Herman The Little Book of Hertfordshire

1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-1-80399-546-5
Verlag: The History Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 192 Seiten

Hertfordshire is full of stories. The county's proximity to London attracts the great, the good and those less so: Hertfordshire was once home to saints such as St Alban, St Thomas More and the only English Pope, Nicholas Breakspear. Such virtuous figures pose a sharp contrast to those involved in the Hertford elections of time gone by, which were once declared the most corrupt in the country! It is no secret that Elizabeth I became queen at Hatfield House in south Hertfordshire - but did you know that her father, Henry VIII, fled a plague-ridden London to a nearby village while waiting for his first divorce to come through? And that just around the corner, 400 years later, engineers were secretly developing the bombers that helped win the Second World War? There are so many tales to be told about this amazing county that it is impossible to squeeze them all between these covers but open The Little Book of Hertfordshire at any time or any place and you can expect to be amused, entertained and intrigued.

RUTH HERMAN has a career in PR and lecturing at university level. Now retired, she enjoys writing to make history engaging and accessible to the general reader. Her first book, The Incredibly Biased Beer Guide, won a Guild of British Beer Writers Bronze prize. Her most recent book was Grub Street: The Origins of the British Press. She lives in Hertfordshire.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Herman, Ruth

Leseproben

GHOSTS AND SCAMS

There are so many good stories about ghosts in old buildings around the county that I am haunted with regret that I cannot include them all. But there are many websites claiming to list the top ten or fifteen of these Hertfordshire apparitions. I have arbitrarily chosen the ones that interested, intrigued or amused me. Some are bizarre and there are even some where a selection of ‘beings’ appear to collaborate. Or at least that’s what it looks like. I doubt there is a ghostly union but it would be interesting to see if they would strike for better conditions – damper and darker perhaps. All I can say is that the reports of them make them sound very unhappy. I cannot guarantee their existence but if you are a ghost hunter check them out. Here is a selection.

Minsden Chapel, Chapelfoot, near the village of Preston, is just south of Hitchin and it is the first of our ventures into the ghostly world of the unexplained. It’s an interesting one to start with as the latest appearances were revealed as a scam. The chapel was built in the fourteenth century but by the seventeenth it had become a crumbling ruin. The late eighteenth century saw crumbling ruins as romantic sites and they made ideal wedding venues. Minsden Chapel was popular until a piece of it fell on to the priest’s prayer book as he conducted the marriage ceremony. This may well have put a damper on the proceedings, and you could forgive one of the participants taking a pause for thought at this less than auspicious moment. Given the choice of venue, the happy couple may have been fans of the newly fashionable Gothic novels where nearly everything goes bump in the night. The place was simply giving up the ghost (pun intended). A photographer with a sense of humour faked a picture of a monk on stairs that had been knocked down. There were also reports of glowing crosses, strange music and a murdered nun (I’m not entirely sure whether she appeared or was simply part of the legend). It has also been reported that one nineteenth-century ghoul and the ghost of another woman also haunt the grounds, appearing in various rooms of the priory. A paranormal investigator spent the night there and confirmed these strange goings on. The cynics among us might remark that he had to keep his reputation intact, so his word is not necessarily reliable. Historic England have plans to restore the chapel. I trust they will consult the wandering priest and the nun.

Not far from this is another doubtful haunting, but the name of the site is so unusual that I felt it was worth a mention, and that’s before you take into account the weird things that people have claimed to see. Cold Christmas Church is the popular name for St Marys and All Saints Church, which sits outside Thundridge village. It is supposed to be the home of various ghosts, including the large gloomy ‘thing’ that wanders round the graveyard. As is the way with many effective hauntings, there is very little left of the church itself, just the church tower that was left after it was partially demolished in the mid-1800s. One of the church’s major problems is that it was built on a north–south alignment rather than the approved east–west. Now, everybody knew that this would attract the wrong sort of worshipper, specifically they would be satanic, including witches and other ne’er-do-wells. The church had its comeuppance in later years when it was pulled down. Some said this was to prevent it from being the go-to place for the beings to meet.

This abandoned church was once the heart of the village and dates back to the eleventh century. The churchyard contains the remains of a large number (unspecified) of children who froze to death. How and why is not clear. The soundtrack for the church is a variable mixture of children’s moans and crying, weird music and also growling. The icing on this ghostly cake was the army of spirits that walked straight through an unsuspecting woman and then walked through what was left of the walls. The church or most of it had been demolished, but leaving enough for the party of transparent soldiers in 1853.

Ghosts seem to be fond of inns and Hertfordshire can boast lots of haunted hostelries. We have the Brocket Arms, Ayot St Lawrence, where the spirits of ancient pilgrims to the shrine at St Albans are said to have taken up residence. I find this difficult to understand as once they arrive there, they are only a few miles from the shrine. Did they decide to stop in the inn and end up staying? And then find themselves murdered? There are also several monks who hang around. I’m not entirely sure why but the monks are said to keep themselves busy walking through walls since these are licensed rather than sanctified walls.

Also in contention as the most haunted hotel is the White Hart Hotel in St Albans. It was a full-service coaching inn in the 1800s. Sadly, the story goes, a woman broke her neck as a coach came in to the low entrance, ignoring the coachman’s orders to duck as they went through. She is said to haunt the hotel ready for travel but looking very miserable. Dickens included her in . She is probably still waiting for the train station to be built to carry on her journey. This lady may have met the ghost of the 12-year-old girl who burnt to death in 1832. She occupies the back stairs of the hotel.

BALLS PARK MANSION, HERTFORD

The story of the Grey Lady is part of the fabric of Balls Park Mansion in Hertford. As a former lecturer there, I can remember the beautiful rooms and ceilings of this Jacobean mansion, which were in dire need of restoration. This has been achieved by its sale to a developer, who has converted it into a set of very sympathetic luxury apartments. It is a Grade I listed building so every care had to be taken to preserve the physical and spiritual essence of the place. However, I do wonder whether this upgrade has frightened off the Grey Lady whose despair haunted the black and white hall, as we used to call it. She apparently threw herself off the minstrel’s gallery after being seduced and then abandoned by the son of the lord of the manor. Generally, she walks through a wall and then does her act. Since she only appeared (I think) after Christmas parties and during freshers’ week celebrations, I have my doubts as to her presence. But it kept students and staff alike interested, so I am ready to be less cynical.

THE WICKED LADY

The next tale of ghostly doings offers a completely different and much more attractive scenario. It involves in no particular order a beautiful young lady heiress who through boredom has taken to literally holding up the traffic by night with a handsome highwayman who is also living a double life: farmer by day and nocturnal robber. This is understandable as quite a lot of the story comes from novels and two Hollywood films. These bits of fiction serve as the only documentary ‘evidence’ and the movies star the impossibly glamorous Margaret Lockwood (1945) and a wild-eyed and equally improbable Faye Dunaway (1983). Neither of these films make the slightest curtsey to authentic staging. Add to this what was once a twelfth-century priory (a ghastly nun has been added in for no particular reason). It is the mythical figure based on a real person that I will put forward for consideration.

The main character in this unlikely tale of haunting is Lady Katherine Fanshawe (née Ferrers). She was the best sort of heiress, an orphaned one. Born in the mid-seventeenth century, she was unfortunate to be caught up in the bottomless pit of funding for the English Civil War. She was even more unfortunate to be married to Sir Thomas Fanshawe. He was a member of a fiercely Royalist family, a soldier and had no compunction in systematically draining her riches to fund the Royalist cause. With nothing to do and nowhere to go, as legend has it, she was bored, particularly as her husband was away a lot fighting for the king and spending her inheritance. Pepys described him as a ‘witty but rascally fellow, without a penny in his purse’. The outcome of this boredom was that she dressed herself up as a man and took up doing a bit of highway robbery as a hobby to keep herself amused. In her male attire, she rode to Nomansland in Wheathampstead.

Let’s recap. She was an orphan with an independent fortune. She died at the age of 26, childless; the cause of death is unknown, although the legend would say that she was shot and crawled back to the family home to die. It was said that she took up this career as a highwayman partly because she was in a household where she knew few people. Why on earth would an aristocratic young lady take up such an unsuitable pastime? Worse still, some said that she had been introduced to galloping after people and relieving them of their money and valuables by a local farmer. Association with a local famer is really not what ladies did. Most likely of all (in the unlikely event that it was her) was that she was trying to replace the large chunks of her fortune that were going into the king’s coffers. This might have been the case if there was the slightest documentary evidence. Even her death has been recreated as a myth. It was said that she expired crawling home after she had been shot but it was a home that had been sold several years before and she had never lived in it. It’s a great story, and I’m sure that sooner or later someone will turn it into a good film that makes no claims on the truth.

ST ALBAN, THE ABBEY AND A FEW SPARE SPIRITS

I am beginning to change my opinion of Hertford county as relatively peaceful. While I’m not comparing it to TV’s...