On Ely (isle)

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Title:     On Ely (isle)
Author: Hilaire Belloc [More Titles by Belloc]

There are two ways by which a man may acquire any kind of learning or profit, and this is especially true of travel.

Everybody knows that one can increase what one has of knowledge or of any other possession by going outwards and outwards; but what is also true, and what people know less, is that one can increase it by going inwards and inwards. There is no goal to either of these directions, nor any term to your advantage as you travel in them.

If you will be extensive, take it easy; the infinite is always well ahead of you, and its symbol is the sky.

If you will be intensive, hurry as much as you like you will never exhaust the complexity of things; and the truth of this is very evident in a garden, or even more in the nature of insects; of which beasts I have heard it said that the most stolid man in the longest of lives would acquire only a cursory knowledge of even one kind, as, for instance, of the horned beetle, which sings so angrily at evening.

You may travel for the sake of great horizons, and travel all your life, and fill your memory with nothing but views from mountain-tops, and yet not have seen a tenth of the world. Or you may spend your life upon the religious history of East Rutland, and plan the most enormous book upon it, and yet find that you have continually to excise and select from the growing mass of your material.

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A wise man having told me this some days before (and I having believed it), it seemed to me as though a new entertainment had been invented for me, or rather as though I had found a bottomless purse; since by this doctrine there was manifestly no end to the number of my pleasures, and to each of this infinite number no possibility of exhaustion; but I thought I would put it to the test in this way: putting aside but three days, I determined in that space to explore a little corner of this country.

Now, although I saw not one-hundredth of the buildings or the people in this very small space, and though I knew nothing of the birds or the beasts or the method of tillage, or of anything of all that makes up a land, yet I saw enough to fill a book. And the pleasure of my thoughts was so great that I determined to pick out a bit here and a bit there, and to put down the notes almost without arrangement, in order that those who cannot do these things (whether from lack of leisure or for some other reason) may get some part of my pleasure without loss to me (on the contrary, with profit); and in order that every one may be convinced of what this little journey finally taught me, and which I repeat--that there is an inexhaustible treasure everywhere, not only outwards, but inwards.

I had known the Ouse--(how many years ago!)--had looked up at those towers of Ely from my boat; but a town from a river and a town from the street are two different things. Moreover, in that time I speak of, the day years ago, it was blowing very hard from the south, and I was anxious to be away before it, and away I went down to Lynn at one stretch; for in those days the wind and the water seemed of more moment than old stones. Now (after how many years!) it was my business to go up by land, and as I went, the weight of the Cathedral filled the sky before me.

Impressions of this sort are explained by every man in his own way--for my part I felt the Norman.

I know not by what accident it was, but never had I come so nearly into the presence of the men who founded England. The isolation of the hill, the absence of clamour and false noise and everything modern, the smallness of the village, the solidity and amplitude of the homes and their security, all recalled an origin.

I went into the door of the Cathedral under the high tower. I noted the ponderous simplicity of the great squat pillars, the rough capitals--plain bulges of stone without so much as a pattern cut upon them--the round arch and the low aisles; but in one corner remaining near the door--a baptistery, I suppose--was a crowd of ornament which (like everything of that age) bore the mark of simplicity, for it was an endless heap of the arch and the column and the zigzag ornament--the broken line. Its richness was due to nothing but the repetition of similar forms, and everywhere the low stature, the muscles, the broad shoulders of the thing, proved and reawoke the memory of the Norman soldiers.

They have been written of enough to-day, but who has seen them from close by or understood that brilliant interlude of power?

The little bullet-headed men, vivacious, and splendidly brave, we know that they awoke all Europe, that the first provided settled financial systems and settled governments of land, and that everywhere, from the Grampians to Mesopotamia, they were like steel when all other Christians were like wood or like lead.

We know that they were a flash. They were not formed or definable at all before the year 1000; by the year 1200 they were gone. Some odd transitory phenomenon of cross-breeding, a very lucky freak in the history of the European family, produced the only body of men who all were lords and who in their collective action showed continually nothing but genius.

We know that they were the spear-head, as it were, of the Gallic spirit: the vanguard of that one of the Gallic expansions which we associate with the opening of the Middle Ages and with the crusades. ... We know all this and write about it; nevertheless, we do not make enough of the Normans in England.

Here and there a man who really knows his subject and who disdains the market of the school books, puts as it should be put their conquest of this island and their bringing into our blood whatever is still strongest in it. Many (descended from their leaders) have remarked their magical ride through South Italy, their ordering of Sicily, their hand in Palestine. As for the Normans in Normandy, of their exchequer there, of what Rouen was--all that has never been properly written down at all. Their great adventure here in England has been most written of by far; but I say again no one has made enough of them; no one has brought them back out of their graves. The character of what they did has been lost in these silly little modern quarrels about races, which are but the unscholarly expression of a deeper hypocritical quarrel about religion.

Yet it is in England that the Norman can be studied as he can be studied nowhere else. He did not write here (as in Sicily) upon a palimpsest. He was not merged here (as in the Orient) with the rest of the French. He was segregated here; he can be studied in isolation; for though so many that crossed the sea on that September night with William, the big leader of them, held no Norman tenure, yet the spirit of the whole thing was Norman: the regularity the suddenness, the achievement, and, when the short fighting was over the creation of a new society. It was the Norman who began everything over again--the first fresh influence since Rome.

The riot of building has not been seized. The island was conquered in 1070. It was a place of heavy foolish men with random laws, pale eyes, and a slow manner; their houses were of wood: sometimes they built (but how painfully, and how childishly!) with stone. There was no height, there was no dignity, there was no sense of permanence. The Norman Government was established. At once rapidity, energy, the clear object of a united and organised power followed. And see what followed in architecture alone, and in what a little space of the earth, and in what a little stretch of time--less than the time that separates us to-day from the year of Disraeli's death or the occupation of Egypt.

The Conquest was achieved in 1070. In that same year they pulled down the wooden shed at Bury St Edmunds, "unworthy," they said, "of a great saint," and began the great shrine of stone. Next year it was the castle at Oxford, in 1075 Monkswearmouth, Jarrow, and the church at Chester; in 1077 Rochester and St Albans; in 1079 Winchester. Ely, Worcester, Thorney, Hurley, Lincoln, followed with the next years; by 1089 they had tackled Gloucester, by 1092 Carlisle, by 1093 Lindisfarne, Christchurch, tall Durham.... And this is but a short and random list of some of their greatest works in the space of one boyhood. Hundreds of castles, houses, village churches are unrecorded.

Were they not indeed a people?... And all that effort realised itself before Pope Urban had made the speech which launched the armies against the Holy Land. The Norman had created and founded all this before the Mass of Europe was urged against the flame of the Arab, to grow fruitful and to be transformed.

One may say of the Norman preceding the Gothic what Dante said of Virgil preceding the Faith: Would that they had been born in a time when they could have known it! But the East was not yet open. The mind of Europe had not yet received the great experience of the Crusades; the Normans had no medium wherein to express their mighty soul, save the round arch and the straight line, the capital barbaric or naked, the sullen round shaft of the pillar--more like a drum than like a column. They could build, as it-were, with nothing but the last ruins of Rome. They were given no forms but the forms which the fatigue and lethargy of the Dark Ages had repeated for six hundred years. They were capable, even in the north, of impressing even these forms with a superhuman majesty.

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Was I not right in saying that everywhere in the world one can look in and in and never find an end to one's delight? I began to explore but a tiny corner of England, and here in one corner of that corner, and in but one thought arising from this corner of a corner, I have found these things.

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But England is especially a garden of this sort, or a storehouse; and in nothing more than in this matter of the old architecture which perpetuates the barbaric grandeur of the eleventh century--the time before it was full day.

When the Gothic came the whole of northern Europe was so enamoured of it that common men, bishops, and kings pulled down and rebuilt everywhere. Old crumbling walls of the Romanesque fell at Amiens; you can still see them cowering at Beauvais; only an accident of fire destroyed them in Notre Dame. In England the transition survived; nowhere save in England is the Northern Romanesque triumphant, not even at Caen. Elsewhere the Gothic has conquered. Only here in England can you see the Romanesque facing, like an equal, newer things, because here only was there a great outburst of building--a kind of false spring before the Gothic came, because here only in Europe had a great political change and a great flood of wealth come in before the expansion of the twelfth century began.

There is one little corner of England; here is another.

The Isle of Ely lying on the fens is like a starfish lying on a flat shore at low tide. Southward, westward, and northward from the head or centre of the clump (which is where the Cathedral stands) it throws out arms every way, and these arms have each short tentacles of their own. In between the spurs runs the even fen like a calm sea, and on the crest of the spurs, radiating also from Ely, run the roads. Long ago there was but one road of these that linked up the Isle with the rest of England. It was the road from the south, and there the Romans had a station; the others led only to the farms and villages dependent upon the city. Now they are prolonged by artifice into the modern causeways which run over the lower and new-made land.

The Isle has always stood like a fortress, and has always had a title and commandership, which once were very real things; the people told me that the King of England's third title was Marquis of Ely, and I knew of myself that just before the civil wars the commandership of the Isle gave the power of raising men.

The ends of many wars drifted to this place to die. Here was the last turn of the Saxon lords, and the last rally of the feudal rebellions of the thirteenth century.

Not that the fens were impassable or homeless, but they were difficult in patches; their paths were rare and laid upon no general system. Their inhabited fields were isolated, their waters tidal, with great banks of treacherous mud, intricate and unbridged; such conditions are amply sufficient for a defensive war. The flight of a small body in such a land can always baffle an army until that small body is thrust into some one refuge so well defended by marsh or river that the very defence cuts off retreat: and a small body so brought to bay in such a place has this further advantage, that from the bits of higher land, the "Islands," one of the first requirements of defence is afforded--an unbroken view of every avenue by which attack can come. There is no surprising such forts.

So much is in Ely to-day and a great deal more. For instance (a third and last idea out of the thousand that Ely arouses), Ely is dumb and yet oracular. The town and the hill tell you nothing till you have studied them in silence and for some considerable time. This boast is made by many towns, that they hold a secret. But Ely, which is rather a village than a town, has alone a true claim, the proof of which is this, that no one comes to Ely for a few hours and carries anything away, whereas no man lives in Ely for a year without beginning to write a book. I do not say that all are published, but I swear that all are begun.

[The end]
Hilaire Belloc's essay: On Ely (isle)

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