CHAPTER 36
The following day I drove to Coity itself, for the most part a rather charming suburb of Bridgend. These days, the castle, having been abandoned as a habitation in the 18th century, is little more than a romantic ruin. Standing at a distance, however, it is still just about possible to imagine how it must have looked at the time of Sir Lawrence Berkrolles, when it withstood the siege of Owen Glendower and his men. Nevertheless, it was not a big castle, so it was difficult to see how it could have survived such a prolonged siege without outside help. I was inclined to think there might be some truth to a story contained in the Iolo Manuscripts concerning a meeting between Sir Lawrence Berkrolles and Glendower. According to this story, the latter, in disguise, was entertained at the castle for four days with the utmost courtesy. Not knowing who his guest really was, Sir Lawrence boasted that he had sent out his men to scour the district for Glendower. The other agreed that apprehending him would be a good thing. However, as he left, Glendower shook Sir Lawrence’s hand and, revealing his true identity, promised that he would never seek to harm him. Sir Lawrence Berkrolles was left speechless and, indeed, never spoke again.
I don’t know if this story is true, but certainly Owen Glendower, while he may have wanted to capture the castle, would have had good reason not to harm either it or its Lord. He would have known that Coity was the last fragment of the earlier kingdoms of Wales, and that because it had never been conquered by the Normans – it was given in dowry – it still retained its independence from both the Crown of England and the Lordship of Glamorgan. This made it, potentially, a very special prize, but one that needed to be preserved intact if it was to have any meaning. In the event, the siege of Glendower had the opposite effect to that intended: it led directly to the ending of Coity’s independence. Thus, we read the following lament in another of the Iolo MSS:
‘One thousand four hundred and twelve – sway became extinct in Coetty [Coity]. Then vanish’d all semblance of justice to Cambria devoted.’
Map 7. The Royal Lordship of Coetty in Glamorgan
Glendower must have known that Coity was a royal town whose lords claimed descent from the line of Iestyn, but did he know something else that he kept secret? Looking for an answer to this question, I left the ruined castle and made my way through a kissing gate into the churchyard. It was late afternoon by now and the sun was shining low along a path flanked by yew trees. These seemed old, but not old enough to prove there had been a church on the site prior to the Norman building we see today.
Once inside the church, my first impression was that there was little there of antiquarian interest, apart, that is, from a couple of small effigies lying on the floor, close to the altar. One of these represented the third Sir Payne de Turbeville who died in the early 14th century; the other was a memorial to one of his children who had died in childhood. I walked back down the central aisle feeling somewhat dejected, but then my attention was caught by something else. Pressed up against the south wall of the church was a curious piece of furniture that resembled a small wardrobe. Curious as to what it was, I walked over to examine it more closely. Standing about five feet in height and width but not much more than a foot in depth, it had a gabled roof that gave it the appearance of a rather large dolls’ house. The church guidebook, however, said it was probably an ‘Easter Sepulchre’ and was meant to symbolize the tomb in which the body of Jesus was laid after the Crucifixion. As such, it would be brought out into the middle of the church on Good Friday to act as a focal point for devotions throughout the Easter Weekend.
While this seemed an entirely plausible explanation for such a curious object, I was not fully convinced. With its gabled roof, it looked to me more like a large reliquary, ie a closed box in which the bones of a saint could be kept. Furthermore, it bore little or no relation to the description of Jesus’ tomb in the Bible. For one thing, there was no door to this Easter Sepulchre, so that on Easter Sunday there could be no rolling back of a stone to reveal it was empty. On the other hand, I could imagine it housing the bones of a prominent saint. If this were so, then the question was: whose bones might these have been?
The only clues to this were provided by a collection of carved panels on its front. These panels (though not the whole chest) are said to date from around AD 1500, which, if true, means they were carved during the reign of Henry VII. A date range of between 1490 and 1510 would put them after the Wars of the Roses but a generation or more before the Reformation. I found the choice of symbols depicted on these panels very interesting in that they formed a visual link between the stone plaques I had previously seen in the Mathew Chapel of Llandaff Cathedral, and the similar symbols on the font in Penshurst Church.
In all there were six panels. These were arranged in two rows of three, one row above the other. The top right-hand panel depicted the pillar onto which Jesus was tied and flogged. Also included on this panel were the whips used and a crowing cock, a reference to Jesus’ own prophecy that Peter would betray him thrice before the cock crowed. The designs on the top left-hand panel were very like those on the shield placed over the tomb of St Dyfrig in Llandaff Cathedral. At its centre was an empty calvary cross as it might have looked after the Crucifixion. Leaning against it was a ladder and also shown were other implements used in the Crucifixion and its aftermath, including the spear and three pots containing burial spices that were brought to the tomb by Mary Magdalene and the other women. Just as on the Dyfrig shield and on the plaque at the foot of the tomb of Bishop Marshall (also in Llandaff), the Crown of Th orns was shown hanging over the central area of the cross. This is a familiar representation that seems to have both echoed the older wheel crosses and been a forerunner of the familiar crucified rose of the Rosicrucians.
Between these two panels there was a third that was more abstract in nature. It showed a floriated cross with a pierced heart at its centre. Around the cross, representations of the pierced hands and feet of Jesus were arranged in its quadrants, with the heart making five wounds in all. The floriated cross with the heart at its centre seemed directly related to the other version of the Rosicrucian cross, the one with a single rose (symbolizing the heart?) at the centre of a floriated cross.
On the bottom row, the two side panels were simply decorated with carvings of vines and flowers. The central panel, however, was again much more interesting. Carved on it was a shield emblazoned with three nails. As we have seen, it was common practice in Medieval times for noblemen to have their tombs embellished with at least one shield depicting their family’s coat of arms. When dealing with legendary figures who either didn’t have a family shield or whose arms were unknown, they would give them attributed arms: for example, Brutus, the legendary founder of the British nation, was attributed a shield bearing three crowns, while King Arthur was given a shield that was green with a white cross and with a picture of the virgin and child in the top right-hand corner. The attributed shield of Edward the Confessor, who lived before the standardization of coats of arms, is still used to this day. It is blue with a golden, floriated cross and five golden martlets (small birds). Taking all this into account, it would seem that the shield with three nails was also emblazoned with attributed arms. But whose arms were they?
The simplest answer to this question would be to say that the three nails represented the attributed arms of Jesus Christ. After all, tradition states that he was crucified using just three nails: one through each hand; a third passing through both feet. Yet there are difficulties with this interpretation. The oldest symbols for Jesus were the fish and then, later on, the Chi-Rho symbol which some people believe evolved into the familiar wheel cross. If the attributed arms on the shield were intended to be his, then it would make more sense to use one of these symbols. There is, however, another alternative. This is that the arms with their three nails’ device were not attributed to Jesus but to someone else. But who could this possibly be?
Like the symbols on the other panels, they clearly refer to the aftermath of the Crucifixion rather than to the event itself. Thinking about this, I reasoned that simply removing the nails (a necessary task if the body of Jesus were to be brought down from the cross intact) would have been difficult to do. If the three nails, which were arranged in the form of the mystic Awen symbol, were not meant to be the attributed arms of Jesus, then the obvious alternative was that they were attributed to the man who succeeded in removing them. This man was, of course, Joseph of Arimathea. Furthermore, the Bible tells us that the stone-cut grave in which Jesus’ body was laid to rest belonged to Joseph and had been intended for his own use. Thus, if the wooden chest as a whole was indeed an Easter Sepulchre, as the guidebook claimed, then it symbolized Joseph’s family tomb. What could be more natural than that it should be decorated with a shield bearing his family’s attributed arms?
There is a tradition that states that Joseph was either the uncle or brother of the Virgin Mary. If this is the case, then Joseph’s family was the same as Mary’s. The legends claim that Joseph, by then an old man, settled in Wales and established the first Christian college at Llantwit Major. This implies that he eventually died in Britain, perhaps leaving other members of his family to carry on his good work. All this reasoning, however, poses another question: is there any evidence, other than legends, that might link the family of the Virgin Mary with South Wales? If so, what was the family’s relationship, if any, to the descendants of King Caractacus, ie such later Kings of Glamorgan as Maurice and Arthur? With these questions in mind, I felt instinctively that I was getting closer to the deepest secret of Coity and its connections with the inner teachings of Rosicrucianism.