St John’s Chapel, Tavistock: Springs, Summers and Hermits

On a recent visit to the Devon Heritage Centre I asked to see a map listed as ‘Tavistock Area Plan of St. John’s Chapel lands of late J.C. Sanders’. This plan refers to the area on the south of the River Tavy on the Whitchurch side of the river, on the bank opposite the former abbey, and near to Abbey Bridge. The map measured only  15 cm by 10cm and was undated. Even though only small, and with few annotations, it is quite remarkable what such an unassuming scrap can reveal. This blog explores what is known of the St John’s Chapel, referred to in the title of this map. Helped by the new information in its annotations and pictorial representations, and aided by interrogating some of the other St John sources, I expand the story of St John’s, to place its history within a landscape perspective.

In particular, new to a landscape understanding of this site, I hope to offer the following:

• A reconstruction of the road and landscape, prior to the construction of Abbey Bridge and the later impact of 19th century railway infrastructure.
• A re-imagining of the hermitage history that connects St John’s Chapel, not to the trope of solitary seclusion, but instead to that of the busy highway and the bustling medieval Great Bridge.
• Finally, and most mysteriously, I interrogate the building labelled as the ‘summer house’ and ask, what can this building possibly be?

But first, let’s take a look at the contemporary landscape of the St John’s area and what is known of its history.

The Contemporary Landscape of St John’s

It is probably worth starting with the observation that, even for most residents of Tavistock, there is a limited conception of St John’s as an historical place. In the current landscape its name echos in: St John’s Avenue – the path along the south bank of the Tavy below Abbey Bridge; the gothic St John’s House, built by the Bedford Estate in 1866 for the steward Gilson Martin (HER¹, Undated); St John’s, the cul-de-sac occupied by St John’s House; and a residential care facility at the end of Abbey Rise (close to where the police and fire service are based). Whilst all of these places vaguely preserve a memory that this area, across the Tavy from the monastery, was connected to St John, I suspect that for most, these names are unperceived as defining it as a place with a coherent identity or having anything other than a vague connection to its history.

Unlike the town centre of Tavistock with Bedford Square, the church, market precinct and shops, the southern bank of the river has a different personality; one that is less easily ‘identifiable’. For me, the area where medieval St John’s would have been is partly defined by the very fact that it is on the ‘other’ bank of the Tavy. It is not ‘in the town’. Once you walk over Abbey Bridge to gain the Whitchurch Road you may feel the proximity to the historic and commercial centre of the town today, but you are outside it. This is not just about leaving the town centre, but the act of crossing the river that gives it a different sense of place. Departing in any other direction does not emotionally feel the same as leaving by crossing over the water.

Roads and bridges form another character trait. This is where the Whitchurch Road descends to cross the Tavy, now at Abbey Bridge but in former times, a little further up-stream at the medieval Great Bridge. Although the road and bridge network here has changed, meaning flows ‘from’ and ‘to’ have altered, this is today, as it would have been in the past, still a busy place of traffic entering and leaving, funnelled by the bridge crossing. For me, the roads, the act of passing through and passing across the river, and the presence and utility of the bridge are prepotent. The place therefore has an identity as a gateway to and from the town and a character linked to travel and traffic.

The other flow here is, of course, the river. St John’s is also for me about the riverside path. Here you can get away from vehicles, to walk in the verdure of trees and to breathe in the tumble of the Tavy’s waters, elevated in volume by the cascades over the weirs. The footpath differs from that on the other bank. Between Abbey Bridge and Benson Meadow the path is elevated above the river, shrouded and shady, lying at the bottom of a steep north facing slope of woodland. St John’s is cooler and damper than the flatter urban land on the other bank, whose walk-way is overlooked, not by trees, but the imposing crenellated wall of the abbey.

Walking over Abbey Bridge and up Whitchurch Road, I am also aware of where I may be going. Sometimes this might mean heading for Whitchurch, but more often than not Whitchurch Down pulls my feet this way. So as well as thinking about St John’s as a gateway to the town centre it has a sense of being the way you come to head for the open country of the down, the high ground, sitting above the town.

Summing up, St John’s, I feel, is about the flow of water; about roads and bridges; about passing into and out of; about shade and damp; about being close to yet set apart; about lying across from and lying below.

A History of St John’s Chapel

Little is known about the precise location of St John’s Chapel as no evidence of it remains. But whilst its location is mysterious, there are a number of historical records that confirm its existence.

First mention is made in AD 1383 in a licence for ‘divine service’, granted to David Baggetorre, to celebrate  mass ‘in the Chapel of Saint John just across the river from the abbey’ (Woodcock, 2010, p30). It is considered that it probably formed part of a hermitage on the basis that the grantee was described as ‘a poor hermit’ (Turton and Weddell, 1991, in HER², Undated) and Woodcock (2010, p31) considers ‘there is sufficient evidence … that it served for a time as a leper hospital’. Later, in AD 1436 a record mentions a chapel ‘next Tavy Water’. About the same time, Bishop Lacey of Exeter wrote of ‘a Chapel of Saint John the Baptist by the River Tavy in the parish of Tavystock’ (Woodcock, 2010, p30). Tavistock Parish Churchwarden accounts contain an inventory from AD 1470 listing the recent acquisition of ‘a silver cup and a small cross, said to be the legacy of John the Hermit’ (Woodcock, 2010, p31). These items reappear in an inventory of AD 1535, described as ‘a little cross of silver, the gift of John Armytt (John the Hermit) in which is a piece of the Holy Cross’. These records beg the obvious question, did all hermits of this chapel have to be called John?

Chapel of St Mary Tory, Bradford on Avon, 10 November 2009. Source Picasa Web Albums. Author John Picken. wikimediacommons.org.

This chapel was described by John Aubrey, writing in the seventeenth century, as ‘the finest hermitage I have seen in England’. According to The Saxon Trust of St Laurence there seems to have been a chapel dedicated to the Virgin Mary and a hostel for pilgrims on their way to Canterbury on this site since early times. The hermit likely occupied the cell hewn into the hillside below.

www.saxonchurch.org.uk/st-mary-tory/

The fortunes of the hermitage altered with the dissolution of the monasteries. St John’s appears again in a record from 1677, but no longer is it clear if the chapel building survived. The petition in the parish archives refers to St John’s as bordering the river and ‘a little cottage much ruyned, with two little garden plots to the same belonginge, called by the name of St. John’s Chapple’ (quoted by Kempe, 1830, p490). The document refers to the place being very useful when it was ‘brought-in’ by the parishioners in the ‘tyme of the late contagious sickness, and then converted to a Pest House’. The site, at the time of the petition, was in the hands of the Duke of Bedford. The signatories of the petition were asking the Duke, out of his ‘noble bountie and wonted charitie’ to bestow the plot to them for a lease of 99 years (being three lives) for a rent of one shilling a year. They wished the land for their ‘choicest care’ in order for use by the poor ‘except great necessitie constrayne us againe to convert it to a Pest House’. It is not known if this lease was granted because in 1718 a lease for this land was then granted, to a lady called Prothasia Saunders, encompassing ‘all those ground called St John’s with a barne’ (Woodcock, 2010, p30).

From these Early Modern records we learn about the changes to the use and ownership of the site, but the details about what happens to the buildings become opaque. Assuming originally there was both a chapel and a hermitage here, it is hard to work out which, if either of these, became the ‘ruined cottage’ and if the ruined cottage later was used as the barn. Perhaps neither cottage nor barn were medieval buildings used continuously after the hermitage fell. Perhaps they were new buildings altogether?

By the early 19th century, St John’s is still very much a known place in the landscape but only in memory. No longer in official records, instead it features in the words of genteel antiquarian and landscape writers such as Anna Eliza Bray, Alfred John Kemp (Bray’s brother) and Rachel Evans. By now the chapel is only a landscape ghost, with these authors describing the location where they understood it to have once stood.

Kemp (1830), for example, describes the chapel as having been located where a ‘fine natural spring rises in this spot from the earth (a circumstance which seems to have been usually sought for in chusing the site of an hermitage) and falls into the Tavy’. Bray (1838) describes this as ‘almost opposite the Still House’ but that ‘all medieval traces had by then disappeared’. She also recounts the site:

‘On the opposite hill , beautifully diversified by trees , some of which droop their branches into the passing waters , once stood a cell , the Hermitage of St. John . Of this no memorial is now left , excepting a spring of the purest kind , but the spot is still called by its ancient name‘

(Bray, 1836, p78)

A few pages later, and more poetically, she expresses:

‘... the reality is before me; there lies the once holy, and the ever pure spring of St. John, unsheltered, open to the sunshine or the storm; those just emblems of the fortunes experienced by the departed guardians of this fountain‘

Bray, 1838 p80

A decade later, and shortly before the railway obliterated this pre-Victorian landscape, comes a description from Rachel Evans (1846, p12 & 37). Rachel says that, a little further downstream from the canal weir is a natural cascade which she describes as ‘boiling and foaming‘ with ‘drops that trickle into its heaving bosom from a font‘. Next to this ‘holy well is still to be seen with the remains of a cross at its entrance‘, which she says is supposed to indicate that it belonged to the hermitage and chapel of St. John.

According to Brown (1957), in an article on the ‘Holy and Notable Wells of Devon’, St John’s Well was reputedly used to cure scabs. Today a well of this name is situated 250m down-river, at Benson Meadow, set into a natural cliff at the bottom of a large revetted wall at the bottom of the old railway embankment. It is framed by a granite arch of ‘uncertain date’ (Turton and Weddell, 1991, in HER³, Undated). The key question with respect to this well is, how does it relate to St John’s Chapel because, according to Kemp, Bray and Evans’ descriptions, this is not the same St John’s Well they observed issuing from the hill-slope further up river. It is in the wrong location.

My suspicions that the modern St John’s Well is counterfeit, given how far removed it is from the medieval chapel site with its railway-obliterated gushing spring, are confirmed by two letters to the Tavistock Gazette. Chris Bellers, Chair of the Tavistock Local History Society alerted me to these letters, knowing my interest in St John’s. The first appeared in December 1908 in which ‘An Old Inhabitant’ writes in to the paper to reminisce about the ‘Lost Medicinal Spring’. The Old Inhabitant then ponders:

“Would it not be wise to restore this Well for the good of the community? I remember, when a boy, often going to St John’s Well, close to the river, near Crocky Nine Steps, and fetching water, which was often drunk by invalids, but being a child, I took no notice of its virtues.”

The impact of the railway is then confirmed as the letter writer goes on to describe how, when the station for the G.W.R. railway was made in 1859, the Well was almost buried by debris.

This letter prompted a response in January 1909, from a person calling themselves ‘A Native’. They also miss the St John’s Well of their childhood, confirmed it as being next to the ‘nine steps’, and that it was lost due to the railway and consequent drainage of the hillslope. ‘A Native’ goes on to give some lyrical details:

“This Well supplied St John’s, a sweet cottage that faced the bridge, and its lawn ran up almost to the present sandpit, and in the meadow behind the cuckoo gave us its first note every spring. Its water was very clear and bubbling and often meandered down to the river”

Given all this evidence, the current St John’s Well, pictured below, looks very much as if it is an early 20th Century memorialisation of the medieval well, erected on a different site, perhaps re-using bits of older masonry to frame the water that dribbles from the rock. Neither of the Gazette letter writers mention this version of the St John’s Well, and therefore the implication must be that it did not yet exist. I wonder if their letters to the Gazette prompted the town to remember, in this new memorial, the ancient chalybeate spring?

The physical reality of what we see before our eyes is very potent though. All this history had been forgotten. The materiality of the present St John’s Well holds sway and, as far as Tavistock’s local history, and the official Historic Environment Record is concerned, this has become ‘the’ St John’s Well.

A final heritage feature of relevance to the hermitage story are two short lengths of chamfered cross shaft, supposedly built into the base of the wall on the left side of the entrance to Saint John’s Avenue, near the junction to Whitchurch road. These are muted to have once stood next to the holy well (HER⁴, Undated). I had a good look for these but was unable to locate them.

And what of the wider, non-religious and more recent historic landscape? It is not possible to mention everything that has happened here but I will say a few words on a few things that I think are key. Firstly is the building of the Abbey Bridge in 1764, which brought the river crossing closer to the putative hermitage site, and caused changes to the road network (as we will see below). Nearly a century later, in 1859, the new railway line, railway station and station yard of the South Devon & Tavistock Railway opened up.

This major development involved levelling sections of the hill, building embankments, and quarrying into the hill-slope, in an enterprise that significantly altered the topography, right down to the edge of the riverside footpath. It is presumably for this reason, along with Victorian and modern drainage engineering that the spring that Mrs Bray and her brother describe as falling into the river, no longer exists.

The railway groundworks may also explain the tragic loss of the following romantic topographic feature from the Tavy riverscape:

‘we are not without wooded hills . For example , that called St. John’s , where the hermitage once stood , is situated opposite to our garden on the other side the river . It is a romantic spot , where stands a rock , that still rears his head , like the tower of an old fortress , and looks down upon the Tavy‘

(Bray, 1838, p144)

Now that we have explored the current geography of the area and outlined its history, let us turn to the map that sparked this blog …

Analysis of the ‘Saint John’s Chappell’ Map

The map of the “Tavistock Area Plan of St. John’s Chapel lands of late J.C. Sanders (DRO L1258M/O/E/MP/2/15) is small. It measures only 15 cm by 10cm and shows a patch of land, measuring circa 300 feet square (about 100 m square). The map is undated and, whilst its elements are few and simple, it contains a wealth of information. In this section I will go through its various elements, describing what is shown, and explaining what meaning and information might be extracted.

The Map Title

The map is titled ‘A Plan of Saint John’s Chappell fallen in hand By the Death of John Cunningham Sanders. Contains £ 0 – 0 – 38. N.B. This is the piece of ground claimed by the parish’.

John Cunningham Sanders is almost certainly John Cunningham Saunders, born in Tavistock to Jacob Saunders and Prothesia (Pertesey) Cudlipp (whom we met above, inheriting the lease in 1718). He was baptised as a Presbytarian at the Abbey Chapel on March 25^th 1717. I cannot find a record of his death but a ‘Sugden’ family tree (on Ancetry.co.uk) places this in the year 1732 when he would have been just fifteen years old. He seems to have had a brother Jacob, who died aged two years old in 1722. His mother and father died in 1724 and 1725 respectively. He would therefore have been orphaned at the age of about eight. He was survived only by his sister Elizabeth, eleven when when he died, leaving her the only surviving member of the family. If this ‘Sugden’ family tree is accurate then this helps date the map to no earlier and probably close to 1732.

We are told that the value of the land is a meagre 38d, and it is being ‘claimed by the parish’. Perhaps this relates to the earlier petition of 1677, at which time an earlier attempt had taken place to secure the lease for use by the poor.

The title of the maps says that the plan is of ‘Saint John’s Chappell’. This raises the question as to whether the building shown in the map is the former chapel or if the title is merely referring to land that is known as Saint John’s Chappell?

The Road and (lack of) Bridge

The road shown in the map is the ‘Road to Harrobridge’, the road we know as Whitchurch Road. It is shown leading straight down to the river at an almost a ninety-degree angle, lined by ‘a wall’ (see map below). Normally, roads that lead straight down to a river’s edge do so where there is a crossing point so this is a bit odd because the map does not depict a bridge here. Initially I found this confusing. If the road went to a bridge then surely the road led to the Great Bridge, as this was still the crossing point 1732? Was it omitted because the map maker didn’t draw it, or because the road did not lead to the bridge?

Today, Whitchurch Road approaches more acutely. Victorian maps record a different line, with the road sweeping further east, running close to the quarry face, before turning towards Abbey Bridge (see blue line on the map below). But what did the road do before Abbey Bridge was built? The Saint John’s Chappell map, assuming it shows the place we understand to be the location of St John’s Chapel, shows the odd layout of the road, heading down-slope to a non-crossing point. How can this be peculiar layout be checked?

In order to try and untangle this confusing road network I consulted another old map called the ‘Aislabie’ Map (DRO L1258M/0/E/SV/B/22), of 1769, drawn just after Abbey Bridge was built. I can’t show this map for copyright reasons but I have depicted the road layout it reveals. Aislabie shows the new road from Whitchurch leading to the recently built Abbey Bridge. This takes a similar line to the current road. However, it also shows the outline of the former, recently defunct road (see map above – orange line). This is the road as it would have been when the medieval Great Bridge was the crossing . In the vicinity of the modern junction at Abbey Rise, it shows this older road turning towards the river, across the car-park and down to the river’s edge. It therefore mirrors the Saint John’s Chappell map, confirming both its reliability and the location.

Can anything be seen of this former route? Along the river bank close to Abbey Bridge there are two paths. The upper one is called St John’s Avenue and is a more recent footway. The lower track is older, and would have been route of the old road. Today it is truncated; cut-off by the bridge.

In the past it would have carried on at this elevation to join up with the approximate line of what is now Dolvin Road. The line of the old road that descended to the riverbank is now obliterated by the former railway embankments and other landscaping. There is no sign of it left, save perhaps for one clue? Connecting the St John’s Avenue footpath to the lower path along the riverbank is an old flight of worn steps, just in the right position for where the road would have been. Do these mark the spot where the Whitchurch Road, before 1764, made its final approach to the Great Bridge?

Saint John’s Farm.

The map record this land as ‘Part of Saint John’s Farm’. Until now, I have not seen any record of Saint John’s Farm in Tavistock. Finberg does not mention it in his book about Tavistock Abbey (1969), there is no mention of it in a search of the Devon Record Office catalogue, and neither is it in the Historic Environment Record. Saint John’s Farm, so close to the centre of Tavistock, on the southern bank of the Tavy, therefore appears to be a previously un-recognised part of Tavistock’s agricultural landscape.

Where might the farm have been located? One possibility is that the chapel site itself became a small farm after the chapel was disbanded. The hermitage and/or chapel could have been repurposed as farm buildings. However, the map labels this site as ‘part of Saint John’s Farm’ so another possibility is that the main farm buildings were located beyond the confine of this small map, acquiring the name of the nearby chapel. What are the likely candidates for such a farm?

According to the Aislabie map of 1769 – the oldest map of the wider landscape around St John’s – there are two sets of residential buildings that might fit the bill. Deer Park Lodge was built in the 1850’s by the Bedford Estate for Theophilus Jones, the Estate’s architect and surveyor (HER⁵, Undated). The Historic Environment Record for this building classes it as a new build, and indeed, the current house was¹. However, the Aislabie map shows an earlier pair of buildings on the same footprint as that of the current house. Further south, but still close enough to be in the sphere of the St John’s, is a pair of buildings located on a track that was later to be developed into Down Road. Were either of these St John’s Farm?

The Summer House

Most intriguingly of all is the only building drawn on the map. If the scale is accurate (and the map does provide a scale) then it looks to be only about 100 feet (30 m ) downstream from where the Harrowbridge road meets the Tavy. It has the annotation ‘Summer house being Part of St John’s Farm’. Enigmatically, to what is the label of ‘summer-house’ referring? Summer houses, in more recent centuries, are the country residences to which the gentry retire in the summer months, but this definition does not fit this context. An interesting question is therefore – for what purpose does the label ‘summer house’ refer?

A Deeper Look at Hermit, Pest and Summer Houses

Now that I have given an experiential description of the landscape of St John’s, outlined its known history, and detailed the evidence represented in this new map, I am now going to use this to interrogate the landscape of Saint John’s and its history in more depth. Questions I want to explore are:

• What was the nature of hermits and hermitages in later medieval society?
• What is a Pest House?
• What might have been the purpose of a ‘summer house’ in this location? and
• Does the dedication to Saint John have any particular relevance to the landscape and historical evidence of this site?  

Hermits and Hermitages

If asked to describe a religious hermit, most of us would probably say that they were a man who lived alone, away from others, and led an austere existence. Some of this is true, but medieval hermits may not have been as secluded as our modern conception entertains.

Early Christian hermits and eremitic communities certainly were reclusive and hidden. In the middle east, where these traditions emerged, hermits took themselves off to desserts. In early Christian Britain, we see hermits on islands in the fens (e.g. Guthlac), in caves, and on remote coastal islands and promontories (e.g. Cuthbert). By the 10^th to 11^th centuries, more permanent hermit cells were established and these became the focus for travellers and pilgrims (Historic England, 2018). In fact, in late medieval Britain, far from being enclosed and shut-off, hermits could live in groups, act as retreat houses for monasteries, offer hospitality, provide hospital care and be:

“active preachers, mediators in disputes and alms-collectors, or they performed valuable services being responsible for maintaining lighthouses, highways, ferries and bridges.”

Historic England (2018, p1)

The rather narrow way that our contemporary eyes see hermits is therefore incorrect and the reality was that they served a great variety of functions and some were not nearly as ‘cut-off’ as we think.

A hermitage, where a hermit or group of hermits lived, would probably include a small chapel, but might also include domestic buildings including living space, a kitchen, a well, and latrines and could be enclosed by walls, ditches or a moat. Again, far from the trope of a ragged man in a cave (and there were cave hermits, but not all hermits live in caves!), the hermitage could therefore be a well-ordered and structured place.

Of all the types and locations of hermits, ‘town hermits’ are one of the later forms. Evidence for urban hermits comes from the 14^th Century onwards through to the end of monasticism. Rather than being focused on isolation, town hermits had a role of public service, and were particularly responsible for the repair of highways and bridges, and acted as ferrymen, locations where they could leverage their advantage to beg for money to support their activities, be this bridge and road repairs or helping the sick (Historic England, 2018, p9; Jones, 2013, p22). Such a function is illustrated by the hermits of Highgate Hill, at the start of the Great North Road, who ‘devote themselves to the repair of decayed bridges and ways and the burial of bodies of persons slain by robbers’ as described in a papal letter (ibid). According to Jones, this urban shift also goes hand-in-hand with a drop in the status of the hermit and a ‘lowering of their spiritual ambition’.

“Most solitaries were to a greater or lesser extent dependent on alms, and therefore they needed passers-by. If a medieval person encountered a solitary … it was probably while they were travelling, by road or by water”

Jones, 2013, p22

Hermitages ended with the dissolution of the monasteries although it is thought that their bridge and road chapels did last a little longer. I wonder if their greater longevity was a combination of their independence from monasteries as well as the fiscal and practical service they provided?

Once we widen our idea of what role the late medieval hermit served, we can see how the St John’s hermitage in Tavistock fits well into the ‘town hermit’ type described. St John’s was located at the bottom of the ‘Harrobridge’ road and near to the Great Bridge. It is therefore likely that the hermits of St John’s helped maintain the Great Bridge. I assume that ‘begging’ for alms went hand-in-hand with offering blessings to travellers in order to obtain donations. Perhaps there was a level of spiritual pressure? Was it bad luck, for example, to pass the hermit without giving a donation? Were, as some have suggested, hermits more like toll-keepers, levying a charge for passage (e.g. Rosevear, 2004; Higgins, 2020)? Given they were party to all the people coming and going, they were also in a position of being the gate-keeper to news and gossip, which presumably could also be traded for alms?

By unpicking the role of the town hermit, this enriches our understanding of, not just St John’s, but also the connection of this place and its hermit to travellers, and the Great Bridge, as well as the relationship of the hermitage to the monastery on the town-side of the river.

The Pest House

Pest houses initially went by the name of lazar houses or lazar hospitals and were for people with infectious diseases, chiefly, but not exclusively, leprosy. They were typically built on main road ways on the edge of towns, to isolate the diseases, but also in places where alms could be begged from passing travellers. The earliest known lazar house in England is St Mary Magdalen in Winchester, dating to the around the late 10th century (Historic England, undated). As waves of pestilence hit Europe, lazar houses were also associated with bubonic plague. As the centuries ticked on lazar houses increasingly became known as pest houses, with this term more common from the late 16th century onwards (see entries in the OED).

Records of a 17th C pest house at St John’s in Tavistock fit with the notion of balancing infectious isolation, away from the town, on the other side of the river, but also with proximity to the road so that travellers could be beseeched for charity. Its history supports the view that there was, perhaps, an earlier lazar house here as Woodcock mentions. This place would certainly connect the locational attributes to the choice of St John – St John’s name is associated with hospital care, from the Order of Knights of the Hospital of Saint John of Jerusalem, from where we also get the St John’s Ambulance. As we learnt above, hermits have a history linked to providing hospital care so this intersection of geography, hermits, hospitals and St John makes a lot of sense.

The ‘Summer House’

The ‘summer house being part of St John’s Farm’ is the most fascinating and mystifying label on the plan. As was noted above, it is not credible that the building is a summer house in the sense of a wealthy seasonal country residence. It is described in 1677 as a ruined cottage and by 1718 as a barn. What other clues does the OED offer in relation to definitions that might help explain its ‘summer’ label?

In addition to being a summer residence in the country, a summer-house may also be defined as ‘a building in a garden or park, usually of very simple and often rustic character, designed to provide a cool shady place in the heat of summer’ (OED).  These places seem to have been buildings in shaded and woody areas where herbs, vegetables and flowers might be grown out of the harshness of the full summer sun.

“Lest the sonne in somer do hit harm, Thi somer hous northest & west let wrie“

c. 1440 Pallad on Husb. I. 347 in the OED, ‘Summer-house’

The location of St John’s, at the bottom of a fairly steep north facing slope by the river would fit with this description. The c. 1769 Aislabie map shows a couple of garden plots amongst the trees next to the putative chapel-cum-summer-house so this map also shows a landscape that fits this definition. Perhaps even as a chapel site and hermitage it always had a shady garden plot, used to sustain its resident hermit?

“Frenche Beanes … climeth aloft … seruyng well for the shadowing of Herbers and Summer houses“

1577 B Goodge Heresbach’s Husb. 34 b. n the OED, ‘Summer-house’

The OED offers one further definition. A ‘summer-house’ might be ‘an arbor or the like used in connection with the summer-game’. An arbor can mean anything from a lawn, to a garden of herbs and flowers through to an orchard or trees, trained on a trellis into a wooded structure and this still fits with the idea of a shady garden. But what is the ‘summer-game’ and could this have any bearing on St John’s Chapel?

The ’summer-game’ is another name for the festival held at Midsummer’s Eve which was widely celebrated across Christian Europe for centuries with dancing, games and dramatic performances. Bonfires were lit and formed a big part of the celebration, it being common for people to leap through the flames. Midsummer’s eve was the 23rd of June and the saint associated with this feast day was … St John the Baptist!

St John’s Chapel, being described as a ‘summer house’ may be nothing more than coincidental link to the midsummer celebrations of St John’s Eve. But then again, it might not be a coincidence. Unless further evidence was to emerge from archival research – a detail not previously spotted – any link is speculative. And until I learn to read medieval Latin, I am not going to be the woman to go-a-hunting!

However, even if St John’s is not named directly for Midsummer Eve, this feast would have been enjoyed in medieval Tavistock, as it was across the whole of medieval Europe and into more recent centuries. It was one of the biggest festivals of the medieval calendar. As we will see from descriptions of St John’s Eve, this land across the Tavy fits many of the landscape requirements for where it was celebrated. So, whilst we are thinking about St John, let’s take a look at how the people of Tavistock would have let their hair down on the longest day, and keep an eye out for any landscape elements of relevance.

The Feast of St John’s Eve

Ronald Hutton, in a book called ‘The Rise and Fall of Merry England: The Ritual Year 1400-1700’ (1994), pulls together detailed examples of how the Feast of St John’s Eve was celebrated. He tells of a London antiquary named John Stow who described how the feast was celebrated in the capital before 1540. Bonfires were made in the streets with every man ‘bestowing wood or their labour’. Wealthier people would set tables before their houses laden with food and drink and doors were decorated with ‘green birch, long fennel, St John’s Wort, Orpin and White lilies’ as well as other flowers. Oil lamps were burned in the name of St. John all through the night. Pageants took place in the streets with morris dancers, model giants (Gog and Magog were popular) and plays. More informally than these, euphoric dances, singing, leaping about and drinking (and general rowdiness) went on (Dashú, undated).

Fire was important. Torches might be carried around fields and flaming wheels rolled down hillsides. The bonfires that were lit were regarded as having purging properties – to disinfest cattle, protect crops and clear the air of infections. Fires of different types were burnt including those made of bones (we get the name of bonfire from bone-fire), whose stench drove away evil, and those made of wood, which were the focal point for merry-making.

Decorating, especially doors, with flower and foliage was a major motif and with respect to this Hutton includes a reference to practice in Tavistock, where rushes were apparently strewn on the church floor on Midsummer Day.

Just like Mayday, Midsummer revels included the crowning of mock-kings and mock-queens. For example, at Wistow in Yorkshire in the 1460s, this ‘coronation’ took place at a location significant for our story because it was described as a ‘summerhouse’, which was apparently a barn, on the Sunday before Midsummer Eve. All sorts of plays and pageants were enacted as part of the celebrations with those relating to Robin Hood becoming very popular from the 1450s onwards.

In many records, water played an important part, as might be expected given the conjunction of the heat of summer and the saint attached to the celebration – John the Baptist. For example, in Spain, records tell of midsummer maidens rushing to be the first to reach a holy and curative spring. As well as being lit on more traditional ‘beacon’ hill tops, St John’s Eve fires are recorded in water and waterside locations such as near beaches, river banks, lakes or springs. At the Water Church of Zurich there is a record from 1418 of a crowd assembling at midsummer to watch women dancing in the chapel which had been built over a spring, long established as sacred for its healing and strength-giving waters (Backman, in Dashú, Undated).

In a paper on sacred springs in Finland, Björkman (2020) uses two case studies of springs used for gatherings at midsummer. An account from 1812 details going to a spring at Muhkuri village and ‘sacrificing a copper coin’ to bring good luck. It describes the gathering as swelling in the number of people until ‘disturbing behaviours, brawls and noisemaking’ broke out. The spring focal point of the festivity was described as on a wooded hill at the southern edge of the village, a location which Björkman picks up on as being significant for being outside the village and in a liminal position. The other spring described in the paper is at a place called Ämmälähde, at the boundary of the parish. Here the custom was to scry the waters on St John’s Eve, to identify a future partner or other life events (Björkman, 2020). Of landscape significance, the spring ‘had to be a natural’ or ‘one whose waters ran to the north’. Björkman picks out the peripheral location of the springs and the celebrations as important in relation to them being a ‘refuge from authority’ and central therefore to the rowdy fun and drunkenness, central to the feast’s character. Letting down one’s hair in this way would not be possible within the confines of the town or village, with its authority and control.

That such celebrating was widespread is confirmed by many sources but not everyone was in the party mood. Disapprovingly, a monk from Winchcombe Abbey, Gloucestershire, writing in the mid fifteenth century describes the Midsummer revels as ‘vain, stupid, profane games’ which were accompanied by ‘much drinking and lighting of fires’ (Hutton, 1994).

The transition to Protestantism significantly curtailed Midsummer celebrations but they did not die out altogether, as attested by records such as that of the tailors guild in Salisbury who witness that processions and feasting persisted into the 17th century (Douglas, 1989).

And finally, what would discussion of midsummer celebrations be without mentioning Shakespeare’s ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’. Partly set in a forest beyond the city, the play involves lovers, mischief and fairies. A love potion mistakenly given results in one of the characters waking from sleep to fall in love with the wrong woman. It is not difficult to see how Shakespeare has embodied St John’s Eve celebrations in the symbolism of one of his most well-known plays.

Summing Up

At the start of this blog I set out three parts of the St John’s landscape history on which I hoped to be able to say something new …

1. The road and landscape of St John’s, prior to the construction of Abbey Bridge and the later impact of 19th century railway infrastructure.

• Prior to the building of Abbey Bridge in 1764, the main road into Tavistock from the south, via Whitchurch was different. The road turned sharply downhill to the river, in the area of the junction of Abbey Rise with Whitchurch Road. It approached the river bank approximately where a flight of steps descends from St John’s Avenue. Traffic would then proceeded beside the river bank up to the Great Bridge. This road layout is shown in the ‘Saint John’s Chappell’ map of c. 1732 and confirmed by the Aislabie Map of 1769.

• The ‘Saint John’s Chappell’ map indicates that, at least in the 18th century, there existed here a farm called St John’s Farm. This farm has not been previously identified in Tavistock’s history. The most likely candidate for this farm is the house now known as Deer Park Lodge. Mapping evidence indicates there was an 18th century building here before the current early Victorian one.

• As demonstrated in the descriptions of the river landscape by Anna Eliza Bray, at the site thought to be that of St John’s Chapel, opposite the vicarage where she lived, Bray could see a spring, which would flow into the Tavy. Also at this location, Bray described a picturesque tor which overlooked the Tavy like a ‘tower of an old fortress’. Neither the spring nor the rock tower described by Bray exist anymore. The landscape here has been significantly re-shaped by the railway and its embankment which it can be presumed are chiefly responsible for their loss.
• St John’s Well in Benson Meadow is almost certainly not the original sacred well. The real St John’s Well was a gushing spring that once existed at the site where the chapel is thought to have been situated. This is confirmed by the first hand testimony of notable Tavistock writers in the early 1800s, and in reminiscences of Tavistock inhabitants writing to the Gazette.
• The only part of this landscape that appears intact from the era before the building of Abbey Bridge is the lower footpath by the river and possibly the flight of old steps which are positioned where the old road would have descended.

2. The hermitage of St John’s Chapel, and its connection to the busy highway and medieval Great Bridge.

• The hermitage of St John’s almost certainly had a symbiotic relationship with the highway and the Great Bridge. The general history of town hermits suggest the hermit of St John’s probably collected alms or tolls for the upkeep of the Great Bridge and possibly the highway too.

• Woodcock (2010) has previously suggested that there was a lazar hospital here for which the hermit was responsible. This suggestion is also in line with the historic role of hermits. Its location on a busy road but ‘over the river’ from the town makes sense with historic understandings of how these buildings were sited for the control of infectious diseases. Seventeenth century records of St John’s being used as a ‘pest house’ are also suggestive of continuity in relation to this purpose.
• St John’s Well was known for being a sacred spring that might cure scabs. Perhaps this lore connects folk memory back to a time when lepers were housed here?
• St John is linked to care of the sick through the Order of Knights of the Hospital of Saint John of Jerusalem and so the dedication of this site to St John may link to a hospital purpose. John the Baptist, through the act of baptism, is also linked to water and so the name may also relate to the site’s holy well.

3. The building labelled as the ‘summer house’ and its landscape significance.

• The annotation of ‘summer house’ on the ‘Saint John’s Chappell’ map of c. 1732 is enigmatic. In line with one of the dictionary definitions in the OED it might relate this site’s north facing aspect and wood-shaded slope beside the river to it being a ‘summer house’ used for growing shade tolerant herbs and flowers.
• Summer houses were also places where the ‘summer-games’ were celebrated – predominantly medieval festivities associated with Midsummer, otherwise known as St John’s Eve. The summer house might therefore make reference to a history of St John’s Eve being observed here by the people of Tavistock.

• Landscape attributes of St John’s Tavistock fit with those identified in the celebration of this feast from other historic accounts – it is a place lying ‘beyond’ the town, allowing a greater social freedom to party; it has a sacred spring for making offerings to, and scrying the future; it is shady, where the heat of the summer sun could be avoided; it has ready access to Whitchurch Down where a fire would be lit and wheels of fire rolled down Deer Park Hill.
• The fact that a ‘summer house’ is recorded here, and because of the landscape suitability of this place for Midsummer celebrations, it is also possible that the site’s dedication to St John is more than coincidence and is related to the Feast of St John’s Eve.

Final thoughts …

As we have seen, there are multiple reasons why St John’s is a perfect name for this area of Tavistock, outside the town and over the river. It does not need to be the case that only one of these – a hospital, a sacred spring, or a place special for the midsummer celebration of St John’s Eve – needs to be implicated in its naming. I love the fact that there are three-fold reasons why St John’s seems so perfectly named.

In writing this blog it was a pleasure to explore this place’s depth of history; a place which today, I feel, lacks a coherent identity and sense of its heritage. In the past, as is now, it was peripheral yet busy with traffic crossing the Tavy. It was these very attributes that were, long ago, so fundamental to St John’s being the place it was.

Many thanks to Andrew Thompson for the lift to the DRO and for his initial insights when we first looked at the map. Also, huge thanks to John Hudswell for pointing me to the Aislabie map. This was invaluable in checking the map of Saint John’s Chappell and for the other landscape insights it gave that added to this blog. And finally to Chris Bellers, who spotted the references in the Tavistock Gazette to St John’s Well, allowing me to conclusively state that the present St John’s Well in Tavistock is a memorial, and not the original holy well.

Footnotes

1 – There has long been a place known as ‘lodge’ in Tavistock. This name goes back to the time of the abbey when the monastery would have had its own Deer Park. The lodge, being so close to the abbey, would not have been a hunting base, as is the case for some ‘elite’ hunting lodges. Rather, this type of lodge would have housed the deer park keeper – a place where he could be responsible for managing the deer park and keeping an eye out for poachers. However, after the abbey was dissolved, the deer park would no longer be used and so it is possible this building became repurposed as a farm.

References

Björkman, J. (2020). Waters at the edge: Sacred springs and spatiality in southwest Finnish village landscapes. In C. Ray (Ed.), Sacred Waters: A Cross-Cultural Compendium of Hallowed Springs and Holy Wells. Routledge.

Bray, M., 1838. Traditions, Legends, Superstitions, and Sketches of Devonshire: On the Borders of the Tamar and the Tavy, Illustrative of Its Manners, Customs, History, Antiquities, Scenery, and Natural History, in a Series of Letters to Robert Southey, Esq (Vol. 2). J. MurrayLondon.

Brown, T, 1957. Holy and Notable Wells of Devon. Transactions of the Devonshire Association. 89

Dashú, M. Undated. The Midsummer Dancers. www.suppressedhistories.net

Douglas, A., 1989. Midsummer in Salisbury: The Tailors’ Guild and Confraternity 1444-1642. Renaissance and Reformation/Renaissance et Réforme, pp.35-51.

Evans, R. 1846. Home Scenes, or Tavistock and its Vicinity. J.L. Commins.

HER¹, Undated. St John’s House, Whitchurch Road, Tavistock. MDV104190

HER², Undated. Saint John’s Chapel. MDV43884

HER³, Undated. St John’s Well, Benson Meadow, Tavistock, MDV43885

HER⁴, Undated. Fragments of stone near St John’s Avenue, Tavistock. MDV121635

HER⁵, Undated. Deer Park Lodge, Whitchurch Road, Tavistock. MDV104183

Higgins, J. 2016. Bridge Chapels – Our First Toll Houses? Milestone Society Newsletter. August 2016, no 31, pp 21-22

Historic England, Undated. The Time of Leprosy: 11th Century to 14th Century. Historic England.

Hutton, R. 1994. The Rise and Fall of Merry England: The Ritual Year 1400-1700. Oxford University Press.

Jones, E. A., 2013. Hidden Lives: Methodological Reflections on a New Database of the Hermits and Anchorites of Medieval England. Medieval Prosopography ,  Vol. 28, pp. 17-34 .

Kemp, Alfred John. 1830. ‘Notices of Tavistock and its Abbey. The Gentleman’s Magazine, and Historical Chronicle, From January to June 1830 (Being the Twenty-third of a New Series). Part the First. By Sylvanus Urban, Gent. J.B. Nichols & Son, London, p113-118, p216-221, and p488-495 .

Mudlark121, 2017. Today in festive history: it’s St John’s Eve – for bonfires, drink, dancing and dreams…. past tense. https://pasttenseblog.wordpress.com/

Rosevear, A. 2004. The Turnpikes of Reading and East Berkshire. www.turnpikes.org.uk/

Woodcock, G. 2010. Tavistock’s Yesterdays: episodes from her history, 19. Deer Park Productions, Printed by Anthony Rowe Ltd: Eastbourne.