This is the text of a paper I gave at the MR James conference (M R James and Modern Ghost Story) in Leeds earlier this year- it's unedited, unreferenced (and pretty much unproofread), but hopefully will be of interest to some- if you are interested in a copy of the accompanying Powerpoint just drop me a line:
The material past looms large in the ghost stories of M. R. James.
In almost all his stories, the supernatural crisis is catalysed or channelled
through a physical object, sometimes a manuscript or book (The
Tractate Middoth), sometimes an image (The
Mezzotint) and sometimes physical objects, as diverse as a bone whistle, a
dolls house or a strip of wallpaper. Although James’ academic work was
primarily focused on the study of text, both as editions and as physical manuscripts,
it also engaged widely with physical objects, particularly sculpture, stained
glass and wall paintings – what Monty himself described as ‘Christian
archaeology’. As well as this interest in the materialised past, practitioners
of the study of the past, archaeologists and antiquarians, also make regular
occurrences in his stories, some simply as supporting cast (the FSA in An
Episode of Cathedral History; the archaeologist in ‘O Whistle and I’ll Come to
you my lad’or the doomed barrow digger, Paxton in ‘A Warning to the Curious’. In this paper, I want to draw out and cotnextualise MR James
engagement with archaeology. Exploring his own direct and indirect engagements
with the emerging discipline in the later 19th and early 20th
century and also highlighting the ways in which he harnessed his engagement
with archaeology in his ghost stories.
Tracing its origins back to scholars of the 16th and 17th
century, such as William Camden (1551-1623) and John Leland (1503-1552), the
early study of the physical remains of the past had been dominated by an
antiquarian perspective. Early writers, drew on the chorographic tradition,
structuring studies by region or area – taking a broad approach, recording
genealogical information, information about important buildings, snippets of
folklore, natural wonders and unusual objects, this encyclopaedic approach
revelled in juxtaposition and collation, but made little attempt at either
chronological or regional synthesis. Often drawing on local informants, early
antiquarians carried out little fieldwork beyond the occasional illustration of
significant castles or abbeys. However, these were the first sustained
engagements with the recording of antiquities- and crucially marked the
beginning of the rediscovery of the middle ages, treating pre-Reformation texts
and monuments as both worthy of study but also bracketing them off as belonging
to antiquity allowing a narrative of rescue and rediscovery to be sustained. A
prime example of this can be seen in the work of the antiquary John Aubrey-
like many early antiquaries he was a polymath – best known outside archaeology
for his biographical sketches ‘Brief Lives’ he published widely on folklore,
place-names, antiquities and with his Monumenta Britannica he
was a key figure in trying to understand major prehistoric monumental
complexes, such as Avebury and Stonehenge. However, whilst this prehistoric
material dominate the modern perception of his archaeological interests, he was
also a key figure in developing approaches to the medieval past- his
unpublished, yet influential, Chronologia
Architectonica of 1670 was an attempt to develop a chronological typology
of medieval architecture and crucially contained not just physical descriptions
but illustrations drawn by Aubrey himself in the same way he surveyed in his
plans of prehistoric sites.
The long 18th century saw the development of the
antiquarianism, both in terms of scope and methodology but also its
institutional structure. First, the level of recording and fieldwork developed-
building on the methods of Aubrey and others. Excavation whilst often
exceptionally crude by modern standard was increasingly carried out-
classically on prehistoric burial mounds. Major early excavators included
figures such as the Reverend Bryan Fausett (1720-1776) and the Reverend James
Douglas (1753-1819) – the former opened over 700 barrows, prehistoric and
Anglo-Saxon over his career. The 18th century thus saw an increasing
emergence of prehistory as a distinct sub-field, comprising both standing
monuments and excavated remains.
However, whilst figures such as William Stukely – more commonly
associated, like Aubrey, with work on prehistoric sites, did record medieval
buildings, medieval archaeology was treated as a topic for which the main
resource were standing buildings rather than a field for subsurface
intervention. The motif of barrow breaking was however used by James in A Warning to the Curious although in
this case in the context of an Anglo-Saxon rather than a prehistoric barrow.
A major development for the wider field of antiquarianism was the
establishment of the Society of Antiquaries of London in 1707 and receiving its
royal charter in 1751. This provided an institutional focus for antiquarian
pursuit in England- as well as crucially being responsible for a series of
journal – most notably Archaeologia
and Vetusta Monumenta - both of which published from the very
beginning material on medieval topics.
Rather topically, one of the few areas where medieval antiquities
were actively investigated through excavation was the graves of kings.
Particularly under the stimulus of Richard Gough, Diretor of the Society of
Antiquaries from 1771 to 1797. In 1774, the tomb of Edward I was opened in
Westminster Abbey revealing both the body and associated grave goods, Edward
IVs grave in St George’s Chapel, Windsor, was opened in 1789, and King Johns
grave excavated in Worcester Cathedral in 1797. This investigation of graves
clearly finds resonances in some of James’ stories, particularly An Episode of
Cathedral History- but as we shall see he also later had a more direct
involvement in the opening of medieval graves.
The later Victorian saw changes in emergence of deep time-
scientific understanding of prehistory particularly due to increase of
excavation – drawing on notions of social evolution ultimately derived from
Darwinism, but also principles of stratigraphy derived from geology, all of
which profoundly influenced the development of archaeology as discipline. But
the mid 19th century also saw the establishment of an increasingly
structure academic framework for the archaeological study of the past.
Crucially this was the great period of the flowering of national, county and
local archaeological societies. A key moment was the establishment of the
British Archaeological Association in 1843, in reaction to a perceived over
emphasis on earlier periods of history by the SA, as well as a perception that
it was London-biased and aristocratic. The aims of the BAA were clearly “for the encouragement
and prosecution of researches into the arts and monuments of the early and
middle ages” . Amongst its aims were the organisation of an annual
archaeological congress, along
the model of the French Congrès Archéologique or the annual meetings of the
British Association for the Advancement of Science. There was a rapid schism
however, partly along class lines. The majority of the founders of the BAA were
from trade backgrounds, but following a squabble about publication, a new
Archaeological Institute was founded by a faction led by Albert Way of a
notably differing class complexion.
Despite the increased ‘professionalization’ of the archaeology and
antiquarian studies in this period, the remit of both societies was still very
wide. The first volume of the Archaeological Journal published by the Archaeological
Institute including papers on Roman London, Observations on the Primeval Antiquities of
the Channel Islands, On Anglo-Saxon
Architecture and, and I quote ‘The Horn-shaped Ladies' Head-Dress in the reign
of Edward I “. The term ‘archaeology’
still had a wide semantic range and in the words of Chris Gerrard “the
relationship between antiquarianism, historians, architects and archaeologists
was uncertain territory”.
The mid-19th century saw a huge range
of other societies being established at this time – both historical- the
Surtees Society 1834, the Early English Text Society 1864, the Harleian Society
1869, and archaeological -By 1886 there were some 49 county and local
archaeological societies, including the Cambridge Antiquarian Society of which
James became a member. It is to this kind of society that Baxter, the
antiquary, in A View from a Hill
seems to have belonged. The protagonist “spend a morning half lazy, half
instructive in looking over the volume’s of the County Archaeological Society’s
transactions in which were many contributions from Mr Baxter on finds of flint
implements, Roman sites, ruins of monastic establishments – in fact most
Departments of archaeology.”. In the story, Baxter was the local watch maker,
and this reflects an important aspect of the widening of archaeology as a
sphere of research, a process of social democratization. Even as early as the
early 19th century, not all antiquarians were of aristocratic,
gentry or ecclesiastical backgrounds. William Cunnington, the important early
19th century field worker was a local merchant.
A facet of many of these early societies was an
increasing emphasis on campaigning to preserve and protect historic monuments-
something which was not within the constitution or ambition of the Antiquaries.
Despite the rampant medievalism of mid-Victorian society, with the emergence of
Gothic as a natural architectural style with figures such as Pugin and Gilbert
Scott in the vanguard of this taste-making, historic monuments were
increasingly under threat. Indeed, it is this very resurgence of medievalism
that led to a sustained attack on the historic fabric of Britain’s churches.
The Oxford movement with its aim to revive and renew traditional and more Catholic styles of worship led to an
assault on the interiors of medieval
churches with later features regularly removed and stripped back to
achieve an allegedly more authentic, medieval style. This movement was
motivated by an enthusiasm for the medieval – the aims of the Cambridge Camden
Society, so closely associated with this thrust, were “to promote the study of
Ecclesiastical Architecture and Antiquities and the restoration of mutilated
Architectural Remains”. However, the followers of the Camden society and its
Oxford counterpart, the Oxford Society for Promoting the Study of Gothic
Architecture did great harm to the historic interiors of British parish
churches. Despite both his loyalties to the Victorian world (remember if you please that I am a Victorian
by birth and education…”)and his love of the medieval, James’s attitude to this
medievalism was one of ambivalence. His preferred architectural style appears
to have been neo-Classical, and the unconstrained and insensitive removal and
reordering of the 17th and 18th century interiors of
medieval cathedrals to be replaced by neo-Gothic furnishings is at the core of An Episode of Cathedral History, and the
fragment of medieval stall and its associated paper message presumably came to
the knowledge of the narrator following their removal from the cathedral. It
was in reaction to such destruction thatWilliam Morris founded the Society for
the Protection of Ancient Buildings in 1877, although the views of the ‘anti-scrape’ as it became known were
not always popular.
A wider
concern about the destruction of historic and archaeological monuments reached
parliament and steered by Sir John Lubbock, 1st Baron Avebury, in
1882, the Ancient Monuments Protection Act was passed. Lubbock was an
important figure in the development of prehistoric archaeology in Britain –
heavily influenced by social Darwinism, he was writer of some of the first
major syntheses of the development of prehistoric society, coining the terms
Palaeolithic and Mesolithic. If the name Lubbock rings a bell for many of you,
it most likely because one of the early memoirs of M R James was written by
Samuel Gurney Lubbock – a nephew of John Lubbock. Monty was also friends with
John Lubbocks sons, Harold and Eric. He certainly visited the Lubbock family
home, where he met Baron Avebury’s second wife, Alice Pitt-Rivers, daughter of
Augustus Lane-Fox Pitt-Rivers, another towering figure in late Victorian
archaeology.
But how does MR James relate to this wider
development of archaeological endeavour in the later 19th and early
20th century?
As a child he wrote to his father that he wanted “above all things
to make an Archaeological search into the antiquities of Suffolk, to get
everything I can for my museum” and later that he planned to “prosecute my
archaeological studies at the Guild-Hall library in the holidays”. Growing up
in rural Suffolk he lived in an area with a strong antiquarian tradition –
indeed, the sons of one of the earlier vicar’s of Great Livermere “Honest” Tom
Martin was a noted Suffolk antiquarian and the Suffolk Institute for
Archaeology was founded in 1848. One possibility I have not been able to confirm is that James
knew about the excavation of the important Anglo-Saxon boat burial at Snape –
probably of a member of the East Anglian royal family these burials and the associated
barrows stood on the main road into Aldeburgh, where he spent much time as a
child. The tumulus was obvious and is shown clearly surviving on the 1st
Edition Ordnance Survey map. It seems
inconceivable that given his proclivities he was not aware of it and must have
consciously or unconsciously fed into the plot of a Warning to the Curious, particularly given its setting in Seaburgh,
clearly based on Aldeburgh.
Despite his occasional roof-climbing adventures, Monty had
relatively little exposure to archaeology or ecclesiology at Eton. However,
when he arrived at Cambridge he emerged into a city and university on the
leading edge of the disciplinary development of archaeology. We might perhaps
at this stage identify three key, distinct, but cross-fertilising streams in
archaeology. Prehistoric archaeology, being pushed forward by Lubbock and
others, medieval archaeology, which was still a blend of more scientific
approaches but still heavily influenced by antiquarian and art historical
perspectives, and finally, an area I’ve not yet touched on, classical
archaeology. This latter field grew out of the world of classical studies and
was profoundly text led and art historical, but with a commitment to excavation.
Classical archaeology was in particular going through a phase of rapid
development – in the decade leading up to his arrival at King’s in 1882, in
particular the work of Schliemann at Troy had received international acclaim.
Cambridge University was the first British university to have an
endowed chair in Archaeology- the Disney professorship set up in 1851; it
required the holder to give three lectures a year for a stipend of £100. In O
Whistle.. the ‘person of an antiquarian persuasion’ who encouraged Parkins to
visit the site of the Templar preceptory was given, in a typical MR James
in-joke, the name Disney. On his arrival at Cambridge, the holder was Percy
Gardner, a specialist on Greek art , with close connections to the British
Museum, but someone whose engagement in research was from the perspective of
connoisseurship rather than fieldwork.
It is important to remember that MR James arrived at Cambridge to
study the Classics tripos and he selected Classical Archaeology for special
study in Part II of the Tripos: he wrote in 1885 ‘the field is so frightfully
wide that I want all the time I can get, and not sanguine about the results.
Sculpture, painting, coins, inscriptions, mythology, gems –each of these
implies a good deal of reading”. Much of his learning was closely supervised by
Charles Waldstein, American archaeologist and Olympic shooter who at the time
was Director of the Fitzwilliam Museum,. Monty was soon appointed Assistant
Director eventually succeeding to the Directorship after Waldstein, although in
this position he focused primarily on the acquisition of manuscripts rather
than artefacts.
It was in the domain of classical archaeology that he made his
first, and most significant, engagement in field archaeology. In 1887, Henry
Babington-Smith an Eton and King’s College contemporary of Monty’s was granted
£150 to engage in archaeological fieldwork in Cyprus - under the auspices of the Cyprus
Exploration Fund, set up with support of the Hellenic Society. However, he
instead took up a civil service job as an examiner in the education department.
Monty was asked to accompany the expedition at short notice. The overall
project was led by Ernest Gardner, the younger brother of Percy Gardner (Disney
Professor) – who was the Director of the British School at Athens- who had
excavated with Flinders Petrie. Another participant was David Hogarth, who
ended up as Director of the Ashmolean Museum, and was later a close friend of T
E Lawrence, for whom he was first an academic influence in Oxford and then
served alongside in the Arab Bureau during WWI. Whilst Gardner was an
experienced excavator, Hogarth recalled in his memoirs that the others ‘were so raw as not to know if there were any
science of the spade at all’. The focus of the excavations was the Temple of
Aphrodite, but also included exploring a number of other related sites. James
had two roles, on site he seems to have led with the study of the epigraphy,
transcribing and translating the many inscriptions found during the work. He
also provided a typically Jamesian wide-ranging and eclectic overview of the
historical source material for the site, drawing on Classical texts as well as
medieval and post-medieval travellers’ stories. The final results were jointly
published by James, Gardner and Hogarth in the Journal of Hellenic Studies, a
series edited by Percy Gardner.
It is intriguing that despite his engagement in Classical
archaeology through his involvement with the Pylos excavations, his role as
Assistant Director of the Fitzwilliam Museum and, by no means least, his
education at Cambridge, that so little evidence of this makes its way through
to his published ghost stories. Neither, despite, his friendship with the
Lubbock’s does any evidence of an interest in prehistoric archaeology beyond a
passing reference to prehistoric flints in a View from a Hill.
However, when it comes to medieval archaeology and physical
remains, it is a different matter, both figure in the bulk of his academic work
and his ghost stories. Despite being primarily remembered as a textual scholar,
James’s research was not just dominated by an interest in producing edited
texts, but also cataloguing - this meant
engaging with all aspects of the manuscript- not only its content, but also its
physical appearance (i.e. illumination and marginalia) and provenance – in this
respect it was as much an archaeological and art historical endeavour as a
purely textual pursuit. In particular his fascination with hagiography and
apocrypha intersected and fuelled a fascination for understanding and unpicking
medieval iconography.
Surprisingly, at the age of 30, when the Disney Chair of
Archaeology became empty, Monty gave serious thought to applying for it. His
writings when thinking of applying and his application to the Vice Chancellor give
a clear understanding of his perspective
“My object in all has been to trace, so far
as I could, the historical development of sacred art from the point of view of
selection and treatment of subjects, and to bring it into connexion with the
literature and legends to which the artist had access/ In other words, I have
worked with the view to applying to Christian art those methods which are
applied nowadays to the remains of classical sculpture and painting”
“During the last twelve years I have accumulated
a very large mass of materials illustrative of Christian art and iconography.
This material consists in the main of descriptions as full and accurate as I
could make them, of sculpture, painted glass, pictures and illuminated
manuscripts existing in a very considerable number of English and foreign
churches, libraries, galleries and museums..”
This in fact fits in nicely with some of the important work done
by earlier Disney chairs. The outgoing Professor George Forrest Browne had made a special study of runic stones, and
published The
Ilam Crosses (1889)
and The
Ancient Cross Shafts of Bewcastle and Ruthwell (1917). An earlier chair,
Churchill Babington, had also contributed articles on medals, glass, gems and inscriptions
to the Dictionary of Christian
Antiquities.
What is surprising though in Monty’s unsuccessful application was
how little he had published on topics even broadly related to medieval
archaeology or art history. Whilst the modern publication requirements for an
academic clearly did not apply in later 19th century Cambridge, this
is a little disconcerting. It is hard not to draw notice to the thoughts of
Parkin’s in Oh Whistle when he
discovers the Templar Preceptory: ““Few people can resist the temptation to try
a little amateur research in a department quite outside their own, if only for
the satisfaction of showing how successful they would have been had they only
taken it up seriously. Our Professor, however, if he felt something of this
mean desire, was also truly anxious to oblige Mr Disney”
In fact it was in 1892, the year of his unsuccessful application,
that he made his first foray in text in church archaeology despite the fact
that he had been clearly exploring church art for a long time. The subject was
the sculpture on the Lady Chapel at Ely Cathedral- he had declared an intent to
write a monograph on this following an undergraduate visit, but it clearly took
him a long time to work up to it. The sculptural programme, heavily defaced by
Protestant iconoclasm, was poorly understood. Drawing on his knowledge of apocrypha he
identified the programme and read a paper to the Royal Archaeological Institute
in August 1892- this was subsequently published in the Archaeological Journal, and then reworked as monograph.
Whether or not provoked by his failed attempt at the Disney Chair
the 1890s and early 20th century saw Monty issuing a series of
papers on topics related to church art – particularly glass and wall painting-
and all with a strong element of iconographic analysis – obviously recalling the
detective work of the Reverend Somerton on deciphering the message in the
stained glass from Steinfeld Abbey in the Treasure
of Abbot Thomas. Most of this work was published in the Reports and
communications of the Cambridge
Antiquarian Society- of which James was a committee member until around
1910. Unlike many of local archaeological journals, due to its University
connections the Reports and Communications had a far wider purview publishing
on a wide range of international topics. For example, the 1903 volume which
contained a paper by James on French tapestries, also include articles on Irish
folklore, Roman Britain, Aztec civilisation, Estonian harpoons, and the ruins
of Rhodesia. In addition to publishing papers, he read many more to the society
which were not published- sometimes two on one night.
His involvement with the Society was important as it meant he was
mixing with other important archaeologists in Cambridge and beyond- including
the Disney Professor. He also saw papers read by key figures in the developing
world of medieval archaeology, such as W St John Hope, with whom he later
collaborated and Frederick Bligh Bond, the
notorious archaeologist and psychic whose research at Glastonbury, was
he claimed, steered by his spiritualist contacts with a medieval monk of the
abbey, and ultimately led to his dismissal from the excavation committee- one
wonders whether the conceit of using psychical powers to see the past partly
inspired a View from the Hill.
In 1901, there were plans to bring relics claiming to be the bones
of St Edmund to the newly constructed Catholic Westminster Cathedral. James,
along with others, wrote to The Times arguing that the provenance of these
items was dubious in the extreme. Whilst some of the correspondent appear to
have had a confessional perspective, James simply took issue with the use and
abuse of historical records.
It is not clear whether directly or indirectly provoked by this
debate, excavations took place in the chapter house at Bury St Edmunds, with which
MR James became involved. This resulted in the discovery of a series of burials
which James, using textual sources identified – this fulfilled his predictions
laid out in an 1895 monograph on the church in which he suggested
“...if a systematic excavation could be undertaken, as a result of
the publication of this book, I should be better repaid thereby for the pains I
have spent upon it than by any other means ... From the lie of the land I am
inclined to believe that much of the crypt would be discovered, and that the
sites of the Abbots’ tombs in the Chapter-house (including that of Abbot
Sampson) might be ascertained (James 1895: 115).”. Following the excavations,
he wrote to The Times re-iterating this identification- although this led to an
anonymous rebuttal, also in the Letters page, followed by further support from
elsewhere. Whatever the final conclusions, it is clear from the correspondence
that he was not present during much of the actual excavation.
James was then again involved in a burial excavation in 1910, when
the remains of Henry VI were investigated in St George’s Chapel in Windsor.
This was led by W St John Hope, indefatigable excavator known for his
“ungentlemanly burrowing” and his “robust” excavation techniques, who James
knew from his Cambridge Antiquarian Society days. James was present in his
capacity as Provost of Kings as a representative of the two colleges founded by
Henry VI. The published description of the opening of the unmarked tomb in the
presence of several officials, the cathedral architect and verger again calls
to mind the opening of the mysterious tomb in An Episode of Cathedral History probably written a couple of years later in 1913.
Throughout his later life James continued to write about church
art and archaeology although after 1910 he mostly stopped publishing in the Cambridge Antiquarian reports and
communications. Instead he published his work as small monographs, such as his
work on the sculptured bosses at Norwich cathedral , or in the Cambridge Review
– as well as regularly writing to the The Times. He also increasingly published
in the journal of the Walpole Society a new body established in 1911.
In some case, he revisited work he had previously explored- most
spectacularly in the case of the Eton College Chapel wall paintings; as school boy he had spoken in a debate
declaring the destruction (as it was then though) of the paintings was ‘among
the worst crimes of the century”- he had also given a paper on them in 1894 to
the Cambridge Antiquarians. Finally after WWI as Provost of Eton he was able to
effect the removal of the stall revealing the surviving paintings. Other work
published on wall painting was done in collaboration with EW Tristram, who had
been closely involved with the restoration of the Eton paintings and shows
James willing to collaborate with talented younger scholars.
A final aspect of his archaeological publication are his two more
popular guides- Abbeys (1926) and Norfolk and Suffolk (1930). Abbeys was a publication by the Great
Western Railway and intended to help promote tourism within Britain. Both are
extensively illustrated with line drawings and photographs and clearly aimed at
the popular reader, and so untypically for James, there is very little critical
apparatus. Instead as he willingly acknowledges he draws on his own notes,
experiences and general guide books (although he does not mentioned the Bell’s
Guides which get name checked in. In the short bibliography in Abbey’s he does
mention antiquarian works, as well as work by colleagues and acquaintances such
as Bligh Bond on Glastonbury. Whilst not academic publications they clearly key
in James’ own fondness for church visiting and ecclesiology which went back to
his boyhood. If not labours of love, they certainly can be seen as a
contribution to the wider, more popular literature aimed at the interested
amateur which James himself regularly used on his visits in Britain and beyond
To conclude- it is clear that James was engaged and informed by
archaeology and archaeologist over his career. His academic research, something
that Pfaff’s biography goes into in far greater depth, is at the intersection
of palaeography, history, art history and archaeology. Despite his brief
excursions into Classical archaeology as a young man, his engagement with the
material remains of the past is solidly rooted in the medieval world. At its
heart is a very text-led conviction that a thorough grasp of the textual
sources – whether part of the cannon or more apocryphal or esoteric- is at the
heart of the interpretation of medieval ecclesiastical decoration. Within the
fairly limited scope of his archaeological work, figurative representation in
ecclesiastical contexts, he was doubtless correct. He never attempted to move
beyond the text, to address imagery in its own terms or widen his interests
more widely into the study of military or economic history and archaeology.
