Four
Backtracking
‘… if all persons, both Ladies, much more Gentlemen, would spend some of their tyme in Journeys to visit their native Land, and be curious to inform themselves and make observations of the pleasant prospects, good buildings, different produces and manufactures of each place, with the variety of sports and recreations they are adapt to, [it] would be a souveraign remedy to cure or preserve from these epidemick diseases of vapours, should I add Laziness? It would also form such an Idea of England, add much to its Glory and Esteem in our minds and cure the evil itch of over-valueing foreign parts …’
Celia Fiennes, The Journeys of Celia Fiennes
Celia Fiennes, Launceston to Hereford, 1698
I seem to be taking a long time to go a very short way, or, as Martin Sheen came close to saying in Apocalypse Now: ‘Cornwall, shit, I’m still only in Cornwall.’ The plan, I hope you remember, is to travel around Britain in the footsteps of (mostly) famous writers, without leaving any gaps, and without straying from their recorded path, passing from one to the next in one smooth movement, so thank God for Celia Fiennes, who in the 1680s and 1690s managed to ride on horseback across the whole of England, clip-clopping through every county, most of them many times, while keeping a detailed journal for the benefit of her astonished family. It wasn’t the kind of thing an unaccompanied woman did in those days, but it has turned out to be very useful 330 years later. She was nothing if not thorough.
Celia was in Launceston in 1698, on her way back from Land’s End (and the inn where the beer was so fine). Wilkie was heading through on his way to Plymouth and the London train. So we can hook up with Celia and make haste for the Welsh border, even though, as she complains, the miles are very ‘long’ in these parts. And they were – longer here in her day than around London, although perhaps shorter than they were in the North. The statute mile was only defined in 1593 and first included on a map in 1675. Very few people in 1698 knew how far they were travelling, or when they could expect to arrive. It sounds quite appealing.
Why was Celia spending so much time riding obsessively around England, with a spare horse and a couple of servants to hack down the undergrowth and frighten away the highwaymen? The roads were in a miserable state, much worse than they had been in the Middle Ages, and a long way from Roman splendour. There was a real danger of armed robbery. Accidents were common. There were storms, floods and mudslides. The accommodation (if any) was shockingly bad – flea-infested, dirty, often rude – and Celia brought her own sheets and stayed with her widespread and generally well-off family whenever she could. She liked to pick over other people’s homes, turning up uninvited (but always, apparently, welcome) and giving detailed descriptions of their houses, gardens, wealth and activities. She said she travelled for the many healing spas, claiming her health needed tending, but she could hardly be more robust. Really, she just wanted to get away from home and see the world. Social historians have been thankful ever since.
Celia rattled through Launceston, pausing to look back from a hill outside town. She’d found it ‘pretty large’, but the streets were tiresomely steep. The best houses, she decided (and there were only two or three of them), were built in the London style by ‘some Lawyers’. The rest were ‘old houses of timber work’, which shows better than anything what it was like to live in a time when people did not fight to hang on to the buildings of the past, for the simple reason that they knew they could make something better. Something less poky and medieval. Celia loved high ceilings and sash windows and she was thrilled to be living through the first stirrings of what would evolve into the Georgian housing boom. Nowadays, of course, people are more likely to try and preserve what they can, against the wreckers and the developers, but that’s not because they cannot move on (or not only that), it is because they have learned that whatever comes next is almost certain to be mortifyingly ugly.
Celia had hope for the future. I don’t think this was unusual for someone living in her times. She was excited by signs of industry and loved to see such immense quantities of coal being mined and transported on her travels. At the side of a river between Taunton and Bridgwater, having crossed a large common ‘of deep black land which is bad for the rider but good for the abider, as the proverb is’, she paused among willow trees at a place where barges were unloading coal into sacks, and watched as pack horses took it further, to ‘places all about’. This ‘is the Sea coale brought from Bristole’ she tells us (with her atrocious spelling), ‘the horses carry 2 bushell at a tyme which at the place cost 18d. and when its brought to Taunton cost 2 shillings; the roads were full of these carryers going and returning.’ She liked industry, as well as a tidy profit. It was her Puritan heritage.
She also liked Exeter, mostly because it reminded her of London. Celia divided her time between Newton Toney near Salisbury, where she was born and her stepmother still lived, and Hackney, a village on the eastern edge of London, where her sister Mary was living with her husband, a merchant called Sir Edmund Harrison, and their five children. London was the place she loved best, despite all the travel. She was thrilled by the new buildings and marvelled at the extraordinary daily spectacle of the new St Paul’s Cathedral rising from the ashes. She also enjoyed fashions – and was there for the coronation of William and Mary to pass judgement on the new queen’s gold tissue robes and crimson and ermine mantle stitched with gold and silver lace and the huge mound of her hair which was set with diamonds and ‘at the least motion brill’d and flamed’.
In Taunton (‘a very neate place’), Celia was struck by the fact that all the country women were dressed the same, ‘wrapp’d up in the manteles called West Country rockets, a large mantle doubled together of a sort of serge, some are linsywolsey, and a deep fringe or fag at the lower end’. What is all this? I am not sure I need to know – it already sounds lovely enough. The women’s mantles were deepest red in the winter and egret white in the summer. Although, come to think of it, there’s more than a hint of The Handmaid’s Tale in the image of the West Country women roaming through Taunton market and Exeter, Plymouth and beyond, baskets in hand, red (or summer-white) mantles flowing behind them.
Celia was born just two years after the return and coronation of Charles II, and thirteen years after Charles I had been executed. The country had been torn apart by a brutal civil war, famously dividing friends and families. Her own grandfather, William Fiennes, the Eighth Baron and First Viscount Saye and Sele, was a fervent Puritan and one of the leading figures in the plot to constrain and ultimately overthrow Charles I. It is likely that the whole thing was planned at his home in Broughton Castle. He was a clever, scheming man, known as ‘Old Subtlety’, although his enemies suggested it was just pique and wounded pride that led him down the road to revolution, and there was nothing especially bright about him except that he stood out in comparison to his idiot peers. Celia’s father, Nathaniel, was a colonel in the same cause, somehow contriving to lose the heavily fortified city of Bristol to Prince Rupert without firing a shot. There was a song about it at the time:
But as soon as he heard our great guns play,
With a flea in his ear he ran quite away …
It has a rousing chorus, culminating in the words – no doubt roared around the Royalist campfires with a great sloshing of beer – ‘Which nobody can DENY … Huzzah!’
Celia had been steeped in Puritanism, which makes her open-minded enthusiasm for almost everything she saw in her battered (but recovering) country all the more impressive. Mind you, she was very careful what she wore when going for a healing dip in one of the many spas she visited. In Bath she donned a huge yellow canvas dress, ‘stiff and made large with great sleeves like a parsons gown; the water fills it up so that its borne off that your shape is not seen; it does not cling close as other linning which looks sadly in the poorer sort that go in their own linning’. So she floated amorphously in the waters, enfolded in a vast tent, while curling her lip at the ‘poorer sort’ who were splashing about in skimpy swimwear.
At Glastonbury (or ‘Glassenbury’ as Celia calls it) she visited what was left of the abbey and the tower of St Michael’s Chapel on the top of the Tor. She threw stones into the cellar of the abbey and heard ‘a great echo’, which came from the Devil who was guarding his treasure, or so said the local country folk. She inspected the famous Glastonbury Holy Thorn, which had sprung from the ground in the place where Joseph of Arimathea had struck his staff. Cromwell’s soldiers had chopped it down not so long ago, during the wars, but an offshoot had been found in a local pub garden and now it was flourishing again, blossoming every year on 7 January – Christmas Day in the old calendar. And so it would be today, or its descendants would, if it didn’t attract quite so much vitriol. The latest assault was in December 2010 when it was mown down by a man with a chainsaw. Whether people resent its beauty, or mystery, or religious associations – or whether they just hate trees – is unclear. Perhaps all of the above.
Glastonbury, of course, is now famous worldwide. And almost every year a Festival blossoms here. But it can also be a glum place, in almost any season, drained of its magic, strenuously touting its crystals and astral charts, trampled flat by pilgrims, undone by the avid attentions of its wide-eyed inhabitants. I don’t believe ‘magick’ should be spelled with a ‘k’, unless, like Celia, you can’t spell. Or maybe I have never stayed long enough, nor waited till dawn to witness the Somerset mists swirling around the Tor, and seen the black tower rising like hope from a ghostly white sea. Many people swear to the power that resides here. Ithell would have pointed out the significance of the name of the church, St Michael’s (and Michael, as she told us, ‘is germane to all other dragon-slayers from Perseus to Hercules and St George, since Michael is the Uranian aspect and St George the human manifestation of the same being’). Celia would have recoiled from this kind of talk, but please do not imagine that I am doing anything other than trying to understand. Wherever the currents take us, it is surely enough to know that others have always taken these readings seriously.
In the late twelfth century Henry II tried to kill the Arthur myth stone dead. He was worried that the Welsh in particular still clung to the belief that Arthur would rise again in their time of need, and having announced that Arthur was definitely buried at Glastonbury, along with his wife Guinevere, he ordered that their bodies should be dug up. He seemed to know (he said it was a prophecy) that Arthur was lying sixteen feet below the surface – and sure enough, when the monks got digging, that’s exactly what they found. The skeleton of a huge man and, said Gerald of Wales, writing soon afterwards, ‘a tress of woman’s hair, blond and lovely to look at, plaited and coiled with consummate skill, and belonging no doubt to Arthur’s wife’. One of the monks leaped into the grave to seize this gorgeous braid of hair and it turned to dust in his hands. ‘In their stupidity the British people maintain that Arthur is still alive’, Gerald sneered, eager to impress Henry II, but it is time to accept that ‘the fairy-tales have been snuffed out’. He would be surprised to see Glastonbury today.
I should say at this point that I am following Celia’s route in reverse – tracking back into the past – but it is the only way I can get to Hereford. Celia is having a great time hopping around the spas and baths of Somerset. At a place near St Vincent’s Rocks she found a ‘hott spring of water which looks exceeding clear and is as warm as new milk and much of that sweetness’. In Bath itself she notices the very fine new Hall that had been built since she was last there, ready for the ‘balls and dancing’. It is not long, now, till the arrival of Mr Darcy, and Celia slips into yet another pool of hot steamy water. Celia, by the way, did not ride naked around Britain, as some people think. That was Lady Godiva. But she may, even so, be the subject of the nursery rhyme, ‘Ride a cock horse to Banbury Cross/To see a fine lady upon a white horse’. Or that’s what the people of Banbury would like you to believe, having spent money on a big, tourist-friendly statue. ‘Fine lady’/‘Fiennes lady’, you see? There’s the proof.
You may also be wondering about the coincidence in our surnames. It’s all very simple. Celia Fiennes’ grandfather, William Fiennes, is my great (x 10) grandfather and her father, Nathaniel Fiennes, is my great (x 10) uncle, which means that Celia is my first cousin ten times removed. She never married and didn’t have any children, so I am not her direct descendant (it is her uncle James who is my great (x 9) grandfather), although I can already sense that this may be more information than anyone outside my immediate family should be expected to endure.
But it’s a familiar question, isn’t it? Usually innocent, but not always benign. Alive with preconceptions. ‘Where are you from?’ Or, to put it another way, ‘Who are you?’ ‘Where did you come from?’ We like to know. Of course we do. Even if the question can imply something about belonging, and something about the person asking it, that has started to make us feel uneasy. The implication ‘Do you belong here?’ can follow softly in its wake – unspoken (at least most of the time) and also (most of the time) never intended at all. To say it again, it is human to want to know. But I am also aware how uncomfortable this question can be, how downright hostile, and indeed how easy it is for me, a middle-aged white man, to travel this land, on the trail of Celia, my first cousin ten times removed, and not have to worry (or not that often) about my welcome or my right to be here. Apart from anything else, I am in the happy position of being able to stare at Celia’s 330-year-old signature (‘Fiennes’ with a flourish and a swirl) and think: I once practised my signature in exactly this same way. That feels like it’s worth something.
Well, leaving aside for now other more troubling considerations, it turns out it’s not worth very much. In his book A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived, Adam Rutherford shows that everybody living in Britain today who has at least some European ancestry is descended from the Emperor Charlemagne. He says it is simple mathematics. And if we had only managed to keep detailed records, we would discover that all modern Europeans (with a trace of European ancestry) are in some way related to absolutely everyone who was alive in Europe just six hundred years ago – assuming they left a line of descendants. It is surprising. If you want to know more, you’d be far better off buying his book, but what this means is that it is likely – not certain (more generations need to elapse), but it is likely – that you too are descended from someone in Celia’s immediate family. Not from her – she never had any children – but someone. And in fact, Rutherford goes on to say, ‘the most recent common ancestor of everyone alive today on Earth lived only 3,400 years ago’. Cousin.
We will see Celia again (we’d be lost without her), but I am going to race past Bristol. It is an inspiring place, I know that, and ‘a very great tradeing citty … and is esteemed the largest next London’. Celia loved the market and the magnificent stone cross, and when she was here the harbour was full of ships carrying ‘coales and all sorts of commodityes to other parts’. Three hundred years ago those ‘commodityes’ included slaves, although I have no idea if that’s what Celia meant. In 1698, when she rode through, the gruesome transatlantic trade was about to ramp up into another, even more intense phase. The monopoly of the Royal African Company had been broken that year (up till then it had exercised exclusive rights to trade with the African continent) and the first Bristol-owned ship was about to leave the city for the Caribbean, picking up a shameful cargo of enslaved African men and women. Celia didn’t have anything to say about that. Although, as we know, her silence is not unusual.
In August 1846 (150 years after Celia rode through the city), the escaped American slave Frederick Douglass arrived in Bristol from London. His explosive autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, had just been published and he’d been forced to flee and seek sanctuary in Britain. He was put up in Bristol by the abolitionists John Bishop Estlin and his daughter Mary. He was still only twenty-eight years old and he toured Britain for eighteen months, speaking over 300 times to enthusiastic audiences, drawing crowds of thousands, crammed into churches, theatres and halls. When he returned to America in 1847, after a group of British businessmen had helped buy his freedom, Mary wrote that ‘many hearts had followed him’.
Slavery had been ‘unsupported on English soil’ since 1772 and finally abolished across the British Empire in 1833, but Douglass was the force who reignited the anti-slavery movement and spread it across the globe, borne aloft by surging waves of British outrage and self-satisfaction. After he spoke in Edinburgh, over 10,000 women sent a petition to Washington demanding an end to slavery. And in Bristol, the day after he arrived in the city, he thrilled a crowd in the Victoria Rooms with the soaring passion of his speech (but not before the mayor had surprised the local paper by pouring Douglass a glass of water).
‘You may’, Douglass began, have ‘heard of America, 3,000 miles off, as the land of the free’, but the truth is that the real sound coming from the South ‘is the clank of the fetters and the rattling of the chains, which bound their miserable slaves together, to be driven by the lash of their driver on board the ships for New Orleans, there to be sold in the market like brutes’.
A few days later Douglass was in Exeter, making ‘A Call for the British Nation to Testify Against Slavery’. He realized that he needed Britain’s help in the fight against American slavery, or at least the support of its people, even though anti-British sentiment in America might make this support counter-productive. But as he said that night in Exeter:
[Slavery] is such a monstrous system, such a giant crime, that it begets a character favourable to its own existence, vanquishing the moral perception, and blinding the moral vision of all who come in contact with it; and a nation has not the moral energy necessary to its removal.
Douglass knew exactly how to tickle his patriotic, West Country audience, and to a final crescendo of wild cheering he shouted:
I will go to the land of my birth, I will proclaim it in the ears of the American people, whether I’m in a state of slavery or freedom, while I have a voice to speak it shall be raised in exposing the guilt of the slave-owners, and in contrasting the munificent freedom of monarchical England, with the slave-holding, man-stealing, woman-whipping, degradation of democratic republican America.
Anyway, I’m going to slide past Bristol and Bath, lovely as they are. Time is short and they’re quite busy enough reassessing their own histories without any help from me.
We can also miss Gloucester. It’s ‘a low, moist place’ says Celia, and she had ‘the worst Entertainment’ and ‘strangers are allwayes imposed on’, and there were very few books in the library and that should be warning enough. Celia stayed outside Hereford with her cousin, Pharamus Fiennes (I mention this so I can write his long-vanished name), and when she rode into the city thought it was ‘a pretty little town of timber buildings, the streets are well pitched and handsome’ and there were plenty of fish in the ‘thick and yellow’ river. Celia never did venture into Wales. She had heard that ‘the inhabitants go barefoot and bare leg’d’ and were ‘a nasty sort of people’. But waiting here in Hereford, in the year 1188, about to embark on a long tour of the country, is Gerald of Wales – and he can explain quite how wrong she was.