Good Things of Good Men by Sharon Jennings, Oremus, £9.99
The Chapel of St Gregory and St Augustine is the first of the side chapels that visitors and worshippers come to when they enter Westminster Cathedral via the great door, and head down the right-hand side of the nave, passing the baptistry with, just outside it, the small statue of St Christopher, donated by Hilaire Belloc and dedicated to his son, Louis John, who died on the Western Front. (“There was no escaping what youth so intensely desired.”)
Good Things of Good Men tells the stories behind all of the saints (not just the titular ones) memorialised in the pictures adorning the chapel. It is a book written by a modern English convert about a chapel commissioned and paid for by a Victorian English convert, Lord Brampton, to commemorate the original papal mission to convert the English in the late 6th century.
The opening chapter is devoted to St Bede. It is always salutary to be reminded of just how much the English Church, the study of English history and the development of English scholarship – indeed, of Englishness itself – owe to the monk of Jarrow, who appears in the chapel heavily bearded, brow furrowed, quill poised over his great history.
Sharon Jennings’s book then develops into a procession of saints: Bede, Pope St Gregory (his mind once devoted to, in his own words, “unclouded beauty”, only to be “bespattered with the mire of daily affairs” when in high office), all the way through to St Edmund, whose life ended under a hail of Danish spears.
Each saint pauses under the eye of the author, who draws out the things that make them both likeable and venerable. St Cuthbert, for instance, with his remarkable life and the almost equally remarkable story of his remains, or the great traveller St Benedict Biscop.
It is heartening, too, to see St Aidan (who is not commemorated in the chapel) garner some honourable mentions for his role in the conversion of the north. As the eminent Anglo-Saxon historian Sir Frank Stenton wrote: “The strands of Irish and continental influence were interwoven in every kingdom, and at every stage of the process by which England became Christian.” These are not dense pages of history. Each chapter is topped and tailed by a testimony about and prayer to the saint in question. The book is written in a jaunty and informal style and it contains a rich layer of colour illustrations, clearly chosen with great deal of care and thought. The reproduction, even in miniature, of a page from a 10th-century English copy of Pope St Gregory’s Pastoral Care makes you catch your breath.
Jennings has taken the title of her book from Bede: “If history records good things of good men, the thoughtful hearer is encouraged to imitate what is good.” Wise words. It is amazing, though, how easily these tales can be wiped from the record when it suits.
In his much-praised How We Invented Freedom and Why It Matters, Daniel Hannan, for instance, makes not one mention of Pope Gregory, Augustine or Aidan. Despite what they brought in the way of law, literacy, education, charity and much else, the idea that Irish and Italian monks helped to forge the traditional freedoms of England can easily be ignored, it seems. They do not fit with a story of proto-Protestant Anglo-Saxon pagans bringing with them the seeds of freedom from the forests of northern Germany.
The procession of saints organised by Jennings is one that could do with further outings through the modern English mind, I would venture.
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