‘Netley Abbey ought, it seems, to be called Letley Abbey’, wrote Cobbett, ‘the Latin name being Laetus Locus, or Pleasant Place. Letley was made up of an abbreviation of the Laetus and of the Saxon word ley, which meant place, field, or piece of ground.’ But like Spike Island, the provenance of Netley’s name was disputed, its very identity surrounded in myth. Some writers considered Laetus Locus a play on the name of Letelie, which was already recorded in the Domesday Book; others believed that it originated from ‘Natan-leaga, or Leas of Naté, a wooded district extending from the Avon to the Test and Itchen’. Yet other sources attribute another old English meaning to the name: lonely, or desolate place.
For thousands of years these river valleys had been used as routes into England’s interior, through primeval forest with its wild boar, bear and wolves, and into the uplands; Bronze Age axes and tumuli have been found in Sholing’s heathland. When the Romans came, they set up their military base and strategic port of Clausentum on a bend in the River Itchen, building a tall lighthouse to make plain their dominion. Half a millennium later it would crumble with the rest of their empire in the Dark Ages. When in turn the Saxons built their settlements, Hamwih and Hamtun, on the opposite bank, they would merge to become Suthhamtun, and give their name to the county, Hamtunscire.
In the Viking raids of the ninth and tenth centuries, the inhabitants would retreat behind the remaining Roman walls; those that did not were slain, enslaved, or, in the coy words of one nineteenth-century historian, used by the invaders ‘to satisfy their insatiable cupidity’. Medieval Southampton learned from such lessons, building defences to the north and east, yet leaving the waterside disastrously open to attack. One Sunday morning in 1338, while most of Southampton was at Mass, a fleet of fifty galleys ‘crowded with Normans, Picards, Genoese, and Spaniards’ sailed up the water to launch an ungodly assault. Many died as they came out of St Michael’s Church, clubbed or stabbed on the threshold of their place of worship; others were hanged in their own houses. The invaders took arrogant leisure in their destruction and stayed overnight to burn, rape, pillage and plunder – a fatal mistake, as by that time the King’s men had arrived to drive them back to their ships, killing 300 in the process. Their leader, Carlo Grimaldi, however, escaped to the Mediterranean, where he used the spoils to establish his Monte Carlo principality.
Netley, meanwhile, remained on the sidelines of these events, looking on as its neighbour suffered successive invasions. Set in its woods, the place kept to itself. This uncanny sense of timelessness was marked by the Seaweed Hut which once stood on Weston Shore. A weird dome of worm-eaten wood, draped with turf and seaweed like a maritime haystack of flotsam heaped up on the beach, it was described by the Victoria History of Hampshire in 1903 ‘to be of considerable antiquity’ and celebrated on Edwardian postcards as a local curiosity. Some claimed it was a fishermen’s lookout, shelter and store, or perhaps an old ferry shelter, but to me it resembled nothing so much as a tribal hut.
As children we used to creep inside, the sky showing through the gaps in its roof, the interior dark and damp and smelling of salt and seaweed. I imagined it tenanted by a Father Neptune figure, holding court and garbed in kelp like a sea voyager crossing the Equator, half-hermit, half-warlock. Even to the end, the hut retained its secrets: crumbling and weather-beaten, when it finally fell apart in the 1960s its age was unknown. Roman coins had been discovered in the field behind; perhaps the hut was there to witness the imperial arrivals in their shiny helmets and red tunics, subjugating the natives and their shamanistic rites in the woods. Perhaps it was a Celtic temple, there when Christian missionaries first arrived to battle with the pagan gods of the forest. But whatever dark spirits had occupied this gravelly shore, they were to be firmly supplanted by a new invasion.
Like the old religion, the order of the Cistercians was born in a wood, founded in the Burgundian forest of Cîteaux as a more austere version of the Benedictines. In the late twelfth century the monks crossed the Channel to establish houses in England and, encouraged by King John, founded an abbey at Beaulieu in the New Forest in 1204. Soon after, the Bishop of Winchester commissioned the Cistercian abbots to investigate the site at Netley, and on 25 July 1239, an advance party arrived from Beaulieu, sent from the beautiful place to the sad place across the water – a journey still made by fallow deer, only to be felled by poachers, an ill-return for these animal asylum-seekers.
Cut off as it was by dense woodland from the interior, with the sea the only practicable means of access, it was Netley’s isolation which attracted the ascetic Cistercians. Their order characteristically sought sites ‘of horror – a vast wilderness’, ‘far from the concourse of men’, as they had at Fountains Abbey on the Yorkshire moors. They would go to great lengths in their search for ‘lonely, wooded places’: if the chosen site wasn’t empty enough then, like later landowners, they made it so, evicting the resident population and levelling cottages. As Walter Map, Archdeacon of Oxford, noted, ‘they make a solitude that they may be solitaries’.
Built out of stone from the Isle of Wight quarry of Quarr, by 1251 the order had run out of money, and work on their new church ground to a halt. To fund its completion, the monks applied for, and were granted, state aid. The result was a rather more sophisticated building, its importance plain from the inscription on the chapel’s foundation stone – ‘H: DI. GRA. REX ANGL.’, ‘Henry, by the grace of God, king of England’ – and the ornate tracery windows modelled on those of Westminster Abbey, which the King had recently rebuilt, in a style which the Cistercians themselves had imported to England. At a time when architecture was an expression of man’s creativity by God’s grace, gothic had become the predominant aesthetic of an age predicated on religion.
One hundred years before, Abbot Suger had built the first gothic structure, the Abbey of Saint-Denis outside Paris: his opus modernum in stained glass and stone. The Cistercians appreciated its sharp pointed arches, functional rib vaults and flying buttresses as a reaction against the ungodly excesses of rounded Romanesque arches and their writhing serpents and mythological beasts. They agreed with the reforming mystic St Bernard of Clairvaux, who declared, ‘What are these fantastic monsters doing in the cloisters … What is the meaning of these unclean monkeys, these savage lions, and monstrous creatures? To what purpose are here placed these creatures, half-beast, half-man, or these spotted tigers?’ In decrying such ‘semi-human beings’, the serpents and monsters which may still have lurked in the woods and lakes, St Bernard looked to a new image of God, exorcising the creatures in which a ‘crypto-pagan’ people hardly out of the Dark Ages still half-believed. This was the aim of the Cistercians’ misson: to convert this pagan shore. Their new order would convey the clarity of God’s vision, and conquer the mythical denizens of a wild forest.
Gothic was as innovatory and as modern as anything by Mies van der Rohe. Like twentieth-century architecture, its buttresses and pillars openly displayed its technological achievements. Load-bearing ribs – a technique later used in skyscrapers – allowed the thin walls between them to be cut away to let in light. The result was a luminescent box, charged to uplift the human soul into sanctity. As God’s light pierced the ‘cloud of unknowing’ between Heaven and Man, so His holy rays shone through the stained glass set in arches that pointed Heavenwards; rays almost as visible as those emitted by a halo’d Christ in a medieval illumination. Abbot Suger named it the ‘new light’, lux nova; a transcendent vision for those who beheld it, at a time when the sense of sight was regarded as so powerful that it could affect the object at which you looked, and vice versa. To look upon the true image of God, for instance, would, were it possible, mean instant destruction, so He was represented by a colour, ‘the strange blue of twelfth-century glass which seems to filter to our souls the essence of other skies in other worlds’. Light itself was God-given. Thus mediated, Netley’s abbey was also acknowledging its dedicatee, the Blessed Virgin, herself known as the ‘window of Heaven’, fenestra coeli, an image through which, like an icon, the unseeable God might be vouchsafed.
As its aspiring gothic windows pierced the walls like thorns in her son’s heart, their glass stained with the sin of the world, so the chapel impressed its cruciform