Hailes Abbey

Back in the Autumn I visited the ruins of Hailes Abbey at Winchcombe, near Cheltenham. Although only half an hour or so from where I live, I had only ever been there once before - about fifteen years ago.


The once great Cistercian abbey was founded about 1245/6 by Richard, earl of Cornwall, as a thanks to God for being saved from a shipwreck. It was built quickly and consecrated in a ceremony attended by Henry III (Richard's brother) and his queen.





In 1270, Richard's son, Edmund, brought back a phial supposedly containing the Holy Blood from Germany and gave it to the Cistercian brothers. From then on, until the Dissolution, the abbey became an important place of pilgrimage and the blood was kept in its own holy shrine close to the high altar.

This mound is all that remains of the shrine of the Holy Blood, situated just behind the high altar

This was once the nave of the great abbey church, with the high altar at the far end

The pilgrims brought in a great deal of money and from it, the abbey was given an impressive make-over. It was one of the last religious institutions to submit to the Dissolution of Henry VIII, and was finally surrendered to Henry's commissioners on Christmas Eve 1539 - 470 years ago. The phial of Holy Blood was denounced as a fake and the property itself was sold to a dealer in monastic properties. Soon after, the abbey church was destroyed and over the next few centuries, the remaining buildings were either demolished or converted to other purposes.

Today, the abbey is a sad shadow of what it would have been, although its architectural beauty is still apparent in the remains of the cloister arches. The engineering feats so typical of the Cistercians are also still evident in the well constructed drainage system that can be seen throughout the entire site.





One building thankfully left untouched by all the upheaval was the small church just outside the abbey which, in the times before the Dissolution acted as the 'Capella Ante Portas'. I shall look at this building in the next post as, in contrast to the abbey, much of its medieval nature, including wall paintings, still remains.

One small sad note - due to circumstances that I can't go into, I have had to pull down the Everything Edward II website. However, New Year, new beginnings - it shall soon be back up in another incarnation except that it shall be based mostly around your favourite 14th C bad boy Hugh Despenser the younger and will also look at other aspects of what it was like to live during that time! I shall let you know as soon as it is done.

Other than that, all that remains is for me to wish you and yours a wonderful, peace-filled Christmas and every good wish for 2010!

Novel Update

The first draft is proceeding very well, although it doesn't seem to follow any sort of chronological order at the moment! With my previous (non historical) writing I always managed to have some kind of plot plan and follow it in a logical progression from point A (beginning) to point B (end). With Despenser, I am finding that certain scenes are throwing themselves so strongly at me that I can't write anything else until they are done - it's quite weird. So I think it will be a case of writing up whatever comes into my head at any one time, then assembling it all a bit like a jigsaw and finally filling in the gaps. Of course it will all then need a fair bit of redrafting to make it seamless and to knock out any continuity errors! It is quite scary for someone like me (who likes to have everything planned to the last full stop) to write in such an unpredictable way, but on the other hand the process never gets boring!

I have just finished writing Hugh and Eleanor's wedding night. It was actually quite a difficult scene to write as I wanted to get the atmosphere and the emotions right (as well as the physical details!). It is so easy to get a sex scene - of any kind - wrong, and end up with it either being farcical, clinical or pornographic. For some really cringe-worthy examples, see this site with the nominations for the 2009 Literary Review's Bad Sex in Fiction Award!* I think that a love scene (to put it more delicately) needs to be treated a bit like a recipe - you have to have just the right amounts of everything on the ingredient list, and you need to bake it for just the right amount of time in order to end up with a yummy, mouthwatering dish. So, with Eleanor and Hugh, although I knew what I wanted to write and how I wanted them to feel, it was a case of choosing the right words and not undoing or overdoing it. It took time. In fact it took more time than normal for me to write the amount of words I did, and I know it will still need redrafting. But, the essence of it is now right and I can leave it alone until the first complete redraft.

The next section to be written is that concerning Hugh's exile and piracy in Autumn/Winter 1321. My head is full of port towns and ships - and some pretty unsavoury characters! I swear that I could even smell the tavern I was writing about the other night! Anyway, imagination only goes so far so I have also had to undertake some extra research into early 14th century ships, parts of ships, Cinque Ports - even naval battle techniques! And, as usual, it's thrown up some questions that I can't seem to find answers to on the Internet. For example: how does a single-sailed square-rigger, such as a cog, manage to get to dock without oars or an engine (as is used in replica ships today)? Sure, if the wind is just right it wouldn't be too hard, although you still might crash into the quay (no rubber tyres to soften the impact then), and if the wind is wrong - what then? Would you be stuck out in the English Channel at the mercy of the weather for as long as it took for the wind to change? If anyone reading this has any answers, please help!


So, in the next few weeks expect the odd post on cogs and Cinque Ports! And I sincerely hope that Hugh didn't suffer from sea-sickness!

* Personally I would have chosen Ten Storey Love Song by Richard Milward as the winner - although they are all pretty bad in various sorts of eeeeewwwww-inducing ways. The eventual winner was actually not included on the page above for some reason - but I do think it richly deserves the award ;-)