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 original building 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. 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.

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.

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.

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 Cholmondeley family remodelled the exterior 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.

Henry I

 * Assassination attempt;

Nixon

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