INTRODUCTION

The scant remains of the Cistercian monastery of Dieulacres lie close to the north Staffordshire market-town of Leek, within a mile of the busy A523 Ashbourne - Macclesfield road. The site of the abbey church is marked by the foundations of the crossing-piers and south transept, but practically nothing remains above ground of what was once an impressive complex of conventual buildings dating from the early thirteenth century. After the dissolution of the abbey in 1538 the site was an easy quarry for ready-cut stone, and the size of the sandstone blocks in several buildings in the vicinity maybe a clue as to their origin. Abbey Farm, which dates from 1612, incorporates a medieval timber-frame gateway, while many of its outbuildings contain fragments of tracery and other Sculptured stones fromthe abbey site. At the beginning of the nineteenth century the remains of the abbey church were covered by a mound of earth and debris which had accumulated over the years to a height of some twelve feet. In 1818 this mound was excavated in a quest for stone for the out buildings mentioned above, and the extent of these buildings is an indication of how much of the medieval structures lay buried at this time. What is left of the church has been scheduled as an ancient monument: this gives it minimal protection. No archaeological surveys have been possible in recent years, but successive photographs and Ordnance Survey maps tell their own story of neglect and slow decay. Unless action is taken soon, one doubts whether anything will remain above ground by the end of the century. Dieulacres today is a working farm in private ownership; it is not open to view by the public, and one must respect the rights of the present owners.

Like the ruins, the documentary sources for the abbey’s history have been eroded over the centuries, but they are sufficient to trace the history of Dieulacres more or less continuously over the four centuries of its existence, the only major gap being the second half of the fifteenth century. The abbey’s estates were enormous both in size and distribution over three counties: Staffordshire, Cheshire and Lancashire, and for these, numerous deeds and charters have survived. A vital document for the study of any medieval monastery is the Cartulary, an enrolled copy of deeds relating to landed property. Two copies of the Dieulaeres Cartulary are extant, the earliest being a fourteenth-century parchment roll containing copies of 64 deeds and charters. Known as the Huntbach Cartulary, it is preserved at the William Salt Library, Stafford. The other is a seventeenth-century transcript of a much more complete cartulary (182 deeds) no longer extant in the original. Known as the Rudyard-Macclesfield Cartulary, it was compiled by Benjamin Rudyard of Leek and kept for a time in the archives of the Earls of Macclesfield. It is now kept in the Public Library at Leek. The British Museum also has a partial copy ( BM Harley MS 2060), highly abbreviated, dating from the seventeenth century. Apart from the Cartularies, the most important single document known to have come from Dieulacres is a Chronicle (Grays Inn MS no. 9 ) which was compiled from earlier sources in about 1410. Local and monastic affairs are interwoven with national history, and there is clear evidence of political controversy at Dieulacres over the character and actions of King Richard ll. Although one assumes that there must have been clashes of political opinion in the monasteries it is not often that one finds such glaring evidence as is contained in the Dieulacres Chronicle.

Controversies of another kind colour the history of Dieulacres from the fourteenth century onwards. Records of legal proceedings taken by or against successive abbots appear in the Patent Rolls, Close Rolls. and other contemporary sources. Many of these incidents involved acts of violence and even murder, and on the evidence of these documents alone it is easy to rush to the Conclusion that the monks of Dieulacres and their servants were often an unholy and troublesome lot. Against this. one has to balance the many unknown and unrecorded lives of prayer and devotion spent within the abbey walls. and the monks’ provision for the poor and needy which continued right up to the Dissolution. "The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones".

Four Cistercian abbeys were founded in Staffordshire: Radmore (c.1143-7), Croxden (01176-9), Dieulacres (1214), and Hulton (1219). Three of these had site changes. Harrassed by the foresters of Cannock Chase, the monks of Radmore moved to Stoneleigh in Warwickshire in 1154. Within three years of Bertram de Verdun`s grant of lands at Cotton ("Chotes") to the monks of the Norman abbey of Aunay-sur-Odon, they exchanged them for a remote but fertile valley a few miles to the south, and so the abbey of Croxden was founded. Likewise, Dieulacres was not a new foundation, but the re-foundation in Staffordshire of a Cistercian community which had begun life at Poulton, on the banks ofthe River Dee, in ll46. In itself there was nothing unusual about a Cistercian abbey changing its site after an unsatisfactory beginning: twenty - five Cistercian and Savigniac houses moved to new sites within a few years of their foundation, and some had several moves. What is unusual about Dieulacres is that the move took place more than sixty years after the original foundation. by which time the monks of Poulton were well-established with lands and buildings, and the complex set of motives behind the move to Dieulacres has no known parallel.

For the first ninety years of its existence (1146 - 1237) the fortunes of Dieulacres were closely tied to those of the Norman Earls of Chester, events in the lives of the fourth and sixth earls being directly linked with the original Cheshire foundation and its subsequent removal to Staffordshire. The history of the Earldom dates from 1071, five years after the Norman invasion. The great Mercian rebellion of 1069 posed a serious threat of joint Anglo - Saxon and Welsh resistance to William I. It was these circumstances which caused William to summon from Normandy his nephew Hugh "Lupus" whom he created Earl of Chester, giving him wide emergency powers and ample resources to deal with any further trouble. Hugh climbed quickly into the first rank in Anglo-Norman society, and his successors stood apart from most of their contemporaries in the power they wielded. This power seems to have derived from a shrewd political sense which brought them in on the winning side in practically every rebellion and civil disturbance down to 1173. Whether through loyalty or cunning, Hugh I sided with William Rufus against Robert Curthose, just as later Ranulph II threw in his lot with Henry of Anjou against King Stephen. Ranulph III, the founder of Dieulacres, played an equally important part in English politics. Under King John he was a member of a very close circle of counsellors of whom John said that without their advice he would do nothing, and after John’s death in 1216 Ranulph might, if he had so wished, have become Regent of England during the minority of Henry III.

The power of the Norman earls of Chester was reflected by territorial gains across the length and breadth of England. Ranulph Il may have held as much as one-third of England under his sway, and to this, Ranulph III added the honours of Leicester and Lancaster through the gift of King John, and in 1217 the earldom of Lincoln. Nor should it be forgotten that Ranulph was Duke of Brittany and Earl of Richmond in the right of his first wife, Constance, until he divorced her in 1199. Commander-in-Chief of the French Campaign of 1231, and a Christian warrior who Led a crusading army at the siege of Damietta, Ranulph III was one of the few English noblemen of quality whose exploits were recorded in verse and song, the geste of “Randolf, erl of Chestre“ being mentioned in Piers Plowman’s Vision.

Cistercian Abbey Cross

Dieulacres Abbey had, therefore, as its founder and principal benefactor, the most powerful and renowned man in England next to the King himself. He was not, however, the first of his family to be concerned with the Religious Orders. Described by the medieval historian Ordericus Vitalis as coarse, wordly and pugnacious, Earl Hugh I nevertheless reconstituted the canons of Chester into the Benedictine abbey of St. Werburgh, and actually became a monk three days before his death in l 101. His illegitimate daughter Geva also founded a Benedictine house: Canwell Priory in south - west Staffordshire. Hugh’s son, Richard, was only seven years old when he inherited the earldom, and in ll20 he was drowned in the ‘White Ship” disaster, along with the two sons of Henry II. Nor did his cousin and successor, Ranulph I de Meschenes, appear to have had any close connection with monastic foundations. Ranulph II de Gernon, however, was a generous patron and benefactor. Combermere Abbey, which was to be the mother-house of Poulton and Dieulacres, was founded in 1133 by Hugh Malbank. The foundation charter was witnessed by Earl Ranulph, whom Malbank wished to be regarded as the abbey’s principal founder and protector. A little later, Ranulph established a daughter-house of Combermere at Basingwerk (Clwyd), and in about 1150 he gave land in Chester for a church and convent of Benedictine nuns (Chester Priory). meanwhile, one of his officials, Robert Pincerna, had issued a charter for the foundation of Poulton Abbey, to be colonised by monks from Combermere “for the health and safety of the most illustrious Earl of Chester”, Ranulph then being held prisoner by King Stephen. One of Ranulph II’s last two acts was to found the Augustinian Priory of Trentham in 1153, for the charter was issued at Gresley, Derbyshire, where he died in December of that year.

Ranulph’s son, Hugh II Keveliok, confirmed his father’s grants to the monks of Poulton. According to the Dieulacres Chronicle he died at Leek in ll8l. His son, Ranulph III de Blundeville, held the patronage of the Staffordshire abbey of St. Mary, Rocester, founded in 1141-46 by Richard Bacon, a nephew of Ranulph II, and he endowed the Cistercian monks of Radmore with the vill of Cannock not long before they moved out to Stoneleigh in 1154. Ranulph III was the benefactor, if not the founder, of the Leper Hospital of St. Giles, Chester (1181) and of the Hospital of St. John the Baptist, Chester (1190). He gave Wincle Grange, on the Staffordshire - Cheshire border, to the monks of Combermere, and further afield he maintained the family’s close links with the Norman abbeys of St. Sever and Mont St. Michel. For the last twenty-live years of his life, however, the foundation and endowment of Dieulacres was uppermost in his mind.

Many ruined abbeys have their ghost stories: phantom monks, mysterious lights, the smell of incense where none has burned for centuries. Dieulacres may be unique in that it has a ghost story as its origin; the  directive for its foundation coming, apparently, from beyond the grave. The Dieulacres Chronicle traces the abbey’s origin to a night in about 1206 when Ranulph de Blundeville had a vision, or dream, in which his grandfather’s ghost told him to transfer the monks of Poulton to a new site near Leek, predicting the date and the circumstances of the move. The Middle Ages abound in tales of the supernatural, and it is easy to dismiss the earl’s vision as mere legend, but there may be more to it than that. There is an old saying that to dream of the dead is to be troubled by the living, and there is evidence that Ranulph was under considerable stress at the time of the alleged vision.

A loyal churchman and crusader, Ranulph had nevertheless left his first wife, Constance of Brittany, widow of King John’s elder brother Geoffrey. Not long afterwards her son Arthur had died under mysterious circumstances, the king himself being under suspicion. The result was a major rebellion in northern France, the loss of Brittany and Normandy, and widespread discontent among the English barons. Outwardly, Earl Ranulph’s loyalty to the king never wavered, but questions must surely have crossed his mind. So too with his marital adventures. The Dieulacres Chronicler writes somewhat disparagingly of Ranulph’s second marriage; in fact he does not use the word “marriage” at all, and one wonders whether the foundation of Dieulacres was in part an act of contrition. The fact that his new Countess, Clemencia de Fougeres, failed to provide Ranulph with an heir, would almost certainly have been interpreted as divine judgment. The reference by Ranulph’s ghostly grandfather to the coming Interdict of 1208-14 is another point of interest. For political as well as religious reasons, King John’s quarrel with Pope Innocent III would have worried the earl. One should not underestimate the spiritual and psychological effect of a Papal Interdict upon a nation of devout Catholics, nor the political implications of John’s excommunication: there was all the material for a major rebellion against a renegade king. Add to this the earl’s obvious concern for the safety of the monks of Poulton, threatened as they were by marauders from across the Welsh border, and it is not at all surprising that Ranulph’s thoughts should have turned to his ancestors.

The fate of the Norman Earldom of Chester after the death of Ranulph III’s nephew and heir, John Scot, in 1237. was of great importance to the monks of Dieulacres. The earldom was finally annexed to the Crown, and then from time to time granted to the sovereign’s eldest son. Certain members of the Royal Family took more than a passing interest in Dieulacres, some to the monk’s advantage, others not. Edward III, Richard II and Henry VI were among the kings who requested corrodies (i.e. free board and lodging) at Dieulacres for pensioned-off servants who would normally have remained there for life at the abbey’s expense. Royal patronage could have its advantages too, and as late as C. 1520 the abbot of Dieulacres prevailed upon the king, as the abbey’s patron, to intervene in a dispute between himself and his monks.

In many respects the moorlands of North Staffordshire were ideal for colonisation by the Cistercians, whose constitutions required that they settled in remote areas away from towns. Nevertheless it was not until ll76-9, nearly fifty years after their first arrival in England, that they made their first permanent settlement in the county. It was only with the foundation of Dieulacres in l2l4 that any significant inroad was made into the northern moorlands, although Ranulph III’s earlier grant of Wincle Grange to the monks of Combermere may have opened his eyes to the possibility of using Cistercian monks to exploit what must surely have been one of the wildest and most barren of all his vast estates.

By the time that Dieulacres was founded, the golden age of the Cistercian Order in England was well past, and the reforming zeal which had kindled the hearts of the founders of Citeaux was burning less brightly than it had done a century before. The Order had begun as a small reforming movement pledged to return to simpler and purer forms of monasticism, but under the direction of the great St. Bernard of Clairvaux it had become a vast international family housing all sorts and conditions of men. The rapid expansion of the Order in the twelfth century strained its administrative machinery to breaking - point. F or example, the abbot of every mother-house was supposed to conduct an annual visitation of each of his “daughters”; yet how could the abbot of Aunay-sur-Odon be expected to come to Croxden every year, or the abbot of Fountains to make the hazardous journey across the North Sea to visit his daughter-house of Lysekloster in Norway? In an attempt to stop any further embarrassing expansion, the Cistercian General Chapter of 1152 prohibited any new foundations, yet in spite of this eleven Cistercian abbeys were founded in England alone between 1152 and 1220, and of these, three were in Staffordshire.

It was a sign of the times that within a few years of their settling in the Churnet valley the monks of Dieulacres were given the patronage of St. Edward’s church, Leek, and the Manor of Leek itself. Under the constitutions of the Cistercian Order the acceptance of such gifts was forbidden. In practical terms it meant that the people of Leek now had a combined spiritual and temporal overlord on their very doorstep instead of the two rather more remote ones - the Bishop of Coventry and Lichfield and the Earl of Chester who had had little direct influence over their lives. The abbot’s rights in Leek included a weekly market and an annual fair, free-warren, and jurisdiction over the manorial courts. His right of infangenthef meant that under certain circumstances he could inflict the death penalty. The lists of properties etc. drawn up at the time of the  Dissolution imply that the abbot and monks of Dieulacres affected the lives of a great many people in and around Leek, either as landlords or as employers. All this came to an end in 1538, and one would dearly like to know more about the impact of the Dissolution on the people of the neighbourhood. The Wednesday market is still held in Leek, and although the market-cross is but a seventeenth-century replica of its medieval predecessor, it is good to see it restored to its accustomed place in the town centre, having been banished from the Market Place in 1806. Would that those in authority were equally sensitive to other aspects of Leek’s architectural heritage: one would not wish to see the Staffordshire Moorlands District Council desen/e Private Eye’s Philistine Council of the Year award for the third year in succession. As to that other fabled link between the town of Leek and the great abbey beyond the Churnet - a “secret passage” or subterranean tunnel connecting Dieulacres with St. Edward’s church - the impracticality and futility of such an enterprise are discussed in a later chapter. However if by “passage” we mean nothing more than is indicated by the latin word passagium, namely a road or right of way, and if by “secret” we mean nothing more than private, then indeed there was such. Old maps of Leek show a pathway leading from the back of St. Edward’s church, over Brow Hill, and down to what is now the junction of Park Road and Abbey Green Road a much more direct route from the town to the abbey and vice-versa than via Mill Street and Macclesfield Road. The pathway may still be followed from Church Lane to Abbey Green Road where, at Broad’s Bridge, the medieval traveller would have caught his first glimpse of the abbey of Our Lady of Dieulacres.


  
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