Tag Archives: Bolton Abbey

Bolton Priory

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bolton.jpgI often refer to Bolton Priory, standing on the edge of the River Wharfe,  as Bolton Abbey – it’s a fairly common mistake but the fact is that Bolton was home to a priory of Augustinian Canons.  They had originally set up home at Embsay having travelled to Yorkshire from Huntingdon in 1120.  The Augustinians were not only monks they were all also ordained priests.

It had a varied history which the History Jar has skirted in other posts.  In 1154 Lady Alice de Romille, the owner of nearby Skipton Castle, gave the land where the priory now stands to the Augustinian order.  The story goes that Lady Alice’s son Egremond had drowned in the the Strid, where the Wharfe narrows  it heads downstream.  The land near where Egremond drowned was given to the monks – Wordsworth waxed lyrical on the subject. A cynic might think that the real reason for the support of the Augustinians was that Henry I was keen to promote them and his aristocracy were keen to get in their monarch’s good books.

There was a Bishop’s Visitation in 1267 when Archbishop Gifford came to check the monastic accounts and to ensure that the inhabitants were following the Rule of St Benedict. The Victoria County History reveals that everything was not running smoothly Brother Hugh de Ebor’  rather than living in poverty and  money which he had handed to a member of his family in York for safekeeping.  There were also charges of incontinence.  Generally speaking the visitation did not go well.  the cellarer was not fit for office, the monks talked too much, a novice called John de Ottele wasn’t keen on some of the rules and had no desire to enter the monastic life and the sick weren’t looked after.   Gifford was the broom that undertook a clean sweep, appointed a new prior and told the malefactors to buck up their ideas.

Unfortunately a later visitation, made in 1280, reveals that monks were buying clothes and shoes that failed to meet the monastic ideal.  A number of them had private property.  The monks also seem to have continued with unnecessary chatter. The Bishop told them to stop gossiping and start paying more attention to divine service.

The Augustinians got on with running their priory until the fourteenth century at which point the Anglo-Scottish Wars went rather badly for the English when Edward II took over from his father and demonstrated a singular lack of skill at the Battle of Bannockburn. Scottish raiders did some serious damage to the buildings. An existent priory account roll details the cost of repairing the vandalism.  The site was temporarily abandoned in 1320 after a skirmish at Myton-on-Swale called the “White Battle”the previous year when some 12,000 Scots led by the Earl of Moray arrived on the scene.

The Black Death did not help matters.  The hay day of Bolton Priory was over but this did not prevent the Augustinians from returning to their monastery and beginning building work.

Building work was still going on at the Dissolution funded from the extensive sheep farms that the monastery owned.  The accounts also reveal that the monks owned a lead mine.  A new tower was begun in 1520 which was not yet finished.  The land was initially acquired by the  Clifford family as their ancestors were interred there but it then passed into the hands of the Cavendishes – where it remains to this day.

Ultimately a wall was built across the east end of the nave in the monastery church so that it could function as a parish church.

The image from the start of the post was painted by Turner in 1825.  It is in possession of the Tate.

 

Butler, Lionel & Given-Wilson, Chris. (1979) Medieval Monasteries of Great Britain. London: Michael Jospeh

 

‘Houses of Austin canons: Priory of Bolton’, in A History of the County of York: Volume 3, ed. William Page (London, 1974), pp. 195-199. British History Online http://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/yorks/vol3/pp195-199 [accessed 9 June 2018].

The Shepherd Lord – part deux

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IMG_3926Henry Tudor’s victory at Bosworth saw a change in fortune for the House of Lancaster and its supporters.  Henry Clifford emerged from skulking in the shadows and in a matter of weeks was established as one of Henry VII’s great lords possibly because the good folk of Yorkshire had a soft spot for Richard III so didn’t take too kindly to the man who’d usurped his throne.  As for the Earl of Northumberland, he was doing a shift in the chokey for not arriving to support Henry in time at Bosworth. Consequently there were few people for Henry Tudor to trust so Henry Clifford with his family history and the role that his brother had played on the continent was in the right place at the right time.

Clifford swiftly took on a series of administrative roles as well as touring the countryside punishing Yorkists.  Eventually the role the king allotted to him became more representative of the traditional role of sheriff – administering the law and collecting taxes.  It was a job that was to keep Henry out of mischief for the rest of his life along with showing his loyalty to the king every time a pretender to the crown showed his head and attacking the scots as deemed appropriate by the rules of border warfare.

In 1487 Henry got married.  Anne was a distant relation of his own as well as being related to Henry VII ( a cousin of some kind)  which just goes to show that medieval family trees are complicated things.  Henry acquired more lands in the north, acted on behalf of the king and developed an interest in astronomy and alchemy.  According to legend he was illiterate which is possible but unlikely. The one thing we can be sure of is that he valued learning.  He supported scholars in Oxford and also provided places for children at Giggleswick.  He also supported the monasteries at Shap, at Bolton and at Gisborough.

To all intents and purposes Henry seems to have been very pious – presumably he made confession about the number of mistresses he is supposed to have kept at various times. Lady Anne complained about the number of baseborn children he’d fathered.  Gossip was ratcheted up a gear after the death of his first wife and his marriage to Lady Florence, Marchioness Pudsey who was considerably younger than him. He also seems to have conducted pretty unneighbourly warfare with his neighbour who responded in kind.

The next time wider history clapped eyes on Henry Clifford was in 1513 at the Battle of Flodden.  He even made an appearance in a ballad of the same name in which he is portrayed as a heroic captain.  At home things were less of a story and more of a nightmare.  He was almost estranged from his son whom he kept on such short pursestrings it caused Henry VIII to tell Henry Clifford to be more generous.  He also seems to have had a bit of a tempestuous relationship with his second wife Lady Florence who brought a lawsuit against her spouse for not letting her live with him.  On the other hand Henry publicly accused Florence of having an affair with one of his household servants Roger Wharton – presumably Florence felt that what was good for the gander was also good for the goose!  It was definitely not a happy family.

When Henry Clifford died in 1523 and was buried in Bolton Abbey the Cliffords had survived the medieval period and were rising ever further in the Tudor world but who would have thought that less than twenty years later Henry Cliffords final resting place would be dissolved along with all the other monasteries in England and Wales.  Times were changing in more ways than one.

More complicated family trees – and a link to the Plantagenets.

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IMG_3953John Clifford, the Tenth Lord, maintained the reputation for jousting that his father had bequeathed to him. Like his father he met with the Douglas family in tournament at Carlisle and like his father he was established as a favourite at court.  He was present at the coronation of Henry V and following the victory at Agincourt at the coronation of Katherine of Valois.

The Cliffords were definitely  on the up. It helped that their experiences on the Scottish borders made them warriors.  John maintained his role in the north and added to the family homes by extending Appleby Castle – the gatehouse which stands today was commission by him.  John aside from his parochial responsibities in the north and job as MP for Henry IV and Henry V’s parliaments also managed to find time  to gain a reputation for thrashing the french during the Hundred Years War.

 

Edward III’s mother was Isabella of France (the one married to Edward II and known in history as the ‘she wolf’’). Upon the death of her brothers she was the last remaining member of the family so logically the French throne should have passed to her son King Edward III of England. Certainly that was what had been promised. However, the French were not keen on the English and also had a salic law in place which prohibited women from claiming the throne so handed the crown straight to a male cousin causing the English to become very irritated indeed and spend slightly more than a hundred years trying to prove their point with varying amounts of success.

 

Edward III carried his claim into war against France and it continued intermittently thereafter through the reigns of Richard II, Henry IV , Henry V and Henry VI. In its early years when the English were successful it was an opportunity for knights to make a fortune in loot and ransoms. It was also an opportunity to gain influence and power. Yerborough records of John Clifford:

 

Henry V retained him in his service for one year for the war with France. The contract was to this effect, that the said John, Lord Clifford, with fifty men-at-arms well accoutred, whereof three to be knights, the rest esquires, and one hundred and fifty archers, whereof two parts to serve on horseback, the third on foot, should serve the king from the day he should be ready to set sail for France, taking for himself 4s.for every knight, for every esquire is., for every archer 6d. a day.

P29 Yerborough, Some Notes on Our Family History

 

John was by Henry V’s side at Agincourt and at the Siege of Harfleur, then the inevitable happened. He got himself killed. He was thirty-three years old in 1422 when he was killed at the Siege of Meaux.  Again according to Yerborough and the Chronicle of Kirkstall he “was buried at Bolton Abbey apud canonicos de Boulton.’ Elizabeth his wife outlived him and married, secondly, Ralph, Earl of Westmorland.”  The moral of the story being that if you were sufficiently important someone would pickle you and send you home to your grieving wife who would promptly marry someone just as important as you even if you were a knight of the garter.

 

Marrying someone important was rapidly becoming a family pass time for the Cliffords.  Elizabeth Clifford started out as Elizabeth Percy. She was the daughter of Shakespeare’s Earl of Northumberland – Harry Hotspur- meaning that not only was she a scion of the most powerful border family in the country but she was also a Plantagenet. Her grandfather had been Edward Mortimer, Earl of March and her grandmother Philippa was the only child of Lionel Duke of Clarence, the second son of King Edward III.

Ties to the Plantagenets were even deeper and even more complicated than the Elizabeth Percy link. John’s sister Matilda (or Maud depending on the text) married Richard, Duke of Cambridge. Richard’s first wife Ann had been a Mortimer (a daughter of the fourth Earl of March– so definitely some kind of cousin of Elizabeth Percy) but Ann had died in childbirth leaving children and brothers who would find their Plantagenet bloodline and claim to the throne increasingly problematic.

 

Richard and Maud had one daughter Alice – about whom I’m currently quite upset as I thought I knew the House of York family tree rather well on the grounds that knowing who was related to whom becomes very important if you study the Wars of the Roses and now there’s someone new for me to worry about. Maud, on the other hand, was not in the least bit worried by the looks of it. She outlived Richard who managed to get himself executed in 1415 in the aftermath of the Southampton Plot.

 

The Southampton Plot had been designed to depose Henry V and replace him with Edward Mortimer – Richard’s young brother-in-law by his first wife Ann Mortimer. Edward Mortimer had a very good claim to the throne being descended from the second son of Edward III. Henry V didn’t take very kindly to Richard and his friends pointing out that Henry’s dad (Henry IV) had stolen the throne from his cousin (Richard II).  Aside from the fact that usurping thrones is generally not very nice, Henry IV and V were descended from John of Gaunt who was the third son of Edward III. Neither of them really should have been king at all – the descendants of the second son having a better claim than the descendants of the third son.  Henry demonstrated that family trees are all very well but actually being a medieval king was largely about having a large sword, an even larger army and a reputation for winning.  Had Henry V lived to see his son grow to adulthood Richard of Cambridge may well have ended up as a footnote in history as it was Henry V failed to do the one other thing that a medieval king needed to do – provide the kingdom with a strong adult male to succeed him.

 

Maud spent a lot of time at Conisborough Castle after Richard’s death and became a founder an patron of Roche Abbey.  She must have seen the various members of the Plantagenet family and their associated noble scions taking sides after Henry V’s death as to who should wield power in England – the House of York to which the Cliffords were allied through marriage or the House of Lancaster. Her will, dated 1446 (just nine years before the First Battle of St Albans), makes no mention of her troublesome step-children who would feature heavily in the Wars of the Roses.

 

Just to complicate matters that little bit further Matilda/Maud had already been married once to John Neville, the Sixth Baron Latimer. The divorce documents still remain – “casusa frigiditatis ujusdem Johannis Nevill”  Now there’s a story to be told in those few words!  Who needs soap operas when the Plantagenets and the Cliffords are in town?