A relic of the Priory

 It's not everyone's idea of a little light reading; a scholarly article about the provenance of a medieval manuscript.  But this one gives us a rare glimpse of the Priory which was the original Charterhouse.  

Julian M Luxford is Reader in Art History at the University of St Andrews with a particular interest in monasteries.  This article* tells of a manuscript, MS. 142/192, currently in the library of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge.  It dates from the late 14th or early 15th century and there is apparently nothing remarkable about it.  It isn't "illuminated" with beautiful pictures.  The text is a Latin commentary on the Book of Revelation and it is bound with its original hide-covered wooden covers.  There is nothing obvious to say that it has anything to do with the Hull Priory.  

However, some of the parchment had been erased, or scraped, before being re-used; and under ultra-violet light one line was very clear.  The book is ex libris (from the library of) the Charterhouse of Kingston-upon-Hull.  Only one other manuscript is known with the same inscription, and that is in Lincoln Cathedral library.  Luxford thinks the two books are in the same hand.  Further detective work showed how the Gonville and Caius MS had started life in a different format.  It was intended to be in folio, the large size which would have made it suitable for reading from a lectern, perhaps during meals in the refectory.  But after the scribe had written a couple of sheets on folio parchment the instruction came down to scrub that (almost literally) and make it quarto, or exactly half the size.  Rather than put the folio sheets aside he scraped off the writing, folded the sheets in half and started again.  The result is that the first few sheets of the finished work show ghostly vertical stripes where the original writing was.  Again, much of this shows up under ultra-violet light.  This intriguing book turned up as a bequest to Gonville and Caius College in 1659, and there is no knowledge of where it was between the closure of the Priory in 1539 and this bequest by William Moore.

There is a record, apparently, of three manuscripts granted to the Priory by Richard II in 1387, after Michael de la Pole's attainder.  A list of printed books by John Spalding from the London Charterhouse to the Hull Priory survives, from the late 15th or early 16th century; and there is a record of two other books in a letter of 1717.  But where any of these are now, no one knows.  So the only physical remnants of a once thriving Carthusian Priory are two manuscripts.

* A Carthusian Economy: Gonville and Caius College MS. 142/192, Julian M. Luxford

 

Lady Alice and the Hull foundations

How much involvement did the de la Pole family have in the life of the priory and hospital that Michael de la Pole founded?  Records of the early priory and hospital are sparse.  Michael rarely visited Hull in what remained of his turbulent life.  We know that in 1408 the 2nd Earl of Suffolk, Michael's son, granted further extensive lands to the hospital.  But after his death in 1415 at Harfleur, and his son's a month later at Agincourt, it was the 4th Earl, and 1st Duke, William, who inherited the responsibility for the Hull foundations.  Did he take an interest in them?

The Cloisters at Ewelme

William had as turbulent a life as his forebears.  But he married Alice Chaucer (granddaughter of Geoffrey Chaucer) and the couple made their home at Ewelme in Oxfordshire.  In William's frequent absences it was Alice who oversaw the foundation of an almshouse there for 13 poor men, together with a school.  The almshouses survive to this day.  On 2 December 1439 William himself granted the manor of Rimswell in East Yorkshire to his Carthusian priory near Hull.  William was killed in 1450 and his remains delivered to his widow.  Although Bulmer's Gazeteer of Hull in 1892 states that in his will he desired his "wretched body to be buried in the Charter House at Hull", he was in fact buried at the family estates at Wingfield in Suffolk.  His son John was still a minor and it was Alice who took the reins.
A hugely informative book was published in 2001, God's House at Ewelme by John A A Goodall [pub Ashgate Publishing Ltd].  Among the archives that Goodall studied was a single sheet relating to the Hull priory.  It's amazing that it survived at all; it is water damaged and is a draft of an indenture, written in abbreviated Latin and much corrected.  Goodall states that it is very hard to read and translate, but offers the following translation:

To all the Christian faithful to whom this written indenture shall come, Henry, Prior of the Carthusian house of St Michael beside Kingston upon Hull and the convent of the same, greetings in the Lord.  The late William de la Pole gave to the late Prior, John Gannesfeld, and the convent in perpetuity the manor of Rimswell in the County of Yorkshire with its appurtenances on 2 December 1439, by licence of the King.  Out of consideration of the devout and pious intentions between us and the late Duke and the venerable lady and princess, Alice, Duchess of Suffolk, his wife, we grant that one monk of the house shall, every Friday, during the life of the Duchess, read, and say the Seven Penitential Psalms and a Mass with the office Reministere, celebrated specially for the good estate of the Duchess and her son, the prince John, now Duke of Suffolk.  We grant, moreover, that from this time forward we will celebrate in perpetuity the anniversary of the aforesaid Duke and also the Duchess, when she has died.  Beyond this we agree also that in the near future we will have made two stone images, one in the likeness of the Duke and the other in the likeness of the Duchess, the which shall bear on the right hand a disk, in symbol of bread and fish, and on the left hand an ale pot, in sign of a measure.  These images shall stand in an eminent place in the refectory of the said convent for ever.  In the presence of these images, I, the aforesaid Henry, and my successors as priors of this house, or our procurator or our representatives if we are ill or indisposed, shall distribute two messes of drink, fish and bread in perpetuity to a maximum of two almsfolk, according to our discretion.  That is to say to a man and to a woman, two conventual loaves, each weighing one and a half pounds, and two conventual measures of ale containing two quarts each.  Conventual messes according to this form shall be made on Sunday, Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday, except in Lent and on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, when fish shall be provided.  These messes shall now and for ever be the same as those of two monks, except on the days when the Carthusian rule demands abstinence from fish.  On those days the poor shall not be deprived of their messes.  In respect of our distribution of food to the two paupers they are to offer prayers for the souls of the Duke and Duchess, their ancestors, parents and all the faithful departed.  If we fail in the discharge of any of the above duties we will pay £10 to the Duchess and her successors and forfeit the manor of Rimswell and its appurtenances as they have been described.  In testimony of which thing we keep one part of this indenture, sealed by the Duchess, while the other part remains with her, sealed with the conventual seal, given in our chapter on 1 October 1462.

This document contains the only mention of a convent in the records we have; but this was frequently used for an all-male religious establishment.
Alice wanted herself and William to be remembered in statues and in the giving of food and drink to the poor, paid for by the income from the manor of Rimswell in East Yorkshire.

Alice's tomb in Ewelme church

Even more interesting than the information about the priory is what is "scribbled" - Goodall's description - on the back of the sheet.  It's a list of the poor men and women in the "New Hospital", the neighbouring almshouse.  Alice had the right of presentation to this; effectively, she had to give her approval.  Disappointingly, Goodall does not give all the names.  This is part of his transcription:
Names of men are listed with a note of their physical health - "sturdy and powerful" or "young and ill" or "poor and old" - and the name of what appears to be a sponsor.  So "able and powerful" Richard Grawngby was appointed at the "instance" of a certain John Hastmore; two men were appointed "by the will" of the Prior of the Charterhouse, one "by" the late Master Peter of the foundation; and the "powerful" William Malyard at the "instance" of G. Crysto and the present Master.  Two men apparently have no proposers - the "poor and old" John Beanghorn, who heads the list, and John Hadelsey, who ends it.  The women are not individually named - there were eleven, five "debilitated" and six "young and strong".  Beneath is a sentence reading "none of these are tenants of my Lady and one, called Joanna Mayre, was lately received without the licence of my Lady".  A note under this list reads: "memorandum of John Campyon comorante per le North feyre in Hull, faithful tenant of my Lady for 25 years, old and debilitated".
Campyon appears to be someone whose place awaited ratification.
The system appears to be that to get a place in the hospital the applicant needed the support of someone prominent such as the Master or a de la Pole servant.  It helped to be a tenant of de la Pole lands but was not essential.  The Duchess had the last word, signing off the names, but usually after they had been admitted. 
This scrappy document provides a fascinating glimpse of the continuing relationship between the de la Pole family and the foundations of their forebear, the 1st Earl of Suffolk.  And it gives us the names of the earliest inmates to emerge as real people.

The Priory that gave us our name

On 18 February 1378 Michael de la Pole put his name to a document setting out his establishment of a Carthusian priory outside the walls of Kingston upon Hull.  He was following, he said, the intentions of his late father William, who had wanted to build " a certain Religious House of Nuns, or Poor Sisters Minoresses Regular, of the Order of St. Clare" instead of the hospital for the poor he had originally planned. Michael preferred a priory for males of the Carthusian order because "their Rules will be kept more safely, and with more Vigilance and Devotion, than by Women". Walter de Kele was to be the first Prior. Michael lists the lands with which he is endowing the Priory.
As with the 1384 document founding the Maison Dieu, there is confusion about whether the hospital, or Maison Dieu, already existed, but we will skip that argument here.
Two religious houses already existed in Hull. The White Friars, or Carmelites, were established here in around 1290, and the Black Friars, or Austin Friars, in 1317. Both friaries are still remembered in Hull street names. The Carthusians were a very different order. They were founded 1084 by Bishop Bruno of Grenoble in the Chartreuse mountains and, to quote from the English Heritage website,       "The purpose of Carthusian life was total withdrawal from the world to serve God by personal devotion and privation. While other monks lived communally, Carthusians rarely met one another, passing the long day in the isolation of their cells and The monks’ lives were ordered by a strict timetable. They followed the same daily round of eight offices (or prayers) as monks of other religious orders. But uniquely, they only celebrated the night offices and the afternoon office of Vespers together regularly in the church, and Mass less frequently. Otherwise they said their offices and celebrated Mass alone in their cells. Only on Sundays and feast days was the monastic day different. On these days, the monks dined together, met to discuss business and discipline, and celebrated all offices in the church."
It was an unusual choice by Michael; there were only ever 10 Carthusian houses in England.  There is no contemporary description of the priory.  The earliest picture of it comes from the Cotton MSS and is dated to around 1538.

The orientation of it is thought to be skewed.
A century later the Hollar plan gives us more detail but the central tower has gone.

(This comes from a conservation document produced by the Hull City Council.  This document also reproduces a drawing purporting to be the ruined gateway to the priory done by Thomas Tindall Wildridge and published in Cook's 1882 history of the Charterhouse, but we now know that it is a fake, a copy of a much earlier etching of Coverham Abbey gateway.)
We can be confident about where the priory was; it was situated just to the west of our current buildings.  Some physical evidence of that was uncovered in 1805 by those digging the foundations of a housing development on the site.  They found skeletons but no coffins.  Carthusians bury their dead wrapped in simple shrouds and without coffins.  But no archaeology has ever been done on the area, and post-war building work may mean that nothing remains.
At its peak the Hull Priory would have had a similar lay-out to Mount Grace Priory near Allerton.  Enough remains of that to reconstruct it.

Although Michael de la Pole stipulated in the founding document of his Maison Dieu in 1384 that the Prior was to have supervision over the Master, there was probably little interaction between the two establishments.  One of the few insights we have into the life of the Priory comes from a document in the archives of Ewelme in Oxfordshire, the home of William de la Pole, 1st Duke of Suffolk and grandson of Michael, and his wife Alice (granddaughter of Geoffrey Chaucer).  It is an indenture given by the widowed Duchess.  It tells us, incidentally, that the Duke had granted the Priory the manor of Rimswell in 1439, but the meat of it is that the instruction that a monk was to say a daily mass and prayers for the Duchess and her son john, the Duke; images of the Duchess and the late Duke to a particular design were to be set up in the refectory of the Priory; and the monks were to give bread and ale to two "almsfolk" every day, on pain of forfeiting Rimswell.  One other surprise comes from this document; it refers consistently to the priory "and convent".  This is the only indication I have seen that at some stage the priory included a section for Carthusian nuns.  Whether this involvement of the de la Poles was maintained for long after Alice's death is doubtful.
Little more is recorded of the priory's history until 1535.  Henry VIII had begun his closure of the monasteries and confiscation of their property, and was said to have a particular dislike of Carthusians.  Hull's priory had a total annual value of the house in 1535 was £231 17s. 3d., and the clear annual value only £174 18s. 3d.  It therefore came under the operation of the Act for the suppression of the lesser monasteries, but it received the king's licence to continue.  Why it was selected for exemption is not known, but the breathing space meant that it could give shelter to two refugees from the London Charterhouse.  The monks there had refused to acquiesce in Henry's Act of Supremacy and most were executed in the spring of 1535.  Two, John Rochester and James Walworth, were seized and brought to the Hull priory.  Both are listed among the 13 members of the community listed in the Suppression Papers in 1536.  However, following the uprising of the Pilgrimage of Grace in 1536, the King felt the need to demonstrate his power in one of its flashpoints, York.  Rochester and Walworth were taken from Hull to York and executed on 11 May 1537.

A commemorative plaque was placed on the wall of our main building 20 years ago.  It is somewhat misleading about where the Priory actually stood.
















The King's enforcers finally came for the Priory late in 1539.  Seven members were given pensions, including the Prior Ralph Mauleverey.  At least two of these are known to have found refuge in Charterhouses in Europe.  The land owned by the Priory, including the land on which it stood, was confiscated by the Crown.  But the hospital, as a separate foundation with its own endowment, was not affected.
A year or two later John Leland in his Itinerary tells us:

If those "trowehes of Leade" did indeed contain the bones of members of the de la Pole family it is not known what happened to them.  The land was leased to Thomas Alured who had come to Hull in the 1540s as paymaster of the garrison, and stayed as a customer of the port.  Both he and his eldest son represented Hull as MPs, and later generations followed suit.  Their official address was "the Charterhouse" and it was not until the rebuilding of the hospital after the Civil War that the term began to be applied to it.

Useful sources include https://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/yorks/vol3/pp190-192  and  http://www.histparl.ac.uk/volume/1604-1629/member/alured-thomas-1583-1638.  

Bring up the bodies?

"It is known that several of the de la Poles sought burial in the Charterhouse (which effectively became the family’s northern mausoleum). Sir William de la Pole (died 1366) and his wife Katherine (died 1381) were buried beneath the high altar in the priory church and their son Michael, 1st Earl of Suffolk and his wife Katherine in the chancel."  So says John Cook, writing in 1882.  What happened to the graves of such an illustrious family?

The priory was closed in 1539.  Writing in the early 1540s, John Leland reported (in his Itineraries),"The Charter House of the De la Poles foundation, and an Hospital of their Foundation standing by it, is without the North Gate. The Hospital standeth. Certain of the De la Poles were buried in this Carthusian Monastery: and at the late suppressing of it were found divers troughs of Lead with Bones in a Vault under the High Altar there. Most part of this Monastery was builded with Brick, as the Residue of the Buildings of Hull for the most part be."  [spelling modernised]  The lead coffins indicate high status burials.  But what happened to these coffins?  No one knows.

Carthusians have always buried their own dead without coffins, usually in the cloister garth.  This is consistent with what was found in the early 19th century, when the land which once belonged to the Priory was developed into what is now Sykes Street.  On 3 June 1809 the Hull Advertiser reported that human skeletons had been found, oriented east - west, and that "masses of wall of immense thickness" were discovered when digging for the foundations of new houses.  The skeletons were no doubt those of the monks who had lived and died in the Priory.  But, like the aristocratic remains found many years before, they appear to have been discarded.  Archaeology had not yet developed as a science, and no plans were made of the site.  Perhaps before any future redevelopment of the area there will be an attempt to excavate it properly.