Vale Royal

Vale Royal


Vale Royal was, from 1974 to 2009, a local government district with borough status in Cheshire, England. It contained the towns of Northwich, Winsford and Frodsham. It took its name from Vale Royal Abbey, formerly one of the largest in England, which was situated near the village of Whitegate near the centre of the district. The name of Vale Royal turns up frequently in any study of Cheshire history, for example in the works of Daniel King once apprentice to Randle Holme and used as a source by Ormerod. King, Holme and Ormerod all illustrate the fascination of the Cheshire gentry with their ancestry.

The original Abbey was founded c. 1270 by the Lord Edward, later Edward I for Cistercian monks. Edward had supposedly taken a vow during a rough sea crossing in the 1260s to found an abbey if he survived. Civil wars and political upheaval delayed the build until 1272, the year Edward's father died and he inherited the throne. The original site at Darnhall was unsatisfactory, so was moved a few miles north to Delamere Forest. John Marius Wilson's Imperial Gazetteer of England and Wales (1870-72) described Vale Royal as follows:


 * "VALE-ROYAL, the seat of Lord Delamere, in Whitegate parish, Cheshire; on the river Weaver, near the Northwestern railway, 3 miles SW of Northwich. A Cistertian abbey was founded here in 1266, by Prince Edward, afterwards Edward I.; and was given, at the dissolution, to the Holcrofts. The mansion occupies the site of the abbey; was built in the time of Elizabeth by the Holcrofts; has been greatly altered by modern renovations and extensions; includes a portion of the old abbey in its basement; comprises a centre and two wings; is adorned in front with several towers; includes a great hall 70 feet long, hung round with interesting portraits, some of them by Rubens; was visited, in 1617, by James I.; and was plundered, in the civil wars of Charles I., by the soldiers of Cromwell."

As always, the story is much more complex. This part of it starts with an assassination attempt on Edward I, has a noted Chester "prophet" in the middle and ends with wife-swapping, cocaine-taking, nazi sympathizers and a murder in Kenya.



Transition from the Earls
Like other powerful earldoms along the Welsh marches, the Earldom of Chester was often a potential issue for the Crown and played a significant part in national politics. At their peak a large part of Ranulf de Blondeville's lands were roughly co-incident with the extent of the core of Mercia. Ranulf was therefore in many ways the inheritor of a geographical power-base which dated back to the time of Leofric and the Anglo-Saxon earls. Ranulph was generally loyal to the Crown, but in many ways Cheshire stood apart from England - The king's writ did not run to Cheshire. The chief administrative official, the justice of Chester, was at times neither appointed by the king nor responsible to him. The king derived no benefit from scutages or tallages levied in the county. Royal justices did not visit it; fines and amercements levied there did not reach the king. Only with the Henrician reforms of the 1530s and 1540s, was Cheshire subjected to English justices of the peace (1536), national taxation (1540), and Parliamentary representation (1543). Palatine practices remained in place because they were grounded in a pair of county specific institutions: the county court (presided over by the justice and roughly equivalent to the Queen's Bench) and the Exchequer of Chester (supervised by the chamberlain and roughly equivalent to the Chancery Division), both of which continued in one form or another until 1830. The apartness should be obvious to any visitor: dominating the Cheshire plain from its perch atop a steep bluff, Beeston Castle guards the southern and eastern approaches to Chester, "all too obviously defending the county from England rather than Wales".

The story of Vale Royal illustrates elements of the at times slow transition from local to national governance.

Lies from the start
Manipulation of the historical facts takes root early in the story of Vale Royal. The Monk's version is contained in their own chronicle. Vale Royal's chronicle was written during the early 14th century, and while its precise authorship is unknown, its beginning at least is often ascribed to Peter, Abbot of Vale Royal, around 1338. The chronicler describes the train of events in some detail:


 * "while [Edward] was on his way to England, accompanied by a great concourse of people, storms suddenly arose at sea, the ship's rigging was all torn to pieces in a moment, and the crew were helpless and unable to do anything. Utterly despairing of their safety, the sailors called loudly upon the Lord ...[Edward] most humbly vowed to God and the Blessed Virgin Mary that, if God would save him and his people and goods, and bring them safe to land, he would forthwith found a monastery of white monks of the Cistercian order in honour of Mary the Mother of God ... for the maintenance of one hundred monks for ever. And behold, the power of God to save His people was forthwith made manifest; for scarce had the most Christian prince finished speaking when the tempest was utterly dispersed and succeeded by a calm, so that all marvelled at so sudden a change. Thus the ship ... was miraculously borne to land by the Virgin Mary, in whose honour the prince had made his vow, without any human aid whatsoever ... until they had all carried their goods safe out of the ship, the prince remained behind them in the ship, but as soon as the ship was empty, he left it and went on shore; and as he left, in the twinkling of an eye, the ship broke into two pieces"



There are several difficulties with this as an accurate historic record. Edward I's only crusade was the Ninth (or "Lord Edward's Crusade"), in 1270. However the name is somewhat misleading - as the English troops only arrived in the Middle East after prolonged debate and delay. By the time Edward actually arrived the fighting was over and the Treaty of Tunis (October 30th 1270), ending the crusade had been negotiated and signed - including the provision that Edward was not to attack Tunis, and leaving him with no share of the spoils, which included a large indemnity paid to the crusaders to go home. Edward did go on to Acre where there was some confused campaigning and at least one assassination attempt on Edward, with an apparently poisoned dagger. According to the "Templar of Tyre":


 * "The Saracen met him and stabbed him on the hip with a dagger, making a deep, dangerous wound. The Lord Edward felt himself struck, and he struck the Saracen a blow with his fist, on the temple, which knocked him senseless to the ground for a moment. The the Lord Edward caught up a dagger from the table which was in the chamber, and stabbed the Saracen in the head and killed him."

One version of what happened next is that Edward’s wife Eleanor saved him by sucking out the poison with her mouth. Another account says that an English surgeon was called in to operate on Edward, and he proceeded to cut away the inflected flesh around the wound. In this story, Eleanor started to cry, prompting the annoyed surgeon to ask that she be taken away; since it was better that she should weep now rather than have the whole of England do it later. By some accounts the assassin was a "double agent" ultimately working for Hassan-i Sabbah (c. 1050–1124) but the dates do not fit.

Taking some time to recover from his wounds, Edward did not return to England until mid 1274, after his father Henry III had died (in 1272). By that time, Darnhall Abbey's foundation charter had already been granted. The charter mentions the King being "sometime in danger upon the sea", so this cannot refer to his voyage back from the crusade, that was not only at the wrong time and was a journey made largely overland. The vow is well authenticated and so was probably made in the winter of 1263-4 during a stormy voyage from France. In 1266 the general chapter of the Cistercian order authorized the abbots of Buildwas (Salop.), Neath (Glam.), and Flaxley (Glos.) to inspect the site proposed for the new house which was to be a daughter house of Abbey Dore (Herefs.); the monks of Dore had shown kindness to Edward during his captivity at Hereford in 1265.

Building
Edward intended the structure to be on a grand scale. Had it been completed it would have been the largest Cistercian monastery in the country, but his ambitions were frustrated by recurring financial difficulties. Regardless of Edward's intentions when founding the abbey, the deteriorating political situation and eventual civil war between his father and the nobility — in which Edward played a prominent role — stalled plans for the abbey's build. In 1265 the rebel barons were defeated at the Battle of Evesham, and the following year negotiations were completed for the establishment of a Cistercian monastery in Darnhall in Cheshire. This was to be paid for with the manor house and estate of the Earls of Chester, which were now in royal hands, following the death, at Darnhall of the last Earl John Canmore. On 2 August 1270, on the eve of Edward's departure on crusade, a foundation charter was issued for the monastery of St. Mary, Darnhall: the monks were given the site of the house, Darnhall and Over manors, Langwith Hay in Wheldrake (Yorks), and the advowsons of Frodsham and Weaverham (Ches.) and of Ashbourne and Castleton (Derb.). It is likely that the original plan had already been modified as the endowment was hardly sufficient to support 100 monks and, according to a later tradition, the house was founded for a community numbering only 30. The process of foundation was slow: in January 1271 Henry III appealed to the abbeys and convents of England for theological books for the abbey which his son had "begun to found" at Darnhall and the first colonizing monks from Dore did not arrive until February 1274.

After the Second Barons' War (1264–1267), the Ash Brook was dammed to drive three water mills and to make pools to keep fish. The Cistercians built the abbey on the north bank of the new lake. However the land was not suitable for the grand scale of building envisaged, and the locals were not cooperative, so the monks left Darnhall to found Vale Royal Abbey. In 1277 the King and Queen and numerous great nobles arrived at Over to lay the foundation stones of the new Abbey. In 1281 the monks moved from Darnhall to temporary accommodation on the Vale Royal site while the Abbey started to rise around them. King Edward had vast ambitions for Vale Royal. It was intended to be an Abbey of the first importance, to surpass all the other houses of its order in Britain in scale and beauty and provide a fitting symbol of the wealth and power of the English monarchy and Edward's piety and personal greatness. The plans for the buildings reflected this.

The nave of the abbey church was the longest in the country and the chapels surrounding the eastern end of the chancel were more akin to the Spanish cathedral of Toledo than the austerer designs for great churches in England. Royal masons under the leadership of Walter of Hereford, one of the foremost architects of his day, started work on a huge and elaborate high gothic church the size of a cathedral. It was to be 116m long. The design was cruciform in plan with a massive central tower and probably two other towers on the western end of the nave. The Black Prince commissioned a new east end for the chancel in 1359 with 13 chapels arranged in an elaborate chevet or fan shape, echoing the east end of the cathedral at Toledo in Spain. Some of these were square, some polygonal; each of the transepts also had a row of three chapels on its eastern side. South of the church stood a cloister, 42m square, surrounded by the domestic buildings of the house, which were to be of a scale and grandeur to match the church.

Work on the claustral buildings has been shown by excavation to have been less grand and some of the work may never have been completed to the original plan. As was usual in the plans of Cistercian monasteries, the claustral buildings formed a quadrangle around the cloister garth. The church formed the northern side of the cloister. The refectory and kitchen on the south side of the cloister were later remodelled as a south wing of Holcroft's house. On the east side was a large chapter house whose foundations and tiled floor have been located by ground survey and trial excavations. There is now no trace of the chapter house above ground. The size of the cloister garth (the area within the claustral buildings) was one of the largest in England, measuring 39m by 35m. The interior of the cloister, together with the large chapter house, have never been fully excavated but there are indications that considerable remains lie immediately below the ground surface. Further remains of ancillary buildings have been located in a trial excavation in the garden of Bell Cottage to the south of the southern claustral buildings.

Survey work around the site of the present house has also established that there were more remains of monastic buildings and related drainage works to the west of the present house frontage extending beneath and to the south western side of the present access road. Originally these buildings were located within a much larger precinct which would have been enclosed by a boundary wall. This would have been approached through the White Gates which gave their name to the hamlet with a church at the entrance to the present country house grounds. There is now no trace of the wall nor of the original gates which must have formed an impressive feature at the entrance to this large precinct. However, it is clear from the distance of Whitegates from the claustral buildings that the area of this precinct was large and probably bounded on the northern side by the River Weaver. The river would have supplied the monastic complex with water and there would have been an elaborate system of drainage and water management connected to the buildings

Troubles
Early during construction, England became involved in war with Wales. As the treasury was thus in need of resources, Vale Royal lost all of its grants, skilled masons and builders. When work resumed in the late 14th century, the building was considerably smaller than originally planned. The project encountered other problems. The abbey was mismanaged and poor relations with the local population sparked outbreaks of violence on a number of occasions. In one such episode in 1336, the abbot was killed by a mob.

Reformation
Vale Royal was closed in 1538 by Henry VIII during his dissolution of the Monasteries campaign, although not without controversy. In the course of the proceedings, the abbot was accused of treason and murder, and he in turn accused the King's men of fraudulently forging the abbot's signature on essential legal documents.

The buildings and estate were sold to Thomas Holcroft who demolished most of the abbey buildings and sold or re-used the materials to build his country house on the site. He remodelled the west range of the claustral buildings of the abbey to create the core of the house which now stands in the middle of the site.

Cholmondeley
The Cholmondeley family descends from William le Belward (or de Belward), the feudal lord of the barony of Malpas in Cheshire who acquired the lordship of "Calmundelai" (as it was spelt in the Domesday Book) through his wife Beatrix, daughter of Hugh de Kevelioc Earl of Chester. Their eldest son David le Belward inherited the feudal barony of Malpas and was the ancestor of the Egerton family. The second son, Robert le Belward, became feudal lord of the barony of Cholmondeley, which he passed to his son Sir Hugh de Cholmondeley (or "Chelmundeleih"), who adopted the new surname.

A stone circular monument, known as the ‘Nun’s Grave’, traditionally commemorates a fourteenth century Cheshire nun, Ida, who tended a sick Vale Royal abbot, and on her death was buried at the site of the high altar. The monument was erected by the Cholmondeley family, possibly to lend credence to the legend of the nun. The material in its construction comes from three sources: the head made from a medieval cross with four panels depicting the Crucifixion, the Virgin and Child, St. Catherine, and St. Nicholas; the shaft, made in the seventeenth century and made of sandstone; and a plinth made from reclaimed abbey masonry. The present country house on the site incorporates substantial parts of the south and west ranges of the abbey plus Holcroft’s Tudor house.

During the Civil War the parliamentarian Sir Thomas Aston exercised all manner of outrages and intolerable taxes. In March 1642 he:


 * "plundered Weaverham and the countrie about, they carried old men out of their homes, bound them together, tyde them to a cart, drave them through mire and water above the knees, so brought them to that Dungeon where they lie without fire or light, and now through extremities are so diseased that they are readie to yield up the Ghost."

The Cholmondeley family remodelled the exterior of Vale Royal during the 18th century, and Thomas Cholmondeley carried out extensive work in the early 1800s. Substantial alterations were carried out under the auspices of Edward Blore in 1833 and by John Douglas from 1860. Sold soon after the Second World War, it was turned into a private golf club. The building remains habitable and contains parts of the medieval abbey, including its refectory and kitchen. The foundations of the church and cloister have been excavated.

Folk Songs
There is no historical evidence that the events of the traditional ballad "Lord Delamere" ballad actually took place. The story is that when King James proposesd a new tax, Lord Delamere asks if he can take all the poor of the land to Cheshire and hang them as it would be better than starving to death because of the proposed tax. Another lord, either French or Dutch, says Delamere deserves to die for insulting the king, but Devonshire, fighting on behalf of Delamere, who is under-age, kills the lord and finds he is wearing the king's armour.

Robert Nixon
Robert Nixon was a legendary prophet of Cheshire. Many accounts about him appear to be in conflict with each other. At least one account has Robert Nixon being born in c. 1467. In this account, he is the son of John Nixon during the time of Edward IV, who leased a farm in the parish of Over from Vale Royal Abbey. Another account of Nixon states that he was born during the reign of James I (1603–25) and that he was for some time in the service of Thomas Cholmondeley, master of Vale Royal after 1625. There are also two claimed homes for Robert Nixon: one says he was an illiterate boy who was born in Bark House on a hill between Over and Whitegate. Alternatively, another source claims Robert Nixon lived at Bridge House near the Forest of Delamere. He is the claimed source of various prophecies circulating in the early 18th Century and published in leaflet form. Many of the prophecies relate to the family living at Vale Royal Abbey mansion at the time of the 1714 and 1745 Jacobite rebellions. It seems the prophecies of Robert Nixon were invented or modified to suit the political situation at the time.

Industrial Revolution
The area around Vale Royal played an important part in the Industrial Revolution. The starting date for that is normally taken around 1707 when Abraham Darby, a brassfounder at Bristol, patented a "new" method of casting iron pots. His pots were thinner, and hence cheaper than those made by older means. In 1709 he acquired Coalbrookdale Furnace and succeeded in smelting iron using coke. Vale Royal Furnace was built by Thomas Hall for the Cheshire Partnership in 1696. It was most unusual in being a considerable distance from any source of iron ore. They used haematite ore from Furness and west Cumberland, brought by sea to Frodsham, and mixed with some Staffordshire ironstone. The consequent need for road transport in the area undoubtedly had an impact on the development of local turnpikes. Mostly however, the industrial history of the area is concerned with salt. It is associated with the ‘wich’ settlements of the Weaver Valley: Leftwich, Middlewich, Nantwich and Northwich: "wic" being an Ango-Saxon place name element associated with craft activity. It was industry that led to the development of the Bridgewater Canal (for coal) and the Weaver Navigation (for salt).

Salt became a vital ingredient for the chemicals industry. The so-called "Leblanc process" used salt, limestone, coal and sulphuric acid to make soda-ash and potash both being important to the glass, paper, soap and textile industries. The process was inefficient and polluting. In 1861, the Belgian chemist Ernest Solvay developed a more direct process for producing soda ash from salt and limestone through the use of ammonia. The only waste product of this Solvay process was calcium chloride, and so it was both more economical and less polluting than the Leblanc method. From the late 1870s, Solvay-based soda works on the European continent provided stiff competition in their home markets to the Leblanc-based British soda industry. Additionally the Brunner Mond Solvay plant which opened in 1874 at Winnington near Northwich provided fierce competition nationally. Leblanc producers were unable to compete with Solvay soda ash.

One result of the Industrial Revolution was a new breed of men who had earned huge amounts of money in their business but did not have the social standing of the original landed gentry, and Robert Dempster a gas industrialist, was no exception. In 1907 Robert leased the great house of Vale Royal from Lord Delamere who was by this time already living in Kenya. There were 18 gardeners and so many timepieces that it took a specialist four hours to wind them each week.

White Mischief
One of the first British settlers in East Africa, Hugh Cholmondeley, 3rd Baron Delamere (1870–1931), K.C.M.G., is credited with helping form the Happy Valley set. A group of hedonistic, largely British and Anglo-Irish aristocrats and adventurers who settled in the "Happy Valley" region of the Wanjohi Valley, near the Aberdare mountain range, in colonial Kenya and Uganda between the 1920s and the 1940s. In the 1930s, the group became infamous for its decadent lifestyles and exploits amid reports of drug use and sexual promiscuity.

Lord Delamere first travelled to East Africa in 1891 for lion hunting and returned yearly to resume the hunt. In 1894, he was mauled by a lion. As a result, he limped for the rest of his life. He is also credited for coining the term "white hunter". In 1896, he moved to Africa and eventually settled in Kenya. In 1906, he acquired a large farm, the Soysambu Ranch, which would eventually rise to 200,000 acres (810 km2). Lord Delamere is also considered to have contributed significantly to the development of Kenyan agriculture. He quickly became the unofficial leader of the white community in Kenya.

A Scottish peer and notorious philanderer, Josslyn Victor Hay, 22nd Earl of Erroll (1901–1941) abandoned his diplomatic career in Great Britain and scandalised society when he eloped with a married woman, Lady Idina Sackville. The couple were married in 1923 and moved to Kenya in 1924. They became the unofficial 'king and queen' of 'Happy Valley' and their home, Slains (named after the former Hay family seat of Slains Castle), became a centre of social life, notorious for its orgies. Idina, Countess of Erroll, divorced him in 1929, because he was cheating her financially. Lord Erroll was already having an affair with married woman Molly Ramsay-Hill. The couple eloped. When Ramsay-Hill's husband found out, he hunted them down and famously horsewhipped Lord Erroll in public at Nairobi Railway Station. Erroll married Molly in 1930. In 1934, Lord Erroll joined Sir Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists (B.U.F.) and, on his return to Kenya a year later, became president of the Convention of Associations. In 1939, on the outbreak of World War II, Lord Erroll became a captain in the Kenya Regiment and accepted the post of military secretary for East Africa in 1940.

In 1934 Thosas Cholmondeley Delamere moved his family into Vale Royal Abbey, only to be forced out in 1939 when the Government converted Vale Royal to serve as a sanatorium for soldiers of World War II. The Cholmondeleys were restored to possession of the abbey after the war, but by 1947 the house and grounds had been sold to Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) in 1947. The company initially used the abbey as staff accommodation and, from 1954 to 1961, as the headquarters of its salt and alkali division. ICI moved out in 1961. There were abortive schemes to use the abbey as a health centre, a country club, a school and a prison. In 1977, the abbey became a residential care home for people with learning disabilities. In 1998, Vale Royal became a private golf club.

In 1939, Erroll's wife Molly, Countess of Erroll, died from the effects of consuming a concoction of alcohol, morphine and heroin. In late 1940, Lord Erroll met Diana, Lady Delves Broughton, the new, glamorous and much younger wife of Sir Jock Delves Broughton, 11th Baronet. Lord Erroll and Lady Delves Broughton soon became lovers. Their romance was a very public one and they intended to elope. Delves Broughton reportedly gave his blessings. However, Erroll was murdered in January 1941. Broughton was considered a major suspect. He was arrested by the police and tried for the murder of Erroll. Due to lack of evidence and to ballistic considerations, he was acquitted. Juanita Carberry, daughter of John Carberry (10th Baron Carbery), maintains that Broughton confessed the murder to her shortly after his acquittal. Diana quickly divorced Broughton. He returned to England, where he committed suicide in the Adelphi Hotel, Liverpool, by a drugs overdose in 1942. Following her divorce from Broughton, Diana married Gilbert Colvile in 1943, one of the wealthiest and most powerful landowners in Kenya and inherited much of his fortune. Years later, Diana married Thomas Cholmondeley, 4th Baron Delamere, and increased her land fortune. For many years in the 1960s and 1970s and until the death of her lesbian lover, Diana lived in a three-way relationship with her husband and Lady Patricia Fairweather (daughter of the 2nd Earl of Inchcape). By the time of Delamere's death, she was possibly the most powerful white woman in Africa, dubbed the "White Queen of Africa."

Related Pages

 * Cholmondeley: an early example of "fake news" involving a "rising" in Grosvenor Park;

Sources and Links

 * A history of the abbey;
 * Historic England;
 * British History Online;

Edward I

 * Assassination attempt;

The Cholmondeleys

 * Sir Thomas Holcroft;
 * Vale Royal: on Thornber.net;
 * Old Africa Magazine;
 * Lord Delamere: traditional folk song;
 * Cholmondeley: at Northwich Heritage;

Nixon

 * "Prophecies of Robert Nixon, Mother Shipton, and Martha, the Gypsy";

Industrial Revolution

 * THE VALE ROYAL COMPANY AND ITS RIVALS;
 * The industrial archaeology of Cheshire;
 * Edith May Dempster: Winsford Historic Society;

White Mischief

 * Happy Valley Set;
 * "'White Mischief' murder finally solved after 66 years";