At the root of many of the stories about the origins of the ghosts at Borley Rectory was a popular local belief that the site on which it was constructed had once been the location of a Benedictine monastery. Since the death of Harry Price, no evidence has been presented to prove or disprove the existence of a monastic establishment at Borley, or of a nunnery or convent at Bures, both of which form the background to the exciting, but fallacious, story of the 'Novice of Bures'. The general opinion these days is that there was no monastery at Borley.
A fairly popular view locally is that the idea of a monastery at Borley most likely developed out of local gossip to explain the presence of the spectral nun in the Rectory grounds. As the monastery idea was popularly believed in the district for so long, the 'fiction from gossip' idea does seem, at least to the writer, as somewhat weak and lacking as a final and conclusive explanation of the truth about a monastic background to the story of Borley Rectory.
In my opinion, in order to be really convincing, any such story has to contain some grain of truth. In the case of Harry Price, despite frequent attempts to discredit his work, his presentation of the Borley Rectory episode was, I think, on balance founded solidly on a good quantity of truth, originating from the experiences of many people.
When one comes to examine more closely the facts about Borley's monastic associations, although one cannot say there was a 'Borley monastery' one couldn't be certain it was fiction.
Several accounts of the Borley Rectory episode indicate that sometime between 1362 and 1364 King Edward III granted the Manor of Borley to an order of Benedictine monks who held it until the Dissolution, after which it was in the hands of the Waldegrave family for some 300 years.
What those past chroniclers of Borley discovered now appears to have been a classic misinterpretation of one part of a very interesting chain of events concerning Borley's links with the monastic world. Before examining these, we do need to go back in time to discover what seems to have been the first documented involvement of monks in Borley's affairs, in fact back to the year 1248.
At that time it would appear that part of the district of Borley was under the wing of the order of Benedictine nuns of the monastery at Barking, or to give it its old rendition 'Berkynge', and of which all trace has long since vanished.
In 1248, the Abbess of Barking was Maud, a daughter of King John, who held the post until 1252, when she was succeeded by the Lady Christina de Boseham. During the period in question, a legal dispute arose between the then Rector of Foxearth, and the Barking establishment, concerning tithes due for the estate of Little Borley from one Humphrey, son of Walter.
In the British Museum's Department of Manuscripts, where several items that relate to Borley, Bures and the Waldegraves can be found, there has survived a document concerning this episode. In it, judgement was given in the dispute by the masters Gilbertus Perdris and Fulco of Dovoria, acting on behalf of Father Fulconis Bassett, Lord Bishop of London.
As far as the writer has been able to ascertain, Little Borley is believed to have occupied the area now known as Brook Hall, so of course there is not necessarily any involvement in the history of the site of Borley Rectory, though if Barking Monastery held title to land in Little Borley, it may well have held land elsewhere in the parish.
The major monastic involvement in the affairs of Borley came in 1301, and has caused much misinterpretation since.
In that year, King Edward I granted to the Prior and Convent of Christ Church, Canterbury, title to the Manor of Borley in exchange for lands that they had previously held at Westcliffe in Kent. The Prior and Convent were then required to render to the Exchequer the sum of £10 per annum, being the stated difference in value between Westcliffe and Borley. Westcliffe was valued at £30 per annum, Borley at £40, hence the difference to the Exchequer.
As recorded in the Canterbury charter, the payments fell into arrears and as a consequence, in the year 1364, the Prior and Convent made over to King Edward III lands held in the Isle of Sheppey in Kent, and thereafter the Manor of Borley was charged with an annual pension to the Exchequer of £4 5s, and that state of affairs continued until the Dissolution. Ownership of Borley Manor by the Priory is also evident from returns of 1303 and 1346. The Prior at Canterbury in 1303 was Henry of Eastry.
The patronage of the church at Borley as given in the Canterbury charter is in some doubt, stating the Lord of the Manor to be the patron of the Church, while according to Repertorium Vol.2, p.75, the patronage remained with the King.
However, the Canterbury document tallies with the British Museum copy in this respect. Morant's History of Essex, Vol. II (London 1768) p.317 states that the advowson of the church was vested in the Crown until 1364, when King Edward III gave it to the Prior and Convent of Christ Church, at Canterbury. It is from here, it seems, that the inaccurate recording of the alleged monastery of 1362 could very well have arisen, or at least partly.
On March 20, 1539, the Prior and Convent's holding seems to have lapsed and on May 21, 1541 King Henry VIII granted the estate of Borley to the Dean and Chapter, who being unable to finance its upkeep, reassigned it to the King on November 23, 1545. Not long afterwards it was apparently given to Sir Edward Waldegrave of Bures, the ill-fated Sir Edward who was later to perish in the Tower of London.
It is generally held that in the administration of the Borley estate during Canterbury's ownership, the only time monks would have been involved directly with the place would have been during the initial period of ownership, when a report on the state of the place would have been needed by the Priory at Canterbury. For all main practical purposes, day-to-day running of the manor would have been in the hands of a land steward or tenant manager.
Now, however, we come to something more interesting than even the time of the Canterbury Priory ownership of Borley. It has been fairly well established that there was not a monastery as such on or close to the site later occupied by Borley Rectory. Why, then, did this supposed community persist for so long in local folklore and folk history?
One possibility is that while there was no monastery at Borley itself there was supposedly a Priory on the opposite side of the River Stour, on land that butted on to Borley's parish boundaries. What is more, according to a local historian, Georgina Dawson, this Priory was of a Benedictine order. It was suggested that this Priory had access to land, or 'free warren' in Borley. If this was indeed the case, then one very obvious source of the stories about an old monastery in Borley reveals itself. Further to this, one should add that if this monastery did in fact exist, two questions arise:
1. Is there any documentary evidence of such an establishment?
2. If it did exist, to exactly which order did it belong?
It would, for example, be rather interesting to discover whether the place was of an English or an alien order. If this last point about an alien priory establishment was found to be admissible, this would be of obvious interest in connection with the story of Borley Rectory, for alien orders that once existed here were, almost always, French. An example would be Boxley Abbey in Kent, which was run originally by monks from Clairvaux in France.
It is worth remembering that Harry Price was convinced at the time of writing his second book on Borley that the nun which so bemused those interested in the story was, if she lived at all, a French girl.
The reader will discover later that there have been many candidates for the identity of the elusive Catholic sister, but for the present it is the supposed Stour Valley priory that must occupy our attention.
Historical archives do indeed suggest that Georgina Dawson's findings were sound because there were not one but two monastic orders no great distance from Borley. On the basis of available evidence, however, neither of them appears to have housed any nuns, though one of these two orders is of considerable interest.
One of these monastic communities was in Sudbury, by the Stour, close to the present-day Sudbury Cricket Ground. Part of the remains is built into premises now occupied by a Masonic lodge. It was dedicated to St Saviour and was founded in about 1248, it is believed by Baldwin of Shipling, and was of the Dominican order. Sudbury Friary, which was its official title, lasted until 1538 and was chiefly known for its theological studies.
More interesting in relation to the Borley story, however, is the now well-proven existence, until 1538, of another rather more obscure order, in fact a very small Priory cell, which had its premises close by the present-day main road between Sudbury and Long Melford, near to what is now St Bartholomew's Lane, so named after the order.
It was, as Mrs Dawson had stated, of the Benedictine order, and was founded by Wulfric, Master of the Mint to King Henry I. The existence of this is apparent from an entry in Dugdale and it also appears in a gazette entitled English Medieval Monasteries 1066-1540, published in 1979.
St Bartholomew's Priory was older than that in Sudbury itself, having been founded in 1115. Of this priory, only the ruins of the church now survive, the prior's lodging having been destroyed in 1779.
It becomes apparent that here indeed, at last, lies the most probable answer to the persistent stories about a Borley monastery.
Two main points now need to be examined concerning St Bartholomew's Priory. Georgina Dawson stated that the Priory had 'free warren' or access to woodland within Borley's boundaries, and therefore, it would be interesting to learn just what the Priory possessed in terms of local land or land rights.
Also, one would naturally be curious to know whether anything in the Priory's history involved Borley, and the site of Borley Rectory in particular.
Readers will recall that mention has already been made of a long-standing belief that part of the grounds had once been a plague pit, wherein had been buried victims of that scourge of the Middle Ages.
The period during which the Priory was in existence did indeed cover those years in which this country, and especially southeast and eastern England, was ravaged by appalling epidemics of bubonic plague. By far the worst of these was that of the autumn and winter of 1348/49.
It is thought to have begun in China, or Cathay, as it was then known, in 1346, as a result of the failure to bury the victims of a famine. The disease then spread through the caravans of merchants returning overland from the Far East, and eventually crews of ships returning to England from the Continent brought the plague to England.
When it struck, the results were nothing less than disastrous and it hit monasteries and nunneries just as badly as it hit the towns and villages. None but a few totally enclosed orders were safe from the consequences.
Very wet weather during the late autumn of 1348 helped the disease to spread out of control and, in a contemporary account, Cardinal Gasquet tells of the disease 'killing by midday many who had been fit and well in the morning'.
In East Anglia, the plague is alleged to have wiped out some 60,000 people in the Norwich area alone. The inference here for the fate of the monks of Sudbury Priory is very obvious and it is virtually inconceivable that either Sudbury itself or Sudbury Priory could have escaped the plague unscathed.
So, how does this relate to Borley and its supposed plague pit?
We will assume that during this epidemic some monks of Sudbury Priory contracted the disease. When one realises that some monasteries used to shelter the poor and the wayfarer in times of bad weather or at night, when it might well be unsafe to travel the open road, it becomes obvious that it would need only one traveller who carried the plague to set the black death loose among the hapless monks.
Faced with this, and the resultant deaths among them, what might the brothers do? They might simply consign the bodies to their own graveyard, or perhaps even burn them, but even at that early date they might have been aware enough of the idea of isolation to protect those not affected to have their dead taken out to a more remote spot to be buried.
What better place than on an isolated and at that time possibly unoccupied spot on a knoll a good mile from the Priory itself across the river?
Although it may not be possible to prove this, the theory does not, to the writer, seem at all impossible. In this case the legend may very well fit the history without any journalistic assistance.
There is more concerning the fate of the monks of Sudbury Priory that lends weight to a connection between the Priory, the plague and the plague pit on the site of the Rectory. Georgina Dawson began by stating the existence of a priory on the opposite side of the River Stour to Borley, no great distance away.
We know now, both from Dugdale and from Roy Midmer's gazette, that in this statement she was indeed correct. She also stated that the Priory had access to land in Borley.
The main difficulty in this lies in our not being able to know just where the boundary lay between the land held by the Prior and Convent of Christ Church, Canterbury, who held title to the manor of Borley at that time and any possible land owned, held or tenanted by or on behalf of Sudbury Priory.
Therefore, it is of course, possible that the site of the Rectory could have belonged to either party, or of course, to neither. Alternatively, as both the Canterbury order and Sudbury Priory were Benedictine, it is just possible that they might have shared some land.
In any case, insofar as the site's use as a plague pit is concerned, the tiny community of Borley itself could well have buried victims of the plague on that site, away from the cottages, some of which almost certainly date back to the 15th and 16th centuries and probably replaced even older structures.
When the epidemic of 1348/98 eventually burned itself out, as far as the monasteries were concerned, the deaths of so many monks and nuns - whole communities in some cases - so damaged these communities that in the opinion of many historians they never really recovered.
In many ways, it is a miracle that a small priory such as that which now concerns us survived those dreadful days at all, more especially when one learns that there were further outbreaks of plague in 1361 and 1368.
By 1665 and the Great Plague, Sudbury Priory had, of course, been suppressed, but one cannot help wondering just how many victims of the Black Death might have been consigned to that knoll above the Stour Valley and to the graveyard of Borley Church.
How short a time it was between the Great Fire of London in 1666 and the alleged death at Borley of Marie Lairre the nun, in 1667, a story that will occupy a later chapter.
What do the available records have to say about this little priory whose history seems to have been so scantily told?
In fact, details as to what land holdings this tiny priory possessed are scant indeed. The Ecclesiastical Taxation of Pope Nicholas IV, 1291 states that Sudbury Priory had property in the Deanery of Sudbury. It also held some other possessions, among which were properties in Acton (Suffolk), Chelveton, Clare, Kedington, Melford, Thorpe and Wratting. The holding of Clare is of some interest in the overall story, because Clare lay out in the countryside beyond Borley, and itself in later years had an order of monks since re-established in recent times and functioning today. No mention is made of Borley in this list.
The reader might well, at this point, feel that this lack of mention of Borley in the list of Sudbury Priory's holdings proves that it held no land there. Historically this may be true, but lack of a listing for Borley among Sudbury's books is not proof one way or the other of course. But the writer asks his readers to remember the statement by Georgina Dawson that the Priory existed and had free warren in woodland in Borley. We have seen how the existence of the Priory is proved from known recorded history, and as I intimated earlier, I see no reason to doubt the comment about the woodland rights either, though it would, of course, be of interest to know the source of Mrs Dawson's evidence.
It is a somewhat peculiar coincidence that it should have been Clare to which Fred Cartwright was going to work, when he came upon the ghostly nun outside the Rectory in 1927.
To conclude, therefore, the writer suggests that Sudbury Priory held either title or right of access to some small portion of land in Borley, the suggestion of which may have attracted Mrs Dawson's attention through knowledge of the Clare holding. It remains to be seen whether or not the writer's submission results in the coming to light of any fresh information concerning this matter.