WORSPRING PRIORY, KEWSTOKE
THE Augustinian Priory of Worspring, or Wospring, now called
“Woodspring,” stands in a very secluded situation in this little-visited
nook of the coast, projecting abruptly into the Bristol Channel
north-west of Wick, and terminated in that direction by St. Thomas’s
Head: a promontory which owes its name directly to the Priory itself,
partly dedicated to the Blessed St. Thomas of Canterbury. The roads of
this district are perhaps better to be termed lanes; and they are lanes
of old Devonian character: narrow, hollow, with high banks and hedges,
stony and winding. The land is purely agricultural. Thus, except for a
few farmers’ carts and waggons, or for those more than usually
enterprising tourists and amateurs of ancient architecture and
ecclesiastical ruins who spend their energies in seeking out the remains
of Woodspring Priory, the stranger has until now been but rarely seen. A
new complexion has, however, been put upon matters by the coming of what
is known locally, “for short,” as the “W. C. and P.L.R.”; _i.e._ the
Weston, Clevedon, and Portishead Light Railway, already described; and
now learned archæologists, enthusiastic, but perhaps not always endowed
with the stamina and endurance of explorers, travel hither in the
company of picnic parties, to whom any ruin in a picturesque setting is
a sufficient excuse for an afternoon afield. “Hither,” however, is here
a generous term, for the railway does not come within a mile and a half
of the spot. But “every little helps,” as the trite proverb tells us.
The name of “Woodspring” does not appear in print before 1791, when it
is found in Collinson’s “History of Somerset.” Before that date it was
always referred to as “Worspring.” The name has puzzled many, but it is
really a simple corruption of the original term, “Worle-spring,”
indicating the situation of the Priory on a rill that descended to these
levels by the sea from the neighbourhood of Worle heights.
The Priory was founded in the first instance by Reginald FitzUrse, as a
chapel of expiation of his share in the murder of Thomas à Becket. It
was in 1210 refounded on a much larger scale by William de Courtenay,
grandson, on the maternal side, of William Tracy, another of those
sacrilegious knights. Courtenay endowed it as a home of Austin Canons
and triply dedicated the establishment in honour of the Blessed Virgin
Mary, the Holy and Undivided Trinity, and St. Thomas à Becket; and it
was further enriched by lands bequeathed by Maud, the daughter, and
Alice, the granddaughter, of the third murderer, le Bret or Brito: Alice
expressing the devout hope that the intercession of the blessed martyr
might always be available for herself and her children.
The seal of the Priory is curious. In the lower portion of the usual
vesica-shaped device is an allusion to the dedication to St. Thomas of
Canterbury, in the form of a representation of his martyrdom: Becket
being shown falling by the altar, on which stands a chalice, at the
moment of his skull being cleft by Richard le Bret’s sword, which
protrudes, immensely large in proportion to the figure of the
Archbishop, from the border.
[Illustration: WOODSPRING PRIORY.]
After more than three hundred and twenty years of an almost unruffled
existence, this obscure religious house was suppressed in common with
others, and its fabric and possessions confiscated. It was surrendered
on September 27th, 1536, and the monks turned adrift upon the world,
perhaps too late in life to set about the performance of any honest
work; but by no means with that utter indifference as to whether they
were clothed and fed, or went in rags and starved, that the apologists
for monkery and critics of Henry the Eighth and his Ministers of State
would have us believe. No: unless they had proved contumacious, the
rulers and the brethren of the disestablished religious houses were
pensioned. The last Prior of Woodspring, Roger Tormenton, who was
appointed in 1525, received a pension of £12 per annum upon his
surrendering the Priory in 1536—a sum equal to nearly £100 at present
values. The Priory itself was then leased for twenty-one years to Edward
Fettiplace, of Donington, Berkshire: one of the formerly numerous family
of that name once settled chiefly in that county and in Oxfordshire, but
now utterly extinct. Passing through many hands, it is now among the
properties of the Smyth-Pigott family, owners of much land hereabouts,
including the site of Weston-super-Mare.
There can surely be no farmhouse more ecclesiastical in appearance than
that of Woodspring Priory. As the traveller approaches it across the
rough occupation-roads of two large pastures, he sees the noble central
tower of what was the Priory church rising exquisitely from a
characteristically English rural scene of tall elms, profuse hedgerows,
and succulent grass. Rude wooden field-gates and rutty tracks partly
filled with straw combed off passing heavy-laden farm-waggons by
projecting brambles, conduct him into a farmyard where porkers grunt
from their sties and cows low from their linhays in a not unmusical
orchestration; the grey and lichened stonework of the Priory tithe-barn
and the tall tower surrounding them with an unwonted halo of romantic
association. On that spot where, in the olden days of Woodspring’s
pride, the porter slid back his hatch in the gatehouse, in answer to the
stranger’s knock, the pigs snuffle in their troughs and thrust pink
snouts through palisades, enquiring curiously who comes this way. A
fantastic thought possibly occurs to the modern pilgrim that they might
be re-incarnations of those old fat porters themselves; and a glance
into those pig-houses further discloses fine Berkshires there, as sleek
and well-larded as any greasy mediæval Prior.
The entrance to the farmyard is flanked with a somewhat noble effect by
heavy sculptured stones bearing shields. That on the right hand bears
the sacred symbols of the five wounds of our Lord, with a heart in the
centre; while on the left is the heraldic coat of the Dodingtons,
anciently among the benefactors of the Priory; a chevron between three
bugle-horns, stringed, two and one; a crescent for difference.
Less remains of the Priory church than might be at first supposed from
the majestic bulk of the tower and the tall buildings that once formed
nave and aisles. The choir has entirely disappeared, and the nave
itself, with the north aisle of three bays, has been divided into floors
for the purposes of a dwelling-house. It may thus readily be imagined
that the interior is as little ecclesiastical in appearance as can well
be; although it is true that winding stone staircases serve instead of
ordinary domestic stairs, and that here and there some ancient carved
corbel, fashioned in the likeness of a human head, projects from walls
otherwise to all appearance secular; its stony countenance seeming to
grin and gibber in the flickering light of a bedroom candle. Clustered
stone pillars, too, thrusting through upper floors, and ending in
capitals and sweeping arches, would convince the stranger that he had
found himself in some farmhouse entirely out of the common order. Even
the coalcellar, which was once a part of the north aisle, has its
features, and the coals repose on incised slabs and other memorials of
the dead. The cloisters, also, have disappeared; and the monks’
refectory, a detached building on the south side, is now a waggon-shed,
its windows filled in with bricks. A peep within discloses a fine
open-timbered roof. The only building that yet retains its ancient use
is the Prior’s Barn, still, as in bygone centuries, the storehouse of
grain, straw, and hay. At the east end of it is a doorway, now blocked
up, formerly leading by nineteen steps down to the existing pool called
the “Holy Well.” The “Prior’s Pool” is the name of a pond in the meadows
westward, to which an avenue of elms leads.
Sand Bay, nearly as large as Weston Bay, but quite lonely, stretches
from St. Thomas’s Head and Swallow Cliff to Anchor Head,
Weston-super-Mare. Shingle and sand continue in an unbroken semicircular
sweep, fringed by pastures, to the neighbourhood of Kewstoke, a small
village situated on a shelf of rock below the craggy uplands of Worle
Hill, and yet raised above the meadows. Nowadays Kewstoke is greatly
afflicted in summer by brakes and traps, and strollers from Weston, for
it is but two miles from the town, and there are the beautiful Kewstoke
woods fringing the road all the way. It thus forms an easy and popular
morning or afternoon trip, in spite of the fact that a small toll is
payable for the use of it—this being really a private road cut by a
Smyth-Pigott in 1848, and used by the public only at the pleasure of
those all-pervading landowners of this neighbourhood. Indeed, were it
not for this fine level road through the dense woods, Kewstoke would
scarcely ever be visited, save by young and energetic people, prepared
to circle round by the rugged old way through Worle.
There are legends of St. Kew at Kewstoke. On the rocky crest of Worle
Hill, looking down upon the village, is an ancient excavation of some
twenty feet by twelve, popularly known as “St. Kew’s Cell”; and the long
rude flight of over two hundred rocky steps towards it is, of course,
“St. Kew’s Steps.” But not the most patient archæologist has ever traced
any genuine association with St. Kew here. The place-name has, however,
a real connection with that so-called “cell” on the height, for the
excavation was a part of the elaborate defensive works constructed by
ancient peoples on the summit of the Hill: a kind of guard-house
situated in a difficult approach, where a small garrison could easily
from behind a palisade or stockade hinder the advance of many. It is an
ascertained fact that here, at various periods of strife, throughout
many centuries, people of widely sundered eras have taken up a defensive
position. Among the many curious finds made in or near this pit was an
ancient silver fibula, or ring, coeval with the Phœnicians who are
traditionally said to have traded to these coasts three thousand years
ago; a Saxon knife; coarse early pottery; remains of a fifteenth-century
spear, and the hilt of a seventeenth-century sword.
[Illustration: RELIQUARY IN KEWSTOKE CHURCH (FRONT).]
Although the sea in those times flowed to the very base of this hill,
just below where the village church now stands, and submerged the site
of the present broad meadowlands, it seems absolutely certain that the
name of Kewstoke does not, as so often asserted, derive from the Celtic
word “kewch,” or boat; and does not mean “the place of boats.” The
hilltop guard-house gave the name, as may clearly be seen in Domesday
Book, that valuable sidelight upon place-names, as also upon many other
things. There we find “Chiwestock,” the not greatly corrupted version
from the original form. It appears to mean “the stockade on the ridge.”
The church, dedicated to St. Paul, is a small building, without aisles.
Here is a fine Norman south door, but the principal features are Late
Perpendicular. The elaborate stone pulpit dates from about 1500. The old
churchwardens’ accounts abound with curious items, among them that of
1702. “Item: gave unto 7 poor ship carpenters that had their bones
broken at Bristoll, O. I. O.” Doubtless the benevolent churchwardens
gave this shilling with strict injunctions to the seven broken-up
carpenters not to be so extravagant as to spend it all at once. But
whatever they did, it is quite certain that the ratepayers of Kewstoke
admonished the churchwardens against this and other reckless charities,
and gave them to fully understand that any future benevolences must come
out of their own personal pockets.
There are no ancient monumental brasses in Kewstoke church; a fact
perhaps fully accounted for by the following entry in the accounts:
“1748. Item: paid for casting the ould brasses, 23 at 6_d._ ... 11. 6.”
So there we perceive the accumulated monuments of centuries going in one
plunge into the melting-pot.
[Illustration: RELIQUARY IN KEWSTOKE CHURCH (BACK)]
An interesting discovery was made during the restoration of Kewstoke
church in 1849. A block of stone sculptured with a half-length figure,
supposed to represent the Virgin Mary, built firmly into the north wall
under the sill of a window, had long been a curious object of the
interior of the building, and was by some antiquaries considered to be a
heart-shrine. The greatly defaced figure appeared to be holding a
shield. To satisfy curiosity, the stone was removed, disclosing a small
arched hollowed-out chamber at the back, in which was a greatly decayed
oak vessel, or cup, partly split open by warping. At the bottom of this
was a dry black incrustation, pronounced to be congealed human blood. It
was supposed, from the circumstances of the founding of Woodspring
Priory, and from the fact of a cup, or chalice, forming a part of the
Prior’s seal, that this relic was nothing less than a precious portion
of the martyr’s blood—the greatest treasure owned by the Priory. It was
further thought that the monks, foreseeing the troubles of the
dissolution of the religious houses, caused the relic to be secretly
removed and placed here, in Kewstoke church. It is now in Taunton
Museum.
The Kewstoke woods, largely of scrub-oak, closely woven and interlaced
and compacted together by the winds off the Channel, descend in tangled
thickets to the water’s edge. At the end of them, a picturesque
toll-gate marks the beginning of the modern pleasure-resort of
Weston-super-Mare. No one need have the remotest shadow of a doubt that
he has arrived, for the crowds of excursionists here and on that
Walhalla of noisy enjoyment, Birnbeck Pier, make themselves very fully
seen and heard.
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