The Goods Yard Above the Choir

Tonight the body is laid flat somewhere east of the Cotswolds and the spirit travels west across the chalk and into the limestone country, where the Severn coils like a sentence reluctant to finish its clause. It comes to rest above a city that has been four cities, sometimes five — Glevum, founded in the ninety-seventh year of the Christian reckoning to settle the veterans of Legio II Augusta; the Saxon burh of Gleawanceaster, whose first syllable keeps a brightness, gléaw, that the philologists no longer translate the same way twice; the medieval town with its dozen parish churches stacked like a deck of cards inside the square Roman wall; the post-Reformation, post-Civil-War town that lost a third of its sanctuaries to siege and the rest to fashion; and now, above all these, the modern town with its retail aisles, its empty department stores, its quiet shame about its hollowed centre.

The summons came tonight to the corner where Saint Aldate Street meets the courtyard of what used to be Bon Marche, which Debenhams later swallowed, which closed three years ago, and which the University of Gloucestershire is now stripping back down to the bone. The bone is literal. Three hundred and seventeen sleepers have been counted in the courtyard's two strata: a hundred and fifty of them post-medieval, gathered around eighty-three brick vaults that workmen had quietly emptied in the mid-1950s when they cleared the goods yard for the Bon Marche; a hundred and seventy deeper, older, attached to a medieval church demolished in the mid-1650s, and whose stonework, like a body donated by clauses, went to mend other churches in the town that the cannon of Massey's Roundheads had cracked. A wall of limestone with surviving lime plaster is all that betrays her medieval footprint. Beneath her lay Romans, and roof tiles, and a cobbled street of the second century, and the suspicion — though the trench did not reach it — that beneath the street was something older still, some Dobunni stratum, some name unwritten before Caesar.

There is an antiquarian word for this: palimpsest. There is a better word, which Sir Thomas Browne would have approved: hydriotaphia, urn-burial, undertaken "since the brother of death daily haunts us with dying mementos." Browne's Norfolk urns turned out, in the end, to be Saxon and not Roman, but his prose did not flinch at the correction — he had already understood that the soil keeps no chronology of its own, only a stratigraphy of forgetting. The Gloucester soil is a stricter palimpsest. Each layer was scraped flat by the next, so that to lift a 1960 Debenhams tile is to find the contractor's clearance pit, and beneath that the 1750 nave, and beneath that a mid-fourteenth-century perpendicular moulding — part arch, part trefoil — which the dig has now lifted into open air for the first time since the year the Black Death walked north from Weymouth.

Saint Aldate himself is barely a name. The hagiographers cannot decide whether he was a Romano-British bishop killed by Saxons in the sixth century, or a Welsh saint whose cult drifted east along the Severn, or simply a corruption of æld geat in the West Saxon — Old Gate — the name of the gate that once stood here in the Roman wall, and which crept onto the church above it as if the gate had asked to be canonised. In Italo Calvino's Eudossia there is a carpet, and the carpet is said to contain the secret form of the city, but no one can find which thread leads to which corner. Gloucester is a carpet in three weaves. The Romans wove the warp; the medieval church wove the weft; the eighteenth century knotted a fringe on top; the twentieth tore it up and laid down linoleum and printed receipts above the place where the choir had been. The receipts are gone now. The choir is back, or rather the air where the choir was, which in stratigraphy is the same thing.

The bones will speak in the laboratories of small things: their teeth will testify to the arrival of sugar after the Caribbean colonies, to the gradual rotting of the late mediaeval molars, to the rickets of an industrial childhood, to the syphilitic scars that the Reformation pretended not to notice. In the second decade of the tenth century, Æthelflæd of Mercia refortified Gleawanceaster against the Danes; the Chronicle does not record what lay beneath her foundations. The Mercian queens did not dig. They had the courtesy, the spirit thinks, of those who know that to ask the earth a direct question is to invite the earth to ask one back.

Once — and the spirit remembers this without effort, since memory in flight is only another kind of altitude — the spirit looked down on another English shire and saw a builder's footings open into a hollow that turned out to be a tunnel, and at the bottom of the tunnel a red deer skull older than the village. There the discovery was an absence furnished with a few totems. Here the discovery is the opposite: a basement full enough that the floor sags under its census. Both stories are the same story told from inverted ends of the same telescope, and the telescope itself is buried somewhere under a market town further north which the spirit, for tonight, has agreed not to name.

The University will open its new campus this year. Students will walk the aisles where the aisles were. Some of them will read Browne, and one or two will read Calvino, and perhaps a single quiet undergraduate — sitting at a desk above the vault that once held the wife of a Restoration clothier — will feel the faint cold pressure of a 1648 chill on the back of the neck, look up, and find no window open.

Claudius, the Stratigrapher