Unless you’ve recently got lost on the way to Walsingham, it’s unlikely that the village of Burnham Norton will be very familiar to you. Nonetheless, there was a Carmelite friary there for nearly three centuries, and there are still some standing remains: the gatehouse, the west wall of the church and a few other stone walls. This friary is the subject of a recent book, edited by Brendan Chester-Kadwell and published in Norwich by Oldakre Press.
The book has nine chapters as well as a chronology of the friary, contributed by the present-day Carmelite Richard Copsey. The first part of the book concentrates on the landscape in which the friars first settled. They arrived in the area sometime before 1247, settling at an unknown local site. They left this in 1253, building a new house at Burnham Norton. In the first chapter of the book, Jonathan Hooton convincingly argues that this move may have been due to the effect of storms and flood tides on their original home.
The close connection between the friars and the landscape in which they lived forms a theme throughout the first half of the book. Having sought an isolated, truly eremitical site for their first venture into East Anglia, they found it to be unlivable. Even in the new location, their surroundings shaped their lives. In Chapter 3, Brendan Chester-Kadwell studies the way in which the friary buildings were laid out and finds close connections to contour lines on the site, which was adjacent to the Burn estuary. All the buildings were located more than five metres above sea level to avoid flooding. Even within the grounds, he finds earthworks along the 4m contour, together with other attempts to manage the drainage of such a low-lying site. Thanks to this work, some of the friars’ land was only occasionally flooded, and so could be used more intensively for food growing, while other areas were more frequently inundated, but still useful for seasonal pasture.
In the second part of the book, attention moves to the connections between the East Anglian Carmelites and the local communities around them. Although Burnham Norton Friary was on a large enough site to allow for a degree of self-sufficiency, it would still have been highly dependent on donations of alms for financial viability. The friars’ monetary income would have taken several forms. They owned a small amount of land that did not form part of their own precincts, which they were able to rent out. They would have received donations and other income from pilgrims, especially due to their location on a major east-west road towards Walsingham. They may have received dues from people fording the river, or provided a ferry for travellers. And they would have received various donations and bequests from people, some as free gifts, others in exchange for some spiritual or other service. In Chapter 8, John Alban analyses the stipulations of surviving medieval wills related to the friary, from benefactors ‘great and small’.
Some of these wills included bequests to several ecclesiastical institutions, while some were associated with a request to be buried in the Carmelite church or its environs. The reasons Alban proposes as lying behind these gifts seem to be mainly transactional: a bequest was made so that the friars would pray for the soul of their benefactor. But this analysis still leaves an important question unanswered: why was the bequest made to this particular church rather than any other? This question is even more acute for those requesting burial. They could only be buried in one place, so why this one? The stereotypical phrasing of most of the wills leaves little evidence of personal or spiritual connections that may have underlain the request. But some patterns can be discerned. Some testators showed a special fondness for the mendicant orders, and others for churches in the local area. Some families developed a tradition of leaving bequests to the same religious houses, continuing over generations.
Ion religious contexts, there are several ways in which the Carmelites would have come into contact with the local community. They would have provided opportunities for public worship, and for lay people to hear preaching. Copsey’s chronology shows several Burnham Norton friars known to have studied at Cambridge or Oxford Universities, as well as some interchange of personnel with the Cambridge house. Other Burnham friars are known to have been entrusted with positions of responsibility within the province, so it seems likely that the preaching at the house would have been to a high standard.
There would also have been processions, and other actions associated with the Carmelite liturgical calendar, as well as the great festivals of the universal church. There was an organised group of lay people associated with the priory, the Guild of St Mary of Bedlam [Bethlehem] which was based in the chapel above the gatehouse. Interestingly, the name of this guild evidences two features of Carmelite spirituality which are still important today: Marian devotion and attachment to our roots in the Holy Land.
This provides us with a glimpse into the relationship between the Carmelites and their neighbours. All too often this is presented simplistically, but in the guild we see an instance of how the different churches and orders were not interchangeable with each other. The book is mostly concerned with the surviving documentary and archaeological evidence for the lives of the friars in a rural context. Inevitably this illuminates the material aspects much more clearly than the spiritual ones, especially since the friars’ own archives have not survived.
As people who live our lives in some way inspired by the Carmelite Rule and spiritual heritage, we have a connection to the way in which Carmelite values were lived in the past. Through our lives we build on and interpret the way previous Carmelites of all kinds have themselves lived in allegiance to Jesus Christ. So how can a book like this, necessarily focussed on material circumstances be helpful to us?
Throughout the book, we are reminded of the different ways in which the friars were rooted in their environment. They lived as part of the physical world, shaping it themselves through their efforts and building works and responding to the world in which they found themselves. The same is true of their social context, and we see valuable glimpses of the deep and reciprocal personal connections that existed between Carmelites and their neighbours. And this is important, because the Carmelite tradition is clear that God speaks to us within the world, and is to be found in the concrete circumstances of our lives – among the pots and the pans in fact. Teresa of Avila used the analogy of different types of irrigation to describe stages in the spiritual life. As we read of the Burnham Norton friars’ drainage schemes their lived experience becomes accessible to our imagination, and we can begin to see how they encountered God within their daily routine. So next time that I get lost on my way to Walsingham, I’ll look out for this site. I’ll try to park the car on the grass verge opposite the gatehouse, get out and look around. Breathe in some of the air that these medieval friars did, and take something of their lives as an inspiration for my own.
