I like church guides. They are quirky and often idiosyncratic, written by experts or rank amateurs, leading scholars or people who can’t tell one end of a churchwarden’s account from another. They might focus on architecture or on incumbents. They may be rambling narratives or tedious recitations of facts. In reading them you might learn all there is to know about a church, or next to nothing. You could be frustrated by the abject failure to convey spirituality, beauty, architectural interest, and the richness of the heritage – or charmed by the love and affection displayed, the wealth of evidence for past centuries, the sense of community and identity.

 

Mr Bird’s history of Bamburgh church disconcerted me greatly. In his introduction he suggests the castle might have begun as a Roman fort built by Agricola (this, I feel, a distinctly dodgy claim) and then disarms – or maybe alarms - the reader: ‘The history of this Church is rather like a teacake: there is a basic substance which holds it all together and there are currants dotted about which are the incidents, often unrelated, which give it colour and flavour. Together they combine to make a fascinating story’.

 

The booklet was written 25 years ago, so maybe this was the currant thinking back in the mid-1980s. That in itself is no raisin to be critical. Indeed, we must record history because otherwise of course it’s scone without a trace. But the view that history is made up of ‘incidents’, with that intriguing analogy of dried fruit held together by a ‘basic substance’, isn’t one which I can espouse. It seems to disregard the continuities and to overlook the significance of the everyday activities of the church and its community.

 

History made up incidents is, to me, history which doesn’t tell a story. It deceives and misleads. It is, as Joseph Hunter, the great early nineteenth-century historian of South Yorkshire, so magnificently commented on the writings of a less illustrious but highly prolific contemporary, ‘a succession of facts detached, a rope of sand’. In wanting a ‘story’ I don’t mean that I need whimsy or fiction, but rather that I demand the reliable description and the plausible explanation of what happened. Of course, reality is infinitely complex, and we are unavoidably selective. Total history is a chimera. We adjust to the space and time at our disposal, as well as the availability of evidence.

 

But we consider processes and patterns, and see the continuum rather than the fragments (which surely cannot be ‘unrelated’, for if nothing else the church and its history are their relationship). The ‘basic substance’ that holds it all together may, in fact, be as interesting, and as full of flavour, than the incidents. Forget the teacake. For my local history I prefer a convoluted analogy with a delicious baguette bought in a bakery in a French village – long, crafted with care, plenty to chew on, tasty (it’s made with the best quality ingredients), crisp on the outside but tenderness within, holes or gaps of different sizes (we all know our lacunae!) but plenty of satisfying sustenance. Straight from the oven when it’s fresh and warm, but before long it’s getting stale, so we, the local historian-bakers, must create another edition to take its place.