The Allure of Medieval Churches

In the 1860s a young architect arrives in a small town in southern England. He has been sent to renovate the town’s great church, a splendid medieval building which has fallen into disrepair. The roof is leaking, the fabric is mouldering and as the floor decays the local doctor worries infection will spread from the graves beneath the church; the dead, he fears, will begin to poison the living.

But the architect realises at once that the church’s problems run deeper than this. Its massive tower is too heavy for the building. It has been slowly shifting for centuries and he seems to hear the voices of its arches crying out: ‘They have bound on us a burden too heavy to be borne. We are shifting it. The arch never sleeps.’ No one heeds his warnings; collapse is only a matter of time.

This is the premise of John Meade Falkner’s The Nebuly Coat, an eerie and atmospheric novel about the weight of history, the burdens of the past and the ways the dead can indeed poison the living. Surprisingly little-known, it is as strange and unforgettable as its peculiar title, which refers to a heraldic coat of arms looming in the stained-glass windows of the church.

Published in 1903, the novel looks back to the large-scale church restoration movement in the middle of the 19th century. One of its inspirations seems to be the collapse of the spire of Chichester Cathedral in 1861, which demonstrated the precarious state of many of England’s medieval churches. The drive for restoration saved many churches from crumbling into ruin, though sometimes at the cost of imposing a markedly mid-Victorian style on top of their older features. We owe a lot to those Victorian restorers; often, what looks today like a well-preserved medieval church is really a sensitively restored one.

An encounter between Victorian modernity, confident in technological progress, and the older, more intangible powers of an ancient place is at the centre of The Nebuly Coat. Arriving as a stranger, the architect soon finds himself involved with the town, which is dominated by its huge church, and the people who live under its shadow. He becomes entangled in the web of a long history developed over generations in a small, slow-changing place: hoary grudges, old regrets and family tragedies. In time he inherits the burden of a weighty secret which has already destroyed two lives, and which almost crushes him too.

Falkner’s understanding of history and church architecture sprang from his own antiquarian interests. Though by profession a businessman in the armaments trade, he had a long association with Durham Cathedral and its medieval library. Late in life he became its honorary librarian, as well as honorary reader in paleography at the University of Durham.

In some ways The Nebuly Coat recalls the ghost stories of Falkner’s contemporary M.R. James, distinguished manuscript scholar and master of supernatural storytelling. Here, too, the antiquarian study of ancient remains seems constantly on the verge of opening up a ghostly connection to the past. Material artefacts – manuscripts, medieval carvings, excavated grave goods – are imbued with mysterious life and power, able to possess and consume the archaeologist or historian who tries to study them.

The supernatural lurks around the edges of The Nebuly Coat, in the gloomy shadows of the church, but as an imaginative presence rather than a literal manifestation. Like many an English ghost story, one of its spectres is the cultural memory of the Dissolution of the Monasteries. It is hinted that this act of violence, when the church was seized from its monastic builders and taken into wealthy private hands, brought an evil fate on the family who profited from it.

This is a burden for their descendants to carry, just as the church itself is an inheritance from the medieval past which later generations have to manage, preserve and repair. The near-animate building and those who live alongside it form a close communion, working with and upon each other. As the architect muses: 

‘What a creature of an hour was he, was every man, in face of these grim walls that had stood enduring, immutable, for generation after generation, for age after age! And then he smiled as he thought that these eternal realities of stone were all created by ephemeral man; that he, ephemeral man, was even now busied with schemes for their support, with anxieties lest they should fall and grind to powder all below.’

Eleanor Parker is Lecturer in Medieval English Literature at Brasenose College, Oxford and the author of Conquered: The Last Children of Anglo-Saxon England (Bloomsbury, 2022).