CHAPTER TWO

‘As I lie here out of sight’

BRASS RUBBINGS

ANY close reading, not only of the Letters, but also of the recollections of those who knew him, especially in T.E. Lawrence By His Friends, demonstrates conclusively that Lawrence began the study of these medieval things very early. At the age of nine and a half, he began what was to become an extensive collection of brass rubbings of knights in armour. One of his childhood friends, C.F.C. Beeson, who knew him at the age of fifteen, recalls:

‘Cut out and pasted on the walls of his bedroom were life-size figures of knights and priests, with Sir John d’Abernon and Roger de Trumpington, a crusader, in pride of place.’¹

These striking brass rubbings are not merely objects of aesthetic appreciation, but depict a certain heroic ideal as well as a technical appeal; produced around 1326 in the Cemoys style, they show the use of plate armour for extra protection of the joints.² Beeson remarks that this interest was no collector’s hobby, but was backed up by ‘much searching in libraries for the history of these priests and knights and ladies’, and included visits to the Wallace Collection and the Tower Armouries, and the permanent acquisition of a Herald’s jargon. This, together with his attachment to Sir Thomas Malory, author of Le Morte D’Arthur, enriched the vocabulary and range of reference of the Seven Pillars, and even leaves traces in The Mint.³ The fact that Chivalry and the technicalities of armour can still provide sources of metaphor within the engineers’ milieux of the RAF in 1925, suggests that the medieval world of these early studies had provided Lawrence with some enduring vocabulary and values.

In view of Lawrence’s later remarks about, and attitude to the body, some attention should be given to another unusual brass in his room. In interviews with other boyhood friends, E.F. Hall and Janet Louise Hall Smith, it emerges that along with the Crusaders, Lawrence’s room also had a brass rubbing of a corpse being eaten by worms, and that his mother complained that he was sleeping in a coffin-shaped box six feet long, two feet high and two feet wide. Hall remarks, ‘… he’d think of this chap dying, eaten by worms every night when he went to bed.’⁴ The most probable candidate for this rare and unusual brass is the monumental brass commemorating Ralph Hamsterley, from Oddington, Oxfordshire. The Monumental Brass Society takes the view that Lawrence ‘… undoubtedly rubbed the skeleton in a shroud at Oddington.’⁵ Hamsterley, as Rector of Oddington Church, laid down this memorial in his own church years before his death.

Lawrence was an enthusiastic maker of brass rubbings, usually of medieval knights. This gruesome shroud brass of Ralph Hamsterley (1450-1518), a Fellow of Merton College, Oxford, was probably made in 1510. Lawrence’s childhood friend, Janet Laurie Hallsmith, remarked that his room was ‘hideous with them’. Hamsterley was probably pasted on the ceiling. (Brass rubbing by Bruce Leigh - permission kindly given by The Reverend Andrew Rycraft and the Churchwardens of St. Andrew’s, Oddington.)

In his paper for the Transactions of the Monumental Brass Society, V.J.B. Torr describes the brass as a ‘unique and most terrifying type of the shrouded and decomposing corpse, already partly a skeleton, and being consumed by worms the very skull is cracked with age, yet the stomach, though putrescent, is still relatively fleshly! [Transactions, page 227.] Torr counts 13 worms in all ‘… carefully drawn little creatures, all save one being ringed naturistically’, and translates the curving mouth scroll:

‘I, here to worms become a prey
Try by this picture thus to say,
That as I lie here out of sight
So must pass all earthly might.’

In passing, it is worth noting that this ‘message from the skeleton’ strikingly echoes the medieval Christian austerity of the classic Chivalrous text L’ordene de Chevalrie:⁶

‘Death and earth where you will rest
Whence you came and wither you will return
This is what you must keep before your eyes.’

To make a rubbing of such a brass would involve a close acquaintance with all its details, even more, to sleep under it would ensure that, whatever one’s thoughts about ‘earthly might’, the ultimate fate of the body would be difficult, if not impossible, to ignore and forget. Less seriously, this brass may also explain the origin of Lawrence’s curious greeting at the end of some of his youthful letters to his family: ‘My worms to …’ – a possibly obscure, perhaps childish family in-joke. More generally, a certain attitude to the body, sometimes instrumental, at others contemptuous, along with odd-sounding pleonasms, for example, ‘I resolved while I lived,’ [Seven Pillars]; all these are consistent with the values expressed in both the English and the French poems on Chivalrous subjects.

The classicist in Lawrence would have known, of course, that Christianity does not have a monopoly on the asceticism expressed in these poems. It can be found in the texts and practices across the entire Graeco-Roman world; in the tradition inaugurated by Socrates – in Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics (both Greek and Roman), the Cynics, Plotinus and the Neoplatonists, amongst others. In all these thinkers and schools, the Body is variously problematised, disciplined, or repudiated in the name of ‘higher’ intellectual or spiritual goals. To some extent, the traces of this tradition can be found in Lawrence’s writings and practices. However, it is rarely overtly theorised in the manner of later modern thinkers such as Nietzsche, Foucault, or Ernst Jünger, perhaps because Lawrence’s writing projects were powered by different motives with other goals. The most explicit views Lawrence articulated on the subject are directed more at Food, and Habits per se, than at Sex. This itself seems to be engagingly pre-modern, and I shall return to it subsequently.

The record of those who knew Lawrence at university demonstrates the level of self-discipline which he embraced. Initially, perhaps, these austerities could be misread as personal eccentricity, or mere undergraduate affectation. Even his brother, A.W. Lawrence, writes that, ‘At college he made fun for himself by eccentricity, riding his bicycle up hills and walking it down.’⁷ If we understand such eccentricities more charitably as personal choices informed by the traditions of austerity in the Christian and Graeco-Roman worlds, which he knew, they are part of the regimen of askesis⁸ which Lawrence clearly followed throughout his life.

Brass rubbings of medieval knights made by T.E. Lawrence in his youth. Left: Sir John D’Aubernoun, 1277; right: Sir Roger de Trumpington, 1289.

‘Lawrence sat cross-legged on the floor quietly explaining that he never sat on chairs if he could help it, that he never indulged in the meals known as breakfast, lunch, tea and dinner, nor smoked nor took drinks, in fact he did nothing which qualified him as an ordinary member of society. But he added drolly that he had no objection to my doing any of these things.’

[A.G. Pryce-Jones, a Jesus College contemporary. Quoted in Wilson, page 43]

‘At University never played or looked on at any game or sport. Lived only one term in College. Read all night, and slept in the mornings. Vegetarian, non-smoker, T.T. Never dined in Hall. Took no part in College life.’

[Lawrence to Robert Graves in Graves, Robert, and B.H. Liddell Hart in T.E. Lawrence to His Biographers, pages 48-49]

‘… one glance at his eyes left no doubt at all that he told the truth when he said that he had been working for 45 hours at a stretch without food, to test his powers of endurance. I did not realize that he was, in his own later words “hardening for a great endeavour.” I thought it was that other side of him – the consuming power of the desire to know – in this case, how much the human frame could stand.’

[E.F. Hall, who was at Oxford High School and Jesus College with Lawrence. Quoted in Friends, page 47]

C.F.C. Beeson, another school friend who knew him for about five years, and accompanied him on his 1906 trip to France, recalls how his friend ‘had to prove himself… was always making himself tough, always climbing, always testing to the limits of his powers.’ Once, in Brittany, they visited a castle ruin with a moat that was crossed by a bridge. According to Beeson, Lawrence had to jump the moat instead of using the bridge. Lawrence seemed to take unusual, even reckless, chances when climbing about old walls with loose stones.⁹ ‘An image has stayed in Beeson’s mind of Lawrence atop some rocks in France with a foot trembling as he tried to find a footing. Beeson warned him, “You’ll fall”, and offered to help. But Lawrence would not let him’. [quoted in Prince of Our Disorder, interview with the author, John E. Mack, page 49].¹⁰

‘He came to visit me one breakfast time on his racing motor bicycle: he had come about 200 miles [in five hours]. He would eat no breakfast… “When did you last have a meal?” I asked. “On Wednesday.” Since then he had had some chocolate, an orange and a cup of tea. This was Saturday. [Lawrence] “It’s my occasional habit to knock off proper feeding for 3 days [rarely five] just to make sure I can do it without feeling worried or strained. One’s sense of things gets very keen, and it’s good practice for hard times. My life has been full of hard times.”’ [T.E.L. to Robert Graves in Letters to his Biographers, page 72.] Graves also recalls: ‘Lawrence, (when his own master) avoids regular hours of sleep. He has found that his brain works better if he sleeps as irregularly as he eats.’

How far this ambitious asceticism is informed by, or consistent with, Medieval Chivalry, is questionable. But Lawrence claims that he read ‘… nearly every manual of chivalry.’ Therefore, to test the hypothesis that Lawrence lived by this warrior code, I propose to examine some aspects of Chivalrous literature, both ‘handbooks’ and ‘chansons de geste’, and to look at his writings, manifest practice, judgements, and library, with the Chivalry question in mind.

Endnotes

¹   T.E. Lawrence by His Friends, p. 53.

²   See Peter Coss, The Knight in Medieval England, p. 92.

³   Chivalry references ‘… the mail and plate of our personality’, The Mint, p. 232.

⁴   Quoted in John E. Mack, A Prince of Our Disorder, p. 24.

⁵   Correspondence with the Society.

⁶   See Maurice Keen, Chivalry, p. 6 et passim.

⁷   Italics added. As a fifteen-year old cyclist, I was personally struck by this, and only later came to see it as a manifestation of Lawrence’s strange ‘counter-Will’, a kind of wit of the Deed.

⁸   Ascesis – the practice of disciplining oneself: asceticism. From the Greek ‘askesis’ = exercise, training. See Chambers Dictionary and Liddell and Scott Greek Lexicon, p. 208. And, for example, Cynics by William Desmond. Also Richard Finn, Asceticism in the Graeco-Roman World. Op. cit.

⁹   Climbing the walls of castles was also one of the risks he took for his thesis on Crusader Castles. Sometimes it was the only way to establish facts, for example wall thickness, or to read inscriptions, or to obtain good angles for photographs. ‘He had climbed the old walls barefoot’, a don remembered later. [See Michael Haag, Preface to Crusader Castles, p. 12.]

¹⁰  Lawrence continued dangerous climbs. See Crusader Castles, pp. 97, 141, 154, etc: ‘… very difficult to make notes… because of the darkness and because I was clinging with teeth and eyelids on a ledge about 4 inches wide, halfway up the tower.’ And after the war putting a Hejaz flag on top of an Oxford college.