Monastic re-union

We arrived in Sherbourne at tea time and checked in to a comfortable room Mike booked at the Britannia Inn, just two minutes walk from Sherbourne Abbey. It's a beautiful well kept small town with many old houses, such that it seems to belong to an earlier era between the wars in the twentieth century, a bit like the villages which are the setting for the TV series Midsomer Murders. It still has a railway station and so the area is within commuter range of London and Southampton - an expensive place to live, or visit for that matter.

We dined on bar snacks, having lunched well earlier in Wells, and then drank a bottle of wine together in our room and talked until we were ready to sleep. Although our room overlooked a minor road through the town, it was very quiet and our sleep undisturbed.

Before departure, we feasted on a full English breakfast, and then a visit to the Abbey, another beautiful fan vaulted mediaeval building in golden hued stone. This place is the spiritual home of the Dorsetshire Regiment  and the history of several centuries of their campaigns was written in the memorial tablets to fallen soldiers on the walls. I may have visited here once as a young church crawling adult, but my abiding memory is visiting here with my parents in my early teens during a South Coast holiday. It was perhaps the first time I heard a boys choir rehearsing Bach's 'Jesu joy of man's desiring'. It haunted me with an unfamiliar sense of awe and wonder for a long time afterwards. I remember that more than anything else about the place.

We drove through quiet country lanes lined with leafless hedges and adorned with daffodils to arrive at Hilfield Friary. I had forgotten how remote it was. Indeed, I had forgotten a great deal about the Friary itself. It took me quite a while to recall this place where I had spent a momentous week at the age of nineteen, confronting the mystery of Christ's passion head on in the rites and ceremonies and preaching of Holy Week, Franciscan style. I guess my attention then was so inwardly focussed that I paid little attention to my environment or drew much from it. 

In those days, a much larger community of brothers cared for elderly and infirm single men, and was still visited by itinerant homeless people, although fewer and fewer came as the Welfare State extended its embrace to the neglected casualties of war and economic turbulence. Membership  of the English Franciscan province is much smaller these days than provinces in other parts of the world. Hospice style work is now no more than a memory shared by elders of the community wondering who will look after them in their final years, as the community itself now seems less able to fulfil this function amongst its members, and less interested in continuing this tradition.

Brother Raymond Christian was there to meet us, and we were allowed to take him into Cerne Abbas and have lunch while we talked together of our lives' journeys over the thrity years since our last visit together. Cerne is a beautful rural village with a fine Parish Church and many ancient houses. We saw a thatcher and his apprentice at work, repairing the roof of the Royal Oak Inn, where we ate. Older buildings have their outer walls surfaced with a mix of red brick and golden hued limestone courses, occasionally with wooden beams, plus mortar surfaces into which knapped flint pebbles are neatly set. A real feast for the eyes.

A Benedictine Abbey was founded in Cerne at the end of the tenth century, hence the name of the village. The monastic church disappeared after the reformation but many of the attached buildings of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries survived as a nobleman's dwelling. The present owner encourages visitors to look around the exterior of the house and grounds. We met him in the yard and he greeted Raymond with warm familiarity, not because he knew him personally but because he knows the Friary well as a local landowner and appreciates his unusual neighbours. He clearly loves his home with its thousand year historical record of ownership, from pre-reformation Abbots to a handful of gentry families over five centuries since then. 

He pointed out to us the courses of knapped flint visible in the facade of the buildings. "The older the building" he said, "The neater the arrangement, size and fit of the flint pebbles used." An indication of the excellence and precision of mediaeval craftsmen compared with their Victorian descendents with so many more implements available to them. "What artisan monks and lay brothers had in abundance that successors did not have", he observed, "was time to achieve their best." To make something really well can be its own kind of art form.

After lunch, we took Brother Raymond Christian back to Hilfield, said our goodbyes and headed North towards Bristol. The plan was to drop me off at a railway station so that I could take a train back to Cardiff and my six thrity Chi Gung class. However, we misjudged the journey time, and the congestion around Bath and the Bristol outer ring road put paid to any idea of punctual arrival. The six fifteen shuttle from Filton Parkway to Cardiff was so crowded with people, plus three cyclists in our carriage, that the conductor was unable to walk through and collect fares. I got off at Newport found the conductor and obtained my single ticket standing in the small guard's compartment, just before arrival in Cardiff Central. A number 61 bus was waiting and I was home in time for the Archers and supper.