Preamble

November

Let me introduce myself before I get too involved in the story of the Monks of Grumpsfield.

I am Dorothy Price, a retired pianist and piano teacher, music adviser and organizer.

I was born in Upper Grumpsfield just before the market town of Middlethumpton shed its suburb of Grumpsfield for reasons best known to the town council. Rumour had it that the councillors stood to profit financially from the arrangement, and I suppose they did, but they had not been able to stop Grumpsfield reorganizing itself into a dormitory for the affluent who could pay high community rates to Grumpsfield rather than to Middlethumpton.

***

The story of the Monks of Monkton Priory has never been proved, and never will be unless there are secret documents somewhere verifying the history. It has been passed on from generation to generation by word of mouth, and as with all history, is has taken on shades of meaning according to who was narrating.

Upper and Lower Grumpsfield were the result of dividing the village of Grumpsfield that had once existed long before Middlethumpton, though the present Mayor of Middlethumpton, Mr Cobblethwaite, a Yorkshireman in denial of his northern roots, likes to think he inaugurated Grumpsfield and therefore enjoyed special privileges with which he had awarded himself. Since Grumpsfield was in a hilly area, public transport was strained to its limits. Walking down a steep hill is one thing, walking up it quite another.

Other villages belong loosely to the Grumpsfield community, notably Huddlecourt Minor, that lies a hill-climb above Upper Grumpsfield.

The two Grumpsfield villages are divided by the River Grump, a forgotten tributary of the Avon that served the townsfolk well in the past. Getting Grumpsfield back was like old times. Getting the two villages established was a challenge the villagers were glad to take on, since there had been a tradition long before the market town of Middlethumpton came into existence. The only hazard was the though the Mayor of Middlethumpton and his town council, who still had the final say in most of what happened. That would have to change, but nobody had yet had the power to do so.

The story of the monks goes back to the reign of Henry VIII, when he became a protestant in order to get a divorce from his first wife. The Pope would not allow it, so Henry simply invented his own church that had most of the features of Roman Catholicism and took over the infrastructure, but allowed him to get rid of Katherine, to whom he had been married for 17 years and wanted to replace with Ann Boleyn, the mother of Elizabeth I.

But I’m not going to write about history here and that short account was just to take you back to when the monks inhabited the priory. I want you to realize what a dilemma it must have been. They were trying to preserve their religion, their prior  and not least, themselves in a hostile atmosphere brought on by a monarch serving only himself. And if that sounds familiar, you might want to say that democracy has still not been invented.

I believe the story of the Monks of Monkton Priory. There was a priory and there are still ruins to prove it, so there must have been monks, mustn’t there?

Geographically speaking, the priory towered only slightly over the people who could see it day and night and the people of Huddlecourt Minor actually looked down upon it since it was not establish on the highest hill available, as was customary, it was instead  at the bottom of a very steep climb to Huddlecourt Minor. It was rumoured that the reason the Upper Grumpsfield site was chosen was that the powerful people of Huddlecourt Minor rejected the idea and cost of the project.

***

To add a little more to my biography: I retired to Upper Grumpsfield after spending all my professional life in London. Unfortunately, by then the family home belonged to someone else, but I was fortunate enough to find a small cottage I could afford to buy, and as luck would have it, it was in Monkton Way, Number 44, to be exact.

Monkton Way is an uphill road leading from the village of Upper Grumpsfield to the priory woods. The path through the woods is short but steep to climb. Huddlecourt Minor residents talked disparagingly about going ‘down’ to the priory, while Grumpsfielders said ‘up’. That’s very confusing for strangers, in days when that only refers to location, but it was important  then. People still go ‘up’ to London, don’t they?

***

The original account of the monks of Monkton Priory was written down by a nameless diarist who happened to live in the village of Huddlecourt Minor. Incidentally, there is no Huddlecourt Major and no one really knows why Huddlecourt is called Huddlecourt Minor at all. Sometimes I think it’s a trick to put tourists into a quandary, but there are hundreds of upper-lower, major-minor, little-great and similarly named pairs of villages and they have often been known by those names since the Middle Ages.

In connection with my preoccupation with the monks, I would like to quote some of what was written by that anonymous diarist, who was probably writing 150 years later, judging from the antiquated spelling, which I will not reproduce here. At this point I should comment that the first narrator about Jesus of Nazareth was also writing about 150 years later, so we rely on the memories of previous generations for the veracity of the story.

The truth of the monk story has never been contradicted, however. If Huddlecourt Minor had been in Wales, I dare say the author would have been a bard writing in rhyming couplets and singing the story.

The diarist’s writings were found in the loft of a cottage and were later included in a history of Upper Grumpsfield. I’ll comment where necessary. He writes:

“It all started in the Middle Ages. Monks built the old priory with their own bare hands. They planted a vineyard and ran a smallholding. When Henry VIII was looking for monasteries to plunder, the villagers of Grumpsfield hid the ecclesiastical treasures and there are rumours that some of it is still buried somewhere.

The monks then disguised themselves as villagers and hid in the cottages until the coast was clear. Out of gratitude for the hospitality they enjoyed in their precarious situation, the monks later taught all the surviving villagers to read and write.”

[N.B. There was fighting and many villagers were killed by the king’s army. The anonymous diarist thought that some of the village widows and wives must have mingled with the monks during the upheavals, basing his theory on an uncommonly large increase in the birth rate despite that fact that most of the men had gone to war.]

“Bad weather ruined harvests several years on the run, which may have been the reason the monks started to offer prayer meetings with bed and breakfast to strangers. There was hardly enough to feed the monks, let alone to sell produce.”

[N.B. I think they call such visits retreats these days. I expect a lot of visitors turned up, but that’s not the end of the story.]

The diarist continued his account by writing:

“All went well until one day a mysterious traveller took up lodgings at the priory. The stranger hardly spoke to anyone. There was a rumour that the man could have been a foreigner and no record of him even being able to speak Latin.

“Not long after the stranger appeared, all the monks disappeared without trace and the stranger was found bleeding from stab wounds in the chapel. The stranger recovered consciousness, but never spoke another word in any language, and one morning he had gone.”

[In my opinion, the diarist was often theorizing because he was writing a couple of hundred years after the events.]

The diarist continues:

“With the priory deserted, the villagers eventually realised that there was nothing for it but to feed the livestock and harvest the crops hoping the monks would return. Eventually they gave up hope. No one came to take over the priory. It fell into rack and ruin. Stories were told about headless ghosts and strange howling at dead of night in the bell tower. Soon nobody ventured anywhere near the priory if they could possibly avoid it.”

***

A few hundred years after the above events, we are going to pick up the story where the diarist left off, though it could be one of a thousand made-up mysteries, of course. No wonder this country is so full of ghosts. Even if you don’t believe in them, many people have apparently been frightened out of their wits by them, and that includes ghost-hunters at Monkton Priory, although my friend and sleuthing colleague, Cleo Hartley, has given up her ghost tours in favour of a large family that is anything but a figment of the imagination.