Winterstoke

by L. T. C. Rolt

  Agriculture and the export of wool was not the only source of the Abbey’s wealth during this last period of its history. The flat-bottomed ‘snakers’ with their square sails which traded to St. John’s Wharf in increasing numbers whenever tide or freshet served now bore away with them not only wool and cloth bales but increasing quantities of iron and surface coal. For this development of the iron trade the conditions created by the Black Death were once again responsible. Indeed, the far-reaching effects of this disaster are very commonly underrated by historians. Because no other major epidemic followed it, England again became more populous so that by the time of the death of Abbot Luttrell the population in the Winterstoke area was approximately the same as it had been a century and a half before when the plague had struck. But the agricultural policy which had been adopted in a time of acute labour shortage had become so commercially successful that it was not to be abandoned to provide land for the landless. Prosperous tenant yeomen who were the descendants of the humble cottars who had been lucky enough to survive the plague were unwilling to subdivide their holdings or to convert the pastures of the ‘golden hoof’ back to common fields for strip cultivation. There were thus an increasing number of landless labourers in the district and it was this circumstance which led to the expansion of the iron and coal trades. The number of bloomeries in work in Winterstoke increased steadily throughout the fifteenth century. At first established by the monks themselves, a number of tenants now followed the monastic example by setting up bloomeries on their lands. Such yeomen did not abandon farming, neither did the ironworkers themselves turn their backs on the land. The trade was looked upon as complementary to the primary occupation of agriculture. Some of the ironworkers might have holdings of their own, while those who did not worked in the fields of the yeoman owner of the bloomery when required. In this way the iron trade absorbed the additional labour which became available and at the same time solved the problem of the fluctuating seasonal demand of agriculture for labour. From the outset the Cistercians had solved this problem in the same way by developing both husbandry and the trades in partnership and thus preserving a balance between them.

  Iron ore, mined in Deepforest, was brought to the Winterstoke bloomeries by pack-horses which picked their way down the rough trackway which wound across the flank of the Lob valley. Although the labour involved was considerable, the tonnage produced by this centre of the medieval iron trade, even at its height, was infinitesimal judged by our standards. Each bloomery consisted of a small furnace blown by treadle bellows like a blacksmith’s forge in which ore and fuel were mixed. By such means it took nine men working for from twelve to fourteen hours to produce two hundredweight of wrought iron ‘blooms’. It was to facilitate this laborious process that the Cistercians of Winterstoke undertook what was destined to be the last extension of their secular activities. A second shallow weir was thrown across the Wendle at a point almost directly opposite the Abbey, the fall thus provided being sufficient to drive the under-shot wheel of a new mill. Here the power of the wheel was harnessed to work two sets of bellows which supplied blast to two bloomery furnaces. This new iron mill soon became known as a ‘water bloomery’, as distinct from the older ‘foot bloomeries’ where the bellows were worked by treadle.

  It was when the lower slopes of High Hanger hill were being cleared for cultivation in the twelfth century that there had been found in the shallow depression left by an uprooted tree, the first of those ‘black diamonds’ whose presence was destined to have so profound an effect upon the future of Winterstoke. The outcropping seams may have been noticed previously, but the value of this black substance as a fuel was not realized until, in this process of clearance, a fire of roots and tree butts was lit in this convenient hollow. From that time forward coal formed a useful addition to winter firing for those tenants on whose lands the seams could be found, but it was not until this later period that coal getting, like iron working, became a regular part-time occupation and coal began to be exported beyond the immediate district.

  Although these latter-day developments of Cistercian Winterstoke are of great significance in the light of future events, they were of small extent and had far less effect upon the landscape of the Wendle valley than Abbot Luttrell’s Tower; here or there a heat shimmer in the air above the flue of a bloomery; here or there in the hanging woods the thin blue smokedrift of some charcoal burner’s fire; now and again the distant creak and sigh of bellows or the thud and ring of a hammer. But that was all. The great tower, with its newly completed upper courses and pinnacles of unweathered stone glowing in the sunlight like a crown of gold, commanded a fair prospect. The partnership between man and nature was still a happy and a fruitful one. Though there were now many more pastures, sewn with sheep as thickly as the sky with stars, there were still orchards and vineyards and fields ripening to harvest. How far the Cistercians of Winterstoke fell short of their first high and selfless ideals can never be determined, but this much is certain: after their tenure of four hundred years they left the valley an infinitely richer and more beautiful place than they found it. That they had been true husbandmen to the valley lands was proved by the rich consummation of that marriage. Moreover, it had been a love match and not a ruthless subjugation; the wilderness had been ordered but not destroyed as though it were some implacable foe or a thing of no account. Marshes and meres below St. John’s Wharf were still a paradise for the wild-fowler. Rivers and streams still teemed with fish, to be netted after the ancient fashion for the griddle or trapped in the putcheons of the weirs to stock the monastic fish-ponds.

  One bright morning in the summer of 1539 a small group of horsemen clattered over St. John’s Bridge and drew rein at the Abbey gateway. If any villagers watched them pass it is unlikely that they would suspect that such a visitation presaged anything unusual, for among such simple country folk the news of momentous political changes travelled slowly. They probably concluded that the richly clad figure at the centre of the group was some wealthy merchant who had come to discuss business with the new Abbot Waldegrave and to enjoy his liberal hospitality. The stranger, who looked about him with such shrewd appraisal was certainly on business bent, and as certainly he was a figure of national significance. This arrogant man with the cold eyes and the thin-lipped mouth was Master of the Rolls to His Majesty Henry VIII, Chancellor of Cambridge University and Visitor General of Monasteries. Although a commoner, the son of a rascally and fraudulent brewer in Putney, at this particular moment in history no man in England under the king wielded greater power. Even the greatest of nobles had found it expedient to curry the favour of Thomas Cromwell however much they might privately detest him. Two characteristics had enabled Cromwell to achieve this position: an overweening ambition as great as that which had caused the downfall of his late master Wolsey, and a machiavellian worship of State power incarnate in the person of his new royal master whom he served without conscience, heart or religious scruple. Only two years later, when his head was struck off on Tower Hill, he was to meet the fate which inevitably overtakes such ambitious agents of unbridled power, but that story does not concern us here.

  Needless to say it was upon no merchant’s business that Cromwell came to Winterstoke that fateful day. He was playing a much richer game and had come to demand the surrender of the Abbey to the king. It was a tribute to the value set upon this particular prize that the Visitor General had chosen to come in person. Usually he remained in London and left such jackal’s work to his four Commissioners. Sometimes the Commissioners met with resistance, and there were occasions where stubborn abbots or priors who had refused to surrender their properties had been hanged in their own precincts. But the momentous meeting in the Chapter which sealed the fate of this Abbey was marked by no such high drama. The end of medieval Winterstoke was in fact singularly inglorious, for the recently installed Abbot Waldegrave proved to be a cipher of the King’s party who, having been promised a rich chaplaincy in return for his compliance, yielded up
the Abbey without scruple. Of the monks, some followed their Abbot’s example, while those who refused to acknowledge the King as the spiritual head of the Church eventually made their way to the Continent. The lay brothers who remained continued to work on the estate as labourers or craftsmen, some of them assisting in the work of pillage and demolition which was not long delayed.

  One might have supposed that at least a part of the monastic estate would be granted by the Crown to the descendant of that William Fitzwinter who had originally bequeathed it to the Church in pious memory of his father. For the family had not only maintained a direct male succession through the troubled centuries but had remained firmly rooted in the place allotted to them by the Conqueror. Its sixteenth-century representative was Sir John Winter, Lord of the manor of Emberley. There is a fine, proud ring about the title ‘Lord of the manor’ which is in this case somewhat misleading. It suggests the autocratic ruler of great estates whereas in fact the Fitzwinter lands had gradually shrunk as a result of church grants and forfeits until, despite their ancient title and noble blood, the family had become little more than prosperous yeomen. Sir John’s lordship consisted merely of a draughty fourteenth-century hall, built on the moated site of the original Norman keep by his more prosperous ancestor Robert Fitzwinter (the last to use the ancient prefix), a home farmery, the small village of Emberley with its church and its common fields, and a few outlying farms which were in the hands of yeoman tenants. The Winters had fought for the cause of York throughout the Wars of the Roses, that protracted and unprofitable struggle in which so many representatives of the ancient aristocracy of the age of chivalry either destroyed each other or emerged impoverished and exhausted. Those who, like the Winters, had faithfully followed the white rose of Plantagenet from the triumph of Mortimer’s Cross to the final disaster on Bosworth Field did not find much favour in the Tudor court, nor did they seek it. About that court had grown a new aristocracy who measured their strength in money rather than in the number of armed retainers they could muster. Sir John Winter, even had he been in a position to do so, was not fitted by nature to play the poker game of power politics with Henry and his creature Cromwell. The Norman blood ran strong in the Winters, and in Sir John’s portrait—the long, proud but melancholy face, the high-bridged, aquiline nose and dark eyes brooding under heavy lids—we recognize a different species of man from those shrewd, square-faced merchant princes who had risen to power by replenishing Henry’s exchequer and who were now angling for their pound of flesh in the shape of a share of the monastic spoils.

  Typical of these new men of power was Sir Richard Hanmer, Groom of the Bedchamber to Henry VIII. The Hanmers were a family of East Anglian yeomen stock who had ridden to power and prosperity on a woolsack. Amongst the merchants of the Staple, Hanmer had become a name to conjure with, not only in England but in the markets of Europe, and their gold had done much to consolidate the Tudor Throne. Now, Sir Richard Hanmer sought the reward of his family’s fealty and was not disappointed. He was created Earl of Winterstoke and received the rich prize of the monastic estates.

  The Abbot’s house had seemed the last word in luxury and grandeur in the days of Abbot Luttrell, but to the new Earl, accustomed to the splendours and the ease of life in the Tudor court it appeared a dark and gloomy warren ill fitted to be the palace of a noble of such wealth and power. So the house was extensively rebuilt and enlarged, the Abbey buildings being used as a convenient quarry for material. In this connection it is a tribute to the esteem which this great church still enjoyed in the neighbourhood that the local inhabitants, led by Sir John Winter, had combined in an attempt to save at least a part of the Abbey from destruction. Elsewhere, similar attempts were sometimes successful. At Tewkesbury, for example, the whole Abbey church was saved, while at Pershore and Abbeydore the choir and transepts were spared while the naves were destroyed. But Abbeydore, as a Cistercian house, was an exception. The very fact that the Cistercians chose to build their abbeys in lonely and waste places sealed their fate in the sixteenth century, and so it was with Winterstoke. The local population was too small to raise the necessary ransom, while it could be argued that they already possessed places of worship adequate to their needs in the church of St. Cenodoc, which had continued to serve the villagers of Winterstoke, and in its near neighbour St. Peter’s at Emberley. So Richard Hanmer had a free hand.

  When we walk through the lofty nave and aisles of one of our great cathedrals it may seem incredible that anyone should set to work to demolish them so completely that not one stone remained on another. Quite apart from any considerations of impiety or vandalism it seems too formidable a task to undertake for a purely destructive and unfruitful purpose. We are so accustomed to seeing the far less substantial buildings of our own age: derelict factories which the industrial revolution has outpaced, casualties of war or the detritus of military encampments, surviving for years in ugly ruin because it is worth no one’s while to pull them down and clear their sites. Many monastic ruins have, of course, survived, and it is this survival which should be the source of wonder, not the fact of demolition. For wherever, as at Winterstoke, any considerable new building was contemplated in the vicinity, the labour involved in demolishing the most massive of buildings was at that time considerably less than that of quarrying and dressing virgin stone and transporting it to the site. Thus the destruction of Winterstoke Abbey by Richard Hanmer was no deliberate and costly act of desecration but merely a practical expedient which put to good use a building which no longer served any purpose in the new age which he represented.

  It was the purely sacred buildings, the Abbey church and its cloisters which became his quarry because of their inutility. Chapter, Refectory and Dormitories became the barns, storehouses and granaries of the Earl’s home farm, while the infirmary and guest house was rebuilt to house his steward. So, to the greater glory of the first Earl of Winterstoke the destruction of the splendid church which generations of tireless hands had raised to the glory of God, went forward relentlessly. The long, empty aisles echoed the clink of chisel, pick and crowbar, the crack of hammers, the shouts of the workmen and the intermittent crash of masonry falling from the high vault to the floor of nave or choir in a smother of dust. And as this great symbol of the medieval world fell, so Winterstoke Place, symbol of the new world of the Renaissance, arose beside it.

  There was as much difference between Richard Hanmer’s new palace and Sir John Winter’s dark and damp abode on Emberley Hill as there was between the latter and the grim Norman keep which it had replaced. Great new windows flooded hall, parlour and long gallery alike with light. Applying the lesson of the perpendicular style to secular purpose, the narrow lancets of Abbot Luttrell’s hall were replaced by windows more than twice their width, massive external buttresses being thrown up between them to reinforce the weakened walls. The new house, for such it could be called so drastic were the alterations, was E-shaped in plan, presenting a frontage of three projecting gabled wings, their façades almost entirely occupied by great oriel windows whose stone mullions extended through both storeys. A more striking contrast to the austere, meticulously proportioned beauty of Cistercian architecture than the interior of Winterstoke Place it would be difficult to conceive. For Richard Hanmer was what a later age would call a nouveau riche. Great wealth and the desire for ostentation were not yet governed or restrained by that sensibility and good taste which is only acquired by time and experience. Winterstoke Place was a work of fine craftsmanship, but it was an example of craftsmanship run riot for the lack of any controlling hand or any guiding purpose save the desire for display. Consequently the armorial bearings of the proud owner which were set in the new leaded windows glanced their jewel lights of ruby, sapphire and gold upon apartments whose spaciousness was spoiled by the vulgar profusion of their ornament. The effect was restless, so bewildering and distracting to the eye was the intricate lozenge moulding of the plaster ceilings, and the over-heavy woodwork of panelling, stairways, doorca
ses and overmantels all elaborately and minutely carved without regard for the proportions of the whole. Even the furniture was treated in the same fashion, the legs and feet of table, chair or tallboy swelling out into meaningless dropsical globes for no better reason than to provide a greater area for the indefatigable carver. Yet here, as in the Palace of the great Cardinal at Hampton, there could be distinguished amid this brash display a crude entablature, an ill-proportioned column, a top-heavy pediment, which were the primitive portents of a new architectural style. With the completion of this great house which was at once a caricature of the age which had passed and of the new age which was to come, a great chapter in the history of Winterstoke drew to its close and a new era began.

  Chapter Two

  IF ANY of the smaller tenants of the Winterstoke estate had imagined that they would benefit by the change from monastic to secular rule they were doomed to disappointment. Richard Hanmer duly installed his family in their new and palatial home, but he was frequently absent himself either at the Court or on mercantile and political business abroad. He therefore delegated responsibility for the day to day administration of his great estate to his steward, Stephen Folliot. From the few estate papers which survive it would seem that this Folliot was a hard-working, conscientious and, on the whole, a just man. But, as the tenants soon found, Stephen Folliot’s brand of justice was not so generously tempered with charity as that of his monastic predecessors. Indeed, it could not be otherwise when the high sense of duty of this steward was exclusively devoted to serving the best interests of his absent master. Whether the master would have acted more generously than the man had he concerned himself more directly with the affairs of his estate we cannot know, but it seems unlikely. For Richard Hanmer was one of England’s first great men of business, and as such he regarded his estate in a light different from that of his predecessors and different also from that of the older lay landlords such as Sir John Winter. His sense of ownership was much more absolute. The lands of Winterstoke were his; he was no steward, holding them in trust either for God or for the King. He could not command the allegiance of his tenants, nor were they under obligation to him except for the payment of rents. Yet perhaps some of the tenants who had chafed against the medieval obligations and clamoured for this freedom now realized that the old responsibilities had been mutual. For there was now no hostilarius to receive the weary traveller, no almoner to help the poor and the sick with the aid of the herbs which were rendered to him by the community; nor did Stephen Folliot hold any ‘poor purse’ with which to help those in trouble even if he had a mind to do so. The old monastic estate could be likened to a wagon wheel in which the hub of the Abbey was linked to the felloes of tenants and village community by many spokes of mutual obligation to form a strong, self-sufficient and highly-organized whole. When the hub was suddenly knocked away, every spoke either split or fell out. The estate retained the shape of the wheel because felloe was still held to felloe by the iron strakes of external authority, but it possessed much less internal strength as a structure. Winterstoke Place might form a new centre, but it did little to stiffen it. An attempt was soon made to remedy this fatal weakness from within by a system of voluntary contributions by the more prosperous within the parish towards a fund to help the poor and the sick. This failed and the next effort to remedy a worsening situation came from without in the form of Elizabethan legislation which levied a Poor Rate from each property holder and person of estate and made each parish responsible for its poor. This was the first step upon that long legislative road whereon the warm spirit of Christian charity was destined to fall by the wayside and to be replaced by cold ethics enforced by the compulsion of remote authority.