Sanctuary Cross, Coscote

Inspired by the series of themed blips by people like Lali and others I'm thinking of doing a short series on the history that sits under our noses every day and is so often unseen. The sense of continuity with the generations that have gone before us is very important to me and I always like to try and learn everything I can about the history of the places I live in or spend time in. The history of ordinary people is what really gets me excited, the connection with those who have walked these streets and fields before us, worked and played and loved and lost just as we do as we write our chapter in the ongoing human story. It amazes me how easy it is to fail to recognise any of the remnants they've left behind as we wander about amongst them.

Yesterday I posted a picture of Coscote Manor which sits amidst a tiny collection of farm buildings and a couple of modern homes between two small but picturesque villages (East and West Hagbourne) and on the edge of the modern commuter/ railway/ army/ power station town of Didcot. Coscote is barely even a hamlet now, it's just a junction between two country roads and people drive past it or even through it, all the time and barely notice it. In fact though its part of what was a group of settlements that go back to the Iron Age and beyond and which bustled with life throughout that time, particularly in the medieval period, interacting with each other and with the larger world outside. It's only in recent times they've become quiet little backwaters and there are some real treasures sitting around here in plain sight. The first of these is less than 100 yards from Coscote Manor, sitting in the grass at the side of the road by the modern sign post. Hardly anyone ever notices it as they scoot past and if they do they think its a bit of stone,( either a field stone or a fragment of an old wall) dumped here in the grass. The more observant or imaginative might wonder if its an old milestone made redundant by the modern sign beside it, easier to read at horseless carriage speeds. In fact it's a component of a once vital invisible network that wove a web of spiritual, legal and commercial power and custom across this landscape.

It is a Sanctuary Cross or at least the decapitated stump of one. From the twelfth century onwards the Abbots of Cirencester held the Manors of East and West Hagbourne and lived in the nearby moated Hagbourne Manor House. The law was in their hands - not just the spiritual leader of an Abbey but a rich political, commercial and even military leader. In the sizeable combined village of the Hagbournes they built their gallows - a few hundred yards from this cross. There were three of these crosses then, marking the apices of a triangle around the church of St Andrews, marking out the protected area of the Sanctuary. If you could stay ahead of the horsemen and the dogs, if you could crawl and trick and sprint your way here within this invisible wall and lay your hand on this cross (or better yet the token in the porch of the church) then whatever your crime, the Abbot's armed men could not touch you, at least for a time you could continue to live or enjoy having a skin on your back or having two hands. Even murderers could be safe here. In a world of inequality , the rich, the powerful were held at bay by this stone shaft and its sisters.

It was also a preaching cross. A place where people could gather in the lane and in the field and listen to the latest wandering friar with his stories of a reward to come, a little glimmer of light in harsh, brutal and short lives. Hope was important, it kept people in their places, rendering unto Caesar, forgoing improvements in this life, accepting inequality and injustice in the hope of paradise in the next life, a paradise physically located above the clouds that you could go to if you did what you were told for now. These stone crosses were like nails hammered through the society, holding it down, holding it in place. And this is also where the Holy salesmen would come selling relics and indulgences that would shorten the long years in Purgatory for you and your dead loved ones, get you a quicker promotion to that promised Big Rock Candy Mountain where everything would finally be ok.

It was also where you met to make bargains, swear oaths, argue and sell livestock and produce. Make a little extra.

And then came the reformation and outwardly at least all the magic was drained out of them, all the power short circuited. They still stood though, as troubling monuments that still held a secret meaning for the dwindling band of recusants that refused to change to these new English versions of the old Latin magic incantations and mysteries.

Then one day, a few miles to the South,at Newbury, there was a battle. Fighting is no rare occurrence around here it never has been. This land and these people have been at the heart of every royal and aristocratic squabble and dynastic coup for centuries. Even in this latest war this has been a dangerous place, this is a no mans land with the Parliament at Reading and Abingdon, the Royalists at Wallingford and Oxford and these fields in between. Both sides have patrolled and foraged and raided back and forth, several battles have been fought near here before, even nearer than Newbury but not on this scale and never with these consequences for this community. Six thousand grim faced cavalrymen arrive in a grey dawn and take these lanes for their own. They are on their way to Oxford, or so they think, and they are in no mood to wonder who in these villages are with them and who against. They stop here to rest, to make these roads safe, to gather in every ear of corn and barrel of apples to feed their hungry army. These are soldiers of God, a harsh, humourless, Old Testament God. A god who angers easily and who will not endure idolatry. In their eyes these crosses are just that - idols and so they decapitate them. With rope and horse and intolerance they pull them down and break apart the stones, prise out the lead staples (poured molten into channels cut in the blocks) that hold them together, kick the little saints from their niches and smash them under booted feet. 500 years of worship and commerce and power now rubble by the roadside. Lying crookedly in place they leave the stump of the shaft but they also leave their mark upon it. A useful piece of stone, what better purpose to put it to than as a whetstone to sharpen God's own swords...

Today it lies there still a marker to our past, an artefact touched by many of the beliefs and politics and forces that shaped our modern Britain, still part of that invisible network for those that wish to find it. It's environment now is a strange incongruous mixture of the old agricultural villages and the modern industrial town, but if you get out of your car and open your eyes that boring, twisted lump of rock has a rich story to tell, treasure indeed lying in the ditch.