What better place to land than in "pleasant pastures" that William Blake himself would have been proud to own: Hertfordshire. This glorious county is a mere thirty miles from London, but could hardly feel more different from the "monstrous ant-hill on the plain / Of a too busy world" Wordsworth described (I seem to be in a very Romantic mood today). Rolling hills, furrows carved into farmland at the very dawn of ancient Briton, roofs thatched with local materials in the same manner as Shakespeare's--this is the Hertfordshire of which I speak.
But I am getting ahead of myself. What was my purpose in even breaching this country landscape, you may ask? Well, even more gloriously than its fourteenth-century thatched houses (I kid you not), Hertfordshire is famous to me as the birthplace and homeland of Lady Hester Pulter (1605-1678), poet, manuscript writer, and daughter of Sir James Ley, who can himself claim the titles of judge, privy councillor, Lord High Treasurer, and--most relevantly for you literary folks--tributee of Milton's Sonnet X. She is my idol, and I am her Pultergeist. That is, I am one of the small, but growing number of literary scholars (using the term loosely, in my case) dedicated to more fully understanding this beautifully fascinating individual. Both my Princeton thesis and my Oxford master's dissertation have used Pulter's mid-seventeenth century manuscript as their primary source, and I hope to continue writing about her to some degree in my doctoral thesis. Most people focus on her writing in a Civil War context, examining the challenges posed to her royalist beliefs by Charles I's plight and subsequent execution.
But equally fascinating to me is the way Pulter integrates these public sentiments with her faith and the constrictions of her daily life. As the mother of fifteen children--all but two of which predeceased her!--Pulter knew what imprisonment felt like, her lying-in periods adding up to over a year of solitary confinement. Even so, her poetry is intimately conscious of the landscape around her, including a poem in which all her local rivers join the Thames in weeping for the lost king.
So when I heard that the house begun by her, finished by her grandson, demolished in the nineteenth century, and rebuilt in the twentieth, actually exists in the very real village of Cottered, which has a parish church with records and even graves of the Pulter family, I had to go. So, I did what any self-respecting journalist-turned-academic would do in such a situation: I went to the internet. I had previously consulted with other Pultergeists, but they were unable to provide me with any detailed information about the house's current owners, or even how to get there. I therefore did a quick Google search and found the contact information for St. John the Baptist Church in Cottered. The very kind reverend then referred me to someone else, who when he isn't playing the church organ is a rather remarkable local historian. He very kindly offered to show me around. So, I bought a train ticket, grabbed my trusty Cymbeline (my bike), and headed off to Hertfordshire.
The first thing I found out (in the next Google search) was that there is no train to Cottered; I would need to go to Baldock, and thence to Cottered. Hence, the need for Cymbeline. But I didn't mind; I retained the romantic notion of a quiet bike ride through the countryside serenaded by ubiquitous birdsong.
Alas, it wasn't to be. I wanted to get to Cottered before my dissertation was due, which meant that I would be riding my bike six miles each way through one of the bleakest Sundays of the year. Now, England doesn't get much full-out rain. But of course, this day it did. Thankfully, my friend Julia had loaned me her raincoat, and my backpack came with a built-in rain shield, so when I did arrive in Cottered, my computer and my torso, at least, were dry. Well, except for the sweat that had accumulated owing to my foolishly warm clothing choices (Hertfordshire is not flat after all, I learned). My hair and my pants (that's "trousers, for you Brits), though, were a different story. Thankfully, I had managed to arrive at 10:30, so I still had half an hour for my hair to dry before the 11am service.
This gave me plenty of time to meet Neville, my host, and look around the church. It dates from the 14th century, and one can literally read England's church history on its walls. When the church was renovated in the not-so-distant past, renovators uncovered a huge mural dating from around 1500. Unfortunately, the colors and details are faded, but I could still make out the image of St. Christopher, complete with, as Neville joked, a shape that is more than slightly reminiscent of a modern red British telephone booth (Dr. Who, perhaps?). This painting had been covered over during the Reformation, when Protestants, eager to remove all signs of their Catholic predecessors, despoiled images, artwork, and even whole churches throughout England. As a result, the whitewashed walls now look pretty bland, but the pity they evoked paled before that I experienced when I saw the size of the congregation. It was a special family service, so it was larger than normal, when parishioners often attend churches elsewhere. The church, the reverend told me, was typical of many English parish churches: Its population was aging with no young one to replace it. Consequently, it was most cost-efficient to have priests serve several different parishes simultaneously; Rev. Leverton currently officiates at five different churches--all of which he visited that weekend!
The service itself, though, was beautiful, with some very cute kids playing the parts of the disciples in a story from the New Testament. It was rather formal in terms of the Anglican order of service, but I had little trouble following along. Then afterwards, Neville showed me around the church, pointing out the graves of Hester's family and some of the more famous rectors (e.g. Anthony Trollope, grandfather of the Victorian novelist).
But my visit wasn't over yet. Neville then took me home, where he, his wife, and I enjoyed an absolutely lovely meal. It was so simple, so heartfelt, and so relaxing that I completely forgot about the single-minded stress of my Oxford life only a few hours away. Chatting over a lunch of salad and cold meats, I started to long that every Sunday could be like this, sharing the humble joys of life with two septuagenarians (at least) who had clearly seen and loved much of it. We sat at their kitchen table, crowded into a room that would be seen as abysmally small by American standards. But the age of the house (hundreds of years), and the care evident in, for example, the collection of commemorative royal teacups and coffee mugs, turned this seeming inadequacy into a pleasant quaintness that wasn't at all lacking.
We talked for much longer than I had envisioned, but shorter than I wished, and then Neville gave me the grand tour of the village. I just couldn't believe the ease and frequency with which he pointed out thatched-roof houses dating from the English renaissance itself. The village seemed to have been crystallized in a time-proof snowglobe (without snow, of course), buildings proudly yet artlessly proclaiming their noble and ancient heritage, Neville pouring over all the details of the intricately-knit community that still knew everything that was going on within its purview.
But then we went to Broadfield. Here, to a certain extent, the snowglobe was broken. Its owners, he told me, are Continental immigrants, and have little contact with the community at large. This is different than it has been, when the owner, a close relative of the royal family, reserved places at a public event (a funeral, I think?) for Cottered residents. Now, though, the family is largely unknown, while getting inside its home is the fervent desire of every Pultergeist. Little remains of the seventeenth-century building aside from the stables, but the foundation is still there, and the house even resembles pictures I have seen in local histories from the period.
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| The Stables of Broadfield Hall, reportedly the only part remaining of the original seventeenth/eighteenth-century house. |
Ok, you caught me: How do I know this if not even Neville knows the family? Well, we snuck in. Neville seditiously drove his red little car right up to the front door, both of us praying all the while that the owners wouldn't emerge to arrest us as trespassers. He even paused to take my picture (though I promptly deleted it later upon viewing my disheveled self). Who knew that history-loving, organ-playing septuagenarians could be so brazen?
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| The main house. Yep, that's Neville's trespassing car. |
Alas, then it was time to go back to Oxford. Thankfully, Neville had been right in assuring me that biking to Baldock was easier than going from it. The route was so one-directional in terms of altitude that it took me less than half the time to return to the station. Of course, it was still raining (had never stopped actually, merely let up a bit around the time we went out to Broadfield). But I had nowhere to get to in particular. All I cared about was getting shower, getting dry, and never getting wet again for the rest of my life.
So that was my visit to Hertfordshire. Perhaps it wasn't the idyllic working vacation I imagined. Perhaps I didn't experience a surge of inspiration that fueled me until I submitted my dissertation. Perhaps I didn't see inside Broadfield Hall itself. But I did experience the world of Hester Pulter, led by one of the most lovely and generous Brits I have yet met. I can now read of "poore Bradfields dreames" with a mental picture fixed in reality. Maybe, in fact, that is more than enough, for as Hester herself says in a poem written when her children were "at London, I at Bradfield", our kingdom is not of this world at all:
When my freed soul, flies to her place of Birth;
Then am I brave, my foot then spurns this Earth.
My mind being rais'd above these Worldly jars;
Mee thinks I play at football withe the stars
(Brotherton MS Lt q. 32, f. 56r)
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