A Parish is a church territorial unit.
St Mary Magdalene Church sits at the bottom of Bermondsey street. It is formed of temporal fragments, with the west wall dating from 1291, the main hulk of the building from 1680, and the tower from 1830. In 2013 glass panels were inserted into its facade. They are modern and transparent, etched with words from St Paul’s letter to the Ephesians ‘He tore down the wall we used to keep each other at a distance’.
Bermondsey wall, Galleywall, barriers built to block the tidal streams and partition the uncertain marsh land. We clambered upon these and used them as conduits.
St Mary Magdalene was built for the lay brethren who lived and worked on the lands of Bermondsey Abbey, one of the largest Cluniac orders in Europe in the middle ages. The Cluniacs, dressed head to toe in black, did no manual labour, just reprographics and song – spreading the scripture through repetition, calling out to god, or warning against him, through scribe and sound. Throats and chapels as amplifiers. Melismatic signifiers extenuated across western scales.
As the years pass the abbey grows, brick upon brick, the city rises, cathedrals loom, architecture blooms towards the sky.
Voices too begin to layer. The monophonic becomes polyphonic.
Music, like maths for the body, articulates a more sublime order through harmonic parallels, 3rds and 5ths.
The liturgies grow increasingly ornate, golden, embossed, curlicued. The feasting becomes gluttonous and the glass becomes stained.
A Parish is a church territorial unit.
How does a church own a territory? How does land belong to god, or those who do his work?
Frankalmoin – Give me your land and I’ll pray for you, I’ll for your soul.
Frankalmoin – possession of land in exchange for prayer. If the alms are pure all services provided will be of a specifically spiritual nature. If the alms are perpetual the grant is intended to be in effect forever.
From malefactors to benefactors. Land is Prayer and Prayer is Song.
The sacred taper’s lights are gone,
Grey moss has clad the altar-stone,
The holy image is o’erthrown,
The bell has ceased to toll:
The long-ribb’d aisles are burst and shrunk,
The holy shrine to ruin sunk,
Departed is the pious monk;
God’s blessing on his soul!”
