St. John and St. Thomas, Royston.
A cave for credulity.
Royston is the crossroads of Icknield Way and Ermine Street, where Roesia’s cross was fixed into the top of a large boulder of red millstone grit, an odd enough erratic to have required sanctifying by early Christians, fearful of pagan powers. The church here is a pulled about priory, but it’s an odd hole in the ground that attracts the tourists. This is the famous Royston Cave, a bottle shaped hole in the chalk under the crossroads filled with carvings of religious imagery. A modern tunnel leads to the man made cave, original access having been by ladder from above, which makes it unlikely to have been a public chapel or shrine; it may have been a Roman chalk pit dug deeper for a religious recluse. Almost eight metres high and over five across, it was only rediscovered in 1742 by accident, though only a foot of earth separated cave and street. It’s attracted plenty of speculation, being linked with everything from U.F.O.s to the Templars, nearly all of it based on complete speculation and twisting of the truth. Being soft chalk, rustic carvings are plentiful around the lower walls, and amongst them several calvaries and the figures of saints including Catherine with her wheel, Lawrence holding his gridiron and Christopher carrying the Christ child. There are rows of token figures, lots of crosses and swords and targets; hands holding hearts, a soldier with a sword, a horse, and a dove. One figure is said to be a sheela-na-gig, though it doesn’t really resemble these twelfth century warnings against lust in many important ways. All of the carvings down here look as if they are cut by an amateur with a lot of time on his hands, sometime between 1350 and 1550, but no one has any clue as to why. They are most reminiscent of religious imagery cut by catholic prisoners in prison cells, but are too early for any Freemason connection, and too late for Templars. It seems that the figures were once coloured, making an anchorite more likely than heretics or prisoners, but we’ll probably never know, so feel free to make your own ideas up, you might be right. Oh, excepting Templars and little green men of course. The cave is open most weekends in the summer, just take the guide’s talk with a big pinch of salt.
A cave for credulity.
Royston is the crossroads of Icknield Way and Ermine Street, where Roesia’s cross was fixed into the top of a large boulder of red millstone grit, an odd enough erratic to have required sanctifying by early Christians, fearful of pagan powers. The church here is a pulled about priory, but it’s an odd hole in the ground that attracts the tourists. This is the famous Royston Cave, a bottle shaped hole in the chalk under the crossroads filled with carvings of religious imagery. A modern tunnel leads to the man made cave, original access having been by ladder from above, which makes it unlikely to have been a public chapel or shrine; it may have been a Roman chalk pit dug deeper for a religious recluse. Almost eight metres high and over five across, it was only rediscovered in 1742 by accident, though only a foot of earth separated cave and street. It’s attracted plenty of speculation, being linked with everything from U.F.O.s to the Templars, nearly all of it based on complete speculation and twisting of the truth. Being soft chalk, rustic carvings are plentiful around the lower walls, and amongst them several calvaries and the figures of saints including Catherine with her wheel, Lawrence holding his gridiron and Christopher carrying the Christ child. There are rows of token figures, lots of crosses and swords and targets; hands holding hearts, a soldier with a sword, a horse, and a dove. One figure is said to be a sheela-na-gig, though it doesn’t really resemble these twelfth century warnings against lust in many important ways. All of the carvings down here look as if they are cut by an amateur with a lot of time on his hands, sometime between 1350 and 1550, but no one has any clue as to why. They are most reminiscent of religious imagery cut by catholic prisoners in prison cells, but are too early for any Freemason connection, and too late for Templars. It seems that the figures were once coloured, making an anchorite more likely than heretics or prisoners, but we’ll probably never know, so feel free to make your own ideas up, you might be right. Oh, excepting Templars and little green men of course. The cave is open most weekends in the summer, just take the guide’s talk with a big pinch of salt.
The church over the road is part of the priory that stood here until the dissolution of the monasteries. Few big monastic sites exist in Hertfordshire; the abbot of St. Albans didn’t want any rivals to get too big a foothold on his patch. This was a house of Augustinian canons, and until 1540 the town was split up between several rural parishes; indeed, one half of the town was in Cambridgeshire until late Victorian times. Having worshipped in the canons’ church before the dissolution, the townspeople decided to buy the church, but demolished the nave as surplus to requirements. Now all that remains of it is the high wall of the original south aisle alongside the path leading to the west tower. This was formed from one originally in the centre of the church and is quite a powerful piece, Tudor in its bones but much rebuilt in Victorian times. It is wide enough to have an ornate triple gabled entrance, and far wider than deep. The original chancel had no aisles, these were added later but were partly rebuilt with old material in Jacobean times ; outside on the north aisle wall are details of those buried in the Beldam vaults nearby. The earliest dating from 1725 are on a big memorial under an open pediment made up of scrolls, later ones have fanciful gothic ogee canopies of the pre-archaeological 1830s when the windows were rebuilt as part of the design. The east end was extended with a chancel added in the nineteenth century.
Inside the two arcades don’t match; to the north the wall above the arcade is slender compared to that on the south. Some of the arcades are original, but many result from the reuse of piers from the nave, and other reused bits of the priory are to be found throughout the church. Many are thirteenth century, like the piscina in the chancel, and original long lancets with dog tooth mouldings of that date remain in the side walls of what was the first chancel. One on the north is complete, with the springing of its neighbour, and to the south the heads of others appear above the fourteenth century arcade cut through below. The pulpit was made from an excellent screen found during rebuilding work in Victorian times, an act of philistine destruction that left a post carved with a winged lion in the good local museum. Alabaster statues found used as rubble stand in the chancel, one a headless virgin with a child on her lap holding the bird he’s just brought back to life, a popular apocryphal miracle in the middle ages; the other statue is a headless bishop, probably Thomas of Canterbury. An alabaster effigy of a late fourteenth century moustachioed knight rests his battered head on a pillow held by angels, fine detail on his head. Both knight and statues would by this period been shop-work, made in one of the few centres that specialised in this material. Most of these centres were close to the source of the alabaster, but London was an exception, and these probably came from workshops there that exported all over Europe.
In the north aisle beside the blocked arch to a demolished chapel there is a little old glass, two seraphim and a saint’s head, and over on the south the roof has some good original carvings of angels and green men, all newly gilded. At the east end of this aisle is a life size stone virgin and child carved by Harry Gray in 2003, a really superb modern work full of feeling yet not sentimental. Both the sculptor and those who bespoke the work should be proud of themselves, such work is rare indeed.
In the north aisle beside the blocked arch to a demolished chapel there is a little old glass, two seraphim and a saint’s head, and over on the south the roof has some good original carvings of angels and green men, all newly gilded. At the east end of this aisle is a life size stone virgin and child carved by Harry Gray in 2003, a really superb modern work full of feeling yet not sentimental. Both the sculptor and those who bespoke the work should be proud of themselves, such work is rare indeed.
The church sits in a graveyard barren of monuments, denuded of history and memory, pretending to be a polite public park. Churches are about life and death, and sweeping one under the carpet is not only a lie but an act of philistine destruction; too often memorials are moved to make machine mowing easier. Piles of ripped out gravestones are a sad sight, and churchyards look bare without them, most especially if they date from before the unbecoming fashion for modern mass produced marble. Sometimes it seems we can get nothing right.
The cave is open summer weekends, the church is always open and is in the centre of town.
All rights reserved for this entire site. Copyright reserved to stiffleaf for all text and images, which may not be reproduced without my permission.
The cave is open summer weekends, the church is always open and is in the centre of town.
All rights reserved for this entire site. Copyright reserved to stiffleaf for all text and images, which may not be reproduced without my permission.