Happisburgh, Deep History Coast: Footprints in the Mud

 

No, not the monolith of 2001 but nevertheless
equally as mysterious

This September the wife and I took our third break on the coast of the out-of-the-way Norfolk village of Happisburgh  As I noted in my post of Oct 2022 Happisburgh, in spite of it having that back-of-the-beyond, on-the-way-to-nowhere feel about it, nevertheless is a very notable location not least because of its paleontological significance. Seven standing wood monuments at the side of car park tell the story as it is currently understood. (See pictures above and below of two of them)

Happisburgh can lay claim to the earliest hominid footprints outside Africa. See the pictures above. See also below for pictures of the actual footprints before they were washed away by the restless sea.

At 850,000 years old these footprints are in the middle of the quaternary period; the age when Milankovitch cycles drove the complex beat of repeated glaciation. These footprints would have been made in mud during a warm interglacial interval. The mud is now soft rock, soft enough in fact for it to be possible to dig out small chunks with one's fingernail. Nevertheless, these hardened layers of mud are harder than the rock forming the cliffs which one can see in the background of the above picture. The cliffs overlie the interglacial strata but are being rapidly eroded leaving outliers of the relatively hard paleontological mud. The interpretation boards explained that these cliffs are largely the deposits of a later glaciation that bulldozed its way through the region 450,00 years ago. A section through the resultant glacial till can be seen in the photograph below of the cliffs. I'm no field geologist but this is my expectation of what the chaotic till left by glaciation would look like.....

In spite of the huge time scales that this landscape is evidence of, as we walked along the beach my overriding feeling was of the changing ephemerality of it all, especially of life.  The soft cliffs of Happisburgh are quickly eroding and each year a few more feet are lost. On the day of our walk the waves were wild with the restlessness that has carried on for eon's carving the coastline, churning the sand and depositing sediment along with fossils. At one point we came across a large bloated dead seal, perhaps ultimately to be buried by the waves and fossilized.

I took a picture of a cormorant perched on a break water. He was probably looking for fishing opportunities.....

The bird, of course, was completely unaware of the deep history drama still playing out around it; it has only been given to human beings to become conscious of that. In the background of my picture can be seen a huge container ship creeping along just over the horizon; a testament to human knowledge & technical prowess but nevertheless dwarfed by the scales of nature. The cormorant, whose mind was entirely focused on the fight for survival, wouldn't have a clue about the meaning of that ship or about the purpose of the orange cage on which he was perched, or about the bipedal ape who was contemplating him; not a clue about these things, any more than he had the slightest inkling about the deep history out of which his species had emerged. In a few more years his fight for survival would be over and he would be forgotten by the world. (Mat 10:29-31)

Later when returning to our caravan via the cliff path we saw another marvel of technology; a large potato harvester (See picture above, looking north): The driver was having his sandwich break in its comfortable air-conditioned cab. In the background are two line-of-sight microwave towers of the Bacton Gas Terminal. The technology in this picture is testament to the warmth and food delivered to modern homes on an industrial scale. Looking along the cliff top in the opposite southerly direction is another kind of communication tower, a monument to an entirely different kind of culture and this can be seen in the centre of this picture: 

This tower is none other than the tower of Happisburgh church. This website tells us that the church was completely rebuilt in the 14th century, the perpendicular period of church building. The late mediaeval culture of the day was emerging from earlier times when a feudal economic base meant that most utilities were generated locally rather than via a market supplied by industrialized production, By the late 14th century the black death had started to break this feudal system. However, pastural farming in Norfolk had brought a brisk trade in wool making the region wealthy enough to build such imposing churches. The market was starting to gain traction as a wealth creator. Since then, in just a few hundred years, human culture has changed beyond recognition as the market and a highly technological industry has generated wealth that the builders of Happisburgh church could not even imagine; the key to it was an agricultural revolution that had reached a pinnacle in our potato harvester where just one man could harvest a huge field in a day - or less.

Seven hundred years later that wealth has bought leisure, health and above all the knowledge and time to contemplate the mysteries of existence; but with it our culture has lost the assurance that those late medieval church builders had about the meaning of life; does our modern culture understand the meaning of the wider cosmic perspective about which we have learned so much? For some scholars the universe "just is" and believe that apart from meanings we create ourselves there is no other meaning to be discovered. So, is the man in the street who has been tutored by numerous academic authorities any better off about meanings than that cormorant? In the "light" of what some authorities will tell us the universe is all very random, empty, dark, cold and meaningless. So, it is no surprise that large swathes of our otherwise blessed & rich Western populations have given up seeking meaning altogether and are content to keep their heads above the economic waters as best they can. But really, although I've critiqued some of these authorities, I can't be too hard on them: The huge empty scales of the cosmic perspective are perplexing to say the least. In comparison those medieval church builders knew very little about this perspective; in their cosmology earth was so obviously the centre stage of a sacred drama that had run only for a few thousand years. In an attempt to cut the knot, the Christian Biblical literalists have returned to those cozier cosmogonies of past ages, reducing cosmic ages to less than 10,000 years and in some cases returning to a cosmogony that even our medieval forebears, who inherited Greek science, knew to be obviously wrong; namely, that the earthly drama takes place on a flat circular stage, not unlike the circular setting of Avebury. 

The universe is so organized that it allows us to describe it in terms of those elegant mathematical forms which our God given minds have distilled from the top of that organization. But that doesn't in anyway give the universe the necessity of aseity: Those mathematical forms are computational devices which only describe. As I've said so often, my view is that the universe is a work of art selected from the platonic world of possibility; laws or no laws it is not a necessity. There is good art and bad art but all is art and art is but reified possibility. Our deep history by God's grace is a reification from just one of the many possible stories in the platonic realm. Just as Tolkien selected one possible history to tell from all the possible stories that could be told, our cosmic history is as equally unique. That history, although perplexing to some, is nevertheless a miracle of creation and grace. With these thoughts in mind as I looked at a crystal-clear coastal night sky at 3am marveling at the visible milky way for the first time in years, it is a remarkable fact that at Happisburgh cosmic history becomes palpable. 

Visit to York: The End of History Experience Part II

 See here for Part I

The excellent White Rose Tours. 
White Rose York Tours « Home of York's finest free tour – Daily at 11am and 3pm

One of the first things we did during our one-day visit to York was to go on the highly acclaimed White Rose Tour (See above - I would recommend this tour). This provided an excellent overview of the History of the City of York, from Roman times through King Charles I convening his court outside the city gates to the recent confectionary industry in the city.  Given some of the changes, traumas and brutality the city has witnessed it help reinforce my not entirely rational feeling that either history had ended or that I was simply a detached onlooker for whom history didn't happen. 

Coming from Norwich, a city which according to Wiki claims to be the most complete medieval city in the United Kingdom, it was inevitable that I'd compare York with Norwich. They have similar population size, but Norwich is far more sprawling & has undergone haphazard modernization. As a result, York gives the impression of being more densely packed with history than Norwich, especially in the famous "Shambles" area.....

The Shambles, York. 

The original fortified Roman town of York is buried under the center of the modern-day city and therefore has a largely archeological presence. This contrasts with Norwich where the nearest Old Roman town is five miles south of Norwich at Caister St Edmund. At Caister there is a very visible square embankment along with some remaining Roman walls. Norwich was founded by Saxons at least one hundred years after the Romans left York. Unlike York I'm not aware that the ghosts of Roman soldiers have been sighted in Norwich, although it is claimed that a Roman crossroads existed in the Charing Cross area of the city.

York has a huge claim to fame in the annals of Western history; namely, that Constantine the Great was declared emperor by his troops in York after his father (the emperor at the time), died in 306 whilst staying in York. I don't think Norwich has so significant a claim to being on the critical path of Western and European history. In the civil wars which often accompanied the succession of Roman emperors Constantine was eventually victorious and became the official emperor in 324. In 325 he presided over the council that gave Christian history the Nicaean Creed, a creed which has so influenced Christian thinking since. Constantine can therefore claim to have set the conceptual and geographical mold for European Christianity which has affected belief and politics right up until the present day with its division (and tensions!) between Eastern orthodox Christianity and the Western expressions of an abstract Christian ethos.  As one walks around the quaint streets of York it is difficult to believe that critical path events took place here profoundly affecting the evolution of both European and world events.

A very imperial looking statue of Constantine with the
 Minister walls in the background

Constantine and Europe's religious foundations.

But before all that happened York was to pass out of Roman influence and the remaining Romano-British faced Anglo-Saxon migratory infusions followed by Viking conquest. The Vikings took over the city of York in 866 (As they did also Norwich). The Jorvik experience with its animatronic Viking tableaus (which include the unpleasant smells of the time!) provides the detached end-of-history observer with a life-like almost time machine experience of the Viking past. With its smells & noises it is a very visceral experience. In fact, it reminded me of one of those fairground rides that takes you into the depths of another world. It was dark like the ghost train except that this wasn't fantasy: This was Danelaw Britain circa 800 AD and I was looking at ghosts from our past.  

One can't help but measure up Danelaw living conditions with our own "end of history" standards. To the comfortable 21st century UK citizen to whom even Roman life seems very uncivilized, the Viking context is intolerably primitive and squalid.  However, it is no doubt true that history has been unkind to the Vikings: Their history was largely written by those highly literate and learned Anglo-Saxon monks who were on the receiving end of ambitious Viking savagery.  And yet it was clear to me from some of the exhibits at the Jorvik Centre that Viking metalwork was much more advanced than the rumored history I was acquainted with would give credit for. In particular I was very impressed with a Viking padlock, and I spent some time studying it. 

Real Viking ghosts!
Travel back to Viking times at the Jorvik Center in York. 

But even the Vikings eventually converted to Christianity's compelling revelation of a God of sacrificial giving and love. In fact, one tableau was of a Viking Monk giving the Christian last rights to an old woman as she died not in battle but in her bed. Given Viking maritime culture the patron saint who naturally appealed to them was St Clement, the martyr who was executed by being tied to an anchor and thrown into the sea. So even the jingoistic Vikings who reveled in force of arms and reckless brutal courage started paying at least lip service to the Christain revelation of a God of voluntary vulnerability & sacrificial love (Philippians 2:1-11). How ironic. It was these people along with other European cultures who were to eventually bring riches and advancements that they couldn't possibly imagine at that time. So, we can thank these primitives for their adventurousness, ambition and above all their conversion to Constatine's faith. Amazing. Unbelievable. Beyond remarkable.

***

The highlight of our visit was of course York Minister. It is the largest gothic period cathedral, bar one:

The present building was begun in about 1230 and completed in 1472. York Minster is the largest cathedral completed during the Gothic period of architecture, Cologne Cathedral only being completed in 1880, after being left uncompleted for 350 years. (Wikipedia)

Because of its size in cramped York surroundings, it is
 difficult to find a space where one can stand back far enough
from the Minister to get the whole building in one frame.

In this cavernous interior the medieval mind would have
 boggled at the paradox of God's overwhelming and intimidating
glory when set against the miracle of His voluntary
self-abasement as recorded in Phil 2:1-11

As I looked heavenward this view gave me vertigo!

Perhaps the architect would have said "Good,

it is meant to!"

So much about York Minister is record
breaking, like for example this huge 
east end window, bigger than a tennis court.

York Minister may well have been built on the top of the very spot where Constantine the Great was declared emperor by his army; that would be a fitting tribute and crowning glory to Constantine's conversion to Christianity. This conversion turned out to have momentous historical consequences and of such import that it perhaps even left a disturbance in the psychic field around York, thus explaining the well-known ghost sighting of Roman soldiers in the basement of the Treasurer's House! (See also here). After all, if I'm right about the nature of conscious cognition, reality isn't "out there", but "in here"! Are apparitions evidence that reality sometimes malfunctions and expresses itself as a kind of reified dream state?

One has to admit that not that many conversions to Christianity are followed by all together exemplary lifestyles: Highly self-motivated Christain kings seeking personal glory continued to fight, squabble and build empires by force of arms, often quite sure they were meeting out the judgement of God. (But then I continue to sin myself, mostly sins of omission I think).  Perhaps the effect of Christianity is a slow burner effect: We are still a long way from peace and social harmony, a harmony that is metaphorically well represented by York Minister's glorious round west end window:

What medieval mind invented this wonder? But like

other gothic structures it probably evolved bit by bit. 

Is the medieval Cathedral building period the zenith of Christianity, a Christian culture whose tide has since turned as Matthew Arnold's poem Dover Beach would have it?  Ironically the individualism of Berean self-criticism (See Acts 17:10ff) which the protestant revolution unleashed is, I propose, implicated as the main cause of the turning of the tide of the Sea of Faith. The individualistic self-analysis and self-criticism encouraged in the Bible easily turns to criticism of others and when it is supplemented by the doctrine of the power of the laity it follows that every voice is a good as everyone else's voice. So, given humanity's epistemological challenges the very natural outcome of protestant Bereanism is that self-aware critical analysis should ultimately be brought to bear on Christianity itself. The power put into the hands of the laity by the protestant reformation has in turn lead to a slow burner revolution which has ultimately entailed that a take-it-or-leave-it opportunity be applied to Christianity itself and in consequence many have left it. This outcome, ironically, seems to be the ultimate outworking of Protestantism. But at least it means that in the democratic West no one is badgering one about the state of one's faith, whether it be one of belief or unbelief. So perhaps this very freedom of faith is the ironic pinnacle of Christianity? But today this private working out of one's personal salvation is in danger from traditionalist authoritarians and autocrats residing in both the east and the west.

Visit to York: The End of History Experience. Part I

I wish to God he was right but with Godfathers like Xi, Putin,
Kim Jong-un & Trump at large not to mention those religious  
hegemonists Francis has had to think again! 

Francis Fukuyama popularized the phrase "The End of History" with the publication of his book "The End of History and the last man" in 1992.  With the end of the cold war and Western democratic values in the ascendency and their capitalist economies generating technology & wealth undreamt of since the beginning of history it might have seemed that we were now all going to live happily ever after in the democratic lap of luxury. Moreover, many smaller countries still under authoritarian yokes wanted to join the rich democratic club, naturally enough. Well, we now know what happened:  Russia and China became powerful dictatorships, religious fundamentalists of differing brands sought the universal hegemony of their oppressive ideas and in the West a recrudescent far-right promoted lies and conspiracy theories in order to reinstate the demagoguery of Godfather style Government and the conceptual world-view of the unwoke. Does this mean we are on the way back to the Sauline worlds of monarchs (1 Samuel 8: 7-18) vying for as much power as possible and magnifying their personal glory via the violent extension of their empires of power? Such are the slaves & dupes of games theory as they make and break alliances in the monarchical ebb and flow of political influence. Traditional history with its unstable games theory feedback systems is very much back with us. 

And yet in a recent visit to the historic city of York (with the wife) the phrase "The End of History" kept coming back to me. I had had a sheltered and comfortable life untroubled by the privations of having to scratch an existence and free from the war & strife stirred up by Godfather rule. I had the education, health, time and comfort to take stock of the world around me. This privileged position allowed me to evaluate in a detached sort of way, the human condition and all that happens under-the-sun.  In a few more years, like my parents, I'm likely die in my bed. and history for me personally ends in a whimper. How anti-climatic!

***

On the way up to York we visited the Palladian Cusworth Hall which overlooks Doncaster from its far-seeing hillside (see picture above).  The remnant of its aristocratic owners sold the hall to Doncaster city council about 70 years ago. The estate is now run as museum by the council with free entry. (But we made a donation). The council keep the hall in good condition, and it has become a specimen in a protective "resin block" ready for curious "end of history" visitors like ourselves with the time on our hands to be thoroughly nosey about the affairs of those who came before us.  

With the wind whistling through the crevices of the house, few other visitors about and the architectural vestiges of a past glory still evident, the house had an abandoned feel about it. It was no surprise when a steward told us that the Hall was haunted and he himself had heard the stories. I've never seen or felt anything that remotely classifies as a haunting. In fact, the wife and I have visited places with the scariest of ghostly reputations and never experienced anything spooky (most notably Bodmin Jail). I was three years working at the haunted Blickling hall and saw and felt absolutely nothing. 

The above picture is of Cusworth Hall's grand staircase, just inside the entrance. After the long driveway with the Hall sitting conspicuously at its end the staircase is the next item on the chorography of status, a chorography designed to impress the visitor. In halls larger than Cusworth I've seen grander staircases but given a hall's size architects would endeavor to make the staircase a statement of the owner's wealth by making it as impressive as possible. Compare the above picture with the main staircase of No 1 the Crescent, Bath:

Being a terraced house, the staircase at No 1 is not as grand as Cusworth's, but nevertheless it does what it can to impress the visitor.  It's worth comparing these staircases with the entrance hall of our own late Victorian terrace house, constructed for the bottom of the end of an aspiring lower middle class where similar ideas about aggrandizing entrances were employed:

With its small footprint in a crowded city street the hallway of our house is inconveniently and painfully narrow, but the Victorian architects tried to mitigate this limitation by increasing the height of the house and its main rooms thus enhancing the illusion of space; it is affected grandeur on a small scale. But to those whose houses had no hall it sent out subliminal signals of being on the next rung of the status ladder and an illusion of keeping up with the De Montegues with their aristocratic Norman ancestry.  

Back at Cusworth Hall we found the main reception room to be decorated with some elegant Georgian plaster work. This would be the room where guests were entertained with music and formal dancing. 

In one of the wings, we found the chapel: In my opinion they should have decorated the chapel with similar elegant Georgian plaster work: Instead, we get a poor imitation of Italian mannerist/baroque art, in an attempt to echo Micheal Angelo's Sistine chapel. I'm no art critic but somehow the figures in this depiction looked as though they were made of dough rather than flesh. They should have stuck with stucco, but then the artist was probably good enough to convey, at first look, a sense of sophistication, & opulence and perhaps even help the owners affirm their faith in God.

To finish let's have look at Osterley House which we visited in 2010. It is much bigger and grander than Cusworth Hall. With its ogee turrets it is a peculiar blend of Elizabethan and later Georgian modernization. But somehow the pedimented Collonade goes well with the turrets although I doubt classicists would have thought so. And just look at that grand reception room below making Cusworth's reception look rather pokey. 

I include this house because of the part it played in Sir Keneth Clark's Civilization series at the beginning of the episode "The Fallacies of Hope".  See the end of this post where I wrote the following: 

 ***

At the start of the 12th episode of his Civilisation series we find Sir Kenneth Clark in the clean rational and regular neoclassical interior of Osterley House in England. As he looks upon this epitome of rational control he says:

A finite reasonable world, symmetrical, consistent and ….enclosed. Well, symmetry is a human concept because with all our oddities we are more or less symmetrical and the balance of a mantelpiece by Adam or a phrase by Mozart reflects our satisfaction with two eyes, two arms, two legs and so forth. And “consistency”… again and again in this series I’ve used that word as a term of praise. But “enclosed”, that’s the trouble. An enclosed world becomes a prison of the spirit, one longs to get out, one longs to move. One realises that symmetry and consistency, whatever their merits are the enemies of movement……and what is that I hear, that note of urgency, of indignation, of spiritual hunger, yes it’s Beethoven, it’s the sound of European man reaching for something beyond his grasp. We must leave this trim finite room and go to confront the infinite. We’ve a long rough voyage ahead of us and I can’t say how it will end because it isn’t over yet. We are still the off spring of the Romantic Movement and still victims of the fallacies of hope.

The romantics of the late 18^th and 19^th centuries rebelled against the deconsecration of the cosmos through the symmetries and regularities of enlightenment thinking and yearned for the infinite. They attempted to return to a much more intuitive apprehension of the natural world. As Clark says the journey isn’t over yet and even today our romantic intuitions and aspirations continue to do battle with our reason. I would suggest that two words are missing from Clark’s last sentence….victims of the fallacies of hope…in man!  !  ….. I want to look at the question of why science has left us high and dry…..

***

According to Clarke, then, we are still very much in the middle of history and Francis Fukuyama has had to go back to the drawing board! In the meantime, in Part II, I'll continue to play out this end of history fantasy as we move on to York and back to times a thousand years or more before the snobbish, self-satisfied and Whiggish post-Newtonian Georgian upper-class who to us feel very familiar and so close to our own times.