When Cambridge University was founded in 1209 (by some monks who got kicked out of Oxford), Barton was already a thriving village. It’s mentioned 3 times in the Do
mesday Book. (The Domesday Book is an account book instituted by William the Conqueror to try to get a handle on the country he’d just invaded.) And there are records of a church in the village dating from the 12th century. The present church, built about 1300, sits at the center of the village, just across a lane from Olivia’s school. Like many of the oldest churches in the area, it’s a simple Norman structure, made of stone. It feels thick and substantial, as though, having been around for 700 years, it has no intention of going anywhere soon.
Before the Reformation the inside of the church was filled with paintings
, which were then covered over by Cromwell’s troops (Cromwell actually hails from around here; I’ll have to do a post on him at some point) and remained hidden until 1920, when they were discovered and cleaned. Here’s what they look like now; I thought the knight in the upper left might be St. George, which would be appropriate enough.One day last week, after dropping Olivia off, I wandered into the church. It’s hard to describe the feel of this place. One is struck by a density of historical time that simply has no analogue in North America. People have been present at this site for a thousand years, marking the chapters of their lives: birth, baptism, marriage, death. As is generally the case, the churchyard surrounds the church, so that one is literally encompassed by those who have come, and gone, before. Standing in this church, whatever one’s feelings about religion, it’s impossible not to feel that the urgency of one’s own preoccupations fade a bit as they brush up against everything that has already taken place here.
I am reminded of Philip Larkin’s great poem “Church Going,” which is too long to copy out here (go read it sometime), but which meditates on the many impossibly old and now largely empty churches scattered around the English countryside. It ends like this:
A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognized, and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,
Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,
If only that so many dead lie round.
