Here is a major cathedral. Ely is known to all as the Ship of the Fens. It has been drifting past me all my life. When I was a child, my mum would drive my twin and me to the Norfolk coast on Friday evenings. My dad would come later on the train after work, but she was proud to get us both there herself. She would wake us to Ely as we passed it. The fens of East Anglia are flat and wet marshland and Ely is the second smallest of the episcopal towns, so you could see the cathedral from a long distance, and for a long time, often with fog rising round it and often, from the time of night, with the fog ablaze with sunset. Experts are surprised the building can stand and not sink on the wet land, but it stands and does not sink. It holds what Batsford and Fry call its “commanding and isolated situation”.

Ely has a long history of brave unlikely stands and, though my twin and I didn’t know it in the car, we were born on the climactic day of it all. The cathedral’s history begins in 673 with Aetheldreda, princess of East Anglia and England’s first female saint. She founded a religious house on her own lands on the site of the cathedral. In 870 the Danes sacked Ely and put the Saxons to the sword. But in the next century the Saxons crept back and the abbey grew rich. Then came 1066, the most famous date in our calendar, still the year that English children know first and best. We had the Battle of Hastings and the English crown fell to William of Normandy, William the Conqueror.

But Ely did not fall. Insurrections against the Normans were brutally crushed in the following years. Rebels against the “Norman yoke” were killed in their thousands, most famously in the “Harrying of the North” in 1069-70. But Ely was an isle then and its waters, swamps, bogs, meres, reed beds and rivers were hard for the Norman armoured cavalry to travel.

Resisters gathered to Ely. And they gathered to the leader there, Hereward the Wake, Hereward the Outlaw. “He bravely led them out”, the Anglo Saxon Chronicle tells us, when the Normans came. He fought them off once. But on 27 October 1071, the invaders conquered Ely and “Hereward’s last stand” became national legend. In Victoria’s reign Charles Kingsley published “Hereward the Wake”, subtitled “Last of the English!”

They were Englishmen; and they would rather die in their own merry England than conquer new kingdoms in the cold northeast. They were sworn, the leaders of them, to die or conquer, fighting the accursed Frenchman. They were bound to St. Etheldreda the holy virgin, beneath whose roof they stood, to defend against Frenchmen the saints of England whom they despised and blasphemed, whose servants they cast out, thrust into prison, and murdered.

When the Nordic ally offers them refuge in his land, “they thanked him: but they would live and die Englishmen. … And every Englishman shouted, ‘Hereward has right! We will live and die fighting the French!’”

On the first defence, when Hereward’s wife Torfrida worries “they are numberless”, Hereward says “Would they were! Let them come on, thick and threefold!” When the Normans win:

Hereward and Torfrida lay side by side upon the heath. She was shivering with cold and horror. He laid his cloak over her; put his arm round her.

“Your stars did not foretell you this, Torfrida.” He spoke not bitterly, but in utter sadness.
She burst into an agony of weeping. “My stars at least foretold me nothing but woe, since first I saw your face.”
“Why did you marry me, then?” asked he, half angrily.
“Because I loved you. Because I love you still.”
“Then you do not regret?”
“Never, never, never! I am quite happy,—quite happy.”

When the two first meet and fall for each other, Kingsley puts love beautifully.

If Torfrida could have foreseen, and foreseen, and foreseen—why, if she were true woman, she would have done exactly what she did, and taken the bitter with the sweet, the unknown with the known, as we all must do in life, unless we wish to live and die alone.

It is a story and a romance that stirs deep and old parts of me. The friend I went with last weekend muttered “they still rule us, they still speak French, they still sniff at us, they still rule us.” I am scared for England too.

But then we ordered croissants. And the events of 1071 came out all right. After all, the cathedral we were there to see was a Norman masterpiece started nine years later.

Most of the building I do find, with Batsford and Fry, a little “ abstracted and sleepy”. Those critics are moved to pleasant vocabulary: the Galilee porch is one of the “flowers” of thirteenth-century building, Lady Chapel is a “springtime” of fourteenth-century carving. It is “Romanesque” exemplary in the “Decorated” style. For me that is all too safe. I want a cathedral to put the fear of god in me. I want it to be “awful” in Shakespeare’s sense of the word, inspiring and terrifying. Ely feels too warm and welcoming.

However, there is a great feature. After a tower collapse in the 14th century, the subprior Alan of Walsingham took an “immense opportunity”. He channelled his “energy and organising capacity” into constructing a huge, octagonal “lantern” in the roof at the crossing.

The construction of the lantern is even more incredible than the idea that the stone for the cathedral was first paid for in eels. To “float”, the lantern had to be made of wood. All England was searched for oaks big enough. The invisible supporting beams are 63 feet long and approximately 3 feet square. They were brought by water from Bedfordshire, and then the roads and bridges into Ely had to be strengthened for their transportation. All sources point out that the lantern would tax engineers today, in the age of concrete and steel. Jenkins says that “Modern engineers continue to marvel at the skill of these masons and carpenters, working with none of the tools of modern construction.” B&F call it “a structural achievement of the first magnitude”.

But what is it like? Beautiful. I could never do better than Jenkins on the approach: “we become aware of a dramatic sense of space ahead. Suddenly the roof opens and a great opening soars upwards. It is one of the most exhilarating moments in English architecture.”

I love that. And it was enhanced even more for me because when I went an orchestra – Ely Sinfonia – were rehearsing Vaughan Williams, Elgar and Malcolm Arnold underneath. It was tremendous, gorgeous drama and all so ravishing. Aetheldreda’s life is painted up there. The lighting effect from the octagon’s windows forms “a luminous pool” high in the centre of the church.

The town is nice too. There is Oliver Cromwell’s childhood home and a great bookshop that I loved called Topping and Company.

The cathedral’s shabbier moments have moved critics to quite funny histrionics. Our friend Austus Pugin burst into tears and cried “O God, what has England done to deserve this!” But it’s been fixed up since then and now we can all be with Jenkins: “After each visit, I am left in a state of wonder that England could have created such a place eight centuries ago.”

Rankings? Love love love love love! Third!

Peaceable Land 10 - What I'm Thrusting At

George Monaghan

·

September 8, 2024

Read full story