It is Good Friday, if you practice Christianity according to the Gregorian calendar or live in a country where the majority of the population do. The day honours the crucifixion of Jesus, three days before his resurrection on Easter Sunday. It is one of the most important dates in the annual calendar of Christian devotion and has been part of the repertoire of Christian art for as long as there has been Christian art.
As I thought about what to write this week, I wondered whether to talk about Good Friday at all. This isn’t a religious newsletter. I’m not personally a practicing Christian, though I live in a culturally Christian country, and talking about the religious expressions and experiences of people in the medieval world can sometimes blur into seeming to advocate for (or against) those beliefs. But it is Good Friday, and, as I say to students coming to the Middle Ages for the first time, religion was fundamental to how people in much of the past understood their lives.
The calendars of religions, along with the changing of the seasons, crafted the rhythm of people’s lives. The tax cycle, the dates of fairs and markets, the joining and commemorating of battles were all regularly linked to the religious calendar, which in Europe and, for the earlier Middle Ages, large parts of North Africa and West Asia, meant the Christian calendar.
The symbols, stories and languages of religion created codes connecting people up and down social hierarchies and across cultures. Whether the Jataka stories of Buddhism, or the tales of the life of the Prophet or the characters of the Torah and the Gospels, shared religious contexts meant that people could hint at depths of meaning unspoken, allude to beginnings and endings undepicted, mark membership or resistance with just a quote or a colour.
Reading the Middle Ages is almost impossible without an appreciation of the role of religion. Appreciating what that enabled or inspired people to do is often secondary, though. If I read a poem, I’m often looking for very different things from the poet: what does he/she say about state structures? In a sculpture: what can this tell us about the tools they used? A piece of jewellery: I wonder where the gemstones came from?
Don’t get me wrong, I’m a historian through and through - I love looking at the world through those questions, seeing the joins and the discontinuities. But looking one way always means missing other things. Sometimes, and Good Friday seems like just the opportunity, it can be good to look differently, to be an admirer for a moment, a fellow traveller, to look with empathy at what medieval craftspeople did with the frameworks that took for granted to understand their world.
So, in the spirit of that different kind of looking, a Good Friday gift, whether you are celebrating or not, here are three glimpses, all from the north of England, where it is currently blowing a gale outside my window, of fellow travellers, centuries ago, finding ways, through the story of Christ on the cross, to express their hopes, their fears and the creative possibilities of being human.
I have never actually seen the Ruthwell Cross. Getting to it, on a day when the church is open, is probably not hugely difficult but is not trivial, and I’ve not yet made the attempt. My partner and I are working our way around early medieval stone-carved monuments of Scotland, though, so we’ll get there eventually. That said, I’ve known about it since I began my undergraduate studies and first saw a grainy photocopy of it on a handout about ‘Anglo-Saxon Art’.
The Ruthwell Cross is remarkable for several reasons. It is very well preserved for a stone carving from the eighth century, especially considering that a lot of early medieval stone crosses in Britain spent centuries outside and in many cases were carved into quite soft rock. It is really quite large for the breed, and its images have a quite specific, liquid, clean-lined style. (I have no art historical expertise in this region and period: this is a combination of how it looks to me as a subjective observer - that sweet of the woman’s hair that becomes her body reminds me of modernist sculpture from the mid-20th century, and the assurance of people who do have such expertise, that the Ruthwell Cross does indeed stand out as being a bit special.)
It is also, importantly, quite ordinary, in the sense that lots of standing crosses were carved and erected all over early medieval Britain. They served purposes that were widely recognised and shared, even if we don’t understand all of them now. Likely they marked church yards or other holy places. They were clearly intended to stand out and be impressive. Many depict stories, so were meant to remind people or provide a prompt for telling people the stories of Christianity. They may also have been designed to play a part in processions and the marking of landscapes. They were also intended to be attractive and to signal the effort and care devoted to a standing reminder of the crucifixion. A viewer could stand beneath any of these standing stone crosses and imagine themselves, in the tilt of their head upwards, the solidity of the stone in front of them, the embodied experience of standing and looking, to be standing at the foot of the cross on which Christ hung.
That is a dimension of the standing cross art which is brought home powerfully in the case of the Ruthwell Cross because, on one of its faces, perhaps added slightly later than its main carvings, is the second of my offerings in this post: a poem (well, parts of a poem), written in runes, the straight-line based alphabet designed to write Scandinavian languages in what is often termed the Viking Age (c. 7th-10th centuries).
The poem I also remember from my undergraduate studies. I was, as described above, in the process of reading for an essay, looking for quotes to support some argument or other about something or other - Christianisation, state formation, monetary circulation, political agency… all the stuff I’m still interested in now! I remember stopping, going back, reading it again, because it suddenly didn’t matter what I was looking for. It mattered that I had found that thing that makes art powerful to me - the voice of another person (actually, likely, people), absolutely real and tangible in that moment of expression.
The poem is called ‘The Dream of the Rood’ (related to the word ‘rod’ in modern English, and a term for a staff or pole, but which evidently in Christian contexts meant ‘cross’, as in ‘the cross’). You can find the full translation (the one I also read) here. We have the full version from a manuscript that has been dated to around the 8th century as well, so a similar time to the Ruthwell Cross, and one of the earliest pieces of poetry in Old English.
Its premise is this: a man lies down to sleep and has a dream.
It was as though I saw a wondrous tree
Towering in the sky suffused with light,
Brightest of beams; and all that beacon was
Covered with gold. The corners of the earth
Gleamed with fair jewels, just as there were five
Upon the cross-beam. Many bands of angels,Fair throughout all eternity, looked on.
No felon's gallows that, but holy spirits,
Mankind, and all this marvellous creation,
Gazed on the glorious tree of victory.
As he dreams, aware that he is dreaming, the tree speaks to him.
"It was long past - I still remember it -
That I was cut down at the copse's end,
Moved from my root. Strong enemies there took me,
Told me to hold aloft their criminals,
Made me a spectacle. Men carried meUpon their shoulders, set me on a hill,
A host of enemies there fastened me.
And then I saw the Lord of all mankind
Hasten with eager zeal that He might mount
Upon me. I durst not against God's wordBend down or break, when I saw tremble all
The surface of the earth. Although I might
Have struck down all the foes, yet stood I fast.
(OE 39) Then the young hero (who was God almighty)
Got ready, resolute and strong in heart.
The tree tells him of Christ’s death and his burial nearby ‘carved…of bright stone’, of how the cross itself was cut down and buried in a pit, until ‘friends and servants of the Lord learnt where I was, and decorated me with gold and silver’. Finally, the dreamer takes over the narrative again, renewed in his faith:
I prayed then to the cross with joyous heart
And eagerness, where I was all alone,
Companionless; my spirit was inspired
With keenness for departure; and I spent
Much time in longing. Now my hope of life
Is that I may approach the tree of triumph…I have on earth
Not many noble friends, but they have goneHence from earth's joys and sought the King of glory.
With the High father now they live in heaven
And dwell in glory; and I wait each day
For when the cross of God, which here on earth
I formerly beheld, may fetch me fromThis transitory life and carry me
To where there is great bliss and joy in heaven,
Where the Lord's host is seated at the feast,
And it shall set me where I afterwards
may dwell in glory, live in lasting blissAmong the saints. May God be friend to me,
He who once suffered on the gallows tree
On earth here for men's sins.
I remember that my first thought, when I read ‘The Dream of the Rood’ was that it had never occurred to me that somebody in the 8th century would ever write a poem about a talking tree. It was still a shock to me then that medieval people could do lots of things that stereotypes about the Middle Ages in modern culture tell us are special, and that only we moderns can do, like wash and think very smart things and have bizarre, beautiful, trippy visions of an artistic nature. I also remember being entranced by the imagery in these few of lines:
At the fair sight. I saw that lively beacon
Changing its clothes and hues; sometimes it was
Bedewed with blood and drenched with flowing gore,At other times it was bedecked with treasure.
I’ve gone back to it over the years, and each time I do, I find a new line that stands out. Today, it was this powerful play of shadows:
I saw the God of hosts stretched grimly out.
Darkness covered the Ruler's corpse with clouds
His shining beauty; shadows passed across,
Black in the darkness.
Each time I am reminded that we can study the past because, no matter how conscious we must be of all the things that make us different from one another, across time and space, we also share so much, including the desire to express ourselves and be understood.
Which brings me to my last offering for the day:
This beautiful thing is rather closer to home. We walked to it during lockdown, in fact, as a mission to get out and find something medieval and get our permitted fresh air and exercise. The dry-stone wall is almost certainly later than the cross, meaning that the cross was probably not meant to be exactly where it is now, but it probably was made in the small village of Laycock. The village currently has a population of around 1100 and would have been much smaller before the boom in cloth making in Yorkshire from the eighteenth century.
A Ruthwell Cross it ain’t. There are no inscriptions, runic or otherwise, to tell us when or by whom it was made. But it is immediately recognisable, part of the same story as the Ruthwell Cross and ‘The Dream of the Rood’. the stone it is carved out of is not very soft. This would have taken hours of work and fairly simple but critical skills, experience and patience. It, too, was a choice, by people who could have done other things with their time and effort, and chose to do this.
They, too, may have stood beneath it and felt the same embodied sense of participating in the story which drew in the dreamer of the rood and the carvers in Ruthwell. They, too, may have used it to mark their landscape with a reminder of the same story which marked the weeks of their years and the years of their lives. They, too, we must assume, from all that we know about Christianity in medieval Britain, expressed the same hope that
…there need none
Be fearful if he bears upon his breast
The best of tokens. Through the cross each soul
May journey to the heavens from this earth,
Who with the Ruler thinks to go and dwell.
One of the things I learned as an undergraduate medievalist, full of the notion that we are now so different from the people of the past, is that the codes and signs and symbols that create each culture and moment are also how we express things that are universal and the same. So, whether you are celebrating Easter or not, this week, in a hope that the people who carved and wrote centuries ago would also have understood, may peace be upon you.