Feature published in Norfolk Suffolk Life July 2015
John Brunham, William Sawtrey and Alan of Lynn - Margery Kempe's merchant father, her parish priest and her scribe - will all make their returns as part of the Doin different tour 2016.
Four Norfolk
notables – a mystic, a merchant (her father), a monk (her scribe) and a martyr (her
priest)– will live again in historic settings along Lynn’s mediaeval waterfront
this summer, thanks to Lynn theatre company ‘Room at the Hanse’. Gareth Calway,
director of the company, writes…
‘Hanse’ - from the mediaeval Hanseatic League
- means a convoy of ships or people travelling together for safety against
pirates and bandits. Lynn has pioneered English participation in the New Hanse
since 2005. 2015 is the Year of the Hanse and Hanse the theme of this July’s King’s
Lynn Arts Festival. Room at the Hanse - based in rooms at Hanse House and Marriott’s
Warehouse - jumped at the chance to mount two Hanse-themed productions at the 2015
Festival fringe.
The Wife of Lynn’s Tale - prefaced by The Scribe’s
Prologue and The Merchant’s Prologue
- is about Lynn’s visionary Margery Kempe (c1373-1438) writer of the first
autobiography in English. It will be staged in the magnificent Lynn Minster,
her own church. A Nice Guy: The Burning
of William Sawtrey, the first heretic burned for his beliefs in England, plays
outdoors in the courtyard of Hanse House, the last remaining Hanseatic building
in England.
The Scribe’s Prologue mines the comic
possibilities of the mismatch in Margery’s Book
of cartoonish autobiography – an illiterate visionary Word with too much
Flesh on it for the clerics– with the clerical spin of her amanuensis: “a woman’s story filtered through a male
religious lens.” The amazing discovery in Gdansk this May (2015) of a letter by
her son John – which has shown Margery as no fantasist but a reliable narrator
of real events – happily supports her over my Scribe’s comic claims to be the
real author (and also incidentally consolidates Margery’s status as the main
documentary witness of Julian of Norwich’s lifer and character.)
The Merchant (Margery’s father) introduces his Prologue thus-
‘John Brunham of
Bishop’s Lynn, deal-broker. Navigating
treaties, steering rivals, roping in partners. Exporting and importing whatever
the Warehouse of the Wash needs. Five times Mayor, twice MP, alderman, coroner,
justice of the peace, chamberlain, royal agent, merchant-statesman, benefactor…’
Brunham’s monologue evokes the hustle and bustle - ‘the
dance - of the Hanse’ and a glimpse of the man behind the merchant. It reminds
us that, beneath the courtiers and kings, knights and wars of our long island
story, merchants and mayors made history as they made the nation’s wealth – on
a daily basis. Brunham brokered a vital and uneasy peace with Prussia on behalf
of Richard II during the Hanseatic trade wars of the 14th century-
the politics of port rather than court.
Though ruled by
the Bishop of Norwich from his palace at Gaywood, Bishop’s Lynn had enjoyed a
degree of borough freedom since Lynn-friendly King John gave the town its own
‘Magna Carta’ in 1204 and would eventually gain the rest thanks to Henry VIII,
who made it King’s Lynn in 1537. In Brunham’s time - and Lynn historian Paul
Richards’ words - it was “in the premier league of English medieval ports.”
This was the age
before exploration and trade opened up the Atlantic West. Norfolk was the heart
of England: advanced, densely populated, bristling with impressive churches.
The Hanseatic League linked this heart with Germany, Scandinavia, the Baltic.
Margery lived on
Lynn’s teeming international waterfront, in St Margaret’s parish, a true wife
and daughter of the town, her family later tied to Hanseatic Germany by
marriage. A mayor’s daughter and a burgess’s wife, Margery was pregnant for
pretty much two decades, raising 14 children. She brewed beer (not very
successfully) as Lynn wives did and managed a horse-drawn grain mill at Lynn’s
hub of Wash waterways and busy sea routes. All this was forty five Norfolk
miles from Mother Julian, whom she met and consulted, and who like her followed
a visionary path. But Margery was a world apart from the mystic who called her
‘sister.’ She was not supposed to have visions!
She broke all the rules, caught between two church-approved states of
womanhood - neither devotedly serving her husband indoors nor following a
religious vocation in a convent or cell like Julian. She undertook Hanseatic
journeys, and pilgrimages in self-appointed white robes, without the sanction
of her confessor, asserting she was ‘directed to do so by God.’ God gave her a freedom wives rarely had.
While honouring
the Sacrament of Marriage for twenty years, with saintly impatience, she
eventually bought a vow of celibacy from John Kempe, along with his conjugal
rights. And, ahead of her time as always, she dictated the first autobiography
in English, not letting a little thing like illiteracy get in her way.
Maternal
mortality in childbirth was common: her first labour was nearly her last. An
unsympathetic priest refused to hear what she thought was a ‘death-bed’
confession and this precipitated visions of flame-mouthed devils - and of a
beautiful gentle Jesus.
Unlike Julian’s church-approved ‘showings’ Margery’s visions were rejected
by the authorities as ‘deceptions.’ Her direct personal relationship with the
Trinity (without a priest present) might have been acceptable if like Julian
she had been literate, learned and officially dead to the world (walled up
alive and the burial service read over her.)
Instead, she was
active, noisy, unorthodox and at odds with the authorities of a church she fervently
loved. Despite support from ‘small friars’ like Robert of Caister the Vicar of
Sedgeford and Alan of Lynn, who believed her visions and helped her record
them, not to mention the parish priest who credited her with miraculously
saving her beloved St Margaret’s from the Great Fire of Lynn in 1421, she
continually upset fellow parishioners with loud weeping at mass, any mention of
Christ’s suffering likely to set her off.
As her scribe whinges - “The whole parish is Mass en masse,
cheek-by-blessed howl with you. The Bishop’s at his wits’ end!”
For a married
woman and mother of fourteen children to claim the Son and Mother of God had
given her a mission and instructions for a holy life was controversial enough.
Margery added to it a new Franciscan emphasis on love experienced in a direct
relationship with Christ and a highly emotional style of religious expression
that riled church, citizens and pilgrims alike.
I suspect Margery’s
visions and metaphors were too Earthy for the theological literati, the
aristocrats who ran the church. Her Jesus is dishy, purple silk-clad. Her
‘female gaze’ would later see him in every handsome Italian she saw in Rome.
Her prayer for a
robin in place of the inscrutable ‘rushing wind’ of God’s third person - which
she complained was like a ‘bellows – parallels the heretical wish of
contemporary rebels like John Wycliffe for simpler faith and a homely Bible in
English.
Wycliffe’s
‘Lollard’ heresy, rife in Norfolk – did for our fourth Norfolk notable,
Margery’s parish priest William Sawtrey, burned as a heretic in 1401.
Sawtrey was England’s
first Lollard martyr or the morning star (Lucifer) of the Reformation,
depending on your religious politics. He was ‘examined’ for preaching Lollardy
by the Bishop Dispenser of the Norwich diocese. After two days, William,
recanted only to relapse into the same heresies in London a year later. This
time he didn’t recant and was burned at Smithfield.
It’s difficult
for us to grasp how terrifying Lollardy was to the English church and king at
the time. The Lollard heresy would shape the Protestant one: centuries of
blood, fire, inquisition, execution, gunpowder and plot as the Reformation
replaced the established Catholic church in England and much of Northern
Europe. Europe would wage a 47 year war (the dreadful and misnamed 30 years
war) over ‘Lollard’ issues. A Nice Guy,
using the delightful Morality play format of the 15th century – borrowing
a verse form and some speeches from the contemporary (Norfolk-written?) play
the ‘Castle of Perseverance’ – takes a moral perspective. The company’s
feelgood trademarks are all here - Norfolk-based musicians and actors; heritage
and humour; catchy songs; poetic theatre, proper history. God, Soul, Mind,
Flesh, World and the Devil all appear!
Margery – perhaps
tainted by association with William - protested her orthodoxy. The point was
even such protestation was ‘unwomanly’ by the repressive standards of the
time. Ordered by the archbishop of York
to swear not to teach in his diocese, she defended her right to speak her
conscience. A brave stand to make a century before Luther – and by a woman.
Mother of English
autobiography, pre-feminist, rebel, Lynn has every right to be proud of its
under-sung visionary. Six centuries after the fact, we celebrate her life in
her beloved St Margaret’s.
for 2016 tour go to Doin different tour 2016.
(2015 tour was:
for 2016 tour go to Doin different tour 2016.
(2015 tour was:
The Wife of Lynn’s
Tale (with Prologues by the Scribe and John Brunham) written by Gareth Calway and starring Joanna
Swan as Margery Kempe plays Lynn Minster on July 24th 7.30pm.
Tickets £9 from Lynn Custom House 01553 763044. Performance approx 90 minutes
with interval and bar. A Nice Guy – The Burning of William Sawtrey by Gareth Calway plays the Hanse House Courtyard on the South
Quay, Lynn on the 17th July 4.00pm. Performance 30 minutes.
Donations only. www.garethcalway.co.uk, http://www.hansehouse.co.uk, http://www.marriottswarehousetrust.co.uk)
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