There may have been a church on the site of All Saints in Breadsall since Saxon times – certainly the stones at the bottom of the tower suggest as much. The Normans rebuilt and there were further changes in the thirteenth century to create a place of worship in the Early English style. Succeeding generations placed their mark on the building. It even boasted a set of chained medieval books and an Elizabethan altar until the night of 4th June 1914 when the whole lot went up in smoke.
At 11.30 pm the alarm was raised by Mr Hopkins who saw the light in the church from his cottage. He alerted the verger who in turn summoned the rector and the church wardens. Before long local inhabitants were through buckets of water on the fire with little or no effect. Meanwhile the motorised fire engine in Derby needed permission before it could attend the fire so that by the time it arrived the Norman tower was an inferno.
Reverend Whitaker told journalists that suffragettes were responsible. The aged cleric was adamant. Witnesses spoke of an explosion suggesting arson. The church had no electricity or gas to have caused the effect. His worst fears were confirmed when Alice Wheeldon confessed to having done so, though not to the police.
The problem with this neat scenario is that aside from Alice’s confession (seated on the far left of the picture next to her two daughters and a prison warder) the only evidence of suffragette involvement were three letters which arrived after the event and some graffiti on a wall a mile away – in other cases letters were left at the scene at the time of the arson rather than arriving afterwards. The only other evidence was a woman sized hole in a window and a hat pin which was found nearby.
Other suffragettes were available nearby (Nottingham) as were some members of the Boys Brigade (camping) -who might presumably have fitted through a “woman-sized” hole – though presumably they might not have required a hat pin to fix their headgear! hough its not beyond the realms of possibility that the hat pin was simply an example of lost property. In any event no one has ever been arrested for the destruction of All Saints.
Just when it couldn’t have got much stranger Alice was arrested on 30 January 1917, with two of her daughters, and charged with conspiracy to murder both the Liberal Prime Minister Lloyd George and Labour Party Minister Arthur Henderson.
Alice was sentenced to 10 years in prison and was sent to Aylesbury Prison where she went on hunger strike. From there she was sent to Holloway. However, Lloyd George requested her release from prison. This happened, on licence, on 31 December 1917. The family had always maintained that their arrests were the result of an elaborate set up, Alice was radical in her opposition to the war. Alice, her health damaged by the hunger strike, died in 1919 but was cleared of the charges in 2013.
Meanwhile All Saints underwent restoration at a cost of £11,000.
https://www.historytoday.com/archive/losing-plot-trial-alice-wheeldon
Thomas Beresford died some ten years after his wife, Agnes. They were buried in St Edmund’s Church, Fenny Bentley opposite their home in Fenny Bentley Old Hall. Their tomb tells us quite a bit about the couple – they had sixteen sons and five daughters – all of them in their shrouds, as indeed are Thomas and Agnes.
St John the Evangelist in Leeds is a seventeenth century church built between 1632-34. To put that in context this is during the later part of the twelve years when Charles I ruled without Parliament. In 1638 John Hampden was sent to trial for refusing to pay ship tax (traditionally paid in coastal communities but not by the whole country) and John Lilburne was flogged for selling un-licensed Puritan books. Between the Elizabethan religious settlement of 1559 and the onset of the English Civil War there were an increasing number of strands of protestant belief. Many of these branches of Puritanism did not want to be part of the Church of England because they saw it as too ritualistic and too hierarchical. In 1639 Charles I went to war with his Scottish subjects in the so-called Bishops War about the prescriptive content of the prayer book. During this period of increasing religious turbulence, just prior to the English Civil War, very few new churches were built in England. During the Commonwealth period new churches harked back to the past – the Crown and to superstitious times. To build a new church would have been an act of defiance against Parliament. Prior to the Commonwealth Period there were new chapels built during the reign of Charles I, notably by Inigo Jones in 1627 – the Queen’s Chapel at St James. However, the queen in question was Henrietta Maria who was, of course, a Catholic. Consequentially if you had enough money for a new-fangled architect designed place of worship you ran the risk of being associated with European ideas, the Court, Laudianism and at worst Catholicism. In 1636 a new chapel was built in Somerset House – it was a Catholic Chapel.
Parliament believed that Harrison was a Royalist and there is a tale that when the king was in Leeds as a prisoner that Harrison took him a lidded tankard of ale, except rather than ale the contents of the pot were gold coins – whether this was to support the king during his captivity or facilitate his escape is a matter for speculation. The moment is commemorated in the Harrison Memorial Window but this was not created until the nineteenth century. And it would have to be said that Harrison didn’t get on with all of Leeds’ inhabitants. There were a number of scurrilous songs about him – we know about this because there was a court case with Harrison taking twenty-two people to court for libel.
The problem for Harrison was that he lived in difficult times and despite his generosity he was insufficiently Puritan for some tastes. In time he found himself being fined by Parliament – which must have been somewhat irritating given that he had loaned them money in 1642. As a result of his ultimate loyalty to Charles I and also as a result of his religious faith which although not described as Laudian was not as austere as Puritan taste demanded much of his wealth was confiscated and his is, described by an article from the Yorkshire Evening Post (29 Oct 2005), as spending his final years in comparative poverty.
The Neville faction personified by Richard Neville, the Earl of Warwick a.k.a. The Kingmaker dominated the borders during the first reign of Edward IV from 1461. He was appointed warden of both the east and west marches. Two years later Warwick’s brother John, Lord Montagu was made warden of the east march swiftly followed by the acquisition of the earldom of Northumberland.
Richard donated funds for the west window of the nave. It was largely destroyed but some fragments are now in other windows scattered around the priory church most notably the arms of Richard. The boar supporters are noticeable. The same window also depicts Edward IV’s arms as Earl of March. Anne Neville’s arms are in the first window of the north quire; the so-called Museum Window. The coat of arms is a modern reproduction but the heads of the bear supporters of Warwick are original.
What a gem! Great Malvern Priory was founded in 1085 by a hermit, Aldwin, from Worcester Abbey on land belonging to Westminster Abbey. This means that during the life of Great Malvern’s monastic establishment it looked to Benedictine Westminster for direction which is why it’s a priory rather than an abbey in its own right.
The pillars in the nave of today’s building are Norman and there are odd clues to the Norman past scattered about the building but the priory as it stands today dates largely from the fifteenth century. The Bishop of Worcester was called upon to consecrate the new build in 1460 – just as the Wars of the Roses really got started (Battle of Wakefield December 30 1460). However, the new build ensured that assorted Lancaster and York monarchs added their ‘bit’ to the decor from Henry VI’s tiles via Richard III’s stained glass windows to Henry VII. At least those monarchs wanted to enhance the building, finished in 1502.
been taken out returned.
