Happisburgh Chuch

 

Happisburgh church with the North Sea just visible top left

The Norfolk coastal village of Happisburgh was one of Arthur Conan Doyle's haunts. He used to stay at Happisburgh's Hill House Inn and I imagine him writing as he reflectively looked out to sea from the top floor. Whilst at the inn he was inspired to write the Sherlock Holmes story "The Dancing Men" (See here for more). In that story Doyle captures the atmosphere of the landscape of this part of Norfolk with the following passage:

...there was much around us to interest us, for we were passing through as singular a countryside as any in England, where a few scattered cottages represented the population of today, while on every hand enormous square towered churches bristled up from the flat green landscape and told of the glory and prosperity of old East Anglia. At last the violet rim of the German ocean [The North Sea] appeared over the green edge of the Norfolk coast and the driver pointed with his whip to two old brick and timber gables which projected  from a grove of trees. "That's Ridling Thorpe Manor" said he.

The view of Ridling Thorpe Manor may have been inspired by Happisburgh Manor which can be seen in this picture which I took telescopically from the top of Happisburgh lighthouse....

Happisburgh Manor

Those enormous square towered wool financed churches Doyle speaks of are typified by Happisburgh church which can be seen in the first picture above. One can also get a glimpse of The German Ocean (Nowadays called The North Sea) on the top left side of my picture. 

The interior of Happisburgh church is typical of a 15th century perpendicular church: A wide aisled building with slender pillars making it far more airy than the claustrophobic interior of those Norman Romanesque churches with their thick chunky pillars.....

Inside Happisburgh Church

The east end of the two aisles may have once been chantries reserved for the wool merchants who helped finance the church, but today at the end of the north aisle we find a colourful postwar stained glass window depicting a romantic and chivalrous looking medieval warrior with sword and bright armour. This window is a memorial to the brave men and heroes who fought in WWII and lost their lives fighting for freedom. Right next to this striking memorial, as my picture below shows, we can see that other archetypical hero who died that we may all have freedom; it is of course a crucifix of Jesus the Messiah

East end of the North aisle

Moving over to the end of the south aisle we find a niche with a statue of Mary the mother of Jesus. This is appropriate as the church is dedicated to St Mary. 

At east end of the South aisle

I was unexpectedly moved by the contrast between the dedications of these two sacred spaces. Unbidden, thoughts came into my mind that were a surprise to me. I've been brought up in a strongly reformed tradition, a culture which tends to look askance at the Catholic status of Mother Mary as if  that status might just be a little too close to idolatry for comfort. But as I sat in one of the pews and contrasted the very different celebrations at the ends of North and South aisles I had an inkling as to what was behind the age old Catholic veneration St Mary.  

The north aisle places before us a daunting ideal of heroism, an ideal which we may feel enjoined, pressured even, to emulate. It's the kind of heroism spoken of in Romans 5:6ff. That passage tells us about how challenging it is to die for the righteous let alone for those who make themselves enemies. Many of us doubt (and that includes me) we could ever emulate this ideal, an ideal often expected of men in war. So, if we feel unable to rise to a challenge that is a qualification for conditional love and acceptance we can leave behind the north aisle and move to the south aisle where we find the mercy and comfort of a mother's unconditional love in the form of St Mary with her welcoming open hands and look of love. This response is very understandable. But though the public rendition of Christianity communicated by some preachers is far too intimidating and presents a moral bar too high for the likes of us, that is not the message I read into Romans 5:5-11 and Romans 8:14ff. Given the (passive) aggression of some preachers it is no surprise that the aspect of love yearned for and symbolized by the very feminine figure of St Mary has somehow come adrift from the Godhead. 

Beeston Castle and Basing House. Part II

(See here for part I)

Reconstruction of the Great Gate House of the Old House at 

Basing: House: Siege of Basing House 1642 to 1645 during 

the English Civil War. See here Siege of Basing House

The ruins of Basing House are situated on a modest salient just outside the village of Basing (Near Basingstoke). Basing House, like Beeston Castle was initially conceived as a Norman motte and bailey fortification, but the environs of Basing House are no scenic match for the high rise epic landscape of Beeston Castle. Basing House, however, compensated for its relatively low relief landscape by reaching social heights that Beeston's functional garrison castle couldn't hope for. During the 16th century the courteous social climber and owner of Basing House, Sir William Paulet, spent a fortune rebuilding the Norman site and ended up with what was arguably the grandest mansion in all England, although it is now largely reduced to its foundations. The guide book tells us.....

 It is [now] hard to imagine that it was once "the greatest of any subjects house in England, yea larger than most of the King's palaces"

Paulet became Earl of Wiltshire and Lord Treasurer of England in 1550 and a year later the Marquess of Winchester. Such was his social climbing success that the guide book can quote Francis Alen the Earl of Shrewsbury who in 1560 said: 

"The Queen [Elizabeth] so liked the house of the Lord Treasurer at Basing and her entertainment there that she openly and meryly bemoaned him to be so olde, for else by my trouthe (sayeth she) if my Lord Treasurer were a young man I could fynde in my harte to have him to husbande, bifour any man in Englande".

Even the much younger Lord Leicester of the fashionable and elegant Kenilworth castle who openly tried to court Elisabeth failed to get a similar compliment. Born in the 1470s Paulet died in 1572 which means he must have been in his nineties, a remarkable age for that era. 

The original foot print of the castle wasn't big enough for the ambitious Paulet and he extended his property by building the New House which was appended to the the original Norman Motte and Baily site. The New House can be seen at the top of my photograph of this model of Basing House....

Model of Basing house depicting how
it looked before its destruction

After Paulet's death the site went into decline, but at the start of the civil war in 1642 it was refortified as a royalist garrison because of its strategic location on the main route to the west country. In 1643 it came under parliamentary siege. Although primarily a house and mansion rather than a castle it was a surprisingly difficult nut to crack and the parliamentarians made several attempts under different commanders to capture it. Finally under the command of Colonel John Dalbert and none other than Lieutenant General Oliver Cromwell, the House fell with the New House proving to be its Achilles heel. See below for an artist's picture of the siege...

The siege of Basing House: The first mansion is on the
 left; its curtain wall follows the circular mound of
the Motte. The New House can be seen on the right. 

After the siege the house was offered as a quarry for the inhabitants of Basing to help rebuild their devasted town. It is no surprise then that little of the original house remains, although the large scale of the still intact Great Barn gives a feel for the red brick glory of the original mansion....

The Basing House Great Barn: I've never seen an old barn
this big: It almost felt aircraft hanger size.

All that is left of Basing's grand dinning hall is its wine cellar. The dinning hall was no doubt the scene of many an aristocratic banquet. Those banquets would be the setting for a mixture of social climbing, connection building, gossipy intrigue and discussions about the latest affairs of state. It was a place to keep your social masks on but those attending probably felt pleased knowing that their presence proved they were on the top rungs of society's status ladder. 

All that is left of the great banqueting hall;
the wine cellar underneath. 

In the nearby oven rooms & kitchens the hoi polloi worked very hard to keep their snobbish betters pleased by serving up lavish vittles. The oven room where they worked would have been a very hot and unpleasant environment; a nearby interpretation board tells us that a Spanish visitor in 1554 described Basing's kitchens as "...veritable Hells such is the stir and bustle in them".

What remains of Basing House's kitchen ovens

Reflection

As I stood on the edge of the open cellar which is now all that is left of the Great Hall and looked at the nearby ovens I became aware of the meaning and apt symbolism of this now ruin of devastation along with its departed culture. It harked back to a day when a privileged upper ruling class, the aristocrats, was taken for granted to be part of the natural order of things. Today, needless to say, high privilege is looked at askance as perhaps an unjust anomaly in what should be the moral natural order of things. How has that change come about? One man to ask is Oliver Cromwell....

 As a show piece of upper class excellence and aristocratic self-satisfaction Basing House had few rivals, although its halcyon days lasted not much over a 100 years. How fitting then that it was Oliver Cromwell, a man of the earth who styled himself as a humble agent of God's people should take part in bringing judgement to this extravagant seat of privilege. But Cromwell was a fundamentalist by mentality and was full of the certitudes of righteousness, a dangerous condition which so often afflicts religious zealots. Nevertheless, as I have remarked before, Cromwell had pioneering ideas about government by parliament but he failed to implement them. He failed to implement them because a man of such decided religious conviction was simply unable to accept that given our very human tendency toward self-interest and our epistemic limitations, government by argument (as opposed to government by ruling class diktat) and government by agreeing to disagree was the inevitable norm of a genuine parliament. So, in all his fundamentalist self-confidence Cromwell could not accept a quarrelling parliament of ordinary human beings and regarded them as too unrighteous to rule; that is, all except himself of course! So, although he rightly didn't have the gall to accept the crown he nevertheless became the "righteous" dictator who ruled with an arrogant certitude. 

Simon De Montfort, Earl of Leicester is also credited with conceiving the idea of a parliamentary democracy. His and Cromwell's ideas were moving in the direction of democratic accountability but ultimately they both muffed it. De Montfort was to the Jews of the country as Cromwell was to England's Catholic community; both leaders unleased terror upon their identified pet hate group, a group they regarded as a conspiratorial cartel of the wicked and who therefore became objects of blame and persecution. Cromwell's and De Montfort's jealously held certainties may account for them both failing to implement a true parliamentary "rule by argument and disagreement" government (but constrained by a constitution). It wasn't until the days of King William III that things started to move in the right direction.

Appendix

This photograph shows a breach in the curtain wall of the Old House allegedly made during the parliamentary siege..

Beeston Castle and Basing House. Part I

Beeston Castle in Cheshire and Basing House in Hampshire are two very different manifestations of the word "Castle". Both started out as Norman castles but their paths of evolution were very divergent. That divergence may be down to their contrasting locales.

***

Beeston Castle is set on a high rocky outlier.  It is a very dramatic location and in its heyday one can imagine it being the setting for a Tolkienesque battle scene. 

Painting be George Barret Senior (?1728/32-1784)
Beeston Castle | Grosvenor Museum

The views from the castle are breathtaking. I took the following pictures: I'm no photographer, but with Beeston Castle you just can't go wrong when photographing the vistas it affords:

The walls of the inner ward

The view from the inner ward

God and man work together to produce beauty. 

The Beeston guide book tells us: "Spectacular views of Cheshire and the Welsh border that stretch for up to 30 miles in all directions have drawn people to Beeston for many centuries".  But in spite of that it is unlikely that Beeston Castle was ever a commodious home for an aristocrat. There was no attempt to level the ground of the inner ward and its rocky lumps and bumps make for difficult traversing. The most comfortable part of the castle was probably the inner ward gate house which was occupied by a constable rather than a live-in-Lord. Beeston castle was primarily a strategic fortification rather than a comfortable seat for a swanky aristocrat. 

The tactical value of the castle became very apparent during the civil war when it became a point of royalist resistance to the parliamentary armies. Such was its strength it was only defeated as a result of the broader military picture of parliamentary victories which made continued resistance futile. As with other castles the parliamentarians slighted its defenses to ensure it could never again be used by royalist forces. Instead it became a very picturesque ruin, no doubt a favorite in the imaginations of the romantics. But apart from the wonderful views I doubt life high-up on that exposed geological feature was very romantic. It is paradox that these old ruined castles evoke romantic feelings as they were about violence and oppression; perhaps it's because their "been-and-gone" status suggests the ultimate passing of all strife in favour of nature's quietous

In part II I'll be looking at Basing House, an Elizabethan mansion where there was a mother of a showdown between the royalists and parliamentarians. 

The gate house of the inner ward.