At a narrow stone casement, hinges black with iron, a robed figure stands with one hand near the bell-rope and her gaze fixed upon the water. Dawn has turned the sky to rose above a sea of deepening blue, and across that sea come the long ships, dragon-prowed, low and swift, making for the shore below her window. She has seen them. In a moment the rope will move and the bell will speak, and the quiet of the morning will break into flight and prayer. This is For Whom the Bell Tolls, and it holds the instant before the alarm, the last stillness of a coast that does not yet know it has been found.
The painting takes its title from words nine centuries younger than the scene it shows, and it draws its dread from an age when such a sight was the most feared upon the whole northern shore. Both are worth following. What lies below traces the phrase to its author and the ships to their harbours, and returns at the last to the woman at the window.
The bell and its poet
The title comes from John Donne, who in the winter of 1623 lay gravely ill and, hearing the passing-bell toll for another, set down the meditation that has outlived nearly all his sermons. The lines are known even to those who have never opened him: that no man is an island, that every man is a piece of the continent, and that one should never send to know for whom the bell tolls, since it tolls for thee. Donne meant the church bell that announces a death, and he meant the bond that makes another’s death a portion of our own.
There is a fitness in setting his words against this particular shore. The great monastery whose fall opened the age of the raiders stood upon Lindisfarne, which the English have always called the Holy Island. Donne wrote that no man is an island; the painting answers with an island that was a whole world of its own, and shows the sea beginning to wash it away. The bell in her hand is at once the warning-bell of the watch and the tolling-bell of Donne’s meditation, sounding for the living who are about to become the dead, and for a way of life that will not survive the century.
The first sails: raiders out of the north
The English coast met the Northmen before it feared them. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records that in the reign of Beorhtric, around the year 789, three ships came to Portland in Wessex, and the king’s reeve, a man named Beaduheard, rode down to the strand believing them traders and meaning to bring them to the royal town. They killed him where he stood. It was the first meeting set down in writing, and the chronicler marks it as the first ships of Northmen to seek out the land of the English.
The blow that woke Christendom fell four years later. On the eighth of June in 793, seaborne raiders fell upon the monastery of Saint Cuthbert at Lindisfarne, the richest and most venerated house in Northumbria. They slew the monks or drowned them or carried them off for slaves, stripped the altars, and desecrated the shrine of the saint. Word of the sacrilege ran across Europe. Alcuin of York, then at the court of Charlemagne, wrote to Bishop Higbald in grief and horror, saying that never before had such terror appeared in Britain, and that the heathen had trampled the bodies of the saints in the temple of God like dung in the street. The event is remembered as the raid that began the Viking Age, and the monasteries had good reason to dread the sight of a striped sail. They were undefended, they lay upon the water, and they held their wealth in gold and silver that a shipload of men could carry off in an hour.
The raids that followed were, for two generations, a matter of summer plunder. Ships came, harried a stretch of coast, and were gone before any levy could be raised against them. When resistance did gather, the English often chose the purse over the sword, buying the raiders off with tribute in silver. The payment earned a name that would echo down the centuries: Danegeld, the Dane-gold, the price of a peace that never held for long.
From raid to conquest: the Great Heathen Army
In the year 865 the character of the thing changed altogether. A host far larger than any raiding band came ashore, and it came to stay. The English called it the Great Heathen Army, and later tradition set at its head the sons of the half-legendary Ragnar Lodbrok, among them Ivar the Boneless, Halfdan, and Ubba. Where the earlier fleets had wanted gold, this army wanted land.
It moved with terrible purpose. Within a year it had taken York, which the Northmen made their own and called Jorvik, the beating heart of their power in Britain for a century to come. Northumbria fell, and then East Anglia, whose king Edmund was killed for refusing the invaders’ terms. Mercia was broken and set under a puppet. By the middle of the 870s the greater part of England lay under Scandinavian rule, and of the old kingdoms only Wessex in the south still stood unconquered. It is worth remembering that nearly all we know of these years was written by the churchmen who suffered the raids, so the darkness of the picture owes something to the hands that painted it. The ruin, even so, was real enough.
Alfred and the turning of the tide
Wessex held because of one man. Alfred, called the Great, came to the throne in 871 with the army already loose in his kingdom. In the first days of 878 the Danish leader Guthrum fell upon the royal estate at Chippenham in a surprise attack of midwinter, when no campaign was looked for, and drove the king into hiding in the marshes of Athelney in Somerset. From that low water Alfred gathered the men of the shires, and in May of 878 he met Guthrum at Edington in Wiltshire and broke the Danish army in the field.
The peace that followed was as remarkable as the victory. Guthrum agreed to be baptised, with Alfred himself standing as his sponsor, and the treaty drew a line across England. To the south and west lay Wessex under English law; to the north and east lay the Danelaw, the wide country where Scandinavian custom and speech would hold. The settlement endured in the very ground. The map of England still carries the marks of it, in the hundreds of town names that end in -by and -thorpe and -thwaite, in the northern words that entered the common tongue, and in the city of York that had been Jorvik. The men who came to conquer England had a hand, against their every intention, in the making of it.
What the watcher sees
Return now to the window. The woman at the casement stands where every coastal house of God stood in those years, at the edge of the water with nothing between herself and the sea but the depth of her faith and the weight of a bell. She belongs to the first age, the age of the summer raid, when a watch and a warning were all the defence a priory had. The rose light on the horizon may be the dawn, and it may be the burning of some place along the coast that the ships have already left behind.
Donne’s bell tolls for the one who hears it as much as for the one it mourns. The painting sets that truth in a harder country. She rings for the brothers and sisters behind her, and the ringing is also her own knell, since the ships will reach the shore before the sound has died. In her stillness there is the whole meaning of the meditation, that no soul stands alone and that the passing of one is the diminishing of all. The dragon-ships upon the water carry the oldest fear of the English coast, and the hand upon the rope carries the oldest answer to it, which was to sound the alarm and to pray.
About the painting
For Whom the Bell Tolls is an original acrylic painting on canvas, 18 by 24 inches, by Rob Medley of Kreative Forge. It was painted live at the Ohio Viking Festival, worked before an audience amid the longships and the reenactors, and it came from the brush some while before its companion in mood and moonlight, Blossoming Dream. The two make an interesting pair, the one all dread and dawn, the other all repose and the risen moon.
The painting is available for purchase, and may be seen in person at the faires and festivals where the studio keeps its booth. A fuller gallery of original paintings is a short journey away, and enquiries are always welcome.