Under Another Sky (16 page)

At some point late in the Roman period, the flooding Avon caused the baths and temple area repeatedly to silt up. And so they were gradually abandoned. There is an Anglo-Saxon poem, from the collection known as the
Exeter Book
, that has often been regarded as describing the ruins of Bath. The poem is ruined itself, in fragments because the manuscript was badly scarred by fire. It is a lyrical
meditation on a once great city, destroyed by
wierd
, fate, and it ends, or fades into fragments, thus:

    There once many a man
mood-glad, gold-bright, of gleams garnished,
flushed with wine-pride, flashing war-gear,
gazed on wrought gemstones, on gold, on silver,
on wealth held and hoarded, on light-filled amber,
on this bright burg of broad dominion.

Stood stone houses; wide streams welled
hot from source, and a wall all caught
in its bright bosom, that the baths were
hot at hall’s hearth; that was fitting …
…

Thence hot streams, loosed, ran over hoar stone
unto the ring-tank …
    … It is a kingly thing
    … city …

Bath’s second heyday was in the eighteenth century, when the dandy Beau Nash became the unofficial king of a newly glamorous, fashionable watering-hole, which burst through its medieval walls to become, through riotous bouts of speculative building, a great Georgian town, its architecture defined by classical qualities, as if it was reliving its Roman period. This was the era of the cure, of taking the waters – both by bathing in them and by imbibing them. ‘
Ariston men hudor
’, is the Grecian boast inscribed above the door of the Pump Room: ‘water is best’, the opening words of Pindar’s first
Olympian Ode
. Thomas Guidott’s
A Discourse of Bathe, and the Hot Waters There
, first published in the 1670s, noted that the waters were good for the stomach, for they ‘infallibly cleanse this useful Receptacle from any Impurities lodging in the Bottom or Plicatures thereof’. The water increased appetite and made ‘those that drink it receive and enjoy their Food with more Delight and Satisfaction’. It was also ‘of good Use in the Heart-burning, or Cardialgia, occasioned by the Sharpness and Acrimony of a bilious Humour’. Furthermore, ‘It is of singular
Use in all Fluxes, whether with Blood, or without; Diarrhea’s, Dysenteries, or bloody Urine.’ Moreover, ‘It is also of incomparable Use in the Diabetes, or pissing Disease.’ For women, the water ‘prepares them for Conception; so that in some kinds of Barrenness, no more effectual Medicine can be used’. A veritable panacea, then, with only one or two caveats: ‘I doubt not also to commend it in the Dropsy, but Care must be taken that it pass well away, otherwise it may prove more prejudicial than advantagious. The like also may be said of the Gout.’ These days, you can buy a little bottle of the stuff for £3.99 a throw in the Roman Baths souvenir shop, or drink a tepid glass (50p) straight from the source in the Pump Room. It is unpleasant enough to make you feel that it is doing you good: William Stukeley, in medical mode, reported that after drinking it, ‘you find yourself brisker immediately’ and that ‘it is of most sovereign virtue to strengthen the bowels, to restore their lost tone through intemperance or inactivity’.

As well as enjoying the health-giving properties of the waters, visitors to Bath might also have rather less respectable experiences. According to a salacious soft-porn tome called
A Step to the Bath
, anonymously published in 1700, the town was both ‘a Valley of Pleasure, yet a sink of Iniquity’. The author described first his journey from London, en route seducing a fellow coach passenger (‘I lay’d her down on Nature’s Carpet, and made bold with Mother Earth for a Boulster’). This activity caused him certain discomforts on the onward journey: ‘Nor would I advise any who have been Sufferers in Venus sports, to Adventure the Fatigue of Coach to the Bath, least it dis-joint a Member or Two.’ Once installed, he provided an unpleasantly graphic picture of those taking the cure – for syphilis, it seems – in the King’s Bath: ‘In a Corner was an Old Fornicator hanging by the Rings, Loaded with Rotten Humidity; Hard by him was a Buxom Dame, Cleansing her Nunquam Satis from Mercurial Dregs, and the remains of Roman Vitriol. Another, half-covered in Sear-Cloth, had more Sores than Lazarus, doing Pennance for the Sins of Her Youth … At the Pump was several a Drenching their Gullets, and Gormandizing the Reaking Liquor wholesale.’ A satire after Juvenal’s own sclerotic heart.

Since these heady days, Bath has been in a state of more or less genteel decline, punctuated by little peaks and troughs in its fortunes. When Jan Morris wrote about the town in 1974, she thought of it as
‘hangdog’, and on its way to ruin: ‘There are houses never rebuilt since the blitz, or awaiting, year after year, planning permission or builders’ cash. There are abandoned churches up for sale. Through the cracks of stately flagstone tufts of grass spring through, and sometimes the corner of a garden, the elbow of an alley, is choked with creeper and bramble, as though a civilization has retreated here, and the weeds are taking over.’ Occasionally, Morris wrote, she fantasised about Bath’s ‘crescents peeling and unkempt under a philistine dictatorship, or forcibly converted into workers’ holiday homes, and … the last of the admirals’ widows scrubbing the floors of ideological museums’. But the town is seeing better days now, firmly established as smart, and as a place where overseas tourists go, on the little British grand tour that also takes in London, Oxford, York and Edinburgh. The Roman baths are paying their way, a major attraction. Bath is revived by the regenerative powers of the hot-water springs, just as it always has been.

The Royal Crescent and the Circus – two of the great Palladian set pieces of the city – were laid out by the architect John Wood, and finished off by his son, also called John Wood. The elder Wood was the most important of the Georgian improvers of Bath: he set the tone in the town for ever after, but he was thwarted in his grander designs. In 1725, he ‘proposed to make a grand Place of Assembly, to be called the Royal Forum of Bath; another Place, no less magnificent, for the Exhibition of Sports, to be called the Grand Circus; and a third Place, of equal State with either of the former, for the Practice of medicinal Exercises, to be called the Imperial Gymnasium of the City, from a Work of that Kind, taking its Rise at first in Bath, during the time of the Roman Emperors’. The Circus is the only element of this grandiloquent piece of town planning that was realised, though it is doubtful whether it has ever been used for the ‘Exhibition of Sports’. Wood, when he made his extravagant proposals, was about twenty-one years old.

With his schemes for imperial gymnasia and his talk of emperors, Wood was playing up to the city’s Roman past. The temple of Sulis-Minerva had not yet in fact been discovered – that happened during the rebuilding of the Pump Room in 1790, well after Wood’s death in 1754. But Bath was known to have Roman origins: as far back as the sixteenth century, antiquary John Leland had noted that ‘There be
divers notable antiquitees of the toune in hominum memoria engravid in stone that yet be sene yn the walles of Bathe.’ He carefully transcribed some of the inscriptions on these tombstones, noting that they seemed to have been recycled into the town walls, rather than originally placed there. Later, William Camden noted, with typical penetration, that ‘where the said Cathedrall Church now standeth, there was in ancient time, as the report goeth, a temple consecrated to Minerva’. He was not very many metres off target. The ‘report’, in all likelihood, was a passage from the third- or fourth-century Roman author Gaius Julius Solinus. His work
Collectanea rerum mirabilium
,
A Collection of Marvels
, had mentioned prodigious springs in Britain consecrated to the goddess: Aquae Sulis clearly had a reputation in antiquity that spread far beyond Britain. In 1727 – a couple of years after Wood had laid out his original proposals – workmen digging a sewer in Stall Street found a bronze head of Minerva: it is now one of the great objects of the Roman baths museum.

Wood’s aim, however, was much broader than a simple desire to re-create the glories of the Roman city. He laid out the theoretical basis for his designs in his
Essay Towards a Description of Bath
, as masterful a piece of entertaining fairy tale, tortured logic, hard-headed architectural sales pitch and pure gossip as has ever been produced. It is remarkable that the result of this kind of thinking was what Angela Carter described as Bath’s ‘lucid and serene’ streets, for the tone of Wood’s book is quite the reverse. He even included a lurid account of the suicide of one of his tenants, one Sylvia, who hanged herself by a girdle ‘of Silver Thread’ owing him ‘two and fifty Pounds three Shillings and four Pence for Rent’. The antiquary Roger Gale wrote to his friend Stukeley that
A Description
was ‘a silly pack of stuff, collected together from our fabulous historians, & where their fictions or traditions are not sufficient to support his fancys, he never wants falsitys of his own invention to supply their defect’, which is a fair review, but does not get across the fact that it is also an oddly enjoyable read.

Wood began by reasserting the mythical foundation story of Bath. In Geoffrey of Monmouth’s
The History of the Kings of Britain
, in which the seeds of the story first appeared, the city was said to have been established by Bladud, father of Lear and descendant of the Trojan exile Brutus. This Bladud ‘encouraged necromancy throughout the
kingdom of Britain’, according to Geoffrey, and, like Daedalus, constructed himself a pair of wings. But the experiment went wrong, and he was dashed to pieces on the temple of Apollo in Trinovantum, the city that would eventually become London. Over time, the story was elaborated. Bladud, as a youth, so the expanded story went, contracted leprosy, and was exiled from the royal court. He became a swineherd. One day his pigs went astray. At length he found a sow wallowing in some hot springs, from which she emerged cured of all her ailments. Bladud too immersed himself in the waters, and his leprosy vanished. He returned to the court and in due course became king. Around the muddy spot where he had been cured he built Bath. By the time Wood was a young man, this medieval story was already regarded as nonsense – though as it happens, Geoffrey of Monmouth’s claim that Bladud founded Bath in ‘around 863
BC
’ is stated as fact in the brochure for the Thermae spa.

Wood took the myth of Bladud, and, through some tortuous chronological comparisons with the Bible and classical history, adjusted Bath’s foundation date from 863 to 483
BC
. He also shifted the whole of Geoffrey’s geography to the south-west. When Geoffrey talked of the Thames, he must have meant the Tamar, argued Wood. Trinovantum, where Bladud died, was clearly not in the south-east of England, as Geoffrey claimed, for the exiles could not have been ‘skipping from one remote Part of the Island to another with a Handful of People and carrying New Troy into Middlesex’. Rather, it was Bath that was Trinovantum. (Geoffrey himself must have been drawing on a garbled memory of the ancient British tribe, mentioned in various classical texts, of the Trinovantes, who inhabited parts of Essex and Suffolk.)

The account became yet more involved. Wood claimed that Bladud was one and the same person as a figure of classical myth, Abaris, who flew about upon a sacred arrow ‘in the Air over Rivers and Lakes, Forests and Mountains’. This character’s existence, and airborne adventuring, were doubted even on his first literary outing in Herodotus’s
Histories
, in the fifth century
BC
. But Wood ran away with the idea: Abaris/Bladud was ‘received in Greece as the known Priest of Apollo’, he decided. Furthermore, he restored the temple of Apollo at Delphi, consorted with Pythagoras, and very likely communicated the heliocentric model of the universe to Zoroaster. On his return to Britain,
he established the priesthood of the Druids: ‘King Bladud appears manifestly to have been their Founder, and to have made Bath their Metropolitan Seat; and part of what he taught them was first communicated to him by the great Pythagoras.’

Wood was not alone in developing a great interest in the Druids, an order of Celtic religious men of Britain and Gaul, known only through their brief mention in a handful of classical texts. The geographer Strabo wrote of their undertaking human sacrifice inside a ‘wicker man’; Caesar and Diodorus Siculus described them as powerful religious figures, diviners of the future. The Romans, easy-going when it came to tolerating and appropriating others’ religions, drew the line at both human sacrifice and anything with a whiff about it of organised resistance to Rome. In Suetonius’s biography of Claudius, the Druidic religion was called ‘dreadful and savage’ – the emperor abolished its practice in Gaul, noted the writer. In Tacitus, Druids are mentioned as a focus for British resistance against Roman rule: Suetonius Paulinus was attempting to put down a Druid-orchestrated rebellion when Boudica struck. From the seventeenth century onwards, antiquaries such as John Aubrey and the Irish philosopher John Toland speculated that megalithic monuments including Stonehenge and Avebury were Druidic. (The architect Inigo Jones was in the minority when he argued that they were Roman.) That the Druids were connected to such monuments was, perhaps, not an entirely unreasonable stab in the dark when a biblical chronology for world history was still broadly accepted, before the archaeological system of Stone, Bronze and Iron Ages had been developed, when all there was to go on for prehistory were scant details about the Celts in classical authors. A wiser head than Wood’s (the eighteenth-century antiquary Robert Sibbald) thought that prehistoric flint arrowheads were elf-bolts let loose from the heavens by fairies. William Stukeley was particularly notorious for his obsession with the Druids, even devising a temple in his vicarage garden, at its centre an ‘antient appletree oregrown with sacred misletoe’.

Wood’s enthusiasm for the Druids impelled him to survey the stone circles at Stanton Drew, near Bath. He did this in the teeth of superstitious opposition from the locals, who warned that everyone who had previously attempted to measure these still poorly understood monuments had been ‘struck dead upon the Spot, or with such an
Illness as soon carried them off’. Surviving the encounter with the monument, he found the main stone circle (through a bit of jiggery-pokery) to be not only the precise diameter of the Pantheon in Rome, but also, when taken together with other standing stones in the vicinity, to ‘form a perfect Model of the Pythagorean System of the Planetary World’. Stanton Drew was, concluded Wood, nothing less than a university for Druids. Bath and Stanton Drew had been ‘founded by one and the same Person, and for the same Purposes, to wit, to cure the Diseases of the People, to honour the Gods, and to instruct Mankind in the Liberal Sciences’.