Lamented Lassington

"John thought sadly of Lassington and its little church. The tower was all that was left of it. For some reason, now forgotten, a Norman church had been demolished and rebuilt in neo-Norman style in 1875. But the foundations had been faulty and the chancel had begun to part company with the nave. The end had come at a Harvest Thanksgiving service in the early 1970s. A sudden downpour in the middle of the service had deluged the visiting preacher in his stall. The church, used only occasionally by that time, had finally been abandoned..."

— Anthony Duncan, Faversham's Dream

What's left, a Grade II* listed stump, perches on a small semicircular tump rising from the farmland within a wider loop of the Leadon. The grass coarse, rough-mown, fends off waiting brambles. St Oswald still has his tower. The church, a ghost, is present only in the long rectangular gap; its delineation faintly seen and dimly imagined.

Almost buried, the steep churchyard steps disappear under grass, ankle-twisting tussocks in the dips and hollows of slipping graves whose stones lurch, defaced, generations flaking from memory, blank bones of stones under frost-sheared scrolls.

Only the lawnmower paces the line of the aisle and bumps over the vanished floor, its vaults mossed over and its chapels a figment in the grass. The skinny, blue-lias tower is silent, a bell-free shell.

I've lamented many times the misguided Victorians in their zeal for church "restoration" which usually involved destroying centuries of priceless heritage. Wall paintings scrubbed away or chiselled off, medieval pews chucked out and ancient atmosphere sterilised. But the restoration of Lassington church by Medland & Son in 1875 was so catastrophic it can only echo Michael Caine's immortal words, "You were only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!"

I haven't been able to find any evidence either to confirm or deny Anthony Duncan's description of events, taken from a fictionalised account, above. But as well as being a writer with a deep interest in, and love for, historic churches, he was rector of the adjoining parish of Highnam (into which Lassington had been absorbed) in the early 1970s and was pastorally responsible for Lassington church around the time of its demise. It's very possible therefore that he was present at the service where the preacher got drenched.

What is certain is that the church was abandoned in 1972, and as it was dilapidated and structurally unsafe, demolished in 1975. Leaving only the tower.

I'm seeing this in so many churchyards at the moment: recent harsh winters have stripped the inscriptions from old graves, in this case what looks like an early 18th century Forest of Dean cherub headstone.

There is an aching sadness about Lassington churchyard even on a summer's day. It's not much visited anyway, being stranded at the end of a long, pot-holed lane. One minute you're driving down a nice smooth road towards a well-appointed housing estate and then ker-thunk, watch you don't scrape your exhaust pipe. There is no village at Lassington apart from a few individual houses strung out along the lane, a rather nice old Court, and the roofless ivy-smothered shell of a derelict building opposite the church. Being the hub of such a small community, Lassington church endured neglect and underinvestment for centuries.

Originally built under the patronage of St Oswald's Priory in Gloucester, hence its dedication to St Oswald, for most of its history it was served only sporadically by a succession of curates and absentee rectors with a roster of eccentric names. One 19th century curate went by the name of Powell Colchester Guise. Going back to the 1640s, the incumbent was Ezra Graile, who had taken over from the exquisitely named Elias Wrench. Not so eccentrically named was the 16th century rector Henry Smith, booted out in 1518 following a charge of sexual incontinence.

In the west wall of the tower – ancient window, modern glass

The Victoria County History records that in the 16th and 17th centuries the church was "in a poor state of repair, lacking paving, glazing and tiling." Though in those days it wasn't that unusual for rural parish churches to have to make do with a bare earth floor. It had a little surge of better fortune in the 19th century when the village population grew and the church was better appreciated, culminating in the money being raised for its drastic and ultimately disastrous rebuilding. Some of the original Norman stonework was retained in the rebuilding, and it had a magnificent chevroned chancel arch (now lost). By the mid 20th century the church was slipping into terminal decline. Which is really sad, as its remaining stump is close to 1000 years old.

The surviving tower was built in the 11th century and may well even be Saxon. The first two storeys are the oldest part, and have the little round-headed lancet windows which are typical of the Saxon and early Norman period. These windows are deeply splayed, which means the openings on the inside are much bigger: large round-headed arches narrowing to a tiny little slit for the actual window (unfortunately the tower is kept locked so it's not easy to get inside and see this). The one in the west wall contains a blue guilloche glazing which is very pretty even if not very old. The window on the south side has a stone jutting out above it which may originally have been carved, but it's too weathered to tell for sure. It certainly looks very like the Anglo-Saxon window-head carvings, similarly weathered, on the nearby Saxon church of St Mary at Deerhurst.

The top chunk of the tower was added in the 14th century, and has the wider ogee-topped windows belonging to that time period. It also includes a few salvaged Roman red bricks in its fabric (one just visible in the photo above, to the top left of the upper window). There were apparently traces of Roman buildings in Lassington visible as recently as Victorian times, in the area south-east of the church where the medieval village used to be – all of which is now just lumps and bumps in a field. It's worth having a look at the aerial view of Lassington on Google Maps (you can find it quickly using the Reference Map tab above). The outline of a large square moat is clearly visible to the south-east of the church, which probably belonged to the manor house destroyed in the Civil War. You can also see the remains of strip lynchets and old roads from the vanished village.

Lassington's pagan connections are possibly thriving more actively. Long beloved by Druids and a gathering place for gypsies, the Lassington Oak was a significant landmark in nearby Lassington Wood, thought to have been getting on for 700 years old at the time of its demise. It had a girth of 29ft and had to be propped up by a complicated assortment of wooden struts. In 1960 it was blown over in a gale, and now only its recumbent trunk survives, although a ring of 12 oak saplings was planted around it in 1921 by a Druid Order. Its spirit also lives on in the Lassington Oak Morris Men who continue the age old traditions of mummers' plays and morris dances in the area.

Writing in 1938, when the church was still extant and in use, Arthur Mee mentions a giant elm tree at the churchyard gate with a girth of over 20ft, and another in the churchyard standing over an ancient coffin. All gone now.

There is now a visitor information board beside the tower which includes some heartbreaking photos of the interior of the church during its last days, derelict and crumbling.

This doorway in the east wall dates back no further than 1976, constructed as part of a necessary shoring up of the wall following the destruction of the body of the church. The wooden door itself is Victorian and was originally fitted during the rebuilding scheme in 1875, while the ironwork on it is known to have been salvaged from the church's original south door and is much older. This ironwork closely resembles that on the west door of Rudford church, a mile or so up the road.

Lassington church is in the care of the Churches Conservation Trust, a charity which has saved many historic churches from destruction, doing a great job despite facing a 20% cut in its funding.

Sources:
Victoria County History: Gloucestershire vol. VIII (draft version, 2010)
Mee, Arthur, The King's England: Gloucestershire (Hodder & Stoughton, 1938)

White violets and clashing kings: the Odda side of Deerhurst

The presence of two Saxon churches in close formation is one obvious reason to revere the parish of Deerhurst in Gloucestershire as a unique historic treasure, but it also lays claim to some other important Anglo-Saxon shenanigans.

Fourteen months of bitter violent fighting, repeated clashes and ravagings across England from Northumberland to Somerset, betrayals, defections, double crossings and fickle loyalties, amazingly came to a peaceful and unbloodied end in a meadow by the Severn.

These battles were the long struggle of the English Saxons, under the Kings Æthelred the Unready and his son Edmund Ironside, to fend off the invading forces of the Danish King Cnut (sometimes spelled Canute to avoid the risk of accidental anagrams), who came in 200 shining longships tipped with silver and gold, "the men of metal, menacing with golden face", terrorising and overwhelming every part of the country. After a vicious battle in Essex, King Edmund fled west, possibly hoping to find some support across the Welsh border, but Cnut caught up with him at the River Severn. And so it was at Deerhurst that the two kings met, in October 1016, and signed a truce. Cnut was to have all of England north of the Thames, but Edmund Ironside was to keep southern England, including London, for the rest of his life. Unfortunately, the rest of his life turned out to be only six weeks. His death at the end of November 1016 forfeited the rest of the English lands to Cnut. The circumstances of the young king's demise are lost to history, but the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle makes no mention of any suspicion of foul deeds, so presumably the cause was natural. Cnut consolidated his position by marrying King Æthelred's widow Emma the following year, while keeping his first wife Ælfgifu as a spare, and went on to help himself to Norway and a few bits of Sweden. He is most famous, of course, for getting his boots wet on a beach in Southampton.

Edmund Ironside (left) and Cnut the Dane, from a 13th century manuscript: Chronica Maiora, Cambridge, Corpus Christi, 26, f. 160.

According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the truce between Edmund and Cnut took place on an eyot, or small river island near Deerhurst, called Ola's Island – Olney or Alney. (Confusingly, there is an Alney island a few miles downstream, but that almost certainly isn't it.) To this safe and secluded spot both kings were conveyed by fishing-boat. In his book Tewkesbury and Deerhurst, published over a century ago, Henri Massé cites the site as the place known locally as the Naight – and many other sources agree. The name is a clue, because the word "eyot" (pronounced the same as "eight") readily morphs into "naight". There is no obvious trace of this island at Deerhurst today. But it can still be found.

Follow me from the place where the road ends, by the gate of Odda's Chapel. A footpath leads over a tiny stream and across a flat plain, lightly moated on both sides, a short way to the bank of the River Severn. The first landmark you see in this featureless plain is not the steely Severn, but this magnificent holey oak tree (with the Malverns lined up behind).

This vast and ancient tree is hollow: if you're relatively small and supple you could get inside it and climb right through. It has survived countless floods, and its cavity is banked up with densely packed river silt. During a flood the river flows straight through the trunk. The tree is a marker of the ways, and has been so for centuries. It stands at the point where the moated path from the village joins another passing track which runs along the cusp of the river (innovatively named the Severn Way). Turn left along this path and through the gate, which leads alongside a patch of scrub and shortly to another gate. This opens out into a meadow with a stand of oak trees in the middle, on what is otherwise a flat expanse of floodplain. The outline of an earthwork, of uncertain date, can be faintly seen running alongside the riverbank, and a corresponding one cuts diagonally across the meadow, marking out a long sliver of land. This is the Naight – it was almost certainly on this sliver of meadow, in 1016, that the Saxon and Danish kings met.

It doesn't look much like an island today, but 1000 years ago this chunk of land was entirely surrounded by water and could only be accessed by boat. The Severn may now pass cleanly within straightish banks (aside from its tendency to erupt in flood) but in the past it was bigger and more sprawling. During the Saxon period it was wide enough to encompass much of what is now riverside meadow. Thus a miniature island was formed in what must have been a very large and formidable river. As the Severn shrunk away over time the eyot was left dry, although its outline was still cut out from the meadow by a little stream known as the Naight Brook. No longer requiring a boat, the brook was small enough to cross with a simple footbridge. In more recent years, the Naight Brook has dried up almost completely – and the delineation of the island is only faintly traced in the contours of the meadow.

I was initially drawn to the spot by its magnetism. Three great oak trees. One fallen, its whorled and grained trunk now barkless and hollow. Within its cavern the cellular pockets of wild bees,  harbingers of faery in old myth. The middle tree shattered black down its core, lightning split, headless, but spiking fresh wands all around. The other tree immaculate, stately. The wind began to blow when I put my hand on the trunk of the middle tree, shaking its branches. The ground is different here – it stands slightly proud of the field, and the lusher plant life gives away the presence of water, which wells up around your feet as you pass. If the ground is spongy underfoot you've found the Naight Brook.

A look at some old maps, such as the Ordnance Survey of 1884, shows a line of trees running along the bank of the Naight Brook for its entire length. Although the positions of trees on Victorian maps can't always be taken too literally, it does seem likely that the two surviving and one deceased oaks are the sole remainders of this tree avenue, with the great holey oak two fields away also being part of the same line. They are doing better than the Naight Brook, which is basically nonexistent. It was still being shown on maps up to the 1970s, but the patches of damp grass are the only hint that it was ever there. Plus perhaps one other clue.

What is this stone wall doing here? Well I don't know, is the honest answer. But it has an arched channel running underneath it which tunnels through the earth for several feet and emerges half way down the river bank (photo below). It's largely blocked up with earth now and completely dry, but it appears to have been designed for water to flow through. Again, study of old maps shows that its site coincides with the outflow of the Naight Brook into the River Severn, so it's probably fair to assume that it was built to contain the outflow. The maps also indicate that there was a footbridge over the brook here, or very near by. So my best guess is that this chunk of strangely isolated stonework is the last remaining portion of the bridge.

The disused and partially obscured conduit where the Naight Brook once discharged into the Severn.

A map of the Naight (more or less to scale).

The proximity of Deerhurst to the River Severn is a mixed blessing. Everyone in North Gloucestershire will remember forever the floods of July 2007 but the residents of Deerhurst went through a horrendous ordeal – which can be seen in pictures on their Floodblog. Their neighbourly spirit and stoic humour is a credit to them. There was also a devastating flood in 1947, and no doubt on many previous occasions in past centuries. The Severn is not a friendly river, and occasionally it becomes a monster.

It's perhaps something of a liability, then, that right on the edge of the vulnerable low-lying floodplain stands one of England's precious Saxon architectural relics: Odda's Chapel.

Forty years after the signing of the English-Danish treaty on the Naight, a local ealdorman, Earl Odda, built a modest chapel on his lands at Deerhurst within view of the priory (see my previous article for more details about the Saxon priory). Cnut's 20 year reign had ended in the depositing of another English king on the throne: Edward the Confessor. Odda's timing might be seen as a little unfortunate, because by the time he built his chapel, in 1056, there were only another ten years to go before the Norman Conquest and the ending of Saxon rule forever. Not that Odda himself lived to see it: he died only four months after completing his chapel. After 1066, the invading Normans became obsessive-compulsive church builders and were all too keen to replace the older English structures with their own edifices. It wasn't very long before Odda's humble little chapel disappeared.

Many centuries later, in 1675, an intriguing engraved stone was turned up in the orchard of Abbot's Court, a medieval house in Deerhurst.

A replica of the dedication stone found in the orchard (the original is in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford). The inscription translates as: "Duke Odda ordered this royal hall to be built and dedicated to the honour of the Holy Trinity for the soul of his brother Ælfric which was taken up from this place. Bishop Ealdred it was who dedicated the same on the 12th April in the 14th year of the reign of Edward, King of the English". A second (mutilated) stone is set above.

Written in Latin, in generous roman-uncial letters, it appeared to be the dedication stone for a chapel of the Holy Trinity which Odda had built for the soul of his deceased brother Ælfric; it was dated April 1056.

The stone was taken by some as evidence that a chapel had once stood somewhere near the spot, as there is some mention of one in the shambolic Tewkesbury Chronicle of the post-1066 period. It was more widely assumed though that the stone belonged to one of the chapels of the priory church, which was only a short distance away and did undergo some extension in the 11th century. If there had ever been any other chapel building, it was thought, it must have been destroyed long ago.

However, Odda's Chapel wasn't destroyed. It was subsumed.

The truth finally came out in 1885. The timber-framed medieval house whose orchard had yielded the consecration stone turned out to have entirely encased the Saxon chapel: swallowed it whole. A portion of half-timbered house had been built at one end, and then extended to swallow up the entirety of the little church. Its small chancel at the east end had been divided into two floors, with leaded-light windows installed; the upper storey fitted with a fireplace and chimney and used as a bedroom. The somewhat larger nave had been pressed into service as a kitchen. The whole structure was plastered over on the outside so that, to all external appearances, it was just a common or garden medieval farmhouse.

Once this discovery had been made, a process of reclaiming the chapel got underway, and what emerged was a 46ft long two-part building with a typically Saxon horseshoe arch in the middle. Confirmation of its provenance came in the form of a second engraved stone, found within the chimney stack. Unfortunately this stone had been re-used as a window head, and a big slice chiselled out of it which makes the inscription undecipherable, but there is enough left of it to confirm the building's status as a chapel. In its transmutation into a domestic dwelling some damage had been done to the structure of the chapel: a wall missing and a doorway lost. And the scars can still be seen in the west wall where a very large kitchen fireplace had been punched through. But all things considered, the building is remarkably intact.

Nave of Odda's Chapel, now restored to its original form after a long and humble career as a kitchen.

Details of the life of Odda are few, not surprisingly for someone who lived so long ago. He was probably born some time around 990, and may have been a kinsman of Edward the Confessor. He was awarded much of the land confiscated from the disgraced Earl Godwin, only to be made to give it back when Godwin came back into favour. He is known to have been an extremely generous benefactor of Pershore Abbey, helping to re-establish it after it had been destroyed by fire and abandoned by its monks. If the chronicler John of Worcester is to be believed, he was also a kindly benefactor to the community and a generous champion for the poor and oppressed. He took holy orders towards the end of his life and when he died on 31st August 1056 he was buried in Pershore Abbey.

If Odda was related to Edward the Confessor then that would also make him a kinsman of Edmund Ironside. In her book The World Before Domesday, Ann Williams suggests the possibility that Odda may already have been in possession of Deerhurst in 1016, which would put him right at the heart of the Edmund-Cnut negotiations. This can only be speculated, but it's an intriguing thought.

I associate Earl Odda with white violets. Why? Because the ground outside his chapel is packed with them. Viola odorata, sweet violets. If you have a look at the closely mown lawn on the south side in early spring they are a beautiful sight – and scent, if you feel like grovelling about on your hands and knees to snuffle at them. White sweet violets are not uncommon in the English countryside but it intrigues me that they are so abundant at Odda's Chapel when the Priory churchyard just a few yards away is blooming with the more conventional purple Dog violet.

Sweet violets (Viola odorata) in the grounds of Odda's Chapel.

Odda's Chapel was consecrated by Bishop Ealdread of Worcester on 12th April 1056. Such a precise dating for an Anglo-Saxon monument is rare, but the survival of the consecration stone gives us this information. The feel of the chapel is quite beautiful, especially in the nave, where I always find my stomach doing a loop-the-loop as soon as I walk through the door. It's small and humble but has a deep aura of sanctity.

Although the chancel is now well lit, there's no trace of any window from the Saxon period, so if there was one it was probably very small. Maybe Odda preferred the sense of mystery created by candlelight. The nave is also dimly lit, having only two small windows, high in the wall.

The photo above shows the alterations to the chancel. The ceiling timbers, leaded windows, and upstairs chimney breast and fireplace are all interlopers, part of the transformation into a domestic dwelling. Not all of it dates from the medieval conversion: the leaded windows are Tudor, and you can also see a small stone bracket in the corner of the downstairs wall which dates from the 13th century (suggesting, perhaps, that the chapel was still in use at that time). The upstairs bit was used as a bedroom from the medieval period onwards, and you can only wonder what strange dreams its occupants may have had. Henri Massé (writing in 1900) makes mention of a ladder allowing access to the upstairs section, but this is long gone, and it's no longer possible to go up there.

Sources:

Gilbert, Edward, A Guide to the Priory Church and Saxon Chapel, Deerhurst, Gloucestershire (privately printed, 1956, revised 1977).

Massé, H.J.L.J., The Abbey Church of Tewkesbury, with Some Account of the Priory Church of Deerhurst, Gloucestershire (London, Bell & Sons, 1900).

Swanton, Michael (ed.), The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (Routledge, 1998).

Williams, Ann, The World Before Domesday: The English Aristocracy, 900-1066 (London, Continuum, 2008).

Deorhurst: grove of glorious beasts

River Severn at Deerhurst.

An isolated flood-prone plateau between the sluggard River Severn and the eternal old track now baptised the A38. A long straight lane ending in a curl before it glances the river bank. A menagerie of wild beasts in stone and legend, and the oaken tracks of Kings. A place of orchard cottage dreams, of roses and lawns and white violets, demurely hosting two Saxon churches barely 100 yards apart.

Deerhurst crouches off the modern beaten track, a secret spot about equidistant between Tewkesbury and Cheltenham. It gets minimal through-traffic because its roads, so close to the unbridged River Severn, don't really go anywhere. It's mostly open meadows and flood plains these days, but its older name, Deorhurst, reveals a "grove of wild beasts".

This is the first of two articles about Deerhurst, as there's far too much interesting stuff in this village to cover in one go. Here we have a dander round the older of the two churches.

From this angle you can clearly see that the Priory Church of St Mary is a bit of a bolt-together job from different time periods. It's immediately obvious that the aisles on either side of the tower have been added later, the smooth ashlar making no attempt to blend in with the rougher rubblestone. If you look carefully you can see that the top part of the tower is also an add-on, although still very ancient. The lower part of the tower is the oldest bit. One of the giveaways is the use of stones stacked diagonally within the masonry, and with little attempt to arrange any of it in level courses – a building style that particularly characterises the Saxon period. Two sticky-outy carvings of dark age provenance are unfortunately too weathered and damaged to decipher.

You only have to get just inside the door to find the first of Deerhurst's wild beasts.

Is it a dog? Is it a dragon? From the front it even looks like a cow, but I wouldn't want to meet a cow with a set of fangs like that. Its nose certainly suggests it's a dog - reminiscent of the style of hunting dogs seen in Celtic artwork. It stands on guard by the door, along with its asymmetrically matching companion, as a label-stop inside the west porch of Deerhurst church. No ordinary church, you understand, but a proud, mutated but miraculously surviving edifice of a vital Anglo-Saxon monastic site. The doggy is of eye-watering antiquity – probably chiselled into being some time in the early 9th century.

At the opposite end of the church is another pair of beastie label-stops on a chancel arch. These look more dragon-like but also, it has to be said, like a cartoon hippopotamus (George from Rainbow?) They have tusks though, so perhaps they're supposed to depict wild boar. The church also has an interesting image of a domestic animal; the tomb brass of Sir John Cassey and his wife Alice (dated 1400) also depicts her pet dog, Terri. It's very unusual to find animals' names mentioned on old brasses.

Anglo-Saxon remains in Britain are rare. There are plenty of Norman parish churches around, but for something as old as Deerhurst priory to have survived is remarkable fortune. It hasn't got through history unscathed of course; the original church was smaller and simpler in shape. During the turbulent medieval years (when its wares were repeatedly plundered by greed-crazed monarchs) it got its chancel whipped off, its tower strangely bolted onto, its outer walls knocked through for an aisle extension and a monastic building shunted up its kisser. But with a bit of imagination and a floor plan you can still see the tall thin lines of the original Saxon building, and some of the ramshackle lopsided herringbone stonework which shows off its dark age credentials.

Plans reproduced from H. Massé's Tewkesbury and Deerhurst, published 1900.

Even within the Saxon period the church was undergoing changes. The earliest church was a simple rectangular job and may have been built in the seventh or eighth century, or possibly even earlier. During the next few centuries a west porch was added and the two side chapels appeared; and then in around 1000 AD the church was extended at both ends with a further souped-up porch in the west, which was built up to make a tower, and a semi-circular chancel added at the east end (now ruined).

However there were some more drastic changes in the 12th and 13th centuries which have altered the character and shape of the church, and some of the Saxon features were lost. Much of the original nave was knocked through to make way for a row of decorated arches.

The domestic building which adjoins the church is also a rude interloper in historical terms, but it is a gorgeous building. Built around the late 14th or early 15th century and much poked and prodded in the fashions of later eras, it's now a private farmhouse but the quadrangle it forms alongside the church was once a monastic cloister. The blocked doorway which once gave access between church and cloister also has beastie-heads as label-stops, but these face into the priory garden and are not accessible to the public.

The Priory farmhouse, joined onto the church at one end, is a surviving monastic relic. What is now a domestic garden was once the cloister (see plan above) still with an original Saxon door.

It isn't possible to put a date on the original foundation of this church. The first definite recorded reference to it is in 804 AD, when it was part of a monastery or abbey and received a gift of land from a bloke called Æthelric. It's highly likely that it was already well established by then, but nobody really knows for how long. It was at one time the principle monastery of Hwicce, the Saxon kingdom of the lower Severn. The churches of Hwicce originally adopted Celtic Christianity rather than the missionary Roman version.

It must have been an important place and it predates its close neighbour monastery, Tewkesbury Abbey, by some centuries. Information about the Deerhurst monastery is scarce but it seems at some late date to have become a Benedictine priory. One of its luminaries was St Alphege, or Ælfheah to give him his Saxon name, who began his monastic life at Deerhurst before going on to become Archbishop of Canterbury and later a martyr to marauding Danes at Greenwich and thus into a giddy spiral to canonisation. St Alphege is commemorated in a 15th century stained glass window at Deerhurst, and as it happens 2012 is his millennial year, having met his sainted demise in 1012.

Another slightly less high-flying martyr saint is associated with Deerhurst, but still important in his own way: St Werstan. He was a monk at Deerhurst at a time when it was ransacked by Danes. He escaped and fled up to the Malvern hills, where he founded a cell close to the site of St Ann's Well. The misery of Viking-harassment was far from over though, and the unfortunate Werstan was murdered in his own chapel. Legend has it that this atrocity was the reason for the founding of Great Malvern Priory; whether true or not, St Werstan is well commemorated in the windows of Great Malvern Priory church.

West doors. The inner one, though probably restored, is a beautiful example of a rounded Saxon arch. The outer one is an original Saxon doorway (from the church's later development, around 1000 AD) with a later medieval pointed doorway inserted into it.

Despite medieval alterations, Saxon features abound. The round-headed arches, the small triangular recess beside the blocked doorway half way up the wall (suggesting there was formerly a second floor in the church at this level, or at least a gallery) and most notably the twin triangular-headed windows at the top, which are exquisitely carved – all are surviving features of the earliest pre-Conquest church.

It's speculated that the Danes may have made an occasional raid on Deerhurst Abbey during the late Saxon period, and they were known to have a particular fondness for ransacking monastic establishments. The eventual fall of the Saxon royal dynasty was enshrined at Deerhurst, where King Edmund Ironside was obliged in 1016 to sign over most of England to the Danish King Cnut in a meadow by the Severn. The decline of Deerhurst as an abbey probably came about a few years later during the reign of Edward the Confessor, who handed it over to the French Abbey of St. Denis. It was downgraded to a priory, and then the notoriously exploitative King John came along and trousered all its revenues. Subsequent Norman dukes and monarchs helped themselves to whatever was left.

Detail of the triangular windows and their curious fluted decoration. There is an "upper room" hidden on the other side and the window is carved on that side too.

Another of Deerhurst's Saxon treasures is its font, decorated with beautiful panels of spiral scrolls in a style that shows a certain Celtic influence. It's made from local Cotswold stone (oolitic limestone) and like the other carvings in the church it dates from before the Norman Conquest. At some point in the subsequent centuries though it became detached from its home and ended up being used as a washtub in a local farmyard.

In 1844 it was rescued from this ignominious fate by the Dean of Westminster, who bought it for the nearby parish church of Longdon. There it remained for 25 years, until its lower portion apparently turned up in Deerhurst:

"A lady in the neighbourhood (Miss Strickland, of Apperley Court) found in a garden close to the river, in 1870, an upright carved stone. It occurred to this lady that the stone was in reality the stem or lower part of the font then in Longdon church, in Worcestershire, as the ornament seemed to be similar. The vicar of Longdon was then asked to give up the bowl portion which had been conveyed in 1845 from a Deerhurst farmyard to Longdon church. The request was graciously entertained, and Longdon church received in exchange a new font. The two portions – probably long separated – were then replaced as they are now to be seen in Deerhurst, and the font previously in use there was given to Castle Morton church." (Massé, Tewkesbury and Deerhurst, p.114)

And so it remains today, but more recent expert opinion is that the stem and bowl don't actually belong to each other at all. You can't blame Miss Strickland for her assumption though – the pattern really does match very closely, and they must be connected in some way or other.

Fittingly for a village named after a grove of wild beasts, Deerhurst has its own dragon legend. The legend was first recorded in 1719, but the best description comes from a guidebook by Samuel Rudder in 1799:

"In the parish of Deerhurst, near Tewkesbury, a serpent of a prodigious bigness was a great grievance to all the country, by poisoning the inhabitants, and killing their cattle. The inhabitants petitioned the king and a proclamation was issued out, that whosoever should kill the serpent should enjoy an estate in the parish, which then belonged to the crown. One John Smith, a labourer, engaged in the enterprise. He put a quantity of milk in a place to which the serpent resorted, who gorged the whole, agreeable to expectation, and lay down to sleep in the sun, with his scales ruffled up. Seeing him in that situation, Smith advanced, and striking between the scales with his axe, took off his head."

There are many theories for the serpent/dragon/worm legends that abound all over England. One possibility is an allegorical origin, with the Danish invaders being a good contender for the role of "serpent of a prodigious bigness". The pagan associations with serpent energy (tying in nicely with the spiral-patterned font) are a nice symbolic connection. Whether there ever was any actual physical manifestation of a marauding mythical beast, well, who knows.

There are a few more mythical beasts on the outside of the church in gargoyle formation. These are much later than the Saxon carvings and belong to the medieval period alterations, and they seem (although very weathered) to depict a more conventional kind of mythical beast, probably gryphons. The beasts are not themselves gargoyles; they appear either side of a large human or semi-human head with a startled facial expression (which is fair enough really) holding its gob open. Very curious.

Gargoyle at SW corner

Gargoyle at NW corner

The church is so full of exciting Saxon features that it's easy to overlook a slightly more recent historic treat which Deerhurst is exceptionally rich in. The churchyard is full of old gravestones dating to the 17th and 18th centuries. Some of these are exquisitely beautiful in their carving and typography. I will only include one sample picture but really you could make an article just about these, as they are so diverse and intriguing. They have done well to survive the all-too-frequent flooding from the nearby River Severn, most recently in 2007 when the whole churchyard was submerged.

 Grave of Thomas Cox, who died on the 19th of April 1696. One of many lapidary gems.

The churchyard is a wonderful place in its own right – quiet and secluded as far as humans go but alive with noise and activity from the crows who live in the tall trees on the north side. They are the custodians of the grove of wild beasts and the place positively reverberates with the skraaaaaa of their derisive laughter.

The magic of Deerhurst will be continued in part two ...

Sources:

Massé, H.J.L.J., The Abbey Church of Tewkesbury, with Some Account of the Priory Church of Deerhurst, Gloucestershire (London, Bell & Sons, 1900).

Gilbert, Edward, A Guide to the Priory Church and Saxon Chapel, Deerhurst, Gloucestershire (privately printed, 1956, revised 1977)

Laing, Lloyd and Jennifer, A guide to the Dark Age Remains in Britain (London, Constable, 1979).

Friends of Deerhurst Church

The Deerhurst Dragon: www.twistedtree.org.uk

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