Part 3

This remaining sixth St. Werburgh is situated within that small peninsula of the north shore of Kent, which is insulated by the mouths of the Thames and Medway. In fact, it is not unlike a tongue in a mouth, of which Essex and the Isle of Sheppey are as the teeth or gums. A line from Rochester bridge to Gravesend would separate more than the entire district from the mainland: indeed it is all of the county of Kent that is north of Rochester. It consists of an elevated chalk promontory, about ten or twelve miles from east to west, and four from north to south, inclosing several small fertile valleys: added to which, on the north or Thames front, is a broad alluvial level or marsh, within the estuary of that river, of several miles in width. Camden says of this peninsula, “HO enim vocatur ilia quasi Chersonessus.” It is, accordingly, a large specimen of that sort of configuration of a tract of land in its relation to water, of which the name is often found to contain the descriptive syllable, “-holm,” “-ham,” or “-hoe.” Whether or not these three are dialectic varieties of one word, need not here be considered: it is certain, however, that the names of such peninsular tracts are very often found to be marked with “-hoe;” and “Hoo”[24] is the name of the hundred which still constitutes the largest and most prominent portion of this peninsula. So it was already called, even before the early time with which we shall find our own concern with it; for in a charter, dated A.D. 738,[25] it is already mentioned as “regio quæ vocatur Hohg.” In the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, A.D. 902, it is mentioned as “Holme.” In Domesday,[26] the hundred which constitutes the peninsular portion, is called “_HOV_;” the isthmus portion having already, however, become a separate hundred, then called “Essamele,” now “Shamwell.” The towns in the district have their proper names added to “Hoo,” as “Hoo-St.-Mary,” and “Hoo-St.-Werburgh:” and this last has the church above referred to. This is situated on the southern or Medway shore of the Hoo; but on the cliff of the northern side of the elevated core of the peninsula, and over-looking the great reach of the estuary of the Thames, and the broad alluvial level embraced by it, is the town of “Cliffe;” of which the church has the dedication St. Helen. The two churches are just four miles apart. There are several other churches now in the peninsula, but the others have been attributed to these two, of St. Werburgh and St. Helen, as their mother churches, of which the other parishes are ancient offshoots or chapelries.

* * * * *

Among the most famous names of places in England, during the long aggressive reigns of Æthelbald and Offa, when, for the largest part of the eighth century, the other kingdoms were more or less threatened with the supremacy of Mercia, was that of a place called Cloveshoe or Clovesham.[27] Its celebrity has been, no doubt, much enhanced by its intimate connection with the Church History of that period; but it has shared, with many of the names of the localities of the most important events of the history of those times, in a great deal of uncertainty and controversy as to the actual place.

Few monuments of those ages are preserved to us in such multitude as names of places, and in such apparent entireness; but few are of such uncertain and doubtful appropriation. Although we are living in the midst of the scenes of the greatest events of our early history; yet one of the most surprising circumstances is, that of the number of the names of the places that have remained almost unaltered, during the interval of twelve centuries, so few of them can, with any degree of certainty, be identified: so that, although a Gazetteer or Index Locorum of those times would be a most valuable help it would be the most difficult to compile; and, judging from past attempts at contributions to it, impossible to be done with any reasonable approach to trustworthiness. The visible monuments have almost entirely been swept from off the face of the earth. Towns, then of importance and even magnitude, if not now entirely subject to the plough, are only represented by the merest villages; and religious institutions have had their identity drowned by the importation of later monastic orders; and generally by more catholic, but less national or local, dedications. The names of the places, in some few cases identified by immemorial traditions, are often the only indications of the whereabouts of some of the greatest events; but even the names themselves are obscured by the different methods, used in that age and in ours, of distinguishing them from other similar names; and the traditions, which should have preserved them, are interrupted by the long interval, between the events themselves, and the time at which the names first come again into our sight.

But this Clovesho = Clofeshoum = or Clobesham[28] had necessarily retained its hold upon the public memory of the ages from the eighth to the sixteenth centuries, from the importance to the Church of the great acts of councils, both royal and pontifical, there held; and the memory or tradition of the National Church, was, of all others, the most vivid and tenacious of any, during that long period--perhaps the only one which may be said to have bridged it, unbroken by interruptions, such as dynastic revolutions. When the tradition of the actual whereabouts of this famous place comes first into our view, we find it attached to the “Hoo” of Kent above described, and to the place called “Cliffe” there situated. The name now current is “Cliffe-at-Hoo,” and this appears to have been the form in which it came to Camden’s knowledge: at any rate, in the earlier editions of Britannia (1587), he mentions this place as “Cliues at Ho Bedæ dictum.”

There is, however, extant a still earlier record, that the tradition had not yet been doubted by the learned. The Rev. Prebendary Earle, Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford, has most judiciously preserved some marginal notes of the 16th century, that he found in that MS. of the Saxon Chronicle,[29] which he distinguishes as “C.;” which notes he considers to be “written in an Elizabethan hand:” but as will be presently seen they must have been of the reign of Henry VIII. One of these is written in the margin against one of the occurrences of the name “Clofes hoo” in the Chronicle, and reads “doctor Hethe’s benyffyce;” and Mr. Earle asks, “where may Dr. Hethe’s benefice have been?”[30] To this question of the Professor’s, two more may be added: Who was Dr. Hethe? And who was--evidently his intimate acquaintance--the writer of the marginal notes to the Chronicle?

The answers to these three questions will shew what sort of men these were whom we find in possession of this historical tradition concerning the actual place of those famous synods; and who, long before any question about it had been raised, by the incipient critical scepticism of the 17th century, out of fancied probabilities, are here seen treating it as an undoubted fact. These answers will also shew what advantages, of time and local associations, they had for judgment of the fact.

The benefice, then, was the Rectory of the Cliffe above mentioned, situated in the peninsula, or Hoo, north of Rochester. This living was held, from 1543 to 1548, by Dr. Nicholas Heath: it was, therefore, during these years that the marginal notes were written. He was afterwards Bishop of Rochester, and of Worcester, and Archbishop of York, and Lord Chancellor; and during the reign of Henry VIII., and to the accession of Elizabeth, took leading parts in most affairs, both in Church and State. Wood calls him “a most wise and learned Man, of great Policy, and of as great Integrity.”

As to Dr. Heath’s friend, the writer of the marginal notes, there can be no doubt that he was Dr. Nicholas Wotton: one of the small knot of revivers of Anglo-Saxon literature, and of those, named by Mr. Earle,[31] as a few persons who then had the handling of Saxon MSS. It is found that the long active and distinguished career, of each of these two men, ran both in the same groove:--through the same period, in the same rank and line of affairs, and locally together.[32] They were both part authors of the well-known Institution of a Christian Man, 1537. Wotton was the first Dean of Canterbury, and so continued for more than twenty-five years: also Dean of York. During two intervals he administered, by commission, the Province of Canterbury; and was named, along with Parker, as successor to that Primacy.

These are the two men, who are first found in possession of the historical tradition, that the famous place where the Mercian kings, with the Archbishops, the Bishop of Rochester, and the Mercian and other Bishops, held their councils; the acts of which must, in all ages, have been most conspicuous to learned English Canonists, was no other than this very Cliffe-at-Hoo; and it is evident, from the directness of the marginal note, that they held it as an unquestioned fact. So, about fifty years afterwards, when he published Britannia, it was as we have seen, also without reserve, accepted by Camden.[33] Up to this time the tradition--not among men who accept Geoffrey of Monmouth’s stories and the like, but among the learned--was yet undisturbed. But twenty years later we find Camden wavering; influenced only by speculations on the nature of the district, and a then prevalent distorted perspective of the remote historical circumstances of the time concerned. In the edition of Britannia, which received his latest revision,[34] he qualifies his former statement, by saying that he no longer dares to affirm, as others do, whether or not the Cliffe in the little country called Ho, may be the “Cliues at Ho,” so celebrated in the infancy of the Anglican Church; because the place seems not to be a convenient one for holding the Synod; and that the actual place seems to have been within the kingdom of Mercia, rather than Kent. From that time to this present day the place, indicated by this name, has ranked among the most disputed and unsettled questions of early English topography.

It also happened, that Camden, when treating of Berkshire, had quoted from the Chronicle of Abingdon, a passage which set forth, that, before the abbey was founded at, or removed to, that place, its name had been “Sheouesham,” and was a royal residence. This name, thus brought forward by Camden, struck the fancy of Somner the learned compiler of the earliest Anglo-Saxon Dictionary,[35] who, collating it with Camden’s hesitation at the Cliffe-at-Hoo tradition, thought he saw in “Sheouesham” a scriptorial erroneous variation of “Clouesho or -ham;” Abingdon being, in accordance with the conception of the greater constancy of the frontiers of the “Heptarchy” then prevalent, more likely to be the place of councils, at which the Mercian kings so often presided. And this seemed to be the more likely; because the Abingdon Chronicle also said, that Abingdon had hitherto been a royal residence, when the abbey was founded, from which it got its new name. The Abingdon Chronicle is, of course, good for its proper uses, but where it says that “Seouescham civitas” had been a “sedes regia,” although the name has an English colouring, it is evidently speaking of British or ante-Saxon times. If a royal residence during the reign of Æthelbald, it must have been of the West Saxons, and not of the Mercians. It could not, therefore, have been the Cloveshoe where Æthelbald presided.

If this liberty of interpretation should be permitted, it is plain that it would be enough to shake almost any recorded name. Indeed another example of its use, if also tolerated, would reverse the one itself that had been proposed: would, if the other was enough to carry it to Abingdon, be strong enough to bring it back again to Hoo. In the charter, dated A.D. 738,[36] four years before the earliest recorded Cloveshoe Council, a piece of land is called “Andscohesham.” This is certainly within the very Hoo district itself, which is the site of the Cloveshoe of the tradition; being described as “in regione quæ uocatur Hohg.” Mr. Kemble prints the charter from the Textus Roffensis, but omits the title or endorsement that fixes the very spot in the Hoo that it refers to. This is, however, preserved in Monasticon Anglicanum:[37] “De Stokes, que antiquitus vocabatur Andscohesham;” and Stoke is now a parish in the Hoo, and close to Cliffe. There can be no doubt that the “And-” stands for, or is a corrupt reading of, “aed-” or the preposition “æt,-” so continually carried, along with vernacular Anglo-Saxon names, into Latin documents; and the name of this “Scohesham” of the Kentish Hoo would thus be practically identical with that of the “Scheouesham”--also written “Seuekesham”[38]--the alleged ancient name of Abingdon. Not that it is intended here to say that “Andscohesham” is a corruption of “Clovesham,” although it would have been just as reasonable as Somner’s inference; but that Somner’s conjecture for removing the place, might be retorted by one equally efficient to bring it back again. But even this might be worth farther scrutiny: for if this identity, of “Andscohesham” and “Clovesham,” should prove to be the case, the ancient controversy would be determined at once, without the further trouble here being bestowed. This Andscohesham or Stoke is close also to Hoo-St.-Werburgh, and probably identical with “Godgeocesham,” the place where “Eanmundus rex,” or Eahlmund (= Alcmund, father of Egbert of Wessex) was living, when he added his form of approval to a gift,[39] of land at Islingham also close adjoining, by his co-rex of Kent, Sigered, to Earduulf Bishop of Rochester, (A.D. 759-765.)

The likeness of the name Clovesho and Cliff-at-Hoo, is not of a sort likely to suggest identity, except first prompted externally, such as by an actual independent tradition; but after having been thus brought together by external evidence, the structure of the old name can thoroughly justify the identity.

But, however slender may have been this original philological cause of disturbance, it served to carry the question, of the actual place, out into the expansive region of conjecture; where it has been ever since rolling and rebounding, from one end of the land to the other, from that time to this. Every succeeding writer treating the matter as if it had been commissioned to him to choose the place of the synods, according to his own views of the fitness of things. Bishop Gibson first accepted Somner’s conjecture, and so adopting Abingdon, concludes that “no sane man,” who admits the authority of the Abingdon Chronicle, “can stick at it:”[40] the Abingdon Chronicle having never said it except through Somner’s distortion. Smith’s gloss, on the name in Beda is, “Vulgo Cliff, juxta Hrofes caester.” But he continues, in a note, that Somner’s opinion in preferring Abingdon seems not unworthy of observation. He recites Camden, but concludes, “Sed in his nihil ultra conjecturam, & illam certe valde fluctuantem.”[41] A conclusion which is even prophetic. In Dr. Geo. Smith’s map to Beda it is, however, placed at Abingdon. Smith’s note is transcribed as it stands by Wilkins;[42] and again by Sir T. D. Hardy.[43]

Capt. John Stevens, in a note in his translation of Bede, (A.D. 1723,) says, as to the true place being Cliffe, “Of this opinion are the two great antiquarians, Spelman and Talbot, to which Lambard likewise gives in, though with caution.” This must be Dr. Robert Talbot, Canon of Norwich, another early Saxon scholar, reign Henry VIII., who left transcripts of charters of Abingdon,[44] and is, therefore, another early learned witness of the tradition. Spelman’s interpretation is “Cloveshoviæ (vulgo Clyff).”[45] The Rev. Joseph Stevenson[46] recites the option of Cliffe and Abingdon. Of the church historians, Fuller remonstrates against Camden’s doubts, with his usual moderation. Collier merely calls it “Clovesho, or Clyff, near Rochester.”

By this time the Abingdon speculation had become strong enough to carry double: to be able to be called in to the help of other theories, on outside matters. The ingenious Welsh philologer, William Baxter,[47] gets from it an offspring _ergo_. He makes Abingdon the “Caleva Attrebatum,” _because_ it had been “Clovesho:” upon which, by a sort of “To-my-love and from-my-love” formula, Dr. W. Thomas[48] completes the symmetry of a logical circle, by citing “Calleva Attrebatum” as evidence that Cloveshoe is near Henley-on-Thames, then thought to be Calleva.

R. Gough, in Additions to Camden, leaves it at Abingdon on Bp. Gibson’s argument: and, throughout the eighteenth century, Abingdon seems to have been favoured; the writers being much given to copy each other. Dr. Lingard, 1803, quoting Capt. Stevens’s translation of Bede, says “probably Abingdon,” and so also puts it in his Anglo-Saxon map; but Capt. Stevens had only quoted both views, without adopting either.

The later editors of the Saxon Chronicle, Dr. Ingram and Mr. Thorpe, return to the tradition, contenting themselves with the simple gloss “Cliff-at-Hoo, Kent,” “Cliff near Rochester.” Miss Gurney, however, prudently says, “Cliff in Kent, or Abingdon.” Professor Earle gives the valuable note and question about Dr. Heath, before mentioned, but leaves the main question, of the place, open. On the other hand, the Dictionaries, since Somner: Lye says “fortasse Abbingdon,” and Dr. Bosworth follows with “perhaps Abingdon,” quoting both Somner and Lye.

But the nineteenth century took a fresh stride away from the start of the seventeenth. Whilst accepting from the eighteenth the inheritance of the doubt, it next renounced the claim itself for which the doubt had been raised. It is no longer Abingdon, but wherever it may be thought likely--Dr. Lappenberg[49] places it in Oxfordshire; Mr. N.E.S.A. Hamilton[50] “co. Berks.” Mr. Kemble more boldly carries it to “the hundred of Westminster, and county of Gloucester, perhaps near Tewksbury.”[51] Next year,[52] he more firmly says “Doubts have been lavished upon the situation of this place, which I do not share,” and concludes that it was “not far from Deerhurst, Tewksbury, and Bishop’s Cleeve; not at all improbably in Tewksbury itself, which may have been called Clofeshoas, before the erection of a noble abbey at a later period gave it the name it now bears.”

Messrs. Haddan and Stubbs[53] accept the objections of their forerunners against Cliff-at-Hoo, thinking that this place “rests solely on the resemblance of the name.” They say of the Abingdon = Sheovesham theory, that it is also “the merest conjecture.” They also reject Mr. Kemble’s Tewkesbury as founded on a mistaken identity of Westminster hundred with another place sometimes called “Westminster,” in the Mercian charters, (A.D. 804-824). This is, indeed, Westbury-on-Trym. But why was the minster there called “west,” and where was the minster that was east of it? At an earlier date (A.D. 794) it had already got its present name, “Uuestburg.” Messrs. Haddan and Stubbs leave the question of the true place of Cloveshoe as they find it, neither endorsing the original tradition, nor indulging in the freedom of choice which had been established for them. In another work,[54] however, Mr. Haddan has said, “On the locality of Cloveshoo itself, unfortunately, we can throw no more light than may be contained in the observation, that St. Boniface invariably styles the English synod, ‘Synodus _Londinensis_;’ and that … the immediate vicinity of that city--in all other respects the most probable of all localities--seems consequently the place where antiquarians must hunt for traces of the lost Cloveshoo.” How far Cliffe, situated near the mouth of the Thames, may satisfy or contradict the “Londinensis” of S. Bonifatius must be left to be judged. Dean Hook recites his fore-goers, but not quite understanding them:--“Where Cloveshoo was it is impossible to say, some antiquarians placing it at Cliff-at-Hoo, in Kent; some in the neighbourhood of Rochester; others contending for Abingdon; others again for Tewkesbury.”[55] But Cliff-at-Hoo in Kent _is_ in the _near_ neighbourhood of Rochester. The present state of the question, therefore, seems to be, that it is given up as hopeless.

But the most strenuous renunciator of the Kentish tradition, in favour of the Berkshire conjecture, was a learned and distinguished native of the Kentish locality itself: the Rev. John Johnson. He is usually reckoned among the learned and suffering body of the Nonjurors, but, by personal merits and some concessions, he appears to have escaped their political ordeal; having retained his preferments throughout a long life. He is commonly distinguished, from the other Johnsons of literature, as “Johnson of Cranbrook.” His remarks deserve all the more careful consideration, because he was born at Frindsbury, immediately adjoining Cliffe, and the intermediate parish between it and Rochester. At Frindsbury, in fact, was the “Aeslingham” of the Textus Roffensis, in one of the charters that concern the Hoo and the locality now in question. He printed a Collection of Canons of the English Church, in 1720.[56] In his preface and notes to the Synod at which was ratified the submission of the usurped primacy of Lichfield to that of Canterbury, A.D. 803, which is one of those held at “clofeshoas;”[57] he oddly brings it, as an argument that Abingdon was the place, that the triumphant Archbishop of Canterbury “was willing to meet” his reconciled insubordinant rival, half way between Lichfield and Canterbury. Converting what is a very strong presumption against Abingdon, into an act of extreme humility on the part of the Archbishop. The learned writer must have felt the difficulty, which he thus strove so hard to liquidate into a virtue. After this, he goes on to allege that “there is not a more unhealthy spot in the whole province, I may say in all Christendom,” than this district of the Hoo. With deference, however, to such a writer, and a native of the spot, this account of it does, to a mere visitor, seem to be exaggerated. The Gads-Hill, of Falstaff, will bring the neighbourhood to the remembrance of many; and it has become more widely known of late years, by the last residence of another great master of humour and fiction, which is less than four miles from the church of Cliffe, and the outlook from which would be about identical with that from any Mercian Villa Regia that may have existed here. An ungrateful remembrance of the inflictions of schoolmasters, or other childish griefs, is often observed to haunt the later career of those to whose distinguished position they may have contributed.

In his “Addenda,” Johnson afterwards says, “I find some worthy gentlemen still of opinion, that Cliff … was not unhealthy in the age of the Councils:” and he truly quotes charters from the Textus Roffensis, to show that the northern marshes, or levels, then already existed; and he urges that it “was, therefore, altogether unfit for a stated place of synod.” That “As Cliff in Hoo was never a place of great note itself, so it lies, and ever did lie, out of the road to any place of note;” and he goes on to recite Somner and Camden’s plea of the greater likelihood of Abingdon, for synods limited to the times of Mercian domination.