- What the See Ordered, and What the Obedience Cost It
- The Thinning of the Old Ordering, and the Year Nobody Can Name
- Who Holds the Ground Now
- The Chapter, Its Statutes, and How It Governs Itself
- The Archive, and What Is in It
- The Four Places Nobody Can Find
“Wee kepe the see and wee maye nat seye the rite for alle other men. That is the whole of what was taken fro us, and it hath been ynough to unmake our primacie in thre hundred yeer.”
What the See Ordered, and What the Obedience Cost It
“Thei wolde have of us a forme in wryting, and we gave hem the rite entire as we had kept it. It was nat the forme thei wanted. Thei wanted that we shulde be tolde it.”
Before the war Canterbury was the ordering see of the island church and had been for as long as anybody could establish. It did not own the most land, it was not the richest, and it did not command. What it did was settle the form: how the rite was said, what made a burial proper, which grounds were consecrated under which words, which local practice was a variation, which an error. Every dispute of that kind in the south came to Canterbury and was answered, and the answers were kept.
The quarrel that became the Obedience War was about that function and not about doctrine, which is why it lasted seven years and why it has never properly ended. The demand was for an obedience in writing, submitted to a reconstituted authority elsewhere. The refusal was made on the ground that Canterbury had kept the rite through two hundred years of ruin and buried its own dead with its own hands, and could not now be told the form of it by men who had not been there. Both parties were arguing from the same premise, which was that the ordering belongs to whoever kept it going.
What the war cost Canterbury is easy to state and hard to measure. It lost the argument in the sense that the island-wide ordering function passed elsewhere and did not return. It did not lose its lands, its fabric, its chapter, its right to bury, or the see itself, all of which remained. The whole subsequent history of Canterbury is therefore not the history of a see disappearing, but of a great local see finding out what it is without the primacy by which the rest of the island once knew it.
The county has never accepted the verdict and does not discuss it. Kent will tell a stranger that Canterbury is a cathedral city and will not volunteer anything further, and a direct question about the old primacy is answered by a change of subject so consistent across so many parishes that it has the character of a policy. This is not shame. It is the county’s long-standing view that the matter was decided wrongly by people with no standing to decide it, and that discussing it with outsiders concedes too much.
For a company the practical residue is this. The Kentish parishes will accept a form of burial and a form of consecration that differ in small particulars from what a band will have seen in the shires, and will be immovable about the difference. A working attended in Kent is attended under the Kentish form. A band that suggests otherwise, however politely, has insulted a grievance six hundred years old and will not be told so.
The particulars a band will actually meet are four and are small enough to be missed until they are not. The Kentish form says the words over the ground before the body rather than after, which visiting clergy find awkward and local ones do without thinking. It requires the ground to be named aloud, by whatever name the parish uses, which in four marsh parishes is not the name on any map. It admits a lay person to say the words where no priest can be had, a licence the rest of the realm withdrew six centuries ago and Kent never did. And it closes with a return to the ground at a stated interval, which is the particular that most often surprises an outside company, because a band that attended a burial in Kent is expected to be there again, and will be waited for, and will hear about it for years if it was not.
The Thinning of the Old Ordering, and the Year Nobody Can Name
“Men aske when Canterbury ceased to order for other men, and I can telle hem no yere. The acte hath his date, but custom hath noon; a thing may passe from use by every man doing somewhat elsewhere.”
Osbern Fen was bishop at Canterbury in the first quarter of the fifth millennium, and the records of the see continue long after the war with bishops at the head of them. By 4471, when Canon Alured Fen the Elder was writing from Canterbury, he signed himself canon because that was his own office, not because the bishopric had vanished. His title therefore proves nothing about an extinction that did not occur. What the archive does show is a steady decline in the number of questions of form referred to Canterbury from outside its local see.
The legal transfer happened in 3949. The practical habit changed more slowly. No second instrument extinguished Canterbury’s local see, because none was made and none was needed. Questions that once came here increasingly went to Oxford; correspondents ceased to ask; custom hardened around the new route. Antiquaries who search for an end of the see are therefore looking for an event that did not occur. The uncertain date belongs to the end of Canterbury’s practical primacy, not to its bishopric.
What that leaves is not an institution without a definition. Canterbury is a local see with a cathedral, bishopric, chapter, endowment, burial right, body of custom and unmatched archive. What it lacks is the former power to state the island-wide form. The chapter governs its own business by statutes written for a cathedral under a bishop, and those statutes remain useful precisely because they distinguish chapter business, episcopal referral, and questions that now belong to the ordering elsewhere.
The effect on the whole county is the thing to carry away. Kent has watched a great institution lose one jurisdiction and continue in all the rest, and that is a better lesson in layered authority than extinction would have been. The pilots argue from custom, the landings argue from custom, and the port-reeve holds an office nobody constituted and shuts the quays of the realm’s gate on the strength of having been right for twenty years. The county did not acquire this habit from Canterbury. But it has had, for as long as anybody can remember, the largest possible demonstration that authority may be reduced without being annihilated.
A company working in Kent should therefore stop looking for the paper. It exists less often than elsewhere, and where it exists it is less decisive. The question that actually settles a matter in this county is who has been doing the thing, for how long. That is a harder question to research and a much better one to ask, and the bands that do well here are the ones that learn to ask it in the first week.
Who Holds the Ground Now
“We keep the largest consecrated ground in the south and we keep it with fewer hands than a market town. I am not complaining. I am explaining why we are careful whom we let dig.”
Canterbury holds the biggest single consecrated tract in the southern counties. The precinct, the old cemeteries, the suppressed houses whose grounds came to the chapter, the burial fields outside the walls: together they make an area that would be a considerable parish if it were one. Every acre is consecrated ground, under a form the chapter itself settled and can still demonstrate. It is also, by the plain measure of hands available to walk it, the least attended ground of its size in the realm.
The attending is done as it is done everywhere, which means it is done by the houses and not by the church. The Brethren come when a parish asks and they come in the manner they use everywhere: four from the house, at night, walking, over one night or three. Two are at the working. Two hold the inner mark and do not leave it for any reason at all. The outer bound is held by hired hands, which is where a company comes in, and it is worth being exact about what that hire is, because bands take it expecting to be spectators at something and find out otherwise.
The outer bound is a line the house draws well outside its own work, and the hired party holds it against everything: the curious, the grieving, the drunk, animals, and whatever else the ground produces. The party is not told what is happening inside and will not be. It is told what the line is, what time it starts, and that nothing crosses outward or inward until a named man says so. Bands that have done it describe the same two difficulties, which are that the night is very long and that the hardest people to keep out are relatives.
What Canterbury can do itself is narrow and is real. The chapter consecrates, and its form is the one the south accepts. It can certify that a burial was proper, which decides inheritance often enough that the certificates are forged. It can refuse, and a refusal out of Canterbury is read across six counties. What it cannot do is attend, suppress, or remedy anything, and the distance between consecrating ground and being able to do anything about ground that has gone wrong is the whole of the county’s difficulty in one sentence.
Into that distance the Grey Nails of Kent have moved, and the county’s feelings about them are complicated in a way a company should understand before it takes a side. The order does answer when called and does go where nobody else will. It has also cropped frauds on evidence that would not have satisfied a market court, has burned charm houses on the word of a neighbour, and has never in its history been required to show its working to anybody. The parishes that call it are not fools. They are people who have watched an institution consecrate ground for four hundred years and then be unable to help them with it.
The thing the parishes say about the order, when they say anything, is not about its methods. It is that the Grey Nails come when they are called and go when they are done, which is precisely what the parishes wanted and precisely what they have never had from anybody else. A chapter will refer. A bishop will consider. A borough will ask who holds the ground. The order arrives in a day and a half, does the work, is gone, and the ground is attended for the first time in the memory of anybody living in that place. Set beside that, the frauds, the burnings, the absence of any obligation to show a reason are things the parishes know about, would rather were otherwise, and weigh against a silence of four hundred years. A company that arrives expecting a village to be scandalised has misunderstood what it is looking at.
The Chapter, Its Statutes, and How It Governs Itself
“The statutes provide for bishop, chapter, and the matters beyond them. Our difficulty is not absence but the border: which questions are ours, which are his, and which belong to the ordering elsewhere.”
The chapter of Canterbury is a body of canons, a dean, and the officers that go with them, governing its own affairs by statutes drawn up for a cathedral under a bishop. The bishopric remains. The statutes have not been rewritten around the loss of island-wide ordering, and the chapter therefore reads their old referrals through the settlement that followed the Obedience War.
Matters referred upward now divide into two sorts. Ordinary episcopal questions go within the Canterbury see. Questions that would state, alter, or settle the general form of rite belong to the ordering that passed to Oxford. The act book distinguishes the two, and most of what outsiders call Canterbury’s constitutional difficulty comes from failing to make the same distinction.
The practical effect is a body that can continue everything it habitually does without pretending the war never happened. The fabric, the services, the endowment, the almshouses, the school, the burials and the certificates proceed locally. Episcopal questions rise within the see. A question that would make a new rule of form is not Canterbury’s to settle for the island.
Precentor Hugh Barton, who keeps the act book, is the chapter’s most candid officer about what this means. He says that half the delays blamed on Canterbury begin with a petition sent to the wrong level. The chapter can decide, the bishop can decide, and Oxford can order; what nobody can do is turn one jurisdiction into another by impatience. A company that establishes which of the three questions it has before filing will save weeks.
How the chapter reaches decisions within its competence is by vote of the canons, which is ordinary, and by a convention which is not. A matter that divides the chapter is normally deferred rather than carried where a contested act might manufacture a question of ordering out of an ordinary local dispute. The convention is nowhere written, has been kept for as long as anybody can trace, and is one reason Canterbury refuses more often than it grants.
A company applying to the chapter for anything should therefore establish the level before it asks for the answer. A decision within chapter competence comes quickly and is honoured to the letter. An episcopal matter goes to the bishop. A question of island-wide ordering goes toward Oxford. The officers will tell a company which it has if asked plainly, which is a courtesy the realm’s other institutions do not generally extend.
One standing referral is treated differently and the chapter does not pretend otherwise. It concerns the Four Grounds, the act book’s own name for the burial grounds of the Obedience War. Release of consecrated ground is an episcopal matter, but the Four Grounds were consecrated while the authority to state the form itself was under dispute, so the post-war ordering also touches the question. The chapter minutes the overlap annually rather than pretending that one local act can settle both jurisdictions.
The annual reading has a form and the form is the interesting part. The precentor reads the entry, the entry names the Four Grounds by the names the Obedience War knew them by, and the act book records that the item stands referred. No location is read, none being known. No motion is put. There is no discussion, the chapter treating the matter as one that crosses its ordinary competence, and it goes on to its next business, which for two hundred and some years has been the appointment of the auditors. The reading is the only thing about the Four Grounds that has never lapsed.
The Archive, and What Is in It
“Four hundred feet of shelving and a working lifetime is not enough to read it. I have spent nineteen years finding things in it for other people and I could not tell you what is in the third bay.”
The chapter’s archive is the best in the southern counties and is open, on terms, to anybody with a reason. It holds the records of the Canterbury see before and after the war, the chapter’s own acts continuously since, the muniments of the houses whose grounds came to it, the registers of the parishes in its gift, and a mass of correspondence nobody has ever catalogued.
What makes it valuable beyond Canterbury is the parish material, and it is why the copyists exist. A question about when a custom began, who has exercised a right, which family held what ground and under what description, is answerable here and very often nowhere else, and in a county that argues from custom that is worth a great deal of money.
The copyists are a small profession and the most useful contact a company can have in the county. Judith Harbledown has done it nineteen years, charges by the day rather than by the result, and is candid that what she sells is not scholarship but knowing where things are. A band that needs to establish who has been doing a thing and for how long should hire one before it does anything else.
The gaps in the archive are as instructive as the contents and there are three of consequence. The correspondence of the other party to the Obedience War, which is not here and is not anywhere. The chapter’s own records for two periods in the fourth millennium, lost to a fire that is documented. And the material relating to the four burial sites of the war, which is present, is complete, and is useless, because it describes them against landmarks that no longer stand.
The terms of access are simple and are enforced. An application in writing, stating the purpose. Nothing removed. Nothing copied without the precentor’s leave, which is given freely for parish material and reluctantly for the chapter’s own acts. And a rule, introduced within memory after an incident the chapter does not discuss, that nobody reads alone.
A company will find the archive the single most productive place in Kent for the work it is actually hired to do, and the least appreciated. Six weeks in this building with a copyist would answer more of the questions this county cannot answer than any amount of walking the ground, and no band has ever been commissioned to spend six weeks in a building.
What is actually in the building, for a company that could get six weeks, is worth setting out so that somebody eventually commissions it. The act books run unbroken except for the Obedience years. The visitation articles run from before them and record, parish by parish, what the archdeacon asked and what he was told, which is the only systematic account anybody has of what the Kentish parishes were doing about their ground in any century. There are institution rolls, terriers, fabric accounts, and a class of paper the catalogue calls miscellanea that runs to eleven feet and has never been listed. The librarian will say, to anybody who asks, that the four grounds are probably locatable from the terriers and the visitation articles together, that it would take a season, and that in her twenty years nobody has asked her whether it could be done, only whether it had been.
The Four Places Nobody Can Find
“Thei are writ in the boke ageynst a gate, a crosse, and a fielde that had a name. The gate is doun, the crosse is doun, and the fielde hath thre names now and noon of hem the olde one. Wee knowe that thei are, and wee knowe nat where.”
The Obedience War left something over four thousand burials in at least nine places. Five are known, located, walled and attended in the ordinary way: the precinct, the two great fields outside the walls, and two smaller grounds the chapter has always maintained. The other four are described in the chapter’s records and cannot be found.
The descriptions are perfectly clear and are perfectly useless, which is the exact condition of the silted harbours on the coast and of the plots on the shingle ness. Each is given against landmarks: a gate, a cross, a named field, a building, a road junction. Every one of those landmarks has gone, in a city that was besieged, burnt in part, rebuilt twice, and has renamed its fields at least three times since.
The chapter has tried. There have been four searches in six hundred years, the most recent of them in 4574 and so within living memory for a few, all conducted from the documents, none of which involved digging. The searches produced candidate locations for two of the Four Grounds and agreement about neither. The candidates are known to the precentor, are not written down, and are the reason two particular applications to build have been refused in the last century. One was at Hackington and one was at Fordwich, which the precentor will neither confirm nor trouble to deny.
What the chapter does instead is what the coast does. It refuses. Any application to break ground within a defined area outside the old walls is declined, without a stated reason, and has been declined uniformly for long enough that the city has stopped applying. The area is larger than the candidate sites because the chapter does not know where they are, and the city regards the whole arrangement as an obstruction and complies with it.
Whether the ground is stable nobody can say, which is the honest position and is the chapter’s own. It has been undisturbed for six hundred years. Nothing has been reported from any part of the refused area within record. Against that, ground consecrated during a war in which Canterbury’s authority to state the general form was being contested and later transferred elsewhere, holding the dead of that war, unlocated, unattended and unmarked, is every condition the manuals warn of assembled in one place.
A company working anywhere around Canterbury outside the walls should establish, before it puts a spade anywhere, whether it is inside the refused area, and the precentor will tell it. The answer is free, takes an afternoon, and is the difference between a commission and the sort of incident after which the chapter dismisses a band and the county hears about it within the week.
What makes the Four Grounds different from ordinary lost ground is the consecration, and the manuals are exact about why. Consecrated earth does not become unconsecrated by being forgotten: the hallowing stands, the obligation to attend it stands, and the parish that owed the attendance has ceased to exist. Reconsecration wants an incumbent with standing and there is none. So the Four Grounds are in the one condition the whole apparatus of the realm has no answer for, which is ground that is holy, unattended, and unfindable, and the chapter has been quietly refusing applications over it for six hundred years rather than say so.
What the chapter does instead of saying so is a practice rather than a policy, and it is the nearest thing to an answer six hundred years have produced. Every application touching the four is refused on the ground that the place is not identified, which is true, and the refusal is minuted and copied to the archdeacon. The archdeacon, at every visitation since the Obedience, has put one article to the parishes that might conceivably stand over any of them, asking whether there is within the parish any ground reputed holy that the incumbent does not serve. The article is answered every time. It has produced, across six centuries, nineteen returns naming a place, of which eleven were shown to be something else, six were never followed up, and two an archdeacon of the day went to see himself. Neither of the two was reconsecrated. In both cases the visitation book records that the ground was found to be already hallowed.