much the way a lawyer for a guilty defendant might enter a plea of mitigation on their behalf in order to reduce their sentence.
In 1505, the prosperous Nottinghamshire Markham family built a chantry chapel inside Saint Mary Magdalene and hired a priest to say mass there. On the outside of the stone panels of the little chapel, they painted a favourite subject of medieval artists called the Dance of Death. One panel showed a dancing skeleton holding a carnation, a symbol of mortality. On the other panel there was a richly dressed young man clutching a purse. The skeleton’s message to the young man was clear. As I am today, you will be tomorrow. And the money in your purse won’t help you. It was a memento mori, a prompt to observers – remember you must die – to make them think about and prepare for their end.
It’s a far cry from how we do things today. Now we spend a lot of time and effort not thinking about death. To face our own death is, quite literally, the last thing most of us will do – if we’re conscious enough at the time to do it even then. Even if we wanted to, the chances are we won’t have much control over how we leave the scene. Death and dying have been taken over by the medical profession; and there’s a lot of evidence to suggest that it sees death not as a friend we might learn to welcome but as an enemy to be resisted to the bitter end. And the end often is experienced as bitter, as a fight we lost rather than as the coming down of the curtain on our moment on the stage, something we always knew was in the script.
People in the Middle Ages didn’t have that luxury, if luxury it is. For them, life-threatening illness was as unpredictable and unavoidable as the weather, and they never knew when the lightning might strike. And, considering what came after, it made sense to be prepared for death. In contrast to health professionals today, who advise us to remember the dos and don’ts of healthy living in order to delay death as long as possible, the medieval Church was an advocate of healthy dying. It produced a guide on how to do it called Ars moriendi (The Art of Dying), a handbook for making a good end. Repenting and confessing your sins was the most important advice they gave the dying. And the reason why is captured by Hamlet in Shakespeare’s most famous play. The young prince finds his hated stepfather at prayer and decides to kill him:
Now I might do it pat, now he is praying;
And now I’ll do it: – and so he goes to heaven;
And so am I revenged: – that would be scanned:
A villain kills my father; and, for that,
I, his sole son, do this same villain send To heaven.
O, this is hire and salary, not revenge . . .
Up, sword, and know thou a more horrid hent:
When he is drunk asleep, or in his rage;
Or in the incestuous pleasure of his bed;
At gaming, swearing, or about some act
That has no relish of salvation in it, –
Then trip him, that his heels may kick at heaven;
And that his soul may be as damned and black
As hell, whereto it goes.2
The message was clear. If you die before you’ve had time to examine your conscience, own your guilt and confess your sins, you’ll go straight to hell. And since you never know when the bell will summon you, the safest course is to be ready at all times, with your bags packed and your soul scrubbed clean. The other big piece of advice in The Art of Dying was about money. There are no pockets in a shroud, so you can’t take your money with you when you die. But disposing of it wisely while you are alive will help you secure decent lodgings on the other side. And there was a saying of Jesus that confirmed the message: ‘Use your worldly wealth to win friends for yourself, so that when money is a thing of the past you may be received into an eternal home.’3 Those were the important messages packed into that little cartoon on the wall of the chantry chapel in Newark’s parish church.
I had travelled to Newark on a golden September day to visit Kelham Hall, a few miles away on the banks of the River Trent. And I was wondering if it might be my last visit. I had been returning insistently over the years to prowl the grounds and remember my life there more than sixty years ago, then a young monk trying and failing to give his life away to God in a grand gesture of self-sacrifice. I knew this constant returning was an unhealthy obsession, but I couldn’t shake it. The Victorian parson poet Charles Tennyson Turner had already warned me of the dangers of trying to recover lost time:
In the dark twilight of an autumn morn,
I stood within a little country town
Wherefrom a long acquainted path went down . . .
The low of oxen on the rainy wind,
Death and the Past, came up the well-known road
And bathed my heart with tears, but sirred my mind . . .
But I was warn’d, ‘Regrets which are not thrust
Upon thee, seek not . . . thou art bold to trust
Thy woe-worn thoughts among these roaring trees . . .
Is’t no crime
To rush by night into the arms of Time?’4
These long-acquainted paths had witnessed great changes since I had lived there in the middle of the last century. Kelham Hall was no longer the home of a religious order that trained poor boys for the ministry of the Anglican Church. Now it was a stately hotel, and on the day of my visit it was hosting a large British Asian wedding. For the ceremony, the massive, domed chapel that had dominated my boyhood and haunted my dreams had been converted into a shrine to the Hindu God Ganesh. And it was filled with hundreds of joyful and colourfully dressed wedding guests. Did they catch the vibration of the hundreds of black-robed young men who had once tried to sacrifice themselves to God in this haunted space, now dominated by the friendly presence of the Elephant God? It certainly did not feel like it to me, but to my surprise this did not deepen my ‘woe-worn thoughts’. It banished them. I was touched by the cheerful indifference of the wedding guests to the ghosts that whispered in my ear. Suddenly, something lifted in me. And I knew I wouldn’t have to come back here again. What had been, had been. Now it was no more. I remembered Binyon’s ‘The Burning of the Leaves’:
Now is the time for stripping the spirit bare,
Time for the burning of days ended and done,
Idle solace of things that have gone before:
Rootless hopes and fruitless desire are there;
Let them go to the fire, with never a look behind.
The world that was ours is a world that is ours no more.5
I decided to let the past go and turn to what was left of my future. I left Kelham happier than when I arrived. But the day’s surprises weren’t over.
The great tower of St Mary Magdalene dominated the flat Nottinghamshire landscape. I had been noticing it for most of my life, most recently from the train window on trips between Edinburgh and London. But I had never entered it, never seen what it was like inside. If my compulsive visits to Kelham were over, this was my last chance. So on my way to the station in Newark, I went in to look around and found that skeleton doing his dance of death. It had an interesting effect on me when I saw it. It did not compel me to rush off to confession to purge my conscience of its sin, but it did remind me that I was speeding towards the final curtain. It made me think.
I had been taught to treat skeletons with respect while I was a curate in 1960s Glasgow by my Rector’s son, a medical student who went on to become a distinguished physician in Africa. He had invited me to a student party and was disappointed when he discovered that one of his fellow medics had borrowed a skeleton from the anatomy lab and laid it in the bath to surprise visitors to the lavatory. I was amused by the prank till he reminded me that the skeleton had once been a pulsing, laughing human being. Someone had once known and loved this object of fun now lying in a bath in a student flat on Byres Road. Skeletons remind us that devouring time will get us all in the end. It has been reckoned that since we appeared on the planet there have