THE GREAT HOUSE AT ELY.
Islands made by the sea, and yet more islands, inland, by rivers,
lakes, and meres, have in many places ceased to be islands in
everything save only in name.[47] The changes are brought about by time
and the fluctuations of nature, or by the industry and perseverance of
man.
We, the monks of Ely that now live (_Henrico Secundo, regnante_),[48]
have witnessed sundry great changes in the Fen Country, and more
changes be now contemplated; in sort that in some future age, men may
find it hard to conceive, from that which they see in their day, the
manner of country the Fen country[49] was when the Normans first came
among us. Then, I wist, the Isle of Ely was to all intents an inland
island, being surrounded on every side by lakes, meres and broad
rivers, which became still broader in the season of rain, there being
few artificial embankments to confine them, and few or no droves or
cuts to carry off the increase of water towards the Wash and the sea.
The isle had its name from Helig or Elig,[50] a British name for the
Willow, which grew in great abundance in every part of it, and which
formed in many parts low but almost impenetrable forests, with marshes
and quagmires under them, or within them. Within the compass of the
waters, which marked the limits of the country, and isolated it from
the neighbouring countries—which also from south to north, for the
length of well nigh one hundred miles, and from east to west, for the
breath of well nigh forty miles, were a succession of inland islands,
formed like Ely itself—there were numerous meres, marshes, rivers, and
brooks. The whole isle was almost a dead flat, with here and there an
inconsiderable eminence standing up from it. These heights were often
surrounded by water; and when the autumnal or the spring rains swelled
the meres and streams, and covered the flats, they formed so many
detached islets. Though surrounded and isolated, they were never
covered by water; therefore it was upon these heights and knolls that
men in all times had built their towns, and their churches and temples.
Communications were kept up by means of boats, carricks, and skerries,
and of flat-bottomed boats which could float in shallow water; and,
save in the beds of the rivers, and in some of the meres, the waters
were but shallow even in the season of rains. But if it was a miry, it
was not altogether a hungry land. When the waters subsided, the
greenest and richest pasture sprung up in many parts of the plain, and
gave sustenance to innumerable herds. The alluvial soil was almost
everywhere rich and productive; and the patches which had been drained
and secured, rewarded the industry and ingenuity of the inhabitants
with abundant crops. The Roman conquerors, with amazing difficulty, had
driven one of their military roads[51] through the heart of the
country; but this noble causeway was an undeviating straight line,
without any branches or cross roads springing from it; and it was so
flanked in nearly its whole extent by meres, pools, rivers, rivulets,
swamps, and willow forests, that a movement to the one side or the
other was almost impracticable, unless the Romans, or those who
succeeded the conquerors in the use of the causeway, embarked in boats
and travelled like the natives of the country. In all times it had been
a land of refuge against invaders. In the days of Rome the ancient
Britons rallied here, and made a good stand after all the rest of
England had been subdued. Again, when Rome was falling fast to ruin,
and the legions of the empire had left the Britons to take care of
themselves, that people assembled here in great numbers to resist the
fierce Saxon invaders. Again, when the Saxons were assailed by the
Danes and Norwegians, and the whole host of Scandinavian rovers and
pirates, the indwellers of the Isle of Ely, after enjoying a long
exemption from the havoc of war and invasion, defied the bloody Dane,
and maintained a long contest with him; and now, as at earlier periods,
and as at a later date, the isle of Ely became a place of refuge to
many of the people of the upland country, and of other and more open
parts of England, where it had not been found possible to resist the
Danish battle-axes. The traditions of the ancient Britons had passed
away with that unhappy and extinct race; but the whole fenny country
was full of Saxon traditions, and stories of the days of trouble when
war raged over the isle, and the fierce Danes found their way up the
rivers, which opened upon the sea, into the very heart of the country.
The saints and martyrs of the district were chiefly brave Saxons who
had fought the Danes in many battles, and who had fallen at last under
the swords of the unconverted heathen. The miracles that were wrought
in the land of many waters were for the most part wrought at the tombs
of these Saxon warriors. The legends of patriotism were blended with
the legends and rites of religion. Every church had its patriot saint
and martyr; in every religious house the monks related the prowess, and
chanted daily requiems, and said frequent masses to the soul of some
great Saxon warrior who had fallen in battle; or to some fair Saxon
maid or matron, who had preferred torture and death to a union with a
pagan; or to some Saxon queen or princess, who, long before the coming
of the Danes, and at the first preaching of the Gospel among the Saxons
by Saint Augustine and his blessed followers, had renounced a throne
and all the grandeurs and pleasures of the world, and all her riches,
(_relictis fortunis omnibus!_) to devote herself to the service of
heaven, to found a monastery, and to be herself the first lady abbess
of the monastery she founded.
The foremost and most conspicious of all the heights in this fen
country was crowned by the abbey and conventual house of Ely, around
which a large town, entirely governed by the Lord Abbat, (or, in the
Lord Abbat’s name, by the Cellarius of the abbey), had grown. The first
conventual church was founded in the time of the Heptarchy, about the
year of our Lord six hundred and seventy, by Saint Etheldreda, a queen,
wife, virgin, and saint. Etheldreda[52] was wife to King Egfrid,[53]
the greatest of the Saxon kings, and daughter of Anna, king of the East
Angles, whose dominions included the isle of Ely, and extended over the
whole of Suffolk and Norfolk. This the first abbey church was built by
Saint Wilfrid, bishop of York, who, with his sainted companion,
Benedict, bishop of Northumberland, had travelled in far countries to
learn their arts, and had brought from Rome into England painted glass,
and glaziers, and masons, and all manner of artificers. When the Church
was finished, a monastery was built and attached to it by the same
royal devotee. Neither the love of her husband nor any other
consideration could make Etheldreda forego her fixed purpose of
immuring herself in the cloisters. Many of her attached servants of
both sexes, whom she had converted, followed her to Ely, and were
provided with separate and appropriate lodgings. Etheldreda was the
first abbess of Ely; and after many years spent in the exercise of
devotion, in fasting, penitence, and prayer, she died with so strong an
odour of sanctity that it could not be mistaken; and she was canonised
forthwith by the pope at Rome. Some of her servants were beatified:
one, the best and oldest of them all, Ovin,[54] who was said to descend
from the ancient Britons,[55] and who had been minister to her husband
the king, or to herself as queen, was canonised soon after his death.
Huna, her chaplain, after assisting at her interment, retired to a
small island in the Fens near Ely, where he spent the rest of his days
as an anchorite, and died with the reputation of a saint. Many sick
resorted to Huna’s grave and recovered health. Her sister Sexburga was
the second abbess of Ely, and second only to herself in sanctity. She
too was canonised; and so also were her successors the abbesses
Ermenilda and Withburga.[56] The bodies of all the four lay in the
choir of the church. The house had had many good penmen, and yet, it
was said that they had failed to record all the miracles that had been
wrought at these tombs. But the holiness of the place had not always
secured it. In or about the year 870 the unbelieving Danes, by
ascending the Ouse, got unto Ely, slew all the monks and nuns, and
plundered and destroyed the abbey. And after this, Saxon kings, no
better than heathens, annexed all the lands and revenues of the house
to the crown, to spend among courtiers and warriors the substance which
Saint Ermenilda and the other benefactors of the abbey had destined to
the support of peace-preaching monks, and to the sustenance of the
poor. And thus fared it with the abbey of Ely, until the reign of the
great and bountiful King Edgar, who in course of his reign founded or
restored no fewer than fifty monasteries. In the year 970 this
ever-to-be-revered king (_Rex Venerandus_) granted the whole of the
island of Ely, with all its appurtenances, privileges, and immunities,
to Ethelwald, bishop of Winchester, who rebuilt the church and the
monastery, and provided them well with monks of the Benedictine order.
The charter of Edgar, as was recorded by that king’s scribe in the
preamble to it, was granted “not privately and in a corner, but in the
most public manner, and under the canopy of heaven.” The charter was
confirmed by other kings, and subsequently by the pope. The great and
converted Danish King Canute, who loved to glide along the waters of
the river and listen to the monks of Ely singing in their choir, and
who ofttimes visited the Lord Abbat, and feasted with him at the
seasons of the great festivals of the church, confirmed the charter;
and the cartularies of the house contained likewise the confirmation of
King Edward the Confessor, now a saint and king in heaven, (_in cœlo
sanctus et rex_.)
Theoretical and fabulous are the tales of those who say that the Saxons
had no majestic architecture; that their churches and abbeys and
monasteries were built almost entirely of wood, without arches or
columns, without aisles or cloisters; and that there was no grandeur or
beauty in the edifices of England until after the Norman conquest. The
abbey built at Ely in the tenth century by the Saxon bishop Ethelwald
was a stately stone edifice, vast in its dimensions, and richly
ornamented in its details. Round-headed arches rested upon rows of
massive columns; the roof of the church and the roof of the great hall
of the abbey were arched and towering; and, high above all, a tower and
steeple shot into the air, to serve as a landmark throughout the flat
fenny country, and a guide to such as might lose themselves among the
meres and the labyrinths of the willow forests. If the monks of Ely
were lords of all the country and of all the people dwelling in it,
those people and all honest wayfarers ever found the hospitable gates
of the abbey open to receive them; and all comers were feasted,
according to their several degrees, by the Lord Abbat, the prior, the
cellarer, the hospitaller, the pietancer, or some other officer of the
house. Twenty knights, with their twenty squires to carry arms and
shield, (_arma ac scuta_), did service to the Lord Abbat as his
military retainers; and in his great stables room was left for many
more horses. The house had had many noble, hospitable, Saxon-hearted
heads, but never one more munificent and magnificent than the Abbat
Thurstan.[57] He had been appointed to the dignity in the peaceful days
of Edward the Confessor; but King Harold, on ascending the throne, had
shown him many favours, and had given him the means of being still more
generous. This last of our Saxon kings had begun his reign with great
popularity, being accessible, affable, and courteous to all men, and
displaying a great regard for piety and justice. In the Confessor’s
time, under the title of earl, he had ruled as a sovereign[58] in
Norfolk and Suffolk and part of Cambridge, and he was a native of East
Anglia. He had been open-handed and open-hearted. From all these
reasons the people of this part of England were singularly devoted to
his cause, and so thoroughly devoted to his person that they would not
for a very long time believe that he had perished in the battle of
Hastings; their hope and belief being that he had only been wounded,
and would soon re-appear among them to lead them against the Norman.
When Duke William had been crowned in Westminster Abbey, and when his
constantly reinforced and increasing armies had spread over the
country, many of the great Saxon heads of religious houses, even like
the Abbat of Crowland, had sent in their submission, and had obtained
the king’s peace, in the vain hope that thus they would be allowed to
retain their places and dignities, and preserve their brethren from
persecution, and the foundations over which they presided from the
hands of foreign spoilers and intruders. Not so Thurstan, my Lord Abbat
of Ely. He would not forget the many obligations he owed, and the
friendship and fealty he had sworn to the generous, lion-hearted
Harold; and while the lands of other prelates and abbats lay open
everywhere to the fierce Norman cavalry, and their hinds and serfs,
their armed retainers and tenants, and all the people dwelling near
them, were without heart or hope, and impressed with the belief that
the Normans were invincible, Thurstan, from the window of the hall, or
from the top of the abbey tower, looked across a wide expanse of
country which nature had made defensible; and he knew that he was
backed by a stout-hearted and devoted people, who would choke up the
rivers with the dead bodies of the Normans, and with their own corpses,
ere they would allow the invaders to reach the abbey of Ely and the
shrine of Saint Etheldreda. Hence Thurstan had been emboldened to give
shelter to such English lords, and such persecuted Saxons of whatsoever
degree, as fled from the oppression of the conquerors to the isle of
Ely. Thanes dispossessed of their lands, bishops deprived of their
mitres, abbots driven from their monasteries to make room for
foreigners, all flocked hither; and whether they brought much money or
rich jewels with them, or whether they brought nothing at all, they all
met with a hospitable reception: so large and English was the heart of
Abbat Thurstan. When it was seen that William was breaking all the old
and free Saxon institutions, and the mild and equitable laws of Edward
the Confessor, which he had most solemnly sworn to preserve and
maintain; that the promptest submission to the conqueror ensured no
lasting safety to life or property; and that the Normans, one and all,
laity and clergy, knights and bishops, were proclaiming that all men of
Saxon blood ought to be disseised of their property, and ought to be
reduced to servitude and bondage, and were acting as if this system
could soon be established, more and more fugitives came flying into the
fen country. The town of Ely was roomy, but it was crowded; vast were
the monastery, and hospitium, and dependencies, but they were crowded
also: and far and near, on the dry hillocks, and in the green plains
fenced from the waters, were seen huts and rude tents, and the blue
smoke of many fires rising above the grey willows and alders.
It were long to tell how many chiefs and nobles of fame, and how many
churchmen of the highest dignity, assembled at dinner-time, and at
supper-time, in my Lord Abbat’s great hall, where each had his seat
according to his rank, and where the arms of every great chief were
hung behind him on the wall, and where the banner of every chief and
noble floated over his head, pendant from the groined roof. All the
bravest and most faithful of the Saxon warriors who had survived the
carnage of Hastings, and of the many battles which had been fought
since that of Hastings, were here; and in the bodies of these men,
scarred with the wounds inflicted by the Norman lances, flowed the most
ancient and noble blood of England. They had been thanes and earls, and
owners of vast estates, but now they nearly all depended for their
bread on the Lord Abbat of Ely. Stigand,[59] the dispossessed Saxon
Primate of all England, was here; Egelwin, the dispossessed Saxon
Bishop of Durham, was here; Alexander, Bishop of Lincoln, was here; and
on one side of Alexander sat the good Bishop of Lindisfarn, while on
the other side of him the pious Bishop of Winchester ate the bread of
dependence and sorrow. Among the chiefs of great religious houses were
Eghelnoth the Abbat of Glastonbury, and Frithric the most steadfast and
most Saxon-hearted of all Lord Abbats. A very hard man, an unlettered,
newly-emancipated serf, from one of the hungriest parts of Normandie or
Maine, had taken possession of the great house at Glastonbury,[60] and
had caused the bodies of his predecessors, the abbats of English race,
to be disinterred; and, gathering their bones together, he had cast
them in one heap without the gates, as if, instead of being the bones
of holy and beatified monks, they had been the bones of sheep, or oxen,
or of some unclean animals. Frithric of Saint Albans, who had been
spiritual and temporal lord of one of the fairest parts of England, of
nearly all the woodland and meadow-land and corn-fields that lay
between Saint Albans and Barnet on the one side, and between Luton and
Saint Albans on the other side—Frithric, who had maintained one score
and ten loaf-eaters or serving men in his glorious abbey, had wandered
alone and unattended through the wilds and the fens, begging his way
and concealing himself from Norman pursuit in the huts of the poorest
men; and he had brought nothing with him to Ely save two holy books
which had comforted him on his long wayfaring, and which he carried
under his arm. Every great house was wanted by the conquerors for their
unecclesiastical kindred; but Saint Albans was one of the greatest of
them all, and Frithric had done that which the Normans and their duke
would never forgive. When, months after that great assize of God’s
judgment in battle, the battle of Hastings, (and after that the
traitorous Saxon Witan, assembled in London, had sent a submissive
deputation to William the Bastard at Berkhamstead to swear allegiance
to him, and to put hostages into his hand,) the Normans were slaying
the people, and plundering and burning the towns and villages, upon
drawing nigh unto Saint Albans, they found their passage stopped by a
multitude of great trees[61] which had been felled and laid across the
road, and behind which—if there had not been traitors in London and
false Saxons everywhere—there would have been posted expert archers,
and valorous knights and hardy yeomen, and nathless every monk, novice,
lay-brother, and hind of the abbey, in such sort that the invaders and
their war-horses would never have gotten over those barricades of
forest trees, nor have ever ascended the hill where the great saint and
martyr Albanus[62] suffered his martyrdom in the days of the Dioclesian
persecution, and where Offa the true Saxon king of Mercia erected the
first church and the first great monastery for one hundred monks, that
they might keep alive the memory of the just, and pray over his tomb
seven times a-day. Wrathful was Duke William; for, albeit none stood
behind those ramparts of timber to smite him and his host, he could not
win forward, nor enter the town, nor approach the abbey, until his
men-at-arms and the followers of his camp should with long toil clear
the road, and remove one after the other those stout barriers of forest
trees. Red was he in the face as a burning coal when he summoned to his
presence Frithric the Lord Abbat, and demanded whose work it was, and
why these oaken barriers were raised in the jurisdiction of the
monastery. Abbat Frithric, whose heart was stouter than his own oaks,
looked, as became the free descendant of Saxon thanes and Danish
princes, right into the eyes of the conqueror, and said unto him in a
loud voice, “I have done the duty appertaining to my birth and calling;
and if others of my rank and profession had performed the like, as they
well could and ought, it had not been in thy power to penetrate into
the land thus far!” We have said his voice was loud when he spoke to
the conqueror: it was so loud that the hills re-echoed it, and that men
heard it that were hid in the woods to watch what the Normans would do,
and avoid their fury; and when the echoes of that true Saxon voice died
away, the thick growing oaks seemed to speak, for there came voices
from the woods on either side the road, shouting, “Hail! all hail! Lord
Frithric, our true Lord Abbat! If every Saxon lord had been true as he,
Harold would now be king!”
Quoth Duke William, in an angered voice, “Is the spirituality of
England of such power? If I may live and enjoy that which I have
gotten, I will make their power less; and especially I mind to begin
with thee, proud Abbat of Saint Albans!”
And how behaved Abbat Frithric when his domains were seized, and
ill-shaven foreign monks thrust into his house, and savage foreign
soldiers?—when, after that the conqueror had sworn upon all the relics
of the church of Saint Albans, and by the Holy Gospels, to respect the
abbey and all churches, and to preserve inviolate the good and ancient
laws which had been established by the pious kings of England, and more
especially by King Edward the Confessor, he allowed his Normans to kill
the Saxon people without bot or compensation, plundered every church in
the land, oppressed and despoiled all the abbeys, ploughed with
ploughshares of red hot iron over the faces of all Saxons, and yet
demanded from Frithric and his compeers a new oath of allegiance, and
fuller securities for his obedience—what then did the Lord Abbat of
Saint Albans? He assembled all his monks and novices in the hall of the
chapter, and taking a tender farewell of them, he said, “My brothers,
my children, the time is come when, according to Scripture, I must flee
from city to city before the face of our persecutors—_Fugiendum est a
facie persequentium a civitate in civitatem_.” And rather than be
forsworn, or desert the good cause, or witness without the power of
remedying them the sufferings and humiliations and forcible expulsions
of his monks, he went forth and became a wanderer as aforesaid, until
he crossed the land of willows and many waters, and came unto Ely, a
lone man, with nought but his missal and his breviary under his arm.
Now the Abbat Frithric was old when these years of trouble began; and
constant grief and toil, and the discomforts of his long journey on
foot from the dry sunny hill of Saint Albans to the fens and morasses
of Ely, had given many a rude shake to the hour-glass of his life.
Since his arrival at Ely he had wasted away daily: every time that he
appeared in the hall or refectory he seemed more and more haggard and
worn: most men saw that he was dying, but none saw it so clearly as
himself. When the young and hopeful would say to him, “Lord Frithric,
these evil days will pass away, the Saxons will get their own again,
and thou wilt get back as a true Saxon to thine own abbey,” he would
reply, “Young men, England will be England again, but not in my day; my
next move is to the grave: Saint Albans is a heavenly place, but it is
still upon earth, and, save the one hope that my country may revive,
and that the laws and manners and the tongue of the Saxons may not
utterly perish, my hopes are all in heaven!”
Some of the best and wisest of those who had sought for refuge in the
isle of Ely, feared that when this bright guiding light should be put
out, and other old patriots, like the Abbat Frithric, should take their
departure, the spirit which animated this Saxon league would depart
also, or gradually cool and decline.