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Religion and mammon connect these three towns, linked as they are to Britain’s Christian heritage and to the ancient trade network that we now call the Silk Road. The British Museum’s Silk Roads exhibition (running until 23 February) concludes with the British Isles – the western extremity of the transport routes that ferried precious stones and ornate textiles, artistic ideas and craft techniques between Asia and Europe, with the exhibition focusing on the second half of the first millennium.
Lichfield, Staffordshire
If I had lived in Tudor times, I, who reside on the far side of Pendle Hill, would have lived in the diocese of Lichfield. It extended from the River Ribble to well south of Coventry. In fact, this was a come down. Lichfield was briefly the seat of an archbishop at the end of the eighth century, when Offa was king of Mercia and powerful enough to thumb his nose at Canterbury.
My guide for worshipping the befittingly magnificent cathedral is Henry James, who writes: “You have not seen it till you have strolled and restrolled along the close on every side, and watched the three spires constantly change their relation as you move and pause.”
The west front, with its saints, apostles, kings and patriarchs, is like a vertical necropolis. Sir George Gilbert Scott added them in the mid-19th century, believing it restored the cathedral to its original medieval glory; Roundheads had ravaged the building during the English Civil War. Not that such religious conflict was new here. Radical Anabaptist minister Edward Wightman, from Burton upon Trent, was the last person in England to be burned at the stake, on the market square; a historical marker records the event.
The cathedral interior is a vaulting, geometrically satisfying upturned ship of stone. In the Chapter house are the eighth century Lichfield Gospels (also known as the St Chad Gospels – after Lichfield’s first known bishop), which have stylistic correspondences with the probably slightly older Lindisfarne Gospels and younger Book of Kells. In the marginalia are some of the earliest examples of Old Welsh.
The other great ecclesiastical treasure, found in 2003 during routine excavations, is a carved limestone panel depicting the archangel Gabriel, carrying his staff as messenger to the Virgin Mary – who is missing. The British Museum describes it as “the finest of several foreign-influenced religious carvings made in the kingdom of Mercia”. Its maker adapted eastern Mediterranean features such as draped clothing, delicately feathered wings and finely coiffed hair. The angel’s eyes, drilled for glass settings, may emulate a technique used on Byzantine ivories. The piece forms part of one end of a box-like structure, probably a shrine chest – perhaps relating to 7th-century monk Saint Chad.
Lichfield prospered as a staging post for travellers between London and Chester and the Midlands and north-east in the late 17th and 18th centuries. The wealthiest town in Staffordshire, it was an early adopter of underground sewers, paved streets and gas-powered street lighting. Minds were illuminated too. Famous Lichfieldians include dictionary-compiler Samuel Johnson (who called it a “city of philosophers”); his student David Garrick, the acclaimed Shakespearean actor; and slave-trade abolitionist Erasmus Darwin.
Trains built many towns. They shrank others. When Birmingham and Wolverhampton became major commercial nexus, Lichfield was bypassed. Oft-overlooked Romantic poet and botanist Anne Seward captured her home city’s untainted pastoral air in Lichfield – An Elegy: “Around thy spires exclusive graces dwell/For there alone the blended charms prevail/Of city stateliness, and rural dale.”
This is still arguably the case. Lichfield wasn’t a Luftwaffe target, and has retained a fair number of Georgian buildings. As industry has dwindled, Midlanders with the wherewithal have relocated here. Between 1951 and late 1980s the population almost tripled. Today, more than 30,000 people live in the city and three times that in the district. More than two million souls live in the diocese, still the fifth largest diocese in the country.
Things to see and do: Lichfield Garrick Theatre, Beacon Park, Heritage Trail
Jarrow, Tyne and Wear
Only a handful of key labour and industrial history events have passed into the collective consciousness: the general strike; the Jarrow March; and Orgreave and the 1984-5 miner’s strike.
The 1936 Jarrow March was a seminal moment for the British worker, known by people who have never been near the town. It was organised to draw government attention to unemployment. The marchers’ petition, signed by 12,000 residents, was ignored. In the first episode of Jarrow-born Peter Flannery’s epochal 1996 series Our Friends in the North, it hangs over the relationship between Nicky Hutchinson and his father, Felix – as contested memory and symbol of shame – later resurfacing as poignant bond. The 1984 sculpture on platform two of the Metro station by the late Vince Rea and the Spirit of Jarrow monument, erected in 2001 in a Morrisons supermarket carpark, reminds us some call the march a “Crusade”.
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Religion is Jarrow’s other deep story – always tied to education and cultural heft. As Frank Musgrove writes in his history of the north: “Jarrow in the early eighth century was a truly cosmopolitan centre of learning where Celtic and European traditions met.”
The Codex Amiatinus, the world’s oldest complete Latin Bible, was produced at Monkwearmouth–Jarrow Abbey, a twin-site monastery founded in the late seventh century. Theologian, grammarian and historian Bede spent almost his entire his life there, recording that its founder, inspired by visits to Rome, imported foreign stonemasons and glaziers to construct buildings in the grand style of the empire. Borrowed for the Silk Roads exhibition from Jarrow Hall – which has a replica Anglo-Saxon farm, village and Bede museum – are architectural fragments from a smart Mediterranean-style guest house at the monastery.
Henry VIII did his time-vanquishing, landgrabbing, despotically destructive thing in Jarrow but St Paul’s church has survived, and has a dedication stone on its chancel arch dated 23 April 685 – the oldest in England. With the nearby monastery ruins it is Grade I-listed.
Bede is thought to have never ventured beyond the Kingdom of Northumbria, refusing an invitation from Pope Sergius to visit Rome. Why would he travel? Everything was to be found near at hand, mainly in the library.
Things to see and do: Jarrow Hall: Anglo-Saxon farm, village, and Bede museum, Bede’s Way
Southend-on-Sea, Essex
A pint of Marston’s at The Saxon King on Priory Crescent provides insulation against the stiff easterly gunning up the Thames. The venue is thematically apt for my short pilgrimage – to a small but prominent mound of earth beside a railway bridge, five minutes’ walk away. In the autumn of 2003, in preparation for a road-widening scheme, archaeological surveyors came upon a large Anglo-Saxon burial chamber. The grave is believed to belong to Seaxa, brother of the seventh- century Saxon king Saebert. He was interred with more than 60 high-status objects, including gold foil crosses, a sword and shield, bronze cauldrons and bone dice. The acidic soil had destroyed his bodily remains apart from fragments of tooth enamel. An Italian folding stool, Merovingian coins and a Byzantine bowl indicated a sophisticated lifestyle.
A copper-alloy flagon – on show at the British Museum – was discovered as part of this internationally significant find, which became known as the Prittlewell Princely Burial. It was most probably crafted in Syria in the late sixth or early seventh century, and is adorned with three medallions believed to depict the soldier-saint Sergius – who, along with fellow officer Bacchus, was humiliated and punished and made to wear women’s clothes. Bacchus died during torture. Sergius was also tortured and finally beheaded, “giving up his spirit to the angels”.
The items were possibly brought home by mercenaries, recruited from across the Alps to join a Byzantine war against the Sasanian empire – sometimes called the Last Great War of Antiquity. When they were first placed on permanent display at the local museum in 2019, a leading archaeologist described them as a “British equivalent to Tutankhamun’s tomb”.
The British Museum curators point out that the treasures found in the UK contradict the long-held prejudice that following the Roman withdrawal around the year 400 “Britain was remote and isolated from the wider world”.
Made in Syria – buried in Essex: can’t the Prittlewell Prince’s appurtenances play a part in recasting the image of Southend and this ancient county?
Things to see and do: Prittlewell Priory, Central Museum, Southend Pier
