Several Naughty Nuns and a Knight

Some of you may recall the torn, repaired, and faded sheets of paper which were found tucked away in a dusty attic, where they had lain for almost two hundred years.    

It was my job to try to decipher the words so beautifully handwritten in ink, which has faded over time.    The pages had been throughly torn to pieces and then someone had stuck them back together with sellotape.  

Since that time I have been trying to get into the church to take a photograph of the crusader in question.

the final page

This morning, I found the church door was open, so I tied Toby to the boot scraper and went inside to take a couple of quick photographs.


The person (unknown) who wrote the poem was appalled at the way the crusader's effigy had been left damaged and dusty, popped in a corner and forgotten about for a couple of hundred years.

This is him, snapped this morning.     Still lying in a corner (no idea whether it is the same corner, probably not) dusty, but not forgotten.  He is a late C13 effigy of a knight wearing chain mail and a surcoat, angels at his head, a lion at his feet.

It is believed that he was brought to the church when a nearby Priory was dissolved in 1536.   Nothing remains of the priory, other than some records and documents, the site of it is now in the middle of a farm and not accessible.

Little is known about the priory, other than that it was founded around 1153 and that it was a small and unimportant one.   

In 1298 a nun was sent there to do penance, she was of a quarrelsome disposition and the Bishop ordered that as long as she remained 'incorrigible' she should be kept in solitary confinement until she learned to comply with the rules of the order, then she could live within the community again.

It seems that the bishop had visited the priory four years earlier and had offered her the chance of resigning, to save herself from this disgrace...  Four years later he had lost patience with her.

Her successor was no more successful, she abandoned the house of nuns for two years and it fell into a state of serious decline.   She eventually resigned and the impoverished nuns at the priory were allowed to keep their tithes instead of paying them to the bishop.

After that there is little of interest recorded - a little disobedience, but nothing more of note.    At the time the priory was dissolved, their income was £63 and there were ten nuns living there.   The prioress received a pension of £10 a year and the sisters were paid off with 20s each.    This was in 1536 - Henry VIII's reign and the time of the dissolution of the monasteries.

Why the crusader effigy was at the priory is not known, nor is it known who he was.    The effigy was carted the two miles from the priory to the church, then it seems that it was hidden away and forgotten, perhaps for its own protection, given the times.

Whoever wrote the poem in 1837 was incensed and wrote these lines:

Hero Warrior of ages past, and is a buried shrine thine?

A broken statue all that tells of daring deeds like thine?

No record lives, for minstrel play, to make thy triumph known

Thy glory is a matchless thing, thy fame a battered stone.

Yet thou hast played a lofty part, the battlefield thy stage

And others less worthy have their place on Fame’s historic page...

and on, and on....

Yet are there none, thou knight of old, none left who hear they want?

Whose pride of ancestry should guard thy resting place from shame?

The heroic Crusader now perchance of thy truly honoured time

Can hope a place be found anew to place thy valiant shrine...etc

I won't type out the whole thing, but you get the gist.

My next task must be to find out which vicar was incumbent at the time.