The life of the antiquarian, William Somner (1598-1669) spanned the end of the Tudor period and the establishment, and then re-establishment, of the House of Stuart. He was a noted Royalist, and imprisoned briefly in Deal for his pains in 1659 for petitioning for a free parliament. A native of Canterbury, his house in Castle Street is clearly marked. His chief work as an historian was `The Antiquities of Canterbury’, issued before the vexation of the Civil War in 1640. But he is of more than merely parochial interest, because of his ground-breaking work on Anglo-Saxon language, the `Dictionarium Saxonico-Latino-Anglicum’ issued in the year of his imprisonment, the first systematic and comprehensive attempt to set down the language of the era in which Canterbury had been the centre for the reestablishment of Christianity in Britain from the late 6th century onwards.
The work on Canterbury exists in a splendid facsimile of the 1703 edition, issued by EP Publishing, Wakefield in 1977. Furnished with excellent maps, the work traces the development of the ancient city through its built and documentary inheritance. It is also scrupulous in its attention to the detail of human figures, from the Archbishops, to priors to archdeacons. At the start of his endeavour, Somner makes clear his belief in the great antiquity of the place he was writing about, and from:
`Now no one thing, almost of this nature that Discourse shall offer to the Consideration of an English-Man, especially a Kentish-Man, shall find more vulgar Belief, nor is it better grounded in Tradition, than (my main Motive to the ensuing Treatise) the Antiquity of this our City’ (1)
Somner’s work is not an easy one to read, but nor is it some dry treatise unenlivened by the author’s voice. Somner interjects his attitude into the historical descriptions, peppering them with opinions and ideas that jolt the reader from their placidity in a gently disruptive way. `A City’s Aspect is much blemished by ruinous Edifices,’ he writes at one point (8) of the Wall which had brickwork from the Roman era, and which was to end up being largely destroyed, particularly in the Second World War. Today, of course, what part of this `ruinous Edifice’ is left is preserved with solicitude veering on the religious. At another such place, the decayed Norman castle, he outlines its history and style, before consigning it with an almost peremptory `A few words now of the Barbican and I shall have done with the castle’ (19).
Of St Martins, the great, ancient church outside the city walls, where St Augustine has first celebrated the Eucharist on his arrival around 596CE, Somner adopts an appropriately more respectful tone: `Only I with that for the venerable antiquity of the Church, and sometime Episcopal estate of the place, things that have much dignified both, it might better flourish in the maintenance of its due rights and respects than I hear it doth’ (35). The Maid of Kent, Elizabeth Barton, soon arouses the more antagonistic tone of earlier parts of the work – branded `that great Imposter of her time’ who before her career as a seer and prophet and her execution at the hands of Henry the Eighth had been briefly domiciled in the city.
Somner’s work might create debate about its accuracy or written merits – but the one incontrovertible aspect of it is the deep fascination with the past and the memory traces and records of it left in the present in which he was writing. In that sense, his attitude was not so different from those today who question the places where they live, and which they are familiar with, and wonder how they came to be as they are, and how best to understand where they have come from. sObject(o)