All aboard this train for Hayles Abbey Halt
If I’d been a bit better organised, I’d be chuffing through the green Cotswolds today on the Gloucestershire Warwickshire Steam Railway, changing at Toddington for the railcar request stop at the newly reopened Hayles Abbey Halt.
The point of getting off there is to visit the place pilgrims came to see the Holy Blood of Hailes, (mentioned by Chaucer).
The station and the abbey spell their names differently, and so under-appreciated is Hailes that I had thought it located at Hales in Norfolk (which has a pretty round-towered church). There is no limit to my ignorance – as is the usual arrangement.
So start at Hailes church, a beautiful little structure of golden stone with a flagged nave floor. It was built before the 13th century abbey nearby. On the walls are a big, if faint, painting of good St Christopher, and brighter ones of St Catherine of Alexandria and St Margaret of Antioch, plus some lively hounds in pursuit of a hare.
But the things to notice in one window are pieces of stained glass once in the abbey church. Among them is a depiction of a barefoot pilgrim with a staff and sensible hat – no other than St James, on the way, perhaps, to his own shrine at Compostela. It happens that the busy gentlewoman of Lynn, Margery Kemp, dropped in at Hailes on her way back to Norfolk from Compostela (since her ship docked at Bristol).
The Holy Blood to which pilgrims came to pay devotion at Hailes Abbey was a gift from Edmund, the son of its founder. The founder was Richard, Earl of Cornwall, a younger brother of Henry III. Richard was motivated by deliverance from a storm at sea. The monks he chose for the abbey were the recently founded Cistercians, who observed a disciplined and rural expression of the rule of St Benedict. In this first century of their existence, they set up 500 monasteries across Europe.
Richard was, surprisingly, made King of the Romans, and went off in 1257, with his wife Queen Sanchia, to be crowned at the very centre of the Emperor Charlemagne’s old empire at Aachen. To Charlemagne their son Edmund attributed the preservation of the phial of Christ’s blood that he donated to Hailes. His uncle King Henry had carried with his own kingly hands a similar relic to be honoured at Westminster Abbey.
Lees than 300 years later, to Henry VIII’S evangelically minded supporters, such as Hugh Latimer, such things were “abominable”. Bishop Latimer and his allies denounced the relic as no more than clarified honey with saffron. But I think they’d have been as hostile if it was by chance genuine.
Anyway, the monastery was plundered, the monks pensioned off, the roof stripped of lead and only the abbot’s house kept from despoliation (and even that house, though suitably Gothic, was demolished in the 18th century). Left are foundations tracing the monastery with its great church. The newly beefed up museum has a beautiful 13th century carved stone boss of Samson forcing open the lion’s jaws, energetically described (as a symbol of Christ breaking open hell) by Dr Michael Carter, the English Heritage curator whom I last met in Battle. But take note too of a curious item here: a remnant of 14th century spectacles, from the earliest days of the invention.
Among the ruins, a grassy mound marks the spot where the shrine of the holy blood stood, as the focal point of radiating chapels behind high altar.
Gone. All gone. But on a July morning you can imagine the bare ruined choirs as they once sounded with the Psalms sweetly sung night and day.