The Secret Lives of Buildings: From the Ruins of the Parthenon to the Vegas Strip in Thirteen Stories (17 page)

Jesus your King is born, Jesus is born,
in excelsis gloria
.

The earliest moon of wintertime is not so round and fair

As was the ring of glory on the helpless infant there.

The chiefs from far before him knelt with gifts of fox and beaver pelt.

Jesus your King is born, Jesus is born,
in excelsis gloria
.

O children of the forest free, O seed of Manitou,

The holy Child of Earth and Heaven is born today for you.

Come kneel before the radiant boy who brings you beauty, peace and joy.

Jesus your King is born, Jesus is born,
in excelsis gloria
.

It is said that the word of the Lord is like seed: some falls on good soil and brings forth crops, but some falls on stony ground and it withers. Father Chaumonot was old when he told his story, and it fell on stony ground. After he died the Huron drifted back to hunting on the prairie and to tracking animals in the forest, and their Holy House disappeared. All that remains of the miraculous tale of Joseph the beggar is the name of his settlement, Ancienne Lorette, and the dedication of the church there to the Annunciation; and the fact that, nearby, large structures full of people take to the air and fly to other places. Our Lady of Loreto is, after all, the patron saint of air travel.

But old Father Chaumonot need not have been disappointed. Uncountable others have heard the message of the Holy House and followed the example of Richeldis de Faverches: in Italy and in Mexico, in Holland and in Scotland. The Holy House looks like a simple building, but it is in fact a complex and subtle prayer. Building it is an act of devotion; and like all devotions, it must be repeated again and again. The Holy House is a prayer that exists in time. It abides only for a while before it flits away on a cloud, suffers iconoclastic desecration, dissolves back into the forest, or slides into ruin. Then it must be made again, as all prayers must be made again.

1931

A
ND LIKE ALL
answers to prayer, the Holy House appears when least expected. Once upon a time in England, not so long ago, in the reign of King George V, a new vicar was appointed to the country parish of Walsingham, in Norfolk. One morning, Father Patten walked to the meadow beside the village, which was covered in a
sparkling dew. He picked up a small metal disk lying in the grass and held it in his hand, and he had an idea.

Farmers were always plowing up old medals that depicted Our Lady of Walsingham. Father Patten had a local craftsman make a statue out of the image on the medal, and he set it up in his parish church. Soon enough, people started to visit the church to pray to Our Lady of Walsingham to intercede for them. At first just a few showed up from the village itself; then the news spread, and more and more people came to the modest shrine, and regular pilgrimages began.

A decade after Father Patten had established the statue in his parish church, the sacred image was moved through the narrow streets of the village to a new home. On a knoll overlooking the meadow where Richeldis de Faverches had built her shrine nearly a thousand years before, the mother and her child were carried into a new church, taken around the aisles, and borne down the nave to a little house thirty feet long and thirteen feet wide. There they were installed, back at home, as if nothing had ever happened.

Every year in May Our Lady of Walsingham is carried in procession around her village. In a floral litter, she is preceded by acolytes, crucifers, thurifers, priests, bishops, monsignors of the Roman Catholic Church, friars, penitents, choirs, and soldiers.
Ombrellini
, barks of flowers, and congeries of plaster saints crowd the narrow streets of the village, and high gilded crosses peer into the bedroom windows of the low cottages. Because this is not the fifteenth century, the route of the procession is lined with reformers and the reformed, their placards denouncing superstition and idolatry, the corruption of the Church, and the sheer vulgarity of the scene; and because this is England, everyone pretends not to notice.

At the end of the procession Our Lady is carried back to her home, with its one small room and its square window. There she waits, until she is called forth the next time.

In Which a Dead Body Brings a Building to Life

T
HE
G
ERM OF A
C
ATHEDRAL
The monument of Edward II in Gloucester Cathedral,
engraved by Hubert Gravelot
.

When the women and the children of the Turkish garrison hid in the Parthenon in 1687, they repeated stories about their place of refuge to reassure themselves; but the stories they told had been repeated so many times that they had long departed from the original script. The doors of the temple had become the gates of Troy, and the Christian apse the throne of Plato. There is no such thing as a perfect copy, and stories and buildings are transformed quite as much as they are preserved in the process of repetition.

The rituals of the Middle Ages sustained a seemingly stable world, but they were also the agents of transformation. The long construction and reconstruction of Gothic cathedrals was a process of copying: each generation of apprentices learned at the feet of the master mason, became master masons themselves, and passed their wisdom on to their own apprentices. But this process was also one of evolution: each generation, in learning from its predecessors, altered what it found, and passed its altered learning on to successors who did the same. The architecture of the earliest cathedrals was an austere, simple affair, but over several centuries it grew into something of wondrous sophistication and complexity.

Because cathedrals took such a long time to build, this evolution manifested itself not only in the construction of new buildings but in the refurbishment of existing ones. Gloucester Cathedral in England provides one of the strangest examples of this process. The original building was a stern Norman basilica, but that church is now festooned with the more florid architecture of later centuries. Each generation of architecture at Gloucester is an increment of refinement
laid over its predecessor, and carries tics and quirks derived from its own genealogy.

The origin of the transformations of Gloucester is found in a royal tomb. The architectural development of the cathedral is like the cult of the body that lies within it: an affair of repeated rumors, grown ever wilder with each retelling.

I
N
1327, a cart rumbled out of the gate of Berkeley Castle, and its wooden wheels bumped down the track into the gray floodplain of the river Severn. When the cart reached the edge of a forest, two white harts emerged from the trees to meet it. Tall, luminous, and still, they allowed the carters to harness them to the vehicle, and then they bore its burden all the way to Gloucester.

The monks at the abbey in Gloucester were waiting for them. They were fearful; and well might they have been afraid, for the cart that had left Berkeley Castle that morning carried the body of none other than King Edward II. It had been three months since the king had died, and the stories that had spread about his demise were colorful and horrifying. He had been deposed by his faithless wife, Isabella, they said, and her lover, Roger Mortimer; and the monks whispered a poem that the king had supposedly written.

In winter woe befell me,

By cruel Fortune threatened.

My life now lies a ruin.

Once I was feared and dreaded,

But now all men despise me

And call me a crownless king,

A laughing stock to all.

Edward had been imprisoned at Berkeley Castle for five months, murmured the monks, suspended above a cesspit filled with corpses. He had refused to die, and so, tired of waiting, his keepers had murdered him. He had been a sodomite, the story ran, and his executioners had shoved a red-hot poker up his arse. You could hear the screams for miles around, but there were no wounds visible upon the king’s body.

Well might the monks of the abbey have been afraid. The other priories in the shire had refused to take the body, so frightened were they of Isabella and Mortimer; but Abbot John Thokey reassured his
charges. He had been a friend to the murdered king, and he reminded the monks of the time the two had dined together. It was right there, in the
Historia
of the abbey. “Sitting at the table in the abbot’s hall and seeing there paintings of the kings, his predecessors,” Edward II had jokingly asked the abbot whether there was a painting of himself among them. “The abbot replied, prophesying, rather than making it up, that he hoped he would have him a more honourable place than there.” And so he would: Abbot Thokey had plans for King Edward II. The king had suffered an ignominious end, the abbot told his monks, but now it was time to accord him the honors he had forfeited in life.

On 20 December the king’s body, being in no fit state to be seen, was hidden under a wooden effigy, and it was paraded through the streets of Gloucester on a catafalque carved with gilded lions. Behind the hearse walked the people who had most benefited from Edward’s demise: his wife, Queen Isabella; her lover, Mortimer; and her son, the young King Edward III. A silver vessel containing the heart of the dead king was held aloft for the crowd to see, and then Edward II was laid to rest.

No sooner had it been planted in the abbey church than the royal corpse began to generate activity. The masons of the abbey were called to make a sarcophagus of Purbeck marble around the body of Edward II, and on the top of this sarcophagus they placed another image of the king, carved from alabaster. The longing eyes and petulant lower lip of this effigy recalled Edward to those who had known him. The pillow upon which his head lay was supported by angels, as if they were lifting him up to spy the celestial realm, and at his feet lay two lions, marks of his royal rank.

Above the sarcophagus and the effigy floated the very heaven to which the stone king’s sightless eyes aspired. The masons had constructed around the tomb a miniature cathedral too delicate to be inhabited by rude man in this life, a habitation only for the dead and the sanctified. The arches of its vaulted aisle seemed to flicker with holy flame, and it was crowned with three miniature shrines, which were themselves crowned with openwork spires bristling with crockets and finials.

It was just the sort of building that caused one to wonder how
many angels could dance on the head of a pin. It was a minor miracle; but, at the time, it occurred to no one to write the names of the men who had wrought it in the
Historia
of the abbey.

G
LOUCESTER ABBEY HAD
been founded by Osric, prince of the Hwicce tribe, in 680. But the building in which Edward was laid dated from 1089, when, after a fire had swept through the abbey, Abbot Serlo commanded that a new church be built in the form of a cross. On 15 July 1100 the head of the cross was completed, and this choir was consecrated for service. Over the high altar was a semicircular apse, and the heavy vault of the choir was supported by thick walls, which the masons had pierced with round arches resting on squat columns.