‘Here, sort your robe out and give me a hand with these’. It was Sunday, and, as usual, I was stewarding and struggling to keep my purple robe, worn by the stewards, evenly on both shoulders as John, hands laden with a pile of A3 paper, shouted over to me to help him. ‘I want you to take down the old fortnightlies while I put the new ones up, here take this one and put it behind the information desk’. He handed me a sheet of A3 and off I went to the information desk while taking down the old ‘fortnightlies’.
III.i. Calendars
For thousands of years, cultures around the world have devised their time into systems, usually the systems involved a number of successive durations, sometimes divided into unequal groups, tabled out into dates. As time moves through these grouped durations and eventually reaches the end of the system, the system then reproduces itself and the cycle begins again. This system is the calendar.
Calendrical systems have been devised for all manner of purposes, for example, as Boone shows, Aztec Annals work retrospectively to ‘track the passage of years and to locate specific years in relative time’ (2012:218), doing so through illustrations that show the main community narrative of each given year. Geertz describes what he calls the ‘permutational’ calendar used by the Balinese, which is ‘built around the interaction
of independent cycles of day-names’ (1973:392), both examples highlighting the diverse nature of calendrical systems.
In Durham Cathedral, the ‘fortnightly’ is the used calendar. Based on the Georgian calendar of the West, it is a plan of events in the Cathedral for each consecutive two weeks, which is posted throughout the Cathedral and monastic buildings. It was often my job as a Sunday steward to retrieve the old ‘fortnightlies’ and replace them with the plan for the coming two weeks. As can be seen in Appendix A, a random two-week period from my time in the field, the ‘fortnightly’ is a complex incorporation of several different calendrical rhythms. Beginning at the top, the fortnightly describes our ‘location’ within the yearly cycle ‘17 February 2014 – 2 March 2014’. Down the two margins of the page we get the precise location within said cycle, as well as specific dates for remembrance. For example, Monday 17th marks the death of Janani Luwum, Archbishop of Uganda, who was murdered in 1977. In the Church of England, Luwum is considered a Martyr and the anniversary of his death is celebrated by the Anglican communion as a ‘Lesser Festival’ on this day. Although attached to a specific date within the calendar, the observation of a Lesser Festival is not compulsory. Similarly, on Saturday 22nd, William Van Mildert, Bishop of Durham, 1836 (the year of his death) is named. Van Mildert is an important figure in the history of Durham Cathedral, having been the last Prince Bishop of Durham and the driving force behind the foundation of Durham University, his inclusion in the margin here is not for the benefit of the Anglican communion. Rather, it is relevant only to Durham Cathedral and would see prayers dedicated to him throughout the day’s services.
Also shown in the margin are Sexagesima and Quinquagesima in small text below the bold titles of ‘The Second Sunday Before Lent’ and ‘The Sunday Next Before Lent’ respectively. Whilst both Sexagesima and Quinquagesima vary in use across Christian denominations, in the Church of England they were the titles used for these dates in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer calendar. The titles were changed on the publication of the Common Worship calendar in 2000 to ‘The Second Sunday Before Lent’ and ‘The Sunday Next Before Lent’, yet within the Cathedral ‘fortnightly’ both titles are given.
The margins of the fortnightlies also include significant international dates within the Anglican communion; national Church of England dates as well as regional dates. Whilst many of these dates are not large festivals, they do impact upon religious services of the Cathedral in some small way. Usually, this happens through a set of prayers being dedicated to the particular marker within the calendar on any given day. Even with such
a brief introduction to what is visible simply within the margins of one week in the fortnightlies, a clear picture begins to emerge of the complicated rhythms of liturgy and historical meaningfulness for the region, the Church of England, and Christianity, that become drawn together in the life of Durham Cathedral today.
The Benedictine community also had their own means of keeping record of important markers within these cycles of liturgy and historical meaningfulness, such as can be seen in ‘The Durham Cantor’s Book’, held now in the Cathedral archives (Durham, Dean and Chapter Library, MS B.IV.24). This collection of miscellaneous manuscripts relating to the life of the monastery includes a calendar and the ‘Martyrology of Usuard’.
According to Piper (1994:85), the calendar had been intended to record important obituaries that needed to be observed. However, in practice it seems the Cantor42 preferred to use the margins of the next main section of the Cantor’s Book, the Martyrology – a calendar, which details the specific dates of church martyrs and saints, recording feasts or anniversaries – to record any new deaths.
However, the Martyrology does not seem to have been originally intended for Durham. The names of famous Northern Saints Cuthbert and Oswald, by my observation, whilst ornamentally written, are also quite clearly later additions to the manuscript, suggesting, following Piper (1994:83,), that the Martyrology was not created with Durham in mind. As such, its rhythms clash with that of Durham’s and as a result, earlier entries on the feast days of important Northern Saints have been erased in order to make the Martyrology fit with the rhythm of Durham Cathedral Priory. Other entries in the Martyrology reveal possible clues as to its origins and journey northwards to Durham with references to the Loire Valley, France, the Benedictine house of Fleury and to the Fenland Monastery of Ramsey.
However, there are also striking resemblances in usage between the Durham Cantor’s Book and the modern-day fortnightlies. Both the fortnightlies and the Cantor’s Book are, at their very basis, calendars used in their respective contemporary settings. Each calendar sets the rhythm of the year through the division of days and months, and upon these basic calendars43 are additional ‘layers’ of rhythm. These rhythms detail liturgy and historical meaningfulness for Durham Cathedral, the Church of England today, and Christianity as a whole, including all feasts, festivals, and Saint Days to name
42 The Cantor would have had the responsibility of organising the choir as well as preparing the divine services in terms of prayers and all other liturgical matters.
but a few. The Martyrology of the Cantor’s Book’s alterations and additions from other monasteries further afield highlight the fact that each individual monastery had their own rhythms, incorporating layers which included important historical events relevant to their monasteries or regions. These ‘layered’ rhythms needed to be partially altered in order to make it fit a rhythm of Durham, which included large feasts for the Saints Cuthbert and Oswald.
III.ii. Rhythms
Hubert argues that the role of the religious calendar ‘is not to measure time, but to endow it with rhythm’, meaning that the purpose of such calendars is, on the one hand, to place religious rites in a historical time, and on the other, to endow them with a rhythm through which these rites periodically pass through the same time (1999:49). He argues, therefore, that religious time differs from the ‘common idea of time’ frequently, but not always, and in a periodical manner. That is, critical dates ‘break up particular durations’, duration being the division of time as expressed in ‘numbers of days, months or years’ (1999:51). The religious time in Durham Cathedral, however, is guided through not one, but many calendars, as I have shown above, from the periodically returning feasts and Saints’ days of the Christian Calendar, to the Anglican Calendar, and the important events of the local history calendar – for example the Durham Miner’s Gala44 on the second Saturday of every July, the daily rhythm of the Morning Prayers and Evensongs, or the rhythm of the 150 psalms that need to be observed every month. The fortnightly is a big A3 piece of paper that tries to anchor or to pull together the layers of these separate calendars to fit in with the duration of the ‘common idea of time’, in this case the Georgian Western calendar, regimenting time into roughly uniform measurements, for example 24 hours in a day, 14 days in a fortnight, or 12 months in a year. This pulling together, however, results in tensions, because the separate rhythms of the calendars have different qualities of time that have to be negotiated to fit one actual lived and performed calendar inside the Cathedral.
44 The Durham Miners’ Gala is a one day event in which miners’ from across the county would converge on the city to drink and display their village banners in a show of solidarity. During the day, the banners would be paraded behind brass bands, the miners would listen to political speeches and a special service is help in the Cathedral to remember the dead and to bless new banners. Whilst coal mining has long since stopped in County Durham, the Gala has remained an important date for the people of County Durham and the day regularly attracts upwards of 100,000 people into the narrow streets of Durham City.