Tag Archives: Lichfield

A Beautiful Wilderness

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The story of Beaudesert Hall features an incredible cast of characters. There’s Lady Florence Paget, the ‘Pocket Venus’ who eloped with her lover Henry Hastings, and married him on the very same day she was supposed to wed his best friend, Henry Chaplin. More famously, there’s Toppy aka The Dancing Marquess, and a film about the decadent 5th Marquess of Anglesey, ‘Madfabulous‘, has just been shown at Cannes. And of course, there is the first Marquess of Anglesey, who rests in peace in a crypt below Lichfield Cathedral (and no, I’m not going to make any missing leg jokes). For me though, it’s the beginning of Beaudesert and its (sort of) end that has captured my imagination most thanks to a fabulous guided walk and talk there last weekend with my friend JP.

Some of the most substantial remains still standing date back to the 15th century, when the place belonged to the Bishops of Lichfield. They christened it the ‘Beautiful Wilderness’, inspired by the surrounding countryside of Cannock Chase. The story of how it came into their possession is still unfolding and the idea that Beaudesert, first mentioned in the 13th century, may also be connected to two other nearby sites is an intriguing possibility. And how does the mysterious Nun’s Well fit into all of this?


At Cannock Wood, a hermitage was established by King Stephen c.1130, which later became a short lived Cistercian Abbey dedicated to St Mary. Tired of being taken advantage of by the local foresters, the monks begged their benefactor, Henry II, to find their somewhere they could pray in peace. He agreed and swapped the site with what then became Stoneleigh Abbey. King Henry was happy with the exchange and turned Radmore, or Red Moor, into a royal hunting lodge. Despite the site of the Abbey being marked on maps, and evidence of a moated site, WH Duignan, the Walsall solicitor and antiquarian, cast doubt on the location suggesting heaps of furnace slag had been mistaken for ancient ruins. He believed the Abbey had instead stood within the ramparts of Castle Ring, where the foundations of a small building are still visible, although this has more recently been interpretated as another medieval hunting lodge.

Beaudesert belonged to the Bishop until the Reformation when Sir William Paget was given the house by Henry VIII. Paget had risen from humble beginnings to become a key member of the king’s court, thanks to his ability rather than ancestory. Many sources speculate he was the son of a nail maker in Wednesbury but what is certain is that this self-made man managed to keep his head, both physically and politically, throughout the turbulent times of the Tudor monarchs. The property stayed in the ownership of the Pagets until the 6th Marquess of Anglesey made the difficult decision to dispose of his Staffordshire seat in. In the end, he couldn’t even give it away and so the place was sold off piecemeal.

If you’ve read this blog before, you’ll know I have a fascination with what becomes of the fixtures and fittings of a lost country house and there are some tantalising trails to follow from Beaudesert. Pitman, writing for The Friends of Cannock Chase, described seeing, ‘Oak floors, decorative plaster ceilings, Jacobean overmantels, fire grates and irons of ancient dates, (and) marble bathroom equipment’, being dismantled by, ‘the bargain-maker’s men’. Many of these items were bought up by Sir Edward and Ursula Hayward and shipped down under to Carrick Hill House in Adelaide, including the Waterloo staircase, so named for the portrait of the 1st Marquess which hung above it. Oak from the Long Gallery went to Birmingham, where the City Council intended, ‘to keep it ready for use when occasion arises’. Did the Beaudesert panelling ever make it into a Brummie building? With the help of a local councillor, I’ve found a house in Armitage which was once a game larder on the estate and there are stories that more of the stonework found its way to Hanch Hall and to the collection of a man who kept curiosities in a disused rail station in Sutton Coldfield. (Yes, the temptation to go off track and delve further into this has been immense!).

According to the Staffordshire Advertiser, reporting on the sale in July 1935, buyers had 28 days to remove their new property. The demolition firm then had two years to, ‘clear the site, it being understood that he demolishes the building to the ground level and leave the site in a reasonably level and neat condition’. As we know, they never quite succeeded and thanks to the firm becoming bankrupt, some of Beaudesert Hall still survives, ready for another chapter in its long and eventful history. To uncover the full story so far, I can’t recommend enough that you book yourself onto a tour and let the experts guide you around this beautiful wilderness.

Sources:

The Friendship of Cannock Chase, Pitman

Staffordshire Advertiser, 27th July 1935

Staffordshire Advertiser, 16th November 1935

Birmingham Daily Post, 4th July 1977

https://www.heritagegateway.org.uk/Gateway/Results_Single.aspx?uid=MST12210&resourceID=1010
Castle Ring Hill Fort

Highway to Hell

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I feared from the looks on my family’s faces that my interest in the macabre may have gone too far when I happened to mention during a meal at the Old Irish Harp that an inquest on the body of a genteelly dressed woman found ‘wilfully murdered’ in a wood near Sutton Coldfield had taken place not far from where we were sat, albeit 250 years prior. I thought perhaps it was time to find a different hobby. Embroidery perhaps? A pleasant pastime for sure, but turns out that for me it’s no substitute for finding and sharing a ripping yarn. And now that we’ve established that I am beyond all redemption, I want to regale you with a post about crime and punishment on the mean streets of Staffordshire.

Back when the inquest took place it was just known as the ‘Irish Harp’.

On the evening of 26th October 1764, a little after 8 o’clock in the evening, Mr Thomas Hurdman of Alrewas was stopped by a footpad opposite St Michael’s churchyard. The Aris’s Birmingham Gazette cryptically reported the rogue was suspected to be a W_____ C_____ of Greenhill. I’m not sure why such nominal secrecy though, when they also published a description of him in the same report (not yet 20, about 5 feet 5 inches high, wide mouthed and wearing his own hair, if not altered, which was brown and short cut’). Despite being caught by one of the city’s constables, WC managed to quite literally give him the slip by sliding out of his coat, and legging it out of Lichfield in a linen frock. His freedom (and any semblance of anonymity) was short-lived however. In March the following year, newspaper reports reveal that the ID of WC was William Cobb and that he’d been sentenced by the High Steward of Lichfield, Fettiplace Nott, to be transported for his assault on Thomas Hurdman and making many violent threats of murder.

St Michael’s Lichfield is the graveyard for some who went to the gallows

Ashmoor Brook, up Cross in Hand Lane, was the scene of another robbery which went awry. In Lichfield March 1833, a notorious local character known as Crib Meacham, a name apparently derived from his success in various pugilistic encounters, was charged with robbing a Mr Lees of Stoneywell. According to Lees, Meacham was one of a gang of four who attacked him and his wife. The pair were in possession of a large sum of money but it was Mrs Lees who was holding the purse strings at the time and the thieves had allowed her to run away. She soon returned with assistance and it was the robbers turn to run, leaving a gagged Mr Lees unharmed but relieved of his relatively empty purse and hat. Meacham was arrested later that evening but as of yet, I cannot tell you anymore about him, neither the fights which earned him his nickname in the past nor the fate he earned from his part in the robbery.

Cross in Hand Lane is only just outside Lichfield but must have felt like the back of beyond travelling through here after dark

I can tell, however, tell you much more about Robert Lander aka Bradbury a cordwainer of Milford near Stafford who robbed Solomon Barnett, a wax chandler of Liverpool in March 1798. The newspaper reports at the time give not only a physical description (Lander was a stout built man, 5ft 5 inches, 25 years of age wearing a blue coat, a striped fancy coloured waistcoat, and thickest breeches, torn upon the left thigh and patched upon both the knees). It also gives his villain origin story, starting at his childhood home of Haywood near Stafford. When his Dad died, he inherited a few hundred pounds. At the age of 21 he got turned down for a job at the Board of Excise and so went to work for a gentleman in the wine and spirit trade instead. This, it seems, may have been the start of his downfall. During his employment he is said to have remained in a permanent state of intoxication, eventually absconding and taking with him a watch belonging to his master. He sold it at Stafford where he enlisted into a Regiment of Foot but ended up, somewhat ironically, in the shoe making business. This didn’t last long either and neither did his subsequent enlistment into four other regiments. His career in crime also came to an abrupt end when he was found guilty of the robbery of Solomon Barnett and sentenced to death at the Stafford Assize. When the judge prayed that the Lord would have mercy on his soul, it was reported Lander replied, ‘G__d d___n you and the gallows too. I care for neither’. I assume he said it in full but that his blasphemy was censored by the Chester Chronicle. He was executed in August 1798 and the parish register of St Mary’s Stafford records that, along with Edward Kidson, Robert Lander alias Bradbury was executed _ _ _ _ _ _ _.

These are all true crime stories, but it would’t be Lichfield Lore without a bit of folklore would it folks? You’ll be relieved to know I’m not going to go down the Turpin turnpike road but I am going to give a dishonorable mention to Tom ‘Artful’ Arnott, a highwayman who was supposedly executed, gibbeted and, eventually, buried at this crossroads in Cannock.

Although Arnott’s grave is marked on old maps there are no records of anyone of that name ever being executed. Intriguingly though, there is a record of a Thomas Arnott being buried on 1st September 1777 at St Luke’s in Cannock. Clearly a man can’t be buried in two places at once but it’s the right kind of era and area. Then there’s a Thomas Arnott mentioned in Aris’s Birmingham Gazette in October 1792 for absconding from his master’s service in Birmingham. Intriguingly, after given a description of him (35 years old, five feet five inches, marked with the Small Pox, dark lank hair, and lightly made, wearing a blue coat), it mentions that prior to his work as a stamp, press, lathe and die maker, he had been employed as a forger. Do they mean the criminal variety and if so, does this strengthen the case for him being our Tom? Just to add an extra layer of intrigue, there was yet another absconding Thomas Arnott, who was apprenticed to a Whitesmith in Worcester but ran away on 5th April 1803. He’s described as 5 feet two inches, black curled hair, wearing a blue coat with yellow buttons, a green striped cashmere waistcoat with yellow buttons and dark velveteen breeches. In that outfit, if he did become a highwayman, he’d have been a very dandy one indeed. Could any of these be the legendary Arnott? Did he even exist in the first place? All I do know is that this story is one T__B__C__________.

Arnott’s Grave. Unless it turns out to be at St Luke’s Cannock.

Sources
Aris’s Birmingham Gazette 5th November 1764

Aris’s Birmimgham Gazette 18th March 1765

Aris’s Birmingham Gazette 25th March 1833

Staffordshire Advertiser 24th March 1798

The Chronicle 7th September 1798

Chester Chronicle 17th August 1798

Aris’s Birmingham Gazette 8th October 1792

Aris’s Birmingham Gazette 2nd May 1803

Abra-cadaver

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It’s Sunday and it’s Spooky Season (or October as we used to call it) and so hey presto, I’ve written a post about unorthodox burials in this old city where magic may have been involved. I think you’ll like this. Not a lot, but you’ll like it (kids, ask your parents).

As a point of reference and, just to show I don’t just completely conjure things up, there’s a great paper by Roberta Gilchrist, which deals with the archaeology of magic in medieval burials. It outlines the norm for Christian interments at that time as being a body wrapped in a shroud and lacking a coffin, personal items and grave goods and also explains that around two percent of excavated burials are exceptional to this. Excitingly but perhaps unsurprisingly, it turns out that some of these intriguing inhumations have turned up in the Field of the Dead (or Lichfield as the authorities insist on calling it).

Lichfield Friary looking over to where bones were found below Bird Street

Amongst the fourteen burials found beneath what’s now the beer garden of the Brewhouse and Kitchen on Bird Street were the remains of three females, including a woman who lived in the mid-fourteenth century, described by archaeologist Mark Neal as being quite elderly and in poor health. The discovery of so many skeletons here suggests it was the location of the cemetery for Lichfield’s Fransican Friary and the presence of women raises some interesting questions about who was allowed to be buried here and what their role may have been. Most puzzling of all however was the discovery of a body found with a 2mm thick layer of charcoal beneath it. Research shows that such burials are mostly associated with people of note in the early medieval period and predate the founding of the Friary in 1230. Was this the site of a high status Saxon buried before the Franscicans arrived? It is of course possible that this funerary ritual was continued beyond the Saxon period here in Lichfield but could we be looking at a site with a history stretching back further than we thought? The history of the Grey Friars site suddenly seems very grey indeed…

The other burning question is of course, what was the significance of the charcoal? There are some intriguing possibilities ranging from the practical, where the charcoal layer was a way of absorbing bodily fluids during putrefaction, to some sort of post-humous purification ritual designed to save the soul after a life of sin and to stop the dead from returning to haunt the living. I don’t think I’ll ever look at a barbecue in quite the same way again.

Lichfield Cathedral. Pure magic.

Five further charcoal burials were found during excavations at Lichfield Cathedral, one of them inside a stone structure believed to have been part of the original Saxon church. One of those burials was that of a priest buried with something variously described as a hazel wand, rod or staff, as well as a cross of twigs, a chalice and patten and a eucharistic wafer. Yes the symbolism is strong with this one. Several theories exist regarding the presence of the wooden wand, including it being provided for protection as the priest made his final journey through the valley of the shadow of death. Perhaps the most peculiar burial here is that of a priest in an 11th century stone coffin which had an opening directly over where the mouth would be positioned. It’s been interpreted as a libation tube, where the living could make offerings of food and drink to their dead relative. It’s a pagan practice mostly associated with the Romans, and as yet, no-one has come up with a satisfying explanation for it being present in a place of Christian worship.

There are also an incredible 49 burials recorded at the Cathedral where white quartz stones have been found inside graves, and even clutched in the hands of the occupants. Again, the exact symbolism of these is unknown, but archaeologist Warwick Rodwell suggested the answer may lie in Revelation 2:17. This is a passage of the New Testament where a white stone with a new name written on it is given by Christ to his followers as symbol of forgiveness and an invitation to the afterlife. I think. It seems to make sense until you realise that people were incorporating these white pebbles into their funerary rituals long before Christianity existed. As we are on the subject of magic, can we also take a moment to appreciate that John who presents the video I’ve linked to looks like he might be an actual wizard.

St Michael’s on Greenhill is a place of many mysteries

A seemingly more recent, but no less bemusing burial was unearthed at St Michaels on Greenhill in 1852. Two gravediggers dug up the rotten fragments of an elm coffin and found that buried with the bones inside it was a bottle filled with a liquid believed to be urine. It has the feel of folk magic to me, particularly as in 2021, a similar discovery was made at the Trinity Burial Ground in Hull. We know that witch bottles were used to protect people from harm and that examples have been found buried in the foundations of buildings. Was this something similar, designed to protect the grave from robbers perhaps, or other less earthly threats? Or was it just a final drink for the coffin’s inhabitant to enjoy on their way to wherever they were headed to next?

I make no apologies for asking so many questions and being unable to answer any of them in this post. Time and time again, through writing this blog and being part of the Lichfield Discovered team, I realise that there is still so much to be uncovered and understood about the incredible history of this city. And for me? Well, that’s magic.

Sources:
Lichfield Mercury 5th January 1990

1 Bird Street, Lichfield Report on a watching brief, Marches Archaeology Series 103, November 103

Stone, R. (1999). 1 Bird Street, Lichfield: archaeological watching brief. Cirencester: Cotswold Archaeology.

Click to access LichfieldEUSReportFinal.pdf

Charcoal Burial in Early Medieval England, James Holloway (2009)

Gilchrist, R. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1967-2558
(2008) Magic for the dead? The archaeology of magic in later
medieval burials. Medieval Archaeology, 52. pp. 119-159

Jonsson, Kristina. “Burial Rods and Charcoal Graves: New Light on Old Burial Practices.” Viking and Medieval Scandinavia 3 (2007): 43–73. Web.

Community and Belief: the Development of Anglo-Saxon Christian Burial Practice,
AD 700-1066, Alexandra Aversa Sheldon (2018)

Anchors Away

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It’s the first day of Autumn today, meaning yesterday was the last day of Summer and it definitely went out with a bang. The storm seems to have subsided a little but the pounding rain continues its bleak fall and so I’m virtually visiting Streethay this afternoon. The village sits on the Roman Ryknild Street, just beyond the boundary of Lichfield City and, most appropriately given the weather, it’s a place with some watery links that I want to explore.

The Anchor Inn, had already been boarded up for two years when I took this photo in February 2017.

The new housing estates springing up around the outskirts of Lichfield are certainly controversial but one positive development at Streethay, is the arrival of Bod. I’m a big fan of the Titanic brewery bar and I do wonder whether this new influx of people would have kept Streethay’s previous pub ‘The Anchor’ afloat, if it had happened sooner. It was not to be however, and it closed in January 2015.

At Bod, I found a tiny mermaid swimming in a glass of porter….(with apologies to Eliza Carthy) Created by Louise from Under a Pewter Sky.

The building still survives and is now occupied by an Osteopathy Clinic and apartments but let’s go back in time to those days when it still served as an inn. It was clearly in existence by November 1848 when an inquest was held there on the body of Henry Crutchley, a fourteen year old lad who died after climbing onto an engine and slipping beneath the wheels of the wagons it was pulling, but was rebuilt around 1906, when the Lichfield Brewery Company was granted permission on the basis that ‘the house was in a most dilapidated condition and it was impossible to repair it’. I’ve yet to find a photo of its former form but I have found a reference in 1779 to a public house ‘known by the sign of the Queen’s Head’ which stood on the turnpike from Lichfield to Burton at Streethay and I’m wondering if this might be an earlier name. There are also mentions of a inn known as The Dog, around the same time and I’d like to sniff out where exactly that was.

The Anchor, when it was still afloat in 2009
Photo © David Rogers (cc-by-sa/2.0)

In the Lichfield Mercury in 1972 an advert for the Anchor appeared with a curious reference to the ‘Klondyke Bar’, inviting you to enjoy your drink, ‘in the pleasant atmosphere of the Gold Rush’. One of the new apartments built in the grounds of the Anchor has been named after this, with the estate agents’ details explaining it was named after the ‘large wooden drinking hut’. Now I was given many nicknames by my brother when we were growing up, and one of them was ‘Klondyke Kate’. Whilst I’d like to think it was based on American vaudeville actress who provided inspiration for Scrooge McDuck’s girlfriend, I suspect it was more likely a reference to the British female wrestler. The Anchor’s Klondyke however is clearly a reference to the gold in them thar Canadian hills in the 1890s and was decorated with old photos and posters and, erm, pheasants, in a bid to recreate a prospectors’ bar. Much more of a mystery is why a bar on the outskirts of Lichfield chose it as a theme. In May 1979, the new licensees Norma and George Wolley presumably asked themselves the same question and relaunched the annexe bar as ‘The Mainbrace’. The hut itself had originally been a first world war army hut and this brings us nicely to a really interesting period in the pub’s history.

During the Second World War, the pub was frequented by personnel from RAF Lichfield. Jean Smith, in an interview with Adam Purcell, described how she and fellow WAAFs would stop off for a half a pint there on the way back home to their quarters on the opposite side of the road. On winter nights, when it was announced that flights had been cancelled due to fog and rain, the women would get their gladrags on and head out to the inn. Soon, the sound of bikes being propped against the wall of the pub would be heard as the lads from the aerodrome arrived at The Anchor, and the grounded pilots would soon be filling the air with cigarette smoke and tunes from the piano. The full interview with Jean can be found here and it’s a fascinating read, which really captures what the atmosphere was like for those young people living their lives in Lichfield, surrounded by the ever present threat of death.

This post was actually intended to be a deep dive into the village as a whole but I’ve got a bit overboard with the history of the Anchor Pub and so we’ll have to return to Streethay and its moated manor and plunge pool, the brewery and the canal wharf, and the lost hamlet of Morughale another day because we’ve only just dipped our toe in…

Brewery Row, once home to workers from the Trent Valley Brewery

Sources

Birmingham Journal 25th November 1848

Lichfield Mercury 16th March 1906

https://www.onthemarket.com/details/8779282/

Lichfield Mercury 25th May 1979

Lichfield Mercury 7th April 1972

Adam Purcell, “Interview with Jean Smith,” IBCC Digital Archive, accessed September 22, 2024, https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/document/3488.

http://raf-lichfield.co.uk/Anchor%20Pub.htm

https://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/staffs/vol14/pp273-282

Battle Plans

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Armed with a bag of Werther’s Originals and a vague plan about finding the site of Boudica’s final battle against the Romans, my friend (and countrywoman) and I headed down the A5 towards Atherstone.

By Boadicea by Colin Smith, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=107819273

Boudica’s burial place is one of Britain’s great mysteries. I thought for years that the warrior queen rested beneath a platform of Kings Cross Station but clearly I was on the wrong track. There is no trace of her there, or anywhere else for that matter, although plenty of places have been mooted as a possibility. Ever since Richard III was found under that car park, perhaps people are more comfortable putting forward their own research into such things. Even somewhere they flog burgers in Birmingham is apparently a contender for the final resting place of the scourge of the Roman Empire. If she genuinely is here, they really ought to consider changing the name to ‘Queen’s Norton’. Let’s be honest, it wouldn’t be the first time a significant piece of history has been linked to the foundations of a local fast food restaurant in the West Midlands. There are two Mummies beneath what was once another MaccyDs in Tamworth.

Despite several sites laying claim to being the scene of Boudica’s last battle, no archaeological evidence has turned up at any of them either. Claims have instead been based on descriptions of the battle ground from two Roman historians, Tacitus and Cassius Dio. It’s described as somewhere within a defile (a steep sided narrow gorge) with a wood behind it and open countryside in front of it, chosen to prevent ambushes from Boudica’s warriors. In 2004, archaeologist Jim Gould wrote an article in which he says the description of the site given by Tacitus is much too vague for positive identification. He believed it would never be identified on the ground, in the absence of an archaeological discovery.

One of the chief contenders is Mancetter, on the outskirts of Atherstone, or Manduessedum as it was known in Boudica’s time. If it is ever proved, then they ought to consider changing the name to ‘Womancetter’ but I think we are going to have to defile that thought away for now.

What we do have archaeological evidence of at Mancetter is a Roman fort, now occupied by the site of the church and manor house. As we stood nosing in at the gate of the latter, the gardener appeared and told us it dated back to the fourteenth century and had a priest hide and a secret tunnel leading to the church. Despite my enthusiasm for stories of this kind, experience tells me these architectural features often turn out to be a cupboard or a cellar. In this case however, it seems he may not have been leading us up the garden path. Well not entirely. According to the Atherstone News and Herald in June 1956, in what’s now known as the ‘Martyr’s Bedroom’, an escape route led to the roof via a sliding panel in, ahem, a cupboard

The manor was the home of the Protestant Glover brothers John, William and Robert. In 1555, the Bishop of Lichfield issued a warrant for their arrest but by the time the Mayor of Coventry arrived with men to carry out the orders two of the trio had escaped. Robert had been unable to flee as he was ill and was taken from his sick bed to Coventry and then to Lichfield where he dined at the Swan before being removed to a cell alongside a dungeon. I suspect this would have been the ‘church prison’, as described by Thomas Harwood which seems to have been underneath what’s now Number One, The Close, rather than the gaol at the Guildhall.

Robert Glover was burned at the stake in Coventry on 19th September 1555. His brother John eluded capture but died of an ague after living in the woods for some months. The Biishop’s Chancellor, Anthony Draycot was not about to let the whole business of him being a protestant lie though, informing the vicar that his body should be dug up and thrown over the churchyard wall. When the vicar pointed out that after six weeks the body stank and finding men willing to undertake the task would be tricky, Draycot instead ordered him to wait for 12 months and then throw the skeleton over the wall into the public highway. The third brother William also suffered post-death disgrace being refused a Christian burial in the town of Wem in Shropshire, his corpse instead being dragged by horses to a nearby field and buried there in unhallowed ground. Just in case a priest hole and secret tunnel haven’t given you your fill of folklore, you should know that Robert Glover’s ghost haunts the room from which he was taken.

Next door to the Glovers lived another Mancetter martyr, Joyce Lewis, who was burned at the stake in Lichfield on 18th December 1557. Despite a plaque in the Market Square recording this dark chapter of the city’s history I knew very little of her story until now. It seems Joyce fought to the death to defend her beliefs, asking the friends who visited her in prison how she might behave so, ‘her death might be more glorious to the name of God, comfortable to his people, and also most discomfortable unto the enemies of God’. The night before her execution she refused the offer of two priests to hear her confession and after fainting on route to the Market Square and being given a cup of water, she used it to drink to ‘the abolishment of papistry’. According to Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, ‘a great number, specially the women of that town, did drink with her; which afterward were put to open penance in the church by the cruel papists, for drinking with her’. I believe open penance would have been some sort of public punishment.

I may not have found the site of Boudica’s battleground on my journey up the A5 but it did lead me to the story of Joyce Lewis’s last stand much closer to home and how her final moments were spent surrounded by the solidarity of the women of Lichfield.

Sources:

https://ancientmonuments.uk/103961-roman-camp-mancetter

http://atherstonecivicsociety.co.uk/projectrm

https://www.archaeology.org/issues/95-1307/features/1090-boudicca-celtic-roman-empire-kings-cross

https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/wall-roman-site/history/

https://www.patrickcomerford.com/2020_05_16_archive.html

Martyrologia, John Sundins Stamp

London Archaeologist Spring 2004, Boudica – yet again, Jim Gould

Bringing up the Bodies

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Our city churchyards are full of those Lichfeldians who have left us. There are gaol keepers and executed prisoners, civil war soldiers and WW2 airmen, paupers and presumably, somewhere, plague victims (although that’s a whole other line of enquiry). Yet there are also others, denied the right to a Christian burial, laid to rest in unhallowed ground.

I’ve written before about Bessy Banks and the tragic tale of Lichfield’s ‘love-desperate maid’. The story seems to have been well known in the 17th and 18th centuries, being written about by both Anna Seward and David Garrick, and the place name ‘Bessy Banks’ Grave’ survived until the start of the 20th century, when the supposedly haunted spot was built on as the area around Dimbles Lane, once a ‘sunken road leading north from Lichfield’, was developed. Ironically, given that Bessy appears to have been denied a Christian burial and instead interred at a crossroads for taking her own life, her grave now seems to lie within the grounds of a Catholic church. Unfortunately, there are no records of any remains being uncovered on the site when St Peter and St Paul was built which may have answered at least some questions about Bessy and her story.

1815 Map of Lichfield showing Bessy Banks Grave

At other Lichfield locations, we have the opposite problem – skeletons without a story. In 1862, workmen digging the foundations of a building at the warehouse of the Griffiths Brewery on St John Street, adjoining the South Staffordshire Railway, found the bones of ‘a full-grown person’, which ‘had been there for many years’, about four feet from the surface. As the newspaper reports that only the head and arms were removed, I can only conclude that the remainder of the remains remain there.

A burial place at the old brewery

Then, in February 1967, a skeleton believed to be around four hundred years old, turned up four feet down from the existing ground level during excavations at the new shopping precinct at Castle Dyke. Most of the bones were crumbled but the teeth were in a good condition. So good in fact that the site foreman said, ‘I would have been pleased to own them’. What became of the body and its nice set of gnashers is unknown.

Could either body belong to a man named Gratrex, found hanging in Lichfield on Wednesday 7th September 1763 and buried in the highway after the Coroner’s Inquest issued a verdict of ‘felo de se’? If not, it seems there maybe another skeleton lying somewhere beneath the streets of Lichfield still to be unearthed.

Sources

Lichfield Mercury 2/2/1967

Burton Chronicle 18/9/1862

Aris’s Birmingham Gazette 12/9/1763

Queen of the Stone Age

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One of the highlights of this weekend’s coronation, appearances from Floella Benjamin and the Grim Reaper through the arched door aside, was The Coronation Chair. It is possibly the most famous piece of furniture in existence, rivalled only by Lichfield’s Victoria Hospital Chair now in the Samuel Johnson Minor Injuries Unit. Royalist or not, there is something rather thrilling about a graffiti and bomb scarred throne on which the behinds of thirty eight kings and queens, and the rump of Oliver Cromwell, have sat.

A big chair for the NHS. Hip hip hooray!

Even more ancient than the chair is is the ‘Stone of Destiny’ it was built to incorporate. The sandstone block, used for centuries as the crowning seat of Scottish kings, was stolen by Edward I in 1296 and only officially returned to the people of Scotland seven hundred years later. Many myths, legends and rumours surround the stone’s origin and its authenticity but today there’s another mysterious coronation seat somewhere in Staffordshire that I want to investigate.

Are you sitting comfortably? Then we’ll begin.

In September 1959, the Western Mail carried a story about a seat-shaped stone, located in the grounds of Blithfield Hall, Staffordshire. Visitors to the hall were told it was the ‘Welsh Coronation Stone’, which caused a great deal of confusion in Cardiff as nobody knew whether a Welsh Coronation Stone was actually a thing or not. An official at the Welsh Folk Museum was also non-committal given, ‘It is one thing to have a Stone and another thing to have a stone around which a story or tradition may have arisen’. It seems there was also reticence to discuss such monumental matters here in Staffordshire for fear of the stone being returned to its rightful home. All that could be established was that the family heirloom/national treasure had arrived at Blithfield in the 1920s.

Dancing kings aka the Abbots Bromley Horn Dancers on the lawn on Blithfield Hall

Ten years on, around the time of Charles’ investiture as Prince of Wales in the Summer of 69, another reference to the stone appeared in the Rugeley Times. The then headmaster of Hill Ridware School is pictured in the hall’s inner courtyard looking at what the newspaper describes as ‘the Welsh equivalent of the Scottish Stone of Scone’ and ‘the seat on which early Welsh kings were crowned’. It says it came from the Bagot’s estate near Ruthin called ‘Pool Park’ and a virtual visit there via the Ruthin Local History Society reveals that a ceremonial ‘coronation stone’ dating to the 5th or 6th century is mentioned in the estate’s 1928 sales catalogue, which fits in with the date of the Blithfield stone’s arrival in Staffordshire. The society give the Welsh name of the stone as ‘Cadair y Frenhines’ (The Queen’s Throne) and says it was brought down from ‘Llys y Frenhines’ (The Queen’s Court) in the early 19th century, along with another ancient monument with Ogham and Latin inscriptions (1). The latter was moved to the museum in Cardiff in 1936 and replaced by a replica at its unoriginal location at Pool Park but according to the history society, the whereabouts of the Queen’s Throne is now ‘unknown’.

Claim of thrones

I’m certain that this missing stone is the one described as being at Blithfield but so many questions remain. Fifty plus years later, is the monument even still at the hall? Was it ever really used to crown queens, or indeed kings, or did it gain this reputation through Georgian whimsy and the fact it looks a bit like a chair? Hopefully if the royal chair is still to be found in the courtyard at Blithfield, the true backside story of The Queen’s Throne might finally be revealed.

Sources
https://www.scone-palace.co.uk/stone-of-scone

https://www.historicenvironment.scot/archives-and-research/archives-and-collections/properties-in-care-collections/object/the-stone-of-destiny-13th-century-medieval-edinburgh-castle-6132

https://www.megalithic.co.uk/article.php?sid=49523

https://www.ruthinhistoryhanesrhuthun.org/pool-park

An Inventory of the Ancient Monuments in Wales and Monmouthshire Volume 4

https://www.mythslegendsodditiesnorth-east-wales.co.uk/pool-park-ogham-stone

(1) In defence of Bagot, the chair was rescued from one of his tenants who had been using it as a horse block. Sadly, its said that the tenant simply went and fetched another ‘old stone’ in its place.

Memento Mori

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Many people are familiar with the story of John Neve, William Weightman and James Jackson, the last men to be hanged in Lichfield on 1 June 1810, for the crime of forgery. Their shared headstone can be seen tucked away under the tower at St Michael’s, although they are buried elsewhere in the churchyard in a now unmarked a communal grave. One particularly poignant postscript to these events is that after his execution, the friends of John Neve commissioned three mourning rings to be made, each with an inscription to his memory and containing a lock of his hair. I wonder whether it was these same friends who erected a headstone as to my knowledge there are no memorials to any of the other executed criminals buried here?

Amongst them is another tragic trio, Thomas Nailor, Ralph Greenfield and William Chetland who met the same end for the same crime at the same place on 13th April 1801. Prior to their execution, two of the men had attempted to escape from Lichfield gaol by filing through their irons and putting them back together with shoe maker’s wax. Their cunning plan had been to knock down the gaoler when he came to lock them up for the night and they would have gotten away with it had it not been for pesky Joseph Vaughton, a private in the 38th regiment of foot, to whom Nailor had given a pattern of the wrench he wanted making and a Bailiff called Mr Scott who discovered the file they had been using. Headstone they may not have but incredibly a tangible link to this execution does apparently exist. In 1947, the Town Clerk of Lichfield received a letter from a Mr Clayton W McCall of Canada to say a morbid memento had turned up in an antique shop in Vancouver in the form of a silver salver, ‘Presented by the Corporation of the City of Lichfield to Revd. Bapt. Jno. Proby, Vicar of St Mary’s, for his pious attention to three unhappy convicts who were executed in that City April 13th 1801’. However, as with the rings, its current location is unknown.

One very unhappy convict sentenced to be hanged at the gallows on 6th September 1782 was 62 year old William Davis who had been convicted of horse theft. The Derby Mercury, reported that in his final moments, David’s behaviour was bold, paying little attention to anything that was said to him. Then, just as the executioner was about to send him eternity, Davis threw himself from the cart with such force, that the rope snapped. After much confusion and delay, the rope was replaced and Davis’s last earthly words are recorded as having been, ‘This is murder indeed!’.

In 1935, the site of the old gallows was described as being ‘preserved and indicated to passers-by with an inscription recording its ghastly use in bygone days’. The area has developed significantly since then, but I was told by Janice Greaves, former Mayor and current Sheriff of Lichfield, that the exact spot where the gallows stood is now marked by a walnut tree growing on the patch of grass alongside the garage. There has been some discussion about what form the gallows actually took, but there is evidence to suggest that there was a permanent structure to which the cart carrying the condemned convicts would be brought. In Aris’s Birmingham Gazette it describes how ‘On Friday Night last, Richard Dyott Esq, who lives near Lichfield was going home from thence, he was stopp’d near the Gallows by two Footpads, who robb’d him of five Guineas, and in the Scuffle he lost his hat’.

My plea to you this Halloween is to keep your eyes on Ebay for Neve’s mourning rings and the silver salver. If however you decide to take a wander over to Gallows Wharf in search of Richard Dyott’s hat, please be warned that an ex-executioner from centuries past appears to have been sentenced to linger at the spot and you may well feel a push from behind as he attempts to dispatch you to your doom.  

Sources

Evening Dispatch 31st March 1935

Aris’s Birmingham Gazette 3rd February 1752

Pipe Lines

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The traffic lights at Pipe Hill crossroads are haunted. Let’s just put that out there right away. Ever since this was pointed out to me by Deb from Melbourne in Lichfield, I’ve often found myself on red, sat waiting for something that I can’t see to pull out of Fosseway Lane. I’m imagining this spectral vehicle to be a Roman chariot because that’s the way to Wall and all of us good classical scholars know that ‘fosse’ is a Latin word meaning ditch. We also all know that ‘Caecilius est in horto‘ but we’re going up Pipehill not Up Pompeii.

Yes that is snow on the ground. Yes this has taken me a while to write.

The Walsall Road was once owned by the Lichfield Turnpike Trust who had built a toll house and gate on it by 1787. In November 1879, the Trust held an auction at the Three Crowns inn, to dispose of them. The Victoria County History suggests the house was probably demolished by 1909, although the person who lives in it assures me that it probably wasn’t. The supposition most likely arises from a parish meeting at Hammerwich in 1909, where an old minute notebook from Pipe Hill parish (which by then had joined up with Wall) was produced, saying that the tollhouse had been sold to the Marquess of Anglesey on the condition it be taken down. At the time of the meeting the building was still standing but encroaching significantly on the footpath and the matter was referred to the overseers of Wall.

Further along towards Muckley Corner is Pipe Place, a mid-eighteenth century farm house. When owner Mr Bradburne was in horto he made a fascinating discovery that, like so much of our local Roman history, has never been acknowledged enough in meam humilem opinionem. As he was digging a drain, Bradburne discovered the trunks of several oak trees deliberately driven upright into the ground. Some had rotted away above the surface, but others were still whole, each with, ‘a cavity four inches wide and three inches wide from the top cut down its middle’. The structure was traced for about a quarter of a mile and was surrounded by a ‘fosse’ filled with peat.

From ‘A Topographical History of Staffordshire by William Pitt (1817)’

According to the Heritage Environment Record, this could still be seen as a linear feature on aerial photos in the 1990s but my amateur eyes can’t make anything out on Google maps. The Georgian gents who originally found it thought it must have been a military barricade erected by the Romans to defend Letocetum but more recently it has been suggested by archaeologist Jim Gould that it may have been an aqueduct built to provide the settlement with water. If you think about it logically, the water for that big bath at Wall must have come from somewhere. Two lengths of lead piping were discovered on the bath house site in 1874, last seen in the Lichfield Museum in 1961 but long since vanished with much else of the collection. In a later excavation, deer horns, a number of dogs’ skulls and the thigh bone of a teenage boy were discovered. Unfortunately, as yet I can’t find anything else about the context in which they were found although the pony skull discovered at the bottom of a nearby well may well have been a votive offering. It probably belongs to that one pulling that spectral chariot up at Pipe Hill cross roads.

Image from Lichfield Mercury. It was definitely a long term policy…

Let us now gallop 1,500 years forward in time from possible pagan practices to Victorian values. The Misses Topham opened an establishment at Pipe Hill for young ladies in 1856 and I’m sure there were definitely some good classical scholars amongst them. In 1882, a tiny chapel was built at Pipe Hill, as a mission room to the church at Wall and during the First World War, a street shrine listing the names of those from the local community who were serving their country stood outside it. These shrines were different to the later memorials we are all familiar with in that they were as much about praying for the living as remembering the dead, and were often bestrewn with offerings of flowers, flags and photographs. Perhaps we didn’t come all that far from those pagan practices after all….The Pipe Hill Mission Church didn’t quite last a century and after laying disused for several years it was bought by Staffordshire County Council and demolished in 1971. One other institution which warrants a brief mention is the Pipe Hill and Farewell Association for Prosecuting Felons who advertised in the Staffordshire Advertiser in November 1817 a list of rewards they offered for the apprehension and conviction of those committing offences such as ‘highway robbery’ (£21), ‘wrongfully milking any cow’ (£5 5s) and ‘maliciously pulling up turnips’ (£2 2s).

Finally, how can I write about Pipe Hill and not mention Lichfield’s creepiest cottage? The property has been empty and decaying ever since I moved here in 2004, intriguing us all with its mysterious ‘Not for sale or rent’ notice. I drove past earlier and saw this is no longer the case. Much of the wilderness surrounding it had been cleared and for just under £300,000 cash, it can be yours. I strongly suspect the traffic lights won’t be the only thing changing at Pipe Hill in the near future…

Sources

Staffordshire Advertiser 29th November 1817 and 30th January 1915

Gould, J. (1998) Letocetum

https://www.lichfielddc.gov.uk/downloads/file/1849/hammerwich-neighbourhood-plan-submission-version-march-2021

Lichfield Mercury 31st October 1879 and 3rd November 1916

‘Townships: Wall with Pipehill’, in A History of the County of Stafford: Volume 14, Lichfield, ed. M W Greenslade (London, 1990), pp. 283-294. British History Online http://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/staffs/vol14/pp283-294 [accessed 25 July 2021

https://www.heritagegateway.org.uk/Gateway/Results_Single.aspx?uid=8244da13-c98a-4ad7-bb08-76e21870497e&resourceID=19191

Kill Bill

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The run up to Halloween feels like the right time to resurrect the blog and, in keeping with the spirit of my favourite season, it’s my intention to share some of the more sinister stories that I know about Staffordshire and the surrounding area over the course of the coming week. However, 2020 hasn’t quite gone to plan and it’s entirely possible that I could fall victim to an attack of the mutant crayfish clones by Friday and so whether my bad intentions will materialise or fall by the wayside remains to be seen.

Anyway, I’m not sure if it’s a Staffordshire thing per se but something I’ve noticed about the churches in our area is their habit of juxtaposing the mundane with the magnificent. By way of example, I once found the tomb of Richard Samson, Bishop of Lichfield between 1470 and 1554 underneath a tea tray and a packet of hobnobs. I am also starting to think that the eleventh commandment is ‘Thou shalt have a stack of plastic chairs behind thy font’.

I suspect Pevsner would not approve but I think it gives churches a nice lived-in feel and exudes an eccentric sort of charm and therefore, I make no apologies for failing to remove the carton of milk and bottle of spray from my photograph of the remains of this stone cross in Tixall Church.

The cross stood on Kings Lowe, a Bronze Age Bowl Barrow on Tixall Heath before what remained of it was removed to the church for safe keeping. Its exact provenance is a mystery but in 1818 Sir Thomas Clifford of Tixall described it as having been placed there in around 1803, it being, ‘a very antique stone cross, which once stood before the gate of a ruined mansion in South Wales…It is of very hard moor-stone; the shaft, which has eight unequal sides, supports a tablet of an hexagonal form, adorned with very rude carvings; on one side, a crucifix, on the other, the virgin with the child in her lap. On the edge of the tablet is also a figure thought by some experienced antiqueries (sic) to be St. John the Evangelist’. The cross was said to mark the spot where Sir William Chetwynd of nearby Ingestre Hall was assassinated in 1494, although you might think that after 309 years the moment for a monument to a murder had passed. Who erected it and why they did so after all that time is not recorded.

In 1825, Alexander Wilson wrote a travelogue called ‘Alice Allan, The Country Town etc’ and appears to have had some sort of down the rabbit hole experience, proclaiming that, “When I entered Staffordshire, my straight-forward, regular travelling was at an end”. After insinuating that the residents of God’s own county used to get up to some Summerisle-esque unpleasantness involving wicker, Wilson relays the story told to him by an old countryman whilst driving across the heath. Sir William Chetwynd of Ingestre and Sir Humphrey Stanley of Pipe Ridware were both vying for the favour of King Henry VII, and so Sir Humphrey decided to rid-ware himself of his rival. A letter purporting to be from the Sheriff of Staffordshire was sent to Sir William requesting his attendance in Stafford at 5am the following morning. As he crossed Tixall Heath at dawn, accompanied by his son and two servants, he was ambushed by twenty men, several of whom were members of the Stanley family.

Despite a petition by the widowed Lady Chetwynd, Stanley literally got away with murder. Or did he? According to the story told to Alexander Wilson, some years after he’d killed Bill, Sir Humphrey was thrown from his horse at the same spot on Tixall Heath, breaking his neck. Official records show he died in 1505 and is buried amongst the great and also probably not very good at Westminster Abbey. As of yet, I can’t find a record of where or how he died and so perhaps that old countryman was right and karma did catch up with him in the end. Interestingly, it seems with the Stanleys, the rotten apple did not fall from the tree. An effigy in Lichfield Cathedral immortalises the disgrace of Sir Humphrey’s son, John, a man who committed a misdemeanor so grave that he was excommunicated and had to agree to spending the rest of his death being depicted as paying penance in order to be granted a Christian burial inside the Cathedral. There is no record of his specific wrongdoing but in 1867, the Very Rev Canon Rock suggested that Stanley’s offence may have been that he had spilled blood inside that sacred space. A 17th century drawing of the effigy by William Dugdale shows the stone Stanley bareheaded and bare chested, flanked by two bucks’ horns, wearing a skirt decorated with heraldic arms and armour on his legs. It’s a strong look to carry off for eternity although during the Civil War, the Roundheads did make some alterations in their own unique style… The much mutilated monument can still be found in the Cathedral so do go and see what’s left of him. I bet you there will be a stack of plastic chairs somewhere nearby too…

Lichfield Cathedral - Effigy of Captain Stanley: engraving

Lichfield Cathedral - Effigy of Captain Stanley: engravingShowing a print of the Stanley effigy.   Anonymous.View Full Resource on Staffordshire Past Track

Sources:

Norton, E (2011) Bessie Blount: MIstress to Henry VIII, Amberley Publishing: Gloucester

https://www.pastscape.org.uk/hob.aspx?hob_id=77400

http://www.tixall-ingestre-andrews.me.uk/tixall/elytxhs.html

The Cathedral Church of Lichfield By AB Clifton

Handbook to the Cathedrals of England by Richard John King

Alice Allan, The Country Town etc by Alexander Wilson

Some remarks on the Stanley Effigy at Lichfield by The Very Reverend Canon Rock