Spike Island: The Memory of a Military Hospital. Philip Hoare

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СКАЧАТЬ completion, the monks applied for, and were granted, state aid. The result was a rather more sophisticated building, its importance plain from the inscription on the chapel’s foundation stone – ‘H: DI. GRA. REX ANGL.’, ‘Henry, by the grace of God, king of England’ – and the ornate tracery windows modelled on those of Westminster Abbey, which the King had recently rebuilt, in a style which the Cistercians themselves had imported to England. At a time when architecture was an expression of man’s creativity by God’s grace, gothic had become the predominant aesthetic of an age predicated on religion.

      One hundred years before, Abbot Suger had built the first gothic structure, the Abbey of Saint-Denis outside Paris: his opus modernum in stained glass and stone. The Cistercians appreciated its sharp pointed arches, functional rib vaults and flying buttresses as a reaction against the ungodly excesses of rounded Romanesque arches and their writhing serpents and mythological beasts. They agreed with the reforming mystic St Bernard of Clairvaux, who declared, ‘What are these fantastic monsters doing in the cloisters … What is the meaning of these unclean monkeys, these savage lions, and monstrous creatures? To what purpose are here placed these creatures, half-beast, half-man, or these spotted tigers?’ In decrying such ‘semi-human beings’, the serpents and monsters which may still have lurked in the woods and lakes, St Bernard looked to a new image of God, exorcising the creatures in which a ‘crypto-pagan’ people hardly out of the Dark Ages still half-believed. This was the aim of the Cistercians’ misson: to convert this pagan shore. Their new order would convey the clarity of God’s vision, and conquer the mythical denizens of a wild forest.

      Gothic was as innovatory and as modern as anything by Mies van der Rohe. Like twentieth-century architecture, its buttresses and pillars openly displayed its technological achievements. Load-bearing ribs – a technique later used in skyscrapers – allowed the thin walls between them to be cut away to let in light. The result was a luminescent box, charged to uplift the human soul into sanctity. As God’s light pierced the ‘cloud of unknowing’ between Heaven and Man, so His holy rays shone through the stained glass set in arches that pointed Heavenwards; rays almost as visible as those emitted by a halo’d Christ in a medieval illumination. Abbot Suger named it the ‘new light’, lux nova; a transcendent vision for those who beheld it, at a time when the sense of sight was regarded as so powerful that it could affect the object at which you looked, and vice versa. To look upon the true image of God, for instance, would, were it possible, mean instant destruction, so He was represented by a colour, ‘the strange blue of twelfth-century glass which seems to filter to our souls the essence of other skies in other worlds’. Light itself was God-given. Thus mediated, Netley’s abbey was also acknowledging its dedicatee, the Blessed Virgin, herself known as the ‘window of Heaven’, fenestra coeli, an image through which, like an icon, the unseeable God might be vouchsafed.

      As its aspiring gothic windows pierced the walls like thorns in her son’s heart, their glass stained with the sin of the world, so the chapel impressed its cruciform plan, Christ’s mark, into the Hampshire soil. And by granting the monks ‘free warren in their demesne lands of Netley, Hound, Sotteshall [Satchell] and Sholing’, Henry III’s patronage gave them full authority to impose their Christian order on the land.

      It may have been suitably ‘horrible’ as a site, but there were also good economic reasons for the monks’ choice of Netley. Here were lush pastures for their sheep and cattle, fertile land for their crops, and plentiful fish and oysters in Southampton Water, supplemented by the abbey’s own freshwater stewponds. A grange farm was set up, along with a lodge to receive lepers barred from entering Southampton – an isolation ward in which the afflicted could be tended by novice monks in an already isolated site. Thus did the Cistercians reinvent the land in their own image – the image, by association and intent, of God.

      The result was a self-sufficient community, maintaining its distance while continuing Christ’s mission in caring for the sick. Its proximity to water was an important spiritual aspect: water held traditional healing powers for the body and the soul, and Netley’s abbey would provide for both. And just as their new settlement sought to express Christ’s message, so the monks emulated their Saviour’s simplicity. They wore white habits and black scapulas without shirts underneath, slept on straw beds, rose at midnight to pray and remained silent for most of their day; they ate no meat unless in sickness, and transgression could result in solitary confinement or flogging. Such a regime was more like that of a prison, a medieval Spike Island, but their ordered lives and monastic traditions set the precedent for the industrialised society to come, just as their beliefs determined the order of life around them.

      Bound by their vow of silence, protected by royal patronage and geographically removed from the sometimes dangerous nearby port (though trading with it in wool and other produce), the abbey’s monks could remain secure in their wordless isolation, as though their own castle walls, gothic rationality and implicit faith could keep out the barbarian world. They escaped the bloody raids of the 1330s, protected by their religious status and French origins, although not immune to the prevailing sense of instability as the taxation returns for February 1341 noted, being short of ‘8s of their usual value as a good part of the corn land lies left fallow through dread of foreign invasion and the marauding of the king’s sailors’. But then came an invasion no one could ignore.

      According to the contemporary historian Henry Knighton of Leicester, the bubonic plague of 1348 entered England through Southampton, via fleas carried on the backs of rats and men up the estuary, injecting the country with its terrible bacillus. Other ports would lay claim to this dubious honour, but a later historian noted that ‘the town suffered much from a destructive pestilence which, beginning in China, had swept over the face of the whole discovered globe, and, entering into this island, spent its first fury in this neighbourhood’. The plague would kill half of Southampton’s population, while upriver at Winchester the townspeople were persuaded to parade around the marketplace reciting the seven penitential psalms three times a week; all to no avail as half its populace too would perish.

      As Pasteurella pestis infected the rest of Britain with its flesh-corrupting buboes and noisome stench, culling three million – half the population – Netley’s Cistercians lived on in their lonely place. Around them England was pulled down by the calamity; fields were left untended, entire villages died. The plague was the hell of medieval imagining come to life, an evil miasma that lurked in the air itself, and in turn culture became infected with mortality, disease and decay. It was the plague that gave gothic its darkness: the images of St John’s Apocalypse, memento mori, and most vividly the Dance of Death, a skeleton leading bishops, kings, merchants and beggars alike to their graves in a danse macabre prompted by the shattered nervous systems of the disease’s victims.

      Even Netley’s institutional self-sufficiency could not resist the inevitable change – not least the decline in lay-brothers, either from mortality or desertion, attracted by better working conditions to a world in which labour was at a premium. As the devils of disease punished the wicked, the halt in civilisation’s progress became manifest in its buildings. Before the epidemic, gothic had begun to develop a decadent enflorescence of ornate foliage and lascivious curves. The plague curtailed such extravagance (not least by decimating the workforce). It was God’s retribution for Man’s decadence – a moral decay which also appeared to have afflicted Netley, succeeding where the bubonic bacillus had failed. Society became more materialistic and more sceptical, paradoxes which made the religious orders prey both to apostasy and their own sensuality. By the end of the fifteenth century, Pope Sixtus IV had relaxed the rules governing closed orders, and the populace now began to turn against its white-robed neighbours, accusing them of laxity of observance and immorality. When Henry VIII began his move towards reformation, his supporters agreed that such orders had become corrupted by their own privilege.

      Yet Netley was hardly a wealthy estate. By 1535 the population of monks had fallen to just seven, with thirty-two staff, £43 worth of plate and jewels, and an annual income of just £100. Establishments of its size were easy targets for suppression – especially by those who might stand to СКАЧАТЬ