NORWICH STORIES by Penny Dolan

As I walked round Norwich, three stories were in my head, all met through historical fiction, and all involving what was once seen as the second city of England.

Norwich stands a safe distance inland, on the banks of the Wensum with Yarmouth offering travel to London and across to the coast and estuaries of Northern Europe and beyond. Norfolk, when travel by land was hard and dangerous, had access to trade and markets, to exports and imports. The city was open, for better or otherwise, to wider cultural influences, knowledge and forces, and the prosperity eventually brought by the monastic wool trade.

Two structures dominate the city. One is religious: the mighty Norwich cathedral, with its tall, peregrine-housing spire and beautiful cathedral close. The other is the keep of Norwich Castle, high on the mound raised when the Conqueror took over the city, a symbol of might and right.

Ah, that cathedral, with its wide close and peaceful grounds!

However, my first historical character, although her story is ‘spiritual’, does not seem part of that great cathedral, though she would have heard its bell and those of Norwich’s many other churches.

Julian of Norwich was a 14th century anchorite, and the author of the first book written in English by a woman. After living through years of plague, bereavement and unrest, Dame Julian chose to be ‘entombed’ within a single sealed room, to live her life as if she was symbolically dead to the world, spending her time in prayers and devotion to Christ’s Passion. 

However, her solitude was not constant: people would seek out the small window to her cell, asking for advice, comfort and her prayers. ‘Revelations of Divine Love’ are Julian’s collected thoughts and meditations on the sixteen intense religious visions or ‘Shewings’ she had experienced earlier in her life. 

At that time, the act of writing, whether as a woman or in English rather than Latin, could have led to her persecution and death. Fortunately, her words were valued and preserved on scraps and smuggled fragments, and gathered together into a single volume later. For twenty three years, she lived alone in her cell with the help of a servant and, traditionally, a cat. Maybe the most loved of her sayings, and most used as a mantra, are these: 

‘All shall be well, and all shall be well 

and all manner of thing shall be well.’

Two recent novels, both quite original in style, relate to Julian’s life.

The first, ‘I Julian: The Fictional Biography of Julian of Norwich’ is by Claire Gilbert, Director of Westminster Abbey Institute.

This novel reads as a passionate reimagining of the life of the anchoress, written at a time when Claire Gilbert was suffering with cancer herself. Julian, on these pages, tries to find freedom in her chosen life, bricked up behind a wall, with only a squint to follow the mass in one direction and a a small window for her maid in the other. All the way through, the reader is reminded of the physical difficulties of that life and of the vulnerability that comes from being fixed in one spot.

At one point, her kindly, familiar priest dies quietly while resting during mass and is buried the next day. Immediately, when Julian is still in shock, ‘Robert Grylle becomes priest and stays for a long time and he could not be more different. Precise, vigilant, correct, cold and later dangerous.’ Later in the novel, an understanding confessor is suddenly replaced by a callow misogynistic youth, full of his own power as a cleric and keen to cause her pain.

This Julian needs the support of others, found in her relationship with the Abbess, of her maid Alice, of other women, by God (of course) and another too:
‘Sarah brings me Gyb, A sturdy black and white stray cat that has been pawing at my door for a week, she says. I concede he can stay for it is suggested in the Guide for Anchoresses, and we may have mice.’

Only later in the pages, after confessing to her ‘Shewings’, does Julian find release and freedom and that is through the very act of writing and remembering her Visions. Gilbert’s ‘I Julian’ reads like a thoughtful journey written from the heart.

In ‘Of The Great Pains, Have Mercy on my Little Pain’ by Victoria Mackenzie, the character of Dame Julian is seen through another’s eyes and intentions. This is a very different voice, unusually and not always comfortably told, which all adds - dare I say - to almost the fun within this account of a larger than life character. How would I behave if I met this woman? I wondered.

 

The main character in this short novel is that of Marjorie Kemp, a restless, garrulous woman from the nearby port of Kings Lynn. Burning with religious zeal, Marjorie feels continually driven to speak of her visions, at home, with neighbours and in the public street, to her family’s shame and annoyance, as well as the concern of the local clergy. 

Devoted to God, she expresses her faith by wearing a hair shirt, avoiding sex with her husband, and by suffering the mocking and ill treatment of neighbours. Now, perhaps, Marjorie would be given medication to calm and quieten her down. Eventually, in 1433, after years of seeking answers and of pilgrimages to Walsingham, Rome and the Holy Land, boisterous Marjorie sets off one last journey: to the nearby city of Norwich.

Desperate for help, she visits Dame Julian in her cell and finds a sense of kinship, understanding and an acceptance of her visions. and the freedom in using her voice and composing the first English autobiography written by a woman.

As an aside, and maybe a long shot, if any copies of this anthology are still obtainable. I must also suggest ‘All Shall Be Well’ a short story about Julian of Norwich written by Katherine Langrish, appeared in Daughters of Time, an anthology from The History Girls, collected by Mary Hoffman, and published in 2014.

And now for Norwich Castle and worldly power.

The City is dominated by the castle mound and keep. Begun in 1067 as a fortification, completed as a royal palace in 1121, used for administration and as a prison, the castle keep gradually fell into ruins. In the eighteenth century, new prison cells were constructed within the ruined walls. Then even the prison moved out of the city and a Museum and Art Gallery built alongside the keep.

However, this very year, the long-promised Castle Keep renovation was completed. Steel structures, walkways, lights and glass panels indicate lost parts of the building and the ‘new’ hall is decorated as experts say it would have been: painted with brightly colours and dressed with carved, gilded furniture and hangings. An authentic, if unexpected, experience of a twelfth century royal palace.

The streets of the old town twist and turn away from the castle, and there are many oddly named ways and ginnels. One strange name – Tombland – refers to the empty area of cobbled market in the centre of the city, and gives its name to my third choice of book, the last of the series of Shardlake novels. This huge novel is an adventure on an epic scale and where the keep and the prisons cells are very much in use.

Tombland by C. J. Sansom takes place in 1549: a very uncertain time. The old Tudor king, Henry VIII is dead. Edward VI, his eleven-year-old son, is on the throne; Edward Seymour, the Duke of Somerset, has assumed the role of Protector and is waging war on Scotland, and radical preachers are stirring up the population.

The lawyer Matthew Shardlake, now out of favour in the court, is summoned secretly by Princess Elizabeth. She wants him to look into the accusation that her uncle, John Boleyn, now in Norwich prison, murdered his wife Edith. As the Summer Assizes will soon start, Boleyn and other prisoners will soon be executed. Elizabeth wants Shardlake to petition, secretly for a pardon, but when he visits the cells, the man seems curiously unwilling to help himself - and the princess does not want her name attached to any of this.

As Shardlake’s investigations lead him to Boleyn’s appallingly violent sons, to secretive merchants and trades-people, to a small religious sect, and with more murders, the mystery of the aunt’s death deepens.

However, there is a stronger and more significant thread in this novel. In their search for evidence and testimony, Shardlake, his assistant Nicholas and his friend Jack Barak are led into the path of the 1549 Peasants Rebellion, led by the charismatic Robert Kett.

During Henry’s reign, the old monastic estates had been bought up by rich gentry and merchants and enclosed for pasture land. These new sheep enclosures drove tenants from their traditional holdings, leaving families without plots or crops. Many hope that the young king will be merciful to the sufferings of his people.

Led by Robert Kett, his followers gather in growing numbers on Mouseland outside the city walls, soon causing skirmishes with local citizens. Shardlake and his men are questioned in the camp and, as the novel progresses, different sympathies emerge between the three. Kett, meanwhile, asks the literate Shardlake, still prisoner, to help by keeping a record of the property and weapons taken from any captured gentry so that none can say their possessions were stolen.

Although the twists of the plot weave between Norwich and Kett’s camp in the Tombland novel, the sense of the ill-fated rebellion is what sits most powerfully in the readers mind. At first, the 'rebels' are camping in the sunshine under Mouseland’s leafy trees but, as branch after branch is cut down for fuel or shelter, it is clear that more wood will be needed. Despite Ketts' careful and fair-minded administration, things go wrong, supplies start to run out and the people of Norwich have nothing more to give or sell to the rebels, and there are cold months ahead.

Seymour, the Protector, had grandly issued proclamations promising justice, but faith in the Protector and the young king starts fading fast and reports of mercenaries returning from the Scottish wars add to the turmoil and terror. What chance does Matthew Shardlake have of solving the mystery of the murder of Edith Boleyn and staying in Elizabeth’s favour? Or even escaping himself?

I have to say that Tombland is the kind of historic novel one can live in, and be thankful for your escape at the end. 

In addition, I was also thankful that C. J. Sansom had included so much information and notes on his research notes at the back of the book. Tudor fiction is so often entranced by the drama and glamour of the court and the adventures of famous gentry. I started to feel that Sansom wanted his readers to see life beyond the castle and palace walls, and make them think about the ordinary people.

Especially, in Tombland, those waiting and hoping for justice outside the city of Norwich.

Penny Dolan

The Rules - by Katherine Langrish

If your new year’s resolutions seem now to be fading like dreams, consider the willpower and strength of character needed to be a medieval anchoress. Wondering what to write for my next History Girls post, I rediscovered a sheet of notes I made a few years ago while researching the background of my story for ‘Daughters of Time’, the History Girls’ very own anthology of short stories about significant women.

My choice was the famous-in-her-own time visionary and recluse, Lady Julian of Norwich, author the first book known to have been written in English by a woman: and I chose to tell the story (aimed at readers of 9 or 10 years-old plus) from the point of view of her young maid Sarah. Lady Julian did have a maid named Sarah, though of course I have no way of telling how old she was when she began her service.

Lady Julian, who spent perhaps thirty years of her life walled up in a small stone room or ‘cell’ at the back of St Julian’s Church in Norwich, may seem a strange character to offer to readers of nine plus. But she was strong, sane and compassionate, and her book, ‘Showings of God’s Love’, is full of imagery drawn from everyday life, as when she describes how God showed her ‘a little thing, the size of a hazelnut’ on the palm of her hand, and when she asked what it was, he told her, ‘It is all that is made’.  Or when she speaks of God as a Mother who tenderly cares for us: ‘for when a child is in trouble or scared, it runs to its mother for help as fast as it can’.

The obvious place to go for information on the life of an anchoress is the 13^th century handbook, the Ancrene Riwle, also known as the Ancrene Wisse: ‘The Anchoresses’ Rulebook’, or ‘Information for Anchoresses’. Its unknown author, who drew on advice Aelred of Rivaulx wrote for his sister in the 1160s, was concerned to guide such women (separated as they were from any collegiate discipline) in every detail of their lives, both everyday and spiritual. It was the everyday, domestic details which were of most interest to me when building the world my little servant-girl Sarah was to inhabit. 

So here are my gleanings from the Ancrene Riwle and Aelred’s advice (remarkably practical and balanced, on the whole) to those women who decided to do this extraordinary thing and spend the rest of their lives shut away from the world in a single room, for the sake of union with the divine.

 Cut your hair, or shave it.  (In the picture above, a lady has her hair cut before entering a convent.) Let blood four times a year. If you’ve had blood let, though, rest for three days and relax, talk with your maidservants. Wash as often as you please.

When you first arise in the morning bless yourself with the sign of the cross, and ‘in the name of the Father, etc’, begin directly, ‘Creator spirit, come,’ and then while dressing, say the Paternoster and creed, etc.

Eat twice a day from Easter till Holyrood day (Sept 14^th , Exaltation of the Cross) except on fasting days, when you mustn’t eat white food.  The entire second half of the year, fast (this means one meal a day, two on Sundays) unless you’re sick. (Eating less in winter sounds odd, but the days would be shorter.) Don’t eat meat or fat. Eat vegetable dishes happily, and only have a little to drink. Don’t, however, try fasting on nothing but bread and water unless you have permission from the bishop. Don’t entertain guests, or hand out charity (you depend on charity). If you do have any poor scraps, send them out secretly. But be generous to women and children and maidens (servants) who work for you.

Have no animal but a cat. (How sensible!) Don’t buy and sell. Let your clothing be serviceable and warm; it doesn’t matter if it’s white or black, no one will see you. No linen next to the body; but you can wear a stamin, an undergarment, if you want.  Wear a night-robe, loosely belted.  No chains or hairshirts or hedgehog skins or flagellation (without permission!) Wear soft, large, warm shoes in winter. In summer you can go barefoot if you want. Don’t sleep with your shoes on.  If you don’t want to wear a wimple, wear a warm cap and a white or black veil over it. No rings, brooches, decorated belts, gloves. You can wear a modest gown in a hot summer (a ‘meek surplice’). If you’re going to sew, let it be for poor people or for church vestments. Don’t turn into a school teacher. Your maidservant can teach a young girl, if she likes, and you can supervise, but your attention should be on God. Don’t write letters or receive them.

Have two women, one who stays at home all the time, the other to run errands. The one who runs errands (this was my little Sarah) must not talk on the way and, if possible, she should sing prayers as she goes and go nowhere but where she is sent. ‘Nor must the younger speak with any man without leave, nor go out of town without a trusty companion, nor sleep out.’  If she cannot read her Book of Hours, let her say the prayers with PaterNosters and Ave Marias, and do the work she is commanded to do without grudging. Let the maids’ hair be cut short, their headcloth or cap sit low.  They should keep their eyes down. No brooches, no romping or frolicking. No kissing or embracing men.

If her servants vex the mistress, they should kneel down before her and say mea culpa and accept penance.  However, the mistress is not to nag! If the two women argue, make them kneel to each other and kiss and make up. 

The ‘maidens’ are not to ‘munch fruit’ or eat between meals or even drink without permission (but grant permission easily if this is not a fasting day.) Not much talking, and none after compline and until prime next morning, so the anchoress’s silence is not disturbed. Wages: food and clothing only. The anchoress should read to and teach her women once a week.  They should love and fear her, but love more.

Every Friday keep silence. In Advent and the Ember (fasting) days, on Weds and Fridays, in Lent, three days a week, in holy week all week till noon on Easter eve.  (But you can exchange a few necessary words with the maids.)

‘Love your windows as little as possible and see they be small – the parlour’s window the smallest and narrowest. Let the cloth upon them be twofold and black; the cross white, within and without.’  ‘When you go to your parlour window, learn from your maid who it is that has come,’ and don’t become known as ‘a great talker’.  Note: some anchoresses such as Lady Julian became go-to sources of advice and consolation, to whom women especially might address themselves. The other famous medieval woman visionary, Margery Kempe, who was a contemporary of Lady Julian, came to visit her in Norwich. Kempe of course had no calling for the enclosed life and in striking contrast became a traveller to all kinds of holy shrines.

Never be idle, but work, or read, or be at beads or at prayer. ‘The heart is a full wild animal and makes many wild leaps’. (I love this!)

The anchoress and her maidens playing tig and ‘worldly games’ is forbidden!

Take the Eucharist 15 times a year.

True anchoresses are birds of heaven…

 You can read my story 'All Shall Be Well' in Daughters of Time, ed. Mary Hoffman,  Templar 2014

Picture credits

Anchoress - Corpus Christi College Cambridge, MS 79, fol. 72r.

Bridget of Sweden - London, British Library, MS Harley 2850, fol. 47v. Bridget of Sweden (1303-1373), author of Revelationes celestes and founder of the Order of the Most Holy Saviour, comprised of both men and women, ruled by an abbess.

Detail from The Luttrell Psalter, British Library Add MS 42130 (medieval manuscript,1325

A lady has her hair cut to become a nun: from the Lancelot-Grail (Prose Vulgate Cycle) http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/FullDisplay.aspx?ref=Add_MS_10293

An anchoress with her pet cat, from the Maastricht Hours (Stowe MS 17, f. 34r)

Sir Perceval consults his aunt, an anchoress, on the Quest for the Grail; illustration from Walter Map's La Quête du Saint Graal et la Mort d'Arthur

Dove of Holy Ghost within initial S : Book of Hours, France, Loire, ca. 1475 The Morgan Library & Museum