In the 1860s a younger architect arrives in a small city in southern England. He has been despatched to renovate the city’s nice church, a splendid medieval constructing which has fallen into disrepair. The roof is leaking, the material is mouldering and because the ground decays the native physician worries an infection will unfold from the graves beneath the church; the useless, he fears, will start to poison the residing.
However the architect realises without delay that the church’s issues run deeper than this. Its huge tower is simply too heavy for the constructing. It has been slowly shifting for hundreds of years and he appears to listen to the voices of its arches crying out: ‘They’ve certain on us a burden too heavy to be borne. We’re shifting it. The arch by no means sleeps.’ Nobody heeds his warnings; collapse is barely a matter of time.
That is the premise of John Meade Falkner’s The Nebuly Coat, an eerie and atmospheric novel concerning the weight of historical past, the burdens of the previous and the methods the useless can certainly poison the residing. Surprisingly little-known, it’s as unusual and unforgettable as its peculiar title, which refers to a heraldic coat of arms looming within the stained-glass home windows of the church.
Revealed in 1903, the novel appears to be like again to the large-scale church restoration motion in the midst of the nineteenth century. Certainly one of its inspirations appears to be the collapse of the spire of Chichester Cathedral in 1861, which demonstrated the precarious state of a lot of England’s medieval church buildings. The drive for restoration saved many church buildings from crumbling into damage, although generally at the price of imposing a markedly mid-Victorian type on high of their older options. We owe lots to these Victorian restorers; usually, what appears to be like right now like a well-preserved medieval church is known as a sensitively restored one.
An encounter between Victorian modernity, assured in technological progress, and the older, extra intangible powers of an historical place is on the centre of The Nebuly Coat. Arriving as a stranger, the architect quickly finds himself concerned with the city, which is dominated by its enormous church, and the individuals who reside below its shadow. He turns into entangled within the internet of a protracted historical past developed over generations in a small, slow-changing place: hoary grudges, previous regrets and household tragedies. In time he inherits the burden of a weighty secret which has already destroyed two lives, and which nearly crushes him too.
Falkner’s understanding of historical past and church structure sprang from his personal antiquarian pursuits. Although by occupation a businessman within the armaments commerce, he had a protracted affiliation with Durham Cathedral and its medieval library. Late in life he turned its honorary librarian, in addition to honorary reader in paleography on the College of Durham.
In some methods The Nebuly Coat recollects the ghost tales of Falkner’s up to date M.R. James, distinguished manuscript scholar and grasp of supernatural storytelling. Right here, too, the antiquarian examine of historical stays appears continually on the verge of opening up a ghostly connection to the previous. Materials artefacts – manuscripts, medieval carvings, excavated grave items – are imbued with mysterious life and energy, capable of possess and eat the archaeologist or historian who tries to check them.
The supernatural lurks across the edges of The Nebuly Coat, within the gloomy shadows of the church, however as an imaginative presence somewhat than a literal manifestation. Like many an English ghost story, considered one of its spectres is the cultural reminiscence of the Dissolution of the Monasteries. It’s hinted that this act of violence, when the church was seized from its monastic builders and brought into rich non-public palms, introduced an evil destiny on the household who profited from it.
This can be a burden for his or her descendants to hold, simply because the church itself is an inheritance from the medieval previous which later generations should handle, protect and restore. The near-animate constructing and those that reside alongside it type a detailed communion, working with and upon one another. Because the architect muses:
‘What a creature of an hour was he, was each man, in face of those grim partitions that had stood enduring, immutable, for era after era, for age after age! After which he smiled as he thought that these everlasting realities of stone have been all created by ephemeral man; that he, ephemeral man, was even now busied with schemes for his or her assist, with anxieties lest they need to fall and grind to powder all beneath.’
Eleanor Parker is Lecturer in Medieval English Literature at Brasenose School, Oxford and the writer of Conquered: The Final Youngsters of Anglo-Saxon England (Bloomsbury, 2022).
