walter Hilton, a Nottinghamshire man, became popular. He had once been a hermit, in Sherwood Forest (the original Friar Tuck? No, certainly not), but later became an Augustinian canon. He wrote for lay men and women who felt attracted to the life of a hermit, commending it, but reminding them of other possible vocations. His mystic writings describe the recon-struction, within the soul, of the deformed image of God that we acquire in youth, a process which takes place in two stages, first the Vision in Faith, and then the Vision in Faith and Feeling, the two separated by an unhappy intervening stage, “the Dark Night of the Soul”.

Two women who were greatly influenced by these writers were Marjory Kemp, the wife of a King’s Lynn merchant, and the mother of fourteen children, who yet tried to live by her own version of the “Ancren Riwle”; and, of much greater importance, Julian of Norwich, who practiced the life of an anchoress, walled up in a city church in Norwich, and who left us an account of her “Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love”, a Love which, she found, transcended and subdued all Evil.

It is plain from this brief summary of a great mass of devotional and mystical writings from Northern, Midland and Eastern England, that one of the most influen-tial religious vocations in the eyes of the men and women of this time was the life of the (usually female) hermit. A century earlier, during the Thirteenth Century, it had been the new orders of mendicant friars which had drawn the admiration of layfolk, but the friars seemed to have grown rich and worldly, like so many of the monks before them, and now, after disasters like that of the Black Death, people seemed to be looking for a different, simpler, and less “professional”, approach to God. There was, it would seem, a progression in the search for symbols to admire, from the rich Benedictine abbey, to the preaching of the wandering friars, and then to the hermit in the woods: a progression from complexity to simplicity, from splendour of worship to puritanism. With Richard Rolle in the damp greenwood, or Julian of Norwich in her dark city cell, we might feel that we have got as close to the poverty of the Gospels as it is possible to go.

This was not purely an English phenomenon. Similar developments were taking place in neighbouring lands: in fact, on the European mainland the roots of this “vernacular religion” go deeper than in England, though these spiritual yearnings become more prominent at this time, during the Fourteenth Century.

The Valdesians, now confined to a few Alpine valleys in Italy, had translated much of the Bible into contemporary language as early as the Twelfth Century, and by this time many laymen had knowledge of vernacular Gospels written in dialects which were on the way to developing into modern Italian, French, Dutch, German and Czech. It was at least partly through reading these Gospels that the Beguigne movement began in the Netherlands and surrounding countries.

The Beguignes consisted of groups of women (usually widows, spinsters or deserted wives), and a very few men, who formed themselves into a new type of religious community. They took vows of simplicity and continence, but did not regard such vows as necessarily being life-long; and ideally, while they tried to incorporate prayer and Bible study into their daily lives, they focussed their energies primarily on being of practical use to their neighbours. Their communities were to be found in cities and towns all over the Netherlands, and in Northern France and Western Germany. Distinct from English spirituality, they seemed to show a typically Dutch common-sense approach to religious practice.

However, they did find enemies. It was difficult to fault their practice, but unfortunately some of them wrote books, trying to express their spiritual ideals, and, being women (women never received any formal education at this period), they knew no Latin, and had perforce to write in “the vulgar tongue”. One of them, Marguerite Poreté, was burnt to death as a heretic, in Paris in 1310, because she had written a book, “the Mirror of Simple Souls”, in which she claimed to have experienced visions, and because she, an uneducated woman, presumed to write, and to teach, against sound apostolic precept. This inevitably aroused the suspicion of the clergy, the only persons trained and authorised to transmit the Word of God.

[Nowadays such priests are demanding a (woman-free) “Third Province”. In those more robust times, they burnt poor Marguerite at the stake, just as Joan of Arc, who also experienced unauthorised visions, was burnt, over a century later.]

The burning of Marguerite Poreté was witnessed by Eckhart, a German friar then studying at the University in Paris. On returning home, he began to move through the lands of the Rhine, preaching in German to the peasantry. That, in a sense, was what Dominican friars were expected to do; but he was not calling the peasants to repentance, but was rather expounding to them a doctrine of the Soul, which was not fully in accord with Christian orthodoxy. The Soul, he proclaimed, is ultimately with God, and is part of God, and indeed, in a sense, is God: for the Soul contains that which is Uncreated, that which is Divine, and is part of “the Uncreated Light”, which seems to be something akin to what most people call “God”. The Soul is part of It, is It, and is not to be distinguished from It. My Soul, thy Soul, Meister Eckhart’s Soul, have been in and with the Uncreated Light since before Creation began, and will be with It after Creation comes to an end.

This was probably rather above the heads of most of the Rhineland peasants who heard him: indeed, it is way above my head. But it inspired poets and painters who chanced to hear him, and ultimately, perhaps, led to Dürer, Goethe and Wagner.

Thus we can observe, during the course of the Fourteenth Century, Christianity growing, perhaps, more intense, more profound; but also more diverse. Vulgar tongues, including English, Dutch and German, begin to supersede Latin, and these countries begin to diverge in religion. We begin to meet with English simplicity and puritanism, Dutch common-sense, and German mysticism.

But, of course, these diverging strands were still, at this period, kept in one skein by the discipline of the Roman Catholic Church: with the exception of the Valdesians, all Christians in the West were at that time in Communion with the Pope. When in 1327 Pope John XXII summoned Eckhart to Avignon, to stand trial as a heretic, the friar went there, stood before the Pope, and submitted. Ordered to keep silent, he stopped preaching. But other German friars whom he had influenced, such as Johann Tauler and Heinrich Suso, continued to preach in German, and to create a whole school of German mysticism.

Has this anything to do with events in this part of the world? Did the English belief in the special sanctity of the life of the hermit (the anchorite, or, in the speech of those days, the “anker”) resonate in these parts?

Well, towards about 1380, a Washington man called John, was said to be living in a cave, among the dense woodland which then bordered the steep banks of the river Wear, and was beginning to win locally a reputation as a holy man, akin to that enjoyed by Richard Rolle and Walter Hilton in their woodland hermitages further South. Hearing of this, the churchwardens of Chester-le-Street, who may have been aware of the fame accruing to Julian of Norwich and the church in that city in which she resided, resolved on persuading John of Washington to move to Chester, and they built a cell for him within the parish church.

In 1383 they, with some other men of Chester, set out in search of John. They found him in a cave somewhere near Worm Hill, and they made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. They then brought him out of the cave, washed him in the Wear, bundled him up, and brought him to Chester-le-Street, and installed him in what became known as the Anker’s House, in a corner of the parish church. He seems to have lived there until his death, and to have been succeeded by five other hermits in the century and a half between then and the Reformation. The reputation of some of them was such that pilgrims began to come to Chester, to receive godly counsel and a blessing from the resident hermit, and many of these pilgrims left generous donations in the offertory box.
When they heard about what their colleagues at Chester-le-Street had done, the churchwardens of Houghton-le-Spring must have realised that they had missed out on a great opportunity.