Let Me Take You on a Journey…
This piece is a rough sequel to Let Me Tell You a Story…
Every journey tells a story
The other day I took a journey.
I drove from my home in Stoke-on-Trent for around four hours and two hundred miles to the cathedral city of Norwich.
It is a journey that I have made many times in the past. A journey through a landscape that gradually flattens and changes subtly as the miles progress. Architecture and agriculture evolve from post-industrial brick to rural flint and red tiles, dairy farms to vast fields of crops waiting for the supermarket.
I was going to a wedding. The wedding of an old friend. That is why I have made the journey so often in the past. Ever since he moved to Norwich decades earlier, I have traversed the tarmac several times annually. I need no satnav nor to look up toilet stops en route.
I begin in my hometown of Stoke-on-Trent. The word “stoke” is derived from the Saxon for “place” or, to be more precise, “holy place”. That holy place was the spot where the old Roman road crossed the infant River Trent. Today it is marked by the minster church of St. Peter-ad-Vincula, but that structure is a Victorian rebuild. Some of the stones from an earlier incarnation have been reassembled in the churchyard but why the site was originally deemed to be holy no one now knows. It is a story lost in time.
In my childhood, we would have followed the course of the original Roman road for some distance, but these days by-passes have been built. Some miles further on, speeding along the dual-carriageway that I remember being constructed as a very young child, we pass through the village of my youth. On the right we can see the Roman Catholic Church of St. Mary, the oldest Catholic place of worship in the county, built by the priest with his own bare hands the moment that Catholicism was legalised again in England. To the left, standing proudly on a hill is the Anglican Church of St. Margaret. Once upon a time, it too was Catholic, but five centuries ago, with much blood-letting in the village, all that changed. Originally it, like the minster in Stoke, was dedicated to St. Peter, but for reasons that no one understands, in the nineteenth century, St. Margaret of Antioch acquired it. It is the church of my childhood and my present-day. On Sundays I worship there and then drink tea in the bell-tower with the congregants. I was married there, and my son baptised there. My forebears are buried there and one day I too shall rest near its stones in peace.
We drive on, away from this brief pilgrimage into my history, past too the old Roman town of Uttoxeter and then over the River Dove from Staffordshire into Derbyshire. The spire of the Church of St. Cuthbert peeps up above the trees marking the village of Doveridge. I once had a friend who lived in the mews next-door to the church and when I stayed at his place I was awakened by the bells on a Sunday. In the churchyard is a wonderful ancient yew tree under which, legend tells us, Robin Hood wedded his Maid Marian.
Some miles on, high on the ridge to the left, is the Church of St. Werburgh at Hanbury, so dedicated because after that great female Saxon saint died at Trentham, the monks at the abbey she founded at Hanbury took her body and laid it to rest there after she expressed a wish in a dream to be buried there. And so she stayed in Hanbury until the Vikings appeared on the horizon and, fearing desecration of her remains, she was swiftly taken to Chester where, behind the Roman walls, they felt she would be safer. And so she was, her shrine becoming Chester Cathedral which still stands today.
Another abbey of St. Werburgh’s was Repton. That did not escape Viking attentions who burnt it to the ground following a terrible battle. Prior to this, it has been a real centre of activity. St. Diuma had established the See of Mercia there and then, later, St. Wystan, a Saxon prince who, when he fell in battle, had a shaft of light from heaven illuminating his corpse, was buried there. Perhaps in the same battle, but probably in another, was Guthlac, a young Saxon warrior who, horrified by what he experienced, turned from the world and became a monk at Repton. Today we would probably term it PTSD; back then different explanations were proffered.
And just beyond Repton, although we can’t see it, is the Anchor Church, a cave by the banks of the now wide Trent, where a hermit saint once lived. He was friends with St. Modwen who lived at Burton-upon-Trent and, one day, when visiting her to study the Scriptures together, he realised that he’d left his holy books back in the cave. Unperturbed, Modwen sent two of her young nuns to fetch them, but their boat overturned and sank. Sensing the disaster, Modwen stood up, prayed and the waters parted just as the Red Sea had once done for Moses. She then walked down the dry riverbed and righted the boat, saving the two frightened girls trapped beneath it.
One thing we can see is the silhouette of the Church of St. Mary and St. Hardulph at Breedon on the Hill. Once an Iron Age hillfort, the Saxons built a mixed monastery — both monks and nuns lived there — around a church, that was home to several saints, one of whom being Hardulph, as well as some of the finest Saxon carvings in the country.
We drive on, skirting the southern side of the city of Nottingham. The Robin Hood legends associated with this region require no introduction but I am also tempted to take a slight detour north to the ruins of Beauvale Priory, once the only Carthusian house in the region. One of the finest works of mediaeval mysticism, ‘The Cloud of Unknowing’, was written by a Carthusian monk in the 14th century. No one knows his name or where he lived, but through examining the text, scholars believe that he had an East Midlands accent and so that narrows it down to basically on monastery. Significantly, Beauvale was a centre for Christian esotericism anyway; it being a place of study for the mystic Richard Rolle.
Today, there are some picturesque ruins and a wonderful tearoom in the gatehouse with spectacular cakes.
Onwards we go, through towns and villages. Just after Grantham I am faced with a choice. I could loop southwards towards Peterborough. On that route I like to call in at Crowland, a fine little town with a three-way mediaveal bridge in the centre. Crowland Abbey is the parish church, situated on the site of the hermitage of St. Guthlac, the same monk that we encountered at Repton. Finding the monastic life too easy and not far enough removed from society for his liking, he went east into the marshes of the fens and there set up a hermitage on a lonely island where he lived a severely ascetic life, surviving on a cup of muddy water a day. During the daylight hours he received countless visitors impressed by his piety, including some kings, but at night he was alone and battled demons with the assistance of St. Bartholemew.
Nearby there was another hermit saint too, St. Pega. Their church is a pretty one, far humbler than the grand ruins at Crowland. That hermit was a she not a he and, what is more, Pega was Guthlac’s sister who had followed her brother out into exile in the isolated marshes.
Today though, I take the more northerly route, across the fens, skirting the Wash where once a royal treasure was drowned, towards the town of Kings Lynn. It’s a humble place these days, but during the mediaeval period it was one of the wealthiest settlements in England due to its relationship with the Hanseatic League. The main church is dedicated to St. Margaret and inside it is a monument to Kings Lynn’s most famous citizen who once worshipped there.
Margery Kempe is an intriguing figure. Born in Kings Lynn (then Bishops Lynn) around 1373, she married aged twenty and went on to have fourteen children. After the birth of her first child, she suffered an acute mental crisis which deepened her faith. She was known for weeping loudly in public because of her intense love for Christ and for going on numerous pilgrimages including Rome, Santiago and Jerusalem. Her book, dictated to a scribe as she could not write, is considered the first autobiography in English.
Past Kings Lynn the road takes us into East Anglia, a land of wonderful churches built with wool wealth during the Middle Ages. In East Dereham St. Withburga had a vision of the Virgin Mary in the 7th century and so founded a monastery there, upon the site of which now stands the Church of St. Nicholas whilst a few miles north at North Elham, one can explore the ruins of the Saxon cathedral there, once the seat of a bishop and the foremost church in the region.
We are now near to our destination, the city of Norwich itself, the most complete mediaeval city in England which dozens of preserved churches. The foremost is, of course, the magnificent cathedral, built of creamy stone with its soaring spire. Begun in 1096 it is the greatest church in East Anglia and one of the finest cathedrals in the country.
It has a saint too, but he is not often talked about these days. His name is William, and he was a young boy who was murdered in 114. Here’s the description in the Peterborough Chronicle (1122–54):
“In his time the Jews of Norwich bought a Christian child before Easter, and tortured him with all the same tortures with which our Lord was tortured, and on Long-Friday hanged him on a cross for love of our Lord, and afterwards buried him — imagined that it would be concealed, but our Lord showed that he was a holy martyr, and the monks took him, and buried him reverently in the minster, and through our Lord he performs wonderful and manifold miracles; and he is called St. William.”
No one knows who really murdered the unfortunate William, but the Jews were blamed and suffered an awful pogrom for it. William was but one of these child martyrs supposedly killed by Jews, a product of the antisemitism of the times and a reminder to us all of the dangers of unsubstantiated gossip and conspiracy theories.
But if Norwich’s canonised saint is seen as questionable these days, her non-canonised one is the opposite and it is outside her church that I park my car and finish my journey. The Church of St. Julian was sadly damaged by a German bomb in World War II, but it has been rebuilt and thousands of pilgrims visit annually. The reason is because of a female mystic who lived as an anchoress in a cell attached to the building. She is referred to as Julian of Norwich because of the church where she dwelt but her real name is unknown. In 1373, aged thirty and so seriously ill she thought she was on her deathbed, Julian received a series of visions or shewings of the Passion of Christ. She recovered from her illness and wrote two versions of her experiences which are called ‘Revelations of Divine Love’ and are seen as some of the greatest pieces of Christian mysticism as well as being the first books written in English by a woman. They are notable for their emphasis on the loving and forgiving side of God and so, I shall end this journey in the cell where she once lived and prayed with her words:
“‘And in this [sight], he showed a little thing the quantity of a hazelnut, lying in the palm of my hand as it seemed to me, and it was as round as any ball. I looked therein with the eye of my understanding, and thought: ‘What may this be?’ And it was answered generally thus: ‘It is all that is made.’ I marvelled how it might last, for it seemed to me it might suddenly have fallen into nought for its littleness. And I was answered in my understanding: ‘It lasteth and ever shall, because God loveth it. And so hath all things being by the love of God.’”
But what is the moral of my story?
All of which is well and good, but you may be asking yourself why it is that I am sharing this journey with you all and what has this got to do with Camino and spiritual journeying?
Well, I guess my thinking is as follows: Many people yearn to go on pilgrimage, to walk to Santiago just as Margery Kempe did around seven hundred years ago and as millions more have done before and since her. And those pilgrimages can be life-changing experiences. But what about after we have reached our goal, when we have returned home and have to readjust back to our mundane and oft-unfulfilling lives. That can be hard and most of us yearn to be on the path again, something which is not always possible due to distance, finance, work and family commitments and, alas, health. But all is not lost, indeed, as Julian of Norwich tells us, “All shall be well” for everything that has been made is loved and blessed by God.
The journey I describe is an eastwards one from my house. It goes from a place of no particular holy significance to a city with no important shrine, passing by places that don’t even register on most people’s pilgrimage maps. It could have been otherwise. I could have made a detour south to Bury St. Edmunds and the Shrine of St. Edmund, once seen as the patron saint of England, or north to Walsingham, England’s Nazareth, where the Virgin Mary once appeared to a local noblewoman and commanded her to build a replica of the holy house. That became the foremost shrine in England and one of the most important in Europe with so many pilgrims making their way towards it that the Milky Way was referred to as the Walsingham Way for its stars were as manifold as the pilgrims on the road to Walsingham. Even today it attracts thousands and has an established walking route leading to it.
But I eschewed these shrines because I was making a point. The Camino travels through a holy land, but so does any other path. I could have written a similar narrative heading west into Wales where the Celtic saints dwelt; south along the Trent Valley and then into the lush farmlands of the Midlands, once dotted with abbeys and saints; or north into the wild peaks where hermits like St. Bertram dwelt in nature.
“But your land is very ancient!” I hear you protest. “There are lots of stories to tell there, but what if you live in the Americas or Australia? How are we to contact with our spiritual heritage?” Well, it is harder, that I do grant, but not impossible. My narrative stops in the Middle Ages, but God’s working with His people does not. I have not explored stories associated with the Reformation, the Civil War, the Victorian Evangelical explosion, or more contemporary Christian tales, let alone those from other faith traditions in our land.
The fact is that stories matter. They are how we perceive and understand the world and they are continually being written. Every church or chapel, temple, synagogue, or mosque has a tale to tell, even if it is new, of how the Lord has worked wonders in someone’s life. And so, when you are feeling distant and downhearted, yearning for the gravel path, the company of peregrinos and a shrine to kneel at, lament no more. Instead, get searching and talking.
Every stranger on every street is a fellow pilgrim.
Every village or town has a library of stories to tell.
And every tree, bench, rock, or room can be your shrine.
Do not plan your Camino to Santiago for tomorrow.
Live the one you are already walking today.
For if you do, as Julian who never even left her cell once might have told the great pilgrim of an earlier age, Margery Kempe when they met in 1413,
“All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”
Written 16–17/04/2024, Smallthorne, UK
Copyright © 2024, Matthew E. Pointon