“The habit of virtue cannot be formed in a closet. Habits are formed by acts of reason in a persevering struggle through temptation.”
Bernard Gilpin
In my Meander on the 'Hoppings' ….
…I recounted my visits there as an opportunity for some grandad-grandson bonding when I was young. The same was true of our annual visit to ‘Houghton Feast’ that I returned to last weekend for the first time in over twenty years.
However, before I write about my visit to the Feast, I must make mention of Ken Loach’s ‘The Old Oak’ that I saw at the cinema last week.
It will not be to everyone’s taste. Still, I found this social realist film with a screenplay by Paul Laverty as powerful and moving in its exploration of community, division, and hope.
The film's centre is a pub, 'The Old Oak', in a working-class community in County Durham in northeast England just after the Brexit vote. A pub that had traditionally been where people from all social classes come together to drink, talk, and support each other.
The people of the northeast are known for their warm welcome to visitors and those who choose to move to the area. But as you'd expect from Loach, he doesn’t hold back from showing a local community divided. Divided by Brexit and economic hardship, some residents resent the recent arrival of immigrants and refugees from Syria. The film addresses the challenges faced by working-class locals and refugees, reinforcing the importance of creating community and showing how it can be a source of strength and resilience.
Loach also does not shy away from showing how division can lead to conflict and hatred. Still, the film also shows that overcoming division is possible and that hope can be found in the community, giving the individuals within that community the support to persevere, even through the most challenging times.
It’s not an easy watch, and I suspect it may not ‘travel well’ outside of the north of England. It won’t garner the audience of the latest blockbuster. Still, it's a film that everyone should watch as its themes are more profound than a simple story around a pub in northeast England. Fundamentally, the film is about kindness and consideration for the less fortunate and how we all might succeed by supporting each other within a community. I see many write of that principle on Substack every day.
So, let’s move on to Houghton Feast, which, too, is a celebration of community.
Houghton (pronounced hoe-ton and not how-ton)-le-Spring is fifteen miles from Newcastle, and human occupation of the area goes way back. My photograph is of Houghton's 'Seven Sisters' which is believed to be a Neolithic burial site dating back to 2400 BCE or even older as there is some evidence that it is Mesolithic which dates the site to 7000 BCE. The name refers to the seven beech trees (only six survive) planted in the 1800s to mark the burial site.
Today's Houghton was first settled in the 1100s as a relatively nondescript agricultural village. That was until the early 1800s and the opening of a colliery; the small village quickly then developed into a typical northeast of England coal mining town.
I need to take a couple of buses to get to Houghton from my home in Blaydon, and on the second of those we passed through a couple of towns whose names will be familiar, Washington and Philadelphia.
Washington is the ancestral home of the Washington family, from which George Washington descended. The town is around seven miles from Sunderland and ten miles from Newcastle, so George was more a Mackem than a Geordie.
Many towns and cities in the USA are namesakes of those from elsewhere, but there aren't many the other way around. The Philadelphia I passed through post-dates its namesake in the USA, being named during the American Revolutionary War by a local colliery owner to commemorate the British capture of the city. Philadelphia’s cricket field is also called "Bunker Hill" after the battle in that war which the British 'won' despite more significant casualties than the American Militia. It taught the British that they faced a far more able foe than they had previously believed. And we all know how that conflict finally ended.
The theme of this year’s Houghton Feast was ‘King of Coal.’ The ‘King’ part reflects the coronation of King Charles III, while the ‘coal’ part marks two hundred years since the sinking of the first shaft at Houghton Colliery. In 1907, the grandad with whom I shared visits to the Hoppings and the Feast, began working in Houghton Pit as a miner at fourteen and continued to do so for some 50 years.
The ‘Feast’ dates to the Middle Ages as a Michaelmas festival and the dedication of Houghton’s 12th-century parish church of St Michael & All Angels. At that time, it was more a religious festival than a ‘feast,’ although the cooking of the first geese of the season did take place. It wasn't until the 16th century that the event started to become what it is today with entertainers, a fair, parades, fireworks, etc. Horse racing was a significant feature of the Feast up until 1938. It wasn’t just my granddad who enjoyed the Feast as it always drew large crowds of coal miners and their families with a few pennies to spare to spend on the stalls, show booths and roundabouts and, in my granddad’s case, ’The one-armed bandits’ of which I wrote in the 'Hoppings'. However, there is still recognition of the Feasts' religious beginnings with a service and hymn singing outside the church on the Sunday evening of the Feast. An event that always draws quite a crowd.
Bernard Gilpin, a theologian and an influential clergyman in the emerging Church of England, created the traditions of today’s Feast when the rector of Houghton-le-Spring. During his rectorship, Gilpin spanned the reigns of Henry VIII, Edward VI, Jane, Mary and Elizabeth I, and his position was lucrative as Houghton was known as a ‘fat parish’ covering more than sixteen villages. Gilpin's salary of £400 per annum reflected this. It’s the equivalent of over £180,000 today and his house was better than many bishops' palaces. This was his reward for extolling Protestantism's virtues over Catholicism as well as recognising his care for the community. He also acquired the moniker, ‘The Apostle of the North,’ for his promotion of the fledgling Church of England in what was deemed the 'wilds' of northern England at the time (indeed, some still believe them to be that today).
Gilpin was a generous man. Strangers and travellers to Houghton found a ready reception, with even their horses treated with so much care that people of the time would joke that a horse turned loose in any part of the country would at once make its way to the rector of Houghton. Every Sunday, between Michaelmas and Easter, Gilpin would open the Rectory and feed the parish's poor with forty bushels of corn, twenty bushels of malt, and a roasted hog or ox. The roasting of an ox is still part of today's Feast celebration. However, sadly, the resultant sandwiches are not free but available to only those who can afford the £5. Ironically, given the tradition he began, Gilpin's death came when an ox knocked him down in Durham's marketplace. He died a few days later from his injuries and now lies in St. Michael's church.
Sir Walter Scott tells a lovely story of Gilpin and his integrity and, in this case, his distaste for the then-common means of settling a cause through duelling. One day, Gilpin found a ‘challenge glove’ stuck on the church door where he was to preach. As no one else dared touch the glove, Gilpin removed it and went ahead to the pulpit to denounce against what he saw as an unchristian custom. Scott describes this in his preface letter to ‘The Death of the Laird's Jock.’
“Bernard Gilpin, the apostle of the north, the first who undertook to preach the Protestant doctrines to the Border dalesmen, was surprised, on entering one of their churches, to see a gauntlet or mail-glove hanging above the altar. Upon enquiring the meaning of a symbol so indecorous being displayed in that sacred place, he was informed by the clerk that the glove was that of a famous swordsman, who hung it there as an emblem of a general challenge and gage of battle, to any who should dare to take the fatal token down. Reach it to me, said the reverend churchman. The clerk and sexton equally declined the perilous office, and the good Bernard Gilpin was obliged to remove the glove with his own hands, desiring those who were present to inform the champion that he, and no other, had possessed himself of the gage of defiance. But the champion was as much ashamed to face Bernard Gilpin as the officials of the church had been to displace his pledge of combat.”
Many were horrified by the vandalism on the Hadrian’s Wall Sycamore that had stood for some two hundred years. In Houghton, until age finally felled it, the ‘Gilpin thorn’ had stood some five hundred years. The local belief is that Houghton’s hawthorn tree grew from a cutting taken by Bernard Gilpin from the legendary Glastonbury Thorn on the grounds of Glastonbury. Legend says that the Glastonbury Thorn sprang from the staff of Joseph of Arimathea, an eastern merchant dealing in metals and copper who, after Christ’s crucifixion, had allowed the burial of the body in Joseph’s burial chamber.
While the senior school I attended had no religious links, it did name three of its four ‘houses’ after prominent historical religious figures: the Venerable Bede, Bernard Gilpin, and Archbishop Sancroft. The fourth was Kepier, named after a place, originally Kepyer, from where a John Heath originated. He and Bernard Gilpin at a cost of £500 (circa £160,000 today), set up the first school in Houghton in 1574 that also carried the name Kepier. I guess poor old John Heath was not a grand enough person for the use of his name. That original school still stands in the town today, close to St Michael's church.
Many will know of Venerable Bede, widely regarded as a notable Anglo-Saxon scholar, writing around 40 books. Belief is he was born near Durham and, at the age of seven, entrusted to the care of Benedict Biscop, who in 674 CE had founded the monastery of St Peter at Wearmouth. Eight years later, Bede moved the monastery to Jarrow (known by most these days as the starting point for the Jarrow ‘Hunger’ March), where he spent the rest of his life. His scholarship covered many subjects, including commentaries on the Bible and observations on nature, music, and poetry. His most famous work, a crucial source for understanding early British history and the arrival of Christianity, is 'Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum' or 'The Ecclesiastical History of the English People.’ It is the first historical work to use the AD dating system.
My house at school was ‘Sancroft,’ named after Archbishop William Sancroft, the leader of a group of seven bishops imprisoned for opposing the policies of the Roman Catholic King James II. But his opposition to authority came from earlier than that when he refused to take the Oath of Engagement, a declaration to uphold the government of the Commonwealth. After the Restoration of King Charles II, Sancroft became a royal chaplain and served as dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. In 1678, he became Archbishop of Canterbury. But when Charles’ brother James II came to the throne, he didn't just imprison the seven bishops; he brought them to trial on charges of seditious libel. Widespread popular rejoicing greeted their acquittal. However, Sancroft was his own man, as after William of Orange overthrew James, Sancroft rejected William’s claim to the throne. Along with several other Anglican clergymen, they refused to take the oaths of allegiance to William. Consequently, William deprived Sancroft of his bishopric.
You will probably see why my school named its houses after the men above. They were kind men of deep moral integrity and a robust belief system who looked to help the less fortunate and to improve the lot of those people through education. Men who weren’t afraid to stand up against what they thought was inappropriate authority. Many say that their education in life begins after leaving school. Maybe I and my school are the exception, but the laying down of the foundations of my life’s view began there. Alas, my Grammar school no longer exists. Unlike the near 500-year-old Kepier school, my primary and secondary schools fell to the demolishers, as did my first college, Hackney Technical College—the ‘advantage’ of progress.
The theme of the Old Oak is nothing new. As the centuries-long celebration of Houghton Feast shows, tolerance, compassion, understanding, kindness and hope have always guided communities.
Fascinating stuff. I'm not really a fan of Ken Loach's films, but I enjoyed this exploration of Houghton. Especially the legend of the hawthorn, that's a great story!
How fascinating!