Pilgrims in a New England
David Wilson medium.com
Fordwich is England’s smallest town. Located along the Stour River, it was, in the middle ages, a port for boats making their way to Canterbury, two miles upriver. From the middle of the 10th Century…
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Medium
Fordwich is England’s smallest town. Located along the Stour River, it was, in the middle ages, a port for boats making their way to Canterbury, two miles upriver. From the middle of the 10th Century through the 15th century, it was one of 14 Cinque Ports which provided naval and transportation support in the years before England had a standing navy. Though the town is little more than a bend in the road as you make your way south from the town of Sturry towards the eastern end of the Kent Downs, it played a small, if vital, role in both the protection of Britain from outside invaders and in the economic development of the towns upriver.

My wife and I are headed to Fordwich in order to spend the night in the defunct Church of St. Mary the Virgin. I’d found out about the church some months earlier when planning a trip that would, as closely as possible, recreate the journey that the pilgrims took in Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. My online search for pilgrims lodgings led me to the Churches Conservation Trust website. Through the Trust, travellers can pay £55 per person to “champ”, a portmanteau for church camping, in one of seven ancient churches located throughout England. Though the website said that we would need to bring our own pillows, linens, and sleeping bags, and though we’d be travelling internationally and would be unable to do so, I immediately booked our stay. The website promised us that, “apart from a few weary pilgrims..monks, and a tired vicar or two” we would be amongst the first to spend the night in the space.

Before arriving in Fordwich, we’d spent three days hiking from London to Canterbury.. For modern pilgrims, walking the path is a uniquely solitary experience. Along our hike, we’d seen only a handful of people, mostly in the small towns that the path passes through. During the day, hiking beneath the beech and pine trees as the path makes its way through King’s Wood, or along the chalky ridge of the North Downs high above the fields and forests below, it’s easy to imagine that you are existing in some liminal space, some time outside of our own. The chalk itself, the skeletal remains of sea creatures that died over 50 million years ago, makes absurd any claim that man might make to the land. The solitariness of the walk, the relative absence of interaction with the man-made, can, at first, make you feel like you’ve slipped into some time pre- or post-man.

Of course, there is something preposterous about this idea. Look closer, and a high speed rail line can be seen cutting across a distant field. The fields themselves- wheat fields that, in mid-summer stand waist high and shimmer gold against the brilliant blue of a cloudless sky- are a testament to human’s ability to cultivate nature, to alter the land to fit their needs. Not long ago, at harvest time these fields would have been worked by men with scythes and reaping hooks. Today, combine harvesters can both harvest and thresh the wheat, allowing the region to depopulate while still being farmed.

Our hike along the trail and our visit to Fordwich continually juxtaposed modern and ancient England. Although we had hiked the route travelled by Romans as early as 80 AD, our accommodations, renovated 16th and 17th century Inns, felt more like New England Bed & Breakfasts than they did medieval stopovers for weary pilgrims. Our hope was that the Church of St. Mary the Virgin would offer us more traditional lodgings, though even the possibility of camping in the church was evidence of a great transformation in English society.

Like the religious devotees of the Middle Ages, our pilgrimage ended at the shrine of Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury from 1162 until his murder in 1170. It was Henry who had facilitated his friend Becket’s consecration as Archbishop, just one day after Becket had been ordained a priest, who hoped that installing his friend, who was already Lord Chancellor in Henry’s government, in power would allow the king greater power over the church. Of course, Becket would soon resign from his governmental position an attempt to end state control over the church. On December 29, 1170 four of Henry’s knights, acting in response to his desire to be “rid of this turbulent priest”, travelled from Normandy to Canterbury where they executed Becket as he stood by the altar of the Virgin Mary inside of his own church. Though Henry would have to do public penance for the deed, the murderers were never punished and Henry was able to ultimately manipulate the event to serve his own political purposes.

Even today, the British government is closely connected with the church. The Church of England remains the state religion, and members of the church frequently serve as members of Parliament. As recently as 2014, then Prime Minister David Cameron publicly declared himself an evangelical and criticized those who fail to see how the church helps “people to have a moral code.”

Despite this institutional relationship between British church and state, the Britons themselves increasingly reject the church. Today, only 1.4% of the population attends Sunday church services, a statistic that the Archbishop of Canterbury attributes to the country’s growing “anti-Christian culture.” Attendance is expected to continue to decrease as current church members die off or become homebound. It’s not just church attendance that has been affected. In the last 15 years, the number of British who identify as Christian has dropped from 75% to 25%.

One consequence of this dramatic decline is that many ancient churches are now underutilized or abandoned altogether. Through the Churches Conservation Trust, champing offers villages a way of paying for the maintenance and upkeep of their historic churches.

To get to Fordwich, we take a 10 minute train ride from Canterbury to Sturry, a village that had been one of the most heavily shelled towns during World War II. Fordwich is a mile walk from the charmless Sturry train station and is separated by the Stour river, which is crossable by walking over the narrow King Street bridge, a bridge so narrow that only one car can cross at a time. This creates small backups of traffic on either side as drivers attempt to negotiate the crossing. On foot, we are tempted to stop and admire the picturesque river, though doing so would have aggravated several drivers waiting to cross.

One of the joys of a walking vacation is that you actually have time to see a place, to move through it at a pace that allows contemplation. In Fordwich, this is particularly helpful since, by car or even on bike, you’d pass through Fordwich without even really knowing you’d been there. Though there are no shops in the town, there are two pubs. All other business must take place in Sturry or some other local town. We don’t pass a single person as we walk down King Street to the church.

Though rented for camping, the Church of St. Mary the Virgin is open to visitors during the day. When we arrive, there is a man and woman inside looking around. They seem more intrigued by the camping supplies than they are by anything inside of the church.

“Staying the night?” the man asks. He is stocky and slightly red faced. He looks like he’d be more comfortable in a pub than in a church. I explain our plans. He tells me that he grew up in a council estate in Sturry, but has since moved to South Africa. He’s back with his wife so she can meet his family and see where he grew up. “Everything has changed,” he says. “Everything. When I was a kid, you could drive in your car and just look out at the countryside. Now, hedges have grown up everywhere. You can’t see anything anymore.”

We have little time to chat because I am late for a meeting at Fordwich Town Hall with Andrea Russo, the town’s Deputy Mayor. We’d been put in touch through Jessica Aiers, my champing liaison. Befitting its claim as Britain’s smallest town, Fordwich also boasts the country’s smallest and oldest town hall, which is located across the parking lot of the pub adjacent the church.

Andrea is a treasure trove of local lore. Despite an Italian accent that suggests he is not native to the town, he clearly takes great pride in sharing his local knowledge. When we meet him, he is regaling a small group of tourists. Before he talks to us, he sends us to watch a 10 minute video about the history of the town hall and the town as well as historical modes of punishment that would have been inflicted on those found guilty in the courthouse upstairs, which doubles as the town’s meeting room..

Afterwards, we rejoin Andrea in the town hall. He explains the significance of many of the items in the room: the swearbox into which those caught using profane language would remit their punishment; the dunking chair in which convicts sat while they were dunked in the river; the 13th century muniment chest that stored the town’s records for hundreds of years and is triple locked so that no one person has access to it without the consent of two others. I get the impression that, had we arrived in Fordwich 200 years earlier, we would have heard the exact same presentation.

Andrea tells us literally nothing about the current state of the town. When I ask him about the church, I learn only that it has been in disuse for 3 or 4 years. When I ask if that’s a result of depopulation, he says only that the population of the town has remained roughly 300 over the past several decades. Before we leave, Andrea asks us for a small donation to the town hall and offers to sell us a DVD of the video we’ve just seen.

It’s late afternoon when we finally settle into the church and unpack. The local champing volunteers have set up small table, some camping chairs and electric candles just outside of the vestry. Inside of the vestry is a newly-built shed which contains a dry-separating toilet, for which we’ve been provided very specific instructions: “It does exactly what it sounds like…When using the loo, you must sit down, even the male of the species…When you sit down the mechanism works that opens the two containers below…it doesn’t whiff, honest.” This informal tone is one I’ve become familiar with since researching and communicating with the champing people. ”It’s nearly Champ O’Clock”, I was informed via email prior to my arrival. In answer to whether Champers need to be Christian, the website FAQ assures us that “that’s like saying that you need to be…a teenager to shriek at a One Direction concert (…ahem)!”

There is a strange dissonance created by this chatty language and the simple beauty of the church. Legend has it that St. Augustine, the Benedictine monk who reintroduced Christianity to England in 600 A.D., is buried outside of the church’s north wall. Some evidence suggests that Shakespeare may have performed inside during his exile from London during the plague. On one wall is listed the names of the church’s rectors beginning in 1283. Tomb markers on the floor date back to the 17th century.

We spend the rest of the day roaming the church and the grounds. Though the church is technically open to visitors until sundown, none come. Elsewhere on the Champing website, visitors are told that “the space had adapted to the requirements in the previous centuries and champing is just the latest chapter in this ongoing tradition of change.” Walking throughout the dusty church and the overgrown graveyard, it feels clear that no miracle short of a second coming is going to drive people back to these churches. Just a few years ago, there was a congregation here, and now it is little more than a relic of an earlier age.

Later, we walk over to the Fordwich Arms for dinner and drinks. The day is waning, and as we sit in our corner booth darkness quickly comes over the town. We drink our first Pim’s and watch as the waitress and bartender chat at the end of the bar. Several small groups of friends are scattered about the pub, talking quietly.

This feels very British to us. It has throughout the trip. We’d regularly paused during our walks to have a quick drink or lunch in a small pub where children and dogs are welcome and where neighbors come to meet and chat, maybe have a pint or two before heading back out. At home, bars tend to be dives dedicated to getting drunk off of cheap beer or nightclubs targeted towards defined demographics. British pubs felt like a refined alternative to us.

Like the church, pubs are part of the British identity that is slowly dying. Nearly 1,500 British pubs closed in 2015. In 2016, the rate was roughly 27 pubs per week. The reasons are complex: competing forms of entertainment like television and internet; cheap supermarket liquor ; high state taxes on beer; changing attitudes towards consumption of alcohol. Regardless, neighborhood British pubs are quickly becoming a thing of the past, another gathering place lost.

Who can say what will come to replace all of this. Centuries ago, a chalk ridge across the North Sea connected the trail we walked earlier in the week with mainland Europe. It was via this ridge that early man first made his way to the island, populating and changing the land as he went. Today more than ever, British identity is being changed by immigration, with thousands of refugees arriving from mainland Europe and the Middle East via ports like Dover, which the ancient chalk ridge would have run through. And though recent events like the Brexit vote suggest that some are not accepting this change without a fight, to an outsider it is not hard to see the inevitability of change throughout British society. One estimate holds that by 2020, as a consequence of immigration and a cultural shift away from Christianity, more Britons will attend mosques than churches.

What will become of these churches is anybody’s guess. Perhaps they will be converted into mosques. Or perhaps the shift from a sacred to a secular society will be completed and they will be reborn as shops and restaurants, as is already happening throughout much of the country. Perhaps they will simply be reclaimed by the earth, as we had seen some doing on our walk throughout the countryside.

We walk back to the church with only the moonlight as our guide. Though it is just past nine o’clock, the town seems deserted, as it surely will be once the pubs go out of business. This may be the inevitable consequence of time, but after several drinks, it seems possible that time is not linear, but rather circular. Maybe Fordwich is simply returning to how it was before man first settled here.

Back at the church, we turn on our electric candles and explore the space once more. There’s an empty bread box, where donations for the poor would have been stored. There’s a locked pipe organ whose foot pedals are still operational. A grave marker on the floor provides details for John Nicholls, who died in 1741 after serving as church rector for 24 years. Nearby, lies a 22 year-old man, though the specifics of his life, once carefully carved onto the stone marker, have been worn away by the countless people who have walked over it through the centuries. In a neighboring pew, initials and faded dates are carved into the wood where some forgotten boy once secretly passed away his time here. Maybe he’s one of the unvisited dead buried out in the church yard.

Our champing hosts have set up two cots in a pew and provided us with sleeping bags. My wife prepares our bed and then climbs into her sleeping bag. I make one final sweep of the church, switching off the electric candles one by one. When the church is dark, I climb into my sleeping bag beside my wife and we fall asleep amongst the buried dead.