English Holy Wells: v. 1: A Sourcebook [Paperback]

Over the summer of 1990 I roughed out the draft for what would become "The Living Stream" and though it acquired more detail and polish in the couple of years before it was handed to Boydell & Brewer the basic argument remained unchanged. It was a polemical statement by an obsessive undergraduate and, for all its championing of 'real history' over the fantasies which had afflicted the study of holy wells, involved an awful lot of flailing around in the dark in the hope of hitting something worthwhile (I like to think it often did). Jeremy Harte's book is the first major corrective to that study, and a smashing one.

Behind the pages of "English Holy Wells" lies an incredible amount of work. Jeremy has spent years chasing down the original source reference for every Christianised holy well known in England, excluding Cornwall. What this achieves (if that were not enough) is to strip away the accretions of misinterpretation, exaggeration, garbling and blunder to expose the secure bedrock of our knowledge about England's sacred springs. Armed with this information, he establishes a new and convincing chronology for the Christian well-cult in England, concluding that 'Holy Wells' so-named generally preceded those dedicated to saints, and fanned outwards from an original centre in the Midlands. The book has less interest in what happened after the Reformation, but later events and the creation of more modern holy wells nevertheless feature as part of the story. This is a pretty narrow focus, but the triumphant result shows what can be done by concentrating historiographical fire.

The argument is involved, but the book wears its great learning very lightly. Jeremy writes in an engaging, human, and in fact, when dealing with the strange and delightful characters we meet through the story, humane way; so, far from being a stodgy academic tome, "English Holy Wells" trots along very amiably. The really knotty discussion is relegated to footnotes, and even there none of it will cause any problems for a non-specialist with a basic understanding of British history. There's a sprinkling of black-and-white illustrations, mainly from obscure old works of local history, which few well-enthusiasts will have seen before, and these help the text along - not that it needs it. The author's willingness to think outside established categories and boundaries is constantly exciting.

The three printed volumes together will set you back a little under sixty quid, so Heart of Albion have compassionately appended to the first the second two on disk. Don't neglect them, though - that's where the bulk of the splendid stories are hiding. The only quibble with this excellent book is the slightly wonky production which has left the cover picture askew and the author's name off-centre.

It is difficult to exaggerate the service Jeremy Harte has done the study of hydrolatry in "English Holy Wells". His approach to what we actually know is certainly severe, and the picture will need nuancing with credible speculation, drawing on information from other, non-documentary sources. But, to adopt a Rumsfeldian tone, once we know what we know we know, we can guess at what we don't know yet. That's how history should work. This book does not end the study of English holy wells: it stakes out a base camp. I hope that, in years to come, the first, automatic thought of future investigators, embarking on their own explorations and coming across an unfamiliar well, will be 'Is it in Harte? What does he say?'

If you only buy one book on holy wells - buy this one! Jeremy has done a fantastic amount of research.
A must have book for all serious researchers.

This is a thorough historical work and will clearly last as an outstanding study of this subject, fully deserving to be described as definitive (with five stars!). Despite the outstanding nature of the work, however, I do not feel that Jeremy Harte has completely made the case against the "myth" (his word) that holy wells are a relic of "ancient cults against which the church preached in vain ... an important part of the religion of the ancient Celts". As he demonstrates, many wells have a documented medieval history of growing cultic status, or are of recent invention, but of course absence of evidence of a pre-Christian or Celtic origin is not evidence of absence. And suggestive evidence is surely not completely absent. As the author shows, Wales and south-west England have the greatest density of examples, and the east generally the lowest, and the church did have to struggle against unofficial water cults. But I don't want to dwell on that. He convincingly explodes some elements of the "myth".
This is THE book on the subject, although restricted to wells labelled "holy" and with saints names, and excluding Cornwall. As a clever way of keeping down the cost of a scholarly work of restricted appeal, the second and third volumes are supplied as pdfs, with a spreadsheet of the wells, on a CD with the printed volume 1.
Just to add a non-well but related story, I recently visited the ancient sites at Tara, in Ireland. A weather-beaten hawthorn on the site was draped with rags and other baubles, surely a continuing relic of ancient reverence? But no, the guide told me this habit had only started recently.