The Apostle and the Wild Ducks/The Apostle and the Wild Ducks

The Apostle and the Wild Ducks
Last week I learned a historical lesson in some sense by going on a wild-goose chase. Perhaps it might more correctly be described as a wild-duck chase. Not that I had any intention of shooting wild ducks, though the country I visited was, I believe, specially suited to the sport; the country round about the Fens of Lincoln and the Broads of Norfolk. Those eastern flats generally are famous for such wild-fowl, as also for the remains of the rich medieval civilisation founded on the Flemish trade, and for expansive opportunities for the admiration of the sunset; or, for those of suitable habits, of the sunrise. Yet the wild duck I pursued was not entirely symbolical, though he was among other things a symbol. What happened in my own case was merely this: that a friend of mine told me that far in the interior of the Fens, in the heart of a labyrinth of lanes and dykes there was a little church which contained some medieval paintings in remarkable preservation. These pictures were said to represent scenes of medieval sport, dealing especially with ducks. After wanderings which might have led to the other end of nowhere, only that the endless road seemed to be perpetually turning inward instead of outward, we came at last to the place, in a wilderness of dusty grass and stunted and sprawling trees; with one of the great square towers of fine flints, that mark the Norfolk churches, alone filling the empty sky and dwarfing everything at its feet. And it was here that I found the feature that seemed to me a sort of symbol or summary for our understanding of the Middle Ages.

Incidentally, of course that great tower was something of a symbol itself. It was not only a beacon or thing to be seen; it is a symbol of blindness as well as sight. Nothing is so strange in human history as the things men do not see. Over all those flat lands the only mountains were made by men; and they were made by medieval men. For that matter, in a thousand little villages all over England there has been for centuries only one tall, stately ornate and orderly building; all the rest was obvious patchwork and poverty. Yet the Puritans could successfully teach five generations of English people, and especially of East Anglian people, that the men who built the big systematic building were living in savagery and superstition, while the men who still tolerated the little hovels had emerged into liberty and enlightenment. In this case it is curiously true that faith can remove mountains; it can remove the mountain opposite a man's door, if his prejudice has taught him that a mountain is only a myth. But this is a parenthesis; for my purpose here is not concerned with the old English churches in general, but with something that is to be found in this old Norfolk church in particular.

I say it is something that can be found, though at first it seemed rather like something that could not be found. In truth, in that remarkable little fane of the flats, we might be said to have found everything but what we were looking for. There were indeed medieval paintings; and very fine ones, by no means hidden but splendidly displayed. Fronting us as we entered the church door, in a great row across the rood-screen, stood the Twelve Apostles, six on each side, with their rich colours somewhat darkened but their gold in full glow, and their emblems and tools of martyrdom unmistakable. Facing inwards, opposite each other, were two figures of St Michael and St George, treated somewhat in a heraldic manner. I mean the manner that looks arbitrary until we realise that it is decorative. The armament of St George seemed fantastic and top-heavy even for the tilting armour of the fourteenth century; the feathers of St Michael seemed to be sprouting from strange parts of him, as from the body of a monster. Only when we consider it as we do a coat of arms, as a pattern more than a picture, we suddenly realise that every line of it is in exactly the right place. High above all these there was a much more faded figure of St Etheldreda, the great Christian foundress and patron of those parts; looking down perhaps the more impressively for seeming more like a ghost or a great shadow on the wall.

This was, in the strict sense of the word, all very fine; but it was not what we had come to see. The attitude of the Apostles however darkly traced, could not be mistaken for the postures of gentlemen when duck-shooting. St George was clearly occupied in killing a dragon and not a duck. St Michael's wings might seem to be sticking out of him in an arbitrary and ornamental fashion; but they did not recall the wings of a duck, or even what the Psalmist coveted as the wings of a dove. Besides, St Michael is more associated with a goose. Nobody would venture to call St Etheldreda a duck. We concluded that the rumour about pictures of duck-hunting in the Fens must have been a rumour without foundation. In short, the duck was only a canard.

Just as we were trailing out of the church in disappointment and even despair, so far as our duck-hunting expedition was concerned, my friend gave a cry; and I turned in the very porch to look back at him. He was bending over the figure representing St Paul, which wore a long inner garment elaborately embroidered with gold; we had both passed it over as a pattern merely adding richness to the general design. But on looking closer, I found that the Apostle of the Gentiles was all over ducks. He was, so to speak, crawling with ducks, with ducks and dogs pursuing them in one pantomimic dance all over the gilded pattern. It was here that the artist had crowded all his comic sketches of the sports of his native fens. It was a very good pattern, but it was made of quite grotesque pictures. It might have been the design for the fancy waistcoat of a fat gentleman in one of the Dickens novels. The first of all the Dickens novels, by the way, was originally written to illustrate some grotesque sketches of sport. It is not too much to say that, in the original scheme of the publishers, Mr Pickwick merely existed for the sake of Mr Winkle. Mr Winkle might very well have gone duck-shooting in the fens, as he went skating on the ice or riding on the famous horse that went sideways. The sporting artist employed on that occasion would doubtless have been ready to depict him surrounded by any number of ducks and dogs. But he would have been mildly surprised if he had been asked to depict them as part of the decoration of the parish church, to say nothing of the vestments of the parson. But the older artist saw nothing incongruous in depicting them thus in mazy detail between the massive book and the mighty sword, that stood for that terrible convert who was struck down upon the road to Damascus.

Now that is the answer to the question I have already asked and that is why this pointless anecdote is also a parable. People were able to shut their eyes to the big church because it was only a church, however big; and they did not think of deducing anything from it about the number of houses or the nature of households. Because the framework of so much of medieval life was a religious framework, they never even looked at the picture in the frame. They passed it over exactly as anyone looking at the painted figures of the Twelve Apostles passed over all the lively little animals of which its ornament was made up. Thus, to take only one example, popular history seldom takes account of the large numbers of medieval people more or less loosely attached to the Church without being in the full sense either priests or monks: students, members of lay orders and men who were merely clerks in the sense of pleading benefit of clergy; that is, being under the milder law of the Church rather than the harsher law of the State. All this popular life, I suspect, moved normally within more or less clerical enclosures, as the details of the decoration seemed to dance within the enclosure of the main lines of the design. In the gradual revival of the study of such a period, we have had to investigate the religious life in order to discover the secular life. We have had to search the cathedrals to find the guilds; as my friend had to scrutinise the saint in order to find the hounds and the birds. There is no way to those things except through that Gothic porch; and this was realised even by the great men like Morris and Rossetti who might well have wished, for some other reason, to come in by some other way. But none ever came in by any other way except the thieves and the robbers.

There are thousands of little things like that to be found in every corner of what is left of medieval craft and culture. I have taken this small instance because it is small, and because it is the last that has occurred to me. The study of these old things has to be intensive study; just as the cultivation of them anew would have to be an intensive cultivation.