The St. Thomas Way and the Medieval March of Wales: Exploring Place, Heritage, Pilgrimage 9781641892469, 9781641892476

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THE ST. THOMAS WAY AND THE MEDIEVAL MARCH OF WALES

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Places and Spaces, Medieval to Modern Places and Spaces, Medieval to Modern is an exciting series that brings together new research and innovative approaches to explore the material and imagined landscapes, environments, and locales through which people engaged with each other and their surroundings in the Middle Ages. In the context of the ongoing “spatial turn” in the arts and humanities globally, the series seeks to shape the field of medieval studies through connecting both academic and practitioner research across disciplines including history, geography, literature, architecture, archaeology, heritage science, and tourism studies, as well as those working in heritage conservation, management, interpretation, and marketing of medieval spaces and places today.

Editorial Board

Catherine A. M. Clarke, Institute of Historical Research, University of London Keith Lilley, Queen’s University Belfast Tadhg O’Keeffe, University College Dublin Sabrina Corbellini, University of Groningen Leonie Hicks, Canterbury Christ Church University Jeremy Ashbee, English Heritage

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THE ST. THOMAS WAY AND THE MEDIEVAL MARCH OF WALES EXPLORING PLACE, HERITAGE, PILGRIMAGE Edited by CATHERINE A. M. CLARKE

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. © 2020, Arc Humanities Press, Leeds

The authors assert their moral right to be identified as the authors of this work.

Permission to use brief excerpts from this work in scholarly and educational works is hereby granted provided that the source is acknowledged. Any use of material in this work that is an exception or limitation covered by Article 5 of the European Union’s Copyright Directive (2001/29/EC) or would be determined to be “fair use” under Section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Act September 2010 Page 2 or that satisfies the conditions specified in Section 108 of the U.S. Copyright Act (17 USC §108, as revised by P.L. 94—​553) does not require the Publisher’s permission.

ISBN (print): 9781641892469 eISBN (PDF): 9781641892476 www.arc-humanities.org

Printed and bound in the UK (by Lightning Source), USA (by Bookmasters), and elsewhere using print-on-demand technology.

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CONTENTS

List of Illustrations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii

Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix

Contributor Biographies. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xi

Introduction: Remaking Medieval Pilgrimage—The St. Thomas Way CATHERINE A. M. CLARKE. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

SECTION ONE: CONTEXTS AND CRITICAL EXPLORATIONS

Chapter 1. Changing Roles of Pilgrimage: Retreating, Remembering, Re-​enacting JONATHAN M. WOODING. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25 Chapter 2. In the Footsteps of the Past: Medieval Miracle Stories and the St. Thomas Way IAN L. BASS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37

Chapter 3. Place, Time, and the St. Thomas Way: An Experiment in Five Itineraries CATHERINE A. M. CLARKE. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57 Chapter 4. Archives as Commemoration / Pilgrimage as Interpretation: Hereford Cathedral, the St. Thomas Way, and Cantilupe 2020 BETHANY HAMBLEN. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83

Chapter 5. Heritage Soundscapes: Contexts and Ethics of Curatorial Expression MARIANA LOPEZ. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103

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SECTION TWO: OTHER PERSPECTIVES

Chapter 6. Reflection on the St. Thomas Way CHRISTOPHER PULLIN. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123 Chapter 7. String Theory for Beginners: The Art of Pilgrimage MICHELLE RUMNEY. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125 Chapter 8. Between the Sea and the Hills: On Walking the St. Thomas Way ANNE LOUISE AVERY. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133 Index. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149

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ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure 1. Figure 2.

St. Thomas Way route map, illustrated by Tom Woolley. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 Example St. Thomas Way website page (Newport): screenshot. . . . . . . . . 17

Figure 3a. The north porch of Hereford Cathedral, facing southeast. The two-​storied outer portion of the porch was added by Bishop Charles Booth around 1518, and is commonly known as the Booth Porch. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84 Figure 3b. Figure of a pilgrim, carved into the arch of the inner section of the north porch, ca. late thirteenth century. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84 Figure 4a. Cinquefoil arches framing knightly weepers on the top section of Thomas Cantilupe’s tomb/​shrine base. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90 Figure 4b. Cinquefoil arch of the door in the late thirteenth-​century inner north porch of Hereford Cathedral. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90 Figure 5a. Shrine of St. Thomas de Cantilupe in the north transept of Hereford Cathedral. The base of the tomb/​shrine was constructed in 1287. The canopy dates from the shrine’s restoration in 2008. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94 Figure 5b. One of two commemorative interpretative hangings designed as part of the 2008 shrine restoration. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94 Figure 6a. Candle lit by Archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Runcie, October 2, 1982 as part of the 1982 celebrations of St. Thomas Cantilupe. A sticker on the candle depicts Cantilupe in red and his dates, 1218–​1282 (HCA 2006/​69). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96 Figure 6b. Impression of Cantilupe’s episcopal seal, 1275–​1282 (HCA 6460/​5). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96 Figure 6c. Icon designed by Peter Murphy on west end of 2008 canopy over Cantilupe’s shrine base. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96 Figure 6d. Modern pilgrim badge designed by Sandy Elliott, 2018. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96

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Figure 6e. Trefoil arches on the top section of Cantilupe’s tomb/​shrine base in the north transept of Hereford Cathedral. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97 Figure 6f. Pilgrims from the Ludlow Palmers Guild received the new Cantilupe badge and a pilgrim prayer card when they visited Hereford Cathedral in 2018. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97 Figure 7.

Fourteenth-​century stained-​glass window in the parish church of St. Mary, Credenhill, depicting St.Thomas Becket on the left and St. Thomas Cantilupe on the right. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98

Figure 8.  “The Map of Mundi,” part of the St. Thomas Way exhibition, installed in Hereford Cathedral. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 126

Figure 9.  The practice of “Measuring to the Saint” (v2.0) with participants in the Creative Medieval Mapping workshop on the launch day of the St. Thomas Way at Hereford Cathedral. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 128 Figure 10. “The Map of Mundi” in place at Hereford Cathedral. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 130 Figure 11. Detail showing the eight-​hundred-​year ​old wall of the north pier which supports the tower of the Cathedral. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 132

Figure 12. Walking the St. Thomas Way near Llanthony Priory, August 2018. . . . . . 140

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PREFACE

This book takes

the St. Thomas Way—​a new heritage route from Swansea to Hereford launched in 2018 and inspired by a real medieval pilgrimage—​and explores multiple dimensions of the project and its contexts through a collection of critical essays, as well as creative and reflective pieces. In the spirit of this series, “Places and Spaces:  Medieval to Modern,” the book aims to find diverse audiences, both within a range of academic specialisms and beyond, including those working in heritage and tourism, as well as individuals with a personal interest in the themes and places explored here. So: what is this book about, and who is it for? This book is for readers interested in medieval cults of the saints and pilgrimage traditions, especially those of St. Thomas of Hereford (also known as St. Thomas Cantilupe), as well as medieval history more broadly, including the politics and culture of the medieval March of Wales (the historical border region between England and Wales). This book is also for those interested in continuing traditions of pilgrimage and in pilgrimage practices today: both academics and professionals working in areas such as faith tourism, and also individuals with their own personal interest—​whether grounded in a religious faith or not—​in pilgrimage. More widely, this book’s exploration of the St. Thomas Way as a visitor experience has something to offer for readers interested in heritage, heritage tourism, and tourism as a route to regional development, from heritage practitioners and professionals to those working in local government or in community projects. This is also a book about approaches to translating academic research into real-​ world activities and outcomes. It presents the St. Thomas Way project as a case study in transposing scholarly research into public “impacts” or benefits, with a discussion of the objectives, funding mechanisms, and project management involved (especially in the Introduction). It is for anyone interested in the process of developing research into public-​facing projects—​including those working on public history, but also in other humanities contexts and beyond—​and for anyone looking for transferable methodologies and insights, or simply the opportunity to think critically about the role of “impact” in scholarship today. The book will be attractive to readers interested in the digital humanities—​that is, in using digital methods, new technologies, and new media to solve critical and conceptual challenges in the humanities, and to present and think about topics in new ways. Through the case study of the St. Thomas Way, some contributions to this volume explore the challenges and critical processes involved in developing a “digital” or even “virtual” pilgrimage experience, and the relationships between this and its medieval antecedents. The Introduction to the volume includes an overview of some of the digital tools used in

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creating the Way, discussing and reflecting upon its technical features to share them with other scholars and practitioners in the digital humanities and digital medieval studies. Finally:  a word on how this book is structured. The first section, “Contexts and Critical Explorations,” is a collection of fairly conventional academic essays exploring the St. Thomas Way and its contexts—​although, in several cases, incorporating creative, experimental, or personal elements. This is followed by a second section, “Other Perspectives,” bringing together three shorter reflective pieces, which move further away from the focus and form of a typical scholarly essay. These include reflections from Canon Christopher Pullin, Chancellor of Hereford Cathedral, on how the St. Thomas Way has contributed to the development of pilgrimage as a spiritual endeavour at Hereford Cathedral, Michelle Rumney on her work as Artist in Residence on the St. Thomas Way, and Anne Louise Avery on her experience of walking the Way in summer 2018. Different readers will find their own pathways through this book, and will value varying elements—​there is no single “right” way to read it. Please navigate your own way through the book, pause to notice and make use of what interests you, and pass by what is less relevant to your own focus. Good journeying!

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CONTRIBUTOR BIOGRAPHIES

Anne Louise Avery is a writer and art historian. She has studied history of art and Japanese language at SOAS in London, ICU University in Tokyo, and Brown University, and was the recipient of a Daiwa Foundation Scholarship. She is the cartography editor for Panorama: The Journal of Intelligent Travel and director of Flash of Splendour, which works to empower disadvantaged young people through innovative academic and museum outreach. Her publications include Albion’s Glorious Ile (Unicorn Press, June 2016), a book of fantastical seventeenth-​century maps, described by Simon Schama as “wonderful.” Currently, she is working on a collaborative project with the Bodleian Libraries, University of Bristol and Aardman Animation, focusing on Anglo-​Dutch history and the figure of Reynard the Fox, which will lead to the publication of her new children’s book, a major exhibition, and a series of animated films.

Ian L.  Bass is a PhD candidate and Associate Lecturer in History at the Manchester Metropolitan University. He has published on the life and career of Thomas Cantilupe, and worked for several years at Hereford Cathedral. Like Jonathan Wooding, he serves on the Advisory Board for the St. Thomas Way Project. Catherine Clarke is Professor and Director of the Centre for the History of People, Place, and Community at the Institute of Historical Research, School of Advanced Study, University of London. She was Director of the St. Thomas Way project (and its antecedent, the research project “City Witness: Place and Perspective in Medieval Swansea”) in her previous role as Professor of English at the University of Southampton, where she remains a Visiting Professor in the English Department. She has published widely on histories of place, heritage, and uses of the medieval past today. Her most recent book is Medieval Cityscapes Today (Arc Humanities Press ‘Past Imperfect’ series, 2019). Bethany Hamblen is the Archivist and Records Manager at Balliol College, University of Oxford, but wrote her contribution to this volume in her previous role as Cathedral Archivist at Hereford. Originally from Connecticut in the United States, she completed a BA in Medieval Studies at Smith College before moving to an MA in Medieval Studies and a PhD in History, both at the University of York. She has an MSc Econ. in Archive Administration from Aberystwyth University, and worked at Worcestershire Archive and Archaeology Service before her time at Hereford. Her particular interests are social history through the lens of late medieval administrative and legal records, and use and reuse of archives. Mariana Lopez is Senior Lecturer in Sound Production and Post Production in the Department of Theatre, Film, Television and Interactive Media at the University of York.

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Mariana has a background in music and sound design, having been awarded the BA degree in Arts with specialization in Music and the MA degree in Post Production with Sound Design. In 2013 she completed her PhD at the University of York on the importance of virtual acoustics to further our understanding of the York Mystery Plays. Before joining the University of York as a lecturer Mariana worked at Anglia Ruskin University as a Senior Research Fellow, where she developed research projects in the fields of sound and acoustics. Christopher Pullin has been Canon Chancellor of Hereford Cathedral since 2008, closely involved with the Cathedral’s educational work in its many aspects, and with Chapter responsibility for the Library and Archives and the Mappa Mundi. With degrees in theology and philosophy, he is a Benedictine Oblate and numbers Dante and painting in oils among his enthusiasms.

Michelle Rumney uses a wide range of materials in her artwork including paper, thread, paint, pigments, string, gold leaf, maps, and books. Central to her practice is the idea of repetition leading to transformation—​a form of ritual journey of making—​and pilgrimages of sorts. The resulting artworks are tactile and often appear fragile and delicate, but are underpinned with grids, stronger than they look. Her art touches on religion, psychology, history, geography, and our attempts to make sense of the world around us. With a keen sense of curiosity and adventure, she is constantly attempting this herself, having lived and worked in London, Auckland, Madrid, New Mexico, Mexico City, Dartmoor, Bristol, Barcelona, Andalusia, and Dorset, plus artist residencies in Somerset and, on this project, in Wales and Hereford. This constant cultural journeying and displacement continues to inform her work. Jonathan Wooding is the Sir Warwick Fairfax Professor of Celtic Studies at the University of Sydney. His research interests lie primarily in the area of religious history, with a particular focus on literary as well as historical narratives of pilgrimage—​including a range of studies of the stories of St. Brendan. In 2011 he was made a patron of Churches Tourism Network Wales for his contribution to local church tourism and pilgrimage developments in Wales. Amongst other works, he is the author (with Anthony Grimley) of Living the Hours: Monastic Spirituality in Everyday Life (Canterbury, 2010) and (with Nigel Yates and others) of A Guide to the Churches and Chapels of Wales (University of Wales Press, 2011).

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INTRODUCTION: REMAKING MEDIEVAL PILGRIMAGE—THE ST. THOMAS WAY CATHERINE A. M. CLARKE

The St. Thomas Way is a new heritage route from Swansea to Hereford, inspired by a real medieval pilgrimage. Launched in 2018, the route is built around thirteen core locations, and interactive, multimedia online resources at www.thomasway.ac.uk. In 1290, a Welsh outlaw, William Cragh, was hanged in Swansea by the Anglo-​Norman Marcher Lord of Gower, William de Briouze. But after his execution, Cragh came back to life, in what was understood as a miracle of Thomas de Cantilupe, the former Bishop of Hereford (died 1282). The St. Thomas Way project had a variety of aims across two broad areas: to share new research on the case of William Cragh, Thomas de Cantilupe, and the geographical and cultural landscapes of the medieval March of Wales with wide public audiences; and to contribute to cultural and economic development in the England–​Wales border region today, through tourism capacity-​building, placemaking, and partnerships with local communities, institutions, and businesses. Funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), under their “Follow-​on Funding for Impact and Engagement” scheme, the St. Thomas Way project was initially conceived and designed in terms of research dissemination, and the achievement of positive cultural and economic “impacts” or benefits, beyond academia. But the development of the Way has also opened up new research questions and directions for scholarly exploration, which extend beyond this project into broader areas of enquiry across medieval studies, heritage studies, digital humanities, and critical theory. Through practice-​led and applied research—​as well as critical analysis and interrogation of the methodologies, implications, and ethics of the Way’s content and representational modes—​the project has animated new approaches to a range of important, often urgent, questions across a variety of fields. The St. Thomas Way project has brought new perspectives to current scholarly conversations around spatial imaginaries medieval and modern, and ideas of place and journeying in the Middle Ages and today. It has shed new light on the parallels and differences between medieval pilgrimage and modern tourism practices, as well as processes of remembering, commemoration, and heritage management. The project has enlarged and nuanced debates about relationships between place and time, and the varied ways of approaching temporality or multiple temporalities. The applied research challenges of the Way’s digital methodologies and idioms have raised questions about how a modern heritage route might respond to and enter into conversation with the aesthetic, conceptual, and representational conventions of medieval pilgrimage. In what ways can medieval productions and practices—​such as pilgrim itinerary maps, or tools for affective or “virtual” pilgrimage—​be transposed into new (digital) technologies, and with what effects or implications? With its many partners and collaborators, including academics,

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creative practitioners, clergy, and museum or heritage sector professionals, the critical questions driven by the St. Thomas Way project span medieval cultural history and modern reception of the Middle Ages, as well as diverse areas of academic practice and public engagement, illuminating current debates about research methods and modes, and the potential idioms or registers of scholarship. This volume uses the St. Thomas Way as a case study to intervene in such conversations across a wide variety of fields and current critical and practice-​led research challenges. It brings together diverse perspectives, including accounts of methodology and practice, critical analysis of historical and cultural contexts, and reflections on the St. Thomas Way in the light of broader theoretical concerns. After this Introduction, six scholarly essays explore various aspects of the Way and its contexts, followed by a collection of shorter pieces which present alternative voices and perspectives: the views of the Artist in Residence who collaborated on the project, the Chancellor of Hereford Cathedral, and the first person (external to the project team) to complete the entire St. Thomas Way route, sharing her first-​hand experiences. This book is intended for a wide and diverse audience: from academics working in related fields and on related critical themes, to practitioners in the heritage and creative sectors, local government and tourism professionals with responsibilities for placemaking and regional development, and general readers with interests in the broad themes of place, pilgrimage, and the past explored here. The aim of this introduction is to locate the St. Thomas Way project within some key contexts: both the cultural, economic, and policy contexts that drove the design of the Way and its immediate “impact” objectives, and also the scholarly and theoretical contexts that shaped the content and development of the Way and formed the starting point for the new critical thinking it prompted. This Introduction will also touch on some of the design and functionality features of the St. Thomas Way website, exploring the methodologies and critical processes involved in their development, and ways in which this experimental “digital pilgrimage” has opened up new spaces for critical dialogue with medieval practices and traditions. In Swansea, in 1290, the Welshman William Cragh (otherwise known by the patronymic William ap Rhys) was sentenced to death by William de Briouze, the Anglo-​ Norman Lord of Gower, for his part in the burning of Oystermouth Castle (in modern Mumbles, just to the west along Swansea Bay), and the killing of thirteen men. This attack was probably part of the rebellion led by Rhys ap Maredudd, a descendant of the royal line of the Welsh kingdom of Deheubarth, in 1287.1 But the hanging of Cragh did not go according to plan. First, the crossbeam of the gallows broke, and Cragh and the other condemned man, Trahaearn ap Hywel, were hanged a second time. Then, after the hanging was completed and Cragh appeared dead, something completely unexpected happened: Cragh came back to life. This astonishing recovery was understood by local people as a miracle of Thomas de Cantilupe: a putative new saint and former Bishop of Hereford, who had died a few years previously. We know the events of Cragh’s hanging in so much detail because they survive in a document associated 1  See Ralph A. Griffiths, “The Revolt of Rhys ap Maredudd, 1287–​8,” in Conquerors and Conquered in Medieval Wales (Stroud: Sutton, 1994), 67–​83.

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with the canonization process for Thomas of Hereford: Vatican Library MS Lat. 4015. This manuscript was produced in 1307, by a team of papal inquisitors investigating potential miracles associated with Thomas of Hereford—​including the strange case of William Cragh, seventeen years earlier. It contains nine medieval eyewitness testimonies (gathered in London and Hereford), giving accounts of Cragh’s hanging and revival, and the details which indicated, in the witnesses’ view, the likely involvement of St. Thomas. For example, William Cragh claims in his own deposition that, while in the dungeon of Swansea Castle, he “bent a silver penny from [his] belt to honour the said St. Thomas (following the English custom) in order that he might free him, and he hid the said penny thus folded in his trousers” (“plicauit, secundum morem anglie, unum denarium sterlingum ad honorem dicti Sancti Thome ut liberaret eum et dictum denarium sic plicatum recondidit in bracali suo”).2 William de Briouze junior, son of the Lord William who ordered Cragh’s execution, recalls his stepmother Lady Mary (wife of Lord William senior) praying for Thomas’s intervention. The manuscript, otherwise written in Latin, records the exact words of Mary’s prayer in their original Anglo-​Norman French, honouring their perceived potency and significance: “I pray to God and St. Thomas of Cantilupe to give him life, and if they give him life we will bring him to praise the said St. Thomas” (“Prium deu, et seint Thomas de Cantelup qe luy donne vie, et si il luy donne vie, nous le amenerouns a lauant dit seint Thomas”).3 Further, while Cragh’s apparently lifeless body lay in the house of a local burgess, Thomas Mathews, Lady Mary had him “measured to Saint Thomas,” another practice noted as “following the English custom” (“secundum morem Anglicanam”).4 This involved cutting a piece of string to the length of Cragh’s body, later to be used to make a votive candle for the tomb of the saint. While the revival of William Cragh was incorporated into the manuscript now known as Vat. Lat. 4015, it did not make the final extant compilation of his miracles, produced in 1319 (Bibliothèque Nationale de France MS Lat. 5373), which appears to include only the most certain and incontrovertible miracles used to make the case for Thomas’s canonization.5 So, perhaps some doubt lingered about this strange and audacious miracle story. John of Baggeham, the steward of William de Briouze senior, claimed, after all, that Lady Mary’s “rejoicing was bad, because it was bad that a bad man was thus resuscitated” (“gaudebat de malo quia malum erat quod ita malus homo resuscitaretur”).6 Still, after Cragh’s recovery, he went on pilgrimage—​together with Lord and Lady de Briouze—​ to the shrine of Thomas at Hereford Cathedral, just as Lady Mary had promised in her prayer of supplication. In his testimony, Cragh claims that he had already travelled to Hereford before, as a previous act of devotion to Thomas (fol. 221r), but recalls in more detail the special pilgrimage following his miraculous resurrection: 2  Vatican Library MS Lat. 4015, fol. 221r. 3  MS Vat. Lat. 4015, fol. 11r. 4  MS Vat. Lat. 4015, fol. 9r.

5  See Harriett Webster’s discussion of the textual history surrounding the manuscripts associated with the canonization process for Thomas of Hereford, in “Mediating Memory: Recalling and Recording the Miracles of St. Thomas Cantilupe,” Journal of Medieval History 41 (2015): 292–​308. 6  MS Vat. Lat. 4015, fols. 224v–​225r.

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Introduction the lord and lady of the said castle went with him on a pilgrimage, on account of the said miracle, to the tomb of the aforesaid St. Thomas, and offered there a certain gallows of wax and the rope with which he was hanged which he carried, bound around his neck. dominus et domina dicti castri cum eo uenerunt peregrini ratione dicti miraculi ad tumulum predicti Sancti Thome, et optulerunt ibi quasdam furcas de cera et funem cum qua fuit suspensus quam oportauit ligatam ad collum suum.7

Cragh also claims that his story was instrumental in increasing devotion to St. Thomas, “because more frequent pilgrimages [were made] to the said tomb than were made previously” (“peregrinantur frequentius ad dictum tumulum quam facerent prius”).8 Indeed, the canons of Hereford made their own record of Cragh’s visit to the shrine and his miraculous story, as part of their campaign, under Thomas de Cantilupe’s successor, Bishop Richard Swinfield, of promoting their potential new saint (and the attendant benefits this could bring to the Cathedral).9 The story of William Cragh has received attention from a number of scholars, most notably Robert Bartlett in his excellent micro-​history The Hanged Man: A Study of Miracle, Memory, and Colonialism in the Middle Ages.10 However, Bartlett’s book includes no maps, and only one photograph—​a picture of Oystermouth Castle today. The unique potential of the nine medieval eyewitness statements—​with their detailed accounts of itineraries and experiences within the medieval town of Swansea—​to extend our understanding of medieval urban environments and spatial practices remained unexplored. In 2013–​14, the AHRC funded the research project “City Witness: Place and Perspective in Medieval Swansea,” which sought to investigate what these medieval witness statements could tell us about spatial practices and identities in medieval Swansea, using textual analysis, digital mapping, and 3D visualizations. This rare opportunity to investigate the routes and itineraries of figures from diverse ethnic and social backgrounds, moving within the same geographical space, revealed ways in which the urban environment was negotiated and understood differently by different individuals and groups. The “City Witness” project also contextualized the story of William Cragh within the wider landscape of the medieval March of Wales, advancing new insights into beliefs, power, and cultural identities in this border region.11 7  MS Vat. Lat. 4015, fol. 221v. 8  MS Vat. Lat. 4015, fol. 221v.

9  This record survives in a manuscript now in Oxford (Exeter College MS 158), fols. 49r–​v.

10  Robert Bartlett, The Hanged Man:  A Study of Miracle, Memory, and Colonialism in the Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004). Other key publications include Michael Richter, “Waliser und Wundermänner um 1300,” in Spannungen und Widersprüche:  Gedenkschrift für Frantisek Graus, edited by S. Burghartz et al. (Sigmaringen: Thorbecke, 1992), 23–​36; Jussi Hanska, “The Hanging of William Cragh:  Anatomy of a Miracle,” Journal of Medieval History 27 (2001): 121–​38; and the Journal of Medieval History, special issue, 41 (2015), “Power, Identity and Miracles on a Medieval Frontier,” especially the Introduction and articles by Clarke and Webster.

11  Resources and analysis produced by the project are available on the “City Witness” website at www.medievalswansea.ac.uk, and in the 2015 special issue of the Journal of Medieval History, “Power, Identity and Miracles on a Medieval Frontier.”

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The “City Witness” project included significant public engagement elements—​activities designed to connect non-specialists with the research underlying the project—​ as well as strategies designed to help deliver specific local impacts—​that is, real-​world benefits outside of academia. The project itself developed out of a direct approach by Swansea Council, who were keen to pursue regeneration plans for the city centre, which had recently been the recipient of significant European Union Convergence funding (directed at regions where GDP per capita is below 75 percent of the European Union average). In particular, the Council aimed to bridge the disconnect between the surviving material fabric of Swansea Castle and the surrounding urban environment, which had been scoured of its medieval character by wartime bombing and later redevelopment. As part of its strategy to create a distinct “Castle Quarter,” with heritage at the heart of the city, the Council co-​funded a pavement marker trail, produced by the “City Witness” project, which linked to multimedia online resources based on the new research into the Cragh story and the landscape of medieval Swansea. The “City Witness” project also worked in partnership with Swansea Museum to produce a major exhibition on the medieval town.12 These activities were all successful, raising local awareness of the medieval heritage of Swansea, and helping to drive the Council’s regeneration and tourism objectives. But by the end of the “City Witness” project, a major challenge had become apparent. While the surrounding areas of the Gower, and even neighbouring Mumbles, with the picturesque ruins of Oystermouth Castle, were enduringly popular with visitors, Swansea city centre itself was not on established heritage tourism routes, or a medieval heritage destination with wide public recognition. There was a clear need to embed Swansea more robustly in the wider heritage tourism map. The proposal for the St. Thomas Way project initially developed as a response to this particular challenge. But its objectives evolved and expanded to engage with further challenges and aspirations identified by other agencies and institutions in the wider region. The Business Wales Cultural Tourism Action Plan 2012, produced by the Cultural Tourism Partnership and Steering Group for the Welsh Assembly Government, highlighted “Sense of Place” as a key attraction for visitors to Wales, which it argued should be developed further. It also identified “religious tourism” as an area “not currently being exploited to [its] full potential,” targeting it as a sector for growth.13 Indeed, in 2013, the Welsh Government pursued this goal through the publication of a specific Faith Tourism Action Plan for Wales, defining “faith tourism” in broad terms as both visitors motivated by faith or belief, and those attracted to sacred sites and their stories as destinations. The Action Plan sets out the ambition that “by 2020 Faith Tourism is recognized as an integral component of the visitor experience in Wales, adding significant value to the destination offer, contributing to the well-​being of the visitor and 12  For detailed discussion of these public-​facing projects, and the critical and theoretical issues they raise, see Catherine A. M. Clarke, Medieval Cityscapes Today (Leeds: Arc Humanities, 2019).

13  Business Wales Cultural Tourism Action Plan 2012, https://​businesswales.gov.wales/​ dmwales/​sites/​dmwales/​files/​documents/​DM%20Wales%20-​%20Cultural%20Tourism%20-​ %20Action%20Plan%20-​%20Eng.pdf.

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Introduction

host community and enhancing local, regional and national ‘Sense of Place.’ ”14 Different places across the region had differing tourism goals and challenges: for example, a key target in the Herefordshire Tourism Strategy was the increase of overnight stays in the area, with the aim of retaining visitors for more than just a day trip.15 And broader challenges—​ and opportunities—​ emerged in terms of heritage tourism across the England–​Wales borders. Where the concerns facing Swansea were acutely urban, linked to economic pressures and the formation of identity in a post-​industrial city, much of the area between Swansea and Hereford is highly rural. Many highly significant, impressive medieval sites (from churches to castles and monastic ruins) are located in remoter areas and are relatively little known and under-​visited. How could the heritage tourism potential of these smaller or less visible sites be better developed? Could less well-​ known locations benefit from being linked into a narrative and visitor experience alongside world-​famous visitor destinations such as Caerphilly Castle or Hereford Cathedral? Further challenges particular to many of these rural areas also became apparent. Where local rural communities struggled to access cultural or arts provision, could spaces such as historic churches fulfil some of these roles? And what kinds of wellbeing benefits could an enriched understanding and experience of local heritage bring to host communities? Finally, a very concrete goal emerged through discussion with Hereford Cathedral—​the key partner for a project taking forward the story of William Cragh and his pilgrimage to the shrine of St. Thomas. In general, the Cathedral hoped to explore traditions of pilgrimage, and its own place in practices medieval and modern. More specifically, the Cathedral planned to commemorate the 700th anniversary of the canonization of St. Thomas, in 2020, and was keen to develop resources and visitor engagement strategies around this. St. Thomas of Hereford, or Thomas de Cantilupe, is not generally well known today, but was an important saint in the Middle Ages, and his shrine was a major pilgrimage destination. The surviving miracle collections in MS Vat. Lat. 4015 and elsewhere are second only to those of Thomas Becket in medieval Britain. Cantilupe was born into the higher Anglo-​Norman nobility in Buckinghamshire between 1218 and 1222: his father William, a prominent baron, had been steward of the household of Henry III and his uncle, Walter Cantilupe, was Bishop of Worcester (1237–​1266). Thomas Cantilupe’s career spanned academia, including a period teaching canon law at Oxford and the chancellorship of the university in 1261 and 1264, as well as involvement in government and politics, including acting as an advisor to Edward I during the period of the king’s campaigns to conquer Wales. His tenure at Hereford began as prebend from 1274 and as bishop from 1275. The circumstances of Thomas’s death were unpromising for a 14  The Faith Tourism Action Plan for Wales, 2013, https://​gov.wales/​docs/​drah/​publications/​ 131024-​the-​faith-​tourism-​action-​plan-​for-​wales-​en.pdf, 2. For a discussion of the meanings of “faith tourism” and its implications for tourism practices and consumption, see Jonathan M.  Wooding, “Historical-​Theological Models of Pilgrimage as a Resource for Faith Tourism,” Journal of Tourism Consumption and Practice 5 (2013): 61–​72, as well as his piece in this volume. 15  A Tourism Strategy for Herefordshire, 2010–​2015, www.marcheslep.org.uk/​download/​ economic_​plans/​european_​structural_​and_​investment_​fund/​tourism/​herefordshire_​tourism_​ strategy_​final_​3910.pdf, 8, 35.

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potential future saint: he died in 1282 while in Rome to plead his case to the Pope, after having been excommunicated in a dispute with John Pecham, Archbishop of Canterbury. This certainly complicated the campaign for Thomas’s canonization, but it was led vigorously by Bishop Swinfield, with the translation of Thomas’s relics to a new shrine in Hereford Cathedral in 1287, and the careful compilation of records of miracles. Swinfield proposed Thomas to the Pope for canonization in April 1290 and the inquisitorial commission was established in 1306. After years of sustained campaigning and pressure from Hereford, as well as complex processes of papal review and evaluation of the case, Cantilupe was finally made a saint by Pope John XXII in 1320.16 The medieval cult of St. Thomas—​incorporating a rich textual record, material evidence such as the surviving shrine, and records of behaviours and practices associated with pilgrimage and devotion to the saint—​offers a window into medieval religious beliefs, both within the official culture of the church and its structures, and within the sphere of lay traditions and customs. Pilgrimage to the shrine of St. Thomas was of course a major part of his cult and expression of devotion to the saint. William Cragh’s journey to the shrine, in 1290, was around the time of its peak popularity amongst pilgrims and those seeking miraculous cures. In terms of miracles recorded by the canons of Hereford (different from, though perhaps related to, the numbers of pilgrims in general), the peak period was April 1287, when the relics of Thomas were transferred to their new shrine in the north transept of the Cathedral. The year 1287 saw the most recorded miracles in the cult’s history (160), with numbers gradually declining in the following years: only ten miracles were listed in 1299. Interestingly, the gender balance among recipients of the saint’s miracles also shifted: initially, those who received miracles were predominantly women, though by 1288 more men were recorded as recipients.17 As the cult of St. Thomas grew in strength, miracles were reported far beyond Hereford—​such as the resuscitation of Cragh in Swansea. Yet the shrine remained a focal point for supplicants and for those, like Cragh, travelling to express their thanks and devotion. In 1307, the papal commissioners involved in Thomas’s canonization trial made an inventory of the offerings at the shrine. This included “silver ships and golden rings, knives and anchors and precious stones and nearly 2,000 wax images of humans, animals, eyes and limbs.” And this, according to the canons’ own records, was “a collection in decline.”18 Pilgrimage to Hereford Cathedral was, for most of the visitors to Thomas’s shrine, a relatively local journey. According to Lady Mary de Briouze and John of Baggeham, the journey from Swansea to Hereford had taken just three days (after a mere three or four days convalescence for the recently hanged Cragh), though the witnesses, relying on memory seventeen years after the events, do not always agree on such details.19 But 16  For detailed discussion of the career, cult, and legacy of Thomas Cantilupe, see St. Thomas Cantilupe, Bishop of Hereford:  Essays in His Honour, edited by M. Jancey (Hereford: Friends of Hereford Cathedral Publications Committee, 1982). 17  R. C. Finucane, “Cantilupe as Thaumatuge: Pilgrims and their Miracles,” in St. Thomas Cantilupe, Bishop of Hereford, ed. Jancey, 137–​44, at 141. 18  Finucane, “Cantilupe as Thaumaturge,” 144.

19  For discussion of the length of time of Cragh’s convalescence, and the time taken for the journey to Hereford, see Bartlett, The Hanged Man, 58.

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pilgrimage could, of course, take the faithful much further, to holy places such as Rome or Jerusalem. Several of the witnesses to Cragh’s hanging are under the impression that he may have subsequently travelled—​or at least proposed to travel—​to the Holy Land on pilgrimage, as a further act of penance or devotion. William de Briouze junior recalls that Cragh had “vowed to go beyond the sea” (“vouerat ire ultra mare”),20 while William of Codineston, the de Briouze family chaplain, is more sceptical: he heard reported that the said William vowed to go to the Holy Land, and had not gone, but remained in his own land.

audiuit […] referri quod dictus Willelmus vouerat ire ad terram sanctam, et non iuit sed remansit in terra sua.21

Whether or not he did in fact make the journey, pilgrimage to the Holy Land was clearly something that Cragh and his contemporaries understood as a further, more testing, act of spiritual devotion—​and which Cragh used (even if only rhetorically) to his own advantage as a way of extricating himself from a tense and complicated political situation in Swansea. Cragh’s visit to Hereford may itself have helped to shape these ambitions for further pilgrimage, and his understanding of the Holy Land as the ultimate destination for a Christian pilgrim. It is possible that, laying his rope noose and wax votive model of a gallows at the shrine of St. Thomas, Cragh glimpsed the Hereford Mappa Mundi, with its spectacular visual representation of a world imagined in patterns of faith, journeying, and pilgrimage. Research over the past two decades has argued, based on a range of evidence, that the Hereford Mappa Mundi was originally produced for and sited at the “shrine complex” of St. Thomas in Hereford Cathedral, as a visual prompt to meditation designed to situate the pilgrim experience within the wider context of geographies and histories of Christian faith. Most recently, Dan Terkla has used the evidence of medieval masonry in the north transept of the Cathedral (where stone inserts suggest medieval wooden supports were once fixed) and dendrochronological dating of the surviving map panel to argue that the Mappa was displayed immediately beside the shrine of St. Thomas. Here, he proposes, “pilgrims to the shrine could have extended their literal journeys to the building by experiencing the Mappa Mundi as a portal to myriad figurative journeys through pagan, mythological, legendary, political and biblical history.”22 Thomas de Wesselow has responded to Terkla’s hypothesis with an alternative theory: that the map was displayed on one of the piers in the south choir aisle of the Cathedral. Yet, despite this slightly different location, Wesselow still interprets the Mappa Mundi in terms of its contribution to the experience of medieval pilgrims to Thomas’s shrine, enhancing “the climax 20  MS Vat. Lat. 4015, fol. 11v. 21  MS Vat. Lat. 4015, fol. 14r.

22  Dan Terkla, “The Original Placement of the Hereford Mappa Mundi,” Imago Mundi 56 (2004): 131–​51, at 146. Terkla also gives a concise overview of other more recent analyses of the provenance and medieval display of the Hereford Mappa Mundi (187). See also Marcia Kupfer, Art and Optics in the Hereford Map: An English Mappa Mundi, c. 1300 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016).

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of the Hereford pilgrimage, explicating the journey’s allegorical significance and articulating the spiritual meaning of its final stage.”23 As Daniel Birkholz comments, “to associate Hereford Cathedral with cartography is now commonplace … for heritage tourists and academic medievalists alike.”24 With Jerusalem at its centre, the earthly paradise at the top, and Christ enthroned in majesty in the upper border, the map configures space according to providential history, with biblical narratives such as the crossing of the Red Sea represented alongside contemporary pilgrim routes and motifs from classical mythology. It locates the pilgrim’s journey within a far wider world, layered with itineraries and stories. Medieval visitors to the shrine of St. Thomas would also have been able to identify (likely with the help of a cathedral attendant or custos)25 England, Wales, and Hereford itself, pressed down into the lower left-​hand rim of the map, almost at the very edge of the known world. If Britain, in its peripheral position at the edge of the map, was perceived as “marginal,” “liminal,” and “other,”26 then Hereford and Wales are doubly remote and otherworldly, located at the far west of the island, teetering at the brink of the world. Already within this marginal position, the region around Hereford and across to the south coast of Wales is an even more acutely troublesome and suggestive edge: a space where liminality is compounded, a wild border landscape where strange and dangerous things can happen, as evidenced in the accounts of Gerald of Wales, a canon of Hereford in the late twelfth century.27 The March of Wales, then, is a borderland within a borderland, balanced precariously at the end of the world. While the “March of Wales” or the “Welsh Marches” is often used today to describe the Welsh borders in general, the terms are used more specifically by historians to refer to the conquest territories of Wales gradually occupied by Anglo-​Norman rulers and governed as semi-​autonomous “Marcher lordships” from around 1067 until the late thirteenth century. Even after the conquest of Wales by Edward I in 1282–​83, these Marcher territories (around forty in number) remained distinct from the Principality of Wales—​ largely land to its north and west—​and under the control of their Marcher lords, who continued to pursue their own territorial ambitions and claims. Encompassing historic kingdoms such as Gower (Gŵr) and Glamorgan (Morgannwg), which ran far along the south coast of Wales, and later encroaching into English territory in the east, the Marches were characterized by ethnic and political frictions and tensions—​between Welsh and 23  Thomas de Wesselow, “Locating the Hereford Mappamundi,” Imago Mundi 65 (2013): 180–​206, at 198. 24  Daniel Birkholz, “Hereford Maps, Hereford Lives: Biography and Cartography in an English Cathedral City,” in Mapping Medieval Geographies: Geographical Encounters in the Latin West and Beyond, 300–​1600, ed. Keith D.  Lilley (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2013), 225–​49, at 231. 25  Terkla, “The Original Placement of the Hereford Mappa Mundi,” 146.

26  Kathy Lavezzo, Angels on the Edge of the World: Geography, Literature, and English Community, 1000–​1534 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), 1–​3.

27  Daniel Birkholz suggests that, based on Gerald’s many close connections with Hereford, he might better be called Giraldus Herefordensis than Giraldus Cambrensis. See “Hereford Maps, Hereford Lives,” p.  229. For Gerald’s stories of the strangeness of Wales and its Marches, see The Journey through Wales/​The Description of Wales, trans. Lewis Thorpe (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978).

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Anglo-​Normans, and between rival Marcher lords—​as well as rich cultural interactions and hybrid identities and traditions.28 The story of William Cragh, the hanged man of medieval Swansea, brings many of these broader tensions and complexities into focus. Cragh, a Welshman born in the Gower parish of Llanrhidian to a Welsh mother (Swannith) and father (Rhys), is described by those associated with the household of Lord William de Briouze as a “malefactor” and “rebel” (“malefactor,” “erat de rebellibus,” William de Briouze junior) or a “famous brigand” (“latro famosus,” Lady Mary).29 Cragh’s actions in burning down Oystermouth Castle were motivated by resistance to Anglo-​ Norman rule, as part of the rebellion of Rhys ap Maredudd, a prince of the Welsh royal house of Deheubarth, of which the kingdom of Gŵr (now occupied as the Marcher lordship of Gower) was part. Yet the medieval witness statements in MS Vat. Lat. 4015 reflect cultural confluences and hybridity, as well as division: Cragh bends a penny as a votive to St. Thomas “following the English custom,” though he later refuses to speak anything but Welsh when interviewed by the papal commissioners (forcing them to seek two local Franciscan monks as translators).30 Lady Mary de Briouze’s choice to direct her prayers for intervention to Thomas of Hereford is also significant, both reflecting her allegiances as an Anglo-​Norman noblewoman and charged with contemporary recognition of Hereford’s “transactional location and borderlands function” within programmes of Welsh conquest and colonization.31 In this context, Thomas’s miraculous resuscitation of the hanged Welsh rebel is as much a performance of Anglo-​Norman “soft power” as it is a revelation of divine mercy. The story of the Welsh rebel William Cragh and the Anglo-​Norman bishop-​saint Thomas Cantilupe is, then, a suggestive and resonant narrative through which to explore the rich and complex history and culture of the medieval March of Wales. The connection with individual medieval lives and stories—​as well as specific places and journeys—​ presents compelling possibilities and opportunities from the perspective of heritage interpretation and public engagement. Yet the medieval March of Wales is still, in some ways, a border region that presents practical challenges. Telling the distinctive story of William Cragh, and his pilgrimage from Swansea to Hereford, takes in places on both the Welsh and English sides of today’s border, and necessarily involves working with multiple tourism agencies and government bodies, across political boundaries. For the St. Thomas Way project, this posed various difficulties, partly through multiplying the partners and stakeholders involved, and in the challenges of making connections and communicating effectively across the structural borders between England and Wales. 28  For landmark works on the medieval March of Wales, see Max Liebermann, The Medieval March of Wales: The Creation and Perception of a Frontier, c. 1066–​1283 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), and R. R. Davies The Age of Conquest: Wales 1063–​1415 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987); for a concise overview see Max Liebermann, The March of Wales 1067–​1300:  A Borderland of Medieval Britain (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2008). 29  MS Vat. Lat. 4015, fols. 10r and 8r.

30  MS Vat. Lat. 4015, fols. 221r and 222r.

31  Birkholz, “Hereford Maps, Hereford Lives,” 230, using Gerald of Wales’s writing about Hereford to illustrate contemporary perceptions.

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But there was also an exciting opportunity here: to work across the usual remits of national-​focused tourism agencies, to tell a medieval story inherently about borders, hybridity, and multifaceted cultural identities. A primary challenge of the project was the development of a route from Swansea to Hereford, either to reconstruct or in some way to take inspiration from William Cragh’s pilgrimage. In the end, our choices were driven by research—​what could be known and what was unknowable about Cragh’s exact route—​as well as by questions of intended audience, the outreach and tourism capacity-​building objectives of the project, and our aims to make positive interventions in local economies and communities. MS Vat. Lat. 4015 gives no detail on the route taken by Cragh and the de Briouzes to Hereford, other than the (somewhat unlikely) claim that it took just three days (with Cragh, only just recovering from his hanging, on foot). Yet it is possible to make some informed guesses about Cragh’s likely journey, based on knowledge of medieval roads, river crossings, and stopping places. The medieval road east from Swansea followed the route of the modern A48 (later the M4 motorway in some sections), with the nearby Margam Abbey well known as a place of hospitality and respite for travellers after (or in other cases, before) they had negotiated the treacherous waters and quicksands of the river Neath.32 Despite the immediate difficulties of the river Neath, a route eastwards out of Swansea seems more plausible than a journey north, through the remote and mountainous landscape towards the Brecon Beacons (with increased possibilities of ambush and attack for Lord and Lady de Briouze). It is likely that a significant proportion of Cragh’s journey followed (in reverse) the route recorded by John Ogilby in 1675 in his map of the itinerary from London to St. David’s. Ogilby’s itinerary travels long-​established roads, setting out a potential route for Cragh and his companions which takes in Aberavon, Margam, and Cowbridge, before crossing the Ewenny river and travelling close to St. Fagan’s, Llandaff, and on towards Cardiff and Newport, and perhaps north to Hereford via Monmouth.33 Recently, Madeleine Gray has interpreted depictions of pilgrims in the newly discovered wall paintings at the church of St. Cadoc, Llancarfan (southeast of Cowbridge, in the same area of the south Glamorgan coast) as a possible suggestion that the church was on or near to a pilgrim route.34 But, of course, all these clues and hints as to Cragh’s possible journey can only be informed speculation. Other priorities were also involved in devising the route for the St. Thomas Way. The final St. Thomas Way route comprises thirteen locations between (and including) Swansea and Hereford, in some places coinciding closely with the probable route of Cragh and his fellow pilgrims, and in others selecting sites with rich and vibrant medieval heritage, which help to tell the story of the medieval March of Wales in the most engaging 32  For example, in the case of Gerald of Wales, discussed in this volume in the essay “Place, Time, and the St. Thomas Way: An Experiment in Five Itineraries.”

33  John Ogilby, Britannia, or an Illustration of the Kingdom of England and the Dominion of Wales: By a Geographical and Historical Description of the Principal Roads Thereof, vol. 1 (London: Ogilby at White Friars, 1675), plate 16. 34  Madeleine Gray, “Hidden Treasures on the St. Thomas Way: Llancarfan and the Good Pilgrim,” unpublished paper presented at Hereford Cathedral, St. Thomas Way launch event, July 7, 2018.

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and compelling ways. The thirteen locations on the Way are: Swansea, Margam, Ewenny, Llancarfan, St. Fagan’s, Caerphilly, Newport, Usk, Abergavenny, Patrishow, Longtown, Kilpeck, and Hereford. Together, they form a mix of world-​renowned and well-​known heritage tourism destinations, such as Caerphilly Castle and Hereford Cathedral, and more remote or less widely known locations such as Patrishow and Llancarfan. Urban locations on the Way include Swansea, Newport, and Hereford, each with their own particular regeneration and development challenges and goals, while other sites are highly rural and often already well-​established destinations in terms of natural heritage tourism (for example, Longtown and the area around Abergavenny). So the St. Thomas Way is different from many other heritage routes, which explicitly seek to reconstruct or retrace medieval pilgrimages and journeys. Best known of these is the world-​famous Camino de Santiago in northwestern Spain, which follows medieval pilgrim routes to the shrine of St. James. In Wales itself, the Cistercian Way is more of a hybrid network, partly following known routes taken by Cistericans between their monasteries in medieval Wales, and partly incorporating other modern paths and rights of way.35 Instead, the St. Thomas Way takes William Cragh’s pilgrimage as inspiration, and as a way into the rich and colourful landscape of the medieval March of Wales. A further difference from most other heritage or pilgrimage routes is that the St. Thomas Way is not one single, continuous walking route. Instead, there is a circular walk at each of the thirteen locations, which visitors travel between (either by car, or by public transport, or, potentially, on foot, though there is no prescribed route). The decision to structure the Way in this form was primarily for reasons of accessibility and inclusion: opening up the experience to those who might not be able or willing to commit to a major walking route, such as families, people with mobility issues, or passing visitors who discover the St. Thomas Way without having planned in advance. While some visitors will follow the route in full from Swansea to Hereford, it is designed so that the locations can be visited in any order. This was a major factor in shaping how the interpretation resources for the Way were conceptualized, and how we told the story of Cragh and his pilgrimage: the locations and their content needed to make sense as a nonlinear experience, as well as (potentially) a linear narrative leading from Swansea to Hereford as the final destination. Practical considerations also determined the medium for the St. Thomas Way content and interpretation. It was clear from the start that it would be impossible to provide onsite physical infrastructure for the Way at thirteen different locations, across multiple local government jurisdictions and two countries. Apart from the slim chance of achieving consensus and cooperation between multiple local councils, and problems associated with proliferating interpretation “clutter” at historic sites, material features such as signage would be vulnerable to vandalism and would in any case require ongoing maintenance—​not something possible after the end of the fixed-​term AHRC funding period. Building on approaches taken in earlier AHRC-​funded projects led by Clarke, in Chester and Swansea, the St. Thomas Way was developed as a web-​based 35  The Cistercian Way is online at www.cistercianway.wales/​.

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digital resource.36 This made it possible to include a wide range of multimedia content, as well as interactive features. The main section of the Thomas Way website, centred on an interactive map of the thirteen route locations, was built in collaboration with the Brighton-​based digital learning company Elucidat, using their proprietary software which allowed the academic team to develop content in a “WYSIWYG” (“what you see is what you get”) interface. The Elucidat software enabled the display to be optimized for various different devices, from PCs to phones and tablets. The Elucidat module was then embedded as an iframe (inline frame element) in a WordPress site. Because of the use of an iframe, an additional (and unforeseen) technical challenge was that the project team had to use the professional version of WordPress—​an interface requiring more coding expertise and with less of the WYSIWYG intuitiveness usually associated with that platform. Of course, building a website brings its own sustainability challenges. Some of those have been addressed by archiving the static content as PDF files, as well as an offline version (though this could still be vulnerable to any major browser changes in future). Any future problems with functionality will be addressed as they arise. The interactive map of the thirteen core locations on the St. Thomas Way was designed by the artist Tom Woolley, who specializes in illustrated visitor maps for towns and cities and heritage sites.37 Woolley’s design brief was to take visual and stylistic cues from the iconography of the Hereford Mappa Mundi, with each representation of a town or place on the St. Thomas Way map directly inspired by a detail on the medieval Mappa, and playful motifs such as animals, a pilgrim, and mythical beasts evoking the sense of a landscape inscribed with stories. These stylistic influences are also carried through the rest of the St. Thomas Way website design, alluding playfully to the cartographic tradition at medieval Hereford associated with the shrine of St. Thomas, and suggesting the role of the Way as a modern extension and response to these medieval pilgrimage traditions and spatial imaginaries. The layout of the St. Thomas Way map is perhaps surprising to modern users: rather than set out in the typical modern cartographic format, with north at the top and locations positioned according to a strict scale and geographical location, the map is structured vertically, with the thirteen locations running downwards in a series from Swansea to Hereford. The map expresses the relationality of these locations, and their rough geographical context (for example, showing the coastline, key rivers, and mountains, and featuring three other significant places—​Neath, Bridgend, and Cardiff) for orientation. But it does not aim for geographical accuracy, which is included instead through a small thumbnail map at the top of the webpage, and a link to the route on Google Maps.38 The vertical layout of the route map is optimized for use on a number of different devices—​especially the screens of mobile phones and tablets, which many visitors will use at locations on the Way. Yet its design is also, again, in dialogue with medieval aesthetic 36  For these earlier projects, see in particular “Discover Medieval Chester” (http://​discover. medievalchester.ac.uk) and the pavement marker trail on the “City Witness” website at www. medievalswansea.ac.uk. 37  www.tomwoolley.com/​.

38  http://​thomasway.ac.uk/​explore-​the-​way/​.

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Figure 1. St. Thomas Way route map, illustrated by Tom Woolley.

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and representational conventions. The vertical concatenation of locations reflects the sense of journey as narrative, and deliberately echoes the visual language of medieval pilgrim itinerary maps, such as those produced in the mid-​thirteenth century by the monk of St. Albans, Matthew Paris, which show the route from London to Palestine.39 This tradition of itinerary maps, read vertically to focus attention on a specific journey through space—​ whether for practical use, or for meditative reading and imaginative travel—​continued well into the early modern period, as indicated by Ogilby’s Britannia, used in this project as a source for the possible route from Swansea to Hereford.40 Matthew Paris’s medieval itinerary map, depicting the pilgrimage from London to Jerusalem, also engages the reader in a dynamic, interactive experience: the approach to the holy city is experienced in the turn of pages, the route can be traced with a fingertip, and flaps showing extra detail for significant places such as Rome can be opened up and explored. Once again, the St. Thomas Way map participates in these medieval pilgrimage traditions, by transposing these interactive elements into the realm of digital technology, with hypertext links and multimedia content to open and explore. Thus, the visual designs and modes of the St. Thomas Way website model ways in which new technologies can enter into productive dialogue with medieval spatial imaginaries and representational tools. In his analysis of the “participatory design” and “interactive quality” of Matthew Paris’s itinerary map, Daniel Connolly suggests how this document may have been encountered and used by its audience at St. Albans. The Benedictine brother who perused these pages understood this map primarily through its performative possibilities, as a dynamic setting, the operation of whose pages, texts, images, and appendages aided him in effecting an imagined pilgrimage that led through Europe to the crusader city of Acre and eventually to a complex representation of Jerusalem.41

Similarly, Dan Terkla notes that the Hereford Mappa Mundi was used as a prompt to imaginary, meditative travel, enabling the “ocular journeys” of those who witnessed it.42 Medieval practices of virtual or imagined pilgrimage have recently received attention from a number of scholars. Kathryn Rudy discusses strategies for “virtual” pilgrimage, developed by those such as nuns and religious women who had little chance of visiting the Holy Land in person. She explores tools and techniques of “somatic virtual pilgrimage”—​which might include physical engagement with a book or map, as well as other performative and multisensory elements—​and examines the motives amongst female religious for these virtual travels.43 On the one hand, they hoped to collect 39  British Library Royal MS 14 C VII, fols. 4r–​5r.

40  Ogilby, Britannia, plate 16 and passim. See discussion of the use of Ogilby in devising the St. Thomas Way route, above.

41  Daniel K. Connolly, “Imagined Pilgrimage in the Itinerary Maps of Matthew Paris,” Art Bulletin 81 (1999): 598–​622, at 598. 42  Terkla, “The Original Placement of the Hereford Mappa Mundi,” 146.

43  Kathryn M. Rudy, Virtual Pilgrimages in the Convent: Imagining Jerusalem in the Late Middle Ages (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), 23.

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indulgences through the completion of virtual journeys, but on the other, with more immediate experiential rewards and implications, they sought “empathetic devotion” and affective experiences through their virtual visits to places associated with the life and passion of Christ.44 Once again, the St. Thomas Way takes cues from these medieval practices and the ways in which they enlarge an understanding of what might constitute journeying or travel. The multimedia resources linked to the Thomas Way map are designed for use both at the thirteen route locations and also remotely, as a form of virtual pilgrimage or heritage tourism. This extends the project’s access and inclusion aims, by enabling engagement with those who are unable—​through geographical distance, financial pressures, or physical limitations—​to explore the Way in person, and also seeks to create space for the kinds of affective and imaginary experience identified in medieval culture by Rudy and others. The interpretative text is accompanied by copious images of sites on the Way, and also by other kinds of multisensory content designed to catalyze virtual, intellectual, and affective experiences of journeying. This content includes ambient sound recordings of locations on the Way, medieval soundscapes, maps, and 360-​degree footage of some walking routes, taken with a “Street View” camera, specially loaned from Google and available via links to Google Maps. Through elements such as these, the St. Thomas Way project hopes to push forward the possibilities of “virtual” tourism—​a topic with major implications for sustainability in many popular visitor sites globally—​and to rethink modern assumptions about journeying and travel through medieval precedents. The thirteen core locations on the St. Thomas Way each include a range of multimedia content, grouped under nine main headings. “Place and History” gives an introduction to the location in the Middle Ages, with image, links to further information, and a “Don’t Miss” section featuring three sites or features worth taking the time to see. Each location also has a “Walking Route,” with an OS map and narrative instructions, as well as information on distance, terrain, and accessibility (for example, whether the route is suitable for strollers or wheelchairs). The walking routes were devised by the project Research Fellow, Chloe McKenzie, and each tested at least twice by members of the project team and volunteer test walkers. “The Hanged Man’s Journey” tells the story of William Cragh’s hanging and miraculous revival, though not structured in a linear narrative from Swansea to Hereford. Instead, this content section takes cues from features or characteristics of each location, developing the story of Cragh in a more thematic, nonlinear, and multilayered way. For example, the content at Llancarfan responds to the medieval wall paintings at St. Cadoc’s church, with their vivid visions of vices, virtues, and other elements of medieval Christian belief, to focus on the visions Cragh experienced before his hanging, and their place in medieval devotional culture. The fourth content section, “St. Thomas and Medieval Belief,” also picks up on thematic connections suggested by the specific route location, exploring the life and cult 44  Rudy, Virtual Pilgrimages, 35–​38, quotation at 35.

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Figure 2. Example St. Thomas Way website page (Newport): screenshot.

of St. Thomas of Hereford, and the insights they open up into wider medieval beliefs and religious traditions. At Llancarfan, for example, this content explores visions of the saint recorded in miracle narratives. “Listen and Watch” includes a range of multimedia content: 3D animations of the medieval townscape in Swansea,45 video, recordings of ambient sound at selected locations, and music from Hereford Cathedral chosen to fit with the themes explored at each location. Most sites also include a medieval soundscape, designed by Mariana Lopez at the University of York, which evokes the place in the Middle Ages, whether as an ecclesiastical, market, or harbour site. These soundscapes play a key role in supporting affective and imaginative engagement with the past, and 45  Produced by the earlier “City Witness” project.

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help to develop the resources beyond the “emphasis on or (perhaps) the fetishization of visual experience” common to much heritage interpretation.46 The final content sections for each location include “Spiritual Reflection”: a short text designed to provide inspiration for visitors of all faiths and none, followed by a short prayer. Written for the project by Canon Christopher Pullin, Chancellor of Hereford Cathedral, these reflections ensure that the heritage route retains a spiritual dimension, linking it to practices of pilgrimage, and they again connect with the themes for each site. The reflections also help to embed and promote the potential wellbeing benefits of pilgrimage—​whether with a religious or secular motivation—​as an opportunity for reflection, recreation, and renewal. The “Kids” section is designed for children and families, where possible focusing on “real-​world” activities and embodied experiences which take participants beyond the digital and invite them to engage actively with places and themes. For example, the activity at Longtown is a virtual scavenger hunt; Ewenny suggests an art project involving the medieval floor tiles; Abergavenny is a “selfie” with a real medieval person (encouraging children to learn about the funerary monuments and memorial effigies in St. Mary’s Priory); and the activity at Caerphilly is making a model from playdough or plasticine “of something important to you,” engaging with the medieval pilgrim tradition of wax votives. The “Natural World” content offers a short introduction to some features of the natural environment, with an emphasis on uses in the Middle Ages. Abergavenny, for example, focuses on bees and medieval beekeeping (picking up on legends around the bees at St. Mary’s Priory and its Abbot’s Garden), while Ewenny looks at medieval monastic brewing. A final section, “Excursions,” suggests places—​usually with a medieval connection—​near the core location for further visits. Finally, each place on the Way also includes a “Collect your Badge” feature, in which visitors can answer a question or solve a puzzle—​only possible if they can find clues at the location itself—​to win a badge. Puzzles include choosing the missing corbel in an image of the Romanesque stone sculptures on Kilpeck church, or spotting the mistake on a memorial stone (Usk, Priory Church of St. Mary). These badges provide an appealing “treasure hunt” element, as well as an incentive to complete all thirteen locations on the Way (a promotional strategy used effectively by other tourism projects, such as the Wild Atlantic Way in Ireland, though usually reliant on stamps in a physical paper “passport” with the associated infrastructure and staffing).47 The St. Thomas Way badges also allude, again, to medieval pilgrimage traditions, offering a virtual, digital twist on the practice of collecting pilgrim badges at saints’ shrines.48 More than that, they also 46  Vincent Gaffney, “In the Kingdom of the Blind: Visualization and E-​Science in Archaeology, the Arts and Humanities,” in The Virtual Representation of the Past, ed. Mark Greengrass and Lorna Hughes (Farnham: Ashgate, 2008), 125–​34, at 127. See also Mariana Lopez’s article in this volume. 47  For the Wild Atlantic Way, see www.wildatlanticway.com/​home.

48  For a brief overview of this tradition, see Diana Webb, Medieval European Pilgrimage, c. 700—​c. 1500 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), 35–​37, and for more extensive survey and analysis (based on collections in the Museum of London), see Brian Spencer, Pilgrim Souvenirs and Secular Badges (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2010).

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demonstrate once again the ways in which medieval traditions and practices can be a fertile resource for developing tourism strategies and visitor engagement devices today. Beyond the website and core visitor interpretation materials, other elements were developed around the St. Thomas Way project, including activities and opportunities unforeseen at the initial planning stage. The Way was launched in July 2018 with a day of special events at Hereford Cathedral, including medieval pilgrims living history and storytelling, mini lectures, an art exhibition and workshops, and a special Evensong sung by the choir of St. Mary’s Swansea—​symbolic pilgrims from the starting point of Cragh’s journey. The day also included a dedication ceremony at the shrine of St. Thomas, with medieval elements such as censing the tomb, singing the medieval antiphon to St. Thomas and the Te Deum (recorded as being sung when Cragh arrived at Hereford in 1290), and making offerings to the shrine, symbolic of all those participating in the project. These offerings were lengths of string and ribbon, produced when all those present were invited to join in the medieval tradition of “measuring to the saint.” The day’s activities, culminating in an evening reception, brought together representatives from across the Way’s thirteen locations.49 “Measuring to the saint” also formed a key part of another aspect of the St. Thomas Way. With additional funding from the University of Southampton’s Public Engagement with Research Unit, the project Research Fellow, Chloe McKenzie, led an art project with Artist in Residence Michelle Rumney. “Remaking Maps of the Mind: Medieval and Modern Journeys” produced an exhibition inspired by the St. Thomas Way and medieval ideas of place and journeying, which launched at Hereford and went on to tour sites along the Way, along with public art workshops and an outreach project which involved “measuring” hundreds of people according to the medieval devotional custom.50 This touring exhibition helped to realize the project’s aims to bring arts and culture into new spaces and communities along the Way. The St. Thomas Way project also fostered partnerships with local communities, stakeholders, and small businesses across the thirteen locations on the Way. One unexpected highlight was a partnership with the microbrewery Mumbles Brewery in Swansea, which led to the production and launch of a new beer, “St. Thomas Way Ale,” alternatively labelled as “Hanged Man Walking.” This medieval-​influenced pale ale was made with a touch of yarrow, a herb often used in brewing in the Middle Ages. As well as becoming an effective promotional tool for the Way (with the map, information, and a QR code printed on the label), the beer was also a success in helping Mumbles Brewery reach new stockists (including Hereford Cathedral cafe) and customers. The essays collected in this volume reflect on diverse aspects of the St. Thomas Way and the research contexts, practices, and critical approaches involved in its development. They examine ways in which the project has opened up new methodologies or insights, and how it has shaped new questions for future exploration. In Chapter 49  A short film of the launch day’s events can be viewed at www.youtube.com/​watch?v=8Ny8t1g eciQ&feature=youtu.be.

50  See the perspectives from Artist in Residence Michelle Rumney in the final section of this volume.

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One, Jonathan Wooding situates the St. Thomas Way in the wider contexts—​historical and contemporary—​ of pilgrimage, religious and secular. In this long-​ view discussion, Wooding explores the motivations that drove pilgrims in the past and which inspire pilgrims today, advancing new insights into this distinctive form of spiritual journeying. In Chapter Two, “In the Footsteps of the Past: Medieval Miracles Stories and the St.  Thomas Way,” Ian Bass uses the thirteen locations of the St. Thomas Way as a framework for exploring some of the miracles of St. Thomas Cantilupe, going back to the contemporary medieval collection in what is now Oxford, Exeter College MS 158. The chapter focuses first on places along the St. Thomas Way route associated with miracles recorded in the medieval collection, and then uses the themes linked to each location on the St. Thomas Way (in the online content) as a framework for a wider exploration of the miracles of the saint. Clarke’s chapter, “Place, Time, and the St. Thomas Way: An Experiment in Five Itineraries,” tests the possibilities of an unconventional structure and critical approach in order to interrogate the ways in which multiple temporal moments might be experienced in place, using the new heritage route—​along with a variety of texts and encounters, medieval to modern—​as a case study. The author of the fourth chapter, Bethany Hamblen, was Archivist at Hereford Cathedral during the development and launch of the St. Thomas Way. Her contribution examines patterns and processes of commemoration and memorialization at Hereford Cathedral, from the Middle Ages to the Thomas Cantilupe anniversary in 2020, drawing on material evidence from the Cathedral and its archive collections. Mariana Lopez, who designed and produced the medieval soundscapes for the St. Thomas Way, contributes Chapter Five: “Heritage Soundscapes: Contexts and Ethics of Curatorial Expression.” Her piece situates the St. Thomas Way multimedia (and especially audio) content within the broader context of multisensory heritage interpretation experiences, asking questions about the potential and limitations or challenges of using sound at heritage sites. The book concludes with a further section, offering contributions that extend beyond scholarly or academic viewpoints, reflecting the involvement of other kinds of practice and perspectives in the project, and enriching the book’s account of this multifaceted endeavour. Christopher Pullin, Chancellor of Hereford Cathedral, reflects on the Cathedral’s participation in the St. Thomas Way, and how the project resonates with the Cathedral’s commitment to developing pilgrimage as a mode of spiritual engagement and expression today. Michelle Rumney, the St. Thomas Way Artist in Residence, tells the story of her creative engagement with the St. Thomas Way, revealing how the development of her touring art exhibition foregrounded unexpected themes and new ways of thinking about place and journeying. She touches on the strange medieval custom of “measuring to the saint”—​and offers an opportunity for readers of this book to share in her renewal of this tradition. The final contribution is by the writer Anne Louise Avery, who walked the entire St. Thomas Way with her family in August 2018. Her luminous evocation of the lived experience of walking the Way—​and encounters with particular places, moments, and fragments of history—​is vivid, immersive, and moving. The diverse range of scholars and practitioners who bring their perspectives to this volume is inevitably reflected in the diverse voices, idioms, and approaches of the essays.

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Rather than seeking homogeneity, and levelling all content into the same style, editorial practice has been deliberately to retain this variety, reflecting the varied disciplinary, professional, and practice-​led approaches to the St. Thomas Way collected here.

Key Reading

City Witness:  Place and Perspective in Medieval Swansea website:  www.medievalswansea. ac.uk. Bartlett, Robert. The Hanged Man: A Story of Miracle, Memory and Colonialism in the Middle Ages. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. Liebermann, Max. The March of Wales 1067–​1300: A Borderland of Medieval Britain. Cardiff:  University of Wales Press, 2008. Power, Identity and Miracles on a Medieval Frontier. Edited by Catherine A. M. Clarke. London: Routledge, 2017. Previously published as a special issue of the Journal of Medieval History 41 (2015). Rudy, Kathryn M. Virtual Pilgrimages in the Convent: Imagining Jerusalem in the Late Middle Ages. Turnhout: Brepols, 2011. St. Thomas Cantilupe, Bishop of Hereford:  Essays in his Honour. Edited by E. Meryl Jancey. Hereford: Friends of Hereford Cathedral Publications, 1982. St. Thomas Way website: www.thomasway.ac.uk. Terkla, Dan. “The Original Placement of the Hereford Mappa Mundi.” Imago Mundi 56 (2004): 131–​51. Webb, Diana. Medieval European Pilgrimage, c. 700–​c. 1500. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002.

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Chapter 1

CHANGING ROLES OF PILGRIMAGE: RETREATING, REMEMBERING, RE-​ENACTING JONATHAN M. WOODING

The St. Thomas

Way project re-​creates the route of a medieval pilgrimage as a resource for modern culture and recreation. The following discussion will offer some brief reflection on the historical phenomenon of pilgrimage, as well as on how this re-​ created pilgrimage, innovative in form as well as content, connects to roles of pilgrimage in spiritual, social, and economic life. This is by no means simply a matter of academic interest. Pilgrimage is once again a rapidly growing activity in England and Wales, having significant potential for regional and national economies. Wales, the nation in which the St. Thomas Way commences, has a Faith Tourism Action Plan (2013) initiated at the level of its national assembly government.1 “Religious tourism and pilgrimage” has its own international research group, established in 2003, which draws together academics and industry professionals.2 Local projects in infrastructure for pilgrimage tourism are underway in many parts of Britain. Heritage authorities increasingly include pilgrimage as a factor in the interpretation and preservation of churches.3 Alongside such indicators of economic significance, we can also connect pilgrimage to contemporary spiritual and social needs. Some of these reflect perennial themes, such as journeying to mark transitions in life, or to reflect on society from a liminal space. Other trends arise from more modern or postmodern circumstances. Joining pilgrimages can be a fresh expression of faith, a search for an alternative community, or it may substitute for participation in a declining model of parochial worship. Pilgrimage, being primarily a physical expression of spirituality, can be an inclusive vehicle for social as well as religious investment, as it allows people of diverse motivation to find their own meanings in the same activities.

1  Welsh Government, Faith Tourism Action Plan for Wales (Cardiff, 2013).

2  Founded as ATLAS Special Interest Group Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage, now International Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage (IRTP) Group (https://​arrow.dit.ie/​irtp/​).

3  For example, Cadw 2011 Pan-​Wales Heritage Interpretation Plan:  Celtic Saints, Spiritual Places and Pilgrimage (Perth: Touchstone Heritage Management); Karin Drda-​ Kühn and partners, ALTERheritage Report on Capacity Building for Religious Heritage Conservation and Management Future for Religious Heritage (Brussels, 2018).

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What is Pilgrimage?

Pilgrimage is a phenomenon in many cultures worldwide. Not all cultures have a term precisely synonymous with the English term “pilgrimage,” but they still evince similar conceptions.4 Across cultures, pilgrimage journeys are used to re-​enact significant past journeys—​real or apocryphal.5 In many cultures, also, journeys are made that mark rites of passage into new stages of life.6 Journeying to a shrine or other sacred destination via “stations” (staging points, often subsidiary shrines) is also found across a range of cultures.7 We should take a broad rather than a narrow view of historical pilgrimage. A narrow view would define pilgrimage as a Christian expression with specific doctrinal as well as theological associations and with defined outcomes. It is useful to take a broad view, however, as pilgrimage was (and is) a spirituality that, while at times brought within the liturgical structures of the church, has also exerted something of a countercultural force upon patterns of belief. Early Christians saw pilgrimage as the state of being a “stranger” to society (see below). In both early and modern churches we will find pilgrimage as a popular expression of spirituality, modifying normative patterns of devotion and community. Pilgrimage, inasmuch as it is a physical performance, has a quality of ritual in which specifics of theological difference are muted by its performance.8 In Llanover, a village in the borders of Wales, the childhood home of a martyred Welsh missionary has become a pilgrimage destination for Korean Christians who come from churches with no explicit role for saints.9 Catholics and non-​Catholic people walk together on the Camino to Santiago de Compostela in rapidly increasing numbers.10 Though they may experience this pilgrimage very differently according to their denominational or other perspectives, the largely physical and material act of travelling the route allows quite diverse experiences to be accommodated within the same spaces. In engaging with pilgrimage as a factor in heritage and tourism it is important to comprehend the strong but nuanced sense of history that is present in pilgrimage. Pilgrimage routes often re-​enact journeys of legendary figures, but using histories that were written as much to inspire as to record historical events. Modern pilgrimage trails 4  Ian Reader, Pilgrimage: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 17–​42. 5  Reader, Pilgrimage, 30–​31; Ian Reader, Pilgrimage in the Marketplace (London: Routledge, 2014), 62–​67. 6  Reader, Pilgrimage, 25–​27.

7  Celeste Ray, The Origins of Ireland’s Holy Wells (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2014), 93.

8  Maurice Bloch, From Blessing to Violence: History and Ideology in the Circumcision Ritual of the Merina (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 160–​67; also A. Maddrell and R. Scriven, “Celtic Pilgrimage, Past and Present: From Historical Geography to Contemporary Embodied Practices,” Social & Cultural Geography 17 (2016): 300–​21. 9  Jonathan M.  Wooding and John Winton, “Incorporating the Parochial Landscape into Religious Tourism:  Case-​studies from Interpretation Projects in Wales,” in Sustainable Religious Tourism: Commandments, Obstacles and Challenges, ed. A. Tronno (Lecce: Esperidi, 2012), 321–​31, at 321–4. 10  Guido Lucarno, “The Camino de Santiago de Compostela (Spain) and the Via Francigena (Italy): A Comparison between Two Important Historic Pilgrimage Routes in Europe,” International Journal of Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage 4 (2016): 49–​58, at 54–​56.

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are often comparably artificial, formed by putting together stories, heritage buildings, and routes through the landscape that are sometimes of differing, or uncertain, antiquity.11 In this, however, the modern designer only repeats processes common to the medieval hagiographers, who often linked together scattered records to re-​create putative journeys of their subjects.12 Pilgrimage itself, as an embodied movement, is moreover self-​affirming through repetition. Carole Cusack, reflecting on walking a modern pilgrimage trail, observes that even where a trail is largely a modern conception out of older elements, “the process of embodied movement through the landscape may nevertheless provide an authentic mode of self-​transformation.”13 Diverse historiographies, embracing religious as well as secular conceptions, pertain to interpretation here—​ perhaps requiring the acquisition of particular skills by heritage professionals.

Peregrinatio and the Earliest Christian Pilgrimages

Christian pilgrimage emerged around the period during which Christianity moved from being a tolerated (ad 313) to an institutionalized faith (ad 380) in the Roman state. If we now tend to see pilgrimage as synonymous with physical travel, it is interesting that the earliest Christian expressions of pilgrimage were symbolic as well as physical. The English term “pilgrim” derives from the Latin term peregrinus, which originally denoted an “alien” or “stranger.” Western Christians, looking into the Latin text of Scripture, found that the followers of Abraham (Hebrews 11:13–​14) were “aliens and guests [peregrini et hospites] on earth … longing for a better country—​a heavenly one.” The term peregrinatio (the phenomenon of being an alien or stranger, hence “pilgrimage”) symbolized both a state of being and a state of mobility. Becoming a Christian was to become an alien; Jesus’s call was to put aside worldly ties (Matthew 10:37–​38). As Mathetes observed to Diognetus in a famous apostolic letter of the second century: Christians are distinguished from other men neither by country, nor language, nor the customs which they observe. […] They dwell in their own countries, but simply as sojourners. As citizens, they share in all things with others, and yet endure all things as if foreigners.14

11  Anne Eastham, “Saints and Stones in Pembrokeshire,” Journal of the Pembrokeshire Historical Society 21 (2012): 67–​72.

12  For a case study see Jonathan M. Wooding, “The Representation of Early British Monasticism and Peregrinatio in Vita Prima S. Samsonis,” in St. Samson of Dol and the Earliest History of Brittany, Cornwall and Wales, ed. L.  Olson (Woodbridge:  Boydell, 2017), 137–​61; also Karen Jankulak, “Adjacent Saints’ Dedications and Early Celtic History,” in Saints’ Cults in the Celtic World, ed. S. Boardman et al. (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2009), 91–​118. 13  Carole M. Cusack, “History, Authenticity, and Tourism: Encountering the Medieval while Walking St. Cuthbert’s Way,” in Journeys and Destinations: Studies in Travel, Identity, and Meaning, ed. A. Norman (Newcastle-​upon-​Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2013), 1–​21, at 4.

14  Mathetes, “Epistle to Diogenetus,” trans. A Roberts and J. Donaldson, in The Ante-​Nicene Fathers: Translations of The Writings of the Fathers Down to ad 325, rev. ed. (New York: Scribner, 1913), I.24–​30.

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To St. Augustine of Hippo, in the early fifth century, the term peregrinus described the state of being a Christian in the heart of the imperial city—​a transient dweller, akin to Mathetes’ Christians, en route to the celestial city.15 In this period peregrinatio was sometimes used a Latin equivalent of the Greek paroikia, a term for a community of Christians. Later, however, paroikia itself was borrowed into Latin to become parochia, describing a settled community (the root of English “parish”) while peregrinatio went on to become a word describing an inherently mobile expression of Christian life.16 As Christianity became synonymous with the state it is not surprising that peregrinatio took on a new dimension of externality, now to Christian life itself. It rise was linked to the rise of monasticism. Both pilgrimage and monasticism were processes of movement into liminal spaces, from which the participants were able to reflect back on the life whence they had departed—​either temporarily or permanently—​and look ahead to contemplate the life that lay ahead. Peregrinatio was, early on, thus a term with a wide range of reference. It took a long time to settle on the usage which we more often make of it today. As late as the eleventh century, for example, armed Crusaders (“crusade” was not a term used at the time) were described as peregrini. When we think of “pilgrimage” today, however, our first images will probably not be of people retiring into monasticism, or of armed soldiers fighting to take possession of shrines, but of travellers following linear routes to destinations such as Santiago de Compostela and Canterbury—​or, looking beyond the Christian context, the city of Mecca, or shrines on the Ganges. In terms of physical travel to destinations, going to tombs of martyrs was an early development in Christianity. Helena, the mother of Constantine, had famously visited the eastern holy places in 326.17 Such journeys gained a further significance with the idea, emerging probably in the late fourth century, that relics had an inherent power to evoke the saints themselves.18 Later in the same century we have detailed accounts of Holy Land pilgrimages by the Roman widow Paula and the Iberian traveller Egeria, both aristocratic women who travelled east in the 380s.19 The destinations of pilgrimage were not yet normative. Paula was keen to see the sites of biblical events, but, in letter to her friend Marcella in 404, refers to contemporary doubts as to the propriety of visiting these sites: Everywhere we venerate the tombs of the martyrs; we apply their holy ashes to our eyes; we even touch them, if we may, with our lips. And yet some think that we should neglect the tomb in which the Lord Himself is buried. … If, as a wicked theory maintains, this holy

15  St. Augustine, Civitate Dei (City of God) I.15; B. Bitton-​Ashkelony, Encountering the Sacred: The Debate on Christian Pilgrimage in Late Antiquity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 110–​15. 16  Wendy Pullan, “ ‘Intermingled until the End of Time’: Ambiguity as a Central Condition of Early Christian Pilgrimage,” in Pilgrimage in Graeco-​Roman and Early Christian Antiquity: Seeing the Gods, ed. J. Elsner and I. Rutherford (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 387–​409, at 394–​97. 17  Maribel Dietz, Wandering Monks, Virgins, and Pilgrims:  Ascetic Travel in the Mediterranean World, ad 300–​800 (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2005), 110–​15.

18  Gillian Clark, “Victricius of Rouen: Praising the Saints,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 7 (1999): 365–​99, at 367, 387–​92. 19  Dietz, Wandering Monks, 44–​54.

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place has, since the Lord’s passion, become an abomination, why was Paul in such haste to reach Jerusalem to keep Pentecost in it? [Acts 20:16] … In speaking thus we do not mean to deny that the kingdom of God is within us [Luke 17:21] or to say that there are no holy men elsewhere; we merely assert in the strongest manner that those who stand first throughout the world are here gathered side by side.20

For some early writers, however, the “holy places” were as much at Rome, where the church had grown and where the Apostles were buried, as in the East.21 Already there was a culture in Rome of visiting the tombs of the saints and Paula observes that the saints of the Near East are not more important than those elsewhere. Paula and Egeria particularly also evince a desire to seek guidance from living holy men—​an extension of the classical fashion of visiting philosophers. To this end Paula sought “the desert made famous by its Pauls and by its Antonies,”22 as well as the monastery of Jerome at Bethlehem, where she ultimately settled. Paula described herself to St. Jerome in these terms: “I am a migrant and an alien [peregrina] as all my fathers were” (cf. Psalm 39:12/​Vulgate 38:13; Genesis 23:4), hence putting the focus onto her departure into a new life.23 Egeria returned to her home, but for Paula, the entry upon her pilgrimage involved a permanent break with her past life. The journeys of early pilgrims such as Paula and Egeria in this way evince a distinct pattern of retreat from secular life and a desire to find guidance in seeking God. In early medieval England, a couple of centuries later, we see a similar pattern with kings abdicating on the premise that they would spend their last years in monastic life in Rome.24 These pilgrimages, like that of the Israelites under Moses, were journeys into new places and states of life, contemplating the promised land to come. We might define many such pilgrimages as “retreat-​” rather than destination-​centred and as overlapping with monastic expressions of spirituality. It is worth pausing here to observe that the broad idea here of pilgrimage as a rite of passage into a new phase of life has parallels in modern society. The teenager about to enter adulthood goes backpacking on an extended journey, sometimes re-​enacting the journeys made by their own parents, by friends, and by the authors of popular travel guides. They are both commemorative and have a type of liturgical form, affirmed by regular re-​enactment. Like religious pilgrims, the “backpacker” pilgrims stay in hostels with likeminded travellers, forming their own temporary communities.25 At the other end of the age spectrum, “grey nomads,” now 20  Jerome, Letters 46:8, trans. in W.  H. Fremantle, G.  Lewis, and W.  G. Martley, Nicene and Post-​ Nicene Fathers, vol. 6 (Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing, 1893). 21  For example, Bede, Historia Ecclesiastica IV.5; V.19, cf. V.15; Bede, Historia Ecclesiastica, ed. and trans. B.  Colgrave and R.  A. B.  Mynors (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 1969), 348–​49, 516–​17, 506–​7. 22  Jerome, Letters 108 (To Eustochium), trans. by Fremantle, et al.

23  Jerome, Letters 108 (To Eustochium), trans. Fremantle et al.; Dietz, Wandering Monks, 109.

24  See Bede, Historia Ecclesiastica V.7, V.19, ed. and trans. Colgrave and Mynors, 468–​71, 516–​17.

25  Jonathan M. Wooding, “Historical-​theological Models of Pilgrimage as a Resource for Pilgrimage Tourism,” Journal of Tourism Consumption and Practice 5 (2013): 61–​72; Dane Munro, “Historical Perspectives of Shifting Motives for Faith-​based Travel,” Journal of Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage 5 (2017): 17–​25.

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free from work and childrearing, embark on extended journeys. These journeys mark events of separation; people travel so as to reflect, from a distance, on a domestic life now requiring new aims and pastimes. These journeys can be seen in themselves as “pilgrimages,” but their touchstones also connect them to more overtly religious pilgrimage trails and developments.

Medieval Pilgrimage in Britain: Destinations and Causes

In Britain, circumstantial evidence suggests that pilgrimage is a phenomenon that has existed since prehistory. Prehistoric field monuments were no doubt sites of memory that were visited by pilgrims. In the Iron Age and Roman periods some ritual sites are identifiable as shrines upon which healing cults were centred, with detritus of invocations and offerings for the sick.26 Christian use of holy wells evinces a similar detritus, inspiring the—​not uncontroversial—​idea that medieval pilgrimage in Britain and Ireland continues older patterns.27 Inasmuch as illness and loss are perennial concerns, such continuities of social function are not unlikely. In England, pilgrimage as a pattern of journeying to shrines of early Christians can be seen as early as the sixth century. St. Albans (Hertfordshire) is referred to by Gildas as a place desired to be accessed by Christians, but now in pagan territory.28 In ad 601, correspondence between Augustine, the new Archbishop to the Saxons, and Pope Gregory the Great reveals anxiety over the validity of a popular local shrine to one “Sixtus” (presumably, like Alban, a Roman-​era martyr). Gregory’s response was to send new relics of a known martyr of the same name and urge Augustine to divert visitors to these more verifiable relics.29 Such management of relics became common practice and in time fuelled a strategic geography of pilgrimage. Many shrines of early holy men and women, being monastic in affiliation, were originally inaccessible to the pilgrim. Abbots and abbesses of monasteries were buried in inner enclosures open only to fellow religious and a few privileged patrons. The pressure to make remains more widely accessible increased, however, and in time the remains of saints came to be elevated into shrines in burial grounds or crypts and later elevated further into the chancels of churches—​such as we see in the shrine of Thomas de Cantilupe, in the Cathedral (Hereford) at the end of the St. Thomas Way.30 In Britain these trends were fuelled by continental fashions mostly originating in northern France, where the promotion of the cult of saints, fuelled by competing political forces in the late Merovingian period, became a highly developed 26  Miranda Aldhouse-​Green, Pilgrims in Stone:  Stone Images from the Gallo-​Roman Sanctuary of Fontes Sequanae (Oxford: Archaeopress, 1999), 76–​87.

27  M. Herity, Studies in the Layout, Buildings and Art in Stone of Early Irish Monasteries (London: Pindar, 1995), 90–​125. 28  Gildas, De excidio Britanniae X; Gildas:  The Ruin of Britain and other Works, ed. and trans. M. Winterbottom (Chichester: Phillimore, 1978), 19, 92.

29  Richard Sharpe, “Martyrs and Local Saints in Late Antique Britain,” in Local Saints and Local Churches, ed. A. Thacker and R. Sharpe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 75–​154, at 123–​25. 30  John Crook, English Medieval Shrines (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2011), 235–​39.

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industry.31 In Britain, local rulers, frequently following continental trends in church “reform,” sponsored architectural rearrangements designed to facilitate the exhibition of relics, as part of larger redevelopments of older cathedrals and minsters. This activity is often seen as synonymous with the Norman push (ca. 1070–​1200) to redevelop British cathedrals and dioceses, but actually began in the late Saxon period and continued into the high Middle Ages beyond the main period of Norman cathedral-​building.32 In time the chancels of major churches were opened out by ambulatories and radiating chapels.33 Additional entry points were provided into crypts. These developments allowed public access to shrines and easy circulation of pilgrims around the church without interruption to services, or intrusion on chancel spaces that were the preserve of clergy. John Crook has observed that the provision of multiple chapels also reflected the installation of monastic chapters, privately saying mass in different parts of the churches, but these developments can also be understood as related, inasmuch as the new chapters were often supported by the expansion of pilgrimage.34 In the present era cathedrals are restoring shrines of saints as part of a more general renewal of their visitor and liturgical programmes. In 2012, St. David’s Cathedral restored the superstructure of the shrine of St. David. Also in 2012, Hereford restored the shrine of St. Thomas de Cantilupe.35 These cathedrals face some of the same challenges as the original shrine-​builders faced. The return of explicit provision for devotion at shrines changes the divisions of space in the Cathedral and challenges institutional liturgical practices as well models of visitor services. Smaller churches also participated in pilgrimage. In the Middle Ages monastic houses of the new “reformed” orders, such as the Benedictines (including the Cistercian and Cluniac orders) and the Augustinian Canons built strong relationships with local cult sites in the landscape—​for example the relationship of Llantarnam in Gwent with the holy well of St. Mary of Penrhys. Local churches and monasteries benefited from the foreign connections of the new Norman nobility (after 1066) to acquire relics, which in turn made them attractive to pilgrims. Margam Abbey, one of the sites on the St. Thomas Way, acquired a relic of the True Cross, while another on our route, Usk, had a relic of St. Radegund of Poitiers that may have been brought there by Alicia de la Marche, wife of Gilbert de Clare.36 The highly ornamented church at Kilpeck, one of the highlights on the St. Thomas Way, has decoration sourced in southwest France, perhaps through the influence of Oliver de Merlimond, steward to Hugh Mortimer (d. 1181), who is known 31  See in general, John Crook, The Architectural Setting of the Cult of Saints (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 32  Crook, English Medieval Shrines, 71–​132.

33  Alan Doig, Liturgy and Architecture from the Early Church to the Middle Ages (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 143–​67. 34  Crook, The Architectural Setting, 159. 35  Crook, Medieval English Shrines, 310.

36  A. G.  Mein, “St Mary’s Priory Church, Usk:  Some Recent Work and some New Theories,” Monmouthshire Antiquary 16 (2000): 55–​72, at 68–​71.

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to have had links to that region and also to have made a pilgrimage to Compostela.37 He sponsored work at nearby Shobdon, which in turn appears to have influenced the design at Kilpeck, a remarkably rich church for its fairly remote location. A development that influenced the culture of pilgrimage in the high Middle Ages was the advent of “indulgences,” which proliferated from the thirteenth century onwards. The grant of an indulgence to a cathedral allowed pilgrims to a shrine there to receive remittance of sin, either in a proportionate amount, or in total (a “plenary” indulgence). Around 1320, the process of securing status as a saint and associated indulgences for St. Thomas de Cantilupe at Hereford, the concluding point of the St. Thomas Way, worked to the material benefit of the Cathedral as a pilgrimage destination.38 Today the ideas of sin and Purgatory appear harsh, but for the medieval person they appealed where the alternative was to die outside a state of grace. Penances were a palliative to a state of sin that was potentially fatal to the sinner. The transactional quality of indulgences concerned medieval writers as well as Reformation theologians—​though the former were generally more concerned with abuses, while the latter were concerned with the more general issues of whether “faith” versus “works” led to the attainment of grace.39 These negative responses may, however, exaggerate the significance of indulgences in motivating pilgrimage. Recent historiographies have observed the need to examine diverse motivations, including the spirituality of pilgrimage and its link to popular devotion to saints—​moving beyond the industrial/​ commercial assessments of indulgences and shrine-​building.40 The virtues of pilgrimage to remote locations, such as those in Wales and the borders, was sometimes cast in terms of the effort made to reach them—​for example the famous claim that two pilgrimages to St. David’s attracted an indulgence equal to one made to Rome.41 These remote spaces had other possible appeals, however, beyond simply the effort to reach them; pilgrims were attracted by the holiness of saints who had lived in remote and liminal spaces and sought to visit these. 37  Elizabeth Salter, English and International:  Studies in the Literature, Art and Patronage of Medieval England, ed. D. Pearsall and N. Zeeman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 7–​8; Malcolm Thurlby, The Hereford School of Romanesque Sculpture (Logaston: Logaston, 1999), 26–​28, 71–​73. 38  G. Aylmer and J. Tiller, Hereford Cathedral: A History (London: Hambledon, 2000), 71–​76; Robert W. Shaffern, “Indulgences and Saintly Devotionalisms in the Middle Ages,” Catholic Historical Review 84 (1998): 643–​61, at 646.

39  R. Swanson, Indulgences in Late Medieval England: Passports to Paradise? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), chap. 7. 40  Shaffern, “Indulgences,” 644; D.  Webb, Medieval European Pilgrimage (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), 49–​74.

41  J. W. Evans, “The Bishops of St. Davids from Bernard to Bec,” in Pembrokeshire County History: 2 Medieval Pembrokeshire, ed. R.  F. Walker (Haverfordwest:  Pembrokeshire County History Trust, 2002), 270–​311, at 273.

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The Experience of Pilgrimage

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Often in looking at the historical causes and modes of pilgrimage we see the big picture, the sums made from large pilgrimages, the social role of indulgences. We do not necessarily reflect on what pilgrimage meant in more personal, relatable, or sensory ways. The pilgrimage of William Cragh to Hereford in 1290 can be understood as an act of thanksgiving, as much as a journey with intent to gain grace. The female mystic Margery Kempe (fl. 1413–​30s), following a number of visions, entered on a life of celibacy within marriage, as well as pilgrimages to Rome, the Holy Land, and Santiago de Compostela. These expressions by individuals reflected the “retreat” as well as “destination” causes of pilgrimage and also evinced individual circumstances. The twice-​hanged William Cragh travelled in company with the lord who judged him (William de Briouze) and the lord’s wife who had interceded for him, across the Welsh border into the land of the English king against whom he had rebelled. Such stories perhaps remind us that pilgrimage could be concerned with belief in rather raw, sometimes confronting ways. The pilgrimage journey was always a diverse experience and in making comparisons we need to understand this diversity. How people travelled varied greatly from case to case. Some walked out of ascetic sentiment, but others out of simple necessity. Aristocratic pilgrims could travel direct by sea to their destinations, or overland on horses or in wheeled vehicles.42 To do this was not to cheat or somehow lessen the experience. The detail of indulgences makes clear that remission is often a reward for the extent of the sacrifice in making the journey, but a medieval theologian would not see excessive exertion as more virtuous than a measured one. Pilgrimage here, as in many other respects, takes its cue from monastic theology. In monastic asceticism the extent of hardship was expected to be appropriate to the physical condition of the individual.43 No one would think less of a woman for looking to her physical safety; most would not question that nobles might travel in a mode appropriate to their rank.44 Here again we can make a comparison with the modern St. Thomas Way. Pilgrims will travel it by foot, but probably more often by car and bicycle. This is not inauthentic, but an adjustment to the relative opportunities and dangers of the modern journey. Our modern pilgrims, however, make exertions in travelling around the sites en route. This too has medieval parallels. Outdoor sites as well as large churches often were (and still are) experienced through circumambulatory pilgrimages around “stations.” To earn a pilgrim badge on the St. Thomas Way—​a new take on a medieval token of fulfilment of the pilgrimage commitment—​the pilgrim must carry out one or more exertions to answer a question. Our journey hence understands both a linear pilgrimage to the shrine at Hereford, but also local pilgrimage activities at the stations en route to achieve the 42  Reader, Pilgrimage, 68.

43  For example, The Rule of St. Benedict, chap. 36.

44  See for example Gildas, Fragmenta IV; Fragmenta, ed. and trans. Winterbottom, 80–​81 and 143–​44.

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badges. A monastic theologian would find in this a symbolism of the liturgy of hours. Each day is a cycle of prayer from the morning to the night office—​a pattern of prayer that marks the passing of the day. But if each day is a cycle, in Christian theology life on earth is not a cycle; it begins with birth and it ends with death, symbolized in the liturgy by the anniversaries of Jesus’s birth and death.45 The linear journey symbolizes life, but the circumambulatory one reminds us to live each day. Thinking about spiritual life holistically in this way also points us to other resonances of our modern pilgrimage with historical experiences. The churches we encounter will frequently not be in “service” mode. Such out-​of-​hours, sometimes “silent,” use of smaller churches is a growing aesthetic, reflecting ideas of “primitive,” de-​institutionalized worship. John Kinross writes of visiting churches: I realised that it was the small, musty ones that seemed to speak to us more of God. They may be difficult to find, the path to them may lead across a boggy field, the door sometimes needs a rugby footballer’s heave to open it, but once inside it is a different matter. There is peace, wonder, quiet; all elements sadly missing in our world today.46

The lack of parishioners is, ironically, seen to make more space for God, who is hence found in a deserted (apophatic) space. Here is also found quiet for reflection and a respite from modern culture. This is in some ways a modern aesthetic of church buildings, seeking God in places remote from urban “bustle.” The pilgrims are also, however, repurposing the church as a space continuously available for reflection—​an older model of use of church buildings.

Conclusion

The St. Thomas Way is a modern re-​enactment of a medieval story, using modern technology and contemporary ideas of recreation. Pilgrimage is a many-​layered expression of spirituality through movement in and between spaces. It is characterized by diverse expressions, which connect to evolving historical models and theological motifs. Resonances of these can be found in the wider context as well as in the specific modern re-​creations and re-​enactments of pilgrimage. Reflection on these is important for both the experience of the modern pilgrimage-​tourist and for the interpretation as well as management of the heritage resources they encounter en route.

Key Reading

Crook, John. The Architectural Setting of the Cult of Saints. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Cusack, Carole M. “History, Authenticity, and Tourism: Encountering the Medieval while Walking St. Cuthbert’s Way,” in Journeys and Destinations: Studies in Travel, Identity, and Meaning, edited by A. Norman. Newcastle-​upon-​Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2013, 1–​21. 45  Odo Casel, The Mystery of Christian Worship (New York: Crossroad, 1962), 63–​67.

46  John Kinross, Discovering England’s Smallest Churches (London:  Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 2003), xv.

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Dietz, Maribel. Wandering Monks, Virgins, and Pilgrims: Ascetic Travel in the Mediterranean World, ad 300–​800. University Park: Penn State University Press, 2005. Hurlock, Kathryn. Medieval Welsh Pilgrimage. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Reader, Ian. Pilgrimage: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Webb, Diana. Medieval European Pilgrimage. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002.

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Chapter 2

IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF THE PAST: MEDIEVAL MIRACLE STORIES AND THE ST. THOMAS WAY IAN L. BASS1

It is no

understatement to claim that St. Thomas of Hereford—​perhaps better known as St. Thomas de Cantilupe—​is one of the most unfamiliar and under-​studied of England’s medieval saints.2 In the city and diocese of Hereford, where he was bishop from 1275 to 1282, he is less well known than the early medieval St. Ethelbert of East Anglia (d. 794) and the martyred Archbishop of Canterbury, St. Thomas Becket (1162–​ 1170, canonized 1173). Outside the diocese of Hereford, fewer people still have ever heard of this obscure St. Thomas—​unless they are historians focused on thirteenth-​ century English governmental or ecclesiastical history.3 Some may remember references to “Tommy Canty” in the 2015 ITV miniseries based on Phil Rickman’s novel, Midwinter of the Spirit.4 Yet for many, if they have ever heard of England’s second St. Thomas, it is likely as not for the miraculous resuscitation of William Cragh, the hanged man of Swansea. It is this particular story of “miracle, memory and colonialism in the Middle Ages” that has brought about renewed interest in the miracles of St. Thomas of Hereford.5 From this interest many articles, books, a documentary, and the recent Swansea “City Witness” project have all had their part in thrusting St. Thomas of Hereford back into public view after almost seven hundred years in obscurity.6 1  I am grateful to Professor Emeritus Nigel Saul, Professor Janet Burton, and Dr. Kathryn Hurlock for comments and suggestions on the draft text of this chapter. The translations of the miracles are taken from work by the author and Lydia Prosser with plans for a Manchester Medieval Sources edition in the future. A preliminary version of this paper was first presented at the St. Thomas Way launch day at Hereford Cathedral in July 2018. 2  The standard reference work on St. Thomas’s life, death, and cult remains: St. Thomas Cantilupe, Bishop of Hereford: Essays in his Honour, ed. E. Meryl Jancey (Hereford: Friends of Hereford Cathedral Publications, 1982). 3  For the most recent work on St. Thomas’s political career see references throughout S. T. Ambler, Bishops in the Political Community of England, 1213–​1273 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).

4  Midwinter of the Spirit, ITV, three episodes, September 23–​October 7, 2015; Phil Rickman, Midwinter of the Spirit (London: Macmillan, 1999).

5  Robert Bartlett, The Hanged Man: A Story of Miracle, Memory and Colonialism in the Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004). This story was popularized by a documentary: The Saint and the Hanged Man, BBC Four, one episode, April 16, 2008.

6  There is an extensive bibliography surrounding the Cragh miracle in addition to the above. For a summary of the evidence see: Ian L. Bass, “Rebellion and Miracles on the Welsh Marches: Accounts from the Miracle Collection of St. Thomas de Cantilupe,” The Welsh History Review 29 (2019): 503–31, at 504–5 nn. 3 and 4.

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The purpose of this chapter is to explore the St. Thomas Way through the witness testimonies of miracles recorded at St. Thomas’s shrine in Hereford Cathedral between 1287 and 1312.7 The miraculous cures were recorded in manuscripts held at the shrine well into the fourteenth century.8 The contemporary chronological list of miracles survives today as Oxford, Exeter College, MS 158 and this manuscript is considered to contain the second highest number of miracle cures performed by a medieval English saint after St. Thomas Becket.9 In viewing these miracle stories as we tread the St. Thomas Way ourselves, we gain a glimpse of details of medieval daily life and how such a cult in this period could be transmitted into the wider world. This chapter first focuses on places along the St. Thomas Way—​notably Swansea, Longtown, Kilpeck, and Hereford—​where medieval pilgrims recorded as having been cured at St. Thomas’s tomb came from. The second half of the chapter turns to the other nine sites along the Way and the thematic strands that have been associated with them by the project in the online resources: Margam and learning; Ewenny and religious life; Llancarfan and visions; St. Fagans and spaces; Caerphilly with castles and the March; Newport and frontiers; Usk and identity; Abergavenny with individuals and their stories; and finally, Patrishow and popular devotion. The stories chosen to illustrate these themes and locations have been chosen as representative of the types of miracles that occurred. Throughout this article, St. Thomas will normally be referred to as Bishop Thomas, since he was not canonized a saint until 1320.10

The Medieval Pilgrims Swansea

The route of the St. Thomas Way begins in Swansea, where a miracle took place in the winter of 1290. On December 2 that year, the custodians at Bishop Thomas’s tomb in the north transept of Hereford Cathedral witnessed the noble procession of Lord William de Briouze, 7  “St. Thomas Way,” http://​thomasway.ac.uk/​.

8  John of Tynemouth (fl. ca. 1350) noted that several manuscripts with miracle stories had survived at the shrine into the fourteenth century: John of Tynemouth, Nova Legenda Anglie:  Collected by John of Tynemouth, John Capgrave, and others, ed. Carl Horstman, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1901), vol. 2, 372–​73.

9  Oxford, Exeter College, MS 158 (hereafter Exeter 158). Fols. 1f–​47r contain the chronological list of miracles from 1287 to 1312. There is one final miracle on fol. 60r dating to 1404. Most of the miracles were copied into the proceedings of the canonization inquiry held in London and Hereford between July and November 1307: Vatican, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vat. Cod. Lat. 4015 (hereafter VL 4015), fols. 265v–​308v. For an examination of the manuscript evidence, see Harriett Webster, “Mediating Memory:  Recalling and Recording the Miracles of St. Thomas Cantilupe,” in Power, Identity and Miracles, 44–​60, originally printed in Journal of Medieval History 41 (2015): 292–​308. Both manuscripts are available for consultation in microfilm format at Hereford Cathedral and it is from these microfilms that this article has been produced. 10  Hereford, Hereford Cathedral Archives, 1445.

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Lady Mary de Briouze, their son William, and household familia arriving at the end of their pilgrimage.11 With this noble entourage was a dishevelled young man, named William Cragh, who had walked barefoot and was still wearing the noose with which he had been hanged only a few days before. Here, at the bishop’s tomb, the lord, the lady, and their household told everyone present Cragh’s story. Cragh had been caught and imprisoned in late 1290 for his part in the rebellion of Rhys ap Maredudd, lord of Dryslwyn (Carmarthenshire), which had involved Cragh’s participation in the burning of Oystermouth Castle in 1287.12 In the days preceding his hanging, Cragh prayed to Bishop Thomas for more time to do suitable penance for his sins and bent a penny—​medieval coins had a high silver content and were therefore malleable, and the bending of the penny denoted it as a votive offering to a saint by taking it out of circulation.13 When the executioners first tried to hang him, the rope snapped. When they attempted again, the crossbeam of the gallows broke. The third time they succeeded. When Cragh’s family went to bury him, suddenly the hanged man sat up and vociferated that “I confess that my life has been restored to me by God on high through the merits of the holy Bishop Thomas de Cantilupe.”14 The Briouze family believed in this miraculous resuscitation and brought Cragh on pilgrimage to the tomb in Hereford to give thanks; Lord William even gave a wax votive of a man on the gallows to the tomb.15 A similar case, which can be used to contextualize Cragh’s hanging and resuscitation by Bishop Thomas, is that of Christina Cray. Cray, from the parish of Wellington (Herefordshire) was hanged on Whitsun (Sunday, June 6) 1294 near St. Martin’s Church to the south of the city of Hereford. According to the witnesses, a stray pig had wound up with her drove, and instead of returning the animal to its rightful owner, she tried to sell it, for which offence she was subsequently sentenced and hanged.16 Afterwards, her 11  For an examination of the Briouze family, see Daniel Power, “The Briouze Family in the Thirteenth and Early Fourteenth Centuries: Inheritance Dtrategies, Lordship and Identity,” in Power, Identity and Miracles, 93–​144, originally printed in Journal of Medieval History 41 (2015): 341–​61.

12  “Chronicle of the Thirteenth Century,” Archaeologia Cambrensis, 3rd ser., 302 (1862): 272–83, at 281; Bartlett, The Hanged Man, 75. For more on Rhys’s rebellion see: Ralph A. Griffiths, “The Revolt of Rhys ap Maredudd, 1287–1288,” Welsh History Review 3 (1966): 121–43. For the miracles see: Bass, “Rebellion and Miracles,” 517–24; Ian L. Bass, “St Thomas de Cantilupe’s Welsh Miracles,” Studia Celtica 53 (2019): 83–102, at 87–89 no. 5.

13  For more on the significance of folded pennies and, specifically, its use in the Cragh miracle see: Richard Kelleher, “Pilgrims, Pennies and the Ploughzone: Folded Coins in Medieval Britain,” in Divina Moneta: Coins in Religion and Ritual, ed. Nanouschka Myrbery Burström and Gitte Tarnow Ingvardson (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018), 68–​86.

14  Exeter 158, fols. 18v–19r. For the transcriptions and translations see: Bass, “St Thomas de Cantilupe’s Welsh Miracles,” 94–95 no. 13. 15  Vatican Library 4015, fol. 9v.

16  In the Middle Ages, the theft of any item worth more than 12d. could result in the death penalty: William Searle Holdsworth, A History of English Law, 17 vols. (London: Methuen, 1903–​66), vol. 3, 366–​67; Frederick Pollock and Frederick William Maitland, English Law Before the Time of Edward I, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1898), vol. 2, 494–​97.

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friends took her body to St. Martin’s Church and used the rope with which she had been hanged to measure her body—​the rope intended for use as the wick of a votive candle of the same length in return for a miracle—​and slowly, over the course of the day, she was revived through Bishop Thomas’s intercession. When she came to her senses, Christina reported that she had seen a vision of a bishop as she was on the gibbet who put his hand between her neck and the rope, reassuring her that she would not die.17 In both of these cases the people had been executed through the judicial law of the land; yet their faith, repentance, and wish to do further penance to atone for their sins allowed Bishop Thomas’s healing powers to override the secular powers of law and order. In fact, those deposing on Christiana’s miracle in the 1307 canonization inquiry claimed that “God and the said St. Thomas conducted royal justice” in this case.18 As has been recently argued by Andrew Fleming, this intervention is part of a wider contrast between secular and religious power. For instance, Archbishop John Pecham of Canterbury (1279–​1292) stressed the supremacy of divine justice and opposing royal encroachment in court matters which had occurred.19 As Fleming notes, “In this context, Thomas’s purported intercession represents a vivid affirmation of the power of justice derived from a religious source, rather than from the frailties and errors of royal justice. By inference, this also reflected local attitudes towards Thomas’s personal ability to deliver just political and legal judgement.”20 Longtown

Within the first year of the cult some 166 miraculous cures were reported and written down in Exeter 158 by the custodians at Bishop Thomas’s tomb. This, unfortunately, means that many of the entries written for this first year are remarkably terse and it is difficult to extract any meaningful information from them. Because there was such a great number of cures occurring and needing recording, the custodians generally chose only to record the person’s name, parish, diocese (if outside of Hereford), and ailment. Conversely, as fewer miracles were reported month on month and year on year, the reports became more detailed and witness-​oriented.

17  Andrew Fleming, “Popular Perceptions of Episcopal Power in Late Thirteenth-​ Century Hereford: Thomas de Cantilupe and the Case of Christina Cray,” in Episcopal Power and Local Society in Medieval Europe, 900–​1400, ed. Peter Coss, Chris Dennis, Melissa Julian-​Jones, and Angelo Silvestri, Medieval Church Studies 38 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2017): 259–​70, at 262–​63; Andrew Fleming, “The Cult of St. Thomas Cantilupe and the Politics of Remembrance” (DPhil thesis, University of Oxford, 2013), 168–​74.

18  Vat. Cod. Lat. 4015, fol. 231r. “Et regratiata deo et dicto sancto Thome afferendo justiciariis regiis”; Fleming, “Popular Perceptions,” 263. 19  See W.  R. Jones, “Bishops, Politics, and the Two Laws:  The Gravamina of the English Clergy, 1237–​1399,” Speculum 41 (1966): 209–​45; Robert N. Swanson, Church and Society in Later Medieval England (London: Wiley-​Blackwell, 1993), 140–​90, esp. 147–​49. 20  Fleming, “Popular Perceptions,” 265; Fleming, “The Cult of St. Thomas,” 173–​74.

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For the village of Longtown, all three pilgrims from here came within the same month of 1287, all appearing at Bishop Thomas’s tomb a few days apart. First was Wentliana, who had been mute for six weeks; upon her visit to the tomb she received back her powers of speech.21 On the next feast day, Philip de Ewyas Lacy arrived complaining that one of his legs was crippled; later that day he could walk again without limping.22 Finally, on the next day, “a certain man by the name of Abwilim de Ewyas Lacy, crippled in each side for half a year, obtained the ability to walk from heaven.”23 However, this was not the last of the miracles for Longtown’s residents. Wentliana actually appears in the miracle collection a few days after her first cure. She had apparently been so overenthusiastic when she first got her voice back that she “squandered repeatedly” the speech which she had miraculously received and Bishop Thomas seems to have punished her for abusing the cure by taking her speech away again. Returning to Hereford Cathedral with her parents and, apparently, in a more devout frame of mind, Bishop Thomas granted her voice back a second time.24 These miracles may be short and devoid of many historically significant details, but they show how quickly word of the cult of St. Thomas of Hereford travelled. From the time of the translation of Bishop Thomas’s remains on Holy Thursday, April 3, 1287, to the time of Wentliana’s first cure was seven weeks. Popular support within the parish of Longtown seemed to exhaust itself within May 1287, for no other pilgrims from there reported a miracle cure for the rest of the cult’s duration. Kilpeck

A similar problem is faced by historians when it comes to a Kilpeck miracle. Only one person in the miracle collection is said to have come from the parish, and his miracle can be translated in full as: “On the next Lord’s day following, namely on the fifth kalends of May [April 27, 1287], a certain man by the name of Thomas de Kilpeck, who for twelve years had been bereft of sight in one of his eyes, obtained sight in the same.”25 Unlike the Longtown residents, it seems that Thomas de Kilpeck did not inspire any of his fellow parishioners to seek a miracle at the tomb in Hereford. However, it may be that there were other influences on Thomas’s miraculous cure. St. Peter’s Abbey, Gloucester, had a monastic dependency based in the parish of Kilpeck. In fact, St. Peter’s had three such dependencies in the diocese of Hereford, all of which produced their own miracle recipient within the first year of Bishop Thomas’s cult.26 Moreover, St. Guthlac’s Priory in Hereford itself was a dependency of St. Peter’s. In 1288 the prior of St. Guthlac’s 21  Exeter 158, fol. 4r.

22  Exeter 158, fol. 4v. 23  Exeter 158, fol. 5v. 24  Exeter 158, fol. 4v. 25  Exeter 158, fol. 3r.

26  Ian L. Bass, “Communities of Remembrance: Religious Orders and the Cult of Thomas de Cantilupe,” Journal of Medieval Monastic Studies 7 (2018): 237–​72, at 247.

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came to Bishop Thomas’s tomb to report the miraculous resuscitation of the abbot of Gloucester’s horse, which had collapsed at the priory.27 These miracles demonstrate that the networks through which the cult spread were important for the canons at Hereford Cathedral to utilize and capitalize on. There is a further set of connections that can be drawn between Kilpeck and the miracle collection. During the siege of Dryslwyn Castle in August and September 1287 several miracles occurred for the English army.28 One happened for Ralph le Buteler, who had been struck just underneath the eye by a defender’s arrow. He and his friends prayed for his deliverance and healing from the wound, since they feared for his life. With the extraction of the arrow and some time, he healed and kept his sight and life.29 After returning from the siege, Ralph continued to play a role in the tenurial politics of Herefordshire.30 Following the successful siege of Dryslwyn Castle, it was granted in September 1287 to the Plugenet family. In 1288, Alan II de Plugenet’s son was feeding his goat on the castle battlements, when the animal plunged to its death. The onlookers prayed to St. Thomas for the creature’s health, and to their amazement the little beast resuscitated.31 In 1310, these two knights, Ralph le Buteler and Alan II de Plugenet, were involved in a lengthy court case over the ownership of the manor of Kilpeck. Ralph’s family pedigree allowed him the right to inherit through his mother, the granddaughter of Hugh de Kilpeck.32 It is miracles such as these which show the highly interconnected nature of religious and tenurial politics in Herefordshire at the time of Bishop Thomas’s cult, which allowed for its rapid transmission.33 Hereford

Hereford itself was the epicentre of the cult, which began on Holy Thursday 1287 with the translation of Bishop Thomas’s remains from the Lady Chapel of Hereford Cathedral to a new, bespoke tomb in the north transept.34 The very first miracle reported in Exeter 158 concerns the Bishop of Hereford’s forester, John de Massington, from his Bosbury estate.35 It is therefore unsurprising to find some miraculés from the city of Hereford itself; 27  Exeter 158, fol. 8v; for a transcription and translation see, Bass, “Communities of Remembrance,” 256–​57.

28  See Bass, “Miracle in the Marches,” 40–​45; Bass, “St Thomas de Cantilupe’s Welsh Miracles,” 87–89 no. 5. 29  Bass, “Miracle in the Marches,” 42; Exeter 158, fol. 5v. 30  Hereford, Hereford Cathedral Archives, 1719; 1751.

31  Bass, “Miracle in the Marches,” 42; Exeter 158, fols. 8r–​v.

32  Bass, “Miracle in the Marches,” 45; Inquisitions Post Mortem: Volume 5, Edward II, ed. J. E. E. S. Sharp and A. E. Stamp (London: HMSO, 1908), 75, 78–​79. For a summary of Hugh de Kilpeck’s significance see Nigel Saul, Lordship and Faith: The English Gentry and the Parish Church in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 58–​59. 33  For a substantial examination of the political connotations see Fleming, “The Cult of St. Thomas.” 34  Exeter 158, fol. 1r.

35  Exeter 158, fol. 1r. John de Massington witnessed charters and court suits by both Bishop Thomas and Bishop Richard Swinfield (1283–​1317), and rendered military service to the bishops for the two virgates of land he held of them: Hereford, Hereford Cathedral Archives, 1442; Hereford,

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however, what is curious is that there are only nine miracle recipients, out of over 450, said to have come from the city.36 It is unknown why so few Herefordians are recorded as having received miracles at Bishop Thomas’s shrine, since pilgrimage in the city must have been high. Yet, as Ronald Finucane has previously shown, as the duration of the cult went on, the distance travelled by reported pilgrims receiving cures increased.37 This is not to say that pilgrimage for the citizens of Hereford or Herefordshire was diminished over the period Bishop Thomas’s cult was active. At points in the late 1280s and early 1290s, King Edward I (r. 1272–​1307) visited Bishop Thomas’s tomb in Hereford and witnessed the townsfolk processing barefoot to the Cathedral.38 Yet it seems that the spread of the cult was ultimately left for those outside of the city and county after the first year’s cures and the initial boom of interest had transmitted the cult to the rest of England, Wales, and Ireland. Once again the records of healings that occurred for Hereford citizens are necessarily short, as is expected of the accounts from the cult’s first year. Of the miraculous recipients from the city we have people such as Richard, who had been blind for five years, receiving sight in his right eye. Partial cures and even relapses, such as that of Wentliana de Ewyas Lacy mentioned above, were commonplace in medieval miracle collections. Any form of cure, whether full, partial, or delayed, was viewed as having been influenced by the aura of a particular saint’s shrine, which also made the medieval definition of “cure” flexible.39 Furthermore, as Finucane noted, we know of cases of relapsed miraculés only because his or her second cure has been entered into the register, yet “how many relapsed pilgrims never improved or never re-​visited a shrine, it is impossible to say.”40 Similarly, a potential saint could even deliberately inflict illness in order to demonstrate their powers to heal. This might be especially tempting if the saint felt that they had been ignored, or their powers doubted. In one such case in Exeter 158, a woman named Juliana, who was blind in her right eye, “had herself irreverently insulted the aforementioned miracles in many ways […] and for that reason, as it was reasonably thought by Herefordshire Archives and Records Centre, AA/​1, fol. 133r; A. T. Bannister, “A Transcript of ‘The Red Book’, a Detailed Account of the Hereford Bishopric Estates in the Thirteenth Century,” Camden Miscellany XV (London: Camden Society, 1929), i–​x, 1–​36, at 18; The Register of Thomas de Cantilupe: Bishop of Hereford (ad 1275–​1282), ed. Robert George Griffiths, Cantilupe Society 1 (Hereford: Wilson and Phillips, 1906), 78; The Register of Richard de Swinfield: Bishop of Hereford (ad 1283–​1317), ed. William W. Capes, Cantilupe Society 2 (Hereford: Wilson and Philips, 1909), 112, 404. 36  Exeter 158, fols. 1r, 1v, 2r, 3r, 4r, 6v.

37  Ronald C. Finucane, “Pilgrimage in Daily Life: Aspects of Medieval Communication Reflected in the Newly-​established Cult of Thomas de Cantilupe (d. 1282), Its Dissemination and Effects upon Outlying Herefordshire Villagers,” in Wallfhart und Alltag in Mittelalter und Früher Neuzeit, ed. Harry Kühnel (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1992), 165–​218, at 210, 212. 38  Vat. Cod. Lat. 4015, fols. 97v–​98r; Bass, “Miraculous Marches,” 11.

39  Ronald C. Finucane, Miracles and Pilgrims:  Popular Beliefs in Medieval England (New York: St. Martin’s, 1995), 78. 40  Finucane, Miracles and Pilgrims, 78.

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those standing by, she fell down to the ground as if dead.” At the same time Matilda de Corderhale, who had received a cure the day before, found Juliana’s body and carried her to the tomb.41 After lying at the tomb for a while, “eventually her [Juliana’s] spirit having been vivified, she sat up” and publicly professed her wrongdoing in doubting Bishop Thomas and the cures. Upon doing this, she was even granted the sight she longed for in her right eye.42 We find people with many different ailments coming from the city to the shrine, offering a small cross-​section of Hereford’s inhabitants at the time. For instance, one Philip, “the harp player,” had suffered with painfully crippled legs from the age of sixteen, which the physicians of the time could not heal. Upon coming to the Cathedral he was cured and in front of the gathered crowd walked around Bishop Thomas’s tomb unaided.43 One Adam, “the painter,” had an illness that caused his hands to swell to such an extent that he could not move them—​an illness totally debilitating for his profession. In coming to Bishop Thomas’s tomb he was cured.44 Even churchmen in the city called upon the putative “Saint” Thomas. Adam Absalon, a chaplain of the city, suffered from quinsy: a rare complication of tonsillitis known today as a peritonsillar abscess. We are told that he had “an inflammation so great and severe in his throat and on his neck that he could not speak or swallow anything, and he was thought by his doctors and friends to be about to die immediately.” At this point, he fell asleep one night and asserted to those present when he woke that he had seen “that man of God, Thomas, arrayed with red priestly robes.” The bishop had touched his neck, “seizing [it] so that quickly he might rise and freely speak.” Thus Adam awoke, cured.45 Finally, a cellarer named Thomas had suffered for fifteen weeks with fevers. Upon coming to Bishop Thomas’s tomb, he received his health.46

The Themes

Margam: Learning During his lifetime before he became bishop of Hereford in 1275, Thomas de Cantilupe had been Chancellor of Oxford University twice.47 However, there seem to be no accounts in Exeter 158 specifically connected with Oxford University or medieval 41  Exeter 158, fol. 1r.

42  Exeter 158, fol. 1v. A similar thing occurred for a cleric from Cirencester named Roger, who had publicly slandered “the life and miracles” of Bishop Thomas. Upon doing so his hands were crippled. A public apology and penitence at the tomb in Hereford after pilgrimage there resulted in healing. Exeter 158, fol. 5v; Bass, “Miracle in the Marches,” 40; Bass, “Miracle in the Marches,” 40; Bass, “St Thomas de Cantilupe’s Welsh Miracles,” 87–89 no. 5. 43  Exeter 158, fol. 1r.

44  In fact, this was one of three such cures in a row on the same day. Exeter 158, fol. 3r. 45  Exeter 158, fols. 3r–​v. 46  Exeter 158, fol. 4r.

47  A. B. Emden, A Biographical Register of the University of Oxford to ad 1500, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1956), 347.

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learning in general. On the other hand, we should note that there are seven cures that relate to pilgrims originating from the county of Oxford, one of which includes Simon of Ghent, future Bishop of Salisbury (1297–​1315), as a witness.48 Whether these cures were influenced by Bishop Thomas’s former tenure as Chancellor of Oxford University is unclear. More importantly, Exeter 158 contains part of the Relatio processus. This was a document written sometime between 1318 and 1320, providing the grounds for the cardinals to approve the cult and sanctity of Bishop Thomas.49 This document is a form of summarium that analysed the miracles investigated in the 1307 canonization inquiry, and applied the most comprehensive of medieval theological and medical or “scientific” thought to the cures. The author looked at each miracle in turn and the witness testimonies in order to provide possible objections and replies to prove that certain miracles were indeed bona fide cures. This is what André Vauchez observed to be “the only medieval document which allows us to observe in detail how the clergy reacted in the face of the supernatural.”50 Of the twenty-​six miracles that were scrutinized as part of this process, only one was outright rejected; three were declared dubious; and all others were agreed to be miraculous cures. A breadth of theological and “scientific” knowledge was brought to bear in order for these conclusions to be made. In the marginal notes we see references to various passages in scripture and sources such as St. Augustine of Hippo’s City of God, in order to ratify various cures.51 Practices such as measuring bodies were compared to stories of Elias and Elisha, who were reported in the Book of Kings to have stretched themselves over deceased children’s bodies before the children were restored to life.52 Other references quoted the gospels, for miracles attributed to Christ and the apostles, again as a way to contextualize the miracles in the best possible way.53 In addition to these references, judgements were made with the most precise “scientific” knowledge available, wherein the author came up with theories for why a child who fell from a great height only received minor fractures, rather than dying on impact.54 This source is important precisely because, as Vauchez writes, it “shows that the alleged ‘credulity of medieval people’ faced with a miracle is a myth. If ordinary people were easily 48  Exeter 158, fols. 5v, 11v–​12r, 12v, 16v–​17r, 18v, 21v–​22r, 24r–​v; Simon of Ghent (de Gandavo) is mentioned in the miracle performed for William de Swillington, rector of Gonalston (Nottinghamshire), fols. 16v–​17r. 49  Exeter 158, fols. 48r–​59v; transcribed in André Vauchez, Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages, trans. Jane Birrell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), appendix 1, 540–​54, from Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS lat. 5357A, fols. 66r–​69v, with a detailed examination in Vauchez, Sainthood, 481–​98, esp. 488–​98. 50  Vauchez, Sainthood, 489. 51  Exeter 158, fol. 52v.

52  Exeter 158, fol. 50v quotes “III Regum XVII”: “Helias enim expandit se atque mensus est super puerum tribus vicibus clamauit que ad dominum et art.” 53  Exeter 158, fol. 49v.

54  See Vauchez, Sainthood, 490.

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deceived and inclined to detect the hand of God in every apparently inexplicable fact, churchmen, especially the ‘great minds’, were not as naïve as is sometimes assumed.”55 Thus, we have a blend here between the supernatural and the natural, the belief in a miracle and an attempt to apply learning to explain its validity. Ewenny: Religious Life

There are eleven miracles recorded in Exeter 158 that specifically mention the presence of a medieval religious or monastic order.56 These miracles have been demonstrated to show the information historians can gain from viewing miracle collections as an objective resource, from being able to utilize a micro-​historical lens when viewing monastic visitations, care for the sick, and animal husbandry, to filling in gaps of knowledge surrounding various heads of medieval religious houses. Of importance to note too is the location of a second cultic site for Bishop Thomas founded at Ashridge in Hertfordshire by Edmund, Earl of Cornwall (1249–​1300). Edmund also built a subsidiary chapel at Hambleden, Buckinghamshire, where Bishop Thomas had been born and baptized as an infant.57 This chapel was closed by Bishop Oliver Sutton of Lincoln (1280–​1299) in 1296, since Bishop Thomas’s cult was not that of an official saint and many people had flocked to Hambleden in the hope of obtaining a miraculous cure.58 An important association here is that of the Hereford Mappa Mundi and the Duchy of Cornwall world-​map fragment. Both were drawn contemporaneously, with the Hereford Mappa potentially being displayed next to Bishop Thomas’s tomb in Hereford Cathedral while Edmund of Cornwall possibly presented the Duchy of Cornwall Mappa to the College of Bonhommes at Ashridge.59 This therefore demonstrates a remarkable attempt to orchestrate a promotional campaign in two separate locations for the same putative saint. There may, perhaps, have been an image of St. Augustine of Hippo on the Duchy of Cornwall map much like on the Hereford Mappa, in order for the two religious locations to be linked in joint enterprise.60 In Exeter 158, the miraculous cures range from brothers at various monastic houses from Oxford to Penrith falling ill and needing divine aid in order to heal, to a group of twenty-​one pigs at Wootton Wawen Priory (Warwickshire) being found dead in their sty, 55  Vauchez, Sainthood, 494.

56  This has been covered extensively in Bass, “Communities of Remembrance.”

57  Exeter 158, fol. 48r; Bass, “Communities of Remembrance,” 253–​54. For more on the connections between St. Thomas and Edmund of Cornwall see Fleming, “The Cult,” 259–​42. 58  Oliver Sutton, The Rolls and Register of Bishop Oliver Sutton, 1280–​1299, ed. Rosalind M. T. Hill, 8 vols., Lincoln Record Society (1948–​86), vol. 5, 143–​44, 173.

59  London, Duchy of Cornwall Office, Maps and Plans, 1; Peter Barber, “Medieval Maps of the World,” in The Hereford World Map:  Medieval World Maps and their Context, ed. P. D. A. Harvey (London: British Library, 2006), 1–​44, 21. For more on the fragment see Graham Haslam, “The Duchy of Cornwall Map Fragment,” in Géographie du Monde au Moyen Age et à la Renaissance, ed. Monique Pelletier (Paris: Editions du Comité des Travaux Historiques et Scientifiques, 1989), 33–​44. 60  Bass, “Communities of Remembrance,” 251.

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eventually being revived by Bishop Thomas’s divine power.61 The most noteworthy of the “monastic miracles” associated with Bishop Thomas’s cult is that of Roger of Conwy in 1303, which was investigated in depth by the canonization commission in 1307.62 As a toddler, Roger had fallen into the dry moat at Conwy Castle, falling some twenty-​five feet onto the rocks below. Upon discovery of his cold and broken body, the coroner was called and he was proclaimed dead. The burgess of Conwy Castle went down into the moat and bent a penny over Roger’s chest and signed him with the cross, promising that if Bishop Thomas revived him the onlookers would take Roger to the bishop’s tomb in Hereford. To everyone’s amazement, Roger revived and the crowd carried him to the parish church—the former Cistercian abbey church of Aberconwy, the monastic community having been removed to Maenan—​where Bishop Anian I of Bangor (1267–​1307) and Abbot David (or Dafydd) of Maenan (ca. 1284–​1303) were celebrating divine service for Sir John de St. John, one of Bishop Thomas’s nephews.63 This is important for a number of reasons. First is that we are able to accurately extend Abbot David of Maenan’s abbacy to 1303, when previously his last recorded mention in the historical record was April 28, 1301 when he professed fealty to Edward I.64 Secondly, there are social and cultural implications of the Bishop of Bangor and Abbot of Maenan celebrating mass for an English royal familiares in the abbot’s former abbey church less than twelve years after the Edwardian conquest of Wales. Finally, this miracle was recorded and copied in the form of a letter patent which held the seals of the Bishop of Bangor, Abbot of Maenan, the justiciar of north Wales, several of the Prince of Wales’s chaplains, and other important figures in medieval Welsh politics. Miracles recorded in such detail as Roger of Conwy’s are few and far between in Exeter 158; however, they do have their uses in illuminating the political climate of the time and once again reveal the networks through which the cult was transmitted. For instance, the justiciar of north Wales who witnessed and sealed the letter attesting to Roger’s miracle had actually sent a man from his own household to Bishop Thomas’s shrine in 1287, which resulted in a cure.65 Similarly, Bishop Anian of Bangor knew Bishop Thomas when he had been Bishop of Hereford, having been requested to look after the diocese of Hereford when Bishop Thomas was away overseas.66 Therefore this miracle was one of the best placed in order to accentuate the cult of Bishop Thomas 61  Bass, “Communities of Remembrance,” 258–59.

62  For its importance and a case study, see Susan J. Ridyard and Jeremy A. Ashbee, “The Resuscitation of Roger of Conwy:  A Cantilupe Miracle and the Society of Edwardian North Wales,” in Power, Identity and Miracles, 61–​76, originally published in Journal of Medieval History 41 (2015): 309–​24. 63  Exeter 158, fols. 38v–​39r; for a transcription, translation, and historical notes for this miraculous cure see, Bass, “Communities of Remembrance,” 260–​65. 64  Calendar of the Patent Rolls Preserved in the Public Record Office:  Edward III 1343–​1345 (London: HMSO, 1891–​1916), 231; Bass, “Communities of Remembrance,” 241. 65  Exeter 158, fol. 5r; Bass, “St Thomas de Cantilupe’s Welsh Miracles,” 87 no. 3.

66  The Register of Thomas de Cantilupe, 253; Bass, “Communities of Remembrance,” 250–​51 and n. 52.

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and highlight to historians the highly interconnected politics surrounding the bishop’s remembrance in the wider world. Llancarfan:  Visions

There are a number of visionary experiences present within the Hereford miracle collection, of which one is of great importance for medieval historians. The first of the miraculous visions occurred in December 1287, when Bishop Thomas’s nephew, John de Tregoz, came to his uncle’s tomb seeking a cure. John slept at the shrine one night, praying for his cure, when he was seized by bad dreams which he recounted the next day. At first he had witnessed a bishop in white vestments rise up out of the funerary brass inlaid on the bishop’s tomb—​one of the earliest such brasses in England.67 The bishop thrust his hand into John’s side, where his pain originated, causing John anguish thinking that the bishop would “rent apart his stomach from that side all the way to the opposite side.” After this, John watched on and saw the head, “as if of a very black Ethiopian,” crawl down between his knees, before a fissure appeared in the floor and swallowed it. A few hours after this dream, John had enough strength to recount his vision and swore that he had no more pain where once it had been.68 Of significance for medievalists is a miracle story dated February 27, 1290, when William de Helston, a merchant from Cornwall, who had been declared mad by his friends for two years, came to Bishop Thomas’s tomb. His friends had suggested that in order to seek healing, William should pray to “the blessed bishop of Hereford.” William was scathing of their advice, replying that “I indeed consider that man to be as holy as that Simon de Montfort is, who is buried at Evesham, and whom you named even a saint.” Upon uttering these words he immediately collapsed. In his catatonic state he witnessed the apparition of a bishop, who vociferated, “Friend, do not further ridicule the servants of God with your ignorant words,” and signed William with the cross. When William awoke, he signed himself with the cross and was apparently cured of his madness.69 The significance of this story comes from the fact that it is the last mention in the historical record of the nascent cult of Simon de Montfort who had a short-​lived miraculous career at Evesham.70 Several other miracle stories in Exeter 158 concern demons, much like those that appear in wall paintings in medieval churches such as Llancarfan.71 One curious tale, 67  Sally Badham, “The Brasses and Other Minor Monuments,” in Hereford Cathedral: A History, ed. Gerald Aylmer and John Tiller (London: Hambledon, 2000), 331–​35, at 333. 68  Exeter 158, fol. 6v; see also Ian Bass, “Miraculous Marches: The Cult of Thomas de Cantilupe and the Mortimers,” Journal of the Mortimer History Society 1 (2017): 1–​18, at 7. 69  Exeter 158, fols. 13v–​14r; see also, Bass, “Miraculous Marches,” 16.

70  C. Valente, “Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester, and the Utility of Sanctity in Thirteenth-​century England,” Journal of Medieval History 21 (1995): 27–​49. St. Thomas had, in fact, sent two falcons to be healed at Evesham, followed by his seneschal, Nicholas:  William Rishanger, The Chronicle of William de Rishanger of the Barons Wars: The Miracles of Simon de Montfort, ed. J. O. Halliwell (London: Camden Society, 1840), 71. 71  Exeter 158, fols. 16r, 20r, 22r–​v, 23r, 24r, 26v, 46v–​47r.

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however, is not recorded in Exeter 158, but in the contemporary fourteenth-​century chronicle of Bartholomew Cotton describing a remarkable apparition in 1290. It is worth quoting the tale in full here: During the same time a certain unheard of and almost impossible event happened in the cathedral church of the canons of Hereford, where a certain demon in the habit of a canon was sat in a certain stall after Matins had been sung. A certain canon approached it; believing it to be a brother and a canon, he asked for what reason it was sitting there. The demon was silent and did not utter a sound. The same canon, more terrified than could be said, perceived it to be an evil spirit. Trusting in the Lord, he commanded in the name of Jesus Christ and Saint Thomas de Cantilupe that it should not depart from that place, but it must remain there. At first, it endured the words out of miraculous power; but eventually, after the canon had sought help, it conceded and remained there. At last they beat him [the demon] and bound him in chains. The demon, defeated and bound in such a manner, lay there before the shrine of the aforementioned St. Thomas.72

What occurred afterwards, or what the “demon’s” true identity was, is not said. It is, however, similar to another case in St. Thomas’s miracle collection when, again in 1290, Agneta Noreys made her way to Hereford. It is said that she came “to the shrine of the man of God, having a demon; one that was mute.” When spending a night in prayer around Thomas’s tomb, she signed herself with the cross and the demon was finally ejected.73 Could it be in the case reported by Bartholomew Cotton that the other canon had simply lost his voice, only to be beaten and bound before Thomas’s tomb? Furthermore, it is also interesting to note that the episode related by Cotton is said to have occurred in 1290, some thirty years before Thomas’s papal canonization in April 1320, yet heavily utilizes the word sancti to describe the thaumaturge. It seems to be another attempt at popular canonization. This had first occurred with the translation of Thomas’s remains in Holy Week 1287. Furthermore, allusions were made to sancti Thome in Bishop Richard Swinfield of Hereford’s (1283–​1317) episcopal register, the canonization inquiry, the Relatio Processus used by the cardinal examiners to depose on Thomas’s sanctity, and a vision of St. Etheldreda of Ely to Walter of Chewton Mendip in 1294. In other parts of Herefordshire there was public acceptance of Bishop Thomas as a saint, as illustrated by the installation of a scheme of stained-​glass windows in Credenhill Church (Herefordshire) in 1306 which included one of Thomas standing next to his saintly namesake, Thomas Becket.74 72  Bartholomew Cotton, Bartholomaei de Cotton, Monachi Norwicensis, Historia Anglicana (ad 449–​1298), ed. Henry Richards Luard, 2  vols., Rolls Series 16 (London:  Longman, 1859; repr. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), vol. 1, 427–​28, “Appendix B to page 179: Legend of an Apparition”; see also Ian Bass and Lydia Prosser, “Midwinter of the Spirit: ‘All Roads Lead to Tommy Canty,’ ” 2015, https://​medievaljourneys.wordpress.com/​2015/​10/​07/​midwinter-​of-​the-​ spirit-​all-​roads-​lead-​to-​tommy-​canty/​. 73  Exeter 158, fol. 16r.

74  Bartlett, The Hanged Man, 117; The Register of Richard de Swinfield, 230–​31, 369, 440; Exeter 158, fols. 25v–​26r; London, British Library, Harley MS 6726, fol. 201r. I am grateful to Professor Nigel Saul for this last reference.

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St. Fagans: Spaces

Exeter 158 is also fascinating because it can offer us a glimpse into the daily life of the medieval person. In some instances, miracles are recorded with the canonical hours of the day, allowing historians to time some of the events that occurred and potentially reconstruct them in great depth to the hour of the day on which it occurred. The miracle collection is a useful source for conducting micro-​historical studies and finding details not often uncovered in other documents.75 One such story that allows for a glimpse of daily life is that of Alienora, the wife of William ap Hywel. She and her husband lived near Hay-​on-​Wye, and one evening she was busy cooking in the kitchen when the fire suddenly got out of control “so that the devouring flame which burst through the roof spread itself about in each direction, stirred up horribly by the great breezes of the wind.” No one around could tackle the blaze and the house was in flames. Exeter 158 tells us that “while she [Alienora] prayed, she began to bend a penny against the fire; when this had been done, suddenly all the flames were seen to be extinguished so wonderfully and easily just like the flame of a candle when it is blown out with force. Nothing further was set alight afterwards.”76 It is events such as this which are lost in the great chronicles and records of the period, in which the average person does not feature much. The areas in which people lived also had their dangers in the Middle Ages, with several miracles relating to the drowning and resuscitation of children who had fallen into nearby rivers or fishponds.77 A story recounted in great detail in the canonization inquiry surrounded the drowning of a girl named Joanna in a pool next to the local tavern in Marden (Herefordshire). She had gone to the tavern that afternoon with her parents, where she met John, her godmother’s child. The two went off to play, and together skimmed stones in the pool. John pushed Joanna in, and she sank, drowning. Onlookers did not wish their fun to be disturbed by summoning the local coroner so pushed her floating body into the river Lugg nearby. Joanna was eventually extracted and the group cut her belt because her stomach was engorged from taking on water, and began making her look peaceful, believing she was beyond mortal help. Joanna’s parents took a length of rope and measured her to Bishop Thomas, praying for her revival in return for the votive candle. Miraculously she came to and was carried around the village to the local parish church, dedicated to Hereford’s second patron saint—​St. Ethelbert of East Anglia.78 75  Michael Goodich, “Microhistory and the Inquisitiones into the Life and Miracles of Philip of Bourges and Thomas of Hereford,” in Medieval Narrative Sources: A Gateway into the Medieval Mind, ed. Werner Verbeke, Ludovicus Milis, and Jean Goossens (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2005), 91–​106; Sari Katajala-​Peltomaa, Gender, Miracles and Daily Life: The Evidence of Fourteenth-​Century Canonization Processes, Studies in the History of Daily Life 800–​1600, 1 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2009); Bass, “Communities of Remembrance,” 237–​72. 76  Exeter 158, fol. 11v.

77  E. C. Gordon, “Accidents among Medieval Children as Seen from the Miracles of Six English Saints and Martyrs,” Medical History 35 (1991):  145–​63; Craig, “Describing Death”; Nancy Mandeville Caciola, Afterlives: The Return of the Dead in the Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2016), 95–​104. 78  Gordon, “Accidents among Medieval Children,” 160–​62; Fleming, “The Cult of St. Thomas,” 157–​69; Bass, “Miraculous Marches,” 15–​16; Caciola, Afterlives, 98.

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If it was not for the survival of medieval miracle collections, such as Exeter 158 for St. Thomas of Hereford, stories such as these which bring out the humanity of people some seven hundred years removed from us would be lost. When we can view, as if through a magnifying glass, the events of a single day in the life of someone from this period, our understanding becomes so much richer. Alienora and William’s miracle and that for Joanna too highlight some of the perils faced in the daily life of the average medieval person, where fire could soon devastate one’s home, or a careless push or slip could result in death by drowning. Certainly, similar events can and do happen now, but the stories we can read here allow us to transport back to people seven hundred years ago, putting the humanity back into a subject often viewed from a far distance.

Caerphilly: Castles and the March

In the Middle Ages, castles were a central administrative hub that affected many people’s lives. Moreover, many castles were also significant symbols of seigniorial power. Castles also required vast amounts of manpower to operate. It should come as no surprise, then, to find mention of several such fortresses and some of the people associated with their running, or even their central location in conflict, within Exeter 158. In three accounts we find members of castle households with the appearance of William Heyward, a servant of Robert de Ros, lord of Belvoir Castle in Lincolnshire; Walter, called “Boton,” clerk of Corfe Castle in Dorset; and in Roger of Conwy’s miracle we meet the castle cook, Gervase, the constable, William de Cicon, and potentially the castle chaplain, Simon.79 More specifically for the March, we find mention of Dryslwyn and Goodrich castles in miracle stories.80 The stories surrounding Dryslwyn are, perhaps, of the most interest, observing the siege of Dryslwyn Castle throughout August and September 1287 and adding a human perspective to the siege.81 In these stories we find one knight who was hit in the face by an arrow, where the “arrowhead became horribly fixed, deep within his head.” In another, the southeastern wall of the castle chapel collapsed, crushing many nobles under masonry, yet the squire of one of these men could identify his master and, calling out for divine aid, was able to lift a heavy block off the knight “with wonderful ease,” rescuing him.82 It therefore offers a unique chance to see medieval warfare in action and the steps taken in some instances when things go terribly wrong for certain individuals. Unfortunately, the account for the cure involving a pilgrim from Goodrich Castle is far less sensational. In 1287, a woman named Eva had somehow managed to shatter her tibia at the castle, rendering her unable to walk very well. Upon being brought to St. Thomas’s tomb in Hereford, it is said that “suddenly, with many marvelling and praising God, she was healed so that she ran into the church and outside, clapping her hands in rejoicing.”83 79  Exeter 158, fols. 20v–​21r, 23v–​24r, 38v–​39r; see also Bass, “Communities of Remembrance,” 260–​65. 80  Exeter 158, fols. 4r, 5r, 5v–​6r, 7v, 8r–​v.

81  For the best account of the siege see, Griffiths, “The Revolt,” 133–​34. 82  Exeter 158, fols. 5v–​6r; Bass, “Miracle in the Marches,” 40–​45. 83  Exeter 158, fol. 4r.

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Newport:  Water/​Frontiers Herefordshire was placed on the periphery of England in an area known as the March of Wales. It was a place where the king’s writ did not always run, as demonstrated by Walter III de Clifford in 1250, who once made a royal messenger eat a royal summons, wax seal and all.84 The 1280s were also a time of rebellion, such as that of Rhys ap Maredudd, and various other clashes between the English and Welsh. This becomes particularly visible in Exeter 158, when we read miracles for fighters such as Milo de Aula from Eardisley who, in July 1295, was so surrounded by Welshmen that the only escape he saw was to ford the Wye at a dangerous point. Trusting in God and Bishop Thomas, he prayed and forded the river with his servant easily, apparently being “carried beyond the river, across onto the bank, in a wonderful way, by a huge ship and were freed from all danger by the help of the man of God.”85 Similarly, we hear tales of those on the Welsh side too, such as Gruffudd ap Madog, from Llanrhystud, who “swore that he had been wounded by an arrow during the last Welsh war” and was thought to have no hope of medical aid. He prayed to Bishop Thomas that the arrow could be removed and he could keep his life, and if this happened he would give his best cow as an offering. It is unknown whether the operation to remove the arrowhead occurred in Hereford Cathedral, but from the details of the account it is possible: the surgeon extracted the arrowhead without any cries of pain and afterwards Gruffudd formed a wax offering with the arrowhead as part of it.86 Therefore, within Exeter 158 we find tales from both sides of the Anglo-​Welsh conflict in this highly charged period. In its placement on the Welsh March, Bishop Thomas’s cult was well placed to penetrate into Wales as well as England. As Michael Goodich argued, there is a case to be made that Bishop Thomas’s cult was utilized by both sides during this time of rebellion and war as a vehicle for reconciliation. Miracles such as William Cragh’s showcase a “joint pilgrimage to Thomas’s shrine at Hereford [which] represented public recognition of a shared religious faith which could overcome political differences.”87 The manuscript’s inclusion of miracle entries for both Welsh and English participants suggests that Bishop Thomas could be seen as acting (or being used) posthumously as a mediator between the two factions, attempting to bring about peace through shared faith. Usk: Identity

We know from surviving items, such as Bishop Thomas’s episcopal seal, that familial identity was important to him.88 However, it is sometimes difficult to discern personal identities from documents and descriptions. The only real identity that we can pick out from 84  Matthew Paris, Matthaei Parisiensis, Monachi Sancti Albani, Chronica Majora, ed. Henry Richards Luard, 7 vols., Rolls Series 57 (London: Longman, 1872–​83), vol. 5, 95. 85  Exeter 158, fols. 28v–​29r; Bass, “St Thomas de Cantilupe’s Welsh Miracles,” 96–97 no. 18. 86  Exeter 158, fols. 29v–​30r; Bass, “St Thomas de Cantilupe’s Welsh Miracles,” 97–98 no. 19. 87  Goodich, “Foreigner, Foe, and Neighbor,” 21.

88  See in particular Melissa Julian-​Jones, “Sealing Episcopal Identity: The Bishops of England, 1200–​1300,” in Episcopal Power and Local Society, 239–​58, at 243–​47.

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Exeter 158 in general is a person’s station in life and, if they are prominent enough, who they are in the wider historical record. Perhaps the most interesting glimpses of individual identities that we get from the miracle collection are those where different languages come to the fore. Considering Hereford’s placement on the Welsh March it becomes clear from the 1307 canonization inquiry that the Herefordian dialect was something quite distinctive. The cardinal examiners brought in two Franciscans from the local convent in order to translate depositions made in Welsh, such as that of William Cragh, but also to interpret the local “vocabulary, which differs in the diocese of Hereford from many other dioceses in the kingdom of England.”89 The concept of the border identity of Herefordshire being somewhere not quite English and not quite Welsh is perfectly encapsulated in the miracles of John de Burton from Bishop’s Castle (Shropshire) and one unnamed youth. In 1288, John de Burton was begging on the streets in Ludlow (Shropshire) since he was unable to speak. He was taken to Bishop Thomas’s tomb by the guardian of the Hereford Franciscans when his tongue suddenly grew, and amazingly he could be heard to speak both English and Welsh.90 Similarly, in 1292, the unnamed youth, who had had no power of speech for twenty-​six years, came to the shrine and also received the ability to speak both English and Welsh fluently.91 Hereford’s own border identity therefore played into the development of St. Thomas’s cult wherein the English and Welsh could both see their own identities as benefitting the thaumaturge’s healing capabilities. Abergavenny: Individuals and their Stories

Exeter 158 as a source is all about the shared stories of individuals who came to a medieval tomb and believed they had been healed of some form of ailment. For the most part, the accounts contained within the collection are of individual people; however, as time went on and the cult developed, the custodians eventually placed an emphasis on mentioning witnesses to these events. Thus, what this record actually provides is but a small, cherrypicked selection of stories from people who were lucky enough to receive what they believed to be a miracle and then have it believed enough by a registrar at Bishop Thomas’s tomb for them to write it down. More importantly, St. Thomas’s collection is valuable because it attaches dates to virtually all of the miracles, which is not often found among other medieval miracle collections. Unfortunately, for all the information we have gained from 460 or so individuals managing to get their stories heard and recorded, we have lost so much more about many who visited the shrine and did not receive a miracle or only came on pilgrimage. Unlike the noble, lordly families, such as the Briouzes or the Mortimers, the registrars did not find it useful to account that other people had been around when the miracle had occurred or for the record that they would write until several years into the cult’s lifecycle. We therefore miss out on all of those individuals passing through and the stories they may have told each other. A testimony that brings this home comes from 89  Vat. Cod. Lat. 4015, fol. 197r.

90  Exeter 158, fol. 7v; Richter, “Collecting Miracles,” 54–​58. 91  Exeter 158, fol. 24r.

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a witness from Worcester Cathedral, who claimed, in the canonization inquiry in 1307, that the halfpennies and farthings deposited at Worcester by pilgrims passing through to Hereford still amounted to some £10 annually.92 This was a vast sum of money, when one considers that 240 pennies constituted a pound, and that these denominations were halves and quarters. According to Finucane and Ben Nilson, the figure proffered by the Worcester source equates to some 1,200 pilgrims still passing through annually, if they donated a halfpenny each, and up to 2,400 if they all donated a farthing.93 This, in turn, constitutes at least 24,000 people over the twenty years since the cult started in 1287, although this figure is likely to be substantially higher since the cult was waning by 1307. A number of individuals thus chose to take the cult of St. Thomas of Hereford into the pilgrimage experience, yet are forgotten, either because their stories were not worth recording or because they did not receive a cure. Patrishow: Popular Devotion

Every miracle in Exeter 158 shows medieval popular devotion in action. The very act of coming to the Hereford shrine in thanks or in search of a cure highlights the nature of personal and popular veneration in the Middle Ages. The specific pilgrimages enacted by the Briouze family with William Cragh, or the noble entourage of the justiciar of north Wales and several of the Prince of Wales’s chaplains attending the pilgrimage of Roger of Conwy in thanks for the toddler’s healing, showcase the potency of this popular devotion. Further to this, other forms of veneration occurred within the miracle as part of the request for the cure. Symbolic methods such as bending a penny or measuring the body to form the wick of a votive candle were as much an expression of popular devotion as they were a part of the ritual for invoking the putative saint’s aid. Similarly, the cases above of Juliana of Hereford and Roger the cleric from Cirencester involved the doubting and diminishing of people’s popular devotion to Bishop Thomas’s cult, which caused them to be struck down with illness and need healing themselves, becoming part of the cycle. A further element of popular devotion to the cult involved the relics of the dead bishop. Relics, like the miracles, spread from Hereford and thus took some of the healing powers with them. These places became centres for local veneration: a knife Bishop Thomas ate with as well as a painting of him at Hambleden, bits of his hair shirt at Leominster, and parts of his iron-​link belt and clothing at Winchester.94 In addition there was the heart burial at Ashridge, and, as Finucane observed, “[f]‌ragments of bone were also dispersed,” such as that obtained by Edmund III Mortimer, which he enshrined at Wigmore Abbey in 1380.95 92  Vat. Cod. Lat. 4015, fol. 122v.

93  Finucane, Miracles and Pilgrims, 180; Ben Nilson, Cathedral Shrines of Medieval England (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1998), 160. 94  Vat. Cod. Lat. 4015, fols. 18r–​v, 27v, 35r, 56v, 88r–​v.

95  R. C. Finucane, “Cantilupe as Thaumaturge: Pilgrims and their Miracles,” in St. Thomas Cantilupe, Bishop of Hereford: Essays in his Honour, ed. E. Meryl Jancey (Hereford: Friends of Hereford Cathedral Publications, 1982), 137–​44, at 142; for Edmund’s relic see Bass, “Miraculous Marches,” 13.

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The popular devotion of Bishop Thomas’s cult spread so much in the 1280s that it was accepted by English royalty. Edward I firmly believed in the bishop’s healing powers, coming to the shrine several times and even instituting an annual ritual of bending a penny dedicated to Bishop Thomas for the protection of the king’s hawks and royal chargers.96 His son and grandson, Edward II (1307–​1327) and Edward III (1327–​1377), also patronized the bishop’s shrine: the former pushing for Bishop Thomas’s canonization, and the latter attending a translation of his relics to a new shrine in 1349.97 It was this popular devotion that pushed the cult’s existence through the stories of miracles, the receipt of indulgences for embarking on a pilgrimage, and letters of postulation by English bishops and nobles, which resulted in Pope John XXII (1316–​1334) canonizing Bishop Thomas a saint in April 1320.98

Conclusion

This article has added contextual information to the modern route of the St. Thomas Way with some of the medieval stories that can be extracted from the contemporary miracle collection of St. Thomas of Hereford. What this has offered is only a snapshot of what the 450 or so entries in Exeter 158 can offer to our understanding of the many facets of medieval life. Yet by studying these themes closely, we gain a more comprehensive picture of medieval thought and belief, with an amazing witness to political upheaval, rebellion, conflict, daily life, pilgrimage, and life and death able to be read. Many places along the St. Thomas Way hold a deep significance, especially when paralleled with stories that can be related from the medieval pilgrims who believed they received a heaven-​ wrought miracle at St. Thomas’s shrine in the north transept of Hereford Cathedral. In contextualizing the St. Thomas Way in such a manner, we bring the stories of these people from the Middle Ages back to life and augment them with our own. It is safe to say that we follow not only William Cragh and the Briouze family from Swansea, but also, through thinking on the evocative themes with each location along the St. Thomas Way, we follow in the footsteps of all 450 or so people who recorded a miracle at St. Thomas of Hereford’s shrine in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. In fact, we tread the route along with the many thousands of others who were not recorded as receiving a miracle but made a similar pilgrimage. That is the greatest legacy of projects like the St. Thomas Way:  it produces a real connection of the present with everyone’s past, and affords agency to those otherwise not studied in the historical record. Even though St. Thomas 96  Finucane, Miracles and Pilgrims, 94; Bass, “Miraculous Marches,” 10–​11; Bass, “Miraculous Marches,” 13. For a list, albeit incomplete, of Bishop Thomas’s relics see William Smith, The Use of Hereford: The Sources of a Medieval English Diocesan Rite (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), 713–​18. 97  Bass, “Miraculous Marches,” 11.

98  For the letters of postulation: Vat. Cod. Lat. 4015, fols. 260v–​263v; The Register of Richard de Swinfield, 234, 358, 369–​70. For the indulgences: Hereford, Hereford Cathedral Archives, 1420, 1421, 1422, 1423, 1424, 1425, 1426, 1427, 1428, 1429, 1430, 1431, 1432, 1433; see also, R. N. Swanson, Indulgences in Late Medieval England:  Passports to Paradise (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). The bull of canonization survives: Hereford, Hereford Cathedral Archives, 1445.

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of Hereford’s miraculous powers seem to have stopped being recorded in 1404, maybe some of those who tread this modern route will experience their own miracles to add to a story which is some seven hundred years in the telling.

Key Reading

Bartlett, Robert. The Hanged Man: A Story of Miracle, Memory and Colonialism in the Middle Ages. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. Bass, Ian L. “Rebellion and Miracles in the Welsh March: Accounts from the Miracle Collection of St Thomas de Cantilupe,” Welsh History Review 29 (2019): 503–31. Clarke, Catherine A. M., ed. Power, Identity and Miracles on a Medieval Frontier. London: Routledge, 2017. Dragulinescu, Stefan. “Thomas of Hereford’s Miracles: Between Aquinas and Augustine.” Journal of Medieval History 44 (2018): 543–​68. Finucane, Ronald C. Miracles and Pilgrims:  Popular Beliefs in Medieval England. New York: St. Martin’s, 1995. Fleming, Andrew. “Popular Perceptions of Episcopal Power in Late Thirteenth-​ Century Hereford: Thomas de Cantilupe and the Case of Christina Cray.” In Episcopal Power and Local Society in Medieval Europe, 900–​1400, edited by Peter Coss, Chris Dennis, Melissa Julian-​Jones, and Angelo Silvestri, pp. 259–​70. Turnhout: Brepols, 2017. Jancey, E. Meryl, ed. St Thomas Cantilupe, Bishop of Hereford:  Essays in his Honour. Hereford: Friends of Hereford Cathedral Publications, 1982.

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Chapter 3

PLACE, TIME, AND THE  ST. THOMAS WAY: AN EXPERIMENT IN FIVE ITINERARIES CATHERINE A. M. CLARKE

The St. Thomas Way heritage route from Swansea to Hereford encompasses a suite

of bespoke multimedia resources designed to facilitate imaginative, affective, embodied engagement with medieval stories, characters, and beliefs, as participants explore the route and its thirteen core locations. This essay should be read alongside my introduction to the present volume, “Remaking Medieval Pilgrimage: The St. Thomas Way,” which gives a detailed account of the various digital and nondigital tools and strategies developed to catalyze encounters with multiple historical moments at sites on the Way. The resources were developed with the visitor experience as primary objective: privileging experiential, participatory encounters with the past, in place, rather than any abstract theoretical or academic reflections. And yet, through this practice-​led, engagement-​driven research, the capacity of the St. Thomas Way to contribute to, and extend, current scholarly conversations around time and temporalities has emerged as a key dimension of the project. In the past two decades, theoretical discussion of time and temporalities has seen renewed attention and vigour—​and much of the most innovative, pioneering work has come from medievalists.1 This essay—​together with the introduction to this volume—​ offers a distinctively new, even radical, contribution to this flourishing theoretical field. In a sphere of enquiry often dominated by highly theoretical discussion at the most rarefied, sophisticated scholarly level, what can a practice-​led project such as the St. Thomas Way add to critical thinking?2 What kinds of new insights can the applied scholarship of the St. Thomas Way project suggest, and how might it meet with and drive 1  Recently, Elizabeth Herbert McAvoy’s introduction to the volume Reconsidering Gender, Time and Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Brewer, 2015), “In Principio: The Queer Matrix of Gender, Time and Memory in the Middle Ages” (1–​12), offers an overview of influential theories on time and temporalities. Recent landmark texts on the topic from medievalists include Paul Strohm’s review essay, “History without Historicism,” Postmedieval: A Journal of Medieval Cultural Studies 1 (2010): 380–​91; Carolyn Dinshaw, How Soon Is Now? Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012); and Thomas A. Prendergast and Stephanie Trigg’s co-​authored volume, Affective Medievalism:  Love, Abjection and Discontent (Manchester:  Manchester University Press, 2018), of which only the introduction was available at the time of writing the present essay. Further key theoretical approaches and scholarly contributions will be explored over the course of this discussion. 2  While Dinshaw and Prendergast and Trigg find inspiration in unconventional sources—​amateur re-​enactors for Dinshaw, or an “old chair” for Prendergast and Trigg, in their “Introduction”—​their responses and modes of analysis are highly theorizing and abstract.

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forward theoretical thinking? This essay seeks to explore those possibilities, and also to investigate how approaches to temporalities might be nuanced when place is drawn into critical focus alongside time. With multiple theories, varied conceptual models, and sometimes contradictory arguments from diverse scholarly perspectives, the complex subject of time and temporalities seems to demand an unconventional critical approach and form of writing. So, rather than a typical, linear essay, pursuing a central strand of argument, this chapter is structured more experimentally, as a way of exploring whether a different shape of academic writing—​encompassing disparate sites of inspiration and critical engagement—​might better serve an investigation into the complexities of time in place, and might more fully acknowledge the tensions, parallels, and divergences between varied approaches. This essay is structured around five itineraries, each of which overlay and intersect with sections or sites on the St. Thomas Way heritage route, as well as with aspects of creative practice or anecdotal experience involved in developing the project: the pilgrimage of William Cragh from Swansea to Hereford in 1290, the medieval cleric Gerald of Wales’s sticky crossing of the river Neath near Margam, the travels of the phantom King Herla and his companions in the Welsh Marches (as narrated by Walter Map), poetic journeys into the region by Geoffrey Hill and T. S. Eliot, and, finally, a bus trip from Hereford down into the Welsh valleys, as recalled by the twentieth-​century writer and cultural theorist Raymond Williams. Immediately, these five itineraries foreground the presence of multiple temporalities in the same geographical space, from medieval to modern; although many of the textual journeys themselves complicate or transgress boundaries between historical moments. Each itinerary opens up a particular way of thinking about relationships between time and place, prompting specific questions, opportunities for theoretical engagement, or sites for revisiting critical positions and practices. These five itineraries also present varied idioms for writing about—​and conceptualizing—​time in place, from medieval narratives (across a number of genres) to modern poetry and autobiography. In what ways can this experimental essay structure catalyze new questions and critical approaches? And—​in the same spirit of experimentation—​how can insights gained from the practice-​based elements of the St. Thomas Way project enlarge and transform theoretical understanding of time and multiple temporalities in place?

William Cragh: Acts of Faith

The itinerary that most obviously and fundamentally runs through the St. Thomas Way is, of course, the pilgrimage of William Cragh from Swansea to Hereford in late 1290. Having been hanged by William de Briouze, the Marcher Lord of Gower, Cragh was restored to life in what was understood by local people as a miracle of Thomas de Cantilupe. Cragh and Lord and Lady de Briouze then made a journey together to the shrine of St. Thomas in Hereford Cathedral to give thanks. The itineraries, in Swansea itself, of Cragh and the witnesses to his hanging, recovered and analyzed from the depositions in MS Vat. Lat. 4015, were previously mapped and visualized by the research project that preceded the St. Thomas Way:  “City Witness:  Place and Perspective in Medieval Swansea.” To encounter the routes of Cragh and his fellow witnesses in Swansea today—​through

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the multilayered digital atlas produced by “City Witness,” with its time-​slice layers of Swansea in ca. 1300, 1852, and the present; or through the pavement marker trail, which invites visitors to follow the paths of medieval witnesses through the modern urban environment—​is already to experience relationships between time and place in unsettling and provocative ways.3 I have written elsewhere about the disorienting ruptures and dislocations between the modern city and its medieval antecedent: the results of wartime bombing as well as later redevelopment, which together have erased almost all trace of the medieval urban environment.4 Following the itinerary of William Cragh in Swansea today exemplifies the dynamics of time in urban space as articulated by the cultural geographer Mike Crang: “the polychronic city as a realm of shattered and fragmented times,” a “folded or haunted” site simultaneously of temporal convergences and estrangement.5 Beyond Swansea, however, reconstructing the itinerary of William Cragh to Hereford requires much bolder scholarly and imaginative leaps. As discussed in the Introduction to this volume, the brief note on Cragh’s pilgrimage, on folio 221v of MS Vat. Lat. 4015, gives no detail of the route taken, which was conjectured by the St. Thomas Way project team through analysis of a range of external sources, along with some informed guesswork. The Way itself does not purport to follow Cragh’s journey (which can never be definitively known) precisely; instead it is “inspired” by his pilgrimage, selecting locations and routes that help best to tell the story of the medieval March of Wales. There are sites—​moments or places—​where the journey of William Cragh and his companions likely intersects very closely with the route of the St. Thomas Way, such as the stepping stones over the river Ewenny at Ogmore, or at Margam Abbey, where the pilgrims probably rested overnight.6 But these points of contact move beyond definitive scholarly proof, offering themselves rather as sites of faith, as walkers on the Way bring the past into confluence with the present through their own imaginative commitment and agency. The resources produced by the St. Thomas Way project seek to catalyze the imaginative and affective engagement required to enable this experience of multiple historical moments: from the medieval soundscapes which evoke other temporalities within place, to the somatic activities which re-​embody medieval practices (for example, making votive models), or the walking routes which trace medieval patterns of movement through the landscape. From the start, then, faith, belief, and imagination are key to thinking about place and time through the St. Thomas Way. And the itinerary of William Cragh brings into focus the ways in which faith—​and especially the conceptual paradigms suggested by medieval pilgrimage, or the idea of the holy relic—​can disrupt and enlarge rigid historical notions of time and place. 3  See www.medievalswansea.ac.uk.

4  See Catherine A. M. Clarke, Medieval Cityscapes Today (Leeds: Arc Humanities, 2019).

5  Mike Crang, “Rhythms of the City: Temporalised Space and Motion,” in Timespace: Geographies of Temporality, ed. John May and Nigel Thrift (London: Routledge, 2001), 187–​207, 191, 195.

6  See the “Place and History” sections and further multimedia resources for these locations on the St. Thomas Way website (www.thomasway.ac.uk).

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From its beginnings in late antique Europe, Christian pilgrimage valorized distance and spatial separation—​as well as, of course, the journeys then made to reach holy sites. Peter Brown comments on the ubiquitous insistence on “Hic locus est” or “Here is the place” in inscriptions on early martyrs’ shrines, noting succinctly that “The holy was available in one place, and in each such place it was accessible to one group in a manner in which it could not be accessible to anyone situated elsewhere.”7 Articulated by Alphonse Dupront as “une thérapie par l’espace” or, in Brown’s translation, “therapy of distance,” pilgrimage was an act predicated on distance and separation, and overcoming them through physical travel.8 Inherent in the analysis of Dupront and Brown—​though unpacked explicitly by neither—​is also the essential role of time in these foundational models of pilgrimage. Long pilgrim journeys could be measured in time as well as distance: in slow travelling (sometimes deliberately slowed, as in the later case of Cragh, by journeying barefoot or carrying penitential symbols),9 delays, and, finally, waiting for access to the saint’s shrine or holy place. As well as the model of physical distance and its arduous traversal, pilgrimage is also predicated on progress through linear time, and is characterized by rituals of deferral, delay, and extension of the temporal period from departure to arrival—​with all the attendant spiritual or penitential benefits this might bring. William Cragh’s itinerary from Swansea to Hereford, then, commits to these models of space and time:  a penitential, sacrificial act dependent on geographical distance and on the arduous hours of linear time that separate the pilgrim from his holy destination. And yet the story of William Cragh, with the insights it offers into medieval beliefs and popular piety, simultaneously troubles and transcends these vectors of physical space and chronological time. The saintly power of Thomas of Hereford reaches William Cragh in Swansea, even as he hangs on the gallows or lies apparently dead in the house of the burgess Thomas Mathews. This miracle, physically far removed from the shrine of St. Thomas or his relics themselves, reflects the growing strength and reputation of the cult, as remarked in general terms by R. C. Finucane. From 1290 onwards, most miracles took place at sites other than the north transept of the cathedral [the site of the shrine]. This outward movement, reflected in the mileages [of pilgrims] and miracle venues, represents inter alia the migration of the idea that assistance, suffragium, could be obtained by calling on Thomas without being present at his tomb: his reputed “sanctity” was now strong enough to be detached from the aura

7  Peter Brown, The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 86.

8  Alphonse Dupront, “Pélerinages et lieux sacrés,” cited in Brown, The Cult of the Saints (with Brown’s translation), 87. For discussion of the importance of physical proximity in later medieval attitudes to relics and the popularization of pilgrimage, see also Dee Dyas, “To Be a Pilgrim: Tactile Piety, Virtual Pilgrimage and the Experience of Place in Christian Pilgrimage,” in Matter of Faith: An Interdisciplinary Study of Relics and Relic Veneration in the Medieval Period, ed. James Robinson and Lloyd de Beer (London: British Museum, 2014), 1–​7, at 1. 9  MS Vat. Lat. 4015, fol. 9v.

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around his bones and to enter the expectant consciousness of those living outside this immediate region.10

Instead of obtaining the healing power of St. Thomas through direct transfer from the relics at his shrine, William Cragh is resuscitated through the intervention of the saint in Swansea, invoked through ritual devotional acts such as “bending a penny” or having Cragh “measured to Saint Thomas.”11 The saintly power of St. Thomas is still associated with his relics in Hereford—​Cragh and the de Briouzes travel to the shrine to give thanks—​yet is not confined in material space. Recent work on relics in medieval culture has called attention to their power to “trespass boundaries and containment,” including the familiar organizing principles of place and time.12 While Seeta Chaganti has suggested that the reliquary itself troubles relationships between memory, anteriority, and figuration,13 Cynthia Hahn has commented that: Although stubbornly material, [relics] do not moulder and decay, but are able to act and operate in the world. Despite their broken and fragmented nature, they adeptly seize their audience’s imagination and propel it on a trajectory that leads to distant destinations, from here and now to there and then.14

Defying norms of age, decay, and decomposition, relics also, according to Hahn, have the potential to shift place and time, short-​circuiting chronology and moving the audience—​ through acts of imagination or faith—​to another temporal moment (either in the life of the saint, or in wider salvific or eschatological history). The relics of St. Thomas in the story of William Cragh enable a version of place and time in which geographical distance can be transcended, and disparate chronological moments can be brought into contiguity, even simultaneity. The power of relics also calls attention to the operation of sacred time in medieval culture more broadly, alongside and across secular models of history.15 In patterns familiar to medievalists, the ecclesiastical year repeated in ongoing 10  R. C. Finucane, “Cantilupe as Thaumaturge: Pilgrims and their Miracles,” in St. Thomas Cantilupe Bishop of Hereford: Essays in His Honour, ed. Meryl Jancey (Hereford: Friends of Hereford Cathedral Publications Committee, 1982), 137–​44, at 141.

11  Cragh folds a penny in half as votive to St. Thomas the night before his hanging (MS Vat. Lat. 4015, fol. 221r); Lady Mary’s maidservant also does this over Cragh’s head as he lies apparently lifeless in the house of Thomas Mathews (fol. 11r). Lady Mary has Cragh measured to the saint: a piece of string is cut to the length of his body to be made into a votive candle (fol. 9r).

12  Familiar, at least, from a secular, modern perspective. Cynthia Hahn, The Reliquary Effect: Enshrining the Sacred Object (London: Reaktion, 2017), 6. See also Robyn Malo, Relics and Writing in Late Medieval England (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013).

13  Seeta Chaganti, The Medieval Poetics of the Reliquary: Enshrinement, Inscription, Performance (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 14. 14  Hahn, The Reliquary Effect, 6.

15  For a broad but useful overview of relationships between sacred and secular (or “social” time), see Claudine Gauthier, “Time and Eschatology,” Archives de Sciences Sociales des Religions 162 (2013): 123–​41.

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cycles of feasts and fasts, while linear time advanced. Techniques of fourfold allegorical exegesis interpreted biblical history not in terms of discrete events, but as polysemous sites in which past, present, and future were imbricated. Rituals of the liturgy, such as the Eucharist, extended beyond the merely representational or symbolic, bringing moments from the life of Christ into being in the shared “now” of the participants. The celebrated Mappa Mundi at Hereford Cathedral, probably displayed as part of the medieval shrine complex of St. Thomas,16 is itself a striking witness to these medieval ways of conceptualizing the synthesis of multiple historical moments in one geographical space, representing a world marked simultaneously with biblical events (past, present, and future) such as the expulsion from Eden, the Jewish Exodus, and Christ seated in majesty, as well as stories from classical legend and mythic history. While medieval modes of sacred time collapse and transcend regimes of linear history, medieval secular time is itself multiple, irreducible, and fugitive. In the depositions of the nine eyewitnesses to William Cragh’s hanging, time is fundamentally contingent and subjective, articulated in terms of embodied, somatic experience. Henry Skinner, for example, estimates that Cragh hung on the gallows for “such a time in which time he estimated a man would be able to walk at a common pace a quarter of one mile” (“aliquod spacium in quo spacio existimat hominem posse iuisse communi gressu quartam partem unius miliaris”).17 In the liminal, contested, colonial space of the medieval March of Wales, time is further complicated as differing political and cultural systems collide. Lady Mary de Briouze describes place in terms that overlay multiple—​often competing—​configurations of geography and authority, referring to “Swansea, in the region of Gower, in the diocese of St.  David’s, and the region was in the temporal jurisdiction of the said William, formerly her husband” (“Sweyneseye, in terra de Gouer, Menevensis dyocesis, que terra erat de iurisdictione temporali dicti domini Willelmi, viri sui quondam”).18 Similarly, conceptualizations of time in the medieval Marches are contingent on ethnicity, culture, and political allegiance. The year of Thomas de Cantilupe’s death (1282), for example, might be counted variously as the tenth year of the reign of Edward I of England, or the eleventh year of the rule of Rhys ap Maredudd, Prince of Gwynedd, over the Welsh kingdom of Deheubarth (of which Gower and Swansea were part), or as the last year of Llewellyn ap Gruffudd, the last Prince of Wales, as well as the sixth year of William de Briouze, the first Baron Briouze, as Marcher Lord of Gower. Indeed, while polychronicity is a concept used across disciplines and methodologies which interrogate relationships between time and place (see the work of the cultural geographer Mike Crang, quoted above), it has particular pertinence for analysis of the medieval March of Wales from a postcolonial perspective, as a space in which multiple temporalities (shaped by varying cultural and ethnic identities, and 16  See Dan Terkla, “The Original Placement of the Hereford Mappa Mundi,” Imago Mundi 56 (2004): 131–​51, and Thomas de Wesselow, “Locating the Hereford Mappamundi,” Imago Mundi 65 (2013): 180–​206, discussed in my Introduction to this volume. 17  MS Vat. Lat. 4015, fol. 225v. See Bartlett, The Hanged Man, chap. 6, “Time and Space.” 18  MS Vat. Lat. 4015, fol. 8r.

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expressed in varying social practices, values, and behaviours) operate simultaneously. As a colonial space, then, the medieval March of Wales resists and rebels against any monolithic or neatly linear model of time. On July 7, 2018, Hereford Cathedral’s last remaining bodily relic of St. Thomas (on long-​term loan from Stonyhurst College, Lancashire) was brought out and displayed on his shrine to mark the occasion of the launch of the St. Thomas Way. In its glass reliquary, with silver fittings at each end, the tibia of St. Thomas was visible to all participants at the event, and formed a focal point for the dedication ceremony, at which the Cathedral clergy invoked medieval traditions by censing the shrine and singing the Te Deum and antiphon to St. Thomas.19 The Dean and Chancellor of Hereford Cathedral also invited visitors to engage physically with the shrine, as medieval pilgrims would have done. The presence of the relic, perhaps, gave those present permission to share, somatically, in medieval practices of interaction with the shrine: placing their arms into votive niches, touching the feretory, feeling and embracing the stonework. On this occasion, the tibia of St. Thomas did dual work, both as a relic of sanctity (for those of Christian faith), and as a relic of the past, of a usually distant historical moment and its beliefs and practices. The dedication ceremony became, beyond an act framed as liturgy, an experiment in immersive history, and the use of shared performance and material prompts as engagement with the past. The idea of the material relic, of course, has become a commonplace of modern heritage discourse, with influential commentators such as David Lowenthal highlighting valorization of the “supreme merit of tangible remains” and the “ready access” which “relics and remnants viewable by all” give to the past.20 Lowenthal’s analysis acknowledges the power of the relic—​of the partial, or fragmentary—​to bring the absent whole into imaginative being; although this modern, secularized, democratized vision of a relic “viewable by all” has little to do with the closely guarded holy relics, often enclosed or hidden, held by medieval shrines (or, indeed, the tibia of St. Thomas, usually locked in the strong room of the Cathedral today). The ubiquitous language of the relic in present-​day heritage discourse remains surprisingly unscrutinized and uninterrogated by those who use it, especially in the context of the exciting and provocative recent theoretical work on relics as tools for troubling historicist regimes of time. The itinerary of William Cragh, from Swansea to Hereford, reminds us that relationships between time and place may be reconfigured and experienced in radically different ways, through the transformative power of the relic and acts of faith.

19  For further detail on this relic and its reliquary, see Dom Illtud Barrett, “The Relics of St. Thomas Cantilupe,” in St. Thomas Cantilupe, Bishop of Hereford, 181–​86, at 183; also William Smith, The Use of Hereford: The Sources of a Medieval English Diocesan Rite (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), appendix 2.

20  David Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country Revisited (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 393. The use of the language of the relic dates back to the earliest antiquarian writing. See for example Sophie Thomas, Romanticism and Visuality: Fragments, History, Spectacle (New  York:  Routledge, 2008), or Angus Vine, In Defiance of Time:  Antiquarian Writing in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).

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Gerald of Wales: Getting Stuck We can conjecture that William Cragh and his fellow pilgrims likely stayed overnight at Margam Abbey, around twelve miles southeast of Swansea, after traversing the arduous terrain around the river Neath.21 This Cistercian foundation had a reputation for hospitality, which we know in part from the report of another medieval traveller, who spent the night there himself, as part of a journey through the region in March 1188 and famously narrated in his Itinerarium Cambriae (“Journey through Wales”). Though the author is usually known as “Gerald of Wales,” Daniel Birkholz has recently proposed “another epithet for multicultural Gerald, with attendant geographical identity: ‘Giraldus Herefordensis,’ ” based on Gerald’s close connections with Hereford (including as canon from ca. 1193) and his distinctively “Marcher” outlook.22 Gerald’s account of his journey with Archbishop of Canterbury Baldwin of Forde, as part of a recruitment campaign for the Third Crusade, takes him along much of the St. Thomas Way route (though in reverse), leaving from Hereford and taking in Abergavenny, Usk, Newport, Ewenny, and the south Glamorgan coast. Gerald tells of his stay at Margam Abbey, remarking on its famed hospitality and generosity. He includes some illustrative stories of the Abbey’s charity, as well as the tale of a man who struck another in the refectory of the Abbey guesthouse, and was found dead the next morning, struck down by divine punishment.23 But the part of Gerald’s account of his journey through this area which is most familiar to medievalists is the episode when he crosses the river Neath. As we approached the Neath, which is the most dangerous and difficult of access of all the rivers of South Wales, on account of its quicksands, which immediately engulf anything placed upon them, one of our pack-​horses, the only one possessed by the writer of these lines, was almost sucked down into the abyss. With a number of other animals it had followed the lower road, and now it was jogging along in the middle of the group. In the end, it was pulled out with some difficulty, thanks to the efforts made by our servants, who risked their lives in doing so, and not without some damage done to my books and baggage.24 Et inde versus Neth fluvium via maritima festinantes, primævum Karadoci cedentibus itaque nobis ad aquam, præ aliis australis Kambriæ fluviis, vivi sabuli periculis, totumque subito quod ingeritur absorbentis, inaccessibilem, inter clitellarios multos, qui via versus mare venerant inferior, unus quem solum qui scripsit hæc ibidem habebat, quanquam medius in turba conserta incederet, solus tamen quasi in abyssum descendit.25

21  For a short introduction to Margam Abbey, see Abbeys and Priories of Medieval Wales, ed. Janet Burton and Karen Stöber (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2015), 137–​43.

22  Daniel Birkholz, “Hereford Maps, Hereford Lives: Biography and Cartography in an English Cathedral City,” in Mapping Medieval Geographies:  Geographical Encounters in the Latin West and Beyond, 300–​1600, ed. Keith D. Lilley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 225–​49, at 229.

23  Gerald of Wales, The Journey through Wales and the Description of Wales, ed. Betty Radice, trans. Lewis Thorpe (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978), 126–​30; Giraldus Cambrensis, “Itinerarium Kambriae,” in Opera, ed. James F.  Dimock, Rolls Series, 21 (London:  Longman, 1868), Liber 1, cap. 7, 67–​72. 24  The Journey through Wales and the Description of Wales, 130–​31. 25  “Itinerarium Kambriae,” Liber I, cap. viii, 72.

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Gerald depicts this as an unstable, treacherous landscape, his description of the river Neath and its quicksands recalling his accounts of other rivers in Wales—​and, especially, its Marches or border regions—​where natural geography seems to embody the slipperiness and changeability of political territory. Most immediately, in this narrative, Gerald has only just forded the River Avon near Margam (“a Margano”), “where the twin hazards of a sandy shore and an incoming tide begin” (“ubi sabulosi litoris et maris influentis alternæ incipiunt vicissitudines”), managing the crossing but “not without being delayed for some time by the ebbing of the water” (“sub plurimo tamen reflui maris moramine”).26 The shifting waters by Margam and Neath also anticipate Gerald’s account of the river Dee near Chester, later in the Journey through Wales. There, Gerald presents the Dee as a changeable, moveable border between England and Wales, noting that “the local inhabitants maintain that the Dee moves its fords every month and that, as it inclines more towards England or Wales in this change of channel, so they can prognosticate which nation will beat the other or be unsuccessful in war in any particular year” (“ut asserunt accolæ, aqua ista singulis mensibus vada permutat; et utri finium, Angliæ scilicet an Kambriæ, alveo relicto magis incubuerit, gentem illam eo in anno succumbere, et alteram prævalere, certissimum prognosticum habent”).27 At the quicksands of Neath, Gerald takes care to note that the party is guided by a member of the local Welsh nobility (Morgan ap Caradog, Lord of Afan), but even this political authority is not enough to master the unruly natural landscape: “It was true that we had Morgan, the prince of those parts, as our guide, but we reached the river [Neath] only after considerable danger and quite a few upsets” (“Quanquam igitur partiam illarum principem Morganum viæ ducem haberemus, sub periculo tamen multo, plurimorumque lapsu, ad aquam pervenimus”).28 Clearly, physical and political geographies are inseparable in Gerald’s imagination here, and in his mental map of the March of Wales. But, perhaps most strikingly, the river Neath functions as an obstacle: an almost impassable barrier or rupture through the landscape, threatening to halt the journey of Gerald and his fellow travellers, and almost severing the neighbouring abbeys of Margam and Neath.29 In the end, as Gerald explains, the group cross the Neath by ferry (probably at Briton Ferry) rather than by ford, as “the passages through the river change with every monthly tide and they cannot be located at all after a heavy flood of rain, when the waters are swollen with floods and inundations” (“quolibet menstruo maris incremento amnis illius vada mutantur, quolibet nubigero imbrium augment non reperiuntur, pluvialibus inundationibus exuberantibus undis”).30 26  The Journey through Wales, 130; “Itinerarium Kambriae,” 72.

27  The Journey through Wales, 198; “Itinerarium Kambriae,” 139.

28  The Journey through Wales, 131 (also reference to Morgan on 130); “Itinerarium Kambriae,” 72.

29  Gerald’s account is also acutely aware that this difficult terrain marks the border between the dioceses of Llandaff and St. David’s. The Journey through Wales, 131; “Itinerarium Kambriae,” 73.

30  The Journey through Wales, 131; “Itinerarium Kambriae,” p. 73. For the site of Briton Ferry (formerly Breton Ferry), see the map of medieval Swansea and its environs produced by the “City Witness” project (www.medievalswansea.ac.uk/​en/​mapping/​static-​map/​).

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For Gerald and his companions, Neath and its environs are an intractable, almost impassable landscape. Despite their best efforts, they can’t help getting stuck. Developing the St. Thomas Way, the project team was always keen to include Neath as one of the core locations on the route, and it was identified as a planned waypoint in the original proposal submitted to the Arts and Humanities Research Council (the project funder). Several factors made Neath an attractive location to include on the St. Thomas Way: the remains of its Norman castle in the town centre, and the very impressive ruins of Neath Abbey on the edge of the town; the exciting recent and current work shedding new light on (and engaging local communities with) Neath Abbey;31 the town’s mainline railway station, offering good accessibility for walkers without cars; and its close convergence with the itineraries of William Cragh and other medieval travellers, such as Gerald of Wales. Neath also fitted into the project objectives of including less well-​established visitor destinations on the route, with scope to build tourism capacity in Neath itself, as well as wider recognition of its medieval heritage as a tourism asset.32 However, early visits and tests of potential routes soon began to raise problems. It is extremely difficult to walk to Neath Abbey from Neath train station—​or, indeed, from any of the other local railway stations. Roads, railways, and canals cut across the landscape of Neath and its environs, making walking routes a challenge. The major A465 or “Heads of the Valleys” dual carriageway runs northeast past the Abbey and to the west of the River Neath. The Neath and Tennant canals intersect the landscape, amongst a tangle of railway lines. Most strikingly, the M4 motorway runs to the south of the town, by Briton Ferry (where Gerald crossed the river), then along through Port Talbot, where it cuts through streets of Victorian housing, raised up on 14-​metre-​high concrete pillars. Even the river Neath itself presents a challenge, remaining nearly impossible to cross on foot. Most of the bridges over the river carry major roads, often with no pedestrian access. Ironically, then, the landscape of Neath Port Talbot (the modern borough which comprises the various elements of this conurbation) is today still one of rupture: of hostile terrain and intractable difficulty, severing the medieval remains of Margam Abbey from those of Neath, and cutting off Neath Abbey from the town centre and local transport links. It became apparent that it would not be possible to devise a safe, reliable walking route around Neath (taking in the Abbey, castle, and river) for participants in the St. Thomas Way. Reluctantly, the project team had to admit we were stuck. We felt real disappointment and frustration at not being able to include Neath as a core location on the route (instead it is a suggested “Excursion” from Margam), and yet, of course, it is local communities in Neath Port Talbot who are far more significantly impacted by the transport links and post-​industrial infrastructure that score through their landscape, and who have to live with their often catastrophic environmental and social implications. The impact, for example, of the M4 motorway, completed in 1966, remains 31  See for example the recent report by the Glamorgan-​ Gwent Archaeological Trust: GGAT 131:  Building Survey and Analysis at Neath Abbey:  Interim Report (Swansea: Glamorgan-​Gwent Archaeological Trust, 2014). 32  See discussion of the project aims, in the Introduction to this volume.

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a focus of bitter regret and resentment in local media and political commentary in South Wales, having “brutally dissected” the town of Port Talbot and now dominating the landscape from the east of Swansea as far as Margam.33 In 2011 the Welsh poet and playwright Owen Sheers collaborated with the Port Talbot-​raised actor Michael Sheen on The Passion, a work of public theatre retelling the biblical Passion narrative in the streets and local landscape of the town. In an article at the time for the Guardian newspaper, Sheers commented on the implications of the M4 for the Port Talbot community and its perception by those beyond the town: Set in beautiful natural surroundings, it’s a town that’s been choked by industry and unthinking development. Like most people, before I worked on this project I’d only ever literally travelled over the town, either by rail or via the M4 flyover, viewing it and the grounded constellation of its steelworks from afar.34

Today, then, this area of the South Wales coast is still notorious for its intractability and difficulty: a landscape riven by impassable obstacles. Both Gerald of Wales and the St. Thomas Way project got stuck at Neath. But what could that mean for thinking critically about relationships between different historical moments in place? Our sticky experiences at Neath suggest the ways in which historical moments may connect in unstraightforward, nonlinear ways, folded together through irony—​through the anecdotal, accidental, and unruly—​rather than through any intentional or predictable ordering of historical correspondence. A radical subversion or counterpoint to medieval typological models, which envisage stable and meaningful contiguities across history, this kind of chance, ludic encounter with another historical moment does not necessarily signify beyond immediate affective experience. Getting bogged down in the landscape of Neath—​in 1188 and in 2017—​calls attention to time’s snags, twists, and wry refractions. Such experiences resonate with recent theoretical work that explores time through the model of “distemporality,” articulated by Rebecca Schneider as “[m]‌oments […] of uncanniness, of error, or of a return to sense [that] occur in pauses … or tiny details of interruptive anachronisms as the ‘now’ folds and multiplies.”35 Writing on the strange discovery, in 2009, of the body of King Richard III in a Leicester car park, Jonathan Hsy suggests that the interpretative model of distemporality “unfixes smooth and linear modes of temporal transit,” and foregrounds the ways in which “temporalities move—​slide, bounce, connect, and shuffle.”36 Getting stuck with Gerald, then, might actually enable us to think productively about time’s movements, 33  See Martin Johnes, “Wales History Month: The M4 in South Wales,” Wales Online, April 9, 2012, www.walesonline.co.uk/​news/​wales-​news/​welsh-​history-​month-​m4-​south-​2047338.

34  Owen Sheers, “A Passion Play for Port Talbot,” Guardian, April 23, 2011, www.theguardian.com/​ books/​2011/​apr/​23/​owen-​sheers-​author-​author-​passion. 35  Rebecca Schneider, Performing Remains:  Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment (New York: Routledge, 2011), 186. 36  Jonathan Hsy, “Distemporality: Richard III’s Body and the Car Park,” Upstart:  A Journal of English Renaissance Studies (2013) (https://​upstart.sites.clemson.edu/​Essays/​richard-​forum/​ distemporality.xhtml).

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and about “co-​mobilities across time and space,”37 through our shared itineraries. On the St. Thomas Way, Neath is a sticking point where past and present adhere, and where different historical moments take issue with each other (Gerald’s text certainly, for me, now speaks reproachfully to our decision not to persevere and include Neath on the heritage route). Together, the perilous quicksands—​and treacherous flyovers—​of Neath Port Talbot invite us to think anecdotally, playfully, and subversively about temporal encounters in place.

Walter Map’s Familiar Phantoms

Carolyn Dinshaw’s book How Soon Is Now? Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time is a highly influential point in the development of these recent critical conversations around time and temporalities in medieval studies, opening up new approaches to “multiple temporalities,” “asynchronies,” and “temporal heterogeneity.” While drawing on and developing notions of “queer temporalities,” Dinshaw points not only to the varied and multiple imaginaries of time in the Middle Ages, but also the ways in which other, nonacademic perspectives, such as the experience of “amateurs,” might afford more diverse, dynamic, and capacious modes of connection with moments in and models of time than the rigid disciplining of professional historians. Taking a variety of medieval sources as starting points for extending and refining her theoretical approach, Dinshaw includes a short narrative included by Walter Map in his work De Nugis Curialium (written around 1200). This is the story of King Herla and his companions: a party of phantom travellers seen near Hereford in the March of Wales during the reign of Henry II (and earlier). Walter was a native of the Welsh Marches, describing himself in the De Nugis Curialium as “a dweller on the Marches of Wales” (“marchio sum Walensibus”), and showing his ambivalent, divided allegiances in references to “My compatriots the Welsh” (“Compatriote nostri Walenses”), as well as in attacks on the unfaithful and treacherous Welsh character, or his vision of the country itself as politically elusive, shifting and (like the sea itself) “always in motion” (“semper in motu”).38 The strange, ghostly wanderings of King Herla and his fellow travellers, then, form another itinerary which intersects with the route of the St. Thomas Way, and which opens up questions about place and temporalities. Returning to Walter Map’s story of King Herla—​with attention to a different part of the narrative, as well as an alternative account by Orderic Vitalis—​offers an opportunity to engage with and nuance some of Dinshaw’s work on time, and suggests new insights into how the past might be experienced in place. Dinshaw focuses her reading of the Herla story on the main narrative in Distinctio II, Chapter 11, of the De Nugis Curialium (“Of King Herla”/​“De Herla rege”), in which Walter recounts this “tale of asynchrony.”39 Long ago, in the time of the ancient Britons, 37  Hsy, “Distemporality.”

38  Walter Map, De Nugis Curialium (Courtiers’ Trifles), ed. M. R. James, revised by C. N. L. Brooke and R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983), Distinctio II, c. 23, 194–​95, 182–​83, 190–​91. 39  Dinshaw, How Soon Is Now?, 61.

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King Herla is visited by a strange, small man (“homuncio,” “pigmeus”), who introduces himself as a powerful king and offers to grace the forthcoming wedding of Herla with his presence, on the condition that Herla should in turn attend his own wedding a year later. Herla agrees, and the strange, small king duly appears at his wedding, along with a retinue of servants who add lavishly to the celebrations and fulfil every wish of those present. After a year, Herla visits the small king in his own kingdom, reached by entering a cave under a high cliff, and enjoys the celebrations. As they leave, the small king gives Herla a bloodhound to carry, and commands that no member of his party should dismount until the dog leaps down from his arms. When they return into the light of day, the surprise of a Saxon shepherd reveals that two hundred years have passed. Some of King Herla’s company dismount before the bloodhound has jumped down, and are turned to dust. This traditional story tells, according to Walter, that “King Herla still holds on his mad course with his band in eternal wanderings, without stop or stay” (“Herlam regem errore semper infinito circuitus cum exercitu suo sine quiete uel residencia”). He notes that this band of phantom travellers was still seen in the March of Wales in the first year of the reign of King Henry II, but: it ceased to visit our land in force as before. In that year it was seen by many Welshmen to plunge into the Wye, the river of Hereford. From that hour the phantom journeying has ceased, as if they had transmitted their wanderings to us, and betaken themselves to repose. cessauit regnum nostrum celebriter ut ante uisitare. Tunc autem uisus fuit a multis Wallensibus immerge iuxta Waiam Herefordiae flumen. Quieuit autem ab illa hora fantasticus ille circuitus, tanquam nobis suos tradiderint errores, ad quietem sibi.40

Dinshaw highlights Walter’s suggestion that the travellers have somehow “transferred their desperate, perpetual motion to Henry II’s court,”41 connecting the observation here with the opening sentences of the De Nugis Curialium. In those opening lines, Walter wrestles with the Augustinian paradox of the unknowability of time (“ ‘In time I exist, and of time I speak,’ said Augustine: and added, ‘What time is I know not’ ” “ ‘In tempore sum et de tempore loquor,’ ait Augustinus, et adiecit, ‘nescio quid sit tempus’ ”), and imagines the Henrician court as peculiarly subject to the vagaries of temporality: “temporal it is, changeable and various, space-​bound and wandering, never continually in one state” (“temporalis quidem est, mutabilis et uaria, localis et erratica, nunquam in eodem statu permanens”).42 Dinshaw’s reading illuminates the strangely meaningless, unexplained temporal distortion in Walter’s tale of King Herla:  unlike stories such as the “Seven Sleepers” or “Oisin in Tirnanoge,” she notes, there is no Christian or moral or allegorical dimension here. Her analysis suggests perceptively the ways in which “Herla is queered by time”—​removed, at the point of his marriage, from patriarchal structures

40  Ne Nugis Curialium, Distinctio I, c. 12, 26–​31. 41  Dinshaw, How Soon Is Now?, 62.

42  De Nugis Curialium, Distinctio I, c. 1, 2–​3.

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of generation and lineage—​as well as the deft connections made by Walter between this strange story and his own “unbearably out-​of-​joint present.”43 However, the part of Walter’s story of King Herla and his ghostly companions that interests me most occurs in Distinctio IV, Chapter 13 of the De Nugis Curialium, and falls outside the passage read in Dinshaw’s analysis. This reappearance of a story is typical of the nonlinear nature of Walter’s text itself, structured more by association and imaginative connection than by chronology or any clear progress through didactic themes. This particular chapter of the De Nugis is a collection of prodigies and portents, including an account of the most recent, and last, sighting of King Herla and his Herlethingus, in the Welsh Marches near Hereford. Walter writes that: This household of Herlethingus was last seen in the March of Wales and Hereford in the first year of the reign of Henry II, about noonday: they travelled as we do, with carts and sumpter horses, pack-​saddles and panniers, hawks and hounds, and a concourse of men and women.

Hec huius Herlethingi uisa est ultimo familia in marchia Walliarum et Herefordie anno primo regni Henrici secondi, circa meridiem, eo modo quo nos erramus cum bigis et summariis, cum clitellis et panariolis, auibus et canibus, concurrentibus uiris et mulieribus.44

The tale of King Herla (variously named as Herlechin, Herlekin, or Harlequin) and his ghostly travellers, or ghostly hunt, is a commonplace of medieval folklore, as noted by the editors of the De Nugis Curialium.45 The closest cognate to Walter’s account of this direct sighting of Herla and his fellow phantoms, in content and provenance, is probably the version in the Ecclesiastical History of the Anglo-​Norman monk Orderic Vitalis, composed in the first half of the twelfth century. In Orderic’s version, a priest named Walchelin is walking alone, at night, near the village of Bonneval, near Chartres. Suddenly, Walchelin witnesses a great crowd passing by, including a giant bearing a mace, men “as small as dwarfs, but with huge heads like barrels” (“homines parui … de magna capita ceu dolia habebant”), a man being carried on a huge tree trunk by two “Ethiopians” (“Ethiopibus”) while a demon tortures him, women studded with burning nails, and others. Walchelin recognizes many clergy whom he knows, as well as other figures from the secular nobility who have recently died.46 Before being accosted, terrifyingly, by a knight who claims to be his dead brother, Walchelin says to himself: “This is most certainly Herlechin’s rabble. I have heard many who claimed to have seen them, but have ridiculed the tale-​tellers and not believed them because I never saw any solid proof of such things. Now I do indeed see the shades of the dead with my own eyes …”

43  Dinshaw, How Soon Is Now?, 62–​63.

44  De Nugis Curialium, Distinctio IV, c. 13, 370–​71. 45  De Nugis Curialium, 26n1.

46  Orderic Vitalis, The Ecclesiastical History, ed. Marjorie Chibnall, vol. 4 (bks. VII and VIII) (Oxford: Clarendon, 1973), bk. VIII, c. 17, 237–​51.

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“Hæc sine dubio familia Herelchini est. A multis eam olim uisam audiui, sed incredulous relators derisi, quia certa indicia nunquam de talibus uidi. Nunc uero manes mortuorum ueraciter uideo …”47

The differences between the stories of King Herla and the Herlethingus in Walter Map and Orderic Vitalis are immediately apparent. Generically, Orderic’s version seems to have more in common with medieval vision narratives, in which dreamers (or those transported back from death) witness the gruesome punishment of figures they have known in life, with obvious moral or political implications—​although, in this account of the Herlethingus, most of the details seem to be meaningless grotesquery, emptied of any didactic purpose.48 Most strikingly, Orderic’s account is far more shocking, sensational, and lurid than Walter’s: longer and more elaborate, it is an assemblage of horrifying apparitions and violent, gory details. For Walter, not usually a writer to resist the opportunity for a sensational or supernatural tale, his own account of the Herlethingus is notably restrained. While Orderic’s Walchelin experiences his terrifying encounter “by night” (“noctu”), King Herla and his ghostly companions are seen near Hereford “about noonday” (“circa meridiem”), in the clarity of full daylight. While the rabble witnessed by Walchelin is made up of strange and monstrous creatures—​from the same medieval imaginary as the margins of the Hereford Mappa Mundi—​and figures afflicted by grotesque bodily mutilation or torture, the Herlethingus in the March of Wales are striking in their ordinariness. “They travelled as we do,” Walter observes, “with carts and sumpter horses, pack saddles and panniers, hawks and hounds, and a concourse of men and women.” In Orderic, the use of the term “familia” (“household,” “company,” more unusually “family”) for the terrifying band seen by Walchelin seems deliberately ironic and disturbing. Yet in the De Nugis Curialium, it seems to function quite differently. The shock and arresting power of Walter Map’s account derive not from lurid horror or grotesquery, but from the impact of recognition, familiarity, and affinity: the perception that these travellers, interruptions into the present from a remote historical time, are not only “familia,” but familiar. By contrasting Walter’s retelling of the Herlethingus story with that of Orderic, the distinctive dynamics of the tale in the De Nugis Curialium begin to emerge. Indeed, King Herla and his phantom companions appear so recognizable and familiar to the Welsh inhabitants of the March that at first they rush to arms: Those who saw them first raised the whole country against them with horns and shouts, and as is the wont of that most alert race [that is, the Welsh], a large force came equipped with every weapon, and, because they were unable to wring a word from them by addressing them, made ready to extort an answer with their arms. They, however, rose up into the air and vanished on a sudden.

47  Orderic Vitalis, The Ecclesiastical History, bk. VIII, c. 17, 242–​43.

48  For an overview of the political and didactic uses of such visions in medieval culture (albeit focused on an earlier period), Paul Edward Dutton’s The Politics of Dreaming in the Carolingian Empire (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994) remains an excellent starting point.

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Catherine A. M. Clarke Qui tunc primi uiderunt tibiis et clamoribus totam in eos uicinam concitauerunt, et ut illius est mos uigilantissime gentis statim omnibus armis instructa multa manus aduenit, et quia uerbum ab eis extorquere non potuerunt uerbis, telis adigere responsa parabant. Illi autem eleuati sursum in aera subito disparuerunt.49

The spectacle of the ghostly travellers is initially read by the local population in terms of their familiar Marcher landscape, and the habitual skirmishes and conflict associated with life on the borders. And the Marcher setting of this story is surely significant to Walter’s retelling. Its geography littered with traces of displaced peoples, histories, and vanished places (either renamed or replaced by Norman plantation settlements), the medieval March of Wales is, always, haunted by memories of the lost, absent, and erased—​an imaginative association facilitated by Walter’s suggestive insistence that Herla was king “of the most ancient Britons” (“antiquissimorum Britonum”).50 Beyond the more acute, localized meanings foregrounded by the Marcher context, the impact of this passage hinges on the uncanny affinity between the ancient Herlethingus and the witnesses in the twelfth century. As with his account of King Herla earlier in the De Nugis, Walter does again exploit the political or satirical possibilities of this strange mirroring, making the point once more that the phantoms “seem to have handed over their wanderings to us” (“nobis insipientibus … suos tradiderint errores”), in the restlessness and unease of the contemporary court.51 But, most fundamentally, Walter’s telling of the tale in Distinctio IV is driven by the dynamics of recognition and familiarity: by the conspicuous ordinariness of his phantom travellers, and by a moment of chance encounter, unexpected proximity, and intimacy with these ghosts from distant history. The immersive content of the St. Thomas Way—​from the walking routes to the multimedia digital resources, and glimpses into the story of William Cragh and other medieval lives—​seeks to catalyze just this kind of vivid, unexpected intersection between medieval and modern itineraries, and encounters between travellers in different historical moments. As Walter Map’s story of the Herlethingus shows, these encounters can disrupt both history and geography: through the power of the uncanny they transform both place and the moment of experience into something simultaneously familiar and strange, immediate and remote, troubling linear time.52 As with the Marcher witnesses to King Herla and his phantoms, this 49  De Nugis Curialium, Distinctio IV, c. 13, 370–​71.

50  De Nugis Curialium, Distinctio I, c.  11, 26–​27. A  reading that locates the Marcher context at the centre of this story’s meaning might recall Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s approach to William of Newburgh’s roughly contemporary account of the strange “Green Children of Woolpit,” who Cohen suggests “embody the cultural diversity from which the [Norman] kingdom had been formed, the hybridity it had long disowned, the capaciousness of the insular expanses of which England remained but a single part.” See Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, “Green Children from Another World, or the Archipelago in England,” in Cultural Diversity in the British Middle Ages: Archipelago, Island, England, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 75–​94, at 75. 51  De Nugis Curialium, Distinctio IV, c. 13, 370–​71.

52  In their Introduction to Affective Medievalism, Prendergast and Trigg refer to a number of recent uses of the uncanny by medievalist scholars to explore temporal relationships, including work by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and L. O. Aranye Fradenburg. See “Introduction: Medieval and Medievalist Practice,” 1–​21, at 20n44.

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transformative, cross-​temporal experience is predicated on sensory, affective engagement with the past, in place—​and, crucially, on jolts of recognition and affinity. Today, such modes and experiences usually fall outside the bounds of scholarly historiography. To what other sources and contexts might we look for alternative idioms which change the ways we think about, represent, and experience relationships between place and time?

T. S. Eliot and Geoffrey Hill: Playing Pilgrims

The twentieth-​century poets T. S. Eliot and Geoffrey Hill both make journeys into the multilayered landscapes of the March of Wales in their work: famously, in Hill’s autobiographical sequence Mercian Hymns (1971), and in Eliot’s short poem “Usk,” privately printed in 1935 and subsequently published as the third of the “Landscapes” in the Collected Poems of 1936 and later editions. Evidently, the poems of Eliot and Hill introduce two separate itineraries, and there is not scope in this essay to explore all the many differences that distinguish the creative practices, approaches, and contexts of each writer—​though it is, perhaps, worth noting that each identified as Christian (Eliot, famously, as Anglo-​Catholic, and Hill as a socially engaged theologian).53 In this experimental discussion, however, I will use both the Mercian Hymns and “Usk” together, as one way into thinking about place and time in the St. Thomas Way. Their differences aside, both Hill and Eliot pursue their own pilgrimages or personal quests into the March of Wales, exploring in their own ways the possibilities of nonlinear time, asynchrony, and the creative fertility of moments that are ambiguous in temporality and meaning. In both the Mercian Hymns and “Usk,” the slipperiness of tone and authorial intent, as well as the refusal to historicize neatly, or to explicate historical appositions fully, contributes to a sense of time in place which is driven by a productive ambiguity. Through these texts, then, ambiguity emerges as one potentially helpful lens for encountering, and theorizing, temporalities in place. The landscape of Hill’s Mercian Hymns maps broadly onto the geography navigated by the St. Thomas Way, extending beyond the March of Wales to places such as Tamworth to the northeast, but also including features distinctively associated with the Marcher region in the past and today, such as the modern M5 motorway (where it runs from Birmingham down to Bristol), the River Teme (rising in mid-​Wales and flowing down to join the Severn south of Worcester), and, most centrally, Offa’s Dyke. Hill’s relationship with this landscape of his childhood (he was born and grew up in Worcestershire) is itself ambiguous: he writes in Hymn V that “Exile or pilgrim set me once more upon that ground.” Hymn I immediately introduces the poems’ typical apposition of disparate historical moments, in an imagined panegyric spoken to the eighth-​century King Offa of Mercia. King of the perennial holly-​groves, the riven sand-​stone: overlord of the M5: architect of the historic rampart and ditch, the citadel at Tamworth, the summer hermitage in Holy

53  See for example T. S. Eliot and Christian Tradition, ed. Benjamin G. Lockerd (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2014) and Robert Potts’ profile of Hill in the Guardian, August 10, 2002.

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Catherine A. M. Clarke Cross: guardian of the Welsh Bridge and the Iron Bridge: contractor to the desirable new estates: saltmaster: money-​changer commissioner for oaths: martyrologist: the friend of Charlemagne. “I like that,” said Offa, “sing it again.”54

Here, the landscape of Mercia—​of Offa’s overlordship—​is a multi-​temporal space, where early medieval earthworks and settlements are brought into startling anachronistic contiguity with the M5 motorway, “new estates,” and the eighteenth-​century Iron Bridge.55 David Annwn has commented on the ways in which, in juxtapositions such as this, “our attention is drawn into swift correspondences between times,” while the Hymns seemingly inhabit multiple historical moments simultaneously, “baffling chronological propriety.”56 Personal or autobiographical history overlays official histories of nation and power, setting up equivalences and doublings between the remote, violent world of King Offa and Saxon Mercia, and the equally distant, irrecoverable realm of Hill’s mid-​twentieth-​ century childhood, with its own small but disturbing violences, and the wider backdrop of the Second World War. Hymn VII opens with a vision of distorted, corrupted pastoral: Gasholders, russet among fields. Milldams, marlpools that lay unstirring. Eel-​swarms. Coagulations of frogs: once, with branches and half-​bricks, he battered a ditchful; then sidled away from the stillness and silence.57

Even the tainted pastoral here is in various ways a product of folded and interwoven time, from the recognition of the historical violence that formed many of the landscapes now cherished as picturesque, to a contamination of the prelapsarian imagery of an Edenic childhood through the adult’s retrospective acknowledgement of its inherent cruelty and brutality. The Hymn goes on to describe an encounter with “Ceolred”—​the name of a Saxon retainer, but apparently a schoolfriend—​who accidentally drops a precious toy biplane down between the classroom floorboards, out of reach. The speaker has his revenge, in a shocking conflation of the casual cruelty of childhood bullying with the extravagant, performative violence of an early medieval king: After school he lured Ceolred, who was sniggering with fright, down to the old quarries, and flayed him. Then, leaving Ceolred, he journeyed for hours, calm and alone, in his private derelict sandlorry named Albion.58

54  Geoffrey Hill, Mercian Hymns, in Selected Poems (London: Penguin, 2006), pp. 61–​90, at 61.

55  For an analysis of the connotations of these and other references to the past (especially the early medieval English past) in the Mercian Hymns, see Hannah J. Crawforth, “ ‘Overlord of the M5:’ The Superlative Structure of Sovereignty in Geoffrey Hill’s Mercian Hymns,” in Anglo-​Saxon Culture and the Modern Imagination, ed. David Clark and Nicholas Perkins (Cambridge: Brewer, 2010), 219–​36. 56  David Annwn, Inhabited Voices: Myth and History in the Poetry of Geoffrey Hill, Seamus Heaney and George Mackay Brown (Frome: Bran’s Head, 1984), 49. 57  Hill, Selected Poems, 67. 58  Hill, Selected Poems, 67.

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The naming of the sandlorry, of course, calls attention to the equivalences between personal and national histories here, folding centuries and eras of national chronology into the brief seasons of a single childhood. The abrupt and disorientating appositions, or conflations, of past and present in verses such as these have been explored by the medievalist Chris Jones as a “mosaic of the familiar and the unfamiliar,” in which “Offa’s kingdom of Mercia may be remote and in some senses irrecoverable in its strangeness, but it is also Hill’s Mercia, the landscape in which he grew up, and it affords him a sense of rootedness as well as dislocation.”59 It is from Hymn XXIX of the Mercian Hymns that Jones takes the title of his study of uses of Old English literature by writers in the twentieth century:  “strange likeness.” While appropriated by Jones to refer to the ways in which modern poets engage with early medieval poetry, this oxymoron also recalls the uncanny affinities of the encounter between medieval witnesses and King Herla’s ancient, phantom travellers, as narrated by Walter Map. In similar ways, Hill’s Mercian Hymns play with paradoxes of strange familiarity, and encounters that trouble linear chronology and temporal difference. The Mercian Hymns pursue this further, moving beyond moments of encounter to conflations and multiple exposures in which chronologically distant events occur simultaneously, or where voices and personae inhabit and ventriloquize each other in fluid and elusive ways. The Mercian Hymns also stubbornly resist full explication, offering suggestive appositions but withholding glosses or the syntactical support that might make meanings clearer and more fixed. The supremely paratactical concatenation of Hymn I, for example, leaves it entirely to the reader to forge imaginative and semantic relationships between the multi-​temporal landscape features listed in the panegyric. The glimpses of disparate historical moments presented in the Hymns are deliberately fragmentary and partial, wilfully avoiding any explicit interpretation of the relationships between historical moments, and instead gifting the reader a series of suggestive, ambiguous, uncertain experiences. While Hill’s Mercian Hymns range across the March of Wales and into the wider extent of Mercia beyond, T. S. Eliot’s short poem “Usk” apparently maps directly onto a site on the St. Thomas Way route: the Monmouthshire town of Usk, on the banks of the eponymous river, with its castle, medieval priory church, and troubled history as a site of conflict, rebellion, and violence in the Middle Ages. Just eleven brief lines long, and one of Eliot’s relatively lesser-​known poems, “Usk” offers advice to some kind of imagined traveller, pilgrim, or quester: Do not suddenly break the branch, or Hope to find The white hart behind the white well. Glance aside, not for lance, do not spell Old enchantments. Let them sleep. “Gently dip, but not too deep,” Lift your eyes

59  Chris Jones, Strange Likeness: The Use of Old English in Twentieth-​Century Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 1–​2.

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Catherine A. M. Clarke Where the roads dip and where the roads rise Seek only there Where the grey light meets the green air The hermit’s chapel, the pilgrim’s prayer.60

The opening lines, typically of Eliot’s work, are densely allusive, as noted by Philip Edwards, who has suggested references to the Aeneid and Frazer’s The Golden Bough, as well as, possibly, Piers Plowman.61 The line in quotation marks, “ ‘Gently dip, but not too deep’,” suggests the repetition of a proverb or remembered saying. Reading the poem as a medievalist, I am particularly struck by its playful use of language and poetic diction to evoke and inhabit other, distant moments in literary history. The heavy alliteration and assonance throughout the lines suggest the aural qualities of Old English or later medieval “alliterative revival” verse (of which Piers Plowman would be an example). From the outset, Eliot also uses language in doubling, polysemous, and ambiguous ways, often with seemingly deliberate attention to the shifting meaning of words through time. In line three, “well” might plausibly function as an adverb as much as a noun; in line four, “glance” suggests both a look and a quick evasive move (perhaps linked to the injunction not to “suddenly break the branch”), while “spell” suggests both incantation and something of a more earnest, hopeful recitation of conscientiously learned formulae. Ambiguity and slipperiness, then, are built into the poem from the beginning. While the poem’s imagery evokes a seemingly timeless, mythical landscape, its title gives it a geographical specificity, explored again, recently, by Philip Edwards. Apparently, Eliot’s second wife reported her husband saying that “an understanding of ‘Usk’ depends partly on the evocation of the immediate scenery in The Mabinogion.” But Edwards is unconvinced, arguing that the poem’s description of rising and falling roads suggests, rather, “the Monmouthshire countryside.”62 Indeed, in 2003, Edwards published an article in the Times Literary Supplement which claimed to solve the riddle of the obscure references to places and landscape features in “Usk,” summarizing the argument in the discussion of the poem in his later book Pilgrimage and Literary Tradition. The third line, for all its sense of mystery, seems to be a joke. Beside the church at Llangybi near Usk there is an ancient holy well, with whitewashed stonework, a few yards from the prominent White Hart Inn. A visit here might have suggested the medieval quest which Eliot invents.63

Edwards’s reading, and the geographical detail he refers to, is convincing. Despite its initial appearance as sincere, meditative, reflective writing, is “Usk,” then, instead a piece of trickster poetry, deliberately misdirecting and wrongfooting the reader? Adrian Barlow 60  “Landscapes III: Usk,” in T. S. Eliot, Collected Poems 1909–​1962 (London: Faber and Faber, 1963), 154.

61  Philip Edwards, Pilgrimage and Literary Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 139. 62  Edwards, Pilgrimage and Literary Tradition, 140. 63  Edwards, Pilgrimage and Literary Tradition, 139.

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has noted how, in the year in which “Usk” was written (1935), “Eliot went on a motoring holiday into Wales with John Morley, his friend and co-​director of Faber and Faber. Together they visited the grave of the metaphysical poet Henry Vaughan in the churchyard of Llansantffraed beside the river Usk.”64 Is “Usk”—​initially printed privately—​the product of a private joke between two friends on a road trip, rather than a genuine attempt to find a way into mythic or premodern pasts in place? And yet, the mood of “Usk” changes at line seven, where the reader is urged to “Lift your eyes” (recalling the consolatory language of Psalm 121: “I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills”), rising above the distractions and misdirections of the opening section of the poem, with its lexical ambiguities, restless allusiveness, and disjointed, fragmentary lines. Here the poem does seem to suggest the real possibility of stepping outside linear time into another historical moment or a space unbounded by temporality, though its imagery of a pilgrimage away from modernity may equally be a playful parody of medievalist desires. Authorial intent in Eliot’s “Usk” remains slippery, the poem’s tone ambiguous, and its meaning potentially duplicitous. As with Hill’s Mercian Hymns, the resistance of poetic form and syntax to fully explicated, stable meaning ensures that the past remains in uncertain, suggestive, irreducible relationship to the present. The poetic itineraries of Hill and Eliot point to the limitations of conventional historiographical writing as a mode of representing experiences of time in place, and the dynamics of contact between multiple temporal moments. Where academic discourse seeks to determine and fix the relationships between moments in time—​through practices of interpretation, reasoning, and clarification—​poetry allows apposition without explication; imaged moments without the constraints of connective syntax or logic. Within the current normative practices and discourses of academic historiography, is it even possible to capture the experiences of encountering multiple historical moments in place? Or is such expression beyond the reach of professional academic history-​writing? The Mercian Hymns and “Usk,” intersecting with the St. Thomas Way, suggest ways in which remaking historical writing as creative practice—​and creative discourse—​might enlarge its expressive, conceptual potential, and enable new possibilities for representing and reflecting upon time(s) in place.

Raymond Williams: Disciplining Time and Place

The poetic itineraries of T. S. Eliot and Geoffrey Hill in the March of Wales illuminate the potential of creative idioms and forms to express relationships between time and place in more capacious and suggestive ways, beyond the tendency of academic discourse to discipline, categorize, and close down meanings. The St. Thomas Way project has taken inspiration from these creative approaches: most obviously in the collaboration with our 64  Further, Barlow asks whether Eliot and Morley went looking for the local hermit, recorded by the nineteenth-​century diarist John Kilvert, who later described the hermitage as “his grey hut in the green cwm”—​perhaps a source of direct inspiration for the penultimate line of “Usk.” Adrian Barlow, World and Time: Teaching Literature in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 127.

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Artist in Residence, but also in the development of elements such as the immersive medieval soundscapes, the visual concept of the route map, and, fundamentally, our imaginative engagement with the pilgrimage of William Cragh and our shaping of new stories and experiences around the bones of partial historical evidence. As a public-​facing project, funded to share and disseminate scholarship with wide audiences—​rather than to produce new primary research—​the St. Thomas Way project enjoyed freedoms in terms of idioms, content, and approach which extended beyond the typical registers of academic historiography. But in what ways can a project of this nature make a genuine contribution to academic scholarship? What are the challenges and limitations of exploring a serious theoretical research question—​the relationships between temporalities in place—​through a practice-​led, creative, public-​facing initiative? This last itinerary shifts our focus away from theory on time and temporalities, and towards an analysis of critical registers, research modes, and academic practices. Raymond Williams’s bus journey from Hereford to South Wales helps to frame questions about authority, prestige, and value—​and how we might make a case for more unconventional, practice-​led projects, such as the St. Thomas Way, and their interventions in scholarship. It also provides a site for evaluation of my own essay, here: its critical approaches, and a reflection on possible future directions. At the beginning of his essay “Culture is Ordinary,” the Welsh writer and cultural theorist Raymond Williams describes an itinerary that traces the St. Thomas Way route in reverse: a bus journey from Hereford Cathedral down into the South Wales valleys. The bus stop was outside the cathedral. I had been looking at the Mappa Mundi, with its rivers out of Paradise, and at the chained library, where a party of clergymen had got in easily, but where I had waited an hour and cajoled a verger before I even saw the chains. Now, across the street, a cinema advertised the Six-​Five Special and a cartoon version of Gulliver’s Travels. The bus arrived, with a driver and a conductress deeply absorbed in each other. We went out of the city, over the old bridge, and on through the orchards and the green meadows and the fields red under the plough. Ahead were the Black Mountains, and we climbed among them, watching the steep fields end at the grey walls, beyond which the bracken and heather and whin had not yet been driven back. To the east, along the ridge, stood the line of grey Norman castles; to the west, the fortress wall of the mountains. Then, as we still climbed, the rock changed under us. Here, now, was limestone, and the line of the early iron workings along the scarp. The farming valleys, with their scattered white houses, fell away behind. Ahead of us were the narrower valleys: the steel-​rolling mill, the gasworks, the grey terraces, the pitheads.65

Williams’s bus trip takes him from Hereford through the March of Wales, and through the landscape of his childhood. Born in Llanfihangel Crucorney, a small village near Abergavenny (one of the core locations on the St. Thomas Way route), Williams writes in The Country and the City of his intimate childhood knowledge of the local environment, “under the Black Mountains, on the Welsh border, where the meadows are bright green 65  Raymond Williams, “Culture is Ordinary” (1958), in Resources of Hope:  Culture, Democracy, Socialism (London:  Verso, 1989), 3–​14, at 3.  I  would like to thank Professor Daniel Williams, of Swansea University, for drawing my attention to this source.

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against the red earth of the ploughland, and the first trees, beyond the window, are oak and holly.”66 The landscape viewed by Williams from the bus window is inscribed with markers of power—​cultural, political, and economic—​from the archives of Hereford Cathedral to Norman castles and the imposing industrial edifices of South Wales. The journey, also, is imagined as a series of crossings or transitions across boundaries which Williams, as a native of the March, is able to read in the environment: from the orchards and farmland of Herefordshire, to the edges of wilderness among the Black Mountains, into the distinctive hillside terraces and steep slopes of the valleys. Williams’s account of his trip from Hereford into South Wales also speaks, of course, of a more fundamental, momentous personal journey, one that shaped his identity as a scholar and writer:  his move from the Welsh borders of his homeland to Cambridge University and, in time, to an academic career.67 First published in 1958, Williams’s account of this bus journey was written after his undergraduate studies in Cambridge (and a period of time teaching in adult education at Oxford University), but before his election, in 1961, to a Fellowship at Jesus College, Cambridge. The essay itself, then, reflects a transitional or liminal moment in Williams’s own life and career, as he moves towards and into established circles of intellectual prestige, power, and authority. Yet his anecdote here, about the bus journey from Hereford into the Welsh valleys, reflects Williams’s characteristic ambivalence towards the worlds of academia and high culture. He uses the story to introduce concerns that were emerging as central to his writing and politics in the 1950s and early 1960s: questions about what constitutes “culture,” where it is to be located, and to whom it might belong. Various features and encounters on Williams’s itinerary from Hereford to South Wales foreground questions of culture, and cultural ownership, in subtle and suggestive ways. Hereford Cathedral, most obviously, represents a world of establishment learning and culture predicated, in Williams’s view, on exclusivity and exclusion. The books in the chained library symbolize centuries of guarded, restricted knowledge, while the ready access afforded to the “party of clergymen” contrasts with the verger’s attitude to Williams, underscored in the pointed metonymy of his account, which refers only to his sight of “the chains.” The Mappa Mundi itself, with its “rivers out of Paradise,” seems to map only the original expulsion of humanity from Eden, and a paradigm of exclusion from knowledge and its pleasures. By contrast, the cinema opposite the Cathedral seemingly offers mere mass entertainment for ordinary consumers, while the rich local cultures and traditions of the Marcher and valleys communities through which Williams passes are left deliberately unparsed behind the environmental vocabulary of agriculture, industry, and working-​class  terraces. 66  Raymond Williams, “Country and City,” in The Country and the City (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 3–​8, at 3.

67  Williams’s description of the landscape of his childhood in The Country and the City, discussed above, explicitly parallels and contrasts the mountains and meadows of the Welsh Marches with the flat country of the East Anglian fenland, and the glow of the South Wales ironworks, viewed from hills near Abergavenny, with the lights of the city of Cambridge, seen in adult life from his study window. Williams, “Country and City,” 3–​5.

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This apparent contrast, however, is illusory. “Culture is ordinary,” Williams insists after this opening anecdote, and repeatedly throughout the essay. He writes: To grow up in that country [near Abergavenny] was to see the shape of a culture, and its modes of change. I could stand on the mountains and look north to the farms and the cathedral, or south to the smoke and the flare of the blast furnace making a second sunset. To grow up in that family was to see the shaping of minds: the learning of new skills, the shifting of relationships, the emergence of different language and ideas.68

Williams notes the two common uses of the world “culture”: on the one hand to refer to “the arts and learning” and on the other to mean “a whole way of life.”69 This distinction, he asserts, is meaningless and—​worse—​dangerous. Culture is to be found everywhere: in all contexts and communities; in all shared, learned, and valued creative and knowledge-​making practices; and in all minds. In fact, Williams’ emphasizes that he “was not oppressed by the university” in Cambridge: his upbringing in the “ordinary” communities of Llanfihangel Crucorney and Abergavenny had already fostered in him an appreciation of and confidence in learning (even though higher academic opportunities were available only to a few). Instead, he reserves his greatest criticism and contempt for the self-​consciously “cultivated people” in the Cambridge tea shop, performing a version of cultural superiority through subtle social mannerisms designed to exclude others.70 No, Williams insists:  culture is ordinary, is deeper and more meaningful than merely superficial modes of performance and practice, and can be found everywhere. Williams’s arguments about the nature of culture speak from a very specific, mid-​ twentieth-​century context, and seem to us now, perhaps, self-​evident truisms. The notion of cultural value as something defined by its exclusivity—​policed and limited—​has been roundly challenged and dismantled. So in what ways could Williams’s fifty-​year-​old bus journey, together with his analysis of culture and cultural value, be of use here, in this essay on rethinking relationships between place and time through the St. Thomas Way project? I would argue that many of those last-​century debates about prestige and value—​largely won and no longer radical in the broader public arenas of culture and society—​remain pertinent to questions about working practices and methodologies in the academy today, and echo in our current conversations (or, perhaps, our unspoken value judgements) about the possible shapes of scholarship and scholarly outputs. Williams’s itinerary overlays questions prompted by the St. Thomas Way project about the (perceived) relative value of varying modes of research (theoretical, practice-​based, and impact-​driven) and the boundaries of scholarship. Where does research happen? What is research, and who owns it? Can it legitimately emerge through co-​production, creative practice, and the alternative modes and idioms associated with public engagement, imaginative interpretation, and public “impact” objectives? Must it reproduce certain markers of authority and status, or can it be found in different forms and places, and animated in new ways? Reframed in the context of scholarship, Williams’s questions 68  Williams, “Culture is Ordinary,” 4. 69  Williams, “Culture is Ordinary,” 5. 70  Williams, “Culture is Ordinary,” 5.

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call attention to the ways in which “primary” research is still disciplined and policed in professional academia (especially in traditional humanities subjects such as English and history), with less conventional modes such as practice-​ led or impact-​ driven research still often excluded or differently valued in a hierarchy of scholarly practice. I would argue that questions about what constitutes research (or how varying modes of research should be valued) remain provocative—​controversial, and under negotiation—​ in academia today. Next to “ordinary,” the key word most repeated and most prominent in Williams’s reflections on his bus journey through the March of Wales is “shape” (in various noun and verb forms; see the paragraph discussed above as an example). “Culture is Ordinary” celebrates the varied shapes and forms of culture, across different communities and traditions. Williams’s itinerary, then, offers a further prompt to fold reflection on and evaluation of the experimental shape of this essay—​as well as the experimental, practice-​led research modes and methodologies which inform it—​into the essay itself. Structuring this essay around five itineraries, each of which overlays or intersects with the St. Thomas Way route (in both geographical and conceptual terms) has catalyzed exploratory analysis and experimental thinking in a range of areas, driven by varied source materials and critical cues. As proposed at the beginning of the essay, this shape has enabled a multifaceted engagement with theoretical positions on time and temporalities, led by the diversity, contradictoriness, and often fragmentary or contingent nature of current work on the subject—​as well as of time or temporalities themselves. The pilgrimage of William Cragh calls attention, via medieval beliefs around sanctity and relics, to the role of faith in transcending linear temporalities. Gerald of Wales’s sticky river crossing between Margam and Neath—​a point where the St. Thomas Way project also got stuck—​figures relationships between historical moments as wry and anecdotal. The strangely familiar “familia” of phantom travellers described by Walter Map, in his De Nugis Curialium, foregrounds affect, affinity, and the uncanny as dynamics of cross-​ temporal encounter. The unglossed, anachronistic appositions of the poetry of Hill and Eliot sustain multiple temporalities in ambiguous, multivalent simultaneity, reminding us of the limits of academic historiography, with its drive to explicate and discipline. Finally, through Raymond Williams’s bus trip, we go back over ground right along the St. Thomas Way route, and think about the place of this essay within broader research culture and practice. These are all intriguing, suggestive starting points, offering new insights from discussion at the nexus of critical analysis, theory, and practice-​based work or anecdote. Yet further pursuit of these five short itineraries, and the possibilities they suggest, is beyond the scope of this essay: a limitation of its experimental and deliberately fragmentary form. This essay models one way in which an experimental critical form might be brought to bear productively on a difficult theoretical topic which, due to the nature of the subject and the scholarly discourse that surrounds it, calls for an unconventional approach. I do not wish to overstate the unconventionality or innovation of this essay’s form, however. More atypical, I would suggest, than this piece of writing is the research practice and wider project that lie behind it: the St. Thomas Way as a practice-​led route into new thinking on temporalities and place. While I hope this essay has suggested new critical

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possibilities and approaches to time and temporalities in place, my conclusions here ultimately have as much to do with the form of this essay, and the shape of the practice-​ led, applied research out of which it developed. As touched upon repeatedly in this essay, and outlined in my Introduction to this volume, the core work of the St. Thomas Way project involved developing the new heritage route itself, with its walks and curated visitor experience, and resources intended to catalyze immersive engagement with the past and encounters with other historical moments. This practice-​based research, then, is always the starting point for the itineraries discussed here and the critical questions or insights which they, in conjunction with sites and experiences on the St. Thomas Way route, suggest. The bus journey of Raymond Williams takes us back from Hereford Cathedral towards Swansea, doubling back on the St. Thomas Way route, thwarting the linearity of a pilgrimage journey and unsettling our endpoint. It cautions us to think critically about the shape of the scholarly disciplines and conventions to which we commit (and to which we attach value), and reminds us that critical landscapes—​in this case, on the complex subject of time and temporalities—​are terrain that can be retraced, re-​ travelled, and seen anew.

Key Reading

Dinshaw, Carolyn. How Soon Is Now? Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time. Durham: Duke University Press, 2012. Edwards, Philip. Pilgrimage and Literary Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Eliot, T. S. “Landscapes III: Usk.” In Collected Poems 1909–​1962, 154. London: Faber and Faber, 1963. Gerald of Wales. The Journey through Wales and the Description of Wales. Edited by Betty Radice, trans. Lewis Thorpe. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978. Hahn, Cynthia. The Reliquary Effect: Enshrining the Sacred Object. London: Reaktion, 2017. Hill, Geoffrey. Mercian Hymns. In Selected Poems, 61–​90. London: Penguin, 2006. Hsy, Jonathan. “Distemporality: Richard III’s Body and the Car Park.” Upstart:  A Journal of English Renaissance Studies (2013), https://​upstart.sites.clemson.edu/​Essays/​richard-​ forum/​distemporality.xhtml. Prendergast, Thomas A., and Stephanie Trigg. Affective Medievalism:  Love, Abjection and Discontent. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018. Walter Map. De Nugis Curialium [Courtiers’ Trifles]. Edited by M. R. James, revised by C. N. L. Brooke and R. A. B. Mynors. Oxford: Clarendon, 1983. Williams, Raymond. “Culture is Ordinary” [1958]. In Resources of Hope: Culture, Democracy, Socialism, pp. 3–​14. London: Verso, 1989.

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Chapter 4

ARCHIVES AS COMMEMORATION /​ PILGRIMAGE AS  INTERPRETATION: HEREFORD CATHEDRAL, THE ST. THOMAS WAY, AND CANTILUPE 2020 BETHANY HAMBLEN

Introduction At Hereford, pilgrimage comes in cycles for the Cathedral Archivist. “Pilgrimage work” is spurred sometimes by the personal interests of Cathedral personnel and external researchers, but most frequently by the evolving needs of the Cathedral in pursuing conservation projects, commemorating anniversaries, and changing approaches to education, interpretation, and ministry. While in post as the Archivist at Hereford Cathedral, I supported the development of the St. Thomas Way and conducted research and helped plan exhibitions for Cantilupe 2020: the seven-​hundredth anniversary of the canonization of St. Thomas Cantilupe. In particular, at the request of the Dean of Hereford Cathedral, I followed the elusive trail of two chapels in the Cathedral’s north porch: a chantry chapel of the Blessed Virgin Mary originally endowed in the decades after the Black Death, and a late medieval chapel dedicated to the Holy Name of Jesus. The Dean wanted to know if it could be proved that pilgrims visited the porch. After all, the late thirteenth-​century inner porch features a famous carving of one, and the architecture of the deluxe early sixteenth-​century outer porch, with its two staircases, certainly seems designed to facilitate visitor flow.1 Bishop Charles Booth was also busy granting indulgences to pilgrims in 1518, in the hope that he would be able to finance the building of yet another oratory to take the overflow.2 After delving through act books, fabric accounts, and articles by historians and archivists who came before me, I did find evidence of offerings made to the shrines in the porch, but Booth’s aspiration that throngs of pilgrims would require extra space seems to have been overly optimistic. St. Thomas Cantilupe of Hereford, despite the decline of his cult from its heyday in the time of William Cragh, still held sway, with offerings to his shrine, his relics, and his head.3 1  R. K. Morris, “The Architectural History of the Medieval Cathedral Church,” in Hereford Cathedral: A History, ed. Gerald Aylmer and John Tiller (London: Hambledon, 2000), 229–​31.

2  George Marshall, Hereford Cathedral Church:  Its Evolution and Growth (Worcester:  Littlebury, 1951), 163–​65.

3  R. N. Swanson, “Devotional Offerings at Hereford Cathedral in the Later Middle Ages,” Analecta Bollandiana 111 (1993): 93–​102.

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Figure 3a. The north porch of Hereford Cathedral, facing southeast. The two-​storied outer portion of the porch was added by Bishop Charles Booth around 1518, and is commonly known as the Booth Porch.

Figure 3b. Figure of a pilgrim, carved into the arch of the inner section of the north porch, ca. late thirteenth century.

Yet Booth’s porch is quite rightly intended as one of the focal points for future interpretation centring on the role of pilgrimage at the Cathedral for the forthcoming celebrations in 2020. As we shall see, the gaps in the archival record for the medieval and Tudor periods, as well as the physical erasure of pilgrimage sites during the Reformation and later, pose challenges and multidisciplinary opportunities for interpretation, and have inspired creative, community-​based commemorative strategies. This chapter briefly contextualizes the uses of archives for commemorative purposes, and the interpretative uses of pilgrimage, by discussing some recent thinking on the role of archives in constructing memory and community. It is also a collection of personal reflections gathered during my time as Cathedral Archivist, in which I try to tease out the connections, interactions, negotiations, and coincidences in the varied ways in which the Cathedral community commemorates its saint and conveys this experience to modern pilgrims and visitors. As an archivist whose experience has been grounded in a local authority setting until recently, I am keenly aware of—​and have participated in—​initiatives using archives to commemorate events and interpret them to varied audiences. With Magna Carta, Simon de Montfort, and Agincourt a few years ago, the Representation of the People Act in 2018, and the four years of World War I  commemorations dominating much of the decade, archival institutions are experiencing somewhat of a renaissance in marking anniversaries. Physical and digital exhibitions, art projects, heritage trails, talks, workshops, and family activities all aim for education and community engagement, perhaps even more so than for remembrance for its own sake. On the other hand, during the past few decades, heritage professionals have become more sophisticated and reflective about what it means to commemorate.

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Commemoration “marks out the special from the ordinary.”4 It can take many forms, from physical and digital memorials to services and processions, from art and music to records and objects, and the places that care for the latter and make them accessible. Heritage practitioners increasingly recognize that we are not simply observing anniversaries and teaching people in the present about the past. Commemorative practices do not just fix people and events in the memories of participants and observers, but actively create memories and assign meaning. We now acknowledge the problematic in commemorating conflict, strive to collect and present the stories of marginalized groups, and try to build in opportunities for reflection.5 I will argue that commemorative and interpretative practices at Hereford Cathedral are similarly nuanced. Whether consciously or otherwise the Cathedral is not simply using its cultural and spiritual heritage to educate, illustrate, or even commemorate an historical event or theme. Pilgrimage—​and archives—​are the commemoration.6

So What Do I Mean by Archives (and Archivists)?

Archives and records have been and can be defined in a bewildering variety of ways, depending on context. An accepted definition within the framework of anglophone professional recordkeeping traditions goes something along these lines: A collection of documents created or gathered by one person or institution and selected for long-​term preservation as evidence of their activities.7

A variant, which I prefer, is:

Materials created and accumulated by individuals, organisations or businesses in the course of their activities and retained for usefulness (research) and as evidence (legal).8

4  “Decade of Anniversaries Toolkit,” Creative Centenaries, http://​creativecentenaries.org/​toolkit/​ what-​commemoration#pid-​1. See also “Commemoration,” University of York, Institute for the Public Understanding of the Past, www.york.ac.uk/​ipup/​research/​commemoration/​.

5  “Decade of Anniversaries Toolkit.” See also the collected essays in Community Archives: The Shaping of Memory, Principles and Practice in Records Management and Archives, ed. Jeannette A. Bastian and Ben Alexander (London: Facet, 2009).

6  The concept of archives actually being acts of commemoration in themselves has been explored in the literature of archival theory. See, for example, Eric Ketelaar, “Archives as Spaces of Memory,” Journal of the Society of Archivists 29 (2008): 9–​27. 7  “Introduction to Archives,” King’s College, Cambridge, www.kings.cam.ac.uk/​archive-​centre/​ introduction-​archives/​definition/​index.html.

8  “Glossary,” Archives Hub, https://​archiveshub.jisc.ac.uk/​glossary/​. A similar definition from the National Archives refers to “collections of documents or ‘records’ which have been selected for permanent preservation because of their value as evidence or as a source for historical or other research. Records are created by the activities of organisations and people; they serve an active purpose whilst in current use and some of them are later selected and preserved as part of an archival collection.” “Archive Principles and Practice: An Introduction to Archives for Non-​archivists,” National Archives, www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/​documents/​archives/​archive-​principles-​and-​ practice-​an-​introduction-​to-​archives-​for-​non-​archivists.pdf.

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“Materials” recognizes that archives can consist of more than paper, parchment, or electronic “documents,” and that the nature of what we consider to be a record—​and why we select certain records for long-​term preservation as archives—​evolves over time. Postmodern theory about archives and archivists over the past few decades makes explicit what archivists implicitly know and practice: archives “extend and corroborate human and corporate memory and play a critical role in maintaining awareness of how the present is shaped by the past.”9 This does not mean that archives are neutral. They are no longer considered to be carriers of objective truth: they often privilege traditional narratives and institutional power, and have been used to deny rights as well as confer them. Archivists, as keepers of archives, actively shape the record, and therefore memory and power structures, by collecting, appraising, and selecting (and rejecting) records for long-​term preservation.10 Archivists who work for institutions necessarily support institutional “goals, culture and ethos.”11 But those needs are mediated through continually evolving archival standards, practice, and technology. All of this informs not only what is kept, but also how information about archival collections is presented and accessed. The descriptions of collections found in archive catalogues, while conforming to currently accepted standards, are unavoidably shaped by the knowledge and biases of the archivist who wrote them. Many archivists, including those at Hereford Cathedral, go a step further in shaping institutional and community narratives by interpreting collections through exhibitions and workshops, and contributing their own scholarship based on the archives in their care.12

Community: Easy to Understand, Hard to Define

The relationship between archives, archivist, and community depends on context: the “traditions and situations of creation and use.”13 Cathedral archivists support the work of the Cathedral by preserving, for example, its statutory, administrative, and financial records. These institutional archives maintain corporate memory and enable the Cathedral to carry out its functions, underpinning critical components of the Cathedral’s religious mission: education and learning, fostering community, and welcoming visitors of all faiths 9  Geoffrey Yeo, “Introduction to the Series,” in Community Archives:  The Shaping of Memory, ed. Jeannette A. Bastian and Ben Alexander (London: Facet, 2009), ix.

10  Joan M. Schwartz and Terry Cook, “Archives, Records, and Power: The Making of Modern Memory,” Archival Science 2 (2002): 1–​19.

11  Victor Gray, “ ‘Who’s that Knocking on Our Door?’: Archives, Outreach and Community,” Journal of the Society of Archivists 29 (2008):  1–​8, at 2; Francis X.  Blouin and William G.  Rosenberg, Processing the Past:  Contesting Authority in History and the Archives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 114.

12  Victoria Lane and Jennie Hill, “Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? Situating the Archive and Archivist,” in The Future of Archives and Recordkeeping, ed. Jennie Hill (London: Facet, 2011), 10; Blouin and Rosenberg, Processing the Past, 115.

13  Jeannette A. Bastian and Ben Alexander, “Introduction: Communities and Archives: A Symbiotic Relationship,” in Community Archives, ed. Bastian and Alexander, xxii.

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and none (including pilgrims) into that community.14 But what is community, specifically within a cathedral context? The sheer variety of different and overlapping communities means that the concept defies easy definition. Communities can be based on location, or common interests or identities, such as profession, ethnicity, or sexual orientation.15 Modern cathedrals explicitly are communities based on the confluence of location, identity, and common interests, just as they are places of worship, homes for residentiary canons, concert venues, property owners, and businesses. Current literature, from staff handbooks to publicity leaflets and newsletters, deploys the language of community: the Cathedral is the “home of a community which has worshipped and worked together here continuously for well over 1300 years.”16 Members of staff, volunteers, and worshippers are encouraged to join the Community Roll. Not all community members are people of faith, but it is, as a whole, a community of faith, so commemoration takes on a further dimension. Commemoration, communal, and corporate memory are intertwined in a living, spiritual community. In fact, the chapter in the current guidebook covering monuments and memorials is aptly entitled “A Remembering Community.”17 Adam de Esgar, the canon who endowed the original chantry above the north porch in the 1360s, ensured his inclusion in the Cathedral’s obit book (joining Cantilupe himself), so that prayers would be said for his soul and those of his parents on the anniversary of his death.18 Medieval obit or memorial books were compiled by ecclesiastical or religious communities, and included members of the community, such as Canon Esgar, as well as lay benefactors and others with a connection to the Cathedral or religious house. They embodied a “conceptual link between inscribing memory and remembering the dead.”19 In one comparable European late medieval Book of Donors, “donors … cooperated with religious … authority to perpetuate memory, redeem souls, and build the city’s beloved cathedral.”20 14  Indeed, old financial and administrative records are now used to present stories about cathedral life and pilgrimage in the past.

15  Communities can and do produce their own archives. In recent decades “community archives” have arisen in response to perceived gaps in the “official” record. They are collected and maintained for and by communities based on location, with or without the involvement of professional archivists. 16  Hereford Cathedral website, www.herefordcathedral.org/​. 17  Hereford Cathedral (London: Scala, 2011), 14.

18  “The Obit Book of Hereford Cathedral:  July–​Dec (f.25r–​),” in Fasti Ecclesiae Anglicanae 1066–​1300: Volume 8, Hereford, ed. J. S. Barrow (London: University of London Institute for Historical  Research,  2002), 128–​58. British History Online, www.british-​history.ac.uk/​fasti-​ ecclesiae/​1066–​1300/​vol8/​pp128-​158.

19  Jill Hamilton Clements, “Writing and Commemoration in Anglo-​Saxon England,” in Death in Medieval Europe:  Death Scripted and Death Choreographed, ed. Joelle Rollo-​Koster (London: Routledge, 2016), 15.

20  Charlotte A. Stanford, Commemorating the Dead in Late Medieval Strasbourg:  The Cathedral’s Book of Donors and its Use (1320–​1521) (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), xvii.

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Six hundred and fifty years later, in 2015, the Cathedral launched a fundraising appeal to place a cross at the apex of the Booth Porch.21 Now, as in the medieval period, donations help fund the repair and enhancement of the Cathedral fabric. Instead of issuing indulgences to elicit offerings, the Cathedral’s fundraising arm distributed flyers with its newsletter. But these recent fundraising efforts also recognize the vital, continuing significance of commemoration to the Cathedral community. Donors to the cross appeal joined a select community of Booth Patrons, named after the Tudor bishop, and had their initials cast in lead, affixed to a plate on the roof near the cross. This is just one of many memorialization strategies encouraged by the Cathedral, where donors, patrons, and community members are invited to inscribe themselves into the fabric of the building or into one of several donor and memorial books. One of these contains the only record of stones sponsored by individuals, frequently in memoriam to a loved one. The inscriptions on the stones themselves are not visible, having been carved on the inner face before being laid during repairs to the Lady Chapel.22 A daughter of Cathedral congregants recently made her own genealogical pilgrimage to view her parents’ inscriptions in this book, preserved in the archives, highlighting the role of archives and the mediating role of the archivist in supporting communities and shaping memory. Cathedrals undeniably benefit financially from encouraging these forms of commemoration, but the relationship is a symbiotic one. Donors achieve a sense of belonging for themselves and their loved ones and ensure that they will be remembered. The need for community is expressed in archives, in this case the records of donors, which in turn construct communities.23

Pilgrimage, Shrines, and Relics

This palpable and conscious continuity from medieval to modern is most apparent when it comes to the Cathedral’s own saint. It can be difficult to escape the influence of Thomas of Hereford. He is everywhere, past, present, and future, in different parts of the Cathedral (and elsewhere) at different times. The Cathedral Librarian and I literally carry him about when we bring one of his relics from the archive strongroom to the vestry safe for use in processions to his shrine on his feast day and other significant occasions. Like the saint’s bones, which were translated in the Middle Ages and underwent various diasporas at the Reformation and after, the tomb/​shrine itself was peripatetic.24 21  The appeal notes that although there is no archival evidence for the presence of a cross, architectural traces strongly suggest that there was one. “the Cathedral Architect drew on his experience to create a new design based on the cross on the north east transept and picking up the quatrefoil design at the head of the entrance arch.” HCA 7064/​2015. 22  HCA ACC67/​17.

23  Bastian and Alexander, “Introduction,” xxi. See also Schwartz and Cook, “Archives, Records, and Power.”

24  Thomas de Cantilupe was buried in no fewer than three places: an unknown site in the Lady Chapel after his bones were returned from Italy in 1282; the existing tomb/​shrine in the north transept whither he was translated in 1287; and the now-​missing shrine in the Lady Chapel that received his bones post-​canonization.

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It has long been accepted that the thirteenth-​century monument, which began as a tomb and was converted into a shrine, escaped the worst of the iconoclasm precisely because it was no longer a pilgrimage site, having been replaced by a more richly decorated shrine in the Lady Chapel in the fourteenth century.25 This second shrine is still elusive, physically and archivally. From indulgences and receipts for work done by a goldsmith, marble supplier, and image maker, we know that work on a new shrine was underway at the time of the canonization.26 We know that work stalled, as a result of national political events and tightening finances due to a decline in pilgrim offerings.27 It was finally complete by 1349, when Thomas’s relics were translated and his cult given a brief boost during the horrors of the Black Death. The Reformation swept away the new shrine, the only traces being evocatively worn steps around where the plinth was, rediscovered during Victorian building works.28 Cursory entries in the first surviving Chapter Act Book tell us only that royal injunctions had been received, first to confiscate offerings in 1538 and then to pull down shrines in 1547. Cathedral authorities were slow to act, and a brief entry shows that Hereford’s shrines were finally taken down in 1550.29 Few other records have survived, or, like the relics themselves, they were hidden or dispersed. This hampers attempts at interpretation for the Cathedral, but archaeology, academic creativity, and artistic inspiration can help fill gaps in the archival record. The Cathedral has been consulting the York-​based Centre for Christianity and Culture for 2020 and beyond. Their interpretation services will combine academic research looking at archival, archaeological, and art historical evidence with digital technologies. The proposals so far involve layers of pilgrimage interpretative foci within the Cathedral. The Booth Porch, part of the primary layer, will incorporate a clear message of welcome (potentially as a rolling presentation) designed to appeal to all types of visitors, focusing on the idea of the journey, in the past and now. This is particularly fitting, since the historical and archaeological consensus is that the north porch, from its thirteenth-​century origins, was designed as a “symbolic entrance to [Cantilupe’s] shrine,” with the north transept shrine’s cinquefoil arches echoed on a “monumental scale” in the inner doorway.30 The primary layer of pilgrimage interpretation will of course also focus on the current, restored, shrine in the north transept, the centre of Thomas’s cult at its height in the late thirteenth century. It is hoped that existing interpretation will be enhanced 25  Meryl Jancey, St. Thomas of Hereford (Newport: Dixon, 1978), 5.

26  George Marshall, “The Shrine of St. Thomas de Cantilupe, in Hereford Cathedral,” Transactions of the Woolhope Naturalists’ Field Club 27 (1930–​32): 34–​50, at 43.

27  Richard Morris, “The Remodelling of the Hereford Aisles,” Journal of the British Archaeological Association, 3rd ser., 38 (1974): 21–​39, at 25–​26; Marshall, “The Shrine of St. Thomas de Cantilupe,” 42; Penelope E. Morgan, “The Effect of the Pilgrim Cult of St. Thomas Cantilupe on Hereford Cathedral,” in St. Thomas Cantilupe, Bishop of Hereford:  Essays in his Honour, ed. Meryl Jancey (Leominster: Friends of Hereford Cathedral Publications Committee, 1982), 145–​52, at 151. 28  Marshall, “The Shrine of St. Thomas de Cantilupe,” 44.

29  Hereford Cathedral Chapter Act Book 1, 1512–​1566, HCA 7031/​1, fols. 98r, 102v, 105v. 30  Morris, “The Remodelling of the Hereford Aisles,” 23.

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Figure 4a. Cinquefoil arches framing knightly weepers on the top section of Thomas Cantilupe’s tomb/​shrine base.

Figure 4b. Cinquefoil arch of the door in the late thirteenth-​century inner north porch of Hereford Cathedral.

by digital reconstructions of the shrine and pilgrims of the past engaging with it. Other interpretative layers will include the modern St. Ethelbert “shrine” in the retro-​choir, the Lady Chapel and its lost Cantilupe shrine, and centres of modern pilgrimage, including the Ascension window, dedicated in 2017 as a memorial to the Special Air Service, and the Three Choirs Festival, which draws its own pilgrims.31 This multi-​site approach echoes how medieval pilgrimage was experienced.32 The depositions in Vatican MS Lat. 4015, the record of the 1307 inquisition determining St. Thomas’s life and miracles, recall a pilgrim being carried around to various altars, up the stairs to the Holy Cross altar in the pulpitum, back down again to the chapel of the Virgin in the east end, and so on.33 This busy pattern of intra-​cathedral movement continued as the number of altars 31  While Ascension is one of many military memorials in the Cathedral, recent interpretation as part of Herefordshire’s Home Front commemorations during the installation of the “Poppies: Weeping Window” sculpture in 2018 acknowledged the role and contributions of conscientious objectors and other noncombatants. Pilgrims walking the Three Choirs Way bear the Festival Flag, and are blessed before they set off. Cathedral Calling 8 (August 2016), www.herefordcathedral.org/​ Handlers/​Download.ashx?IDMF=c98c8fb8-​4fbb-​42f9-​b5b4-​2d573d461215. 32  Ben Nilson, Cathedral Shrines of Medieval England (Woodbridge:  Boydell, 1998), 92–​121; Tim Tatton-​ Brown, “Canterbury and the Architecture of Pilgrimage Shrines in England,” in Pilgrimage:  The English Experience from Becket to Bunyan, ed. Collin Morris and Peter Roberts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 90–​107.

33  Pilgrim testimony shows that people were not always aware of the location of Cantilupe’s original burial place in the Lady Chapel. Conversely, pilgrims made offerings at the old site as well

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grew and the liturgical calendar became increasingly complex as devotions to popular saints were added. The cathedral hosted a “complex pattern of interlocking and overlapping services and devotions in different parts of the church, large numbers of passing travellers, visitors and pilgrims.”34 It must be emphasized that the Centre for Christianity and Culture will be enhancing, adding value to, a multi-​site scheme designed and implemented more than a decade ago as part of the major Celebrating the Saints project. This project linked three strands: the design of a new shrine for St. Ethelbert the King, the Cathedral’s oft-​overshadowed early medieval patron saint; installation of windows inspired by the mystic and poet Thomas Traherne in the Audley Chapel; and its centrepiece, the newly restored Cantilupe shrine. All three sites were planned as reinvigorated places of prayer, while also incorporating a teaching element, and a further ecumenical element particularly for the Cantilupe shrine. Downside Abbey and Belmont Abbey, both owners of Cantilupe relics, and the Catholic Church of St. Francis Xavier, have participated in services at the shrine.35 A further ambition was to reintroduce both the Ethelbert and Cantilupe shrines as linked liturgical areas. We do not know exactly where the original Ethelbert shrine was, but shrines to a patron saint were usually situated behind the high altar.36 For this reason, the retro-​choir was chosen as the site for a striking shrine-​like structure wrapped around a pillar, providing a visual, spiritual, and commemorative focus for a space that had hitherto diminished to a mere “passing place” between the north choir aisle and the Lady Chapel.37 The Ethelbert structure and the restored Cantilupe shrine are linked visually to each other and to their surroundings. Both structures were designed by Cathedral architect Robert Kilgour and adorned with icon artwork by Peter Murphy. The bold primary-​ colour scheme picks up on the colours in the Lady Chapel reredos and the new Traherne windows in the Audley chapel.38 In the case of the Ethelbert structure, there is no attempt to reconstruct an actual shrine. Rather, the saint-​king’s story is illustrated in a series of twelve icon as the new in the late thirteenth century. One woman clearly attributed her cure to this original site, and continued to visit it after the 1287 translation. John Crook, English Medieval Shrines (Woodbridge:  Boydell, 2011), 236; Ronald C.  Finucane, “Pilgrimage in Daily Life:  Aspects of Medieval Communication Reflected in the Newly-​established Cult of Thomas Cantilupe (d. 1282), Its Dissemination and Effects upon Outlying Herefordshire Villages,” Wallfahrt und Alltag in Mittelalter und Früher Neuzeit (October 1992): 166–​71. 34  John Harper, “Music and Liturgy, 1300–​1600,” in Hereford Cathedral:  A History, ed. Gerald Aylmer and John Tiller (London: Hambledon, 2000), 379–​80. 35  The Friends of Hereford Cathedral Seventy Fifth Annual Report (2009), 6–​7.

36  The fourteenth-​century translation of the Cantilupe shrine to the Lady Chapel, and the subsequent joint dedication of the Lady Chapel altar to the Virgin and Cantilupe, helped mark out the sanctuary as Ethelbert’s space (the high altar was also jointly dedicated, but to the Virgin and Ethelbert). The two saints, Ethelbert and Thomas, are linked elsewhere in the Cathedral, particularly on the tomb iconography of Cantilupe himself, and several other medieval bishops. Morris, “Architectural History,” 224. 37  Friends Seventy Fifth Annual Report, 5.

38  The Friends of Hereford Cathedral 75th Anniversary Year Seventy Third Annual Report (2007), 6.

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panels echoing medieval hagiographical tropes but still resonating with modern audiences.39 The Cantilupe monument, of course, still stood in its original position in the north transept, but it needed to be visually reinterpreted, and resituated as a shrine. The surviving shrine base has been much studied, but we do not know what its feretrum—​the portable reliquary resting on top—​looked like. We know that one existed from documentary references to a feretrarius, or custodian of the feretrum, and extant holes for iron fixings on the top of the base.40 The canopy or modern feretrum added in 2008 could be described, like the Ethelbert shrine, as a medieval pastiche. It evokes, rather than slavishly reconstructs, a medieval shrine, through the use of traditional icon painting techniques and materials. It boldly incorporates modern art in the design of the small glass pyx holding a fragment of Cantilupe’s bone on loan from Stonyhurst College. The icon on the canopy’s western end integrates all the Cathedral’s primary saints and symbolism, including recent thinking about the Mappa Mundi’s role as a “pilgrimage attraction” and teaching tool as part of a “Cantilupe pilgrimage complex.”41 Both shrines are further linked by interlocking layers of communal and individual commemoration. Donors to the Ethelbert shrine, primarily the Friends of Hereford Cathedral, whose support was crucial to the project, had their names (or those of departed loved ones) inscribed around the base, and it was dedicated during the Friends’ Festival in 2007. Similarly, donors had their initials woven into interpretative hangings featuring scenes from Thomas’s life and cult. The scenes were themselves inspired by the Friends’ four-​year pilgrimage in the steps of St. Thomas (about which more below). Notably, the initials of those Friends who completed these pilgrimages are also commemorated in the hangings.42 The commemorative function of the Cantilupe shrine canopy is even more pronounced: the icon on the less visible east end depicts the principal donors holding a model shrine in the style of a medieval donor portrait; the Bishop and the Dean; and 39  The Cathedral Archivist at the time, Rosalind Caird, helped select the twelve key events, telling a story of “hope, vision, jealousy, death, healing and new life.” Friends Seventy Fifth Annual Report, 5. 40  Chapter Act Book 1, HCA 7031/​1. For the fittings, see Nichola Coldstream, “Hereford Cathedral: The Shrine of Saint Thomas Cantilupe,” Report, 1998, 7.

41  Daniel Terkla, “Speaking the Map: Teaching with the Hereford Mappa Mundi,” Geotema 27 (2007):  199–​214. There is debate about the original placement and function of the map, but this interpretation is attractive as it helps the Cathedral link its primary medieval attraction, the Cantilupe cult, with its most well-​known draw for modern tourists, the Mappa Mundi, creating a more coherent, integrated interpretative and spiritual framework around ideas of pilgrimage. “the map of wonders functioning, like the shrine itself, as a draw for pilgrims.” Michael Tavinor, Shrines of the Saints in England and Wales (Norwich:  Canterbury Press, 2016), 155. Tavinor makes the spiritual link more explicit elsewhere: “the wonders of the world it depicts conspiring together with the wonders worked at the shrine of Hereford’s own saint.” Friends Seventy Fifth Annual Report, 6.  For a summary of scholarly debate about the map, see Martin Bailey, “The Discovery of the Lost Mappamundi Panel:  Hereford’s Map in a Medieval Altarpiece?,” in The Hereford World Map: Medieval World Maps and their Contexts, ed. P. D. A. Harvey (London: British Library, 2006), 79–​93. 42  Friends of Hereford Cathedral Seventy Fourth Annual Report (2008), 5.

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male and female emblematic figures with apples, hops, and a cow, Herefordshire’s most familiar exports.43 A key moment during the launch of the St. Thomas Way in July 2018 was the dedication and blessing of the route, which took place at this shrine. Pilgrims from stops along the Way were present, and all were invited to be “measured” to the saint. The resulting profusion of brightly coloured ribbons was set at the shrine’s base as an offering, and participants were encouraged to approach the shrine and touch it as they prayed. A decade after its restoration, the shrine in action is still just as evocative, and those who gathered around it that day briefly formed their own community.

Commemorating St. Thomas

The St. Thomas Way has become part of a continuum, and it is difficult to separate it from the 2020 commemorations and from those celebrations, devotions, exhibitions, and publications that have come before. I discovered this when preparing for an initial meeting with the St. Thomas Way project team, searching the archive catalogues for all references to Thomas, his shrine, and pilgrimage. Apart from the medieval documents—​ indulgences, disputes over wax offerings, and so on—​I found the modern records, documenting the 1982 St. Thomas Festival, commemorating the seven-​hundredth year of his death. The festival itself was an act of performative commemoration, preserved in photographs and ephemera such as orders of service.44 One of the key outputs in 1982 was a collection of essays. The Friends of Hereford Cathedral, the Bishop, Librarian, Archivist, and academic scholars collaborated to celebrate Thomas, a saintly bishop who was himself a scholar, with archival research.45 Essays about Thomas are brought together with essays about his cult and its effect on the Cathedral long after his death, all edited by the Archivist. It struck me that this emulated the process of canonization itself. Reports of the life of the saint combined with the recorded memories of miracles witnessed by pilgrims built up a fuller picture for papal commissioners in the fourteenth century. One contribution analyzes how Thomas changed the liturgical calendar when he joined the community of saints commemorated in the Cathedral each year. Another offering is music composed in his honour.46 This book embodies many of the forms commemoration can take, and still effectively interprets the distant past for a modern audience. Yet it is undeniably traditional in its approach, reflecting the views of the Cathedral “establishment” and academic elite. 43  Tavinor, Shrines of the Saints, 155–​56. The canopy was given by Sir Roy Strong and Julia Trevelyan Oman. 44  Bastian and Alexander, “Introduction,” xxiii; Paul Clarke and Julian Warren, “Ephemera: Between Archival Objects and Events,” Journal of the Society of Archivists 30 (2009): 45–​66.

45  Meryl Jancey, ed., St. Thomas Cantilupe, Bishop of Hereford: Essays in His Honour (Leominster: Friends of Hereford Cathedral Publications Committee, 1982).

46  Brian Trowell and Andrew Wathey, “John Benet’s ‘Lux Fulget ex Anglia—​O Pater Pietatis—​ Salve Thoma:’ The Reconstruction of a Fragmentary Fifteenth-​ century Motet in Honour of St. Thomas Cantilupe,” in St. Thomas Cantilupe, ed. Jancey, 159–​80. They theorize that the music was commissioned by Edmund Lacy, Bishop of Hereford, to celebrate the centenary of canonization.

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Figure 5a. Shrine of St. Thomas de Cantilupe in the north transept of Hereford Cathedral. The base of the tomb/​shrine was constructed in 1287. The canopy dates from the shrine’s restoration in 2008.

Figure 5b. One of two commemorative interpretative hangings designed as part of the 2008 shrine restoration.

The association of Cantilupe’s name with scholarship and learning was strengthened by the creation in 2003 of the Cantilupe Institute, an initiative led by the Chancellor’s department—​the Cathedral dignitary traditionally responsible for oversight of archives, and Master of the Library today. Designed to broaden understanding and debate in theology, social issues, and the arts, it was renamed, appropriately, Life and Learning in 2009.47 This name change, which broadcasts a spirit of greater inclusivity and accessibility, accompanied a more diverse and popular programme focused on adult continuing education and enrichment. Many of the talks are given by volunteers, and are often free for volunteers, a key constituent of the Cathedral community. Fresh impetus for commemoration and interpretation came with the convergence of a number of events. The first was the discovery in 1998 by the Cathedral Archivist of Cantilupe’s household account, covering his final journey to Italy, where he died in Ferento in 1282. This find coincided with the conservation of the shrine base in the north transept, but was not published until 2007, when the shrine restoration as part of the Celebrating the Saints project was almost complete. Celebrating the Saints was accompanied by a new wave of lectures, exhibitions, and publications, of which a booklet, published by the Friends of Hereford Cathedral, was one.48 47  The programme of talks for July 2018 included a contribution by Catherine Clarke on the St. Thomas Way.

48  Friends of Hereford Cathedral, Following in the Footsteps of St. Thomas Cantilupe: To Celebrate the 75th Anniversary of the Foundation of the Friends of Hereford Cathedral, 1932–​2007 (Leominster: Friends of Hereford Cathedral in association with Orphans Press, 2007).

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This booklet bundles the Archivist’s exposition of the household account with an account of the previously mentioned pilgrimages taken by the Friends from 2002 to 2005. They used the document to reconstruct Thomas’s footsteps through Italy—​the perfect combination of archives, commemoration, pilgrimage, and interpretation. It also commemorated the seventy-​fifth anniversary of the founding of the Friends, and is dedicated “To all the pilgrims.” These pilgrims, having already, as we have seen, positioned themselves and their anniversary within the Celebrating the Saints project, inscribed themselves in the pages of the book. The names of all those who participated are listed, accompanied by their memories of the journey. In this community-​led effort to preserve collective memory, the Friends commemorated themselves while simultaneously demonstrating their devotion to St. Thomas and the Cathedral community.49 In both publications (1982 and 2007), archivists, historians, and latterly pilgrims offer archives to the memory of the saint, echoing the wax and silver votive figures offered to his shrine hundreds of years ago—​which in turn appear in the fabric accounts, which are analyzed in the essays. A  more palpable reflection of the wax votive might be the candle lit by the Archbishop of Canterbury in Cantilupe’s honour in 1982 and now preserved in the archives. Its logo simultaneously recalls Thomas’s episcopal seal and looks forward to the Cathedral’s current pilgrim badge, which has already been distributed to pilgrims from the Ludlow Palmers Guild and will form part of the suite of images and souvenirs for 2020.50 This badge fuses archival language (Thomas’s image and the fleurs-​de-​lis from his coat of arms, borrowed from his seal) with the architectural (the framing arch from Cantilupe’s tomb/​shrine and the shields held by the knightly weepers). There is a conscious nod to the 2008 reinterpretation of the shrine, whose canopy icon features the two St. Thomases, Becket and Cantilupe, the latter accompanied by a friendly, modern version of his wolf rebus, and angels holding up the Mappa Mundi. This process behind generating logos, the negotiations over symbolism, the drawing together of past and present, also occurred in the St. Thomas Way logo. There was a question as to whether it, too, would reflect Thomas’s seal, but fittingly it ended up also using the framing arch of the shrine as a window looking out on a winding pilgrim’s path, making it more relatable for modern secular “pilgrims” or those of other faiths than an image of the bishop may have been.

49  A similar phenomenon is discussed in Andrew Flinn and Mary Stevens, “ ‘It is Noe Mistri, wi Mekin Histri’: Telling Our Own Story: Independent and Community Archives in the UK, Challenging and Subverting the Mainstream,” in Community Archives, ed. Bastian and Alexander, 17. Medieval pilgrimage was also a communal activity to be fixed in the memory. See Joel T. Rosenthal, Telling Tales:  Sources and Narration in Late Medieval England (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003), 36–​37. 50  The badge was designed by Sandra Elliott, a former Cathedral lay canon.

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Figure 6a. Candle lit by Archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Runcie, October 2, 1982 as part of the 1982 celebrations of St Thomas Cantilupe. A sticker on the candle depicts Cantilupe in red and his dates, 1218–​1282 (HCA 2006/​69).

Figure 6b. Impression of Cantilupe’s episcopal seal, 1275–​1282 (HCA 6460/​5).

Figure 6c. Icon designed by Peter Murphy on west end of 2008 canopy over Cantilupe’s shrine base.

Figure 6d. Modern pilgrim badge designed by Sandy Elliott, 2018.

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Figure 6e. Trefoil arches on the top section of Cantilupe’s tomb/​shrine base in the north transept of Hereford Cathedral.

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Figure 6f. Pilgrims from the Ludlow Palmers Guild received the new Cantilupe badge and a pilgrim prayer card when they visited Hereford Cathedral in 2018.

Pilgrimage as Interpretation (and Commemoration) Those who follow the St. Thomas Way can choose to immerse themselves in spiritual reflections written by the Cathedral Chancellor, contemplate nature, explore the history of a place, or all three. The St. Thomas Way thus complements a rich history of modern pilgrimage at Hereford. The Bishop of Hereford set off on a pilgrimage around the diocese during the 1982 celebrations, and we have seen that pilgrimage played a significant role in Celebrating the Saints.51 This tradition continues to be upheld by the current Dean, who not only leads popular diocesan walks but also supports and welcomes others. These include pilgrims from Hambleden, Buckinghamshire, the parish of Thomas Cantilupe’s birth and one-time holder of some of his relics. They journeyed to Hereford for the 1982 anniversary and will be invited back in 2020. The Dean has composed a special pilgrim’s prayer to be distributed along with the new badge in 2020, and plans are afoot to create resources for further walking routes joining places where Cantilupe is known to have visited/​ministered within the diocese. This is explicitly seen as a programme of engagement—​interpretation as well as ministry. The Cathedral will also bring Thomas out to the diocese in the form of a portable icon, in a reversal of the traditional pilgrimage to the Cathedral. Similarly, in the 2000s, the Cathedral pilgrims—​the Friends—​took this icon when following Thomas’s footsteps through Italy. It is a symbolic piece of Herefordshire, a replica of his image in a stained-​ glass window from Credenhill parish church. So Hereford Cathedral’s interpretative framing of pilgrimage is simultaneously commemorative, spiritual, and educational, fulfilling its mission of welcoming those of all faiths and none. And the Cathedral is serious about learning about its pilgrims in order to improve that welcome: a 2015 analysis of prayer cards left at the Cantilupe shrine revealed that a significant motivation for making the journey was to remember a loved 51  Celebrating the Saints inaugurated pilgrimage routes that continue today, for example a pilgrimage from St. Ethelbert’s Well in Marden, Herefordshire, to the Cathedral. Friends Seventy Third Annual Report, 7.

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Figure 7. Fourteenth-​century stained-​glass window in the parish church of St. Mary, Credenhill, depicting St. Thomas Becket on the left and St. Thomas Cantilupe on the right.

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one.52 In a way, this looks forward to the St. Thomas Way’s “Postcards from the Way” scheme: an inclusive, creative method of seeking feedback from participants that simultaneously creates a sense of belonging. It acknowledges that people travelling on their own personal journeys for very different reasons share commonalities and belong to a community, no matter how dispersed. The Cathedral’s Schools and Family Learning programme’s pilgrimage workshops also stress the individuality of pilgrims and the diversity of their backgrounds: they tell real stories to illustrate the idea that there are different ways to be a pilgrim, depending on status and situation. This aligns entirely with the approach to pilgrimage taken by the Centre for Christianity and Culture, whose involvement will complement and enhance existing Cathedral practices.53 Alongside actual journeys, Schools and Family Learning offers contemplative metaphorical pilgrimages within the Cathedral building. For the St. Thomas Way launch, children and adults alike had the opportunity to walk a labyrinth, which asks participants to think about the pilgrims of the past while at the same time contemplating their own lives as a journey. They anchor their thoughts by holding a glass pebble and engaging in the physical act of placing it in a candlelit pool at the labyrinth’s centre. This tactile activity evokes medieval offerings at the shrine, but participants often like to take their pebble away with them as a souvenir, another modern equivalent of the pilgrim badge. The education programme also uses the embroidered hangings near the shrine as an interpretative and spiritual tool, just as we think wall paintings near the shrine—​and perhaps the Mappa Mundi itself—​were used to teach medieval pilgrims.54 There is a distinct materiality to all this. Candles, badges, icons, embroidered hangings, pebbles—​the material culture of modern pilgrimage embraces a medieval past. The Centre for Christianity and Culture highlights the centrality of sensory experience to past and present pilgrims, which is essentially what the Cathedral has embraced all along.55 The Cathedral has hosted artistic pilgrimages too—​not only Michelle Rumney’s “Re-​Making Maps of the Mind,” commissioned for the St. Thomas Way, but also a popular Photography Pilgrimage introduced as part of the Heritage Lottery-​funded Eastern Cloisters Project. This shows the potential of pilgrimage as an inclusive interpretative framework, enabling synergies between various Cathedral initiatives and projects.

Conclusion

This process and attitude of looking back and forth through time applies to both commemorative acts and pilgrimage at the Cathedral. Archivists, educators, clergy, and 52  Cathedral Calling (November 2015).

53  Visit with Dee Dyas and Louise Hampson of the Centre for Christianity and Culture, Hereford Cathedral, May 22, 2018. See also “Pilgrims and Pilgrimage,” University of York, www.york.ac.uk/​ projects/​pilgrimage/​index.html. 54  Terkla, “Speaking the Map.”

55  Visit, Dee Dyas and Louise Hampson. See also Emma J. Wells, “Making ‘Sense’ of the Pilgrimage Experience of the Medieval Church,” Peregrinations: Journal of Medieval Art and Architecture 3 (2011).

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pilgrims act as intermediaries and memory creators, shaping projects and making and using documents and objects that commemorate the past and interpret it for the present. This permeability of time was sensed by the Cathedral’s first professional archivist, Meryl Jancey. In her booklet outlining the history of Cantilupe’s life and cult she observed the almost devotional nature of archival research in a cathedral context: For a space of some twenty years a long time ago, this shrine was the centre of dramatic events. It is possible that a journey into the past to investigate those events and to find the historical figure of Saint Thomas of Hereford might become something more. It could become a pilgrimage to a Saint whose austere virtues can still speak to this age as they once spoke to his own.56

We are still investigating, and still journeying. The journey has changed over time, to become more inclusive:  from the 1982 scholarly publication which emphasized the political and personal life of the bishop—​himself a member of the Anglo-​Norman elite—​as much as the pilgrims’ experience, to the more community-​led book produced by the Friends, to the interactive, reflective, and accessible practices embodied by the St. Thomas Way and Cantilupe 2020. As Michael Tavinor, the Dean of Hereford Cathedral, has observed, interpretation and commemoration are not immutable, and what we are doing now is only part of “the story so far”: there can never be “the last word” in how our saints are celebrated at Hereford. Future generations may think entirely differently. History reminds us that the Cathedral changes time and time again and we can but contribute as best we can in our generation…57

In a way, I have joined this continuum, the “story so far.” I have recycled archives. I have used archives of old exhibitions, commemorations, and services to create a promotional display for the St. Thomas Way launch, which will be archived and hopefully used in the future. I have concurrently used archives to help try to reconstruct spaces of pilgrimage and movement through those spaces to inform the way in which they will be interpreted in 2020 and beyond. The modes of commemoration and interpretation may change, but in my time as Cathedral Archivist, I have learned just how multilayered and interchangeable commemoration and interpretation are and have always been at Hereford. Cantilupe’s own tomb/​ shrine is simultaneously a site of pilgrimage and a form of commemoration, surrounded by interpretative features and symbolism, echoed in the badges that pilgrims take away with them to fix their journeys in their minds. And earlier in 2018, Hereford Cathedral Choir made their own journey to Italy, to the Vatican—​the first Anglican choir to be invited to perform at the Papal Mass on the Feast of Saints Peter and Paul. In a gesture of ecumenical solidarity, commemorating the visit, and perhaps as thanks for the canonization, Hereford made its own offering of saint-​related archives, or a portfolio of facsimiles 56  Jancey, ed., St. Thomas of Hereford. For an interesting view on religion and archives, see Tim Macquiban, “Historical Texts or Religious Relics: Towards a Theology of Religious Archives,” Journal of the Society of Archivists 16 (1995): 145–​51. 57  Friends Seventy Fifth Annual Report, 7.

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in this case, including receipts for work done on St. Thomas’s shrine the year he was declared a saint almost seven hundred years ago. We have come full circle, because the Cathedral Archives have just accepted into their collection ephemera commemorating this visit to Rome.

Key Reading

Aylmer, Gerald, and John Tiller, eds. Hereford Cathedral: A History. London: Hambledon, 2000. Bastian, Jeanette A., and Ben Alexander, eds. Community Archives:  The Shaping of Memory. London: Facet, 2009. Blouin, Francis X., Jr., and William G. Rosenberg. Processing the Past: Contesting Authority in History and the Archives. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Creative Centenaries. “Decade of Anniversaries Toolkit.” http://​creativecentenaries.org/​ toolkit/​what-​commemoration#pid-​1. Friends of Hereford Cathedral. Following in the Footsteps of St. Thomas Cantilupe: To Celebrate the 75th Anniversary of the Foundation of the Friends of Hereford Cathedral, 1932–​2007. Leominster: Friends of Hereford Cathedral in association with Orphans Press, 2007. Jancey, Meryl. St. Thomas of Hereford. Newport: Dixon, 1978. Jancey, Meryl, ed. St. Thomas Cantilupe, Bishop of Hereford: Essays in His Honour. Leominster: Friends of Hereford Cathedral Publications Committee, 1982. Marshall, George. Hereford Cathedral Church:  Its Evolution and Growth. Worcester: Littlebury, 1951. Morris, Richard. “The Remodelling of the Hereford Aisles.” Journal of the British Archaeological Association, 3rd ser., 38 (1974): 21–​39. Swanson, R. N. “Devotional Offerings at Hereford Cathedral in the Later Middle Ages.” Analecta Bollandiana 111 (1993): 93–​102.

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Chapter 5

HERITAGE SOUNDSCAPES: CONTEXTS AND ETHICS OF CURATORIAL EXPRESSION MARIANA LOPEZ1

Introduction Museums and heritage interpretation practice are mainly focused on the visual, a tradition that stems from the nineteenth century, when the display structure around which museums were constructed and exhibitions curated was first developed, resulting in experiences that were reliant on the sense of vision,2 even though (curiously enough) that was not the case in earlier periods. Bennett explains how Renaissance cabinets of curiosities were not governed by sight, but were framed instead as opportunities to open up conversations on the items on display.3 Speaking and listening as well as seeing were key to the experience.4 It is not just the public exhibition of heritage that has been focused on vision but also the language used in research, with its use of terms such as mapping, framing, visualizing, representing, focusing, and shedding light, among others.5 The implementation of multisensory museum experiences has been growing in popularity, including the utilization of sound elements. However, there has not been a systematic critical reflection on the different ways in which sound can be integrated within historical sites and what the implications of different forms of integration are, both from the perspectives of production and consumption, as well as in terms of ethical considerations and overall historical value. Such reflections sit within the remit of sensory history, a field that considers the roles of the senses in past cultures and 1  I am very grateful for the funding provided by the British Academy for the project The Sound­ scapes of the York Mystery Plays. It is also thanks to the University of York Priming Funds Scheme that further research was conducted. Huge thanks to all the actors and singers who contributed to the creation of the soundscapes of the Mystery Plays, as well as the fantastic participants who contributed their oral histories: my research would not have been possible without you. Thanks are also due to all the volunteers who provided feedback on the online interface. 2  Tony Bennett, “Pedagogic Objects, Clean Eyes, and Popular Instruction: On Sensory Regimes and Museum Didactics,” Configurations 6 (1998):  345–​71; Catherine Foster, “Beyond the Display Case: Creating a Multisensory Museum Experience,” in Making Senses of the Past: Towards a Sensory Archaeology, ed. Jo Day (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2013), 371–​89. 3  Bennett, “Pedagogic Objects.”

4  Bennett, “Pedagogic Objects”; Barbara Maria Stafford, Artful Science: Enlightenment Entertainment and the Eclipse of Visual Education (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994). 5  Yannis Hamilakis, Archaeology and the Senses:  Human Experience, Memory, and Affect (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

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societies, and how they have shaped people’s experiences and their understanding of the world.6 Fields such as sensory archaeology and archaeology of the senses have similarly introduced such considerations within archaeological studies and will provide the theoretical framework for the discussion of sound in heritage sites presented in this chapter, which takes the reader on a journey from the St. Thomas Way through what it means to study past soundscapes, how sound has been used in a variety of ways in connection to heritage sites, and what the potential and drawbacks of those different uses are. The senses, as Mark Smith reminds us, are not universal; they are historical, context-​ specific, and linked to a particular time and place.7 The act of hearing, for example, is not just physiological, it is also cultural, and the associations created, for example, when certain sounds are heard are linked to cultural values within a particular society.8 Physiologically, senses might be universal, but the way we assign meaning to them is not, for such experience is influenced by factors such as class, gender, and age.9 If the understanding of the senses is defined by a specific historical period and a specific culture then researchers themselves bring with them a baggage of associations and contemporary attitudes related to the senses that they need to be aware of when dealing with sensorial studies on past cultures.10 Furthermore, when dealing with “re-​creations” of the past, as Bennett reminds us, we are always creating a facsimile.11 Even if we could, for example, re-​create an exacting physical copy of a medieval town, it would still be different from the “original,” because each of those towns was organized by societies operating under different sets of circumstances and under different “cultural horizons.” Therefore, even the act of making a re-​creation will leave it embedded within a particular cultural framework.12 This chapter proposes an original categorization of the uses of sound in heritage with the aim of understanding 1) its functions, 2) how it affects the end user and the perception of history, and 3) how the different categories interact with an audience’s own perceptions of what history “sounded” like, as mediated through our exposure to historically set films, television programmes, radio dramas, video games, and other simulations. Sound is considered as particularly interesting due to its intangible nature and its own peculiar forms of preservation and exhibition, which sit across a number of academic disciplines as well as crossing over into artistic fields. It is the creation of a series of soundscapes for the St. Thomas Way project that has served as the source of 6  Mark Smith, Sensory History (Oxford: Bloomsbury, 2007). 7  Smith, Sensory History.

8  Constance Classen, “Foundations for an Anthropology of the Senses,” International Social Science Journal 49 (1997): 401–​12. 9  Hamilakis, Archaeology and the Senses.

10  Steve Mills, Auditory Archaeology:  Understanding Sound and Hearing in the Past (London: Routledge, 2014). 11  Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (London: Routledge, 1995). 12  Bennett, The Birth of the Museum, 128.

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inspiration for such categorization, a categorization that goes beyond this project and is key to sound designers, curators, and academics working in the heritage sector. The St. Thomas Way soundscapes, then, provide a starting point here for a re-​evaluation of uses of sound in public history and heritage interpretation, and a new theorization of potential approaches.

The Sound of History

“Aural history” is often mistaken to be exclusively about music, but it also encompasses everyday sounds and what they meant to past societies.13 It is about what our ancestors considered to be noise and what they did not. What value was assigned to silence is also crucial to the understanding of the past and it is equally time-​and place-​specific.14 When considering the sense of hearing in relation to past cultures it is crucial to consider the soundscape people inhabited. Murray Schafer suggests that soundscapes include three main types of sound.15 “Keynote” sounds are those sounds that form part of the natural environment, such as the wind, rain, and thunder. The second type of sounds are “signals,” for they are consciously listened to and are used to communicate meaning. Finally, “soundmarks” are equivalent to landmarks; they have features that make them recognizable to members of a particular community. Keynote sounds invite a reflection on their levels as well as their impact on everyday life. If we consider, for example, European medieval towns, the overall sound levels would have been lower than in modern cities. Sounds that we would currently consider quiet would have been clearly audible and more easily identifiable.16 The sounds of storms, thunder, and animal cries, such as dogs barking, would have had a greater acoustic impact than they do today. Sound signals that were of particular relevance in the medieval period were those produced by bells. The sound of church bells served to regulate life within monasteries as well as the activities of lay communities. Within religious institutions different bells were used to communicate different meanings, such as the times for prayer, calls for assemblies, and meal announcements.17 Church bells were also a key aspect of the soundscape of towns, since the bells of parish churches functioned not only as an indication of the passage of time but also as a means to express the power of a church over an area of the town. A parish church has been understood as “an acoustic space, circumscribed by the range of the church bell,”18 and in this way they are not just signals 13  Mark Smith, “Introduction,” in Hearing History: A Reader, ed. Mark Smith (London: University of Georgia Press, 2004), ix–​xxii; Smith, Sensory History. 14  Peter Bailey, “Breaking the Sound Barrier,” in Hearing History:  A Reader, ed. Mark Smith (London: University of Georgia Press, 2004), 23–​35.

15  Murray Schafer, The Soundscape:  Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World (Rochester: Destiny, 1994).

16  Christopher Woolgar, The Senses in Late Medieval England (London: Yale University Press, 2006). 17  David Hendy, Noise: A Human History of Sound and Listening (London: Profile, 2013). 18  Schafer, The Soundscape, 54.

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but also soundmarks. Bells were also used by civic authorities to announce battles and public ceremonies, and to indicate curfew.19 The fact that bells were used for such specific functions meant that any unexpected ringing could be used also to indicate danger, death, or a miracle.20 Even when bells were tolled for death, some medieval towns would vary the size of the bell used (and therefore the sound emitted) to indicate the age and gender of the diseased: smaller bells were used for children and women, and larger ones for men of rank.21 Sound could also be associated with good or evil, heaven and hell. On the one hand, sounds such as loud laughter, sneering, shouting, hissing, and nonsensical expressions, among others, were associated with demonic possessions.22 On the other hand, words and music were a means through which to communicate with God and the divine message. Christianity considers the spoken word and, therefore, hearing of the utmost importance.23 In the scriptures, God communicates with the faithful by speaking to them. In the Middle Ages religion was mainly transmitted through the sense of hearing, in the form of the sermons given by preachers, and hearing the sermons constituted a means for salvation.24 Also, within religious life, especially in monastic contexts, silence had a meaning considered crucial in terms of reverence, piety, and learning.25 A number of disciplines have focused on sound in history. A notable example is archaeoacoustics, which can be defined as the study of the acoustics of archaeological sites.26 Such studies are often done through the capture of impulse responses of the sites and/​or the use of virtual acoustics.27 In simple terms, impulse response (IR) measurements consist of playing a sound, which acts as an excitation signal, within a space, and simultaneously recording via a microphone the response of the space to 19  Barry Blesser and Linda-​ Ruth Salter, Spaces Speak, Are You Listening? Experience Aural Architecture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007); Woolgar, The Senses. 20  Hendy, Noise.

21  Smith, Sensory History.

22  Hendy, Noise; Woolgar, The Senses.

23  Walter Ong, The Presence of the Word (Binghamton: Global Publications, 2000). 24  Ong, The Presence; Hendy, Noise; Woolgar, The Senses. 25  Bailey, “Breaking the Sound Barrier.”

26  Rupert Till, “Sound Archaeology: Terminology, Palaeolithic Cave Art and the Soundscape,” World Archaeology 46 (2014): 292–​304.

27  Mariana Lopez, Sandra Pauletto, and Gavin Kearney, “The Application of Impulse Response Measurement Techniques to the Study of the Acoustics of Stonegate, a Performance Space Used in Medieval English Drama,” Acta Acustica United with Acustica 99 (2013): 98–​109; Mariana Lopez, “Objective Evaluation of a Simulation of the Acoustics of a Medieval Urban Space used for Dramatic Performances,” Applied Acoustics 88 (2015):  38–​42; Mariana Lopez, “Using Multiple Computer Models to Study the Acoustics of a Sixteenth-​century Performance Space,” Applied Acoustics 94 (2015):  14–​19; Mariana Lopez, “An Acoustical Approach to the Study of the Wagons of the York Mystery Plays: Structure and Orientation,” Early Theatre Journal 18 (2015): 11–​36; Mariana Lopez, “The York Mystery Plays: Exploring Sound and Hearing in Medieval Vernacular Drama,” in Sensory Perception in the Medieval West, ed. Simon Thomson and Michael Bintley (Turnhout: Brepols, 2016), 53–​74.

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the signal. The position of the sound source (loudspeaker) and the receiver (microphone) are determined by possible source and listener positions at the time the site was in use. For example, an acoustic analysis of a medieval cathedral could have a source position that represents a priest preaching at a pulpit and the listener position indicating a member of the congregation sitting at a pew. Such IR measurements allow the researcher to determine parameters linked to speech intelligibility, music clarity, definition, and envelopment, among others. Virtual acoustics can be described as the design of computer models, using specialized software, to study the acoustics of spaces. In the study of heritage sites, it allows researchers to investigate the acoustics of sites that no longer exist, or those that do survive but not in their original form, maybe as a result of demolitions due to changes in the infrastructure of the surrounding area, destruction as a consequence of wars, or their deterioration as a result of the passage of time. It is also possible to apply virtual acoustics to the study of sites that, although partially or fully preserved, have limited the access to visitors. An example of such a site is found at Chavín de Huántar in Peru, where the ceremonial centre has been studied in relation to its acoustic characteristics and the use of virtual acoustics was proposed for the reconstruction of those parts of the site that are now inaccessible.28 Acoustical studies using computer models can consist in the analysis of the characteristics of a space through a series of objective parameters, as well as processes of auralization. Auralization describes a computer-​aided process that allows the user to hear the way sound is modified by the characteristics of an indoor or outdoor space.29 The user does not need to be in the space to hear its impact on sound and what is more, it is not necessary for the space to exist. In this way, for example, we could hear a modern recording of a read passage of the liturgy as it would have sounded in the acoustics of a medieval church that no longer exists. However, as described in the above discussion, although we might have reconstructed physically the acoustics of the space, what listening to that would mean from the standpoint of a modern listener is vastly different from what it have meant for its medieval inhabitants. Related to the field of archaeoacoustics is that of music archaeology, which focuses on the use of literature, archaeological findings, iconography, and experimental approaches, such as the reconstruction of musical instruments and performances, to study the use of musical instruments and music by past cultures.30 The European Music Archaeology Project (EMAP 2013–​2018, funded by the European Education, Audiovisual and Culture Executive Agency) is a prime example, with their work involving archaeology, art,

28  Miriam Kolar, Jonathan Abel, Parry Huang, et al., “A Modular Computational Acoustic Model of Ancient Chavín de Huántar, Perú,” Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 128 (2010).

29  Mendel Kleiner, R. Orlowski, and J. Kirszenstein, “A Comparison between Results from a Physical Scale Model and a Computer Image Source Model for Architectural Acoustics,” Applied Acoustics 38 (1993): 245–​65. 30  Till, “Sound Archaeology.”

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science, and creative elements. A specific example presented by EMAP is the re-​creation of a musical procession at the Bronze Age Kivik Tomb in Sweden.31 Another related approach to the study of sound and heritage is auditory archaeology,32 which is the practice of increasing awareness of contemporary sounds in archaeological and landscape contexts in order to stimulate thinking about the meaning of sounds in the past, examining the varying connections between places, people, and animals. It also encourages researchers to consider contemporary sounds that would have also existed in the past (rivers, animals, weather) and what meanings they would have had for our ancestors. Till prefers the more encompassing term of sound archaeology, which considers sound as part of the context of the archaeological site, as intrinsic to the environment being studied.33 Sound archaeology includes the study of sound-​making objects (not necessarily music-​making objects) such as bow and arrow, and even the sounds of the environment. All the above-​mentioned disciplines play a crucial role in investigating sound in past cultures, but the knowledge derived from them often gets confined to books, academic journals, and presentations, leaving aside the crucial question of how to communicate such findings to general audiences. Mark Smith indicates that the use of historical re-​creations, including those that could be derived from such disciplines, should be approached with extreme caution and urges curators against claims that “history is brought to life” in such museum and exhibition experiences.34 Smith’s condemnation of such experiences stems from the fact that they often provide a one-​sided re-​creation of sensorial experiences that lacks acknowledgement of the contextual specificity of the senses. He goes on to say that: Without a dedicated and careful attempt to attach meaning to those noises, cataloguing is not only of very modest heuristic worth but, in fact, quite dangerous in its ability to inspire unwitting faith that these are the “real” sounds of the past.35

Similarly, Hamilakis comments on the “experience economy” in heritage and how historical context is often considered secondary if at all present.36 On the contrary, Mills considers the creation of immersive experiences as one of the key assets of auditory archaeology.37 Foster also presents a more positive outlook as to how to present multisensory experiences in museums and do so ethically and contextually.38 Foster discusses the importance of museums encouraging visitors to provide 31  European Music Archaeology Project (EMAP) www.emaproject.eu/​. 32  Mills, Auditory Archaeology. 33  Till, “Sound Archaeology.” 34  Smith, Sensory History.

35  Smith, Sensory History, 123.

36  Hamilakis, Archaelogy and the Senses, 64. 37  Mills, Auditory Archaeology.

38  Foster, “Beyond the Display Case.”

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their own interpretation in multisensory exhibitions, which supports the understanding that sensorial experiences are personal and, as such, can be infinite.

Sound in Heritage Sites

Faced with the availability of findings from sound archaeology we should ask ourselves how historians and curators embrace (or not) the inclusion of sound in heritage sites and what discussions are opened up as a consequence of such inclusion (or lack thereof). What the uses of sound in museums and heritage sites all have in common is that they force the visitor to negotiate two main spaces and temporalities: the space of the site they are visiting and navigating, and the historical space and time that is being re-​created and played through headphones or loudspeakers. Holger Schulze comments on the irritation visitors may experience when a re-​created soundscape is played over headphones and is as a result overlaid on the soundscape of the venue (and even the ability to communicate with fellow visitors), which can cause confusion and disorientation.39 Instead, Schulze suggests that audio guide designers could learn from the techniques of soundwalking (that is, the practice of reactivating the sense of hearing by exploring environments through our ears),40 creating a synergy between the sounds of the space and our bodies’ rhythms.41 Moreover, the sound experiences presented to visitors consist of many elements recorded, edited, and mixed. They are subject to the cultural framework of the designer and the listener, which are very likely drastically different from the sensorial frameworks of our ancestors. To aid reflection, I would like to suggest a classification of the use of sound in heritage sites that considers 1) sound as evocation, 2) sound as re-​creation of the past, and 3) sound as artistic reflection on the past. This categorization is meant to aid discussion, allowing us to reflect on the use of sound in heritage sites, but it is not exhaustive and nor are the specific categories by any means closed. Many of the examples presented could potentially be situated across multiple categories depending on how they are analyzed. The examples presented are meant to illustrate the topics discussed, and there are certainly many more in existence. The categorizations presented here are intended to serve the purpose of allowing designers and curators to reflect on the advantages and disadvantages of different approaches, as well as how they might be combined to produce a desired effect. Sound as Evocation

By this category I refer to the use of sounds designed to evoke the past, utilizing preconceived notions of the past that are widely known and accepted: in other words, sounds 39  Holger Schulze, “The Corporeality of Listening: Experiencing Soundscapes on Audio Guides,” in Soundscapes of the Urban Past: Staged Sound as Mediated Cultural Heritage, ed. Karin Bijsterveld (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2013), 195–​208.

40  Hildegard Westerkamp, “Soundwalking.” Hildegard Westerkamp: Inside the Soundscape (1974), www.sfu.ca/​~westerka/​writings%20page/​articles%20pages/​soundwalking.html. 41  Schulze, “The Corporeality of Listening.”

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that visitors would easily associate with a historical period to help their immersion within a site. An example here would be the playing of plainchant recordings as a means of cueing heritage site visitors into a medieval setting. This association is founded on a historical fact: that in the medieval period plainchant was a key mode of musical expression within ecclesiastical settings. Therefore, plainchant can provide an effective means of invoking an array of images and atmospheres associated with the medieval period. However, individual sounds and combinations of sounds may be used that are not especially rooted in historical facts, but are instead a consequence of the way contemporary media has represented the medieval period in recent decades. Such preconceptions might even include anachronisms that are used as an avenue to tell a story from the past to modern listeners, in the same way a film might exploit such anachronisms to render it more appealing to modern audiences.42 The sound experiences can be thought of as a representation of what the creators believe is the version of the past that visitors would like to be presented with.43 Whether based on historical facts or taking a more open interpretation of the past, such uses of sound are a gateway to engage visitors with a heritage site and encourage them to explore further after their visit. While such experiences might not replace the historical knowledge present in academic texts, they might encourage visitors to learn more about the site and the period in question.44 Nevertheless, we also need to recognize that this type of installation can potentially be more a reflection of a contemporary imaginary of the past than an objective or authentic re-​creation. An interesting example is the exhibition Sound Ways, organized in 2010 in the Aboa Vetus & Arts Nova Museum (Turku, Finland), which captured the medieval history of the town by minimizing the use of images and heritage objects, exploring instead how this could be conveyed using sound. The exhibition was framed around a number of “aural images,” as the organizers referred to them,45 which were dramatized accounts by fictitious characters that represented roles linked to the town and its surrounding areas: a blacksmith, a fisherman’s wife, a teacher and pupils at a cathedral school, a very young maid at a merchant’s house, a herdsman, and a mother superior. These narratives were all imaginary, but were nonetheless connected to medieval history, and were chosen to give voices to the men, women, and children of the period, aiming to help visitors empathize with their ancestors.46 In addition to this, the museum included the recorded sound of parchment that was triggered whenever visitors turned the pages of a fake medieval manuscript. In this way, the curators hoped to bring visitors closer to the historical 42  Tison Pugh and Angela Weisl, Medievalisms: Making the Past in the Present (London: Routledge, 2013). 43  John Aberth, A Knight at the Movies: Medieval History on Film (London: Routledge, 2003). 44  Aberth, A Knight at the Movies.

45  Aboa Vetus and Ars Nova:  Museum of History and Contemporary Art, “Sound Ways.” www. aboavetusarsnova.fi/​en/​exhibitions/​sound-​ways.

46  Aboa Vetus and Ars Nova:  Museum of History and Contemporary Art, “Sound Ways”; Karin Bijsterveld, Annelies Jacobs, Jasper Aalbers, and Andreas Fickers, “Shifting Sounds: Textualization and Dramatization of Urban Soundscapes,” in Soundscapes of the Urban Past, ed. Bijsterveld, 31–​66.

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objects, which in traditional exhibitions are untouchable.47 The exhibition looked into providing contextual information on the meaning of sound in medieval times, and so evading Smith’s critique concerning the lack of contextualization provided alongside such experiences.48 Another interesting example is the sound installation created for A Castle and its Lords:  The Cadolzburg Experience (Cadolzburg Museum), which opened in 2017 in Germany.49 The site has a history spanning from the twelfth century up to its appropriation by the Nazi government, and was damaged considerably during the Second World War. The museum curators wanted to make an explicit statement on “staged authenticity,”50 and visitors were invited not just to absorb historical “knowledge” but to follow how researchers and curators worked to select what was included in the exhibition. As the authors explain, the sound installation was reproduced through four loudspeakers and had two main components: a sound component and a musical component. The music component takes the listener on a journey of music styles spanning from twelfth-​ century vocal music to a twentieth-​century piece by Webern. The sound component is a re-​creation of a medieval castle, which includes the sounds of horses, fire, dogs, roosters, cannons, and sword fights, among others: elements popularly associated with medieval castles and are typically found in films set in the period. The soundscape was created to be overtly artificial, inviting visitors to question where their notions of the medieval period originate. The soundscape alternated with the musical component, but every time the soundscape looped, a specific sound element would be deliberately removed, emphasizing once more the idea of staging, in that everyday sounds cannot be so filtered. Moreover, in place of the missing sound was a recording of the calls made by the bats inhabiting the site, transposed to the audible frequency range for humans. Textual information explains what those sounds are for visitors. The twelve-​minute installation ends with a fusion of the sound and music components together, with the rising chorus of bat sounds working to signify the opening of the museum.51 A final example of the category of sounds as evocation are the three pieces I designed for the St. Thomas Way in 2018: a medieval harbour soundscape (mapped to Newport and Swansea), an ecclesiastical soundscape (linked to Abergavenny, Ewenny, Hereford, Llancarfan, and Margam), and a medieval market soundscape (connected to Kilpeck, Longtown, St. Fagans, and Usk). The medieval harbour soundscape was designed to give listeners the impression of following an imaginary character as they step aboard a boat. With this in mind we can hear the footsteps of this character as well as the sounds of their interaction with 47  Bijsterveld et al., “Shifting Sounds.”

48  Smith, Sensory History; Aboa Vetus and Ars Nova: Museum of History and Contemporary Art, “Sound Ways”; Bijsterveld et al., “Shifting Sounds.”

49  Gerald Fiebig, Uta Piereth, and Sebastian Karnatz, “The Cadolzburg Experience: On the Use of Sound in a Historical Museum,” Leonardo Music Journal 27 (2017): 67–​70. 50  Fiebig, Piereth, and Karnatz, “The Cadolzburg Experience,” 68. 51  Fiebig, Piereth, and Karnatz, “The Cadolzburg Experience.”

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rope. In the background we can hear generic chatter and a suggestion of a coastal setting through the sound of seagulls and waves lapping against the hull of the boat. The soundscape was created in binaural audio (3D audio through headphones) so as to create a more immersive experience. The ecclesiastical soundscape includes two medieval plainchant pieces: Alleluia Christus Resurgens and the medieval sequence Veni Creator Spiritus. The pieces were performed in an anechoic chamber (a space that has no sound reflections) at the University of York by Pierre-​Philippe Dechant and Christopher O’Gorman. The audio recordings were then processed with a reverberation plug-​in to add the effect of the performers being in a cathedral setting. The start of the soundscape as well as the division between the two pieces is punctuated by the addition of recordings of medieval bells which were carried out in the city of York, using the fifteenth-​century “Ring for Peace” bells in the city centre. Additionally, the Veni Creator Spiritus was edited to re-​ create an antiphonal setting, in which two different voices alternate and are panned to the left-​and right-​hand side to simulate their separation within the church space.52 The medieval market soundscape (also in binaural audio) is a combination of sounds that seek to re-​create the atmosphere of a busy market town. The effect was produced by layering a generic background sound of crowds, laughter (recorded in a studio), and recordings of the movement of a wagon used for medieval drama. The soundscape also included pigs and sheep that may have roamed the markets at the time, as suggested by research on the medieval town of York.53 The project website for the St. Thomas Way, featuring extensive background information on the history of the sites themselves, as well as interviews with experts, provides context to the soundscapes. Furthermore, the captions that accompany the soundscapes refer to them as “a simple evocation” or “evoking,” establishing that they are not attempting to be historically authentic, but instead to provide the listener with some context on how the spaces visited during the pilgrimage might have sounded. All the above examples endeavour to provide an evocative aural depiction of the past, while providing also a context within which visitors can interpret these sounds. However, the actual effectiveness of such approaches is not documented by current research, and whether the contextualization resulted in visitors understanding that these sounds were not explicitly authentic is not known. Evocative soundscapes operate by taking as a starting point visitors’ preconceptions of the past, which, although not necessarily accurate according to scholarly knowledge, are nevertheless already crystallized in their minds, and which can help the designer and curator in their efforts to connect with modern audiences. For example, Pugh and Weisl reflect on how medieval music and pageantry are used for Christmas celebrations, even though Christmas celebrations as we know them now derive primarily from 52  Richard Rastall, Minstrels Playing:  Music in Early English Religious Drama:  II (Cambridge: Brewer, 2001). 53  Terry O’Connor, Animals in Medieval Urban Lives: York as a Case Study, 2013 (unpublished article provided by the author).

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Victorian tradition.54 While such representation amounts to a fantasy of “the past” that is inaccurate, and makes no distinctions between the elements that are medieval and the ones that are Victorian, it also allows consumers to connect with the past by including an element (Victorian Christmas) that is familiar and making them more likely to accept the medieval pageantry aspects.55 Sound as Re-​creation of the Past

By “sound as re-​creation of the past” I refer to cases in which the aural experiences are based on thorough research on a space and its historical context—​an approach that is often linked to sound archaeology in its various forms. An example in this category is the exhibit The Sound of Amsterdam (Amsterdam Museum, 2013).56 The exhibition presented visitors with a touchscreen and headphones and invited them to build the soundscape of Dam Square by selecting a year (1895 or 1935) and then combining sound sources which, for 1896, included horses on rails, horses with riders, horse-​drawn carriages, street vendors, and belly organs among others, whereas for 1935 it included electric trams, cars, trucks, bells, and gramophone. Visitors could also access a recording of the 2012 soundscape of Dam Square as a point of comparison. The visual display included the painting Dam Square (1896) by George Hendrik Breitner and the interface itself was located opposite the painting displayed at the museum. The soundscapes were partly based on what could be seen in the painting, but most important was the research on the sounds of Amsterdam as derived from travel accounts, memoirs, magazines, and newspapers. The sound designer sought to provide additional “authenticity” by measuring the acoustics of the space in its modern setting (in 2012) and applying the acoustic characteristics to the sounds that were recorded offsite, through the process of auralization described earlier in this chapter. The sound effects were binaural recordings and, where possible, historical artefacts were used as sound sources. Furthermore, the auralization process applied to the sound sources took the listener position to be the same as the one occupied by the painter of Dam Square, placing the visitor both visually and aurally in the artist’s place. The installation also included contextual information regarding the research project. Also belonging in this category is my own research on the York Mystery Plays—​a series of plays with a religious theme performed on wagons in the streets of York from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century. My work explores the desire of presenting acoustical and soundscape research on medieval drama in York, while simultaneously engaging modern audiences with the concept of multiple interpretations of the past, the curation of history, 54  Pugh and Weisl, Medievalisms. 55  Pugh and Weisl, Medievalisms.

56  Karin Bijsterveld, “Introduction,” in Soundscapes of the Urban Past, ed. Bijsterveld, 11–​30; Warna Oosterbaan, “Het knerpende geluid van de paardentram” (“The Grating Sound of the Horse Tram”), NRC Handelsblad, March 23, 2013; Manon Parry, “Exhibit Review: The Sound of Amsterdam, Amsterdam Museum,” Public Historian 35 (2013): 127–​30.

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and how acoustic and soundscape re-​creations (even when based on carefully researched material) represent only one possibility of what the past “might” have sounded like. Aberth explores a similar problem in relation to historically set films,57 enquiring as to how multiple points of view linked to historical studies and re-​creations may be conveyed while still providing an enjoyable experience to audiences. Aberth contends, not unreasonably, that this is only possible in the realm of experimental filmmaking, in that providing different points of view, citing sources, and delineating critical methodology within a film would very likely result in a commercial and artistic failure.58 But can the same be considered true for the heritage sector? Can we still provide immersive visitor experiences while also being transparent as to how these experiences are built? Scholars in the field of archaeology have discussed ethical considerations on the use of visualizations of heritage sites, reflecting on how the use of only one computer model as a representation of a space tends to obscure the areas of uncertainty involved in the study of historical sites, and can sometimes be mistakenly interpreted as a reality.59 However, this ethical concern is rarely voiced in the field of acoustical heritage and auralizations. Consequently, the research project on the York Mystery Plays, and the sound work derived from it, looked into making use of a multiplicity of acoustic simulations and presenting more transparent results to the public. My first exploration of this topic was through a 2014 sound installation at All Saints Church, Pavement, York entitled Hearing the Mystery Plays, as part of the Festival of Medieval Arts in York.60 The installation was based on my research on the acoustics of Stonegate, one of the performance sites, as well as the acoustical impact of different types of wagon structures, wagon orientations, and performer and listener positions. The sound installation explored the unknowns related to the space and made this multiplicity of acoustical options available to the public. The sound installation included three different soundscapes based on the plays of The Resurrection, Pentecost, and The Assumption of the Virgin, which all played in a loop over headphones. The idea of soundscape in this context was limited to speech and music auralizations, as well as some generic environmental wind. A screen was also present and displayed images of the virtual models used for the acoustical re-​creations as well as the names of the plays and characters. QR codes were available onsite to encourage visitors to access through their 57  Aberth, A Knight at the Movies. 58  Aberth, A Knight at the Movies.

59  Hugh Denard, The London Charter: For the Computer-​based Visualisation of Cultural Heritage. Draft 2.1, King’s College, London, February, 7 2009, www.londoncharter.org; Kate Giles, Anthony Masinton, and Geoff Arnott, “Visualising the Guild Chapel, Stratford-​upon-​Avon: Digital Models as Research Tools in Buildings Archaeology,” Internet Archaeology 32 (2012), http://​intarch.ac.uk/​ journal/​issue32/​1/​1.html; Paul Miller and Julian Richards, “The Good, the Bad, and the Downright Misleading: Archaeological Adoption of Computer Visualization,” Proceedings of the 22nd CAA Conference, ed. Jeremy Huggest and Nick Ryan (Oxford: Archaeopress, 1995). 60  Mariana Lopez, “Giving History a Voice,” in The Cambridge Companion to Music in Digital Culture, ed. Nicholas Cook, Monique Ingalls, and David Trippett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 147–​49).

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mobile devices web pages that included information on the research behind the creative work. The installation had more than one hundred visitors, who spent an average of four minutes listening (out of a total length of thirteen minutes). Only 8 percent of visitors interacted with the web pages, meaning that a low number of visitors accessed the context of the sound design. However, this low percentage does not represent a lack of interest in the research context, for 69 percent interacted with the research team onsite, expressing their thoughts on the project, asking questions, and leaving comments.61 However, these findings imply that the communication of contextual information was strongly dependent on the presence of a facilitator and not the access to accompanying written material, which is problematic (both in terms of time and cost) for most exhibitions, especially if a large volume of visitors is to be expected. Although the sound installation had its merits it had not fulfilled the aim of promoting acoustical heritage while providing contextual information and communicating to listeners the fact that there is a multiplicity of ways of listening to history. Indeed, the fact that it was situated in a church, which had no links to the plays being re-​created, proved jarring, and may have misguided attendees while discouraging the visits of others. Building up from this installation, the next step was to build an interactive experience devoid of physical space and its accompanying connotations, which was accomplished through the design of an online interface. The interactive interface allowed users to choose among the same three plays available in 2014 and build their own soundscapes around them. They were encouraged to trigger a “Performance Audio” icon (which included the spoken and sung parts of the plays) and then to click on different icons labelled “Acoustics 1–​7” to hear how different acoustical settings affected the audio. They could then also trigger sound effects linked to the town, the wagons, animals, bells, audiences, and weather conditions, allowing them to reflect on the effects of these on the speech and music that were part of the performances. The use of those sound effects was linked to research on the rich soundscape of the city of York during the plays and included sounds that were intentionally produced during the performance (speech, music), those that were a result of the performance but were not part of the narrative (wagon wheels, audience sounds), and those sounds that were independent from the performance (bells, animals, weather).62 The inclusion of the ability to create soundscapes out of these elements aimed to generate a fuller soundscape (compared to the 2014 installation, which only included the bare minimum), while also making audiences aware that those sounds may have been active during the performances. The fact that they may have been active was represented by the fact that users were given the freedom to choose what sounds were playing and could modify their volume. The visual interface emulated those seen in computerized role-​playing games (with bold, colourful icons and interactive avatars) 61  Lopez, “Giving History a Voice.”

62  Clifford Davidson, Corpus Christi Plays at York: A Context for Religious Drama (New York: AMS Press, 2013); Pamela King, “Poetics and Beyond: Noisy Bodies and Aural Variations in Medieval English Outdoor Performance,” presentation at the 14th Triennial Colloquium of the Société Internationale pour l’Étude du Théâtre Médiéval, Poznan, Poland, July 22–​27, 2013; Lopez, “The York Mystery Plays.”

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and to avoid overcrowding no contextual information was presented, meaning that the user would have to refer to the project website to find out more about the historical and research context. In addition to these features, users were also able to access oral histories linked to the different sounds included in the interface and that were recorded especially for the project. In this way they would be presented with material that would allow them to reflect on the similarities and differences between the medieval and the contemporary experience of the York Mystery Plays. The sonic material included in the interface was also used for the creation of a multi-​channel sound installation in Bedern Hall (York, 2016) that invited listeners to consider the contemporary performances of the plays in light of both their contemporary and medieval history.63 A survey conducted on the online interface indicated that further work was necessary in order to better contextualize the sonic material available. In response, the third stage of the project focused on developing and incorporating new visual cues so as to provide some additional context. In the latest version of the interface, the user is still able to click on the acoustics buttons, but every time an acoustical change is triggered the background image changes in response, offering a graphical depiction of the computer model the acoustic rendition was based on—​including the street space, the wagon type, and performer/​audience positions. These visualizations are used to cue the user into different forms of listening, and emphasize thereby the basic point that it is indeed listening that is key to the experience, instead of the graphical contents of the screen. Bijsterveld et al. reflect on the paradox presented by the connection between sounds and images.64 Sounds in museums without any visual reference might encourage guesswork by visitors as well as result in a lack of understanding of what those sounds meant for our ancestors, again due to a lack of contextualization. On the other hand, simply informing visitors about sounds (or displaying varied sound-​making artefacts) and not actually playing them does not provide for an engaging experience. Meticulous re-​creations of the past based on historical evidence and using cutting-​ edge technology may make for a more rigorous representation, but the key question is whether they are more acceptable to audiences than those that are simple evocations. Audiences experiencing such meticulous re-​creations have (depending on their age) many years of experience of “consuming” a version of the past that is presented to them in the popular media, and so have learnt to accept this as the authentic “truth.” Thus, what happens if this meticulously re-​created past does not live up to their established expectations? It was quite telling to analyze the feedback received on the online experience of the York Mystery Plays. One of the users mentioned that they “couldn’t access the actual plays, only some singing.” This is based on the notion that the Mystery Plays only included speech, even though research has demonstrated that the plays included a large number of musical items, including complex polyphonic pieces (musical items with more than 63  Mariana Lopez, “The Soundscapes of the York Mystery Plays,” https://​soundcloud.com/​user-​ 401350808/​the-​soundscapes-​of-​the-​york-​mystery-​plays. 64  Karin Bijsterveld, Annelies Jacobs, Jasper Aalbers, and Andreas Fickers, “Shifting Sounds.”

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one melodic line).65 The Mystery Plays were complex performances in which many resources were invested. These preconceptions of the plays meant that this particular user thought the singing was not an aspect of the plays at all. We might hypothesize subsequently that their point of reference might have been renditions of medieval drama shown in film or television productions, or, alternatively, they might have based their whole understanding of the plays on their attendance of one contemporary performance. Related to this point is a comment by another user that “it would be good to know what a ‘typical’ setting was!” This indicates that some users might be unsettled when confronted with multiple possibilities of what the past acoustics of a space might have been, even though this is a more representative scenario than that of a fixed “typical” staging situation—​one that would amount to little more than a fiction, as researchers cannot readily surmise “typical” conditions that, in all likelihood, never existed. Such reflections are suggestive of Jean Baudrillard’s observations in Simulacra and Simulation (1981), in which he discusses how simulations of “the real” have now been transformed into the new “real.”66 Stated succinctly, the reality of the medieval past, as popularly understood, is currently what was once deemed a simulation, for the repetition of stereotyped versions of the past has now turned those simulations into a new reality, and such is their popular hold that even when evidence of the contrary is presented, audiences still believe them to be true, with everything else being questioned as unreal. Sound as Artistic Reflection on the Past

The final category is one that does not share the same ethical concerns as those outlined above, for it encompasses creative sound pieces that, while being linked to heritage sites, represent a sound artist’s own particular interpretation and reflection on the space and its history, which may or may not include knowledge of the history of the space. The way in which such experiences are often marketed places them into a different set of relations to the frameworks discussed in this chapter. There are no claims of “bringing history alive” or “authenticity,” but instead there is interpretation, artistry, and creativity. An intriguing example is the 1984 piece by Bill Fontana, Entfernte Züge (Distant Trains), in which he relocated the sound of Germany’s busiest train station at the time, the Hauptbahnhof in Cologne, to an empty field where Berlin’s busiest train station before World War II, Anhalter Bahnhof, used to be located. The recording of the train station in Cologne was played back in the field through eight loudspeakers buried and located in two parallel rows that mimicked the position of the tracks and the platforms.67 In this way the visitor is presented with the acoustic spirits of a train station that once 65  Richard Rastall, The Heaven Singing: Music in Early English Religious Drama: I (Cambridge: Brewer, 1996), and Minstrels Playing: Music in Early English Religious Drama: II (Cambridge: Brewer, 2001). 66  Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1981).

67  Bill Fontana, “The Relocation of Ambient Sound: Urban Sound Sculpture,” www.resoundings. org/​Pages/​Urban%20Sound%20Sculpture; Verónica Soria-​Martínez, “Resounding Memory: Aural Augmented Reality and the Retelling of History,” Leonardo Music Journal 27 (2017), 12–​16.

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was.68 Those familiar with the history of Anhalter Bahnhof may be encouraged to reflect on its use in 1941 and 1942 to transport Jewish people to concentration camps.69 Maybe for those listening the sounds are echoes of the people who were transported to their death. Those unfamiliar with the history of the station might choose to build their own connections, perhaps encouraged to think about their own journeys. It is the relocation of those sounds that gives them a new meaning, one that is not just determined by the space but also by the listener.70 Another interesting example of this category is the sound installation Taken (2012) by Ailís Ní Ríain, created for the Keep at Clitheroe Castle. Taken reflected on the Lancashire witch trials and is a composition for twelve humming voices, harp, and bells that reflects on the last day in the lives of the convicted women. It is telling to note that the installation’s opening on the four-​hundredth anniversary of the witch trials was purely coincidental, with the composer being entirely unaware of this at the start of the project—​the topic of the composition arising in response to an open commission.71 This coincidence highlights the difference between this type of creative composition and those that aim to provide sensorial experiences to visitors, for in these cases such details, and even the commissioning process itself, would most likely be established in advance. Ríain’s composition was not about re-​creating the final moments of the convicted women, but aimed to allow listeners to ponder on the intensity of their waiting beforehand, providing a reimagined version of that final night. On this point, the composer describes how, when working with the twelve local men and women who provided their voices, she encouraged them to bring into the piece their own imagined version of what the condemned witches’ last night would have been like. The installation could be heard within the Clitheroe Keep and also from the outside, seeking to provide in the former a more visceral and haunting experience, while, in the latter, visitors could listen from a distance and decide when to leave those condemned to their fate.72 A final, and particularly fascinating, example of this category of installation is Sonic Museum (Auckland War Memorial Museum, 2009), in which nine professional composers were asked to choose a gallery for which to create a musical piece. Galleries included Maori Court, Origins, Oceans, Ancient Worlds, Land, Volcanoes, World War I  Sanctuary, World War II Memories, and Landmarks. The music could be played back through headsets hired from the museum, or visitors could download the tracks and play them through their personal devices. The aim was to encourage visitors to spend more time in the galleries and explore the changing perception of each space through the 68  Fontana, “The Relocation of Ambient Sound.”

69  Todd Presner, “Remapping German-​Jewish Studies: Benjamin, Cartography, Modernity,” German Quarterly, German-​Jewish and Jewish-​German Studies 82 (2009): 293–​315. 70  Fontana, “The Relocation of Ambient Sound.”

71  Alan Dunn, “Taken,” Stimulus: Respond (April 2012). https://​issuu.com/​stimulusrespond/​docs/​ captive.

72  Arts & Heritage, “Contemporary Heritage: A New Way of Seeing,” www.artsandheritage.org.uk/​ case-​study/​contemporary-​heritage-​a-​new-​way-​of-​seeing/​; Dunn, “Taken.”

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addition of a musical experience.73 Of course, visitors could still choose to experience the museum without the overlaid sounds, or even choose from their own personal musical collections what resonated with them as they walked along through the galleries. A similar idea was also explored by the creative music charity Brighter Sound and their Music at the Museum residency for musicians aged sixteen to twenty-​five. The residency invited the fifteen participants to spend a week taking inspiration from the collections at Manchester Museum to create new pieces of music under professional guidance.74

Conclusions

This chapter has presented a novel categorization of the use of sound in connection to heritage experiences, and also discussed the tensions that arise as a consequence. The categorization presented, although focused on sonic experiences, has broader applications in the general field of visitor experiences. Such considerations have the potential to influence the ways in which practitioners, curators, institutions, and researchers approach interactive experiences in heritage sites, and as a result pave the way for more creative and conscientious work. Evocative soundscapes might employ preconceptions of history built on common notions of the past generated by popular media, but these are not always accurate.75 Media producers have always imposed their own understanding of the sounds of the past to the content they create, and are therefore complicit in perpetuating notions of the past which are personal rather than universal.76 Such experiences do not provide academic rigour in their re-​creation of the past, but they do seem to maximize engagement, and unlock the potential of listening to the past in different ways. That is, they leverage expectations that hopefully cue listeners to look into the aural past more carefully. Nevertheless, by continuing to build evocative soundscapes that refer to the stereotypes developed through the media, the immediate question is whether such actions are reinforcing traditional stereotypes. How might we then move beyond this cycle? On the other hand, when producing rigorous soundscapes based on academic research, the sonic output might not be what visitors expect. Rigour is achieved but there is a loss in engagement, with a concomitant risk of a visitor believing the more “authentic” experience was simply a fictional re-​creation, or that there is an error in the presentation. Sound designers, as much as heritage site management, need to 73  Scott Kara, “Tracking the Past,” NZ Herald (April 24, 2009), www.nzherald.co.nz/​entertainment/​news/​article.cfm?c_​id=1501119&objectid=10568432; RNZ Music, “Don McGlashan at the Sonic Museum,” RNZ Music podcast (May 2, 2009), www.radionz.co.nz/​national/​programmes/​nat-​ music/​audio/​2532839/​don-​mcglashan-​at-​the-​sonic-​museum; Hugo Verweij and Mark IJzerman, “Sound and Music in Museums,” Everyday Listening:  Sonic Inspiration (May 10, 2010), www. everydaylistening.com/​articles/​2010/​5/​10/​sound-​and-​music-​in-​museums.html. 74  Brighter Sound, “Music at the Museums,” www.brightersound.com/​music-​at-​the-​museums/​. 75  Bijsterveld, “Introduction.” 76  Bijsterveld, “Introduction.”

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work within this matrix of influences and expectations, for the work created cannot be separated from it. In this regard, could we or should we then add evocative elements to such experiences to make them more accessible, despite the aforementioned risks? As mentioned at the start of this discussion, Smith warns us about the dangers of re-​creation studies and making them available to visitors,77 but although his warnings are well founded there is also a lack of reflection on how the actions that make such re-​ creations problematic can be tackled. Moreover, we might detect a certain level of audience dismissal in Smith’s argument, assuming that audiences accept unquestioningly whatever heritage providers place in front of them. Instead, they do indeed appear to actively question the nature of “rigorous” soundscapes, and so it seems that context and transparency are key here. This discussion has shown that there is an ongoing need to consider how we can create and deploy soundscape re-​creations so as to engage audiences while concurrently providing them with the context that allows for greater transparency—​the acknowledgement by curators, sound designers, and others that it is only one possible version of the past, and that we cannot perceive this past in the same way our ancestors did. Therefore, by presenting the experience together with such context, we can open up a gateway towards greater discovery, and allow our audiences not just straightforwardly to experience a particular version of the past, but also to open up their minds to the concept of relativism in historical re-​creations. The different contributions within the St. Thomas Way project attest to the different approaches to connecting creative content to scholarship to engage users and visitors, providing each individual with a different road into history and, as a result, increasing the reach of the research and its impact.

Key Reading

Bennett, Tony. The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics. London: Routledge, 1995. Bijsterveld, Karin, ed. Soundscapes of the Urban Past:  Staged Sound as Mediated Cultural Heritage, edited by Karin Bijsterveld. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2013. Blesser, Barry, and Linda-​Ruth Salter. Spaces Speak, Are You Listening? Experience Aural Architecture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 2007. Hamilakis, Yannis. Archaeology and the Senses:  Human Experience, Memory, and Affect. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Hendy, David. Noise: A Human History of Sound and Listening. London: Profile, 2013. Schafer, Murray. The Soundscape:  Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World. Rochester: Destiny, 1994. Smith, Mark. Sensory History. Oxford: Bloomsbury, 2007. Stafford, Barbara Maria. Artful Science: Enlightenment Entertainment and the Eclipse of Visual Education. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994. Woolgar, Christopher. The Senses in Late Medieval England. London: Yale University Press, 2006.

77  Smith, Sensory History.

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Chapter 6

REFLECTION ON THE ST. THOMAS WAY CHRISTOPHER PULLIN

The Cathedral is approached on a regular basis by people with bright ideas for it!

Exploring these has sometimes involved considerable work, and then come to nothing. One therefore becomes cautious about approaches, so I have to confess that when Professor Catherine Clarke appeared with a bright idea my colleagues and I probably adopted the usual defensive position, waiting to be convinced. This, however, has been one of the happy occasions when the bright idea and its promoter quickly convinced us that here was a project worth putting time and effort into. Pilgrimage has become an increasingly strong element in the Cathedral’s life. The creation of a shrine for St. Ethelbert and the restoration of the shrine of St. Thomas have intentionally opened up possibilities for pilgrimage in new ways. The St. Thomas Way project clearly linked into and strengthened that element of our ministry; by its timing, too, it dovetailed in a very happy way with nascent plans for the commemoration of the seven-​hundredth anniversary of Thomas Cantilupe’s canonization in 2020. In short, the St. Thomas Way project was a gift to the Cathedral. It is a recognized feature of spiritual experiences and numinous places that they are heightened by careful management; architecture, art, music, movement, colour, and smell can all be employed to evoke a greater sense of presence or of experience or event. This is not about confecting something out of nothing, but about helping to realize the full potential of experiences and events. The shrine of St. Thomas, even in its restored condition, has needed help in order that it can truly be experienced as “a place of arrival.” The rigours of the Camino prepare pilgrims psychologically for the moment of arrival at the shrine of St. James in Compostela, where the magnificently dangerous Botafumeiro scythes across the basilica from transept to transept, filling the building with clouds of incense. While Hereford cannot as yet imitate Compostela in that regard, it does now have a recognized pilgrimage route which people can follow so that the moment of arrival at the shrine really can be the culmination of a journey of expectation. Already people are getting out of their cars in order to walk the route, and looking at maps to see how this can be achieved. Plans for 2020 include the creation of other pilgrim routes, more locally based. The St. Thomas Way has also evoked for the Cathedral a more living sense of the past in the present. It was powerfully affecting to see how many people positively wanted to “measure themselves to the saint” on the St. Thomas Way launch day, with ribbon or thread measured to their height being presented at the shrine. It was instructive also to see how unselfconsciously people placed prayers on and around the shrine once they knew that this was encouraged. That the practices of the past can so easily come alive and show themselves still to have meaning in the present is very revealing. A question

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for the Cathedral, then, is how to facilitate that degree of meaningful physical engagement with the shrine for the present and the future. People needed little encouragement on the launch day: how do we encourage them on ordinary days? The resurgence of pilgrimage in our day is a gift and a challenge to the Cathedral. Gift, because it connects us with people of every sort who express their quest for an often unnamed or unrecognized fulfilment through coming to a particular place. Many who visit cathedrals have about them the spirit of the unconscious pilgrim. The challenge is for us to find appropriate ways of helping them take what is unconscious and express it more consciously and intentionally. The importance of being able to leave offerings that embody their hopes or fears at the shrine (prayer cards, flowers, photographs, and so on) is vital so that they feel and know that they have actually done something, perhaps above the more standard lighting of candles. There is the importance too of being able to take something away (pilgrim badges, selfies, postcards) to continue a connection with the place of arrival. Are there other ways in which we can help people bring to visibility that which is hidden within them, of which they may be scarcely aware? That is an ongoing piece of work for the Cathedral. My main involvement in preparing the St. Thomas Way was through writing the spiritual reflections that relate to each of the places on the route. I  visited each of them, sometimes places that I had never heard of before let alone seen, and so made the pilgrimage myself. Each place has something distinctive to offer, so the whole pilgrimage has a cumulative effect. One is aware of a certain connectedness, a fellowship, shared by the places on the route, with the shrine of St. Thomas—​or rather St. Thomas himself—​ reaching out and belonging to them all. This is a reminder that although located in one place, focused on a particular shrine, the presence and “call” of a saint is universal and not limited by space or time. The end point of the pilgrimage is not a shrine per se, but a person who is associated with the shrine; the shrine exists because of him, and the pilgrim route exists because of him. Wherever on the route we live or visit he is accessible to us in the present moment, and everywhere can be “the place of arrival.” For this reason, Hereford Cathedral owns St. Thomas and the shrine no more than anybody else. That the St. Thomas Way has been designed to operate on a number of different levels, engaging different audiences, reinforces that point. Pilgrimage, St. Thomas, this place or that place, will all be engaged with differently. For some that will be devotional, for others historical or cultural. There is no right way of approaching the Way. Just as the Cathedral doesn’t own St. Thomas, neither does anyone own the St. Thomas Way. Hereford Cathedral has been enriched by the experience of working with Catherine Clarke and her team in the production of the St. Thomas Way. Long may it flourish!

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Chapter 7

STRING THEORY FOR BEGINNERS: THE ART OF PILGRIMAGE MICHELLE RUMNEY

If you’d told me a year ago that I’d be making artwork touring Wales on a ­medieval

research project with nothing more than a ball of string and some scissors, I would probably have laughed at this ridiculous idea. When I was invited to join the St. Thomas Way Project as Artist in Residence, I’d immediately imagined all those medieval works of art that we’re all so familiar with: the delicate pages of illuminated manuscripts, the intricate stone carvings adorning our medieval buildings, and the dazzling stained-​glass windows of our Gothic cathedrals. And for map enthusiasts like me, of course, the strange and magical world depicted within Hereford’s thirteenth-​century Mappa Mundi. Indeed, if you visit any of the thirteen waypoints along St. Thomas Way yourself (and I encourage you to do so), you will find many of these stunning examples of medieval art and craftsmanship—​and more too. My “journey in making” for this project led me along the whole trail, looking closely at the architecture, the art, the landscapes, and all the details and quite wonderful visual clues I could find in every place I visited, all evidenced in the 2,794 photographs I took over the nine months leading up to the exhibition. But they were all eventually eclipsed by a humble piece of string.

A Cyclical Journey of Making

My work is process-​based. That is to say, I don’t set out with a fixed idea of what I’m going to make or the exact outcome. Instead, I let the places and people I meet and the processes I use help create the artwork. As an art student, during an exchange ­programme to New Mexico, I was introduced to the work of Joseph Campbell, the a­ nthropologist who’d connected certain myths, rituals, and cultural practices from all around the world via the concept of “the Hero’s Journey.” For me, the process of making artwork echoes its cyclical steps: following the call and setting out on a (creative) adventure—​meeting a mentor—​ crossing the threshold into the unknown (no turning back)—​facing trials, tests, and perils (where it’s not working or coming together at all)—​learning new skills—​going into the abyss (yes, really)—​reaching a point of transformation (this takes trust in the process)—​and then returning, changed, with a gift (the finished artwork) and sharing (with an exhibition and through workshops). This also echoes in many ways the idea of making a pilgrimage: setting out into the unknown and only returning after a long and possibly arduous journey, somehow touched or changed by the experience and with new insights and stories to share. Setting out on the St. Thomas Way journey, I began at the very end—​by meeting Chris Pullin, Chancellor of Hereford Cathedral, at the shrine of St. Thomas in the north transept

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Figure 8. “The Map of Mundi,” part of the St. Thomas Way exhibition, installed in Hereford Cathedral.

to discuss where the exhibition might go. Cathedrals are busy places and although they are huge, when you look closely every spare nook and cranny is already being used. I was looking for a bare space on a wall, and the one Chris selected—​the only one—​was an eight-​hundred-​year-​old stone pier at the base of the tower looking towards the shrine of St. Thomas—​and right beside the altar. The surface of this stone is beautiful in itself, full of texture in the vertical marks left by the stonemasons’ tools that were used to craft it. I knew immediately that whatever I made for this space, it shouldn’t cover it up, but should somehow draw people in to look more closely—​to notice what was already there. Chris also said I could use the crypt—​a gorgeous setting for an exhibition with its beautiful vaulted ceiling and hushed and uncluttered sense of space. Here it was the lighting that drew my attention. The low-​level lighting on each column supporting the ceiling is designed to highlight the structure of the crypt itself. It reminded me somehow of the Stations of the Cross, as it seemed like each light was itself a waypoint in a journey around the room. I left with the destination for the exhibition—​for this pilgrimage—​clear in my mind.

Into the Labyrinth…

I then set out on the physical trail and, as I’ve mentioned, I collected hundreds of photographs for reference. Coincidentally, two of my closest friends have family in the region—​one in Hereford and the other in South Wales—​and the St. Thomas Way Research Fellow and project collaborator Chloe McKenzie met me at many points along

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the route, so, in true pilgrim style, I had companionship on almost all of my travels. These shared experiences, walking through the stunning—​and sometimes shocking—​modern landscapes, navigating and discovering the St. Thomas Way, are treasures in themselves. We met people all along the route—​people out walking, fellow visitors and tourists, local historians and specialists, volunteers, and the custodians of the churches, abbeys, priories, and cathedrals. We engaged fully with it all. Even on my three-​hour journeys back to Dorset I continued absorbing myself: listening to audiobooks and lectures on medieval history and an eclectic mix of medieval music and plainsong in the car. At home, I kept researching, looking, seeking, immersing myself as much as possible in the medieval world—​reading more about the Mappa Mundi and what it might mean or represent, poring over floorplans of Gothic cathedrals, downloading images of Books of Hours, working out what a monk’s day governed by bells would consist of, delving into the City Witness project in Swansea, and rereading the story of William Cragh and the testimonies of his eyewitnesses to the papal inquisitors. In the studio, I tore up maps of Newport and Cardiff, then tried to stitch them back together; I gathered bits of rope and untwisted the twine; I made holes in paper and looked through them at details of the Mappa Mundi; and I rubbed gold leaf on various textures to see what might shine out. I kept collecting ideas, influences, stories… until I reached the point of utter saturation and overwhelm. (Yes, I’d reached that “abyss” step I mentioned previously.)

String Theory

I called one of my fellow pilgrims for moral support—​the one from South Wales, who actually lives in Morocco, running international artists’ retreats with local artisans of traditional crafts. After enthusiastically telling her about all the medieval artworks and stories and ideas I’d been exploring, she asked me to pause and tell her the one thing that stood out most, the crux of the whole story, the one that made me most curious … and I said that, really, it all keeps coming back to that length of string—​the one that they were measuring William Cragh’s dead body with on the afternoon of his hanging. This medieval practice—​which I’d never heard of before reading about William Cragh—​is called “measuring to the saint.” It was the custom to measure the body of a person who needed healing or spiritual help, then curl up that length of string or thread and send it to the nearest cathedral or abbey, where the monks would make a candle from it, light it in the name of whichever saint had been measured to, and then pray for the person’s eternal soul. The fact that such a simple practice as being measured with string could be your connection with life in this world and the next seemed so profound that it just kept coming back to me. It was while he was being measured to the saint that Cragh came back to life, so a single human length of string now seemed full of mystery and power to me. And at the other end of Skype, somewhere in the market in Sefrou, my friend started laughing—​at that very moment she happened to be standing next to a man who sold string. At my request, she duly bought some string from him, measured herself from head to toe, curled it up, and posted me my first human length of string to work with. And at last, the project artwork had begun. (If you happen to visit the exhibition, look out for the thickest piece of string in the centre of the piece “The Map of Mundi”—​that’s the Moroccan string.)

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Figure 9. The practice of “Measuring to the Saint” (v2.0) with participants in the Creative Medieval Mapping workshop on the launch day of the St. Thomas Way at Hereford Cathedral.

String Theory in Practice: Public Engagement During the next three months, I told the story of William Cragh, measuring to the saint, and the St. Thomas Way countless times. I carried a ball of string and scissors everywhere with me and, whenever the opportunity seemed right, I’d ask a person—​or groups of people—​if I could measure them to the saint for a medieval project I was working on. They’d look puzzled and smile and ask me what it was all about and I’d tell them the story in the exact time it took me to ask them to hold the end of the string and place it on the top their head, let the string fall to their feet, and cut the string to their length. Essentially, I created a modern version of this medieval custom—​a new ritual.

Measuring to the Saint, Version 2.0

If you’d like to help me keep this practice going, here are the instructions for you. (This is entirely safe—​medieval experts have tested this in Hereford Cathedral and suffered only positive side effects, including increased levels of creativity.)

1) Stand facing each other and decide who will measure who first. The Measurer holds the ball of string and the scissors. 2) Look each other in the eyes. 3) Measurer, give the person being measured the end of the string and ask them to hold it and place it on the top of their head, looking straight ahead.

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4) Measurer, start telling them the story of William Cragh and the miracle that happened when he was measured to the saint. While you’re talking, take the ball of string down to their feet and cut the string gently at their toes where it touches the ground. 5) Keep telling the tale. Meanwhile, wind up the cut length of string round two or three fingers, curling it into a little coil. 6) Now swap over and repeat the whole process. 7) Smile, say thank you to each other (and to St. Thomas if you like), then either place your coils of string somewhere in the landscape and take a photo of them in situ and email me your pictures, or send the coils of string to me and I’ll mail you a photo of whatever artwork results—​both addresses are online at michellerumney.com.

With this engagement, I resolved not to use social media to spread the word and get more lengths of string quickly. Instead, in the spirit of medieval time and space, this had to be entirely physical, present, and a real-​time connection with others. In all I measured nearly three hundred people (and one Great Dane—​animals were apparently measured sometimes too), and they were of all ages and different walks of life. Each time, I told each person briefly about the launch date and the project’s Twitter feed, so that they could follow the project if they wished to. The word was spreading, but more slowly than we are accustomed to. As you can imagine, there were lots of interesting conversations and questions beyond the basic storytelling in these interactions too. Some people seemed concerned that if someone else was taller than them, would the prayer said for them be shorter? Some told me interesting facts about Wales or hanging or string. In asking nearly three hundred people face to face, only one person refused to be measured—​a seven-​year-​old girl who was too shy, but she kindly let me measure her teddy bear as her avatar instead. Most people were delighted to get involved. As one of the participants put it: “Who wouldn’t want to be prayed for?” It is fascinating to me the way that a medieval practice can seem so strange but connect us so immediately and easily with one another, even if we’re not “religious.”

Remaking Maps of the Mind

Back in the studio, I set to work with all the coils of string I’d collected—​and also all those I’d been sent by people who’d gone and measured others themselves. The practice had been spreading. I’d measured the Mappa Mundi itself with string in Hereford and I used its diameter as the basis of the whole artwork. With that medieval wall in mind, I chose translucent paper as the main medium: I took each length of string, unfurled it, and recoiled it into a spiral, placed it carefully into a square translucent paper envelope, then stitched it in place horizontally and vertically, forming a coloured cross on each one—​another mini-​ritual. I also placed details from the Mappa Mundi into some of the squares. Once all 286 envelopes were prepared, I stitched them into thirteen strips, one for each stop on the St. Thomas Way. I knew the artwork would be touring, so couldn’t stitch them together any further. I curled the whole lot up into a box and when I uncurled them and hung them on that huge medieval wall, it was quite breathtaking—​each strip

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Figure 10. “The Map of Mundi” in place at Hereford Cathedral.

curled slightly and twisted to face the altar, exposing the wall in its own way, not just the way I’d intended. These human lengths of string had truly been transformed.

The Art of Pilgrimage

On the launch day at Hereford Cathedral, we stepped up measuring to the saint into another level of engagement—​this time, not just within the practice, but within the medieval space of the building. After visiting the shrine of the Mappa Mundi and asking questions about concepts of the medieval world in terms of time and space, and what a map might be far beyond our limited view of them, we visited the shrine of St. Thomas. There, Chloe and I taught participants how to measure each other to the saint v2.0—​ with colourful ribbons rather than string—​and everyone had to measure everyone else in the whole group. This was a way of breaking the ice as much as anything, but the result was that everyone had ten human lengths of coloured ribbon. They tied these together to make one long length each and I invited them to use their ribbons to “guide” them round the medieval building. They each walked around and chose a starting point, to which they tied one end of their ribbon, then they unfurled the whole length, letting it thread them through the building, until wherever they ran out of ribbon was where they had to stop and look. Wherever they landed, I was sure that there would be something special and unique to marvel and wonder at and, of course, indeed there was. Once everyone had spent time wandering and marvelling by themselves, we came back together as a pilgrim group and set out again to share our discoveries. A brand new guided tour of the

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Cathedral unfolded as each person showed us where they’d been led by their ribbon and what they’d found there. Since we had medieval experts in our group, and people from all walks of life and experience, we all learnt much more than we could have alone. We concluded with a tour of the art exhibition in the crypt, where all those experiments in the studio with dissected maps of the Welsh landscape and holes in paper and lengths of rope had gelled into a mini-​pilgrimage of artworks dealing with how we locate and orient ourselves—​about how we find our way.

Are We There Yet? The Journey Continues

The launch of the St. Thomas Way may have marked the end of my “journey of making,” but it was just the start of another journey for the artwork itself. Since it went out into the world, it has already travelled to several places along the trail, such as Abergavenny and Swansea, and been on show in each for four to six weeks, allowing many more people to engage with the St. Thomas Way story. Google Streetview generously lent us a camera to document the medieval spaces and some of the circular walks on the trail with 360-​degree photographs, so we revisited some of our favourite places, such as Patrishow, which is remote and can be quite tricky to access. Now, mapped with virtual reality photos and the Streetview app, you can “walk” around inside the church, then venture outside onto the walking route. I wonder (and slightly dread) what the makers of the Mappa Mundi might have created given this technology. Each time the exhibition moves, it seems to evolve and morph, adapting itself to the setting it finds itself in. Equally, the hanging of each show is hugely influenced by whoever is there to invite it in—​our hosts—​and in this sense, it’s a true collaboration—​and a delight each time. In Abergavenny, at St. Mary’s Priory, “the Westminster Abbey of Wales,” Father Mark (with a twinkle in his eye) and Father Tom suggested hanging “The Map of Mundi” from the ceiling below the bell tower so that it hung above the altar and could be seen from all directions, which helped us see the artwork differently too. Father Edwin, of Ewenny Priory and St. Illtud’s in nearby Llantwit Major, has experimented with coloured stage lighting projected onto the same piece, and has used it as a backdrop to musical performances and social gatherings within the community—​yet another ­unexpected way of engaging people. This second cyclical journey has had a huge impact on the way I see my work and how I will approach projects in the future. The artwork in the mini-​pilgrimage adapts each time, the order of the artworks depending on where they fit within the ­architectural space and how they feel in relation to one another within the space. I’m constantly delighted with the new juxtapositions, connections, and conversation starting points that each move has. I’ll be adding more work to the exhibition, not least because people have been measuring to the saint, telling the St. Thomas Way story, and sending me more lengths of string, including that of the Archbishop of Wales, who obviously should be included too. Showing in historical, sacred, non-​gallery spaces, where considerations are more about caring for the ancient walls and fabric of the building than worrying about

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Figure 11. Detail showing the eight-​hundred-​year old wall of the north pier which supports the tower of the Cathedral.

the “precious” artwork, is at once a humbling and a transformative experience. The audiences attracted to these culturally significant spaces are different from and also similar to those who come to galleries. The artwork starts or provokes the conversation, but it really can go off in any direction. This is engaging from so many points of view and reassuring that our medieval worldviews are of interest to “modern” people and these “maps of the mind,” these ideas of medieval and modern journeys, are clearly relevant to all of us in some way.

Change the Way You Look at Things and the Things You Look at Change

The exhibition is on the move and my ideas are evolving with each new encounter—​with a place, its space, and the way time ebbs and flows inside it. To me, this is the art of pilgrimage and of that archetypal hero’s journey. Eventually, it—​and by default all the people essenced in it and connected through it—​will return to where it began: on the wall of Hereford Cathedral, not covering up the eight-​hundred-​year-​old chisel marks, but drawing our attention to another time and space, and to new ways of experiencing them.

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Chapter 8

BETWEEN THE  SEA AND THE  HILLS: ON WALKING THE  ST. THOMAS WAY ANNE LOUISE AVERY

“To live in Wales is to be conscious At dusk of the spilled blood That went into the making of the wild sky … There is no present in Wales, And no future; There is only the past, Brittle with relics.” From R. S. Thomas, A Welsh Landscape

High summer and the rain is pouring down on the cornfields and coppices of Ewenny, on the Bridgend golf course and the neat rows of 1930s semis, on the pocked grey battlements of the Benedictine Priory, on the graves of the Picton-​Turbervills and the Carnes and the Bowens. The rain swells the River Ewenny, the Afon Ewenni, and its dark, glassy tributaries skeining through the water meadows, by the hawthorn and the willow herb, edging the old Barry railway lines; genealogies of water carved deep in the Welsh soil, their names incantations of this place: Nant Canna, Nant Ciwc, Nant Crymlyn, Ewenny Fawr, Ewenny Fach, Afon Alun. Inside the Priory church, the silence is weighted, layered. This has always been contested ground. Ewenny Priory was established as a cell of St. Peter’s, Gloucester, in the early twelfth century by the local Anglo-​Norman landowner, William de Londres, and his son, Maurice, who fortified it to an exceptional, military level, to withstand the ebb and flow of raids and attacks from rival lords, Welsh and Norman, and Irish pirates raging up the Bristol Channel. This was no hermitical refuge, but a place to pray with one eye open and one hand on your sword, dedicated to the bellicose St. Michael the Archangel, a steeled and armoured tutelar who could be relied upon, as John Mirk wrote at the turn of the fifteenth century, to “defende you from your enmyse” without pause.1 Drenched, my eight-​year-​old son and my husband and I pace soberly through the nave, along a lopsided march of heavy white Romanesque columns and arches. We trace the fragments of paint outlining the thin, sad face of a long-​forgotten saint and the crumbling niches where the rood screen once lodged. On the south wall, my son finds a memorial to the old village blacksmith, David William, who died on March 16, 1742, the 1  John Mirk, Mirk’s Festial: A Collection of Homilies (London: Published for the Early English Text Society by Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1905), 255.

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words of his epitaph briefly conjuring the clang and hiss of a Georgian ghost-​smithy into the church: My sledge and hammer lie decay’d, My bellows too have lost their wind, My fire’s extinct, my force allay’d, My vice is in the dust confin’d, My coal is spent, my iron’s gone, My nails are drove, my work is done.

By the end of the eighteenth century, the Priory had become shabby and half-​derelict, the north transept and chapels ruined, farm animals wandering in and out, rusting ploughs in the south transept, pigeons nesting in the gallery. It was still keenly visited by determined tourists, artists, and antiquarians, however, prepared to jolt along country tracks for its melancholic Romanticism. Turner was much taken by Ewenny, sketching it on his first tour of South Wales in 1795, and developing those studies into one of his most innovative watercolours. Influenced by the tonal contrasts and strange “negation of time and incoherence of space” of Piranesi’s prison scenes, the painting depicts the south transept in all its bucolic dilapidation.2 Pigs snuffle around the tomb of Sir Paganus de Turbeville, known as “Y Cythraul” (“The Demon”) of the Marches, his stone bed now lying in a shambolic farmyard, surrounded by scratching chickens, his import no greater than the makeshift henhouse in the foreground.3 We try to stand where Turner stood, and take photos, attempting to get the same view, but his spatial distortions makes it impossible to transpose his ghost scene upon ours, and there’s an odd sense of time collapsing and folding in upon itself, the past abutting upon the present—​all those shifting, transient layers of human experience. We’ve already walked a good nine miles that morning, following old ways carved deep into the farmland. We’ve crossed harvest fields where house-​martins skim and skitter over the wheat and the whirled haystacks and bedraggled poppies, and tramped high over the downs above Corntown and St. Brides Major, a thin knife-​blade of sea, pewter in the stormy light, edging the far horizon. At the de Londres castle at Ogmore, we forded the river by the old limestone crossing-​stones, slippery and weed-​wrapped, the water deeper and colder than we imagined. The Priory marks the beginning and the end of our third circular walk of the St. Thomas Way, the third stage of our journey along the Welsh Marches, from Swansea to Hereford, following the new AHRC-​funded mapping of the pilgrimage route of the rebel William Cragh, hanged twice by the neck in November 1290 and restored to life though the miraculous intercession of St. Thomas de Cantilupe. We are the first modern pilgrims to walk the way in full, the first to follow in the footsteps of Cragh and the de Briouzes to St. Thomas’s gold-​leafed shrine in Hereford Cathedral. 2  Marguerite Yourcenar, The Dark Brain of Piranesi and Other Essays, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1980), 110. 3  H. J. Randall, “Turberville family of Coity, Glam.,” The Dictionary of Welsh Biography Down to 1940/​Y Bywgraffiadur Cymreig (London: Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, 1959). Available online at: https://​biography.wales/​article/​s-​TURB-​COE-​1100.

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Whilst that strange party walked for three frosty days under the pale skies of early December, our journey is through the golden fields of Lammastide, the bright early medieval Weed Month, with its ripening fruit and endless light. Accidentally slipping into the old agricultural rhythms of the church, we set out on Lammas Day itself on August 1, and end on August 15, the old festival of the Dormition of the Virgin, a good time to end a country pilgrimage, when “the fairest of maidens, glory of women, sought the Lord of Hosts because of kinship with her son, a victorious home in the green, open fields of Paradise.”4 There are thirteen stops on the Way. My son can recite them in order now, and as he calls them, they prick out the journey like a beadroll, a litany of the edgelands between England and Wales, winding through the valleys and hills and estuaries of Glamorganshire, Monmouthshire, and Herefordshire: Swansea, Margam, Ewenny, Llancarfan, St. Fagans, Caerphilly, Newport, Usk, Abergavenny, Patrishow, Longtown, Kilpeck, Hereford. Thirteen pauses across the land, thirteen little pilgrimages within one greater journey. The number thirteen also recalls the old folkloric wage of a hangman—​thirteene-​ pence-​halfe-​penny. In memorializing the figure of Cragh, the archetypal hanged man, the St. Thomas Way is profoundly roped and rooted in ideas of mortality, skirting eschatological borderlands, just as it traverses the undulating geopolitical margins of Anglo-​Norman Wales. William Cragh walks to Hereford in gratitude for his release from his violent, sin-​soiled death, wearing a twist of the hanging rope around his neck and accompanied by both condemner and intercessor, but that reprieve is, of course, only temporary; death is inevitable, only postponed. And that forestalling, that amelioration of the darkness of life, of the shadowy woods at its close, seeps in around the edges of all acts of pilgrimage, present in the longed-​for miracles, indulgences, forgiveness for sins, and scouring of the soul. As we walked the St. Thomas Way that hot, stormy, shimmering summer, this awareness of mortality was funnelled through a profound sense of the slippage of time, of following the trackways of so many ghosts. The paths of our walks became skeining ghost-​lines, tethering us back to Cragh and his party, and, as we progressed slowly across the Marches, back to the ever-​changing cast of medieval Wales with their complex multiculturalism, their violence, and their blood feuds, back to the Welsh princes and the Marcher lords, to the saints and the hermits, to the drovers, the shepherds, the monks, the brewers, the fisherfolk, and the quarrymen. Walking the rural Marches, it is easy for the imagination to flicker on a lonely track. As John Masefield wrote in a poem penned on passing through a Roman fort in 1915, these old ways are “haunted and … thronged by souls unseen, who knew the interest in me and were keen, that man alive should understand man dead, so many centuries since the blood was shed.”5 4  Translation from the tenth-​century Menologium by Eleanor Parker, with my embellishments. The original verses read:  “Swylce þæs ymb fif niht fægerust mægða, wifa wuldor, sohte weroda god for suna sibbe, sigefæstne ham on neorxnawange; hæfde nergend þa fægere fostorlean fæmnan forgolden ece to ealdre.” 5  John Masefield, The Story of a Round House and Other Poems (New York: Macmillan, 1915).

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I thought of Masefield’s words at Abergavenny, the site of one of the most infamous massacres of the Middle Ages. Drawn from various sources, the tale is a familiar one in those troubled endlands, a story of men of blood and their endless coils of revenge. In 1175, in an act of apparent reconciliation at Christmastide, William de Briouze invited Seisyll ap Dyfnwal and other Powys princes and leaders to a Christmas Day feast at Abergavenny castle. However, the moment the Welsh had settled at the table—​their weapons stacked outside, ale beginning to flow—​the doors to the great hall were locked and at a sign from de Briouze, his men brutally murdered the entire company. One detail of the account which is particularly chilling, passed carefully and soberly from telling to telling, is that after the massacre, de Briouze is said to have ridden out to kill Seisyll’s seven-​year-​old son, Cadwalladr, whilst his mother held him in her arms. News of the bloodshed and the boy’s death spread fast, sending shivers across the Marches, and leading to Briouze’s epithet “the Ogre of Abergavenny.” Despite Gerald of Wales’s later exoneration, citing his piety and describing him an “exceedingly devout” man who prayed whenever and wherever he saw the cross of Christ, his acts have seeped deep into the soil of the town.6 We’d spent the afternoon by the river Usk, where we skimmed stones and lay in the hot sun, watching the faerie-​like damselflies darting over the water. By the time we walked up to the castle gate, it was locked. But we still stood and stared up at the curtain wall, grey and brooding after the drowsy, golden water meadows, and imagined the Welsh princes riding in that icy morning, their horses’ breath like dragon smoke in the cold air. William’s motive is said to have been revenge for the murder of his uncle, Henry FitzMiles. The Welsh in turn sought their revenge and the castle was attacked and burnt by relatives of Seisyll in 1182. In the town’s Priory Church of St. Mary, founded in 1087, the diachronic urgency and generational burden of those blood-​fealties is expressed in one huge piece of oak—​a fifteenth-​century sleeping Jesse figure, which once formed the base of an intricate and elaborate “family tree” construction depicting the detailed lineage of Christ—​a direct descendant of Jesse, father of King David. Whilst it represents one of the most important extant medieval wooden sculptures in the world, it is still intimately, precisely tied to this small landscape and the turmoil and the blood feuds and familial complexity of its medieval history. The tenth walk of the St. Thomas Way begins in the little village of Patrishow, nestled on the shoulder of Crug Mawr, deep in the Black Mountains, and winds around a landscape pitted with the same endemic borderland violence. It slants up across rough, thistled sheep pasture, through old-​fashioned farms (washing hung between hazel posts, children playing in a sloping orchard, hens scratching in the cobbles), then uphill along an isolated path, once thickly wooded, known as “the Ill-​way of Coed Grano,” where, high on the ridge, the Marcher lord Richard de Clare was brutally murdered on April 15, 1136 by Morgan and Iorwerth ab Owain, lords of Gwynllŵg, no doubt burning with the fiery anger of the invaded and dispossessed. 6  Giraldus Cambrensis, The Itinerary Through Wales and the Description of Wales (London: Dent, 1908), 21.

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A fretted lichened stone, once a cross, marks the murder site now—​the “Dialgarreg” or “the Stone of Revenge”—​and even in broad daylight on a sleepy afternoon in high summer, there’s a pall about the place, an odd feeling of being watched. As if in response, the weather started to turn, heavy rain clouds massing over the hills. As we rested for a moment on that high adder-​haunted path, eating thick cheese sandwiches and sticky slabs of flapjack, we could see for miles; along the valley to the Gothic ruins of Llanthony Priory, where we’ve been staying in the farmhouse, once the old Prior’s lodgings, and across to the thin ridge of Offa’s Dyke and the border with England. Above us, a buzzard wheeled and dipped in the thermals. According to Giraldus, de Clare had carelessly dismissed his guardsmen before ascending, and was “preceded only by a minstrel and a singer, one accompanying the other on the fiddle.”7 In the dimming storm-​light, it was easy to imagine the jovial music drifting across the hillside, the sudden ambush, the confusion and the slaughter, the scattering sheep with their lambs, blood on the greening turf. Richard de Clare’s refusal to believe an attack could occur in a place of such hushed, nested seclusion was pre-​shadowed by another death deep-​rooted in the folklore of the valley, that of the sixth-​century hermit-​martyr St. Issui, whose cell at Patrishow once stood beside the cool, clear waters of the Nant Mair stream, next to a stone-​dressed well where offerings were made. Here he preached and prayed and had his living, by the shield ferns and the moss and the liverwort. Walking down the deep green lanes from the Revenge Stone, I tell my son again, who is fascinated by the simple fairytale horror of the old tale, how an ungrateful passerby asked the saint for hospitality and refreshment, who gave both gladly. After breaking his bread and drinking his wine, the man brutally killed Issui and stole the gifts and coins from the well-​side. Some versions are undercut by deeper cultural fractures, describing the murderer as an entrenched mountain-​dwelling pagan, enflamed by hatred for the new creed, who strikes in fury after an endless, angry, and circular argument. Whatever the reason, blood was spilt and the site became a place of pilgrimage. There are still offerings clustered around the well mouth, and a coin tree has organically evolved next to it, its furrowed, studded bark like a strange kind of armour, expelling the randomness of fate. But not all ghosts upon the St. Thomas Way are mired in the battles of its embordered topographies. The voices of fellow pilgrims call particularly clearly and poignantly to us across the long centuries. In Newport Museum, a dimly lit cabinet displays a thirteenth-​ century pilgrim’s cross, once secured to a traveller’s hat, then dropped at the castle of Penhow, perhaps from a loose pin or after a wine-​soaked dinner. In the same case lies a delicate ampulla or pilgrim’s flask, filled with holy oil in the 1450s and found centuries later near the ruins of the monastery at Goldcliff, to the southeast of Newport, perhaps discarded by a monk on the return from a successful pilgrimage. One of the largest and wealthiest Benedictine houses in South Wales, the Priory was built on the highest point for miles around: a sea-​washed limestone promontory, rising above the Severn Estuary, between the mudflats and the tidal salt marshes. 7  Cambrensis, The Itinerary and the Description, 45.

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This is a wild and liminal place, keened by the screams of curlews—​Seamus Heaney’s eerie “maimed music” of the tidal flats. Here everything is in flux, water and land in constant conflict, the Prior writing anxiously to Henry VI in 1424 about crumbling cliffs and life-​threatening flooding.8 Over the centuries, the monks built a series of drainage channels across the wetlands, an intricately woven network of ditches or “reens” running to the sea, where they empty between tides in a series of gouts. The largest medieval reen remains known as the Monksditch, and is still vital to the parish’s flood control and prosperity; the rich hay from the reclaimed pasturage once used to feed pit-​ponies in mines across the valleys.9 The St. Thomas Way passes north of here, through the post-​industrial cityscape of Newport, with its fierce history of independence and revolt, of Chartism and coal. But the two places are linked by the River Usk and its lacework of tributaries, by silt and mud and pooling water, and I like to imagine that William Cragh and his party stopped at the Priory before they turned towards the mountains. Perhaps they dined on the fine salmon from the monks’ famous fisheries; perhaps Cragh stood on the low cliff and watched the moon rise up from the sea in the dark December sky; perhaps the ethereality of the place, its heightened liminality, moved him to think of his own strange positioning between worlds, between permeable thresholds of life and death and rebirth. The name Goldcliff derives from a vein of yellow mica running between the limestone and the sea, long gone now, but once all a-​glitter in “the reflections of the sun’s rays” as Gerald of Wales observed, fascinated, noting the “bright golden colour.” “Perhaps,” he continued, “if anyone would take the pains to penetrate deeply into the bowels of the earth … [they] would extract honey from the rock, and oil from the stone.”10 This image of gilden treasure hidden in plain sight, revealed by the vicissitudes of light and weather, has a certain metaphorical resonance within the pilgrim’s path, which is often illuminated by the small, the slight, the overlooked, many of its profundities and riches lying between the cracks of the journey. So many of our memories of walking the St. Thomas Way that summer are a jumble of bright fragments scattered against the shifting town-​, land-​, sea-​, and sky-​scapes: eating Welsh rarebit in Glanmor’s Tearooms in Caerphilly; wading an icy stream in the fields outside Longtown, hopelessly lost; sheep calling to their lambs in the dusk on the sloping hillside above Llanthony Priory; the sweet liquorice scent of yellow fennel outside the Nant Wallter cottage at St. Fagans; searching for hermit crabs in the rockpools at Dunraven Bay; stroking an elderly tabby cat in the dappled sunlight at Usk Castle. At each stop along the Way, at every church we enter, we light candles, transient flickers of gold chaining across the Vale of Glamorgan and Monmouthshire and Herefordshire, linking the Edwardian, bomb-​scarred St. Mary’s in Swansea across the 8  Martin Bell and Astrid Caseldine, Prehistoric Intertidal Archaeology in the Welsh Severn Estuary (York: Council for British Archaeology, 2000), 18.

9  Martin Locock, “The Goldcliff Stone and Roman Drainage on the Caldicot Level: An Evaluation at Hill Farm, Goldcliff, 1996,” Britannia 29 (1998): 329–​36. 10  Cambrensis, The Itinerary and the Description, 41.

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fields and valleys and rivers to St. Thomas’s shrine at Hereford Cathedral. And it is at that precise point of match flaring and wick catching that we think about our own reasons for walking in Cragh’s footsteps as modern pilgrims, how multilayered and complicated they are. It must have been exactly the same for medieval pilgrims: the urge is never singular, never simply one of piety, or sickness, or adventure, but always oscillating between the secular and the divine, as varied as the human condition itself, the “Vale of Soulmaking” as Keats put it. As a family, we have been on long, long walks with our little son before, crisscrossing England along the high chalk paths of the Ridgeway and the rolling hills of the Cotswold Way, and the vast skies and flat, reflective beauty of the Thames Path. We’ve walked across Gloucestershire, Oxfordshire, Warwickshire, Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, Somerset, Surrey, and London. Each journey has changed us, but none have followed overtly religious paths, although they have frequently traced and merged with ancient pilgrimage routes. In walking the St. Thomas Way, however, we were entranced by the possibility of understanding something, however slight, of the lived experience of the medieval pilgrim, through the kind of somatic, phenomenological archaeology which the journey offered: travelling with similar purpose through the same mountains and forests, priories and castles and hollow ways, moving day by day towards the same destination of the shrine at Hereford. Whilst Cragh and the de Briouzes were travelling to give thanks, rooting that strange intercessory, eschatological magic deep in the land as they walked and rode, we dedicated our pilgrimage towards the resolution of challenges in our lives. We were not expecting a miracle, but perhaps the realization of how to improve matters for ourselves, the revealment of a forward path formerly obscured, a sense of renewal and hope. And as we departed at the corn-​time of Lammas, under skies still bright with lark song, we felt a profound atemporal connection with that odd party. While in medieval Wales, as Hurlock has argued, pilgrimage tended to strengthen or bind societal ties (in the case of Cragh, problematizing his Welsh identity), for us, our connection with those original pilgrims was achievable precisely through our journey’s positioning outside of the everyday—​in its liminality, its atemporality, we formed an old communitas of the road with the Hanged Man and his company.11 At each holy site along the route, at churches dedicated to St. Mary, St. Thomas Becket, St. Cadoc, St. Issui, St. Martin, St. Michael, and St. Bridget, we said our simple prayers to Blessed St. Thomas de Cantilupe and lit our candles. As we read more about his life—​rich vignettes and anecdotes from Oxford, Hereford, and Italy; the poignant series of miracles, the drowned children, the trampled falcon, the blind servant—​he began to assume a distinct personality, donnish, generous, self-​controlled, calm, compassionate. And just as geographical affinity mattered in the medieval period—​you were, it seemed, more likely to be healed or protected by the saint of your particular home-​land, your mamwlad—​so we felt, as Oxonians, a strong affinity with St. Thomas.12 Hearing some of his tales, our 11  Kathryn Hurlock, Medieval Welsh Pilgrimage, c.  1100–​1500 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 145. 12  Hurlock, Medieval Welsh Pilgrimage, 52–​55.

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Figure 12. Walking the St. Thomas Way near Llanthony Priory, August 2018.

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son swore the bishop was a little like Dumbledore or Gandalf, with the same brilliance, equanimity, and slight edge of danger and unfathomability to dull officialdom. In the vision of Alice de Lonsdale, whose putrefied foot was miraculously healed after praying to St. Thomas, he even appears in magus-​white robes, “silvery as a lily.”13 Sometimes we lit candles for others, too. At St. Woolos Cathedral in Newport, we read the carved names of the war dead, the officers and riflemen of the 1st Battalion Monmouthshire Regiment, the Welsh, English, and Norman surnames mapping the border history of the city. There were men from the steelworks, from the docks, from the mines, many losing their lives in the devastating Battle of Frezenberg Ridge: Andrews, Williams, Commer, Bennett, Parry, Meredith, Griffiths, Howells, Bailey, Morris … 592 names in sum, 592 telegrams, letters, dreaded rat-​a-​tats on the front doors of Newport. One young man, Private Archie Walter Pope, worked in the Temperance Hotel in Goldcliff, close to the sea wall and the old Monks’ reen. He never returned from Flanders. He was killed at Ypres on August 22, 1917. He has no known grave, his body was never found, lost to the tangled wire and shells and the thick, drowning mud of the Western Front.14 Gold was, of course, central to the medieval pilgrimage and its visual culture, both in its associations with divine light and illumination, and also as an all-​too-​human currency. Pilgrim sites like Hereford were piled high with precious metals and jewels; amidst the two thousand waxen figures, the inventory of offerings made by the canonization committee in 1307 included gold rings, gemstones, and silver models of limbs and ships (Thomas Cantilupe was known for rescuing sailors from watery doom).15 There were, however, always voices to admonish and remind that the true treasures of a shrine were the moon-​white bones of the saint. “We see small relics and a little blood,” wrote Victricius of Rouen in the fourth century, “but truth perceives that these tiny things are brighter than the sun.” In Erasmus’s famous colloquy, “A Pilgrimage for Religion’s Sake,” he describes, with tart humanistic disapproval, St. Thomas Becket’s shrine in Canterbury, which he visited in 1513 with his friend John Collet, as displaying “treasures beyond all calculations.” “The most worthless thing there,” he wrote, “was gold, every part glowed, sparkled and flashed with rare and large gems, some of which were bigger than goose eggs.”16 At Llanthony Priory, deep in the Vale of Ewyas in the Black Mountains, I thought about that continual juxtaposition of wealth and poverty, worldly corruption and hermitic sanctity, that seams beneath the stories, miracles, and murders of the St. Thomas Way. The Priory has its origins in the late eleventh century, when the knight William de Lacy, out hawking, is said to have stumbled across the ruins of “the very spot where the 13  Gabriel Alington, St. Thomas of Hereford (Leominster: Gracewing, 2001).

14  Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) Casualty Records, Imperial War Museum, London.

15  Robert A. Scott, The Gothic Enterprise:  A Guide to Understanding the Medieval Cathedral (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 191.

16  Quoted in Stanford E. Lehmberg, The Reformation of Cathedrals: Cathedrals in English Society (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 59.

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humble chapel of David, the archbishop, had formerly stood, decorated only with moss and ivy.”17 Profoundly moved by the remoteness of the place, its peace and numinosity, de Lacy renounced his life as a soldier, vowing to remain as an eremite in the solitary valley. He was swiftly joined by one Ernisius, former royal chaplain to Queen Matilda, and together they established an Augustinian monastery, “far removed from the bustle of mankind.”18 Sitting on a crumbling stone staircase leading down from an old apple store, now my bedroom, watching the night pool in the valley, I could understand why de Lacy had left the stormy world behind for Llanthony. Bats dart in the gloaming, and laughter from the pub drifts across the fields. Sarn Gwydion, the Milky Way, wheels over Hatterall Ridge, the stars sharp and cold in the black sky. This building was once the Prior’s lodgings. Edward II was hosted here by the canons on Palm Sunday, April 5, 1327, arriving at night, the last stop on his ill-​starred journey from Kenilworth to Berkeley Castle. After the dissolution, it was converted into a rambling farmhouse. However, situated on the frontier, the Priory had been struggling long before then, battered by constant raids and border warfare, the valley changing hands multiple times. After Owain Glyndŵr’s rebellion in the early fifteenth century, it limped on, much reduced, for a few more years, a victim of its remoteness, its liminal topography; Gerald of Wales describing it as “fixed amongst a barbarous people.”19 And the scar tissue from these conflicts, from living an arrow-​shot from the border, has never quite healed here. The farmhouse in Bruce Chatwin’s dark and austere novel On the Black Hill, with the border running through the middle of its staircase, lies only a mile or so away. “One of the windows looked out over the green fields of England; the other looked back into Wales, past a clump of larches, at the Black Hill.”20 A young Turner visited Llanthony several times on his Welsh tours of the 1790s; his route, a pilgrimage of bardic Romanticism, following the St. Thomas Way in reverse, winding from ruin to ruin, through Abergavenny, Usk, Newport, Cowbridge, Ewenny, Margam, the landscape flush with the melancholy cultural loss so central to the English perception of Wales in the eighteenth century. (An old grammar of Welsh was republished in 1833 to include the tourist phrases, “Is there a waterfall in the area? I long to see the monastery. I will take a gig to go there.”)21 He created a series of delicate pencil sketches and more developed paintings of the Priory, early experiments in the Sublime. One watercolour completely obscures the ruins with a great smoky pall of grey fog washed with shafts of sulfuric sunlight. A curator at the Tate has written “?Llanthony” in their cataloguing, but I recognize it immediately, that overpowering feeling of claustrophobic otherworldliness that wreaths and encircles this valley. “Mist drizzled on the 17  Cambrensis, The Itinerary and the Description, 31. 18  Cambrensis, The Itinerary and the Description, 31.

19  Rev. George Roberts, Some Account of Llanthony Priory, Monmouthshire (London: Pickering, 1847). 20  Bruce Chatwin, On the Black Hill (London: Vintage, 1998), 20.

21  Prys Morgan, “From a Death to a View: The Hunt for the Welsh Past in the Romantic Period,” in The Invention of Tradition, ed. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 88.

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moor and melted on the hills. Each hill had a hat, a great cloak of mist … Very wandering was the way they had to take through the woods,” wrote the Gawain poet in the fourteenth century about the West Midlands, but it could quite easily have been the Ewyas Valley, the faerie “grene chapel” of the Green Knight not dissimilar to St. David’s ivied hermitage.22 In Landor’s Tower, Iain Sinclair’s bleak novel about the nineteenth-​century poet Walter Savage Landor’s failed utopian experiment in this very farmhouse, the narrator describes that seeping feeling that the veil is caul-​thin in these deep green valleys:  “These Welsh borderlands … are passages where sights and sounds break through the mantle of unconvinced reality with grail hints, chthonic murmurings, earth spirits and strange atavistic impulses.”23 Today, the farm creaks and settles, haunched on a muddled set of medieval wood and stone and eighteenth-​century windows and Victorian hardware. A well-​tended blackened range still dominates the main living quarters and the studded, worm-​riddled oak front door dates from the time of Edward’s stay. Dozens and dozens of nests are skilfully woven into the eaves and arches and castellations, and we watch an endless swoop and flicker of house martins, swallows, and swifts, preparing to fly south. They remind me of the “guests of summer,” “the temple-​haunting martlet,” which Banquo describes in the Scottish Play: “No jutty, frieze, /​Buttress, nor coign of vantage, but this bird /​Hath made his pendant bed and procreant cradle, /​Where they most breed and haunt, I have observed, /​The air is delicate.”24 And there is a haleness to the air here, particularly up on the mountains, where our eleventh walk on the St. Thomas Way leads us—​through the sheep and the horses grazing on the lithe, past broad oaks, along an ancient trackway fringed with ferns and rutted with stones and gnarled roots, climbing high up onto Offa’s Dyke running along the spine of Hatterral Ridge. It’s the weekend of the Llanthony Valley and District Show—​the highlight of the valley’s year, with classes for working hunters and children’s ponies, and growing parsnips and sweet peas and pansies, and baking treacle tarts and Welsh cakes—​and far below, white marquees and bright bunting are dotted across the fields. Halfway up, we suddenly intersect with the fell-​running race; they peel past us in striped jerseys, pink-​ cheeked and Edwardian, like the Hare and Hounds race in The Railway Children. At the top, it is beautiful and austere, even in the hot sun, with wild ponies grazing on the heather moorland and an astonishing view: on one side, the craggy mountains and deep green valleys of Wales, on the other, Herefordshire and the Golden Valley, a homely patchwork of cornfields and gently rolling hills. And on the far, far horizon, the long blue smudge of the Cotswolds. We follow the steep monk’s pass—​the Rhiw Cwrw or Beer Path, used for centuries by the Priory canons for transporting supplies—​right over the Ridge and down into 22  “Mist muged on be mor, malt on be mountez, Vche hille hade a hatte, a myst-​hakel huge … Wela wylle watz þe way þer þay bi wod schulden.” Quoted in Martin Puhvel, “Snow and Mist in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: Portents of the Otherworld?,” Folklore 89 (1978), 224–​28. 23  Iain Sinclair, Landor’s Tower: Or the Imaginary Conversations (London: Granta, 2002), 166. 24  Macbeth, Act 1, scene 6.

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England, into the Olchon Valley, where, five miles further across the fields, lies the medieval settlement of Longtown, the twelfth stop on the Way, a Norman colony strung along the old winter road to Hay and Hereford. In the Black Mountains, rhiw is the name for an uphill track, deep-​carved into the landscape over long years of use. David “Dai” Griffiths described them in That Inward Eye as: All the drovers’ tracks, tracks that were used to carry salt and possibly even further back to carry flints, and to drive animals to market, to visit relatives and go to church—​all these old tracks went up on the diagonal slope out of the valley, virtually one to every farm, over the top of the hill and down into the other valleys and up on to the next ridge, till they covered the whole of the mountain area. So if one wanted to go some distance, say from the Llanthony Valley to Crickhowell or Brecon across the mountain, it was possible to follow these old tracks, these old drovers roads, and the ‘rhiws’ as they were called, over the mountains.25

It is unsurprising, then, that in the Old Straight Track, Alfred Watkins claims Llanthony with its intricate cluster of rhiws as one of the most important convergence points of leys in Britain, a key site to identify these prehistoric tracks and hitherto unnoticed notches, the ancient passing places on the crest of hills. Watkins “haunted this country,” writes Iain Sinclair. “It had been the locus for his original revelation: everything connects and, in making those connections, streams of energy are activated. You learn to see … You access the drift … Movement fires the imagination.”26 Amidst the sheep tracks and overgrown bracken, it is very easy to become completely disorientated on Hatterall and follow a phantom trail over the edge or, as we did, lose the footpath under the spreading summer ferns. Gingerly, we edged down the hill, plunging into humid green feathers, watching for adders sleeping deep in the fern-​ brake—​a dog had been bitten and died only days before near here. Local ghost stories tell of monks and long-​dead villagers aiding lost travellers in the mists and moonless nights over the pass. In the early 1900s, the Herefordshire folklorist Ella Mary Leather wrote of a Longtown man returning home from Llanthony when a fog came on suddenly and he lost his way. He was standing, quite at a loss, when a man came towards him, wearing a large broad-​brimmed hat and a cloak. He did not speak but beckoned, and the man followed him, until he found himself in the right path. Turning round, he thanked his unknown friend, but received no reply; he vanished quickly in the fog. This seemed strange, but he thought no more till, on visiting his friends at Llanthony later, they asked if he reached home in safety that evening, as they had been anxious. When the stranger in the broad-​brimmed hat was described they looked at each other in surprise. “What!” they said, “tell us exactly what his face was like.” He described the stranger more minutely. “It was T—​H—​, for sure,” they cried, “he knew the mountain well, and he has been dead these two years.27

25  David Griffiths, That Inward Eye:  A Black Mountain Memoir (London:  Griffiths and Griffiths, 1995). For the history of rhiw, see also Eddie Procter, The Rhiws of the Black Mountains: Liminal Ways, Old Beyond Memory, published on www.littletoller.co.uk. 26  Sinclair, Landor’s Tower, 12.

27  Ella Mary Leather, The Folk-​lore of Herefordshire (Hereford: Jakeman & Carver, 1912), 36–​37.

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As we leave the pub at Longtown, and climb back up onto the Ridge, a huge orange sun sinking below the mountains, we stop for a moment, seeing the ghosts of the man with the wide-​brimmed hat, of de Lacy with his falconer’s glove, Watkins with his camera, and Cragh and the de Briouzes, one day’s walk ahead of them, pausing on the crest on a December day, on this knife-​edge border, looking back to Wales and then to the frost-​hardened fields of England and on, on towards the glittering shrine of St. Thomas de Cantilupe in Hereford and journey’s end. The St. Thomas Way is a pilgrimage of airy heights as much as deep valleys and rivers. A week before, we had walked up the southern slopes of Mynydd Margam—​ Margam Mountain—​in a blustering, stampeding, salty wind following a torrential downpour that had us sheltering in the gloomy, haunted halls of the Talbot mansion. At the high viewpoint called the Pulpit, the breeze almost knocked us off our feet. We could see for miles: down to the Eglwys Nunydd reservoir and the stacks and cooling towers and the blast furnace of the Port Talbot Steel Works, then across the Bristol Channel to the grey coasts of Devon and Somerset on the horizon. Richard Burton, who was born in Pontrhydyfen in the Afan Valley, just outside Port Talbot, used to come up here as a young man to improve his elocution and pronunciation, howling passages from Shakespeare into the wind: It sounds terribly romantic and idiotic, but in actual fact I would go to the top of the mountain and scream as loudly as I could until my voice hurt. Then when it hurt, I waited for a bit and then screamed again to fix it some way so that it didn’t hurt. It was a very primitive way of doing it, but it worked.28

Years later, in 1974, Burton talked about a brush with death when he was mired in a severe episode of alcohol abuse, informed by his doctors that he only had two slim weeks left to live. He went right up to “the edge of a terrible precipice,” he said, then managed, somehow, to pull back, like Cragh suddenly, miraculously recalled to life. “We [the Welsh] rather love precipices,” he told Michael Parkinson a couple of months later; “we go towards them and withdraw … sometimes we go over the edge … No-​one else has been there, but I’ve been there, I’ve seen that dark wood. I know how terrible it is, how frightful it is, how frightening.”29 That rush towards to the edgelands, to the faultlines, to their precariousness and freedom, also lifted and blighted the life of another local boy, Dylan Thomas, whose “ugly, lovely” Swansea marks the beginning of the St. Thomas Way, and the frontier-​wild setting of St. Thomas’s miracle. In the 1930s, it remained a town of multiple borders and contested spaces—​where rural and industrial, Welsh-​speaking and anglophone Wales collided, the great crescent of the sea forming an elemental frontier to the south. The last time we came to Swansea was deep winter and we stayed in Dylan’s childhood home at 5 Cwmdonkin Drive in the Uplands, now a museum and guest house, 28  Cited in “Richard Burton’s Pontrhydyfen and Port Talbot,” Richard Burton Online Museum, https://​richardburtonmuseum.weebly.com.

29  Michael Parkinson, interview with Richard Burton, 1974. Directed by Annie Lewis and produced by Tony Moss for the BBC. Available online at: ​www.bbc.co.uk/​programmes/​b01h22vh.

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close to the probable site of William Cragh’s hanging on North, once Gibbet, Hill. We slept under plump paisley eiderdowns and starched white sheets in the bedroom he was born in, gas fire blazing, looking out over the “ice-​edged, fish freezing waves” of Swansea Bay, sea almost indistinguishable from grey November sky. In 1931, Dylan began his first job working as a reporter on the South Wales Daily Post. He was sixteen years old. At the time, the newspaper offices and printing presses filled the courtyard of the ruins of Swansea Castle, where Cragh had been imprisoned all those centuries before. “Shut too, in a tower of words,” Dylan wrote afterwards, leaving in less than a year to escape the drudge of reporting on marriages and accidents and the doings of the local coal merchants and civic societies. Ten years later, the heavy, relentless Luftwaffe bombing of the Three Night Blitz, on February 19–​21, 1941, devastated Swansea, reducing 41 acres of the town centre to flattened rubble and killing 230 people. The raging fires could be seen from the Devon coast. The Castle and Daily Post largely escaped, but Dylan’s old hangout, the Kardomah Café close by on Castle Street, was “razed to the snow.” The voices of his young bohemian gang—​writers, painters, poets, composers—​once feverishly discussing “girls, Einstein, Epstein, Stravinsky, death, religion, Picasso and girls” now “hung silent in the snow and the ruin.” Dylan was in Swansea at the time of the raids, and an old friend, Bert Trick, recalls, “I remember standing there with Caitlin … and [Dylan] said ‘Bert, our Swansea has died. Our Swansea has died.’ ”30 It was not until after the war was over that Dylan felt able to write about the bombings.  Return Journey, a radio memoir broadcast on the BBC Home Service in June 1947, dramatized his return visit to Swansea in the deep snow and bitter cold of February of that year. For three days, notebook and pen in hand, he trod the freezing bomb-​shattered streets, noting down dozens upon dozens of vanished shops, businesses, churches, houses, and whole streets lost in the firestorm. Even his old school was largely destroyed: It was a cold white day in High Street, and nothing to stop the wind slicing up from the docks, for where the squat and tall shops had shielded the town from the sea lay their blitzed flat graves marbled with snow and headstoned with fences. I  went out of the hotel into the snow and walked down High Street, past the flat white wastes where all the shops had been. Eddershaw Furnishers, Curry’s Bicyles, Donegal Clothing Company, Doctor Scholl’s, Burton Tailors, W. H. Smith, Boots Cash Chemists, Leslie’s Stores, Upson’s Shoes, Prince of Wales, Tucker’s Fish, Stead & Simpson—​all the shops bombed and vanished. Past the hole in space where Hodges the Clothier had been, down Castle Street, past the remembered invisible shops.31

Walking the St. Thomas Way around Swansea seventy-​one years later, on the first morning of our journey across South Wales, our route intersected with Thomas’s grim, snowbound pacings, and as we tried to remap and refigure the thirteenth-​century topography 30  David N. Thomas and Simon Barnes, Dylan Remembered 1935–​1953, vol. 2 (Bridgend: Seren, 2004), 92.

31  The full script is reproduced in Dylan Thomas, On the Air with Dylan Thomas: The Broadcasts, ed. Ralph Maud (New York: New Directions, 1992).

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of Cragh’s town, we kept encountering the terrible scars of 1941, all those “dead boys and ruined buildings.” We had our breakfast in the shopping centre built on the cleared ruins of Oxford Street, the bomb rubble once piled knee-​high like the tumbled grey rocks on Dunraven beach and on Orchard Street, where we parked the car, the red brick walls of the old Swansea Central Police Station are still riddled with shrapnel pockmarks. The eighteenth-​century St. Mary’s on Princess Way, built over the old medieval parish church where the pious Lady Mary de Briouze is likely to have attended mass, was destroyed by an incendiary bomb, having to be completely rebuilt. Even the very pattern of Swansea’s inner streets, the urban grain deep-​trodden for centuries, had to be replotted in some places after the war. And this fractured urban morphology mirrored for Dylan the same fissure between his prewar and postwar selves, who flicker briefly back into life in the rolling drama and monologues of the broadcast: the little boy of A Child’s Christmas in Wales, singing carols in the snow-​felted darkness, the “two-​typewriter Thomas, the ace news-​dick” of the Daily Post, the poet laureate of the Kardomah Boys, swaggering along the prom with his pals on a Sunday night, after chapel, are as vanished as the flattened, havocked buildings.32 And in this way, refusing to mitigate even one scrap of the experience of pain and loss of the bombings, Dylan’s Return Journey also represents a pilgrimage to revisit the ghosts of his youth: a polyphonic hymn of homecoming to his beloved, complicated, shabby, rich, glorious, holy, border town. Journeying from Swansea that hot summer, in a world as troubled and dangerous as ever, we were also companioned by long-​dead phantoms, but equally we were touched and uplifted by a powerful sense of our own mark-​making across the land, our own layers of memories and thoughts and hopes and exertions palimpsested upon those of the past. When, on August 15, 2018, we finally reached Hereford, and walked through the great north door into the Cathedral, the sense of true companionship with Cragh and the de Briouzes was profound and deeply moving. We lit candles for them, for us, for Dylan, and placed a damp sprig of bright purple heather from the spine of Hatterall Ridge, the borderline between Wales and England, directly onto the cool, worn stone of St. Thomas de Cantilupe’s shrine.

32  Jeff Porter, Lost Sound: The Forgotten Art of Radio Storytelling (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016), 134–​35.

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INDEX

Page numbers in italics refer to figures. Saints are listed under “St.” rather than their name.

Aberconwy, abbey church, 47 Abergavenny cult of St. Thomas, 53–54 massacre, 136 St. Mary’s Priory, 131, 136 Williams and, 78, 80 Aberth, John, 114 Aboa Vetus & Arts Nova Museum, Turku, Finland, Sound Ways (exhibition), 110–11 Abraham, 27 Absalon, Adam, 44 accessibility, 12, 16, 30, 60, 66, 85, 107 AHRC (Arts and Humanities Research Council), 1, 12 “City Witness: Place and Perspective in Medieval Swansea,” 4–5, 37, 58–59 Alienora, wife of William ap Hywel, 50 Amsterdam Museum, The Sound of Amsterdam, 113 Anglo-Norman period, 6, 9–10, 100, 135 Anian I, Bishop of Bangor, 47 Ashridge, Hertfordshire, 46, 54 atemporality, 139 Auckland War Memorial Museum, Sonic Museum, 118–19 Audley Chapel, Hereford Cathedral, 91 Augustine, Archbishop to the Saxons, 30 Augustinian order, 31, 69, 142 Aula, Milo de, 52

Baldwin of Forde, Archbishop of Canterbury, 64 Barlow, Adrian, 76–77 Bartlett, Robert, 4 Battle of Frezenberg Ridge, WWI, 141 Baudrillard, Jean, 117 bells, 105–6, 112 Belmont Abbey, 91 Benedictine order, 15, 31, 137

Bennett, Tony, 103, 104 Berlin, Anhalter Bahnhof, 117–18 Bijsterveld, Karin et al., 116 Birkholz, Daniel, 9, 9n27, 10, 64 Black Death, 83, 89 Book of Kings, 45 Booth, Bishop Charles, 83, 84 Booth Porch, Hereford Cathedral 84, 88, 89 border identity, 53 Breitner, George Hendrik, Dam Square (painting), 113 Brighter Sound (charity), 119 Briouze, Mary de, 3, 7, 10, 11, 33, 39, 62, 147 Briouze, William de, 1, 2, 3–4, 10, 11, 33, 39, 136 Briouze, William de junior, 3, 8, 10, 39 Briton Ferry, 65, 66 Brown, Peter, 60 Burton, John de, 53 Burton, Richard, 145 Business Wales Cultural Tourism Action Plan, 5 Buteler, Ralph le, 42

Cadolzburg Museum, A Castle and its Lords: The Cadolzburg Experience, 111 Cadwalladr, son of Seisyll ap Dyfnwal, 136 Caerphilly, 18 Camino de Santiago, 12, 26, 123 Campbell, Joseph, 125 Canterbury, Archbishops of Baldwin of Forde, 64 Becket, 37 Pecham, 7, 40 Runcie, 95, 96 Cantilupe, Thomas de see St. Thomas of Hereford Cantilupe, Walter, Bishop of Worcester, uncle of Thomas, 6 Cantilupe, William, father of Thomas, 6

150

150

Index

Cantilupe Institute, 94 Centre for Christianity and Culture, University of York, 89, 91, 99 Chaganti, Seeta, 61 Chatwin, Bruce, 142 Chavín de Huántar, Peru, 107 children, miracles of, 45, 50 Christianity, institutionalization of, 27–28 Cistercian order, 31, 47, 64 Cistercian Way, 12 “City Witness: Place and Perspective in Medieval Swansea,” 4–5, 37, 58–59 Clare, Gilbert de, 31 Clare, Richard de, 136, 137 Clifford, Walter III de, 52 Clitheroe Castle, 118 Cluniac order, 31 Codineston, William de, 8 Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome, 72n50 College of Bonhommes, Ashridge, 46 Cologne, Hauptbahnhof, 117 colonialism, 10, 37, 62–63 Connolly, Daniel, 15 Conwy Castle, 47 Corderhale, Matilda de, 44 Cotton, Bartholomew, 49 Cragh, William crime and imprisonment, 10, 146 miracle of, 1–4, 37, 52, 127 pilgrimage, 7–8, 11–12, 33, 39, 58–63, 81, 135, 139 Crang, Mike, 59 Cray, Christina, 39–40 Crook, John, 31 Cultural Tourism Partnership and Steering Group for the Welsh Assembly Government, 5 Cusack, Carole, 27 David (Dafydd), Abbot of Maenan, 47 De Nugis Curialium, (Map), 68–73, 75, 81 Dechant, Pierre-Philippe, 112 Dee, River, 65 Deheubarth, kingdom of, 2, 10, 62 dialect, 53 Dinshaw, Carole, 57n2, 68–70 Downside Abbey, 91 Dryslwyn Castle, siege of, 42, 51

Duchy of Cornwall, 46 Dupront, Alphonse, 60

Edmund, Earl of Cornwall, 46 Edmund III Mortimer, 54 Edward I, 6, 9, 43, 47, 55 Edward II, 55, 142–43 Edward III, 55 Edwards, Philip, 76 Egeria, 28–29 Elliott, Sandy, 96 Eliot, T. S., “Usk” (poem), 73, 75–77, 81 Elucidat, 13 EMAP (European Music Archaeology Project), 107–8 Erasmus, 141 Ernisius, 142 Esgar, Adam de, 87 European Music Archaeology Project see EMAP European Union Convergence funding, 5 Evesham, 48 Ewenny Priory, 46–48, 131, 133–34 Ewyas Lacy, Abwilim de, 41 Ewyas Lacy, Philip de, 41 Ewyas Lacy, Wentliana de, 43

Faith Tourism Action Plan for Wales, 5–6, 25 Finucane, Ronald, 43, 54, 60–61 FitzMiles, Henry, 136 Fleming, Andrew, 40 Fontana, Bill, Entfernte Züge (Distant Trains) (soundscape), 117–18 Foster, Catherine, 108 France, 30, 31 Friends of Hereford Cathedral, 92, 93, 94, 97 Gaffney, Vincent, 18 Gawain poet, 143 Gerald of Wales, Itinerarium Cambriae, 9, 64–68, 81, 136, 138, 142 Gildas, 30 gold, 127, 134, 141 Goldcliff, 137–38, 141 Goodich, Michael, 52 Goodrich castle, 51 Gray, Madeleine, 11 Grifffiths, David, 144 Gruffudd ap Madog, 52

151



Guardian (newspaper), 67 Gŵr, kingdom of, 9, 10

Hahn, Cynthia, 61 Hambleden, Buckinghamshire, 46, 54, 97 Hamilakis, Yannis, 108 Heaney, Seamus, 138 Hearing the Mystery Plays (sound installation), 114–17 Helena, mother of Constantine, 28 Helston, William de, 48 Herbert McAvoy, Elizabeth, 57n1 Hereford Cathedral archives, 83–101 Booth Porch, 84, 88, 89 Cantilupe 2020 exhibition, 83 cinquefoil arches, 89, 90 Cragh pilgrimage, 3, 39 Lady Chapel, 42, 88–91 Schools and Family Learning programme, 99 shrine of St. Thomas, 7–9, 19, 31, 38, 42, 91–92, 94, 96, 97, 141 St. Thomas Way project, 6, 19, 93–99, 128, 130, 132 Williams on, 78–79 Herefordshire Tourism Strategy, 6 heritage tourism, 5–6, 12, 16 Herla, King, 68–72, 75 Hill, Geoffrey, Mercian Hymns, 73–75, 77, 81 Holy Land, pilgrimage to, 8, 28 Hsy, Jonathan, 67, 68 identity, 52–53 indulgences, 16, 32, 33, 55, 83 interactivity, 13, 15, 100, 115 Iorwerth ab Owain, 136 Iron Age, 30 Itinerarium Cambriae (Gerald of Wales), 9, 64–68, 81, 136, 138, 142

Jancey, Merly, 100 Jesse, father of King David, 136 John of Baggeham, 3, 7 John of Tynemouth, 38n8 Jones, Chris, 75 Kempe, Margery, 33 Kilgour, Robert, 91

Index

151

Kilpeck, 31, 32, 41–42 Kilpeck, Hugh de, 42 Kilpeck, Thomas, 41 Kilvert, John, 77n64 Kinross, John, 34 Korean Christians, 26

Lacy, William de, 141–42 Landor, Walter Savage, 143 Landor’s Tower (Sinclair) (novel), 143, 144 Langland, William, Piers Plowman (allegorical poem), 76 Leather, Ella Mary, 144 liminality, 9, 28, 53, 62, 138, 139, 142 Llancarfan, 11, 16, 17, 48–49 Llanover, 26 Llantarnam, 31 Llanthony, 142–44 Llanthony Priory, 137, 140, 141–42 Londres, William de, 133 Longtown, 18, 40–41, 144 Lopez, Mariana, 17 Lowenthal, David, 63 Ludlow, Shropshire, 53 Ludlow Palmers Guild, 95, 97

Maenan, 47 Manchester Museum, Music at the Museum, 119 Map, Walter, De Nugis Curialium, 68–73, 75, 81 Mappa Mundi, Hereford Cathedral Duchy of Cornwall map and, 46 and shrine to St. Thomas, 8–9, 62, 92, 95 and St. Thomas Way, 13, 15, 126, 129 Williams and, 78–79 March of Wales Anglo-Welsh conflict, 52 “City Witness” project and, 4 Gerald of Wales and, 64–65 Hill and, 73 Map and, 68–73 miracle stories, 51 St. Thomas Way and, 135, 136 temporality and, 62–63 Williams and, 78–79 Marche, Alicia de la, 31 Marden, Herefordshire, 50, 97n51 Margam, 65, 67

152

152

Index

Margam Abbey, 11, 31, 59, 64, 66 martyrs’ tombs, 28–29 Masefield, John, 135–36 Massington, John de, 42 Mathetes, 27 Mathews, Thomas, 3, 60 McKenzie, Chloe, 16, 19, 126 measuring to the Saint, 19, 45, 54, 127–30 Mercia, 74–75 Mercian Hymns (autobiographical sequence) (Hill), 73–75, 77, 81 Merlimond, Oliver de, 31–32 Midwinter of the Spirit (TV series and novel), 37 Mills, Steve, 108 Mirk, John, 133 monasticism, rise of, 28 Monksditch, 138 Montfort, Simon de, 48 Morgan ab Owain, 136 Morgan ap Caradog, Lord of Afan, 65 Morley, John, 77 Mortimer, Hugh, 31–32 multimedia resources, 5, 13, 15–17, 20, 57 multisensory content, 103, 108–9 Mumbles Brewery, Swansea, 19 Murphy, Peter, 91, 96

Neath, 65–68 Neath, River, 11, 58, 64–65 Neath Abbey, 66 Neath Port Talbot, 66, 68 Newport, 52, 138, 141 Newport Museum, 137 Ní Ríain, Ailís, Taken (sound installation), 118 Nilson, Ben, 54 Noreys, Agneta, 49 Norman period, 31, 72, 144 Offa, King, 74, 75 Offa’s Dyke, 73, 137, 143 Ogilby, John, 11, 15 O’Gorman, Christopher, 112 Orderic Vitalis, 68, 70–71 Owain Glyndŵr, 142 Oxford, University of, 6, 44–45, 79 Oystermouth Castle, 2, 5, 10, 39

Paris, Matthew, 15 Parker, Eleanor, 135n4 pastoral, 74 Patrishow, 54–55, 136, 137 Paula, 28–29 Pecham, John, Archbishop of Canterbury, 7, 40 penances, 8, 32, 39, 40 penny, bending of, 3, 10, 39, 47, 50, 54, 55, 61 peregrinatio, 27–30 Piers Plowman (allegorical poem) (Langland), 76 pilgrim badges, 18, 33, 95, 96 pilgrimage definition of, 26–27 early history of, 27–30 growth of, 25 living holy men, 29 medieval, 30–32 modern, 33–34 symbolic, 27–28 as thanksgiving, 33 Plugenet, Alan II de, 42 polychronicity, 59, 62 Pope, Archie Walter, 141 Pope Gregory the Great, 30 Pope John XXII, 7, 55 Port Talbot, 66–67 postcolonialism, 62–63 prayer cards, 97 Prendergast, Thomas A., 57n2, 72n52 Pugh, Tison, 112–13 Pullin, Canon Christopher, 18, 125 Reformation, 32, 84, 88, 89 Relatio processus, 45, 49 relics and pilgrimage, 30–31 power of, 28, 54 St Thomas, 7, 54, 55, 61, 63, 83, 88–89, 91, 97 “religious tourism,” 5, 25 Rhys ap Maredudd, 2, 10, 39 Rickman, Phil, Midwinter of the Spirit (novel), 37 Roger of Conwy, 47, 51, 54 Roman period, 27–28, 30

153



Rome, pilgrimages to, 29, 33 Rudy, Kathryn, 15, 16 Rumney, Michelle, 19

Salisbury, Bishop of see Simon of Ghent Santiago de Compostela, 26, 32, 33, 123 Schafer, Murray, 105 Schneider, Rebecca, 67 Schulze, Holger, 109 Seisyll ap Dyfnwal, 136 “Sense of Place,” 5–6 Shakespeare, William, 143, 145 Sheen, Michael, 67 Shobdon, 32 Simon of Ghent (later Bishop of Salisbury), 45 Sinclair, Iain, Landor’s Tower (novel), 143, 144 Skinner, Henry, 62 Smith, Mark, 104, 108, 111, 120 soundscapes, 103–20 as artistic reflection on past, 117–19 ecclesiastical, 110, 111, 112 engagement and, 17–18 ethical issues, 108, 114 as evocation, 109–13 heritage sites and, 109 history of sound, 105–11 medieval harbour, 111–12 medieval market, 111, 112 plainchant, 110, 112 as recreation of past, 113–17 sound archaeology, 108, 109 virtual acoustics, 106–7 Southampton, University of, Public Engagement with Research Unit, 19 St. Albans, 15, 30 St. Augustine of Hippo, 28, 45, 46 St. Cadoc, church of, 11, 16 St. David, 31 St. David’s Cathedral, 31 St. Ethelbert of East Anglia, 37, 50, 90, 91, 123 St. Etheldreda of Ely, 49 St. Fagans, 50–51 St. Francis Xavier, Catholic Church of, 91 St. Guthlac’s Priory, Hereford, 41–42 St. Illtud’s, Llantwit Major, 131

Index

153

St. Issui, 137 St. John, Sir John de, 47 St. Martin’s Church, 39–40 St. Mary’s, Credenhill, 49, 97, 98 St. Mary of Penrhys, 31 St. Michael the Archangel, 133 St. Peter’s Abbey, Gloucester, 41, 133 St. Radegund of Poitiers, 31 St. Thomas Becket, 6, 37, 38, 95, 98, 141 St. Thomas of Hereford (formerly Bishop Thomas de Cantilupe) canonization, 2–4, 7, 32, 40, 45, 47, 49, 55, 141 Cragh and, 1–4, 37, 52, 127 cult of, 6–10, 37–56 death, 62 early life, 6–7 episcopal seal, 96 relics, 7, 54, 55, 61, 63, 83, 88–89, 91, 97 shrine of, 7–9, 19, 31, 38, 42, 91–92, 94, 96, 97, 41 St. Woolos Cathedral, Newport, 141 Stonyhurst College, Lancashire, 63, 92 Sutton, Bishop Oliver of Lincoln, 46 Swansea, 39–40 “City Witness: Place and Perspective in Medieval Swansea,” 4–5, 37, 58–59 Cragh and, 1, 2, 4, 5, 8, 60 Dylan Thomas and, 145–47 place and, 62 post-industrialization and, 6 St. Thomas Way and, 11–12 Swansea Castle, 3, 5, 146 Swansea Council, 5 Swansea Museum, 5 Swinfield, Richard, Bishop of Hereford, 4, 7, 42n35, 49 Tavinor, Michael, 92n41, 100 Teme, River, 73 temporality, 57–63, 67–69, 73–75, 77–78, 81–82, 109 Terkla, Daniel, 8, 15 Thomas, Bishop see St. Thomas of Hereford Thomas, Dylan, 145–47 Thomas, R. S., 133 Times Literary Supplement, 76

154

154

Index

Trahaearn ap Hywel, 2 Traherne, Thomas, 91 Tregoz, John de, 48 Trigg, Stephanie, 57n2, 72n52 Turbeville, Sir Paganus de, 134 Turner, Joseph, 134, 142–43

Usk, 75 Usk Abbey, 31, 52–53 Usk, River, 138

Vauchez, André, 45–46 Vaughan, Henry, 77 Victricius of Rouen, 141

Walchelin, 70–71 wall paintings, 11, 16, 48, 99 Walter of Chewton Mendip, 49 Watkins, Alfred, 144 Weisl, Angela, 112–13 Wesselow, Thomas de, 8–9 Wigmore Abbey, 54 William, David, 133–34 Williams, Raymond, 77–82 Woolley, Tom, 13 Worcester Cathedral, 54 Wye, River, 52, 69

York Mystery Plays, 113–17