Local History - Celia Rees

Publisher: Amberley Books
 (Images Jamie  Robinson)

I was very excited recently to be able to go to a real, live event hosted by wonderful Warwick Books, my closest Indie bookshop. I went to hear Warwick writer, S. C. Skillman, talking about her latest book: Illustrated Tales of Warwickshire. This was the first live event I'd attended since before the pandemic, so it was nice to see the author in person talking about her book, answering questions and engaging with an audience. Zoom is a poor substitute, especially as the event took place in the Visitors' Centre of Hill Close Gardens, a rare survival of original Victorian gardens once used by Warwick townsfolk to escape from the crowded town. Once under serious threat from development, these gardens have been lovingly restored and still present a haven of birdsong, peace and quiet. If you are ever in or around Warwick, they are well worth a visit. 

Author - S. C. Skillman (Celia Rees)

I'm Warwickshire born and bred and I love local history and local stories, especially of the spooky kind. S. C. Skillman's previous book was entitled Paranormal Warwickshire, so it is not difficult to locate where her interest also lies. I have used local stories in my writing. The notorious St Valentine's Day murder of agricultural labourer, Charles Walton, on Meon Hill in 1945 was inspiration for my third novel, Colour Her Dead. The crime is unsolved to this day. Surrounded by a wall of silence, accompanied by whispers of witchcraft, carried out in a place with its own strange and sinister legends, the story has a prominent place in modern Warwickshire folk lore. I blogged about it here in 2012 and it is well covered in Illustrated Tales of Warwickshire in chapters, Tales of Warwickshire Witchcraft and Rural Crimes, with accompanying photographs of Lower Quinton, Charles Walton's home village hard by Meon Hill, and the hill itself.  

Meon Hill (Celia Rees)

S. K. Skillman covers many of my own favourite places and stories. Some I already knew, others I didn't know at all. I had no idea, for example, that J.R.R. Tolkien had an association with Warwick town and may have referenced Warwick Castle in his work. Neither did I know that the Old Coffee Tavern in Warwick was haunted and I've never noticed the carving of Old Tom in the Market Square. I'll look out for it and other apotropaic carvings next time I'm in Warwick. 

Old Tom, Swan Street, Warwick (S.C. Skillman)

Illustrated Tales of Warwickshire ranges across the whole county and covers all sorts of fascinating local stories and legends, some from the deep past but others happening as recently as 2018 with a big cat sighting on the golf course of the Ardencote Manor Hotel.  The author covers Warwickshire notables, from William Shakespeare to Larry Grayson. Some famous, like Daisy, Countess of Warwick, others not so famous like traditional toymaker, Cyril Hobbins. 

I'd like to thank Warwick Books and Sheila Skillman for a fascinating evening in a magical place. I'm from Warwickshire, so I'm biased, but it was good to be reminded of the rich and varied history of this ancient county. The evening ended with a performance from a local Morris Side, Plum Jerkum. My family come from Warwickshire and this was what my brother called slivovitz, or any plum based schnapps,  Sheila explains that it was the name for a plum cider - something I've never tried. The cider was made from a local plum, the Warwickshire Drooper. My dad had a tree on his allotment and they are still dotted all over local allotments. I've never tried plum cider but they do make the most delicious jam!

Warwickshire Droopers

Plum Jerkum Morris Side (Terence Rees)

Celia Rees

www.celiarees.com

Insta: celiarees1

Twitter: @CeliaRees

Guy of Warwick - A Very English Hero - Celia Rees

My last month's History Girls blog was about the gothic ruin,  Guy's Cliffe House, and the history and legend attached. One or two of the comments wanted to know more about Guy of Warwick, legendary knight and renowned hero who gave his name to Guy's Cliffe.

Guy of Warwick is one of those figures, like Robin Hood and King Arthur, whose existence is more legend than history. His story has been told and re-told over the centuries in early English 'Histories', Medieval Romances, chapbooks and ballads. There may be a kernel of history there. He was probably Anglo Saxon. His name is connected to the family of Wigod, Lord of Wallingford under Edward the Confessor and events re-counted place his adventures in the reign of King Athelstan. He is always firmly placed in Warwick and the surrounding area, just as Robin Hood is associated with Sherwood Forest, and I always think there must be some truth within these stories, or why would they endure?

Embellished, and expanded, Guy of Warwick has taken on the trappings of the times in which his story was told, or re-told. The Anglo Norman warrior, Gui de Warewic, first appears in the early thirteenth century. He was further transformed in the fourteenth century in a number of romances, adapted from the French.

Guy of Warwick, from an illumination in Le Romant de Guy de Warwik et d'Heraud d'Ardenne

 Guy's 'History' would not look out of place as a plot line in Game of Thrones. It goes like this:

Guy was a humble cupbearer, a page at the court of the Earl of Warwick. He falls in love with the Earl's lovely daughter Felice but he is rejected as being too low born to win her hand. He has to go out and prove himself worthy of her. He embarks on a series of heroic tasks, ridding the country around of the Dun Cow, a monstrous beast twelve feet high and eighteen feet high. A rib bone (actually a whale bone) was on view for many years at Warwick Castle - a nice example of how the legend passes as history. The castle also holds Guy's two handed sword. The Dun Cow is remembered in place names like Stretton-on-Dunsmore and Dunchurch and there are many Dun Cow pubs in the area. Once he has despatched the Dun Cow, Guy takes on a giant boar that has been terrorising Coventry.

Guy of Warwick slating the Dun Cow, tableaux in the Bull Yard, Coventry City Centre

He returns to Felice after completing these superhuman tasks but it is not enough. To win her, he has to be famous, he has to gain renown. He leaves for Europe to prove himself as a knight in battle and combat, now more a figure of chivalric romance than a heroic beast slayer (although he does kill  dragon). After knightly adventures on the Continent, he returns triumphant. Felice marries him but this is not the end of Guy's story. Full of remorse for all the violence in his past, he decides to embark for Jerusalem disguised as a pilgrim, leaving a distraught wife who is only prevented from committing suicide by the thought of her unborn child. He wears a gold ring as his promise to return.

Guy of Warwick

Guy reaches the Holy Land but on his return journey he is involved in more adventures, fighting as a champion and doing battle, righting wrongs and delivering justice for various people he meets on the road. He also discovers a magnificent sword (see above) hidden in a cave. He travels in disguise, refusing to reveal his name and is often underestimated in battle by his opponents, to their cost.  When he reaches England, he finds the country under threat from the Danes. Still disguised as a pilgrim, he goes to Winchester where King Athelstan and his court are praying for deliverance. The king has called for a knight to fight the Danes' huge African champion, Colbrond but no-one has come forward. The king is visited by an angel in a dream and told that his champion will be the first pilgrim to be at the North Gate of the city on the next day. That pilgrim is Guy. In an epic encounter, worthy of Game of Thrones, Guy defeats Colbrond. He then returns to Felice in Warwick. Still disguised as a pilgrim, he joins a group of poor men being fed at the castle gate. Unrecognised, he is invited to eat with her in the castle but leaves to visit a hermitage, on the nearby banks of the Avon, where he hopes to receive instruction. 

Guy of Warwick's Cave. Guy's Cliffe

When he finds that the hermit has died, he replaces him. On the point of death himself, he sends a message to  Felice in the form of the gold ring. She comes to him as he lies dying and the pair are re-united. Felice dies soon after and is buried alongside Guy. 

And there ends the story. Told and re-told, more myth than history, it contains a wealth of different motifs: the mythic monsters of English folklore: the questing adventure, the dreams and miraculous discoveries, the battles and single combat of chivalric romance and the exile and return narrative,  the long separation, the disguise and discovery, common to so many myths and stories including the The Odyssey. 

Guy of Warwick has been rather eclipsed by Arthur and the Matter of Britain but his story is full of romance and adventure. He is a very English hero and his name lives on, not least on that quintessential symbol of England, the pub sign.

Celia Rees

www.celiarees.com

Legendary Heroes and Gothic Ruins - A Walk to Guy's Cliffe by Celia Rees

Guys Cliffe, Warwick

Like many writers, I often go for a walk if I'm stuck, if I need to think my way through a knotty plot problem, map out the next part of the story, or simply to get away from my desk. I live in a small town and five or ten minutes in any direction will take me out into the countryside. One of my favourite walks is to Guys Cliffe, an impressive gothic ruin on a sandstone bluff above the river Avon, about a mile upstream from the town of Warwick.  

Guy's Cliffe is named for Guy of Warwick, the legendary English hero, who fell in love with the  high born and beautiful Felice. To win her hand, he had to prove his valour by battling it out with dragons, a giant boar and the fiercesome Dun Cow which had been ravaging the land hereabouts. He wins the lady's hand but later goes on a pilgrimage to atone for his life as a man of violence. On his return, he became a hermit and retreated from the world to live in a cave above the Avon.

Guy's Cave

The Oratory reputedly founded by him became the chapel of St Mary Magdalene which is still on the site. After the dissolution of the monasteries, the chapel, outbuildings and surrounding land were acquired by a Sir Andrew Flammock who built a Tudor house, completed in 1556.

Guy's Cliffe on the Sheldon Tapestry, Warwick Museum

In the 18th Century, the property was acquired by Samuel Greatheed who built himself a mansion. He was MP for Coventry and an extremely wealthy man, having inherited a large plantation on St Kitts in the West Indies and the slaves that went with it. The house was started in 1751, after his marriage to Lady Mary Bertie and built in the grand palladian style.

The house passed by marriage from the Greatheed - Berties to the Percy family in 1826. They occupied the house for over a century, their graves can be found in the nearby village of Old Milverton's Cemetery, but the last Percy to inherit in 1933 never took up permanent residency. The house  was used as a hospital during the Second World War and as a school for evacuees. In 1947, the estate was broken up and sold. The families who had owned it from the 18th Century were gone, although their names live on as streets in Leamington Spa: Greatheed Road, Percy Terrace, Bertie Terrace and Bertie Road in nearby Kenilworth. Plans to convert the house into a hotel came to nothing and it fell into disrepair. The Free Masons acquired the undercroft and part of the house as a Masonic Lodge in the 1970s. They still use this part of the building but in 1992, during the filming of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - The Last Vampyre, the building caught fire, leaving the suitably gothic ruin that we see today. 

Now, Guy's Cliffe is often used for ghost hunts and ghost tours because, of course, there are ghost stories. Oppressive atmospheres, giant black figures, white ladies and even bad boy, Piers Gaveston, but perhaps he belongs to nearby Blacklow Hill and a different History Girls post. 

Celia Rees
www.celiares.com

AGES OF MEMORY by H.M. Castor

I’ve just completed a two-week tour to mark the publication of the paperback edition of my Tudor novel VIII. It took me to all sorts of places – Ipswich & Bramhall, Oxford & Hampton Court – and among them was my old childhood stamping ground of Leamington Spa & Warwick, neighbouring towns that have spread so close to one another that, as Eric Morecambe used to say, you can’t see the join. Here, Keith & Frances Smith, the lovely owners of the independent bookshops ‘Warwick Books’ and ‘Kenilworth Books’ (see their website) arranged for me to speak at an evening event alongside Nicola Shulman and Prof. Eric Ives, at the most wonderful venue imaginable…


'These deep eyes were now surveying them, slow and solemn, but very penetrating... One felt as if there was an enormous well behind them, filled up with ages of memory and long, slow, steady thinking; but their surface was sparkling with the present...' J.R.R. Tolkien, The Two Towers

The week before last, early on the Wednesday evening, a taxi deposited me outside an ancient building in the town of Warwick. I walked up to the imposing gate. Since it was well past 5 o’clock, a notice beside the gate said ‘Closed’ but, feeling rather Alice-in-Wonderland-ish, I thought I should try the door anyway. I turned the giant handle (above) and stepped inside. 

The gate from the inside

I had come to speak at an event in this most august of venues: the Lord Leycester Hospital in Warwick.

Alone inside the gateway, I hesitated. As anyone who has had the misfortune to wait for a train with me would confidently predict, I was early. No one else was in sight. What should I do? Ah, what? Loiter, of course! Loiter and look about me and feel the privilege of spending some time alone in this flabbergastingly gorgeous place.

The Westgate of Warwick (left), with chantry chapel above, and The Lord Leycester Hospital (right)

The Hospital’s own website (here) offers this potted history:

The Lord Leycester Hospital is not now, and has never been a medical establishment. The word hospital is used in its ancient sense meaning "a charitable institution for the housing and maintenance of the needy, infirm or aged".

The Hospital is an historic group of timber-framed buildings dating mainly from the late 14th Century clustered round the Norman gateway into Warwick with its 12th Century Chantry Chapel above it. Hidden behind the ancient buildings is the tiny but delightful Master's Garden.

For nearly 200 years it was the home of Warwick's mediaeval Guilds. In the reign of Queen Elizabeth I it became a place of retirement for old warriors. So it remains today as an independent charity providing a home for ex-Servicemen and their wives.

I loitered my way into the galleried courtyard, passing beneath this bear and ragged staff – an emblem that has been associated with the Earls of Warwick since at least the 14^th century, and was used by Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, favourite of Elizabeth I (whose father & brother were Earls of Warwick). It was Dudley who, having bought these buildings in 1571, set them up as a home for aged or injured soldiers.

Inside the courtyard, on the façade of the Master’s house, I spotted other bears standing guard along with a marvellous bristling porcupine (the porcupine was an emblem of the Sidney family, who were linked by marriage with the Dudleys).

The Master of the Hospital himself, Lt. Col. Gerald Lesinski, soon emerged from the door you can see on the left above. He would have been well within his rights if he'd asked me brusquely what I thought I was doing, peering at his house after closing time… but, on the contrary, he was all graciousness & generosity. He had, he told me, just been looking through the Hospital’s guest book and had found Oscar Wilde’s signature. “I knew we had Dickens and Darwin,” he said, “but I didn’t realise we had Wilde too!”

Oscar Wilde… Dickens… Darwin… I looked at the buildings about me with fresh eyes. The Lord Leycester, I reflected, is not only a medieval place, a Tudor place… it has been a Victorian place too. And a Georgian one, and an Edwardian and an everything-in-between-and-since.

Of course, you simply cannot stand here without thinking of the past in some fashion. But often I tend to think of the past in slices, rather than taking in the scale of the whole it… So, I look at these buildings and automatically estimate when they were built… and then, a few moments later, I try to picture them during my favourite period, the 16^th century.

And in so doing, I tend not to think of the sheer length of time the buildings have stood here and all that has happened in that time - the enormous well these buildings represent, filled up with ages of memory.

A short time later, as I looked across the street from the Lord Leycester, instead of defining the (wonderfully wonky) half-timbered building opposite (above) solely by the era in which it was built, I thought instead about all the changes it must have seen, and how it had stood there while the brick houses that you can just make out on the right were being constructed. And I realised that I’ve often looked at rows of buildings of different dates as if they were simply different cakes lined up in a cake shop window: this is 14^th century flavour, this is 18^th century flavour…

...instead of recognising that the 14^th century one is a building that, perhaps, stood alone before it acquired neighbours - or perhaps had other, different neighbours and stood solid even as they were demolished and replacements built.


It’s rather like a child’s view of the people around them, i.e. Granny happens to be a wrinkly person whose job is to be my grandmother, rather than Granny has seen so much! She was my age once, and then my mum's age too, and has lived through so many more days & years than me…

Now I began to think: the Lord Leycester Hospital buildings are medieval & stood here as the Wars of the Roses raged... but they stood here during the Civil War too – and during the Napoleonic Wars and the Russian Revolution and the Blitz. I began to think: these buildings were lived in by soldiers who fought in the Crimea, and on the Somme (perhaps). These buildings have seen all those days and months, those decades and centuries, and they will be here – I very much hope – when I am in my grave.

How easy it is to forget the accumulated weight of the past! If people’s life experience shone out of the tops of their heads like the light of Dickens’ Ghost of Christmas Past, the elderly’s would shine tallest & brightest… (for an illustration of the ghost, see here).

In the same way, the life experience (if I can put it that way) of these buildings is awe-inspiringly huge. And they have been significant not just at the time of their 'birth', but in each period they have 'lived' through. It is not only the new buildings of any period that give the flavour of that time. Just as in Henry VIII’s inventory there are treasured old items (devotional objects that belonged to his mother or grandmother, for example, or a sword used by Henry V) as well as items from Henry's time, so too the people of each period have inhabited, used, loved (or hated) old buildings, as well as modern ones.

When the Lord Leycester Hospital itself was ‘modern’, there would have been ‘old’ buildings in Warwick, of course. Over the centuries, as the Hospital has stood firm, buildings around it have come and gone. The idea plays in my mind like a time-lapse film – like this intriguing film from 1901 (credited as the first time-lapse film, in fact) which records the demolishing of a theatre in New York (it runs first in reverse, so that the theatre seems to be being built): see the film here.

Note the beady-eyed white pigeon!

Add to all this another layer: in the Lord Leycester Hospital, for me, the sweep of history is riffle-shuffled with my own personal memories.

For example, I love the Great Hall where that evening’s event took place – & where once, as the Master told me, James I sat down to dine (they still have the chair he sat in!). I love it for its marvellous beamed roof & higgledy-piggledy lattice windows…

… but I also love it because it was the venue, 23 years ago, for the Ruby Wedding celebration for my very dear great-uncle & great-aunt, Gordon & Lucy Southeard, and I could not possibly spend a moment in that room without thinking of Lucy (who still lives in Warwick) and without remembering Gordon - a remarkable, lovely and much missed man.

Uncle Gordon & Auntie Lucy (wearing red button-holes)
 in the Great Hall 

Try to hold your attention wide, taking in all that sweep of time, and it’s as if a pack of cards is being shuffled - what you see is: now that day, now this, now – in your mind’s eye – James I, now Oscar Wilde, now (for me) Uncle Gordon… now the astonishing kaleidoscope of every moment, great and small, that this building must hold in its memory:

How many people have stood in that dark doorway on the right (above), over the centuries? For how many people has the Lord Leycester Hospital been an old friend, a part of their lives, a place past which they have walked daily?

Never mind Oscar Wilde or Robert Dudley, what about the ordinary people of Warwick who knew it in, say, the 1720s, or the 1830s, or the 1940s?

That Wednesday visit turned into a wonderful evening, and I must end this post with some book recommendations. My fellow-speaker was Nicola Shulman, author of Graven with Diamonds, which is an audacious, erudite & superbly entertaining new analysis of the poems of Thomas Wyatt, and the uses to which they were put within the claustrophobic inner circle of Henry VIII’s court.

The chair for the evening was Prof. Eric Ives, author of an absolutely brilliant biography (the biography, I'm tempted to say) of Anne Boleyn - The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn. Prof. Ives is also the author of (amongst other things) a fascinating analysis of the rise & fall of Lady Jane Grey: Lady Jane Grey - A Tudor Mystery. And – to be published this June – a book on the Reformation that I can’t wait to read: The Reformation Experience. See details of all 3 titles here.

(l-r) Prof. Eric Ives, Nicola Shulman, Brother Peter, me

Here we are at the steps to the chantry chapel alongside Brother Peter, one of the Hospital’s residents.

Thank you to Keith & Frances Smith of Warwick Books for arranging & supporting the evening, and to the Master for welcoming us so warmly!

The Lord Leycester Hospital is open to visitors all year round and can be contacted about hosting events (including weddings) through its website here. It relies on visitor fees to keep it going and is an independent charity well worth supporting!

H.M. Castor's novel VIII - a new take on the life of Henry VIII - is published by Templar in the UK and by Penguin in Australia. It is now available in paperback, hardback & ebook format.

H.M. Castor's website is here.