friends and relatives (because Mark calls him ‘the father of Alexander and Rufus’). These relatives might not have lived in Jerusalem, however, because Luke and Mark both describe him as ‘coming from the country’. This phrase may have meant either the countryside, as in ‘not the town’, or the country where Cyrene lies. I do not know. We do know he didn’t volunteer to help Jesus with his burden: all three Evangelists say he was compelled to help. The point is that all three choose to identify him by his place of origin. Of course they would. In a city and rural region that must have been home to hundreds of Simons there had to be additional identification: Simon the fisherman, Simon son of Jonas, Simon Magus, or Simon, the one from Cyrenaica.
Our towns become us, perhaps most of all when we are away from them. The John of Gaunt who with his dying words celebrates England in Shakespeare’s Richard II (‘This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England, This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings’), was historically John of Ghent – he was born in that town in Flanders in 1340 – as well as Duke of Lancaster and King of Castile and Leon. Other people quite unconsciously tend to place us, a neutral act that is entirely to do with geography, rather than classification, as in ‘put us in our place’.
Sometimes this works in reverse: an individual bequeaths his name to the town. Adelaide, Darwin, Melbourne, Brisbane and Sydney in Australia; Auckland, Wellington, Napier and Palmerston North in New Zealand; Vancouver, Halifax and Churchill in Canada; Alexandria in Egypt; and so on, were all named for individuals. These namings however were salutes and celebrations rather than claims of direct connection: in most cases the name-bearer never visited the namesake. There are rare cases in which the identities of town and first citizen seem difficult to separate: outside Geneva is the commune of Ferney-Voltaire. It was simply called Fernex or Ferney until François-Marie Arouet, one of whose pen names was Voltaire, moved there in 1759.
Sometimes we salute the town unconsciously when we reach for the wardrobe, because towns dress us. The whole world has adopted denim, originally known as serge de Nîmes, after the town in southern France where it was traditionally made, and cambric takes its name from Cambrai in northern France. But islands, districts and townships have also given their names to a variety of clothing forms: Jersey, Guernsey and Arran for woolly knitting; Harris for a tweed weave; calico from the southern Indian city of Kozhikode once known, to the English at least, as Calicut; and so on. Towns give their name to products: Bakewell tart, Pontefract cake, Stilton cheese, spaghetti Bolognese, Chelsea bun, frankfurter and so on.
Towns also address us. Hastings is a common surname in the British Isles, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the United States, and there isn’t much doubt that as a surname, its origins lie in the town of Hastings. The suffix ‘ing’ once meant ‘the people of’, and one version of the town’s history has it settled by an invading Saxon clan called the Hastingas, or sons of Haesten. There is a similar-sounding Norman word that implies swiftness, speed or haste, and Hastings is where the Norman invaders landed, and fought and defeated the English in 1066; but the settlement name of Hastings is a great deal older than that: the ‘men of Hastings’ get a separate mention in the story of Offa, king of Mercia, who seized Sussex in 771, and according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Danish marauders committed violence there in 1011. The town was the first Norman conquest in Britain, the site of the oldest Norman castle, an early gift of land by the conqueror to a loyal tribesman. There is an eleventh-century title of Baron Hastings: it was held by John, son of Henry de Hastings. Shakespeare evokes one of his descendants in three of the history plays. ‘… ere I go,’ says Edward IV, in Henry VI Part Two,
Hastings and Montague,
Resolve my doubt. You twain, of all the rest,
Are near to Warwick by blood and by alliance:
Tell me if you love Warwick more than me?
Warwick, too, is a place that became inseparable from a name, especially in Australia and New Zealand, two countries rich in toponymic first names such as Warwick and Clyde.
So there are a number of levels at which we accept that our identity derives from our place in the world. These connections between identity and place seem the more natural because they are timeworn: we are comfortable with a book title such as The Da Vinci Code, but nobody, as far as I know, ever refers to a painter called Urbino; he is either Raphael, or Raphael of Urbino.
In a café in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a bartender once hailed me as ‘London’ to bring me to the counter to collect my hot salt-beef on rye: she knew the names of her regular customers, and by default she identified me by the place that I had said I was from. I heard her later call out the word ‘Ohio’ for somebody else’s double cheeseburger. It seemed, at the moment, quite reasonable in the land in which movies could be named for the Man from Laramie or a bandit called the Sundance Kid because he once served a prison sentence in Sundance, Wyoming.
This identification with place and origin must have made sense in an older world, too – one in which many people must have stayed where they were born, and rarely travelled for more than a day from their homes, for most of their lives. It is possible to identify a very tentative modern trend in what might properly be called place-name christenings: Chelsea for a president’s daughter, Brooklyn for a footballer’s son. But it remains hard to imagine Londoners being identified by registrars as ‘Catford’ or ‘Peckham’, or young bucks addressed as Milton Keynes. One feels that Henry de Hastings was plausibly so-called because he more or less owned the place, could deliver its rents, loyalty and fighting men to the king’s cause, but most of all because he was another Henry, the one from Hastings. Back in Hastings, he would have seemed an outsider, because of the time he spent at court. But this connection of identity with place is a little tenuous and uncertain everywhere, and through all history, and so, on occasion is its reverse: the connection of place with identity.
I live in one of the most famous towns in the English-speaking world, but about this fame hangs a faint air of embarrassment, a whiff of inferiority complex. J. Manwaring Baines, a former local museum curator and author of Historic Hastings, a 1955 memoir, observes that ‘it is rather remarkable that although so many noteworthy people have visited Hastings, few of its citizens have achieved national fame’. The town’s name is linked forever with William the Conqueror, also known as William the Bastard and William, Duke of Normandy, and the Battle of Hastings in 1066; but William’s cross-Channel invasion force neither landed at Hastings, nor fought there. William brought his troops ashore at Pevensey, and defeated the forces of England at a place now called Battle, miles to the north of Hastings. As an ancient town that grew swiftly in the seaside property boom that followed Regency investment in Brighton during and after the Napoleonic wars, Hastings has had its share of famous residents, but many of them stayed there only fleetingly. The pre-Raphaelite painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti brought the beautiful model Elizabeth Siddall to Hastings, and later married her there. Sir Arthur Wellesley, later Duke of Wellington, veteran of the eighteenth-century campaign to subdue India, was quartered there, and returned for a while during the war against Napoleon. Another soldier briefly billeted in Hastings and celebrated by a blue plaque was Sir John Moore, who died during the Peninsular War at Corunna in Spain and was immortalised by the poet Charles Wolfe in verses that children of my generation were required to learn by heart (‘Not a drum was heard, not a funeral note, as his corse to the rampart we hurried …’). Byron swam off Hastings in August 1814, ate turbot there, walked the cliffs, and in a fit of pique threw an ink bottle out of a window. Keats visited Hastings, and Edward Lear painted there. A plaque commemorates Admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovell, who in 1707 sailed his squadron onto the rocks of the Scilly Isles, and perished with 1,400 other men. His connection with Hastings is that he ‘in about 1700 took the opportunity whilst sailing past Hastings to visit the house reputedly lived in by his mother’. Titus Oates, a turbulent figure from the seventeenth century (dismissed as an Anglican priest for drunken blasphemy, discharged as a ship’s chaplain for buggery), certainly lived in Hastings in his youth: he is now famous for producing fraudulent claims of a Popish plot against King Charles II, charges that ended with the murder and execution of a number of Catholics. Oates was later exposed as a liar, prosecuted for perjury, fined, pilloried, whipped, imprisoned for life and then a few years later released. The town’s shingle beach, its fishing fleet, its long history and