Lastingham
A place of wild beasts and men who
lived like wild beasts
Bede’s description of the wilderness
of Farndale as a place of dragons and wild beasts
A small
monastic community was founded at Lastingeau in 655 CE, by Cedd.
Lastingham is only a couple of miles from Farndale. This is a place at the
heart of our ancestral lands.
Directions
Head for
Hutton-le-Hole and take the road eastwards which leads to Lastingham. Before
you drive into Lastingham, stop at the edge of the moors which stretch
northwards and take in the remoteness of this place. Imagine how remote it must
have been in the seventh century when the Vale of York was well settled, but
the moors and the dales were wild and unsettled places.
The land
of wild beasts
Now let Bede take you to a Lord of the Rings world when
he described these lands, stretching from this place up through Farndale and
Rosedale to the high moors as a world of dragons and wild men.
Cedd chose himself a site for the
monastery amid some steep and remote hills which seemed better fitted for the
haunts of robbers and the dens of wild beasts than for human habitation; so
that, as Isaiah says, “In the habitation where once dragons lay, shall be grass
with reeds and rushes”, that is, the fruit of good works shall spring up where
once beasts dwelt or where men lived after the manner of beasts.
It was in
this place that Cedd built his monastery, near to the entrance to Farndale, ‘vel bestiae commorari vel hommines
bestialiter vivere conserverant’,
‘a land fit only for wild beasts, and men who live like wild beasts’.
Cedd was on
a mission to civilise this wild place.
The
Church at Lastingham
As you read
the history of Lastingham, you can
visit the church of St Mary at Lastingham. It is not of course the same
building as the seventh century monastery, but if you take the steep steps down
into the extraordinary Crypt you will enter this ancient world. The crypt dates to 1078 but the site
dates back to a much earlier era. This is the only Norman Crypt in England with
a nave, apse and side aisles. The walls are nearly 3 feet thick.
In the crypt
are pieces of a Saxon preaching cross found in the 1800’s and believed to be
part of Cedd’s original church. The cross may have been over six metres high.
There are Celtic carved stones
believed to also date back to Cedd’s time and which would have been part of a
shrine. Although the crypt is Norman, the space might link us more directly to
the early history of the church. The crypt was built possibly on or near the vicinity of the
earlier 7th century structure.
Before
leaving Lastingham, look across to the fields to the south of the road which
joins Lastingham to Hutton le Hole. Within these fields, including around
Grange Farm at Spaunton, Roman remains have been
found which suggest that remote farmsteads were the homes of smallholder
families cultivating lands on the approach to Lastingham in Roman times, and
there is evidence of small scale farming here back to the Bronze Age through to
the Neolithic.
These were
remote lands at the very edge of civilisation, where small isolated families
had worked the land for millennia. To the north were forested dales and bare
moorland tracts. A little further south, at Kirkdale and beyond across
the Vales of York and Pickering, larger communities cultivated more promising
land.
Go Straight to the History of Lastingham
or
Go Straight to Chapter 4 – Anglo
Saxon Kirkdale