The Magus of Freemasonry

At the time of Elias’s birth, Lichfield, properly called the City and County of Lichfield, was home to some 3,000 people, dwelling in neat streets of timber-framed lath-and-plaster houses. The streets themselves were not paved with gold, but they were paved—with stone—thanks to the paternal hand of Bishop Walter de Langton (1296–1321).

During the Middle Ages, a powerful bishop needed a powerful king, though many a king might have preferred otherwise. Walter de Langton celebrated his patron Edward I’s life with a grand series of frescoes that decorated the great hall of the palace he built, measuring one hundred feet in length and fifty-six feet wide. Visitors were looked down upon by images of Edward being crowned king (surrounded by noble bishops); Edward being married (bishops again); and Edward victorious in battle (bishops carrying swords). It was, after all, a bishop’s palace, even a bishop’s world.

The power of the king to bring victory, and the power of the bishops to confer righteous judgment, came from one source: God the Father (not the will of man) manifest on earth through the majestic incarnation of His Son. However, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, there was a growth in enthusiasm for what is today described as a “divine feminine principle.” It may have been the case that there already existed an enthusiasm for a divine female figure (such as Brigid, the “Bride” and earth mother) and that the Church transmuted the principle.

In official or mainstream ecclesiastical circles, this spiritual need was met by the elevation of the Virgin. It had long been a feature of pagan belief to think of the Great Mother Goddess as both whore and virgin: ever fertile, ever willing, ever renewed in purity. The Church could Christianize the “Bride and Mother of the Church” by emphasizing the virginity while leaving the whore image to the Magdalene. The Virgin offers herself freely to the Holy Spirit and will of God, thereby demonstrating the very “wisdom” (sophia) that in more ancient times was the central characteristic of the Holy Sophia, virgin-whore, stellar goddess, and earth mother combined.

Given the unconscious associations of the Virgin, it is no surprise that she inspired the lives of men and women in a way that the frequently austere image of Christ the Judge could not. The Virgin was the patroness of the Knights Templar, capable of inspiring fanatical devotion. Bishop Walter made his own marvelous contribution to the movement by adding a massive Lady Chapel to the cathedral’s east end. During the Civil War, those who regarded the elevated Mary as a pagan idol (while idolizing Parliament) gutted the Lady Chapel, while Bishop Walter’s Great Hall with its frescoes disappeared forever.

Lichfield Cathedral as seen from Aldershaw to the south.

As we shall see, there is reason to think that the Great Mother had been worshipped at the site of the cathedral before the Christians came to preach the message of her Son.

Bishop Walter was a good patron of the masons and freemasons (master masons of freestone). He enhanced the building work of his twelfth-century predecessor Roger de Clinton. Under de Clinton (1129–48), the Cathedral Close had been transformed into a fortified mini-state, a sandstone holy island of power and miracle, rising above the waters below like the unbreakable will of God triumphing over chaos. Power temporal and power spiritual were concentrated there. Great walls and turrets, great gates and towers protected the cathedral’s mysteries from the wayward, hell-bound world beyond.

At the center of the mystery lay the holy bones, the relics of St. Chad, patron saint of madmen. In his life he had lived with awe-inspiring simplicity, forgoing the horse that was the sign of power, walking everywhere, spending timeless hours in concentrated prayer. In death, his remains occupied the center of a great multicolored cake of tiered stone and stained glass that thrust upward as a sinuous stone forest to the Father of Lights. Medieval artists had perceived the incalculable glory of Chad’s spirituality and they represented this exemplary mystery and image of Christlike life in the manner they knew best: with every ounce of their intelligence, technology, artistry, geometrical sophistication, and proportional ingenuity.

For the builders, no contradiction marred the contrast between the gold of spiritual purity and the lesser gold that adorned the images and inscriptions of the church. It was because they recognized the spiritual glory of Chad’s sainthood that they wanted to draw attention to the eternal within by the seemingly infinite material without. Rude rock was to be transfigured into squared and righteous stone. The stable of Christ’s birth, the simple cell of the saintly hermit, would become an image of that heavenly City and Temple beyond this world. The cathedral was clothing, dress for the infinite transcendent principle held within.

The body, with its sense of sin and spiritual illegitimacy, was to be overwhelmed with massive, overarching beauty so that the spirit would be awakened and the contrite soul would shake off its own gaudiness and come to humble recognition of the will of God. Here man’s bread became God’s flesh. Within the transformations, miracles were possible. Man might hope with hope purified.

So, at least, ran the theological theory. As a result of this magical marriage of theology, art, and science, Lichfield became one of the world’s great pilgrimage centers. By the grace of God, and by the intercession of Virgin and Saint, there were cures to be had. That is to say, cures were sometimes offered to those who themselves made offering: some sacrifice, a sign of penitence. Heaven was watching; the eyes and the stars looked down. Dig deep, penitent, into thy purse. The cause is worthy: the glory of the Church and its sacred charge, the healing of your degenerate flesh, the salvation of your delinquent soul.

As has been said, there is every reason to think that Lichfield had been a spiritual center even before Chad’s arrival there in 669. Since his arrival from York came with the cooperation of the pagan king Wulfhere of Mercia, based at nearby Tamworth, it might be that the link with the past came from the king’s mind.

The Bridestones: site of a neolithic temple, below Bosley Cloud, Staffordshire moorlands.

Since Chad came to plant—or replant—the Christian tree in Mercia, it would make logical and, from the point of view of evangelical custom, consistent sense to plant that tree in a locus where religion was already seen as its focal purpose. Chad aimed to show the pagan Saxons of his diocese a higher path out of their established traditions. Furthermore, both legend and archaeology attest to a significant Christian presence in Lichfield before the Saxons themselves settled in the valley; Lichfield was already spiritually significant. Why else, one might ask, would a man as holy, respected, and, in Celtic ecclesiastical terms, powerful come to Lichfield from the monasteries of Lindisfarne and Lastingham, pulse centers of Celtic Christianity in the north?

What was there at Lichfield in those days but a marshland dampening a shallow valley, a series of pools and streams, and much untamed forest? According to the Victoria County History of Lichfield, Lichfield may mean, prosaically, a field or feld (Saxon) “by the gray wood” (from the old Welsh, luitcoit), while local traditions since the thirteenth century have preferred the etymologically unsound interpretation, “the field of the dead.”

The earliest manuscripts of the eighth-century Saxon historian Bede call the place Lyccidfelth, which might derive from the Old English lic, meaning a corpse. Unfortunately, there is no way of being sure whether the name for the area assigned by King Wulfhere to Chad was of predominantly Celtic or Saxon origin, though Celtic seems the more likely.

St. Chad’s Well at Stowe.

Whether one prefers one interpretation or the other, the single consistent element that has shone through the murk is that the place is somehow associated with death. In an early Welsh poem there is a reference to a bloody battle that took place when Caer Lwydgoed was raided in the seventh century. That place, wherever it may actually have been, has been identified with the Celtic word “Letocaiton,” and with the Romano-British settlement at Wall (the Latin “Lectocetum”) a little to the south of the city.

Meanwhile, Matthew Paris (d. 1259) of St. Alban’s Abbey linked the idea of a field of corpses with the martyrdom of 999 Christians who had escaped north after the execution of the Romano-British saint Alban during the reign of Diocletian (A.D. 284–305). This interpretation was accepted in Ashmole’s day. In a letter of thanks sent to Ashmole by Lichfield’s bailiffs in 1666, reference is made to “three knights martyred,” “as ancient as the days of Diocletian.”¹ This story has been discredited by scholars but has proved nonetheless popular, and when the City and Corporation designed its coat of arms, it included some corpses for good measure.

Also for good measure, I should add that laec, lecce, and lic are Old English words for “stream” or “bog,” but it is still unlikely that the Saxons had been in “Lyccidfelth” long enough to give the place or area their own name.

There may be something in the “field of the dead” idea that has lingered in the subconscious minds of local people. Could Lichfield once have been a place where the sick were brought to be healed, or the dead to be buried—or the guilty to be sacrificed? Healing, death, sacrifice, burial, and religion go together and, as far as we know, always have.

We know that pools and lakes held a special, even profound fascination for Celts and pagan Saxons alike. Expensive votive objects—and human bodies—were cast into them at sundry times: a practice going back into the mists of time. Danu the water goddess (after whom the Danube was named) was worshipped in ancient Staffordshire, as the river Dane in the Staffordshire moorlands testifies. In the last century, I have been informed, it was customary in the Marchington Woodland and in the Ridwares (after the Saxon for “reed-folk”) for the few retainers of the old traditions to cast corn dollies into flowing streams at propitious times of year. The winding stream and the old hill still evoke in us strange and powerful feelings of belonging and spiritual beauty, even of “Englishness,” a divine love of homeland transcending politics: the feet of ancient time walking on the “mountains green.”

Greenhill, topped by the spire of St. Michael’s.

If today you go to Greenhill, Lichfield’s high point, you may see a sign next to St. Michael’s Church informing passersby that Greenhill is “one of the five oldest Christian sites in the country.” Matthew Paris may not have been the sole author of the legend of Christians making their way up the Watling Street to Lichfield (Etocetum) for refuge after the martyrdom of St. Alban at Verulamium. This legendary story even seems to have subconsciously inspired the founder of the Quaker movement, George Fox, to an act of unconscious folly.

In the winter of 1651, catching sight of Lichfield from a distance, Fox ran barefoot across the damp and frosty fields into the freezing streets of the city. Oblivious to the reality about him, he shouted for all he was worth, “Woe unto the bloody City of Lichfield!” to the surprise and annoyance of the already hard-pressed populace.

Unaware of a legend he later reckoned to have been “behind” this strange experience, he had, at the time (or out of it) undergone a vision of the city flowing with blood. The implication in Fox’s mind seems to have been that Lichfield was in some manner complicit in the blood spilling and would have to pay for it. Perhaps Lichfield has buried itself.

While it is recorded that four Northumbrian missionaries were brought to Mercia by Peada, Wulhere’s brother, in 658, eleven years before Chad’s arrival to take up the new bishopric, it is also quite possible that Romano-British Christianity had survived in pockets in the Midlands into Saxon times. Stories survive of a cell near Warwick nourished by visits from monks from Christian churches in Wales.

The fact that the church atop Greenhill is dedicated to the archangel St. Michael is significant. St. Michael “slew the dragon” of the ancient “earth religion” with its tendrils of mystery rising from the depths. Michael’s spear, aimed at the dragon’s mouth, “plugged up,” as it were, the earth magic of pagan times, leaving it “in hell,” its denizens damned as demons unredeemed and deadly. Hell has always held a fascination that fear itself generates, a thirst for which is currently slaked by horror movies, “Gothic” computer games, and sword and sorcery play of every kind. A cinematic recreation of J. R. R. Tolkien’s Catholic Lord of the Rings stories is currently enjoying tremendous success. Tolkien appears to have found the models for his “hobbits” in the villages around Can-nock Chase.

There is topographical evidence that Greenhill was once the site of an ancient fortification, reached by a causeway over the marshes of central Lichfield, part of whose path may still be seen at the cut sandstone ridge by Wissage Lane. Greenhill was very likely a religious sanctuary as well as a site of refuge. Old churches were usually built on venerated pagan centers. (Perhaps this goes some way to explain the somewhat forlorn character of so many relatively new urban and suburban churches—as well as so many modern estates themselves; they have no true center and one experiences in their midst a sense of soul-loss and energy depletion. The “kids” are not all right.)

Below Greenhill to the northeast lay the ancient hamlet of Stowe beyond the City boundary, the marshy place that Chad made his personal spiritual retreat after his arrival in Lichfield in 669. There beneath a wooden canopy is St. Chad’s Well. Covered today, it was used—and venerated—in Ashmole’s day. A sign recently uprooted by vandals used to tell the pilgrim that the site of the well “is Holy Ground.” Legends of Chad’s life tell of how he would leave his simple cell at dawn and stand naked by the well to say prayers or sing a hymn to his Creator at the rising of the Sun (the practice may derive from Hermetic circles in Egypt via Ireland).

St. Chad’s church at Stowe, Lichfield, traditionally held to be the site of the saint’s private retreat.

It is reported in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History that Chad believed that every natural phenomenon—especially severe winds, storms, and climatic changes—contained a message from God. During one terrific storm, for example, Chad could not cease from profound praying in his chapel. As the rain and tempest lashed all about him and his frightened inner circle who tried to restrain him, Chad prayed fervently that mankind be spared harsh and final judgment.

For Chad, as for the Hermetist, the cosmos was a cryptogram, a palimpsest; beneath the obvious image were a sign and message hidden from the “blind”—those who refused to see. Mastery of the body was a path to keep the spiritual eyes clear and in focus so that God’s will could be “read.” God sends his seers for the guidance of mankind; this was also Elias Ashmole’s belief.

The universe reflected the divine will mediated through nature as through a symbol. Ashmole shared much of Chad’s Orient-derived spiritual-magical vision of the divine cosmos; it gave Ashmole great stability and not a little insight. He could see the timeless principle operating behind the panoply of change, the light behind the passing, flickering celluloid of life.

After Chad’s death in 672, his bones were moved half a mile from Stowe to a sandstone shelf overlooking the northern banks of what is now Lichfield’s Minster Pool. This area had probably been the site of Chad’s chapel. A Saxon cathedral was built around the saint’s remains.

Lichfield grew to be not only the largest diocese in the country but also from 788, an archdiocese of England, until 802, when Pope Leo III restored Canterbury’s rights. From Lichfield’s center, the Christian message was taken to the greater part of the nation’s body. It is still a light in the darkness, though light has become very expensive and the dean and chapter of today might well wish for those extensive resources formerly garnered from the gilded hopes of pilgrims.

The site of the cathedral may already have held spiritual significance. To the northeast of that site today runs the ancient way called Gaia Lane. The name Gaia first appears in extant Lichfield records in the late 1200s as a name for the area to the northeast of the cathedral where the clergy grew their crops. The two half plots of land may be supposed to have extended upward to what is now called Prince Rupert’s Mount. Gaia was of course a name for the Greek earth goddess and many today will be familiar with Lovelock’s “Gaia Principle”—that the earth is a living, self-regulating, even spiritual being, involving some kind of self-consciousness.

The appearance of the word Gaia as a place-name is certainly puzzling. Gaia (whose name seems to derive from an ancient Greek word for earth), wife of Uranus, the god of the heavens, was mother of the Titans. Her role in Greek mythology suggests a hieros gamos or sacred marriage idea somewhat reminiscent of the Ishtar-Tammuz myths of Syria and Babylonia.

Gaia was the Earth Mother or Great Mother. If Mary had been renamed by the ancient Greeks, she would have been called Gaia. The Motherhood of the Earth was strongly emphasized. The name was passed over to the culture of the Romans, who were wont to call the bridegroom and bride at weddings Gaius and Gaia for the special day. A higher or holier marriage was thus invoked; the marriage had a sacred dimension. Gaia then could be the word for Bride.

The Celtic earth goddess worshipped in ancient Staffordshire was Brigid, or Bride (hence the word we know). Uranus comes from the Greek ouranos, meaning heaven. Gaia is the Bride of Heaven: earth and heaven locked in sacred union. Ex Uno Omnia. To unite is to make One.

Greek and Phoenician traders came to Britain in ancient times. Is it possible that pre-Christian Lichfield was the locus of a Greek-founded religious cult? If it was, then Walter de Langton’s Lady Chapel was certainly built at the right place.

Hills have long been associated with divine presence. One thinks of the seven hills of Rome or Mount Moriah in Jerusalem. Men have indeed looked to the hills for their salvation for many thousands of years. To the northwest of the city, the observant eye cannot fail to notice a series of three well-rounded hills, rising like distant, serpentine waves in a line to the south around Swinfen. In the foreground we see three more hills.

Borrowcop Hill, just outside the city’s old southern boundary, has its own place in Lichfield’s mythology. It was almost certainly the site of an ancient fortification, close to the Mercian royal family’s burial mound at Offlow. There is a legend of three kings being buried at Borrowcop. To the northeast of Borrowcop stands the aforementioned Greenhill, and to the northeast of Greenhill, the mount that rises above the fields of Gaia. These hills were once partially “moated” by streams that flowed into Lichfield from the west. When Ashmole was a boy, these streams supported four water mills, at Leomansley, Dam Street (just outside of the Cathedral Close’s southern gatehouse), Stowe, and Ponesfield.

The waters from springs at Aldershaw in the southwest were piped to conduits in the City. Ashmole’s family would have obtained their water from one of these (provided by the Conduit Lands Trust, founded in 1545). References to Conduit Street in the town center exist from the twelfth century, though it is not clear where the water for such a conduit would have come from before the Franciscan friary activated its own conduit from the springs at Aldershaw in 1301.

The confluence of hills and water, springs and pools within a “contained” environment was irresistible to the imagination of our ancient ancestors. Their priests recognized the signs of a transcendent pattern; the universe was bound by patterns, and man was caught in the weave. On the principle of “As above, so below,” the earthscape reflected patterns derived from the heavenly realms. Where such a pattern was seen to concentrate, spiritual associations and images flowed from the human soul, or as Jung would put it, archetypes buried in the unconscious would be “constellated” by analogous phenomena in the natural world.

This is what the visionary artist William Blake (1757–1827) meant by saying that Albion, his archetypal Ancient Man or giant (representing England as a spiritual being), contained within himself the earth and the stars in a primal harmony. Blake was an enthusiastic reader of Ashmole’s friend John Aubrey’s book on the religious landscape of Wiltshire.

Spiritual vision, or what Blake called “Jesus the Imagination,” was the key to seeing this landscape: heaven in a wildflower, eternity in an hour. Ashmole seems to have enjoyed something of this gift. However, according to Jung (who analyzed Ashmole’s dreams), he was inclined to suppress it, favoring the path of the more “masculine” rational intellect. Nevertheless, Ashmole was deeply moved by the spiritual universe. His belief in magick saved him from becoming another harbinger of the Age of (rational) Enlightenment. The enlightenment Ashmole sought was deeper and more elusive.

Jung’s principle regarding the mind’s tendency to “see” archetypes projected as images when confronted by particular patterns in life and nature may explain the phenomenon of today’s spiritual seekers finding “earth energy” lines, magnetic or “leylines” radiating from the center of Lichfield. Such observations have concluded that the place is a radix of subtle spiritual power capable of drawing in souls and nourishing departing ones, like moons drawn to the orbits of powerful planets. As above, so below, indeed.

Modern Lichfield is in dire and perhaps irreversible danger of burying its magnetism and its meaning beneath so much modern builders’ tat, selling its soul for a mess of council-tax pottage. Not in my backyard! saith the Lord. Those with ears to hear, let them hear.

When Elias Ashmole wandered about his home city as a lad, he would have found an atmosphere quite different from that which is now pervasive. Indeed, Providence could hardly have chosen a finer birthplace for one who would distinguish himself in, among other things, antiquarian studies and alchemy, the Royal Art, the black art. For that ancient phrase “As above, so below” derives from the first lines of the gospel of alchemy, the Emerald Table of Hermes Trismegistus, patron saint or (to use Jung’s phrase) “psychopomp” of alchemy. Alchemy, Ashmole was at pains to point out in Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum, his brilliant study of English alchemists (1652), was an art once practiced in the religious houses of pre-Reformation Britain.

The boy Elias studied Latin, Greek, poetry, and arithmetic at Lichfield’s grammar school and church music at the cathedral. There is no direct evidence from this period indicating an awareness of dwelling in a “sacred landscape.” However, Ashmole’s later preoccupations and magnetic fondness for Lichfield leave little doubt that something of the sacred landscape was dwelling in him. His powerful desire to see Lichfield’s religious monuments (especially the cathedral, or “temple,” as he called it) restored, preserved, and filled again with song came from very deep within his being. This desire was more instinct than whim or predeliction; it marked him out, possibly, in spite of himself.

Breadmarket Street, formerly Women’s Cheaping. The original Guildhall stood at the far end of the street.

What if we try to get behind the boy Elias’s eyes? What would those eyes have seen as his buckled shoes dodged the puddles and ordure of Lichfield’s anciently paved streets?

Coming out of his family’s house onto Women’s Cheaping (now Breadmarket Street), he would immediately have found himself in the shadow of the Gothic tower of St. Mary’s. The church was full of sepulchral monuments that the adult Ashmole was to record in detail; the monuments have disappeared but his records remain. The church was rebuilt in alien limestone in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and its subsequent transformation into a museum and community center gives little idea of the hoary grandeur that would have greeted Elias each morning.

Sixteenth-century building, Bore Street, now a tearoom and antique shop.

Glancing to his right, he would have taken in the black and white beams of the old Guildhall, resplendent on the south side of Borde (now Bore) Street. “Ye Gelde of ye gloriouse Virgin Marie of Lychefelde” was established out of two former guilds in 1387 by Richard II. The Guildhall itself was in existence by 1421.

The life of the Guild was entwined with the life of the Church. Suffering a considerable decline at the time of Ashmole’s birth, the country’s guilds had once wielded considerable influence on town life and demonstrated how intimately all aspects of life were, in pre-Reformation England, attached to religious festivals, symbols, ceremonies, and ethics. Guilds eagerly sought allegorical links between their trades and the Bible. Passages obscure to most of us held great meaning for guilds and confraternities.

St. Mary’s Guild enjoyed the power to make bylaws for the maintenance of social order, employing its own dungeons, the remains of which survive to this day. Before its dissolution at the hands of Edward VI in 1547, the Guild had its own chaplains, who lived in a house on Women’s Cheaping. Ashmole’s family home may have been constructed on the site.

The Guild of St. Mary administered the Church’s interest in the Christian relief of the poor, as well as taking care of its own members in the manner of a welfare system. The master and two wardens each held a key to the three locks of a chest, commonly called a “box,” which would be opened on Boxing Day, among other occasions, for gifts to the poor. The dignitaries above all had to be present when the box was opened to secure its contents. Relief from sickness and poverty came from the Guild’s fines, rents, dues, and gifts, held in the box. The practice continued after the establishment of the Conduit Lands Trust in 1545, shortly before the Guild was dissolved.

Conduit Lands Trust Box for money and documents. Note the three keys.

The dissolving of the Guild left the town in financial straits. Probably as a result of the efforts of Minister of State William Paget (who owned a mansion at nearby Beaudesert), Lichfield was incorporated by royal charter in 1548. Having achieved a large measure of self-government (the Close was still an independent entity), Lichfield’s City Corporation moved into the Guildhall. Not that the move required much furniture removal (Edward VI had plundered the city of silver and other valuables); the first bailiff and half of the Corporation’s brethren had formerly been masters of the old Guild, while a further six of them had been Guild Wardens.

Queen Mary confirmed the charter in 1553, granting county status to a City of Lichfield that could now boast its own sheriff. By Ashmole’s time, the trade companies, whose seniors occupied the ranks of the Corporation, appointed the all-important bailiffs. On March 1, 1633, Simon Ashmole had his fifteen-year-old son Elias enrolled as a freeman of the city’s Company of Saddlers, Glovers, Whittawers, and Bridlemakers.

Turning away from the Guildhall to his left, young Ashmole would in a few short steps have found himself in the marketplace, which on a Tuesday or a Friday was filled with people and livestock come to market. Worsted cloths (produced at the city’s mills), milk, cheese, meat, fish, vegetables, confections, spices, wine, pots, pewter, and paper were sold there as they are today, as well as cattle, poultry, game, and pigs.

Well-to-do people (one wonders what they would have thought of the word consumer) might also find leather carpets (to replace rushes), padded seats, tinderboxes, books, looking glasses, chests of drawers, silver and brass candlesticks, buttons, buckles, velvet waistcoats and cloaks, satin petticoats, and silk suits. The streets would be clogged with oxcarts and perhaps a stage-wagon: a heavy, lumbering cart, billowing and bulbous as a huge haggis, pulled by six, eight, or ten horses. The driver would walk alongside the horses, carrying a whip the size of a fishing rod.

Wives and servants would crisscross the market square. Veils, pearls, and furs were the height of fashion. Keen eyes followed maidens, who assessed the quality of the interest with discreet glances from behind simple white bonnets.

Memorial in Lichfield marketplace to Edward Wightman, burned for heresy there in 1612.

The air would have been thick with country accents and country smells. Perhaps some folk still found time to comment on the execution of Edward Wightman in 1612. Wightman had been accused of heresy; he recanted, then recanted his recantation, believing himself to be an incarnation of the Holy Spirit. He was burned alive in the marketplace.

The burning resulted from Lichfield still being the seat of the Bishop’s Court. It had shocked many Lichfieldians. Poor Wightman was the last person to be burned in England for heresy but the people of Ashmole’s Lichfield were not to know that; it could still happen to them, their friends, or their relations if they stepped too far out of line.

Much drinking was indulged; the country wasn’t called “merry England” for nothing! Some decades before, there had been complaints that there were too many alehouses in the city, the cause of “much decay in the place.”² Nevertheless, Lichfield was by far the richest town in Staffordshire, and with the money came the drinking.

Lawyers in broad-brimmed hats would converse with bailiffs, squires, and company men. Proud yeomen would meet fellow farmers and suppliers (such as saddlers) to pursue private transactions either beneath the stone market cross—a gift from Dean Denton in 1530—or in one of the many inns of Lichfield. Drinks might include syllabub, a sweet wine with cream; mum, a beer brewed with wheat, and buttered ale, beer served hot and flavored with cinnamon and butter.

We may imagine Elias dodging farmers and merchants as they made their way west from the Market Square, up Sadler Street (now Market Street) to one of the galleried inns in Bird Street, which runs at a right angle at the end of Sadler Street.

Looking to his right along Sadler Street, Ashmole would have recognized the large home of the influential and traditionalist Dyott family, roughly where Woolworth’s currently stands. Behind the Dyotts’ gabled home flowed a long garden. It ran parallel to other long gardens, extending down to the great pool that flowed from Bishop’s Fish Pool (now Beacon Park) to the west into the marshy “Moggs” to the east of the town before becoming a large pool once more at Stowe.

Reflected in the pool (called Minster Pool) were the great sandstone walls of the Cathedral Close defenses, while from behind them, rising with a titanic thrust, the three great spires of the cathedral reached toward heaven.

Lichfield Cathedral as it would have appeared to the boy Elias. The Bishop’s Fish Pool (foreground) has long since been drained. Note the battlements around the Cathedral Close.

As Elias’s eye glided over the bristling thatch that nestles to the eaves above Sadler Street’s fine houses, his ear would have been alerted to the sound of melodious pipes. Where today the pedestrian on Market Street might be swayed into rattling his pocket by the twanging and whining of a busker, the professed instruments of the seventeenth-century street musician and inn entertainer were the pipes. The piper’s tune: the payer’s choice. To young Ashmole’s ears, the sonorous breath of the pipes held a special meaning—not only because in Old England the sound of the pipes suggested liberty, but also by reason of an old and cherished memory.

Fellow antiquarian John Aubrey (the historian of Wiltshire) related how Ashmole revealed to him that when he was a boy, a Lichfield piper had enchanted the young Elias with his music. The piper had also been enchanted, but not by another musician. He told the spellbound boy of how he was “entertained by the Fayries,” that he “had oftentimes seen them” and that “he knew which homes of the Towne were Fayry-ground.”³

Fayries, being rather more alarming creatures than the Edwardian image of them would indicate, were usually the denizens of an intermediate world between this one and the next. They were associated with hills, trees, pools, and departed spirits. Were there Fayries at the bottom of the Dyotts’ garden? Or were they dancing on the rustling thatch, leaping from gable to gable and table to table, mad with the pipers’ tunes? The piper had eyes that saw “out of the ordinary.”

Ashmole’s mature philosophy certainly held room for the secret life of these supposed strange, intermediate beings. It was customary to give fayrie-like characteristics to the spirits of the elements: of earth, gnomes; of water, undines; of air, sylphs; and of fire, salamanders. A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest were modern plays when Ashmole was a boy.

But whereas the four traditional elements were everywhere and constituted everything, the “fayries” were quite particular about their chosen place. Not every house was suitable for fayries. It was a question of location, of locus, of genius loci, and of locus genii. Ashmole could hardly have been a stranger to the concept of the magick of place, whether that magick induced ecstasy or panic (remember the pipes of Pan). The pipes, the pipes are calling me … The pipes called one over to the Other Side.

The pipes had told Elias that Lichfield was magical. Why, one wonders, did the piper choose to grace Elias’s warm and highly musical ears with his account? Did he know a sensitive ear when he saw one? Such things of which the piper had to speak were not common knowledge. But, then, Elias had little interest in common knowledge.

Now standing outside the Swan (until very recently a hotel), Ash-mole looked back across Bird Street to the George and Dragon (now the George Hotel). Both inns were built around cobbled courtyards, and both echoed with horses’ hooves, the cries of ostlers, the cackle of fighting cocks, and the clanking and slapping of saddlery, which was the Ashmoles’ staple income.

Looking to the north up Bird Street, Elias would have seen the low, narrow bridge built in stone by Bishop de Langton nearly 300 years earlier. The bridge gave access toward the cathedral fortifications and in doing so divided Minster Pool to the right from Bishop’s Fish Pool (now drained and called Beacon Park) on the left. Crossing the bridge, Elias would approach the mighty gates, siege-proof walls, and the portcullis that guarded the western end of the Close.

Remains of defensive tower at the entrance to the Cathedral Close.

The bridge over Minster Pool as it is today, from the east.

Dr. Milley’s hospital.

Walking northward up the hill, with the moat and defensive walls to his right and fields to his left, he would find himself in Bacon (now Beacon) Street. A few low cottages lined parts of this exit street from the city and we may be permitted to imagine the sound of truffle-digging swine that in their cooked state perhaps gave this street its name.

Near the top of the grassy hill, in a healthy, breeze-blown position above the denser, damper air of the town below, Dr. Thomas Milley had reendowed the almshouse founded by Bishop Heyworth in about 1424. Once rebuilt, Canon Milley’s hospital for fifteen women had opened its doors to charity in 1504; it still stands and serves the needs of elderly ladies to this day. Perhaps a coterie of the old dears was perched on stools by Bacon Street watching the passing market traffic and gossiping about the good old days of Queen Elizabeth, or even—who knows?—the Virgin Queen’s half sister, the Catholic Mary, named after the competing Virgin of England’s spiritual imagination. Lichfield’s population included a large number of Roman Catholics. Both the cathedral and the parish church were dedicated to Mary.

From the brow of the hill, Elias could see Bacon Street wind into the fork of Abnalls Lane and Cross in Hand Lane to the northwest as the cottages petered out into the rich farming land that surrounded the city.

Looking back down into Lichfield, he would be able to see the remains of the old ditch and bank raised by Bishop Roger de Clinton around the city’s center, interspersed by the four city “barrs,” or main gates. The first barr was below him on Bacon Street, just north of the cathedral gateway, opposite Gaia Lane, one of two main roads to the north that skirted the Cathedral Close’s moat and defensive walls. The wooden gates would doubtless be open for market.

Looking across the depth of the town toward Greenhill to the south-east, Ashmole would have seen another of Roger de Clinton’s ancient barrs. Casting his eyes down to the right, his gaze would have been met by the neat row of imposing Tudor brick chimneys of the Hospital of St. John the Baptist, refounded and reendowed for thirteen almsmen by Bishop Smyth of Lincoln in 1495. Somehow, this hospital (which had been serving the needy since before 1208) had survived the desecration and destruction of Henry VIII’s Reformation, which had reduced Lichfield’s Franciscan friary just a bit further down St. John Street to ruins less than a century before.

St. John’s Hospital.

St. John’s stood outside the barrs of Lichfield—but only just. Beside the hospital stood another of Roger de Clinton’s barrs, now permanently open to trade and travelers coming up from London and the south. Customarily, travelers could claim a kindly pot of ale from the hospital gates before pasing the barr and entering Lichfield. Failing that, the thirsty visitor might join locals at the Hartshorn Inn, adjacent to the hospital and temptingly close to the lips of Lichfield’s grammar school boys. The grammar school was a further endowment of Bishop Smyth of Lincoln.

At the sight of this stone structure, Elias’s eye would have good reason to linger, for this was his school and to it he had better hasten. And in returning—festina lente, Elias!—he had better harden his posterior for the master’s rod that would soon descend for so abandoning his proper studies, to show us, his posterity, the stony lineaments of his glorious, gilded home, Lichfield, a pilgrim’s dream at the center of Old England.

Site of Ashmole’s grammar school and headmaster’s lodgings, opposite St. John’s Hospital. The grammar school was rebuilt in 1682.