Whitby Abbey - Early History

 The Abbey ruin we see now is not the first religious building on this site.  In the 7th and 8th centuries the headland it stands on was known as Streaneshalch and was the site of  an Anglian settlement and Minster church established  in the 5th and 6th centuries by the peoples who had settled on this side of Britain - the Angli or Anglians.

The Minster was founded some time after the battle of Winwaed in 655 when the forces of Oswiu of Northumberland beat the pagan forces of Penda of Mercia. Oswiu married King Edwin's daughter Eanflaed.  Oswiu gave his infant daughter Aelfflaed into the care of Hild the Abbess of Hartlepool.   In 657 Hild founded a new Minster for both men and women at Whitby.  It is assumed that the first settlement and minster was destroyed sometime in the 10th century by Viking raiders who burned and sacked many of the Christian establishments along the North East coast.  The name of Streaneshalch all but disappeared from the records and the Danish name of Whitby appeared.

The foundation of the second monastery at Whitby came in the aftermath of the Norman invasion of 1066.  A second Romanesque church was built in the early 12th century and this in turn was replaced by the Gothic buildings, the remains of which we see today.

Although the weather looks sunny and calm it really wasn't.

The wind up on the headland was so strong and was buffeting us about, it must have been quite bleak living up in the settlement in those early days.  Through the arch you can see St Mary's church.  I'll write about this in a later post.

The building below was the home of the Cholmley family who leased the site of the abbey after the suppression or dissolution of Whitby Abbey in 1539.  At this time Henry Davell was the last abbot of the abbey and at the time it was handed over to King Henry VIII's commissioners there were twenty two members of the community and the estates were worth £437 2s 9d.  Whitby was one of the poorest Benedictine Monasteries in England.

It now houses the museum, gift shop and cafe.

All for now, more to come over the next week or two.

Croxden Abbey

Croxden Abbey is one of our nearest English Heritage sites.  I've written a couple of posts about it over the years but I thought it could be featured again as it is a beautiful and atmospheric place.

We visited on Wednesday after a visit to Uttoxeter and then a walk around the JCB Lake at Rocester.  We saw some wonderful water birds at the lake so I'll write about those in a later post.

Croxden Abbey was founded in 1179 on land granted by local nobleman Bertram de Verdun, Lord of the Manor of Alton.  By the 13th century it housed about seventy Cistercian monks.  In 1538 after the Dissolution it became a farm and farmland.  In 1539 the site was leased to Francis Bassett a servant of Archbishop Thomas Cranmer.

The ruins comprise remains of the Abbey Church, Infirmary and Abbot's lodging.

 

Above and below show remains of the Warming House, Refrectory and Kitchen.

West Range

 

Latrines

 

West Door

 

Above what is left of the site of the bookroom and Sacristy.

Remains of the church.

 

It's said that some of the burials close to the high altar in the church are those of Bertram III de Verdun the founder of the Abbey and his wife Rohese.   Theobald de Verdun, 2nd Baron Verdun and his first wife Matilda or Maud Mortimer daughter of Edmund Mortimer, 2nd Baron Mortimer.

As you can see from the photos it was a bright, sunny day. It wasn't cold either.  Rain came later as the sky darkened in the late afternoon and evening. 

Thimble Hall and All Saints' Parish Church, Youlgreave, Derbyshire

There is a small car park at the top of the hill as you enter the village of Youlgreave in Derbyshire and we decided to park there and walk down the hill into the centre as the road is quite narrow and traffic is sometimes heavy as drivers weave their way around parked cars and other obstructions.  Locals were waiting at bus stops along the way for the bus to Bakewell.  The people we passed had a ready smile and a 'Good Morning' for visitors.

We could see the tower of All Saints' Parish Church as we walked down into the village.  We did eventually walk as far as the church but first we had a smaller building to find.

 Opposite the old Co-operative Grocery shop which is now a Youth Hostel stands The Conduit or Water Fountain.

Almost hidden by the Conduit Head or water fountain was the building we were looking for....

Thimble Hall

Thimble Hall was built in the 18th Century.  It was a one up one down home with a ladder to the upper room.  It was thought that a family of eight lived there at one time.  It was last lived in as a family home in the 1930s and has been used since then as an Antiques shop, a Butcher's shop and also as a Cobbler's shop.  It is a Grade II listed building.

 Apparently, according to one source I read on line, Thimble Hall is in the Guinness Book of World Records as being the smallest detached house at 11ft 10ins by 10ft 3ins and 12ft 2ins high.  It was sold at auction in 1999 with a guide price of £15,000 but it sold for £39,500 apparently bought by an ice cream maker from Chesterfield.  Sadly it seems to stand empty at the moment although a lady was watering the plants on the side.

The Conduit Head is also a Grade II listed building made of  grit stone ashlar and erected in 1829 by the Youlgreave Friendly Society of Women.  Before this water reservoir was built families had to draw water from the nearby River Bradford.

From Thimble Hall and Conduit Head we walked along Church Street, past The Old Bakery, now a B&B establishment towards the church.

The Parish Church of All Saints' is, according to their guide book, one of the oldest and largest medieval churches in the Peak District.  We had visited the churchyard before, a few years ago, looking for some of Paul's ancestors but hadn't been inside.  Luckily we found the building open.

The interior is mostly Norman with the oldest parts in the nave dating from between 1150 and 1170. There is a Tudor roof and the usual Victorian restoration done between 1869 and 1871,  the stained glass in the east window dates from this time. The Gothic style chancel dates from the 14th century with 15th century additions. 

The glass in the east window was designed by Edward Burne Jones and made in the William Morris workshops.  The table tomb in the centre of the chancel is a memorial to Thomas Cockayne a member of a prominent local family of the time.

 He died in 1488 in a fight with Thomas Burdett of Pooley Park in Warwickshire  as they were one their way to Polesworth church.  The fight was apparently about a family marriage settlement.  It is quite a small effigy, even though he was a grown man,  done this way because he predeceased his father.

Above is the effigy from the 14th century which is thought to be of Sir John Rossington, he lies with his head on a pillow with a dog at his feet. He holds a heart in his hands.

Looking back from the chancel to the nave.

In the north aisle is a Jacobean memorial to Roger Rooe of nearby Alport who died in 1613 and also to his wife and their eight children.

The Norman font which belonged originally to Elton church and was moved to its present place in the 19th century.

Thought to be a 17th century burial slab this figure was moved inside the church for safe keeping.

 A little part of the village school at the edge of the churchyard.

We liked the look of this old shop front opposite the church.  The property is up for sale by auction, just like Thimble Hall was.  I wonder who will buy it and what they will do with the building perhaps a family home, an art and craft gallery or a tea shop?  Who knows.

Contrasting Lifestyles - Part One

I promised in my last post to take you inside the two newly opened residences at Quarry Bank Mill.  As we visited the worker's cottage first that is the one I will write about first too.  All information is from my memory of what the guide told us on our tour and from the information boards and film in the hub plus information gleaned from their own website.

The cottages is known as the 'pickled' cottage as it has been kept just as it was found after the last, elderly resident left in the 1960s.   The cottage was one of many built in the 1820s by the Greg family to house their workforce .  Before the mill was built in the area Styal was a small agricultural village. You can see from the photo above that there was a cellar below the main cottage.

 Shall we look inside?  There are only about a dozen people allowed on each tour and only two at a time on the staircase.  We had a lovely guide who told us a lot about the cottage and who had lived there.

 Through the front door and into the living room.  Much of the research done has been into the first occupants of the cottage and I think plans are afoot to recreate the cottage as it would have looked in the 19th century but for now we were looking at the kind of dwelling that was familiar to many of us on the tour, all being of a certain age. Seven layers of wallpaper were found in this cottage showing that the families who lived there cared about how their houses looked and kept them clean and tidy.  An early 19th century wallpaper with bright green patterning was found to have arsenic in the green dye.

 We all remembered gas mantles and meters, coal ranges and lino covered floors. In the early days of the cottage this would have been the room where all the cooking, eating, sewing, darning and mending would have been done.  The first family recorded as living in the house in the 1841 census were Peter and Ann Nicklin a couple in their 50s.  There were no children living with them at that time but there were two lodgers who shared the back bedroom upstairs a Catherine Burn age 26, a dyer at the mill and later a Mary Brown who was a spinner at the mill.  The two women would have shared the bedroom, probably had their meals with the Nicklins but the etiquette of privacy and morality would prevent them from washing and mending their clothes, especially stockings and undergarments or washing themselves when a man was in the house.

 In the scullery was a sink and drainer, there would also have been a copper providing hot water in the opposite corner.  In here was a large hook on the ceiling used for either hanging meat or a dryer for laundry, no one was sure which.  There was also a cupboard under the stairs.  Outside, beyond the window, was an outside privy shared only by the occupants of the one cottage.  This was seen as a great improvement on the housing in the larger towns and cities where one or two  privies would have been shared by lots of families.

 The upstairs back bedroom which was rented to Catherine Burn and Mary Brown in the 1840s was small and had no heating. Whereas Peter and Ann Nicklin's bedroom had a small fireplace.  In the cellar there was a two roomed residence which was, at the time of the Nicklins, lived in by  William and Mary Bradbury and two children.  The cellar was closed as there were still safety issues with it but we could peer through the window and see a large brick fireplace with parts of a black range in it.

If you compare the two photos above and below you can see that over the fireplace new wallpaper recreated from the pattern on the old has been placed on the walls.

 On the floor were the indentations of a where a bed had stood with its head against the wall above.  The window on the opposite wall looks over the small allotments in front of the cottages where families like the Nicklins could grow their own vegetables, usually root vegetables, to supplement what they could afford from the shop which was provided by the Greg family.  This was run on the 'truck' system which meant that everything a family had from the shop during the week was tallied up and the amount stopped from their wages.

 The Gregs also built two chapels and a school for their workers so all of their daily lives were catered for.  Mrs Greg, especially, believed in education for all and later adult classes were available too.  I didn't take a photo of the school as it is still a primary school and children were playing in the playground but it is just a couple of doors away from 13 Oak Cottages.

 

The village shop became a Co-operative Store in 1873 and was run by the workers rather than the owners.

Above is Norcliffe Chapel one of the two chapels (the other a Methodist Chapel) built by the mill owners.  It is still used for services.

 Working at Quarry Bank Mill must have seemed a lot better than working in the huge cotton mills of cities like Manchester, working conditions may have been better and there was less disease caused by insanitary living conditions, plus the fresh air of the country around especially in the early days of the factory when water power was used to work the machinery in the mill.  But, there is always a but isn't there?  As our tour guide pointed out there was also a loss of personal freedom as workers were tied to the mill, chapel and the shop, if you joined any kind of group or society which promoted the rights of workers for example the Chartist Movement you would lose your job and therefore your home as well.  Some people may have found the choices and freedoms of a larger city more appealing. 

Shall we go and visit the owners now? Perhaps as this post is so long we'll visit next time.