Going to Battle for the long view of 1066
From a high room in the gatehouse of Battle Abbey a visitor can see one of the most remarkable pair of views in England. The traceried north window looks over the receding High Street of the Sussex town of Battle – a busy variety of facades, tile-hung, timbered or stuccoed in Georgian symmetry. It is like a setting for a film by Powell and Pressburger.
Falling away from the south window, rich spring grass covers the slopes of the battlefield along which swept the Conqueror’s army like a rising tide against the shield-walls of king Harold.
Are these monastic remains really the site of the Battle of Hastings? Listening to Michael Carter, Battle’s learned curator, this week, convinced me. He knows a thing or two about medieval monasteries, and the top of a dry ridge was no place to build one. Yet it was built, the summit levelled and ranges supported on stilts (with lovely stone vaults).
The whole purpose of the awkward arrangement was to ensure that the high altar of the monastery church stood at the very spot where Harold died. For the aim of bringing over a community of Benedictine monks from Normandy was to have them sing their divine office eight times each day for the dead of either army, Norman or English, and to offer Mass for their souls.
William the victor was glad to be seen a benefactor, and three centuries later, the abbey cellarer was still ordering extra wine for the annual commemoration of their Norman founder. But William had a penitential motive for the endowment too, since penance for the bloodshed he had loosed was imposed on him by the bishops of Normandy.
Despite the perennial water shortage, the monastery of God the Holy Trinity, the Blessed Virgin Mary and St Martin throve, the mitred abbot rivalling the bishop of Chichester. The town on its doorstep boasted goldsmiths and artisans earning a living from the abbey and its visitors.
Integration of abbey and town, Dr Carter argues, is reflected by a carol written in English on a blank page at the back of the only surviving liturgical book from the abbey.
It was first sung around 1500, probably by lay people, if composed by a monk. A cheerful religious song, not a Christmas carol, it was typical of its time, Christocentric and morally directed. “Be mery all with one accorde,” its refrain goes, “And be ye folowers of Crystes worde.” Sorrow increases and envy is bold, it says, when charity is scant and waxes cold. Perhaps it was sung at a church ale, a parish social gathering.
Set to a contemporary tune and recorded by the Schola Gregoriana, it is one of the pieces of music heard in the new English Heritage museum display rooms in the gatehouse, open today. Usually I’m no fan of piped music, but this has a point.
Gatehouse and roofless dormitory and calefactory still stand, but of the fine monastery church no stone remains at ground level. The parish church the monks built is in use today, but the dissolution of the monasteries saw the most convenient abbey building taken as a mansion by Sir Anthony Browne. Oddly, perhaps, he was religiously conservative. In the next century Battle was such a hotbed of recusants it was nicknamed Little Rome.
Since then it has shared the fortunes of the times, bought by an antiquarian duke in the Victorian era and becoming a boarding school in the last century.
England has never been keener on history than today, and the 137,000 visitors last year to the English Heritage part is bound to rise, if only for those incomparable views.