As I Wondered Lonely as a Special Advisor at Barnard Castle…
…I found myself considering the many synchronicities of The Journey from London to County Durham – one that I have taken on several occasions, though generally by train (highlights include the JCB distribution centre north of Doncaster, so many shiny diggers, all in a row).
Some of these are personal: My father was a keen draftsman and avid Sunday painter, when I was a child we spent many hours sketching the English landscape on holidays. One of his favourite places to draw was the northeast and the castles of the Borders, including Barnard Castle – which he referred to, in his characteristic manner as Barnyard Castle. I don’t think I have ever been to Barnard Castle, but I have been to Lindisfarne, Bamburgh, Alnwick, Warkworth, Chester-le-Street and, of course Durham. A friend of mine from Durham told me that during the 90s a trilby-hat wearing Dominic Cummings was the collector of door tax at Klute in Durham. A venue owned by his uncle, which was unofficially titled “officially the worst nightclub in Europe” [1] by the local population and always (apparently) referred to by Cummings’ grandfather (a seller of Christmas trees) as Klunt. A vignette that may or may not give an insight into Cummings personality.
Others are public knowledge: The use of “Barney Castle” in the local dialect to indicate a pathetic or contemptable excuse, dating to the refusal of Sir George Bowes to engage the rebellious northern Earls during the Rising of the North (1568) owing to being “besieged” in the castle. The more widely known “barney” in reference to a minor brawl – thought by some to be cockney rhyming slang (Barney Rubble = trouble) but apparently of earlier 19th century origin. And the fact that the middle name of Cummings’ child – the one who raised Cummings’ parental instincts to a noteworthy level – is Cedd.
St. Cedd of Lastingham, as a delighted internet was informed, died of plague in 664CE and post-mortem caused the death of a party of 30 monks who had undertaken The Journey from London to County Durham in homage to their dead mentor. Bede recording that the entire party, with the exception of a small boy, succumbed to the plague. [2]
Cedd was a follower of the Irish priest St. Aiden of Lindisfarne and an adherent of the Celtic Church favoured by the Kings of Northumbria, but at odds with the wider hegemony of the Roman Catholic Church. The official Catholic line was that the Celtic Church had strayed from the fold on various obscure doctrinal issues, but the real concern for the Roman priests was that it was politically independent. The issue came to a head at the Synod of Whitby in 664 where the supporters of the two rites met to decide upon the fate of the English Church. Cedd was integral to this process as he was trusted by both the Northumbrians and the East Saxons and could speak the various languages of the protagonists fluently and act as translator. In the end the greater political clout of the Roman Church prevailed and seeing which way the wind was blowing; “Cedd, forsaking the practices of the Scots, returned to his bishopric”. [3] The transferral of the religious and intellectual leadership of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms from the Celtic to the Roman Church re-orientated the political landscape of the British Isles and sundered the various kingdoms (Celtic and Anglo-Saxon) along ethnic lines.
Text:
Jonathan Trayner
Images:
Peter Trayner, Bamburgh Castle, (1972)
Stephanie Dickinson, Barnard Castle, (2020)
