A One-Sided Quarrel

And why this author loves these arguments

Grasmere’s Saint by E. G. Fletcher

I love literary and historical quarrels. The more obscure the better. The older, the better. And if I can only read one side of an intellectual scrap, one side so lost in the sauce, so deep into the argument, that I can’t make out what the other author said, better still. I think, as I read about disputes I’ve never heard of and don’t understand — but about which someone else felt or feels very strongly — ‘this is wonderful. I’m in heaven.’

So you can only imagine my delight and pleasure when, perusing the online Cornell University archive of an evening, as one does, I encountered this half of a quarrel about British history before the Norman conquest.

It’s titled Grasmere’s Saint: Verses and Poems. A Reply to “Wild Lakeland” by E. G. Fletcher. How could I refrain from reading something so inviting? A reply to a book I’d never heard of, by an author I’d never heard of. Oh, I thought to myself, someone somewhere must like me. I’m in for a treat tomorrow, when I settle down to give this a read.

And so I was. So I was.

Essentially, E. G. Fletcher’s problem with the book Wild Lakeland by Mackenzie McBride is not just one but many; it’s multifarious. Fletcher writes that she sought in vain for someone to join this argument instead of her. She looked high and low. She wanted someone, anyone, who was qualified — and there must be people who are! — to join the fray. But combatants were there none, and so she had, simply had, to get involved herself. This little pamphlet is the result.

All well and good. Now the detective work begins, on my end.

It seems to me, working with significantly less than half of all the evidence, that McBride’s book is about either the English landscape or about English history. And in the course of this meditation, or historical study, or national biography, McBride made several intemperate judgements which roused the ire and stirred the pen of Miss Fletcher. What did McBride say and do? Most of the latter’s crimes, it seems, are to do with the person of Oswald — monarch and saint, king and martyr.

Oswald, as of course you know, was a king who united two Northumbrian kingdoms in the seventh century, before challenging Penda of Mercia — the great pagan — and dying (incredibly young, like so many rulers of that era) in battle against the Mercian horde.

For a time, Oswald was centre of a cult and venerated as an English saint.

But what does McBride apparently say of Oswald? Fletcher steams. McBride says of Oswald that he was not the great originating Christian figure; and that he was, in his manner, in his designs for the whole of Britain, akin to the German Kaiser. (That being Wilhelm II, this book having been written not long after, or not many decades after, the First World War — and before the second.)

And this is not the end of it. To whom else does McBride compare Oswald, king and martyr? To Napoleon.

One does not need to know much history to guess why, for an Oswald defender, to an Oswald fan, this might be considered a step too far.

Napoleon wanted to conquer Britain, to subjugate Britain into continental tyranny. He was a godless man, who rose through the deistic or atheistic revolutionary period, crowned himself emperor in defiance of the pope, and to top it all off, he was French. To compare a goodly Christian like Oswald — a Briton, a Northumbrian — to a French tyrant like Napoleon might make some of his fans more than a little upset.

So far, Fletcher has made her point fairly well. She backs it up with quotes from McBride and I must say, as a purely one-sided observer of this contest (and if the quotes provided are accurate and representative), it seems that McBride writes absolutely awfully.

And that must be a sin, whatever the author says about the sainted Oswald.

Fletcher weakens her own work, of course, when she starts engaging in a little amateur historiography, in theory to strengthen her case. She asks why McBride does not appear to have consulted the sources, including Bede. Isn’t Bede, Fletcher says, a source of which, a named historical commentator says, any other country would be proud? Does this not mean that everything in Bede — from his facts to his normative judgements — must be correct? Mustn’t they be?

As so often, I think, there’s a particular quality to these self-published books on historical subjects. They’re about less and more than the history, and the terrible, painful, often incomplete search for the truth that history so often is.

No, pamphlets of this kind are about faith: religious faith, in the case of Miss Fletcher, whose Oxford home is listed as being named after St Chad in this very book. She is religiously attached to Oswald as a local saint and object of veneration. Whatever the state of the scholarship, whatever the state of the evidence, whatever McBride actually said, Oswald must, simply must, be a great and noble man, a king and a martyr. A servant of god.

But then, as the pamphlet surpasses the majestic, Olympian length of six pages, we begin the second section.

You were promised verses and poems in the title, were you not?

And so we get verses and poems. Some of them claim to be long-standing Northumbrian songs — sung by goodly Northumbrians upon their observances of feast days and in local marches and parades. Another — the final piece — is apparently another old song of good vintage: but this one has been arranged, or edited, or otherwise worked upon, by the author’s late sister, a Miss C. M. Fletcher of Lowfold, Grasmere. It mostly concerns the story of Oswald, and enjoins the listener to remember that time when Oswald ruled their fathers well.

All sounds good to me, I must say. I love these one-sided arguments. I’ve had a wonderful time.