18th May - Epworth

A book I know reasonably well, and enjoy, is "Three Men in a Boat" by Jerome K. Jerome. A whimsical account of a boat trip along the Thames, I was thinking of it (and in particular the classic section where Harris describes getting lost in the Maze) when I was close to Hampton Court a couple of weeks ago. It came to mind again on Friday and Saturday, when I visited Epworth. In particular, the section which talks of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, and how wherever people at the time seemed to go (Windsor, Hever Castle, St. Albans...) they would bump into them "just happening" to be going the same way. But why did this come to mind in Epworth?

John Wesley famously covered a lot of ground, and one sometimes gets the impression that other travelers of the time would have been hard pressed to avoid him! Back in 2022, I was contacted by someone from North Yorks Moors National Park about a stone in Kildale, bearing the inscription that says John Wesley had preached there in 1772 - could I add anything to that? While it may say something that this was a momentous enough occasion in some people's lives that they erected the stone to mark it, it doesn't even get a line in Wesley's Journal - it will have been just one of the stopping-points on his journey from Stokesley to Whitby, and given the tens of thousands of times he preached, if every one was commemorated in this way you'd think parts of the country would still be paved with them. Epworth though is where John and Charles started their journey, and on Saturday, together with half a dozen others, I would be walking in his footsteps.

Samuel Wesley's Grave

Arriving after attending the Supers Conference in Oxford, on Friday Evening I took a turn around some of the sites: St. Andrew's Church; in its Burial Ground, the tomb of their Father, Samuel, the Rector of Epworth, from which John preached when he returned and found himself barred from the Pulpit; a stone near the main street, which looks like it should have a statue on it, but in fact just has a plaque saying that Wesley preached from it many times. 

Along the road, an actual statue of Wesley. Just opposite, the wall that marks the garden of what is now a museum: Epworth Old Rectory, John and Charles' childhood home.

Epworth Old Rectory

The story is of course a famous one now. In 1709, when John was just 6, there was a fire at the Rectory - possibly deliberate, as Samuel (and indeed the Church of England as a whole) were far from popular with the locals. All the family were thought to have got out, when John appeared at an upper window, trapped by the flames; the watching crowd rallied, and with one man standing on the shoulders of others, John was pulled to safety from the window shortly before the blazing roof fell in. "A Brand plucked from the Burning", quoting Zechariah 3:2, was how he would later describe this. Samuel rebuilt in brick and stone on the same site; the family remained there until his death, and it is this building that we now see as the Old Rectory.

As I returned to the Red Lion, my accommodation for the evening, I was amused to see a plaque next to it - "John Wesley slept here many times on his visits to Epworth in his later life" - I may not quite have been sleeping in the same bed, but apparently I was at least under the same roof! It is simply impossible to be anywhere in Epworth and not feel like John Wesley has been there first! This, it seems, is Epworth: it remains proud of those famous sons and daughters, not just the Wesleys, but I'm told Ian Botham and Lesley Garrett too!

Journeying from Epworth to Haxey

This was something I was told as part of Saturday's Pilgrimage Walk, organised by a group called Journeying. They offer a programme of guided walking holidays, mostly with a Celtic Christianity influence, and, as I had found by chance, some Day Walks (free to join!) which included Epworth. One of the Walk Leaders is local to Epworth, and as we visited some of the places I had gone to the previous night, that meant that we learnt a lot more of the background. I hadn't realised for example that one of the causes of the Church of England's unpopularity in the area when Samuel arrived was that within living memory of that time, it had been the Isle of Axholme - a tract of higher ground surrounded by rivers and marshes; the locals had a very good arrangement from the Earl of Mowbray, but then in the 1620s King Charles I had persuaded him to allow a Dutch engineer to drain the land; they lost two thirds of the land that they'd had, and the fishing and catching wildfowl that had been their way of life was abruptly ended. As supporters of the King, the Church of England didn't escape their ire, and Samuel's attitude towards them in the early days didn't help!

The Fool of the Haxey Hood

Much of my walking and visiting so far has been fairly solitary, and so it was refreshing to be joining with a group of like-minded pilgrims as we walked from Epworth, past the site of a Holy Well claimed by some to be where King (later Saint) Oswald of Northumbria was killed in Battle - although most historians disagree - to our Lunch Stop at the King's Arms in Haxey. Then it was back to Epworth, passing a carving of "The Fool", part of the tradition of something called the Haxey Hood, which takes place on the 6th January each year, and seems to have some similarities to the Shrove Tuesday "Football" matches that take place in some parts of the country, as the ceremonial hood has to be moved in a scrum of bodies to one of the local pubs! 

We returned to Epworth, and some of us had a brief look around the Old Rectory itself - brief, as there was a coach party that was visiting at the same time! People come from all over the world to visit the Old Rectory, and to walk around Epworth; it's a real site of Pilgrimage now for the People called Methodists. As we gradually dispersed, I was thankful for those that I had walked with; thankful for the points of prayer and reflection that had been part of it; thankful for the work of Journeying, and in particular to Jane and Jo who led us through the day. 

Having also now finished Jack Hitt's "Off the Road" about his journey to Santiago de Compostela, one of the things that struck me was how important those who shared his journey had become to him; there's a feeling of loss as they disperse at the end of the pilgrimage. Those we share the journey with matter.

Even though I hadn't met any of those I shared this particular (and much shorter!) journey with before, we had quickly developed into a sort of little community as we walked, talked, prayed, and reflected together on the way. We had gathered with a shared purpose, and that I think made a real difference. You can argue that all sorts of groups have a shared purpose, shared values, whether those groups are religious or secular in nature; for me, in church, it's a reminder that whatever our differences, we share something at our core that helps bind us together - our shared belief in God the Creator, Jesus Christ the Saviour, and the Holy Spirit our constant companion and guide. I had certainly felt the Spirit as I shared in walking in and around Epworth.

Having been away for almost a full week (the Midlands, the Supers Conference in Oxford, and then Epworth), I'm having a couple of quieter days at the moment before hitting the road again - first of all to Birmingham for a day related to the Deacon that's joining the Circuit, before joining a Retreat at Wydale Hall near Pickering until Friday. Watch this space....