In the seventeenth century the Independents, as they were known, tended to get subsumed into the whole Puritan movement. The Leyden group of separatists from which the Pilgrim Fathers sprang included Congregationalists from East Anglia; the Mayflower and the Pilgrim Fathers would beget American Puritanism and American Congregationalism with it. But there is, and always has been, a fine distinction between Puritanism and Congregationalism. For the Puritans the church was a national institution. Congregationalism sought independence for individual churches. In its institutional form it is doing as well today as any of the Nonconformist churches. But it is its spirit that has Church of England clergy uneasy, it seems, within the climate of quota confusion and resentment. They may indeed do well to watch their backs. In the last resort, for most worshippers loyalty and commitment is to their local church, just as it always has been, and never mind the bishops and their palaces. Or the Church Commissioners and their committees.
My grandmother and aunt, both devout Christians, were also church tourists. They introduced me to church tourism when I was too ignorant and too young to appreciate what was happening. On any drive or ‘trip’ close attention was paid to churches. As soon as a spire or tower was spotted, we homed in on it. Assessment began as they went through the lych-gate: good Romanesque doorway, pity about the nineteenth-century windows, those corbels are interesting. Inside, comment and criticism intensified: fascinating misericords, the screen must be very early, lovely hammerbeam roof, hideous kneelers (my grandmother). I trailed behind, staring vacantly, wondering how soon we would be allowed to leave and then maybe stop off somewhere for a cream tea. If the tour was unendurably prolonged, I would sneak out and sit in the porch, glumly reading the Sunday school announcements and the flower-arranging rota (empathizing with whoever it was around here who got landed with the potted-meat jars).
Years later, I caught the bug myself. By then I was living in Oxfordshire with husband and children and I had bought all extant volumes of Pevsner's Buildings of England with my first book advance. I ‘Pevsnered’ every Oxfordshire church (a verb which has not yet achieved the dictionaries, but should). On any car journey, the relevant volumes of Pevsner were stacked up on the back seat. We did the recommended perambulation of market towns and saved till last the church – the treat and centrepiece – tacitly respecting the significance of religion as both a historical and architectural phenomenon. We entered churches as unbelievers, but acutely conscious of every resonance. All that beauty, all that faith. So much intransigence, oppression, exploitation, intolerance. So much suffering, heroism, endurance. And every bit of it somehow represented and recorded by brick, stone and glass.
Landscape mutates. It must. The landscape of this country bears the imprint of much that has happened, not least the landscape of cities, towns and villages. Religion and religious change have been central to our history; churches are the most eloquent of all those physical testimonies. I remember that once during those church visits of my adolescence I emerged from boredom and incuriosity to ask about the headless effigies over a doorway. And thus learned about iconoclasm and had a sudden startling insight into the power of prejudice and conviction and coercion. That such things could finger – could have fingered – that slumbering Devon village. And I remember too a moment of aesthetic perception – looking up at the fan-vaulting of a cathedral and realizing that it mirrored the canopy of a beech wood and must have been thus inspired. For a while the lust for a cream tea receded, and the place came alive.
The established churches of this country are today marginalized institutions. Since about 1700 we have been both a secular and a tolerant society by comparison with most other European countries. But the slide towards secularization has been most precipitate in the twentieth century. Patterns of church attendance vary of course between country and city; industrialization meant a steady erosion of the traditional Sunday church-going habit. In 1851 around 40 per cent of the population would have attended at least one church service a week. It was the heyday of the village church as community centre and social indicator, as described by Owen Chadwick, the historian of the Victorian Church:
The squire was in his pew, his friend the parson in his stall, respectable farmers in pews, and on the benches the labourers in smock frocks, delicately embroidered at front and back, their wives often in scarlet flannel shawls. The men sat passive, not following in books, some unable to read, but silent with a solid attentiveness, not liking to be absent because of the squire or the farmer or habit, but in no way sorry to be there, men without hostility and with quiet acceptance.
The ‘quiet acceptance’, if such it was, must surely have been a surface feature, if you think of agricultural unrest both earlier and to come, but the general picture is clear, and very similar to that conjured up by Richard Gough, writing of his community of 150 years earlier. The Victorian Church underwrote society itself.
By the early twentieth century church-going was already a minority custom. Overall attendance had fallen to around 25 per cent, with 20 per cent in cities and 30 in the country. The village church was evidently clinging on with a little more success. But religion was still a central feature in Edwardian society. Two thirds of all infants were baptized. Church parade was compulsory in the army as college chapel was at university. It was as the century progressed that defection accelerated. By 1950 the national rate of church attendance had dipped to 10 per cent (the end-of-century figure was 8 per cent, and falling). That was the point at which I was sitting in the customary pew at Rodhuish, with a dozen or so other people. Since the total population of the hamlet was then around seventy, St Bartholomew's was not doing too badly.
Why have most people ceased to go to church? Clearly there can be no simple answer, but perhaps first of all one needs to ask why any go in the first place. Are they in search of spiritual solace or does membership of a church fulfil some other need? For many people both may be true – certainly that was the case with my grandmother. And of course a church in order to flourish needs both factors to apply. People must feel that religious belief is a comfort and a support and they must also need the reassurance of a like-minded community. This last is the sociological and anthropological explanation for religious adherence, through space and time: in the words of Emile Durkheim, ‘Rites are the means whereby a social group reaffirms itself.’
The Roman Catholic Church has been more successful in retaining membership than the Church of England or the Nonconformist churches, for obvious reasons. The looser and less insistent connection between the Protestant churches and their adherents was always bound to make them more vulnerable to the tide of secularization. It is when the age level of church attenders rises that the institution is in danger. When church-going is a family activity and the commitment of children is fostered by that of their parents, the priest doesn't have to worry too much. And the Roman Catholic Church sees to it that this happens. Interestingly, the demise of Sunday schools seems to have played a significant part in the falling-off of faith, or at least of church attendance, among the Protestant churches. Back in the early part of the twentieth century, they still retained some of their Victorian prestige as valued sources of educational opportunity. But they also provided free child care for harassed and overworked mothers – no wonder they were popular and no wonder the church recognized that they were expedient.
When visiting a church these days I look out for evidence of a Sunday school, and it is often there, in the form of a lavish display of pinned-up artwork. There has been much finger-painting of baby Jesuses and camels and palm trees. Sometimes there is a nook beside the vestry with a low table and small chairs. And I remember that my own first-ever experience of a school situation was a Sunday school. It took place in the grounds of the Bishop's Palace in Khartoum, in steamy Sudanese heat. I was about nine and had never been to school, so I shared the awed sense of privilege of the Victorian child. I thought it was wonderful. The exercise book and sharpened pencils. The other children, also
done up in Sunday best: clean cotton frocks, white socks and hair-ribbons for the girls, shorts for the boys, with shirt and tie. We read a chapter from Genesis and then answered questions. My hand shot up: I was a child well versed in the Authorized Version, tales of Greece and Rome, The Arabian Nights and not much else. We copied out a psalm in best handwriting. We drew a picture of the Holy Family on the flight into Egypt (no difficulty with palm trees and camels – most of us had grown up knowing nothing else). I got red ticks and a gold star and went home a devout member of the Church of England. I'd have been theirs for life, if they'd cared to follow through.
For a church to thrive, recruitment is crucial. Ideally, that recruitment which stems from established family practice. Generation follows generation and the congregation remains well stocked of a Sunday. And for this to happen it seems that there has to be this fusion of spiritual and social needs. In the twentieth century, both have been seriously eroded. Many people still believe in a God, but the requirements of believers have changed. Belief has become something more personal, a private commitment rather than a public affirmation. In 1938 a Church of England Commission could talk of ‘a living God, on whose act of will creation itself depends, and who has a purpose for mankind, to accomplish which He is Himself active in history’. In the wake of the First World War, this seems a rash statement. The theodicy question and David Hume rise up in indignation: ‘Is he willing to prevent evil but not able? Then is he impotent. Is he able but not willing? Then is he malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Whence then is evil?’ After 1945, those claims were wisely dropped. The Church of England's interpretation of the nature of God today would seem to be rather different. But while that 1938 declaration may have looked a touch archaic even then, it is of course entirely accurate in terms of the traditional understanding of the divine role. God directs and intervenes. Things happen by His grace; He disposes. He thus ordains society, and not just private fates.
But when the social order changes dramatically, as it has over the course of the last century, people's perception of society changes, as do their communal requirements. Organized religion flourishes in social groups such as the enclosed unit of the village, or work-centred communities based around mining, fishing and agriculture, for example. Nineteenth-century changes in patterns of employment and the advent of cheaper transport did much to erode the self-contained community. Industrialization opened the way to wider influences and other ways of bonding. The pub, the football pitch, the Sunday outing. When the Sunday church service is no longer the only time and place at which you can be sure of meeting up with friends, neighbours and relatives, then a subtle aspect of its allure is threatened. ‘I'll be able to have a word with Mrs So-and-So on Sunday,’ my grandmother would say. After the service, there was much standing around and chatting outside the church. There still is at St Bartholomew's, and long may it continue.
Any church is also a museum and an art gallery. One of the most consistently rewarding moments when Pevsnering a church is turning to the furnishings section after the main perambulation. There you are confronted with the tangible evidence of individual commitment over the centuries, the memorial plaques and the brasses and the tombs and the effigies. Those who wanted to make sure that we would take note of their names – and their status and their piety. And there also is the display of creativity. The gifts lavished upon the church in the name of God – and the salvation of the donors' souls. The carved screens and the paintings and the lecterns and the brass-bound Bibles. The embroideries.
I always take a look at the kneelers, in tribute to my grandmother. The salvation of souls is out of fashion now as a motive for church embellishment. Kneelers usually stem from a local body – the Mothers' Union, the Women's Institute, or a craft organization – and would seem to be prompted by social involvement and, perhaps, a sense of commitment to the church. My grandmother was a superb needlewoman and her inspection of kneelers was that of a connoisseur. They seldom came up to scratch. Sometimes they gave such offence that we had to curtail our visit to that particular church. They invariably fell short in terms of either colour combinations or technical achievement: harsh primary colours, patterns taken from a book, nothing more ambitious than a basic cross-stitch or, at most, a stab at the Berlin woolwork so beloved of the nineteenth century.
The chapel at Rodhuish is of basic simplicity within – whitewashed walls, tiled floor, simple carved pews. Modest pulpit – not that of the potted-meat jar ordeals, which I remember as a large, ornate and forbidding structure. There are wrought-iron candlesticks at the ends of the pews, and a brass pair on the altar; and a fine candelabra by Jim Horrabin, a distinguished artist-blacksmith who lives locally. Nearly all the rest of the furnishings were created by my aunt and grandmother, over the years. Rachel's metalwork sculpture of Jacob wrestling with the angel stands near to the altar. Her carved altar screen with trumpeting angels at either end holds up a linen altar curtain topped by a border of my grandmother's superb green and blue wool tapestry. More of her work frames the altar itself. There are two large kneelers, one at either side of the altar. And from the lectern hangs a banner in Assisi work – a flight of blue and white swallows.
Looking today at this work – at my grandmother's chair-seats, her sampler, the evening bag she made for me when I was seventeen, at the piles of Assisi-work mats and tray cloths and table runners that I would never dare to use – I recognize a remarkable talent. Indeed, pursuing the whole matter – conjuring up information on textiles and embroidery in the British Library to find out what she was doing – I realize that she was in the top league, in the first flight. She was a mistress of the art, or craft, or whatever it is. I pore over illustrations of embroidery from museums and galleries and see that her work is just as good, indeed much of it is better. And all through my adolescence I sat at the other end of the sofa of an evening, while she planned and pondered and stitched, and I paid little or no attention. At one point, she put needle and canvas into my hands and tried to get me going. Hopeless. No powers of application, no talent.
Now I understand her brisk dismissal of run-of-the-mill church embroidery. She was the professional casting an eye at an exhibition of Sunday painters. She knew quite well that what she was doing was of another order. Indeed, she exhibited her work occasionally. But would never have sold it, which makes the term professional inappropriate, I suppose. She did it in the long tradition of women making beautiful things at home for their own consumption or that of their friends, and to adorn the local church.
She did Assisi work and what seems usually to be called Winchester work. The Assisi work came first. This is a special form of cross-stitch on linen, using a method known as voiding, in which it is the background that is embroidered rather than the design, which then stands out in white or cream linen against the darker stitching, traditionally red, though blue and green are also used. The principal motifs are nearly always symmetrically arranged animal pairs, mostly birds, which are then surrounded with filigree scrollwork in Holbein stitch, a double running stitch used also to outline the motifs. A large Assisi-work piece of my grandmother's has a border of dove pairs tumbling around the central square, a crisp and elegant harmony of blue and cream. In another, the outlined creatures look like stylized dolphins. Both the designs and technique of Assisi work are based on an ancient Italian tradition reaching back into the Middle Ages, but which had fallen into disuse until revived in the early 1900s in an Assisi convent as a means for poor women to supplement the family income. Tablecloths and napkins were turned out instead of the time-honoured altar cloths and chasubles, and a nice little line established for the tourist trade. Maybe that is where my grandmother first saw the work, on one of the Grand Tours of her girlhood. The voiding idea, incidentally, seems to have perhaps come from the technique of woodcuts, way back, while Holbein stitch gets its name from Hans Holbein the Younger, many of whose paintings show clothes embroidered with double running stitch. And the favoured bird motifs surely have reso
nances of St Francis.
Assisi work is a highly formalized craft. Most of the patterns would have come out of books, but the tried practitioner plays around with these. My grandmother's patterns are not quite like other people's. Her doves are somehow plumper and more skittish, her dolphins distinctly idiosyncratic. And the blue and white banner of swallows at Rodhuish is entirely her own design, I suspect, while remaining true to the basic principles of the craft.
At some point in the 1930s my grandmother discovered Winchester work. This now became her favoured medium, and the ensuing twenty years or so were her most richly productive, when she was in her fifties and sixties. Winchester work is named for the finest flowerings of the style, which are the 360 kneelers, along with alms bags, cushions and other furnishings created by the Winchester Broderers and presented to the city's cathedral in 1936. But thereby hangs a tale, of which the heroine is a splendid lady called Miss Louisa Pesel. Miss Pesel was a Yorkshirewoman born in Bradford in 1870 who settled in Hampshire in mid-life. She was by then a renowned craftswoman who had been presented with a gold chatelaine (a decorative pendant worn on the lapel, apparently) by the Worshipful Company of Broderers in 1914 in recognition of her work for the study and revival of embroidery in England. But she had also spent five years in Athens as designer to the Royal Hellenic School of Needlework and Lace. A set of specially commissioned samplers by her is in the Victoria and Albert Museum. She was the author of a string of publications such as Practical Canvas Embroidery, Stitches from Eastern Embroideries, and so forth. One of these titles has a pompous introduction by the then Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford, which I would have slung right back at him had I been Miss Louisa Pesel:
One of the ways in which civilized man [sic], the victim of boredom, machinery, mass-production and standardized culture, tries to recapture something of the zest of a primitive life of personal achievement is the making with his [sic, again] own hands of beautiful things. The skill required for such work is often slight; and dexterity has not yet ceased to be the birthright of the race. But the ability to make a thing which is not only a ‘good job’ but also beautiful is a rare gift, and much first-rate craftsmanship goes to the making of objects which, from poverty or imperfection of design, fail to achieve beauty. Of no craft is this more true than Embroidery… Miss Pesel's admirable handbooks on various traditional stitches come to the assistance of the worker exactly where, in the matter of formal design, he (or she) is weakest…