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CHAPTER 8: BRISTOL, PETERBOROUGH & ELY SO TAKE A PICTURE
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Nowhere symbolises the passing of time for me more than Bristol. I don't mean the historic docks with their access along the River Avon to the Severn estuary that made the city rich from its involvement in trade, exploration, piracy and slavery. My eight visits chart a passage of time from my first encounter with the city as a young man leaving childhood behind to my most recent visit with Sue, H and A as retired couples enjoying a slower paced day out. I was nineteen when I came here with my parents and Sue who was then my girlfriend of two years. We went to the zoo and we stood on the Clifton Suspension Bridge where I experienced a feeling of great helplessness as my glasses slipped off and descended into the muddy shore below. We went on to tour Devon and Cornwall in my parents' caravan, the highlight being the day Sue and I went off on our own, found a cafe by a beach somewhere and stuffed ourselves silly with a Cornish cream tea, only to return to the caravan, our stomachs groaning, to discover my mother had laid on a scrumptious Cornish cream tea. It was the start of me appearing in photographs again after seemingly disappearing from history for most of my teenage years. In this age of digital photography, where people are snapping away at the most insignificant occasions, that back in the day, you had a limited number of pictures you could take on your roll of film which you then had to take to a chemist to have processed. In researching my family tree, I have two photographs of my great grandparents and probably about thirty of my grandparents. There are a number of photos that chart my life from birth to age four, at which point my sister arrived on the scene and got her own 'baby book' meaning I keep appearing until the age of eight at which point I disappear from view. I have one school photo aged ten, another aged fourteen, two pictures of me skimming stones on a Scottish lock at fifteen and a highly embarrassing photo of me on our first foreign holiday to Tunisia wearing the most unflattering dirty brown jacket that used to belong to my uncle, and that's it until Bristol, Devon and Cornwall. There is one photo that shows me making sand castles, marking the last feasible time I could engage in such activity until my own children arrived. I am now enjoying working alongside my grandchildren in constructing scale models of famous castles.Â
I recently spent some time going through all our photo albums to capture the pictures digitally. I now have a collection on disc beginning with the Bristol holiday pictures, through our wedding, holidays, new homes and children to our 2006 trip to Las Vegas and California where we finally entered the digital age. The original albums are stored safely away in the loft along with little else following Sue's executive order that we needed to de-clutter. The loft was the first area to be attacked. Out went the wedding presents that we'd not used for 40 years, out went the rolls of wallpaper and carpet that might have come in useful. Off to the charity shops went the model soldier collection I was looking after for a friend whom I'd lost contact with twenty years earlier, and into the bin went a sadly eaten card model of the old London Bridge. After the loft came the bookcases. I had to agree that most of the books I had collected over the years were ones I would never read again. I managed to hang onto my tomes on the history of London and books that mapped the history of everything from railways to maps themselves. However, I was on trickier ground trying to justify hanging on to the many reference books I'd amassed because now if I needed to know a specific fact, I'd just google it. I held out longest for sentimental reasons to Animals Without Backbones, a two paperback classic that I'd last opened when taking my A level zoology exam aged 18. After the books had been heavily reduced it was the turn of the CDs and DVDs and also some old video cassettes that long ago became white elephants when we got rid of the video player they ran on. Unlike many of my contemporaries, I never had much of a record collection. Due to a love of classical music and a fairly sheltered childhood, I didn't buy or even really listen to pop music. I was sixteen when I bought my first LP in this genre, Rick Wakeman's Journey to the Centre of the Earth. My second purchase was by a Japanese drummer called Stomu Yamashta. I was hardly your typical teenage music buyer.Â
So that was my first visit to Bristol as a shy nineteen year old, beginning to find his feet in the world, in love, at university, putting away those childish things like making sand castles, oh and damming streams - that was another little pleasure I had to forgo as a proper adult. The most recent visit saw us arrive by train at Brunel's wonderful Temple Meads station, saunter into town to find a little cafe by the docks for a coffee whilst we watched the world go by. We then visited the M Shed museum on the harbour side where A and I visited each floor, finding out interesting information about the city's history whilst the ladies stood leaning on a balcony on the top floor the whole time, watching a group of men unfold a sail and then attach it to the Matthew, a reconstruction of the famous ship that the Italian explorer John Cabot used on his voyage of 1497 from Bristol to Newfoundland, one of the first sighting of America (along with Columbus, the Vikings and most likely the Chinese). Then it was lunch on the outside balcony of a restaurant overlooking the docks where we ate, drank and watched the world go by. This was followed by an exploration of Brunel's SS Great Britain, the wrought iron passenger liner that was the biggest ship in the world when it was launched in 1843. I hasten to add that the exploration was only carried out by A and me, the ladies choosing to take another coffee and spend a fascinating hour watching a ferryman ferry passengers from one side of the river to the other and then back again. Once A and I had finished exploring we joined them and also watched the ferrying: it was indeed a stunning spectacle. A short walk into the city centre followed and another coffee stop where we drank and ate and watched the world go by. Are you spotting a pattern here? Finally we climbed up to the Cabot Tower which A and I ascended whilst the ladies sat on a bench and watched... Â well you get the idea. After such a busy frantic day, we dragged ourselves back to the station, quite exhausted from all our endeavours.Â
The other six visits to Bristol included a trip to see my sister who'd started work there, three Leicester City defeats, two a Bristol City with A and one at Bristol Rovers on my own, a FA Cup game which had taken me ages to get to due to a heavy blanket of snow falling the night before, and two attempts to go around the cathedral. The first attempt in November 1984 was another of our Christmas Shopping Days. We'd managed to pass the Cheltenham junction on the M5 without turning off - I think I must have been driving. We'd caught the incredibly short Park and Ride service and alighted in the city centre where we did actually do a bit of shopping. Then we climbed up the hill to the cathedral which sits overlooking the docks, the green expanse of College Green on its north side. We began noticing a number of younger people wearing black gowns as we neared the cathedral and on reaching College Green we were faced with many more of them, some wearing mortar boards, most surrounded by family members clothed in their best outfits. It was graduation day for the University of the West of England. It was at this point that A started to dither. "We won't be able to go in the cathedral," he said, beginning to fall back as I strode on to the west gate. "Michael, they'll either be a ceremony going on or they'll be getting ready for the next one," he continued as I purposefully ignored him. He was correct, of course. Graduates were beginning to round up their family guests and from our position by the west door we could see a number of people were already in place for the next session of degree awards. I'm not the bravest of souls but there was something it A's steadfast refusal to enter the cathedral that flicked a 'what the he'll' switch inside my brain. It was a similar situation on our Winchester day when I led him directly through the middle of an angry baying mob of Portsmouth supporters because he'd told me not to go that way. I set off confidently into the cathedral whilst he crept in at the back and stood timidly in the shadows lest anyone discover the duplicitous nature of his presence there. It was no good. No matter how much I tried to enjoy the many delights to be found in the cathedral, I knew we'd be coming back because, after a completing my tour, I arrived back at the west door to find A studiously examining the guidebooks having not ventured more than three yards inside. We called it a day and set off home. We didn't call in at Weston-super-Mare, just a few miles south of the city, so I must have been driving, but I wasn't happy. As it was, we returned there the following year on yet another Telegraph weekend.
The hotel was located in a suburban area to the west of the city and looked very much like the Fawlty Towers hotel. Fortunately the manager bore no similarity to the John Cleese character and we were soon unpacking in our rooms which were upstairs in an annex. What we didn't realise was that downstairs area was a function room and that first night; oh boy did they have a function. I think we slept with pillows over our heads to try to cut out the noise but there was nothing we could do about the vibrating bass that seemed to shake the very foundations of the building. The next day we tried for a second time to look round Bristol Cathedral and this time there were no gowns, mortarboards or proud family members anywhere. The cathedral, like many others, started life as the abbey church of a monastery. It was founded between 1140 and 1144 by Robert FitzHarding, a local landowner, merchant  and broker of deals, described by the author Elizabeth Chadwick as a "minor character, major player". Mainly of Anglo Saxon descent (his grandfather was an exotically named English nobleman from Somerset called Eadnoth the Staller) with some Norman genes thrown in, Robert supported the Empress Matilda during her struggles with King Stephen, providing loans and possibly ships. Matilda's grateful son, Henry II, granted Robert various additional lands including those belonging to the somewhat less supportive Robert de Berkeley. Robert was allowed to build his own castle, Berkeley Castle - the one where Edward II died, but the King then showed regret for the way he'd treated Robert de Berkeley and forced the arranged marriage of the son and daughter of Robert FitzHarding to the daughter and son of the other Robert. This was the start of a feudal barony that continued unbroken through the male line to the present day, a unique occurrence within the British aristocracy. Robert FitzHarding lived out his final days in the abbey and although much of it was later rebuilt, the gatehouse and chapter house still date from this time, the later being an excellent example of the Norman style with arches decorated with the popular motifs of the period such as floral and geometric designs. The ceiling has what is known as lierne ribbing, a purely decorative feature where the ribs interlink with each other rather than cascade out from a central point.Â
When Henry VIII began the Dissolution of the Monasteries, the nave of the abbey church was halfway through a major rebuild. Although the monastery was dissolved in 1539, three years later the church became one of Henry VIII's 'New Foundation' cathedrals' no doubt through some heavy lobbying from the merchants and ship owners of what was the second busiest port in the country after London. The rebuilding had been halted and for the next three hundred years the cathedral went about business as usual within a fairly truncated building. It wasn't until 1868 that the Victorian church architect G. E. Street was called into to complete the nave, something he accomplished in a style our guides informed us was Gothic Revival. Our information sheets also encouraged us to look up at the vaulted ceilings at the eastern end. These were all at the same height in what is known as hall-church style. Architectural historian, Nikolaus Pevsner (remember him?) described it as, 'superior to anything else built in England and indeed in Europe at the same time'. A looked considerably less stressed than he did on the occasion of our previous visit but the following morning we found him in a bit of a dither again. It was time to settle our bill which involved handing over the piece of paper with the Telegraph tokens stuck on in order to receive our discount. A had forgotten to do the sticking on bit and when we arrived packed and ready to go at their room, we found him was desperately trying to find some way of attaching the ten or so tokens to the paper. His solution, which I have to say worked long enough for us to pay the bill, load up the car and head off for the day: toothpaste!
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Whilst we had been successful in tying in cathedral visits during weekends away, holiday journeys and Christmas shopping days, occasionally we would set off for a day out with cathedrals as our only goal. So it was that we travelled west in April 1999 to Peterborough and Ely. I was reasonably familiar with Peterborough as my sister lived there for many years so A and I found our way to the cathedral fairly easily. We entered the enclosed cathedral precincts through the Norman Gate. The wall at the top of the gate bore a passing resemblance to a castle with its crenellations. Just like modern day planning permission, a 'license to crenellate' was needed from the monarch before you could start fortifying your manor house, castle or abbey. Peterborough's license was granted in 1308. The gateway boasted the oldest set of working gates in the country and led us to a view of the western wall of the cathedral. For much of its history, it mirrors Bristol. Both were originally monasteries that were closed down by Henry VIII before he decided to designate them new cathedrals. After a devastating fire in 1116 that destroyed the original church, work began on the present structure. It would take a further 80 years before it was finally completed and consecrated. Much of that building remains, including the rare painted wooden ceiling above the nave, one of only four wooden ceilings of this period in Europe apparently.
In St Oswald's Chapel, we found a curious stone tower a bit like a sentry box. This was the watch tower for the monks who guarded the relics of St Oswald. On our visit to Durham, we had learnt how the body of St Cuthbert had been brought from Lindisfarne by monks who finally stopped lugging it about in Durham and built a church where the cathedral now stands. What we didn't realise was that the coffin containing not only Cuthbert's bones but an additional head. This belonged to St Oswald, a king of Northumbria who did much to develop Christianity in the north of England. It was Oswald who brought St Aiden and his Irish monks over from the Scottish island of Iona and established him at Lindisfarne, within sight of his castle at Bamburgh. When he wasn't waging war against other English kingdoms, he would often accompany St Aiden on his preaching missions, translating for him. He was known for his generosity and once, at a feast in the banqueting hall at Bamburgh during a particularly severe winter, he invited a group of poor beggars in and handed them a silver platter laden with food. St Aiden, on seeing this, expressed the desire that Oswald's arm should never perish. When Oswald somewhat inevitably died in battle, fighting King Penda of Mercia, his body was dismembered and stuck on stakes. After a while, his remains were gathered up and returned to Bamburgh. His arm remained uncorrupted and was placed in a shrine in St Peter's chapel in Bamburgh Castle, his head was buried on Lindisfarne until it was popped in with St Cuthbert's remains and taken to Durham. St Cuthbert often appears in sculptures, paintings and stained glass holding the head of Oswald who soon became a saint after a string of miracles occurred in the vicinity of his remains. Some of his bones were taken to the Priory of St Oswald in Gloucester and when the priory declined, its lands were used to build the church that eventually became Gloucester Cathedral.
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His association with Peterborough begins with a theft. In medieval times, the relics of saints were big business. Pilgrims would travel incredibly long distances to pray at shrines for forgiveness and healing, and they would offer up alms, gifts of money. It was such a lucrative enterprise that, either by accident or design, for any particular Saint, the amount of bones being venerated usually far exceeded the number he or she had when still alive. The towns of Zug and Schaffhausen in Switzerland, Childes in Germany, Echternack in Luxembourg and the city of Utrecht in Holland as well as Durham Cathedral miraculously all lay claim to having St Oswald's head. Some monks at Peterborough decided that a way to please the Abbot might be to travel up to Bamburgh and steal the arm. It was placed in a shrine in the chapel with the watch tower where it remained until the Reformation when both the arm and the silver casket that held it disappeared. The watch tower was constructed so that it would only hold one standing monk, the fear being that if the monk sat down, he may well fall asleep as they mounted a 24 hour guard, an arrangement that obviously went sadly wrong when the relics went missing.
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After visiting the chapel, we went in search of some queens. At one time, there were two queens buried here, now there is only one - Catherine of Aragon. She was the youngest surviving daughter of Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, whose marriage was the cornerstone for the unification of Spain. She was betrothed at a young age to Prince Arthur, the eldest son of Henry VII and in November 1501 they married in the old St Paul's Cathedral. Immediately after the wedding, Arthur, accompanied by his young bride,maws sent to Ludlow on the Welsh border where, in his role as Prince of Wales, he took charge of the Council of Wales and the Marches. A few months later, both of them became ill and in the April Arthur died. Henry VII now had to decide what to do with Catherine. He contemplated marrying her himself but the logistics became too complicated. With the death of her mother, Catherine lost a large part of her inheritance and her father's tardiness in paying the full promised dowry meant that for a while she was held a virtual prisoner in London. During this time she took on the role of Spanish ambassador, the first female ambassador in European history. Eventually, having testified that her marriage to Arthur had never been consummated, she was granted dispensation to marry Arthur's brother, the heir to the throne and future King Henry VIII. Catherine was pregnant seven times but only one survived, their daughter Mary. Her marriage to Henry was by far the longest of the king's six, but once she was no longer able to bear children, the fates conspired against her. Henry had already fallen for the young Anne Boleyn and the absence of a son got him thinking that perhaps the pope's decision to allow him to marry his brother's wife was the wrong one and the God was punishing him. His inability to get a divorce from the pope led to the split with Catholicism and decades of religious turmoil. In 1533, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, declared the marriage illegal and Catherine was banished from court. Granted only the title of Dowager Princess of Wales in recognition of her marriage to Prince Arthur she lived most of her remaining life at Kimbolton Castle, about 25 miles south of Peterborough where she confined herself to one room, lived a simple life and devoted herself to God. To her dying day, she claimed to be the legitimate queen. Henry forbade her to see or even communicate with their daughter Mary and neither he or Mary attended her funeral in Peterborough Cathedral.
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51 years later, another queen was laid to rest in the cathedral. Mary Queen of Scots was the daughter of Catherine's nephew, James V, King of Scotland. She led a particularly tumultuous life which included becoming Queen of Scotland when she was six days old and a short marriage to the teenage Dauphin. When he died, two years after becoming King of France, Mary returned to Scotland and married Lord Darnley. Darnley became jealous of Mary's secretary and favourite David Riccio and he and asome friends murdered Riccio in front of the now pregnant Mary. Darnley too came to a sticky end when the house he staying in blew up one day. Closer examination of his body, blown into a nearby garden, revealed that he had been strangled. The new love of Mary's life, Earl of Bothwell, was accused and found not guilty of the murder. Their subsequent marriage upset the Protestant nobles who imprisoned Mary at Leven Castle. Bothwell fled the country and Mary never saw him again. Forced to abdicate, she mounted an unsuccessful attempt at regaining control before fleeing to England. Regarded by some English Catholics as the rightful monarch, her cousin Elizabeth I had her confined in several castles over the next eighteen and a half years. Eventually she was implicated in a plot to remove Elizabeth and was executed at Fotheringhay Castle, north of Peterborough in 1587. She had wanted to be buried in France but Elizabeth denied her this request and so her body was sent to Peterborough. In 1612, Mary's son, now both King James VI of Scotland and King James I of England had her reinterred in Westminster Abbey.
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Whilst they failed in that task, the monks of Peterborough did succeed in providing future generations with information about a particularly chaotic period in English history, the Anarchy. Towards the end of Alfred the Great's reign in the 9th century, monks, most probably from the English kingdom of Wessex, began assembling a history of Britain. They drew upon existing sources such as the writings of Bede and genealogies of Saxon and Scottish kings, to create their history which they then continued, recording the events of their own time. Copies were created and distributed to monasteries across the land where the monks there would continue the narrative, providing some local colour to the on-going story of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. A number of these chronicles have survived including the one compiled by the monks of Peterborough which is now kept at the Bodleian Library in Oxford. A fire in August 1116 destroyed the monastery's library where their chronicle would have been kept, so the monks borrowed one from one or more other monasteries and copied it out. This chronicle is consistent with others until 1122 when the story becomes unique. The Peterborough chronicle not only continues the history of Norman England long after all the other surviving copies, it also focuses on the extreme hardships endured by the poor, especially during the Anarchy.
It notes that King Stephen, "he milde man was and softe and god...", in other words a weak King at a time when monarchs were expected to rule with strength in order to keep the barons in check. The barons do not come out of the story very well being described as doubly sinful for both starving the poor and extracting money to build castles and then for punishing the destitute when they are forced to steal in order to survive. It also describes in gruesome detail some of the torture inflicted by those in power such as, "One they hung by his feet and filled his lungs with smoke. One was hung up by the thumbs and another by the head and had coats of mail hung on his feet. One they put a knotted cord about his head and twisted it so that it went into the brains ..." The Peterborough authors also diverge from those of other chronicles in expressing political opinions such as criticism of those bishops who supported Stephen's rival to the throne, the Empress Matilda. In addition to being a vital source for historians, it is treasured by linguists as the language used by the authors undergoes a change from late Old English to early Middle English.
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We returned to our car to head off for the second cathedral of the day, Ely. The next time we'd return to Peterborough together would be in March 2009 for a football match during Leicester City's only season in the third tier of English football. The despair of being relegated on the last day of the previous season had been replaced by the heady optimism of a new season, winning a lot of games and a whole new lot of grounds for us to visit and add to my collection. Well, that was the theory but as I only managed to get to a couple of away games a season, the wealth of new venues was left largely unvisited. We'd been to Walsall's stadium over the winter on a bitterly cold night with snow on the ground. Leicester won convincingly that evening and we returned to Andy's car in high spirits, stopping to buy some food on the way back as we'd not eaten. It was then that Andy decided he didn't want the smell of fish and chips in his car and suggested we eat them outside in sub-zero temperatures. I was not amused and after kicking up quite a fuss, he caved in and we were allowed to get inside to eat. I was rather pleased that the journey back home was fairly quick surrounded as we were by the stench of fried fish. My other away game was at Birmingham City where Leicester broke their club record of successive away wins. That season they won more games away from home than at the King Power Stadium, losing just three. One of those was against Peterborough! I do believe that Andy has kept every programme he has bought since he began attending regularly again. He keeps them in neat little ring binders and occasionally, as a treat, he'll bring one of these binders out to show me - I get so excited. I used to buy programmes until I started giving Andy lifts to the football. As a way of saying thank you for transporting him all of 400 metres, he would buy an extra magazine and present it to me. This tradition ceased when he detected that my reaction to his proffered gift was not as effusive as he expected it to be. After that I didn't bother buying programmes. The ones I had went up in the loft until the great de-cluttering project. I gave Andy a few away programmes that he hadn't got, kept a few for sentimental reasons and offered the rest for sale. On discovering that nobody wanted to buy them, they were consigned to the bin. It wasn't only programmes that I had difficulty accepting from Andy. He would go to sales of discontinued books at the central library in Leicester and if he found something that I might be interested in, he would buy it for me. The problem was that often there was a good reason why the book had been discontinued: it wasn't a very appetizing read. Consequently, when he thrust the tome into my hands, I had considerable difficulty generating any enthusiasm at all. This led him to stomp about a bit telling me how ungrateful I was and he didn't know why he bothered. I didn't either and eventually he didn't. Occasionally he will and when he does I now go so over the top with my undying thanks that he thinks I am being sarcastic, as if.
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Our journey to Ely took us across the fens, where for as far as we could see there was very little but very flat agricultural land. Every so often we'd pass farms or through little villages but most of the time it was very level, not a hill to be found anywhere. The fenns have been called  Holy Land of England because of the close proximity of abbeys that are now cathedrals or churches including Peterborough, Crowland, Thorney just outside Peterborough, Ely and Ramsey where we stopped off, it being on our route. I had visited the ruined abbey of Crowland many years before as it is where the Crowland or Croyland Chronicle was written, a valuable source of information about the reign of Richard III. Whilst the abbey appeared much like other ruins I had visited, the village of Crowland did contain a fascinating 14th century triangular bridge, its  three arches built to cross the River Welland and one of its contributaries. Bizarrely, the river had been diverted so the bridge stands in isolation.
Ramsey's abbot was once the third most important abbot in the country after those of Glastonbury and St Albans, sitting in Parliament as a mitred abbot, the mitre being the pointy bishop's hat. Most of the abbey remains were now in the grounds of a school so all we could do was stand at the gate and peer in. The gatehouse is owned by the National Trust but back then, neither of us were members. Andy still isn't but a few years ago Sue and I joined and now, whenever we explore a new part of the country, we make a point of seeking out any National Trust properties there. Not only are they fascinating places to visit but it means I can enter them on my Google Maps recorded collection of National Trust properties. Realising we were not going to get to see much more of the abbey, we set off once again through the flatlands of Cambridgeshire and Norfolk. This whole area is so flat (I'm not sure if I mentioned this before) that it would flood regularly before the construction of massive ditches than run in straight lines for mile after mile. It was in one of these ditches that my all time favourite conspiracy theorists, the Flat Earth Society, conducted one of their experiments. Near the village of Welney is a six mile stretch of the Old Bedford River that is completely straight. In 1838, an English inventor and writer Samuel Birley Rowbotham was one of a number of people who conducted experiments on the curvature of the earth. He published a book called 'Zetetic Astronomy: Earth Not a Globe' in which he argued that his findings indicated the earth was flat, centred around the north pole with a wall of ice on its perimeter and the sun moon and stars a few hundred miles above. His first experiment happened when he waded into the water and watched a boat with a mast sail away into the distance. At six miles, through a telescope the mast was still visible thus, for Samuel and his followers proving the earth was flat. What they hadn't taken into consideration is a physical phenomenon called atmospheric refraction where the atmosphere causes light to bend. Subsequent experiments placing poles at both ends and one in the middle disproved his theories because, viewing the top of the far pole from a telescope at the top of the near pole should have resulted in the middle pole top being in line if he was correct. In reality, the top of the middle pole was considerably higher, showing the bump caused by the earth's curvature. After his death a Universal Zetetic Society was formed and although its popularity faded in 1956 it was revived as the Flat Earth Society.Â
As we neared our next destination, we began to get glimpses of the cathedral, rising up from the surrounding fens like a beacon, guiding us in. It can be seen from many miles away due to four factors: it's very tall; the buildings surrounding it aren't; the fenland countryside is interminably flat (I may have mentioned this before); and it is built on slightly higher ground. Up until the 17th century, the Isle of Ely was an island, the largest in the fens. Then they went and drained the surrounding land, a measure not universally popular which prompted several acts of vandalism towards the dykes and drainage equipment. Whilst there are alternative suggestions for the derivation of the name Ely, they both relate to eels. There were other fish living in the fenland waters but eels were the most plentiful. The abbey of Ramsey had an arrangement to supply Peterborough with 400 eels a year in return for access to their quarries. We arrived in the city and parked not far from the cathedral. The roads still follow the medieval street pattern in what was at the time the third smallest city in England (in the 2011 census, it had dropped to fifth). For centuries it was a self governing area under the rule of the bishop, a county Palestine like Durham. It lost that status in the 16th century and existed as an administrative county in its own right in the years from 1889 to 1965. Although long considered a city because of its cathedral, it only formally became one in 1974 by Royal Charter. Notable residents include Oliver Cromwell who was appointed Governor of Ely in 1643. Already an experienced and prominent member of Parliament, this was at the early stages of his military career during the English Civil War.Â
I'd not been to Ely before but I did remember a figure from my history classes who used it as a base to mount guerrilla action against the Normans after the conquest - Hereward the Wake. By all accounts the young Hereward, Saxon nobleman, was a trifle hot-headed. after an argument with his father, he was exiled abroad. He returned after the Norman invasion to find his home requisitioned by the Normans and his father and brother killed by them. In revenge,me is said to have killed fourteen Normans and placed their heads on spikes. Realising this may upset the Norman authorities he thought it prudent to exile himself, waiting until all the fuss had died down to return once more. In 1070, he led a rebellion against the Normans, using the Isle of Ely as his base. He and his followers ransacked Peterborough Abbey where a Norman had replaced the Saxon abbot. William I decided to  launch an attack on the island but his first three attempts to cross the marshes onto the island ended in failure. On the first attack, his men were too heavy for the causeway they'd built and it collapsed into the water, drowning many of the soldiers. According to the legends surrounding him, Hereward foiled the third attempt by hiding amongst the reeds with his me, watching William's army pass by on another causeway, complete with a witch casting spells on the Saxon rebels. Once the Normans were in the middle of the reeds, Hereward set fire to the reeds. Finally, the Normans managed to bribe Ely's abbot into showing them a safer crossing to the island and with that knowledge, they retook the island and ended the resistance.
For such a small settlement, Ely has a disproportionately large place of worship. Maybe it's isolated position enhances the sense of awe it inspires. One of the first stops once we were inside the cathedral was to stand under the lantern tower. We'd ben spotting this distinct feature for many miles of our journey. Now we could admire it from the inside. The present building dates from the 11th century, become nag a cathedral in 1109. Constructed on the site of a monastery founded by St Etheldrea in 673, the cathedral originally had a fairly conventional central tower but this collapsed in 1322, as towers were want to do from time to time. Its replacement was the octagonal tower we stood beneath, topped with a lantern, the name meaning in this sense something that lets light in. An eight sided shape was symbolic, representing the eighth day, a time that is beyond our earthly seven days. The stone tower, considerably wider than the original, draws your eyes upwards, past glorious stained glass windows to the sweeping arches, curving inwards. And then there's a blast of light from the lantern, constructed from wood to lessen the weight on the foundations and covered on the exterior with sheets of lead. Below the clear windows are a series of decorated panels displaying musical angels: above is a magnificent timber fan vaulted ceiling. Apparently the panels can be opened so that real life musical choristers can sing from these exalted positions.Â
As far as comparisons with other cathedrals, Ely is a nearly building. It's original monastery was the second richest in the country at one time, it's surrounding city the third smallest and, as we wander down the 164 metre long nave, our guide sheet informs us that it is the fourth longest in the country. The word 'Nave' comes from the Latin 'navis' meaning a ship, this being the main body of a church, the vessel in which the congregation can make their journey to God. By now, we knew that a rich foundation meant only one thing: it had been a site of pilgrimage and we were correct. A plaque on the floor indicated the location of St Etheldreda's shrine. She was the daughter of one of the East Anglian kings and in both her marriages she had remained a virgin. When her second husband, Egfrith, King of Northumbria, decided he'd like to change that, she refused and left court to become a nun. When she died, they found a tumour on her neck which they ascribed to a punishment from God for her vanity in wearing necklaces when she was younger. Seventeen years later, her body was found to be uncorrupted and the tumour miraculously healed. Somewhat inevitably, this resulted in her shrine becoming a place of pilgrimage and, equally inevitably' the shrine was destroyed at the Reformation. We retraced our steps to the entrance. There under the West Tower is a labyrinth set in the floor. Unlike a maze which has dead ends, a labyrinth is a continuous route, ending up at the centre. They were installed in many churches and cathedrals, this one dating from the 19th century. The idea behind them is that the journey you make on the labyrinth is like the journey of life; full of twists and turns. Eventually you reach the centre where you will find God. The total distance walked here was the same as the height of the ceiling above, a nice touch.
CJ8: Text
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