Deserted villages have long held a romantic fascination, especially when their memories are evoked by crumbling ruins. Old, roofless churches evoke images of once-bustling village communities, lost to the ravages of Black Death, heartless landowners intent on evicting them from new parkland, or simple economic failure at the expense of nearby towns and cities.
St Etheldreda’s church in Chesfield is exactly this sort of place. Tucked away off a narrow winding road – Back Lane – that connects Graveley with Weston, it is a building easily overlooked by car drivers and walkers. To find it, one has to go searching. Its flint walls sit incongruously next to the late seventeenth-century brick of Chesfield Manor Farm, with a statue of the patron saint by Mary Spencer Watson standing by its south door since 1982. The gable of the west end of the nave stands almost to its original height, as does the west wall of a chapel to the south of the chancel, but little else remains.
The church consisted of three rooms: the nave to the west, chancel to the east, the two forming a rectangle 15.2 m by 5.6 m, and a side-chapel measuring 6.4 m by 4.0 m south of the chancel. There is a doorway in the south wall of the nave with fourteenth-century mouldings, with another but narrower door in the west wall of the chapel with identical mouldings. A traceried window of the same date also survives in the west wall. These details show that the whole building consists of a single phase of construction, around 1360.
To confuse matters, there is documentary reference to a chapel at Chesfield manor in 1216 and another that the advowson (the right to choose its rector) was in the same hands as that of nearby Graveley in 1232. It is also mentioned as Ecclesia de Chivesfeld (‘Chesfield Church’) in Pope Nicholas’s tax survey of 1291-2. This evidence shows that there was a church here more than a century before the present one was built. Throughout the Middle Ages, Chesfield and Graveley were rivals: John Smyth, the priest at Graveley, murdered Robert Schorthale, the priest at Chesfield, in 1384. According to the historian Nathaniel Salmon, the two parishes were combined in 1445 as Graveley-cum-Chesfield. In the Lay Subsidy lists of 1307, the two are already assessed together (as Gravelee & Cshivesfeld), separating the names of householders between places. By the Subsidy list of 1334, it is described as hamelettus de Chevesfeld (‘hamlet of Chesfield’), suggesting that its status as a separate parish had been lost. In 1750, Bishop John Thomas of Lincoln gave permission for the church to be dismantled. In an ironic twist of fate, he allowed the stone rubble to be used to repair Graveley church.
Inside the ruined chancel, a trapezoidal stone coffin was once visible. Percival Westell of Letchworth Museum excavated it in 1921, and the vicar of Graveley donated it to the museum the next year. It was moved to the Letchworth Urban District Council depot in 1935, but its present whereabouts are unknown.
Chesfield does not appear in Domesday Book, compiled in 1086, and the earliest reference to the place is in 1200, as Chivelesfeld. It was probably included with Graveley (Grauelai in the original), which was given five separate entries, each with a different lord (Bishop Odo of Bayeux, Robert Gernon, William of Eu, Gosbert of Beauvais and Peter of Valonges). Gosbert’s and Peter’s holdings were the two described as manors, so one probably refers to Graveley proper and the other to Chesfield. By the thirteenth century, Chesfield was part of the de Valonges barony, so Peter’s Domesday manor was likely Chesfield. William of Ow’s smaller holding possibly also included part of Chesfield. Peter de Valonges later acquired the Bishop’s lands. He also held land in Escelueia, usually thought to be Chells (now part of Stevenage) but was probably somewhere in the north of the historic parish of Graveley, as this part of it was said to be in Wilga (Willian): Robert Gernon also had land there.
So what of the deserted village? Nothing in the landscape suggests that there was ever a nucleated community at Chesfield, although the creation of Chesfield Park in Georgian times has changed the road layout. The figures in Domesday Book suggest a population of perhaps 70 or so people at Chesfield in 1086, which is large for Hertfordshire, and about 40 people in Graveley itself.
Who was St Etheldreda? The name is a Latinised version of Old English Æðelþryð (Æthelthryth), who was born a princess, daughter of King Anna of East Anglia, about AD 636. She took a vow of perpetual virginity as a young woman but despite this, she was married about 652 to Tondbert, ruler of the South Gyrwe in the Fenland. After he died, she retired to Ely, where Tonbert had given her property as part of her dowry. In 660, she was married again – probably against her will – to Ecgfrith of Northumbria, a teenage boy. He became king in 670, at which point she found herself queen. She took advice from Wilfrid, Bishop of York, who advised her to retire and become a nun, although Ecgfith objected. In 672, she joined the monastery at Coldingham but evidently did not feel safe there (it was a Northumbrian royal foundation, so Ecgfrith perhaps had proprietorial control over it). She fled back to Ely, which was her own propery, and founded a monastery there in 673, becoming its first abbess. Æðelþryð died on 23 June 679 and her sister Seaxburh succeeded her. Sixteen years later, Seaxburh decided to remove her sister’s remains from an unmarked grave to put the body into a specially built shrine. Æðelþryð’s body had not decayed, which was traditionally a sign of sainthood.
Æðelþryð was duly moved into a white marble sarcophagus, taken from a Roman tomb at Cambridge, which was miraculously found to be a perfect fit. Her original wooden coffin and her burial clothes were found to have miraculous healing powers. Accordingly, Ely became a place for pilgrims to visit in the hope of being cured throughout the Middle Ages (with a hiatus between 870, when the invading Danish Great Army destroyed the monastery, and 970, when King Eadgar rebuilt it). Gradually, her name transformed into Middle English Seynt Audrey,giving us the modern name Audrey. Seynt Audrey’s fair in Ely was renowned for its lace, which pious ladies would wear to conceal their cleavage. By the seventeenth-century, ‘tawdry lace’ (from ‘Saint Audrey lace’) had become a by-word for cheap and vulgar finery. From there, it went on to develop its commoner modern meaning of cheap, gaudy, unseemly and sordid. Poor Æðelþryð did not deserve that!
Written by Keith Fitzpatrick-Matthews
Some archaeological discoveries are hiding in plain sight. Tucked away under a hedge on the east side of Baldock Bowls Club’s car park (owned by the council) on West Avenue in the town was what everyone thought was an old horse trough. It consisted of four sides of a roughly rectangular stone container filled with soil. Most users of the car park probably never even noticed it. One day in 2009, Steve Geach from North Hertfordshire District Council invited Keith Fitzpatrick-Matthews (the writer of this post) to take a look at it as the Bowls Club wanted to get rid of it.
On seeing the ‘trough’, Keith’s first thought was ‘this is a Roman coffin’. Horse troughs tend to be
much longer: in this case, the object was quite short (about a metre and a half). He suggested that when lifted, it would prove to have a hole, either in one side towards the bottom or somewhere in the base. He also asked if the Museum Service could have it.
On lifting, it did indeed have a hole in one side. This makes it impossible to use as a horse-trough (any water put inside it would drain away instantly), but ideal for a coffin, which needs to have somewhere for fluids to escape. Without going into too many gory details, bodies produce a lot of water when they decay (sometimes referred to as ‘coffin soup’ by archaeologists trying to be humorous), and it is important to let it seep out.
The coffin proved to weigh over half a tonne, despite being for a child. At 1.40 m long, 0.66 m wide and up to 0.62 m high, with an internal hollow of 1.03 × 0.41 × 0.33 m, it contains about 0.43 cubic metres of stone. We can calculate that this volume of limestone would weigh a minimum of 670 kg! The limestone in question is Totternhoe Stone, a relatively hard form of chalk, part of the Lower Chalk that formed between about 100,500,000 and 93,900,000 years ago during the Cenomanian phase of the Cretaceous era. It has been quarried since Roman times in the village of Totternhoe, although outcrops are found in other places along the foot of the Chiltern scarp.
Before arriving at the Bowls Club car park, it had been a garden feature in a nearby property in West Avenue. A photograph sent to the local newspaper in 2009 showed it being used as a planter during the 1960s. It seems that it had already been in the garden when the householder arrived, so the trail goes cold at that point. Given its weight, it is unlikely to have moved far, so it had probably been discovered nearby. Letchworth Museum records record a collection of Roman pottery from Norton Crescent, barely 100 metres away. The houses were built in the late 1930s, and this may be a context for finding the material. Although this is about 300 metres from where current thinking puts the western edge of the Roman town of Baldock, this area could have been part of suburban development.
Transporting such a heavy object from the quarry, almost 30 km away along the Icknield Way, would have been challenging. Using a cart pulled by oxen, the journey would have taken about three days; historians have calculated that the cost would be about 1 denarius per kilogram of freight. If correct, the cost would then be almost 700 denarii. A denarius was roughly a day’s pay for a soldier around AD 200, so the transport cost would be about two years’ salary; in the modern British army, a Private’s salary is £21,424, per year, putting the transport cost at about £40,000 in modern terms. Making comparisons of this sort is fraught with difficulties, but it gives a good impression of the sort of wealth needed to transport a coffin of this sort. Add on the cost of manufacture, and you can appreciate that whoever bought this sarcophagus for their child had a lot of disposable income.
We know that wealthy people lived in the hinterland of Baldock (there will be some spectacular evidence coming up in one of these posts in a few months), while finds from the town hint that it was a prosperous place. It is easy to imagine a large villa in the countryside beyond Baldock’s western fringes whose owners could afford an expensive stone sarcophagus for a treasured child. A child burial discovered in Icknield Way East in 1988, northeast of the town, had a wooden superstructure and its coffin contained an antique pipeclay goddess figurine. Although not as costly as a stone sarcophagus, the complexity of the grave and its superstructure shows that the child’s parents wanted to show off their wealth and status.
Roman burials had to be deposited outside the boundary of a town. An ancient Roman law, the first section of Part X of the Leges XII tabularum (‘Laws of the Twelve Tables’) states hominem mortuum in urbe ne sepelito neve urito (‘neither bury nor cremate a dead man in the city’). The law code was first published in 450 BC and remained the basis of Roman law throughout the empire until Justinian I reorganised and codified all laws in the 530s. Because the law about burial was so fundamental, we can assume that all the known cemeteries in Baldock lay outside its formal boundary. Outside towns, people could have burials on their own land, and many villa owners had private cemeteries for family members close to the main house.
An almost identical coffin with a similar history was found in a Wiltshire garden in 2015. Luke Irwin had been using a stone ‘planter’ for geraniums outside his kitchen for some years when work laying electrical cables uncovered a Roman mosaic floor. Excavations at his Deverill home by Wiltshire Archaeology and English Heritage uncovered the remains of an enormous Roman villa, built in the decades around 200 and occupied for more than two centuries thereafter. When archaeologist David Roberts from English Heritage saw the ‘planter’, he realised, like Keith, that this was originally a stone coffin for a Roman era child.
The Baldock coffin is on display in the Living in North Hertfordshire gallery in North Herts Museum, Hitchin.
Knebworth, in the south of the district, is a community with a complicated history. The medieval community worshipped in the twelfth-century Church of St Mary and St Thomas of Canterbury, now in Knebworth Park. It remains the official parish church. The present park dates from about 1641, when Sir William Lytton created ornamental gardens around Knebworth House. The main medieval park lay between what we now call Old Knebworth (formerly Knebworth Green) and Gipsy Lane, around Park Lane. Another, the Little Park, lay between Old Knebworth and Knebworth House.
The name Knebworth Green, recorded since the time of King Edward VI (1547-1553), for what we now know as Old Knebworth is a sign that this was not the main settlement. The community recorded since the time of Domesday Book perhaps lay around St Mary and St Thomas’s church, as archaeologists saw slight earthworks here in 1989.
The railway arrived in 1850 and in 1884, the Lyttons of Knebworth House persuaded the railway company to build a new station 1.8 km (about 1¼ miles) east of Knebworth Green, just past Deard’s End. A new community was beginning to grow around it by the 1890s, in what had been the extreme southeastern corner of the parish. Known at first as Knebworth Station, it had simply become Knebworth by the 1930s. The boundary changed to incorporate Swangleys Farm and Roundwood Cottages, previously in Datchworth, into the parish.
The Church of England opened a Mission Room on Gun Lane in 1880, where the Royal British Legion Club now stands. As the community grew at Knebworth Station, it was not enough to meet the needs of the new village, so a new church was commissioned, to be designed by the famous architect, Sir Edwin Lutyens (1869-1944).
Lutyens had already worked in Knebworth, designing the Arts and Crafts style Homewood for his brother-in-law Victor, Lord Lytton in 1901, a new garden at Knebworth House and cottages in Knebworth Garden Village, an intended planned settlement around Knebworth Station, in 1904. Work began on the Garden Village in 1912 but it was interrupted by the First World War and foundered for good in the 1920s. In the meantime, Knebworth Station continued to grow, with an increasing need for a Church of England church there.
Lutyens designed what he originally called Christchurch in 1911, with a site in the intended Garden Village donated by Lord Lytton. A local builder, William Darby, won the contract for building it, and work started in April 1914. The outbreak of war slowed its construction, as it became harder to get hold of building materials and many labourers left to become soldiers. As a result, the plans had to be scaled back, with the nave reduced in length and the west end abruptly finished off with a plain brick wall. Edgar Jacob, Bishop of St Albans, consecrated the church on 12 November 1915. He chose the dedication to St Martin of Tours, as the saint’s day falls on 11 November.
William Darby followed Lutyen’s very specific instructions about the quality of materials he wanted for the church. The bricks and pantiles for the roof came from his own brickworks on Spinney Lane at Rabelyheath and he used Portland Stone for the columns, as Lutyens specified. The shortage of materials meant that the portico with steps intended for the west end – the entrance – was left until 1963. Sir Albert Richardson designed an extension to the nave (but without portico and steps), which includes the present cupola containing the 3½ tonne bell. Work on his alteration was finished in 1964, creating the church that can be seen today.
Sir Nikolaus Pevsner described St Martin’s Church as ‘one of Lutyens’s most remarkable churches’. Its location on a slight rise gives it an imposing presence, which is enhanced by the wide overhanging eaves. Inside, Lutyens’s attention to detail includes the organ with its pipes arranged in double spirals and a shallow apse at the east end, containing the altar.
Archaeologists are interested not just in the most ancient of remains, glittering ‘treasures’ or the pyramids of long-dead pharaohs. The remains of the recent past, even when they stand as complete buildings, are just as valid a subject for study. Often they can tell us so much more as they come with a richer background of documentary evidence, social context and living memory. St Martin’s Church is one of these special places.
Written by Keith Fitzpatrick-Matthews