FEATURE: Discovering the lesser known corners of Catholic England

I have long been collecting the Macmillan Highways and Byways series, published between 1898 and 1948. Each book covers a different area of the United Kingdom, and it inspired me to compile a Catholic version that  people might use to supplement their travels around the English countryside – Highways and Byways:  Discovering Catholic England was published by Gracewing late last year. Most of the highways are well known – Canterbury, the Tower of London, Walsingham, and so on. I included many of these but took especial delight in the many byways which lie off the beaten track, sometimes just around the corner from where we live – a quirky place name, an ancient church, or a manor house hidden behind the closed gates. A few tasters follow.

The ‘Jack in the Box’ Priest

Buckinghamshire

One finds in most parishes those who follow devotions which are still awaiting formal approval by the Church, often centred on the latest apparition or mystic. Sometimes they are eventually recognised by the Church, at other times they simply fade away. This is not a new phenomenon, for unofficial cults could be found – with surprising frequency – in England just before the Reformation.

A case in point was the veneration of a country priest called Sir John Schorne (medieval priests were generally called “Sir” rather than “Father”). Despite never being canonised, Schorne was actively regarded as a saint for over two centuries.

Although he was the subject of much devotion, Schorne’s life was never written up, perhaps because he was a secular priest and thus did not interest monastic writers. Thus, little is known for sure about the details of his life. He may have studied at Oxford and served as rector of parishes under the care of the Augustinians at Dunstable.

Schorne was a pious man and we are told that “his knees became horney by the frequency of his prayers”. He became particularly associated with two miracles during his lifetime. On one occasion during a drought he struck the dry ground with his staff and a spring of water burst forth. The parallels with Moses were unmistakable.

The water, naturally rich in gypsum, Epsom salts and carbonic acid, was said to cure gout, ague, eye disorders and other afflictions. Perhaps on account of his powerful assistance for sufferers of gout, Schorne was also celebrated for trapping the devil in a boot – or “horn”. As  a local rhyme put it, “Sir John Schorne / Gentleman borne / Conjured the devil / into a horn.”

At his death in around 1315, Schorne was buried near the high altar of his church at North Marston in Buckinghamshire. Pilgrims began to visit his tomb, together with the nearby spring of water. Depictions of Schorne appeared in churches as far afield as Devon and Norfolk, and archaeologists have discovered many pilgrim badges in the south-east depicting Schorne holding the devil in a jackboot.

The popularity of the pilgrimage meant that the church at North Marston could be extended. However, on April 7, 1478 a licence was issued by Pope Sixtus IV to move Schorne’s bones to St George’s Chapel, Windsor. Although the cult was never formally approved by the Church this papal permission gave the devotion some respectability.

It seems that the authorities in Windsor hoped that pilgrims would bring the revenue needed to complete the building of the chapel. Edward IV also hoped to divert attention from the tomb of his rival, Henry VI, in nearby Chertsey, which was the centre of another unofficial cult. As it happened, the relics of “Good King Henry” joined Schorne at St George’s in 1484, making it a popular religious centre right up until the Reformation.

This obscure medieval cult has left its mark on our culture. Schorne’s imprisonment of the devil in a boot is supposed to have led to the children’s toy, the “jack-in-the-box” – in French, diable en boîte or “boxed devil”. Perhaps readers have such a reminder of Sir John Schorne sitting in their nursery or attic. Old devotions rarely die completely.

The Secrets of Anmer Hall

Norfolk

Anmer Hall occasionally appears in the press because it is the country home of the Prince and Princess of Wales. If few have been there, many flock each year to Sandringham House, two miles away, which was purchased by the future Edward VII in 1862 and has been a favourite of many royals since.

At first glance, Anmer Hall could easily be dismissed as a comfortable retreat with limited historical interest, beyond the fact that it passed into royal hands in 1898. It has had many different residents over the years, but our interest is with the family who lived in an older house on the site during the reign of Elizabeth I. Several future Jesuit priests grew up there, including St Henry Walpole, one of the 40 Martyrs of England and Wales. 

The Walpole family owned around 50 square miles in this part of Norfolk. There were Walpoles at Houghton, Herpley and Docking; a large house at the first of these was later built by Robert Walpole, the UK’s first prime minister. In 1575 Christopher Walpole of Docking purchased Anmer Hall and moved in with his large family. Four of his sons – Henry, Richard, Michael and Christopher – and a cousin, Edward, became Jesuits. 

The most famous of their number, St Henry Walpole, was educated at the grammar school in Norwich and then at Peterhouse, Cambridge. He entered Gray’s Inn and seemed intent on a comfortable legal career. However, at the end of 1581 he attended the public disputation between the recently-arrested Jesuit St Edmund Campion and various distinguished Protestant divines.

On December 1 Walpole witnessed Campion’s execution at Tyburn, and was splashed by his blood. It was a moment of conversion, and Walpole felt called to continue Campion’s mission. He wrote a poem about the martyr, which unsurprisingly attracted the attention of the authorities. The printer was fined and had his ears cropped; Walpole, meanwhile, went into hiding at Anmer.

Shortly afterwards he escaped overseas, entering the English College, then at Rheims, in July 1582. The following year he moved to the Venerable English College, Rome, whose protomartyr, St Ralph Sherwin, had suffered with Campion. Walpole was eventually ordained a priest in Paris on December 17, 1588. 

He did not return home immediately, but served the English and Irish Catholics who were fighting for the Spanish flag under Colonel William Stanley. When the Dutch town of Flushing (Vlissingen) was captured by the English at the end of 1589, Walpole was captured. It was only because his family at Anmer were able to pay a ransom that he was freed in January 1590. After spending time at Tournai (Belgium) and Valladolid (Spain), Walpole was finally sent on the English Mission in December 1593, together with two companions. They intended to land on the Norfolk coast, not far from the Walpole estates, but bad weather drove the ship northwards, and so they landed at Flamborough Head – the north of England’s only chalk cliffs – near Bridlington in the East Riding of Yorkshire.

Resting at Kilham, Walpole was betrayed by a fellow passenger and arrested. He was interrogated and tortured 14 times at the Tower of London over a long period but refused to endanger the lives of his supporters and co-workers. The Jesuit inscribed his name into the stone walls of the Salt Tower, along with those of St Peter, St Paul and the Latin Doctors of the Church – they can still be seen today.

At the beginning of 1595 he was brought back to York for his trial. The result was a foregone conclusion: he was condemned to death solely for being a priest and a Jesuit, and hanged, drawn and quartered at Knavesmire – the York Tyburn – on April 17, along with Blessed Alexander Rawlins. The executioner pushed him off the gallows ladder before he could finish his last Ave Maria. 

What of the other Jesuit members of the Walpole family? Richard studied in Rome, then helped set up the English College in Seville, and joined the Society of Jesus in 1596. Michael wrote several treatises, corresponded with St Robert Bellarmine and ended his days at Seville. Christopher, who had been converted by the ministry of Fr John Gerard in Norfolk and Suffolk, became spiritual director at the English College, Valladolid.

Such are the twists and turns of English history that future monarchs now use the house where these future Jesuits – and alleged conspirators – once resided. Apparently, the saintly Jesuit still watches over its modern inhabitants. It is said his ghost wanders the gardens and can be heard calling when the strong Norfolk winds blow.

When the royals moved to Anmer in 2014, it was suggested that Prince George would have a phantom friend – or, should we say, heavenly intercessor? The Daily Express reported that the attitude of the royals was that “no old home would be complete without its ghost”.  

The Jewel of Slough

Berkshire

Come, friendly bombs, and fall on Slough.  It isn’t fit for humans now,  There isn’t grass to graze a cow.

Sir John Betjeman’s words still cause frustration to locals and the poet later expressed regret for his sentiments, written a few years before the outbreak of war and the horrors of the Blitz. Surprising though it may seem, Slough has its treasures and Betjeman could not have wished any bomb to fall on the medieval church of St Mary the Virgin, located within the Slough conurbation but, as residents would proudly say, in the quite distinct area of Langley Marish.

This “Jewel of Slough”, as it has been called, can be found in a largely residential area, opposite a pub, like so many of our historic churches, and sandwiched on the other side by picturesque almshouses. Its extensive and leafy graveyard includes the tomb of the war artist Paul Nash, whose atmospheric paintings of the desolate landscape around Ypres, full of trenches and blasted trees, have entered the popular imagination.

The key figure in the church’s history was Sir John Kedermister, whose fingerprint can be found throughout the building: the impressive family monument in the chancel, with numerous kneeling Jacobean children; the red-brick bell tower; the Tuscan pillars that separate the nave from the north aisle, which Sir John put in to replace the medieval arches and improve the congregation’s visibility.

Most importantly, Sir John commissioned a magnificent family pew in the chapel south of the nave, raised by a flight of six steps and with an exterior painted ornately to resemble marble. The inside consists of a narrow gallery, with a long bench, Latin quotes from the psalms, and numerous heraldic shields of the Kedermisters and the associated families of Spencer, Harvey and Seymour.

There is a clear view through the latticework of the church and pulpit, though no-one can easily see in. Lest this become the cause of temptation, there are frequent depictions within the pew of the Eye of God, with the words Deus Videt – the minister may not see you, but God is most certainly watching! There was much indeed on which to meditate, for below lay the family vault, where the bones of the living Kedermisters would one day rest.

The glory of the Kedermister Pew is in the adjoining and rightly-famous library, probably built on the site of a pre-Reformation chapel. It is the sort of room one expects to find in the stateliest of homes, in a French chateau or an Italian palazzo, rather than a church in Slough. The neatly-bound volumes are kept on shelves behind elaborately decorated panelled doors. There are paintings of prophets and apostles, as well as scenes of various places, real and imagined, including nearby Windsor Castle and a mansion that may have been the Kedermisters’s home at Langley Park.

The books – numbering 307 in a catalogue of 1638 – largely consist of the Fathers and Doctors of the Church (Augustine, Gregory, Bede, Aquinas) as well as more contemporary authors (Luther, Calvin, Jewel, Andrewes). Of particular value is the 11th-century Kedermister Gospels, now deposited in the British Library, a pre-Reformation Missal, and the family medical book or Pharmacopolium, full of (to our eyes) unusual prescriptions.

The books were for the benefit of the parish clergy, “as well of ministers of the said towne and such other in the County of Buck as resort thereunto”. It was a library endowed by the laity for the benefit of the clergy, though one wonders whether family members occasionally wandered through to browse the shelves during an especially onerous sermon.

A family pew was a way of expressing the local hierarchy, as well as providing privacy, warmth and distance from the less desirable elements of the congregation. As with the Kedermister Pew and Library, many had private entrances, and fireplaces or stoves. Another expression of social status was the practice of collecting pew rents – paying for the use of a pew, the more expensive ones having a better position.

For many an incumbent it was a substantial source of income, though by the mid-19th century it became the subject of controversy and free, open seating was increasingly promoted. Some thought it smacked of “popery”; an article in the Rambler of 1851 states: “what a fearful sight it is to see a Catholic chapel at Mass with its largest portion, and all its best parts, half empty, sometimes not a third or a quarter full, while below the bar, where the box keeper sits, a multitude of poor persons sits crushed together.” Perhaps a residue of this still exists in the 21st century: welcome Mass-goers into a typical church and they will seldom sit at the front. Better be squeezed in discomfort at the back, in the cheap seats. The escape route is clearer and there is no charge.

If you find yourselves exploring England this summer, do look out for the byways of Catholic heritage which exist in almost every locality. They are often full of surprises, and serve well to deepen an understanding and appreciation of the Faith.

Highways and Byways: Discovering Catholic England is published by Gracewing (£15.99)

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