King Arthur - another lost Temple?

I was so excited on reading Michael Harrison's book (see yesterday's blog) to find some evidence of the veneration of King Arthur in London because it is in London that his story starts and if there was to be a temple to him anywhere it would be in London.  If Michael Harrison's identification of St Martin's as a key clue to identifying a temple of Artemis/Arthur (they probably shared temples as they are both represented by a bear) as suggested by the connection with St Martin's Vintry then another possible temple site would be further to the west at St Martin's in the Fields. 

This is a good candidate because it was on the banks of the river Tyburn, another of London's tributaries, the name of which is usually said to derive from the old welsh Ty Burn, burn still being a common name for a stream in Scotland and is therefore translated as 'House by the Stream'.  But, using Harrison's method, what if the corruption is actually from Ty Bruin ie the House of the Bear?  The site as potentially a temple to Arthur makes sense because it is at Westminster, then Thorney Island, that Arthur finds the all-important Sword in the Stone.  The temple would have looked across the river estuary towards the island where, if the story 'The Sword in the Stone' is accurate there was a temple to Merlin, later shared with the Christians.  You don't need me to tell you how closely Arthur and Merlin have always been connected.

Bearing in mind what Michael Harrison has to say about the continuity of London's history (which I would agree with) it is worth noting that this was the site of religious worship right through the Middle Ages.  Covent Garden, which lies right behind the church of St Martin's In the Fields, is a corruption of Convent Garden.  The nunnery at Tyburn lasted until the reformation.

It's a bit of a long-shot as this area of London has been thoroughly dug over what with the 17th century damming of the Tyburn to change its course and create the lake in St James's Park and the creation of the underground.  It's unlikely that any physical archaeology will provide us with substantial proof and it may be that the tenuous linguistic connection is all we will ever have but it might be worth some furtghher investigation so watch this space!

I should add that I disagree with Michael Harrison on one point, that is his identification of Billingsgate with the Roman war goddess Bellona.  I have found an early Tudor reference to 'Bolin's Gate' which seems to me much closer to 'Balin's Gate' as I suggest.  Balin is clearly an important Druid God as he has a whole section in 'The Sword of the Stone'.  He is the one who demonstrates the principle of free will, a crucial element in Druid and later Christian Druid theology.  It is natural that he would have a shrine adjacent to that of his brother Bran which archaeology does provide us with under the White Tower at the Tower of London.  Bellona does not make a contribution to British culture at all - most of the Celtic gods were war gods and they had at least three war goddesses of their own so she was hardly needed.

King Arthur's Lost Temples - Exciting new discovery

I have been reading Michael Harrison's book The London that Was Rome (George Allen & Unwin 1971) in which he introduces his 'new archaeology', a form of etymological archaeology by which means he is able to map Roman London through an analysis of surviving place names and their Latin roots.  Setting aside the purely Roman connections, using his method and information supplied his his book, I have been able to confirm my theory set out in my book The Wonderful History of the Sword in the Stone that a British-Celtic temples complex extended along the north bank of the Thames before, during and after the Roman period.  Below is a (very) rough sketch-plan of how this now looks.

 

Better than Jane Austen?

Today is the 200th anniversary of the publication of Jane Austen's 'Pride and Prejudice' probably known to most people through the recent films/TV series and the 'Bridget Jones' version than through people reading it.  I actually like 'Pride and Prejudice'.  The style is impeccable and the comedy first-rate although I am always disappointed in Jane Austen.  Her later books lost their comic touch and are irredeemably dull.  She never developed any intellectual  or stylistic ambition to compensate for the lack of sparkle.  At a time of huge social upheaval her books, as one critic put it, never move outside the park gates.

Those looking for good women novelists in the 19th century though have several to choose from.  I would recommend Maria Edgeworth whose 'Ormond' bravely tackles the tricky problem of Irish politics and is at least as good as anything written by her male contemporaries (it's 'Tom Jones' without the sex), George Eliot whose superb 'Middlemarch' is breath-taking in its ambition and range and Elizabeth Gaskell, best known for Cranford because it's most like Jane Austen in its subject matter but whose several books 'North and South', Mary Barton and the unfirnished (altough only just) 'Wives and Daughters' tackle the issues of social change in the mid-19th century.  The latter was a Minister's wife but she managed to combine decorum with a social conscience which Jane Austen never did, but she did write of herself 'people think I'm a communist but I think I'm just a Christian' which I love.

All of these novelists were in my opinion much better writers than Jane Austen because they combined style with substance,  If you want to kinow what is meant by the phrase 'style without substance' then read Jane Austen by all means.

Who saved Alfred the Great?

Next week on BBC Radio 4 historian Michael Wood is running a series of programmes about Alfred the Great, a subject dear to my heart as I have written a play Isle of Princes about his comeback after he was ousted in the Christmas coup.  This has, alas, so far failed to make it to the stage partly I fear that my theory that Alfred had assistance from his Frankish sister-in-law, Judith, thus denting the idea that he did it all by himself. Judith was the Duchess of Ghent but also technically still Queen of Wessex as she was the only early Anglo-Saxon queen to be crowned and anointed.  Anglo-Saxon queens of the period were generally regarded simply as 'the King's wife' but Judith was especially well-connected, her father being not only the French King but Holy Roman Emperor.

The section of Asser's life of Alfred, our principal source, which would relate to how Judith assisted Alfred has mysteriously been expunged.  It may have been damaged in the Cotton library fire but more likely male historians did not care to acknowledge that the paragon of English Kingship had to be rescued by a woman but if we look at what Alfred did after his restoration we have a couple of important clues as to who helped him get back his throne.

He founded two monasteries, one at Shaftesbury which I believe to be the site of 'Egbert's stone - the traditional siting to the far west makes no strategic sense - where his troops rallied prior to the march north to face Guthrum's army at Bratton Camp, and the other at Athelney, the Isle of Princes, where he found refuge after the coup.  What is interesting about the foundation at Athelney is that it was not for English scholars as you might expect but to provide a refuge for Flemish scholars fleeing Viking raids and seeking safety on this side of the channel, a thank-you to Flanders for the help given to him during his fight back.  The other significant act he performed immediately after his restoration was the betrothal of his new-born daughter to Judith's infant son, cementing the alliance between the two countries.  Alfred is given credit for founding the 'British Navy' but his purpose in doing so was not to defend Wessex but to protect the Scheldt estuary which was being harried by Viking fleets based in East Anglia.  The strong connection between Alfred and his sister-in-law are quite clear but in most histories poor Judith barely gets a mention.  Her erratic love-life (and her independence) was so disapproved of that she was almost completely excised from history.  We don't even know when she died but the 'English-speaking peoples' that Alfred rallied against the Vikings have good reason to be grateful to her. As am I, as she provides me with a great part for a leading actress in what would otherwise be a distinctly male-dominated play.

First music video

Yesterday I published my first music video on Youtube http://youtu.be/75id-GCT0PY title 'Winter Skies by Carol Richards'.  I have posted five other short films under youtube/satampix but this is the first one for which I have used one of my own songs as the soundtrack.  It occurred to me that this is a great way to publish some of my songs. The film is shot on a Blackberry Curve 8250 smartphone and put together with Windows Movie-maker as it is the esssence with these short films that they cost no money.

Looking forward to..the Dark Ages

I am looking forward to a new series on BBC - The Dark Ages: An Age of Light in which art critic Waldemar Januszczak embarks on a trip around the world to discover if the Dark Ages were actually a time of artistic achievement inspired by novel ideas and religion.  This is a subject dear to my heart since it is the background of my biography Columbanus: Poet, Preacher, Statesman, Saint which more or less explores the same subject.  Historically the Dark Ages are dark to us for two reasons.  It is thought of as an illiterate age but it was far from that.  The reason we think so is because they wrote on paper, made from Egyptian papyrus, which does not survive in our damp northern climate.

In the 7th century the supply of papyrus to western Europe dried up due to the Arab incursions and upheavals all over the Middle East and it was at this time that writers, mainly monks, switched to using parchment and vellum. (The aristocracy was only illiterate in the sense that they did not read or write if they could get someone else to do it for them.) The benefit of this for us is that those books have lasted very well indeed.  Our earliest books such as The Lindisfarne Gospels date from the late seventh century.  The downside for historians is that no public records which are the mainstay of historical research survive from the end of the Roman Empire through to the seventh century.  We know they kept written public accounts because the 6th century Frankish king Chilperic threw all his tax records on the fire but much else must have been destroyed.  The later monks occasionally oblige us by copying records out onto parchment and vellum thus ensuring their survival but these are usually just records relating to their own monastery recording for example the monatery's title to its various lands and not general information that would be available from census records and tax accounts.

 

In art too we are deprived of a real view of this period between the end of the empire and the early middle ages proper.  There are no portraits even of the kings and queens of the period, no glimpse of the great and good.  This is not because they were so self-effacing as to not require to have their portraits painted but because paintings were made on wood panels in tempera (water-colour) which does not survive over the centuries.  Our earliest such paintings in Europe date from the 12th century, much later in historical terms. But we know from Egyptian mummies of the late Roman period that portrait painting had reached extremely high levels of skill and realism and there can be no doubt that portraits of the great and good between 400 and 750AD did exist and were probably of very fine quality.  Again our damp climate is to blame.  The Egyptian mummies have survived because they were buried in sand and in very dry conditions. 

 

The Dark Ages was not a period of great technological advancement.  By and large they stuck to the technology that they had achieved in the late Roman period but the level of craftsmanship we know from the artefacts we do have was extraordinarily high.  It was not a primitive age.  Above all it was an age of ideas, the age when most of our own ideas began to flourish.  In religion particularly there was an explosion of radical thinking which spilled over into science and politics.  We may not have much left to go on but what we do have is of vital importance to our understanding of modern history.

 

The Dark Ages: An Age of Light begins on BBC4 at 10:00 p.m on Thursday 29 November.  My book on Columbanus is published by Imprint Academic and is available from bookshops and libraries.

The Nativity - where did the shepherds come from?

Pope Benedict is just about to publish a scholarly book on the various stories relating to the nativity of Jesus examining how they come to be included in the gospels.  Matthew for example only tells us that Jesus was born in Bethlehem and fails to suggest that there was anything miraculous or unusual about his birth. Rather more interestingly the apocryphal gospels suggest that Jesus had a twin brother in which case of course the traditional nativity scene should present two babies in the manger but convention dictates that there is only ever one child in the Madonna's arms. This is because the scene is not meant to be a historical representation of the facts surrounding the birth of Jesus but is an effective bit of allegorical symbolism.  The Holy Family represents the Trinity - God the Father represented by Joseph, God the Holy Ghost or Spirit of Holy Wisdom represented by Mary and God the son represented by the infant Jesus.  It's an easy visual image to enable Christians to grasp the very tricky philosophical principles of Trinitarianism, one that even small children understand.

 

So what about the shepherds and angels?  If Jesus was actually born one of twins in a regular house in Bethlehem where did they come from?

 

The shepherds and angels occur only in the gospel of Luke which is believed to have been written down somewhere between 100AD and 150AD, quite some considerable time after the events the writer was describing. I believe the date is significant.  In 110AD the Emperor Hadrian is recorded as having become confused between the followers of Horus in Alexandria and the Christians in the same city.  Possible the two had combined as it was common practice for the early Christians to work alongside their pagan counterparts and gradually try to achieve a merger. 

 

The introduction of the followers of Horus into the Christian community is significant because at least two features of the story of Horus have found their way into the nativity.  It was Horus who was born in a stable and whose birthday was celebrated on 25th December.  Jesus, it is believed, was actually born around 4BC and on 6th January.  The Celts too seem to have had a corresponding myth regarding the birth of the sun-god Lud.  The Venerable Bede tells us that 25th December was known to the Celts as 'Mother's Night' suggesting a corresponding nativity myth associated with that date.  The mother goddess was Dana or Don, depending on whether you are British or Irish.  However we have no record of any shepherds or angels appearing in either the Egyptian or Celtic versions.

 

So where did Luke come by his beautiful story?  I believe the answer is he pinched it.  Luke's gospel is deliberately fashioned to appeal to a western audience.  You will note that in his account of the sermon of the mount he omits the obviously Jewish features such as the tradition of circumcision which appear in Matthew.  Luke knew that his western readers would not be interested in this and it might put them off accepting the more universal aspects of Jesus's teachings.  Instead he slips in to the narrative key symbols that they would find familiar.  Luke lifted the story, not to put too fine a point on it, from one of the Roman masters of literature, Virgil.

 

Why do I think this?  I have no proof as such but around forty years before the birth of Jesus Virgil wrote a great series of poems called The Eclogues which tell the tale of shepherds in northern Italy and recount the details of their lives living in the fields and on the hillsides.  In Book 4 of the Eclogues Virgil announces the arrival of a 'prince of peace' in terms which have long been thought to foreshadow the coming of Christ.  In fact the passage was so well-known in the Middle Ages Virgil was deemed to be a prophet or a wizard.   

 

Eclogue 4 describes a Golden age 'foretold in prophecy' when the 'first-born' of Justice comes down from heaven and is born in human form beginning an era in which 'hearts of iron cease and hearts of gold inherit the whole earth'.  In this age mankind will be freed from fear and all the stain of past sins will be cleansed.  The child will eventually return to the life of the gods.  The parallels with the Christian story are obvious.  But Virgil adds a bit more to his prophecy that is not contained in Judaic Messianic tradition.  His Prince of Peace will receive as his first birthday presents 'nature's small presents'.  He will be surrounded by the fruits of the natural world, the kind of gifts that in the Christmas tradition are represented by the shepherds.  Virgil seems to echo Isaiah when he writes that 'the ox will have no fear of the lion'.  Small wonder that mediaeval Christians believed he was foretelling the birth of Jesus.

 

At the end of Eclogue 4 Virgil observes that the baby is already overdue and the birth is imminent but then he returns to his original narrative and we hear no more of it.  Of Virgil's original ten Eclogues survive but he framed his poem according to an earlier Greek poem by Theocritus which has eleven books.  I have a theory - and it is only a theory - that Virgil did in fact write eleven books and in his final book - because this is the way the story has been tending - his shepherds visit the new-born prince of peace.  Whether Virgil included angels or whether they were Luke's invention I couldn't say - except to note that the Egyptian Coptic gospels are full of angels - but by slipping Virgil's shepherds into his narrative of the nativity Luke achieved a literary masterstroke suggesting that the much-revered Latin poet had predicted the birth of the Christian Son of God thus giving him a western provenance to match that of earlier Jewish tradition.  In Mediaeval Britain which was heavily economically dependent on the wool-trade shepherds abounded and it is no surprise to find that this is the most popular gospel story in mediaeval literature. Mediaeval Europeans knew Luke and they knew Virgil.  What happened to Virgil's final Eclogue if it existed?  Now there's the mystery.