Historic Description of Hailes Abbey

Hailes Abbey

This Cistercian house was a founded quite late in 1246 by Richard, Earl of Cornwall, brother of Henry III, and colonised with twenty monks and ten lay-brothers from Beaulieu in the New Forest.

This Richard was the only Englishman who ever occupied the throne of the Holy Roman Empire. He was elected in 1257, and though he was never crowned by the Pope at Rome, he ruled or attempted to rule Germany until his death in 1272.

The great moment in the history of Hailes was in 1270, when Edmund, son of Richard, gave to it the third part of a relic of the Blood of Christ which he had acquired in Germany; the rest he gave to the college of Bonshommes at Ashridge (Herts.). But the blood of Hailes was what became famous. The relic was the subject of great debate during the time of the Reformation period.

The Picturesque and popular story about the relic is owed to William Thomas, Clerk of the Council to Edward VI. According to him it was really the blood of a duck (a duck was killed every week by two monks appointed for the purpose) enclosed in a glass which was thick on one side and thin on the other. You paid your money to see it, and if it was thought that more could be got, the thick side of the reliquary was turned towards you, and that was a sign that you were still in deadly sin. Further payments on repeated visits eventually procured you the sight of the Blood, seen clearly through the thin side of glass.

Unfortunately for the credit of William Thomas (which does not stand very high), we have an original report of certain Commissioners appointed specially to view the relic in October 1539 – Hugh Latimer, Bishop of Worcester, the Prior of Worcester, the Abbot of Hailes, and another; their decision is that it is “an unctuowse gumme colouryd.” Within the glass it resembled partly the colour of blood; taken out, it was of a glistering yellow colour like amber or base gold, and in consistency was like gum or bird-lime.

This agrees with the description afterwards given by Hilsey, Bishop of Rochester, at Paul’s Cross, that it was honey clarified and coloured with saffron. But the Commissioners say nothing of glass thickened on one side, and their account is otherwise quite incompatible with that of Thomas, and may be trusted.

The Abbot of Hailes, who assisted in this commission, had no doubt been put into the abbacy as one not likely to thwart the intentions of the King. He is accordingly praised by the Suppression Commissioners for being conformable.

The annual value of the Abbey is given as £330. It was granted to Sir Thomas Seymour and then went to the Tracys. A large mansion was built on the site, of which there is a view in Atkyns’s Gloucestershire (1712). It is now quite gone now.

The original church of Hailes had an aisled nave, transepts with three chapels in each, an aisled presbytery or chancel, a procession path round it, and five chapels at the east end. It was dedicated in 1251. After the acquisition of the Holy Blood, and perhaps after a fire, a new east end was begun, and finished by 1277. It consisted of a five-sided apse with five semi-octagonal chapels surrounding it. A procession path was between this and the work round the shrine of Edward the Confessor at Westminster Abbey, which is twenty-five years older. We owe our knowledge of it to Mr Brakspear, whose plan and account of the church are to be found in the ArchAeological Journal 1901.

The nave was eight bays long. The western part was originally the choir of the lay-brothers. But lay-brothers ceased to exist in England during the fourteenth century, and this part of the church served no special purpose after that. Going east, you first came to the rood-screen, with an altar before it; behind this was the retro-choir, where invalid monks heard Mass. Then the pulpitum, supported on two screens 6 feet apart. Then the choir, with two rows of stalls and sub-stalls on either side, beneath the crossing. Behind the high altar, almost in the centre of the apse, was the shrine of the relic. Pilgrims entered the church by a door in the north transept. In the thickness of the west wall of the south transept were the night stairs to the dorter.

In order to see what remains of the Abbey in the 1920’s you had to get the key from the cottage just beyond the parish church, where there was a small museum of relics and a plan of the Abbey. The building is in part medieval. The ruins are in a field, railed in, and much covered with weeds. The church is gone, except for some bits on south and west. Trees have been planted to show the general outline. The only remains above ground are parts of the south wall of the nave aisle.

At the east end of this is the procession door into the cloister. At the west end is another door of the fifteenth century, inserted, and in the angle is the site of a staircase which once led up to the lay-brothers’ dorter. In the aisle wall are three recesses of unequal size, that on the west being the broadest. Possibly some contained cupboards for books. Part of the buildings on the east of the cloister remains – practically confined to the west wall, with half a dozen arches in it. That nearest to the church may have led into the sacristy. The head is cusped. Next, are the three arches of the chapter-house vestibule. Then a trefoiled arch (passage to the infirmary?) and lastly a round-headed arch. On the south side is the wall of the frater with the recess of the lavatory and two doors, the western one having been altered in the fifteenth century.

The west side must originally have contained the lodgings of the lay-brothers, but was later turned into the Abbot’s lodging. At the Dissolution this range “from the church to the frayter southward” was spared, and formed part of the later mansion. There is some nice fifteenth-century work here. But really the best thing at Hailes is the little parish church, though the old books call it “a very small and mean edifice constructed from the ruins of the Abbey before 1603.”

It has a western bell-cot which has been very prettily built out behind with timber into a gabled turret. Inside it has been well repaired, not restored. There is a nice screen, and in the east window is old glass representing Apostles and Prophets, with clauses of the Creed and prophecies corresponding thereto. This glass was taken from the Abbot’s Chapel, probably to Toddington House near by, and has been recently given to the church, very generously, by Mr Andrewes, the owner of Toddington. But the most notable feature of the church is the floor tiles and the mural paintings.

In the splay of the north window of the chancel is a thirteenth-century painting of St Katherine with cusped nimbus and book, treading on the Emperor Maxentius, and on left a monk with inscribed scroll, almost perished. In the splay of the window opposite is a similar painting of St Margaret emerging from the back of the dragon, and a monk on right. At the top of the wall has been a series of figure subjects, very faint now. On the north one can distinguish some trefoil arches, two of which are crossed at bottom by a tomb or altar. The rest of the walls are diapered with heraldry, on the north in squares, on the south lozenges. We see the displayed eagle of the Empire (for Richard Plantagenet) and the castles of Castile. In the spandrels of the windows are dragons.

In the splay of the south door of the chancel are remains of a later painting of the Virgin and the dead Christ (called a pieta). An excellent owl is to be seen here too, and angels with censers. The tiles are very fine. Altogether this is a building not to be missed. The paintings show that it was intimately connected with the Abbey. Was it the capella ad portas which the Cistercians often had for the use of strangers? An undoubted example of this is at Merevale.

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