According to local tradition, the first cuckoo to return from Africa will sing from the Celtic Cross in Saint Brynach’s churchyard at Nevern in Pembrokeshire every 7 April. Its song, on the feast day of Saint Brynach, heralds the arrival of Spring.
Brynach was an evangelist from Ireland who, in the sixth century, made the Peregrinatio Pro Amore Christi, travelling the coasts of England and Wales establishing small Celtic monasteries. By the time the Celtic Cross was erected in the tenth century thousands of pilgrims were visiting Nevern on the Pilgrim Way to St. David’s, and numbers increased when in the twelfth century Pope Calixtus II declared three pilgrimages to St. David’s the equivalent of one to Jerusalem. But a fallow period was to follow at the Reformation when the monastery and its church fell into disrepair. The church was restored during the Methodist Revival of the 1730s.
But while my friends were examining the knotwork and ringwork carvings on the cross, I was more interested in the seven-hundred-year-old yew trees which line the path to the church, and especially in the bleeding yew. For one of the trees produces a blood-red sticky resin. Thin legends have grown up around this phenomenon: the tree will bleed until Nevern Castle, abandoned in 1179, is again occupied by a Welshman; a monk, hanged from the tree for a crime he did not commit, vowed that it would bleed for eternity. More prosaically the release of sap is normal if a yew has been damaged and usually it will heal itself. But this sap is a very red and blood like sap, and the tree shows no sign of healing.
Many explanations have been offered for the common occurrence of ancient yews in the churchyards of England and Wales. My favourite comes from the seventeenth century astrologer, botanist and translator of mystic texts, Robert Turner, who claimed they were planted to protect and purify the dead, absorbing the gases from decomposing corpses. Their branches
draw and imbibe… the gross and oleaginous vapours exhaled out of the grave by the setting sun.
and their roots
suck nourishment from the dead. *
From this it is only a step to imagine vampire-yews sucking blood as well.
As I wandered the graveyard embroidering this ghoulish fantasy, I was distracted by an old gravestone now fixed high on the wall of the churchyard and overhung with ivy. The stone records the deaths in infancy of Anna Letitia and George, the children of David Griffith, vicar of Nevern between 1782 and 1834. Infant mortality was high in those years, and while the deaths did not surprise me, I was taken aback by the strangely jaunty verse which commemorated them:
They tasted of life’s bitter cup.
Refused to drink the potion up
But turned their little heads aside
Disgusted with the taste – and died.
It sounded horribly callous and cold-hearted. Could anyone record the death of their children in such insensitive terms? Was it meant to be humorous?
But the jocularity was not entirely unfamiliar: a commemorative brass in Southwark Cathedral begins conventionally enough:
Susanna Barford departed this life the 20th of
August 1652 aged 10 yeares 13 weekes, the non-
-Such of the world for piety and virtue
In soe tender years.
And death and envye both must say twas fitt
Her memory should thus in brasse bee writ.
Here lyes interr’d within this bed of dust
A virgin pure not stained by carnal lust;
Such grace the king of kings bestowed upon her
That now she lives with him a maid of honour.
Her stage was short, her thread was quickly spun
Drawne out and cut, gott heaven, her worke was done.
But the final couplet has a chirpy insouciance like that on the Griffith grave:
This world to her was but a traged play
Shee came and sawt dislikt and passed away.
The origin of this and similar couplets may lie in a poem written by Henry Wotton in 1626;recalling the death of his nephew’s widow shortly after that of her husband, it ends:
Hee first deceased; Shee for a little Tryd
To live without him, likd it not, and dyd.
The lines were certainly adapted on the stone of Margaret and John Whiting, found in Saint Bartholomew the Great, when John died a year after his wife in 1681,
Shee first deceased; Hee for a little Tryd
To live without her, likd it not and dyd.
On an adult grave, and where the epitaph also records that the couple had,
“lived lovingly together … 40 yeares and upward…having had issue 12 children”.
the humour sounds gentle and not out of place. But on the child graves the seeming emotional detachment is disturbingly unfeeling and unsympathetic.
Lawrence Stone** has advanced the chilling suggestion that the high infant mortality rate in earlier centuries led parents to make only a limited emotional investment in their children, but I think it is more credible that an age of greater faith may have rendered even child death less traumatic than it is today.
Pat Jalland*** reasons that the evangelical movement of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century engendered a view of death as an escape from an unhappy world of pain and suffering. As angels in heaven the children would watch over those left below, who should anticipate a joyful reunion, certain of a future life in a happier world. She warns against judging the emotions of an earlier age from our own standpoint where there is reduced prevalence of religious belief.
Certainly, Reverend David Griffith was both a product and a part of the Methodist Revival which espoused these evangelical views. Nonetheless I find the epitaph he chose for the grave of his young children, with its apparent bland and untroubled acceptance, deeply disquieting.
*Quoted in Richard Mabey, Flora Britannica, (1996) p.29.
**Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800, (1977) pp651-2.
***Pat Jalland, Death in the Victorian Family, (1996) chapters 1 and 6.