CHAPTER 12

Saints of the River

St. Birinus has long been venerated as the first and principal saint of the Thames. In the seventh century he converted the first Saxons to Christianity by baptising them in the river at places such as Somerford Keynes, Taplow, Ewen, Poole Keynes and Kemble. He baptised King Cynegils of Wessex in the Thames at Dorchester; in the same stretch of river, in the following year, he baptised the king’s son. The river had become his fountain of grace. In the early seventh century he is supposed to have established a church by the river at Hurley, on a previously pagan site of worship, as well as the church of the Holy Trinity at Cookham. The graveyard of this church is the scene for Stanley Spencer’s painting of the final resurrection of the dead, completed in 1926. Bapsey Pool at Taplow, associated with the baptismal ministry of Birinus, is still to be found in the grounds of Taplow Court. As a missionary bishop he established his see by the Thames at Dorchester; he is buried in the abbey there, and his shrine became a place of pilgrimage in the Middle Ages. The shrine still survives in the church, to be visited by modern Thames pilgrims.

St. Alphege is the patron saint of Greenwich. He was Archbishop of Canterbury at the beginning of the eleventh century, when he was abducted from the cathedral there by a detachment of Danish invaders and taken to their court by the river at Greenwich. Here he was murdered by his captors, beaten to death with the bones of oxen, and the present church of St. Alphege was erected by Nicholas Hawksmoor on the site of his martyrdom. There is every reason to suppose that shrines have been placed on this spot ever since his death in 1012.

St. Alban parted the waters of the Thames in front of the blasphemers who murdered him. On his way to execution, on 20 June 304, he was obliged to cross the river. “There,” according to the Venerable Bede,

he saw a multitude of both sexes, and of every age and rank, assembled to attend the blessed confessor and martyr; and these so crowded the bridge, that he could not pass over that evening. Then St. Alban, urged by an ardent desire to accomplish his martyrdom, drew near to the stream, and the channel was dried up, making a way for him to pass over.

In his sixth-century chronicle, De Excidio Britanniae, Gildas reported that “with one thousand others, he [Alban] opened a path across the noble river Thames, whose waters stood abrupt like precipices on either side.” As a result of fervent prayer “he opened up an unknown route across the channel.” Gildas’s analogy here is with the river Jordan in the Holy Land.

St. Chad is supposed to have given his name to Chadwell St. Mary on the Thames estuary, in the seventh century, and there is a well here in which he is believed to have baptised the East Saxons to the Christian faith. St. Erkenwald founded the abbeys of Barking and of Chertsey in the seventh century, and so can be considered a tutelary spirit of the Thames. And then there is St. Edmund, born by the river in Abingdon, who was one day wandering in the water-meadows beside the Thames when he was vouchsafed a vision. According to Caxton’s Golden Legend (1483), “sodeynlye there apperyd tofore hym a fayr chylde in whyte clothynge which sayd, ‘Hayle, felowe that goest alone.’” But he is perhaps not so much a saint of the river as the saint of solitary walkers, who find by the moving water peace or solace and quiet dreaming.

There have of course been many female saints intimately associated with the river. St. Frideswide is perhaps the most celebrated. In the late seventh century she fled to the Thames with her two sisters in order to escape the advances of Algar, an Anglo-Saxon prince, and on the Thames near Oxford they found a youth of heavenly appearance, clothed in dazzling white, who seated them in a boat, and within an hour landed them 10 miles downstream at Abingdon. At Abingdon Frideswide performed a miracle and, her presence being known, she sailed upstream to Binsey where she erected a chapel constructed of “wallyns and rough-hewn timber” by the Thames. Here through the medium of prayer she found a stream of water that, in succeeding generations, became a healing well. Hers could be the tale of a river nymph, fleeing from sexual pollution and in the process rendering the water of the Thames sacred. But her principal connection is with Oxford, of which city she remains the divine patroness. She established a monastery in that place which was at a later date transmogrified by Cardinal Wolsey into Christ Church College. She died at Binsey in AD 740, and her shrine is still to be seen in the cathedral of Christ Church. Her most celebrated maxim, according to legend, is that “whatever is not God, is nothing.” That part of the Kentish bank known as the Hoo was under the special care and protection of St. Werburgh, daughter of Wulphere, king of Mercia; little is known of this blessed lady except for the fact that she had an aversion to geese.

The abbey at Reading once contained a sacred relic, believed to be the hand of James the Apostle. The bones of a human hand were in fact found in the ruins of the abbey, in the late eighteenth century, and somehow or other they migrated to another church by the river, St. Peter’s in Marlow. The Thames has always attracted votive objects. It is suggestive to note, however, that the skeletal cadaver of St. James, buried in the cathedral of Santiago di Compostella, lacks its left hand. At the priory of Caversham, too, many relics were venerated—among them the spearhead that pierced the side of Jesus upon the Cross.

With this litany of attendant saints and relics it is not at all surprising that the Thames is a river of churches. Their history often begins with the wooden constructions of Saxon origin, but almost all of the churches in the Thames Valley had taken their present form by the eleventh century. It represents a remarkable story of continuity. There are some very ancient foundations indeed, still manifest in the long and narrow churches by the river. The presence of the Thames is always sensed within them, if for no other reason than that many of them are built as close to the river as the stonemasons and labourers could possibly manage. The churches of Castle Eaton and Kempsford, near the source of the river, are almost in the waters. The church of St. Mary Magdalene at Boveney, meaning “the place above the island,” is so close to the river that it can only be reached by a footpath; it was said originally to have been a chapel upon a wharf. It is now being sponsored by “the friends of friendless churches.”

The church of All Saints at Bisham stands upon the river-bank. The church of St. Mary the Virgin stands beside the bridge at Henley, raised upon an embankment so that it can look over the waters. The church of St. Peter, at Caversham, is similarly built upon a steep bank beside the river. The churches of Streatley and Goring face each other across the Thames.

There is some deep connection between worship and the crossing of the water. The church of All Saints at Marlow, built upon a site dating back to at least the twelfth century, is beside the bridge there. The church of St. Leonard at Wallingford is close beside the river and the bridge. The church of St. Mary at Hurley was sited by an important ford, recorded as early as the seventh century. It is likely, however, that there was a significant crossing here in prehistoric times. The church of St. Andrew in Sonning stands beside a bridge. The riverside village of Sonning itself was also the site for the palace of the bishops of Salisbury, dating back to the tenth century; once again the association between the Thames and religious power is maintained.

To visit these churches now is to be made aware of solemnity and old time; there is a palpable stillness within them, a perpetual harbouring of worship. In many of them are the relics of very different styles, from the ninth to the nineteenth centuries, and this heterogeneity of periods is typical of the Thames churches. It is a place where time itself is mingled and confused. From a certain vantage, in the meadows outside Lechlade, the spire of the church of St. Lawrence seems in fact to rise from the water and become an expression of it.