One summer’s evening, while quietly tending the plants on his allotment, Martin Stott thought he heard a choir of angels. Putting aside his spade, he leant over the boundary hedge. Sure enough: wafting towards him on the warm breeze were the strains of a celestial music. It seemed to be coming from an ancient building close by …
Bartlemas chapel and its associated hospital were founded in 1126, little more than a generation after the Norman Conquest. For centuries they afforded a place of sanctuary for outsiders – and especially for lepers, whose bodies could be cared for at a safe distance from town while the needs of their souls were assuaged through prayer.
Also housed in the chapel were sacred relics – including a comb once used by Edward the Confessor, and a piece of skin reputed to have come from the flayed body of Saint Bartholomew himself. King Henry I, founder and benefactor of the fifteen-acre site, made provision for an annual endowment of £23 together with a modest clothing allowance for its leprous occupants and an allocation of two loads of hay from the King’s Mead at Osney.
What would Oxford have been like in 1126? It is hard to imagine, but not impossible. Then as now the ragstone pinnacle of St George’s tower would have loomed over the castle at the western crossing of the river. The giant causeway known as Grandpont would have arched across the water meadows towards Abingdon along the same route it follows to this day. The grid pattern of the streets, laid out in Saxon times, would be recognisable to any time-traveller – as would Oxford’s encircling town wall, within whose protective embrace some three thousand people huddled in houses of timber and thatch, wattle and daub. Pets and livestock lived here too.
Smells of brewing and tanning and tallow mingled with the smoke of a hundred hearth fires. The air would have been thick with the pungent odour of fish and the entrails of animal carcasses being gutted in the Shambles. Thick, too, with the percussive clamour of carpenters, stonemasons, and smiths, the clopping of horses’ hooves, and the cries of street vendors and market traders as they went about their raucous business.
The bells of the sainted churches (St Ebbe, St Aldate, St Martin, St Mary the Virgin, St Mary Magdalene, St Michael, St Peter) would have rung out, then as now, marking the hours and summoning parishioners to prayer, while, at the heart of the town’s religious life, in St Frideswide’s priory on the site of today’s cathedral, were enshrined the bones of our patron saint – a grail to which visitors in their thousands flocked to pray and to be healed.
For twelfth century Oxford, as well as being a hub of business and trade, was a magnet for pilgrims and spiritual seekers; and its reputation as a centre for theological and scholarly enquiry was destined to grow and grow in the centuries that followed as the colleges of a nascent university came into being.
The abbeys of Osney, Rewley, and Godstow were as yet unbuilt; but up-river a mile or so visitors could partake of the healing spring-waters of Binsey. Bartlemas also boasted a holy well (these days, alas, hidden away behind a locked gate) – a source of healing and of purification and a further reminder of the sacredness of this place. Every year on Ascension Day the well would be dressed according to local custom, an ancient rite which lapsed following the Reformation but which has since been revived.
Listen! Here comes that music again, floating in on the late summer breeze. For today, 24 August, is the feast of St Bartholomew. We have come here to celebrate 900 years of the chapel that bears his name, to sing hymns and give prayers in remembrance of this holy martyr so cruelly put to death for his Christian beliefs.
Today’s Oxford may long since have burst through its medieval walls, but the oasis of Bartlemas remains intact – a remarkable survival and a precious reminder of the world we have lost.
How to get there:
Walk up a narrow lane (newly metalled but easily missed) off the Cowley Road, past hedgerows, allotments, the remains of a children’s nursery and of a bowls club. Stop briefly to admire Bartlemas Farmhouse with its canopied door and smart white picket fence …
Cross the lane. And there it is: the chapel. A compact building, unmistakably Norman in origin, its windows deep-set above a heavy wooden door. Inside: plain, white-washed walls and an oakwood screen some four centuries old.
The setting is a modest orchard of apple trees and yew. Across the adjoining lawn is a low range of almshouses fronted by neatly trimmed hedges. This is the land on which once stood the hospital – burnt down during the Civil War when it was used to garrison Parliamentarian horses.
In 1328, King Edward III bestowed the land and its buildings upon the recently founded college of Oriel, whose Provost maintains overall responsibility for it to this day. The relics were removed at the same time ‘for safekeeping’. What happened thereafter we don’t know, and probably never will. No record of them can be traced in the Oriel College archives. They are gone, like the ghosts of the lepers before them and the ghosts of the pilgrims to come.
Feedback
Local resident and dedicated allotmenteer, Martin Stott has produced a splendid commemorative volume of photographs entitled Bartlemas: Oxford‘s hidden sanctuary which he describes as ‘a portrait of a deeply spiritual, connected, and multilayered place whose history of care, acceptance, mystery and healing continues to resonate nine hundred years later’.
The image below and the picture of the well-spring are reproduced with his kind permission.
On 21 May 2009, a well-dressing ceremony was carried out at Bartlemas, the first time such a custom had been observed in 400 years. The person behind the event was Edward Higginbottom, Emeritus Professor of Choral Music and Fellow of New College. He explains:
I’d been intrigued to read a reference (dated c.1690) to well-dressing at Bartlemas, by the celebrated antiquarian, John Aubrey:
The fellows of New College, have time out of mind, every Holy Thursday [Ascension Day] betwixt the hours of eight and nine, gonne to the hospitall called Bart’lemews near Oxford, when they retire into the chapell, and certaine prayers are read, and an antheme sung; from thence they go to the upper end of the grove adjoyning the chapell (the way beforehand being strewed with flowers by the poor people of the hospitall), they place themselves round the well there, when they warble forth melodiously a song of three, four or five parts; which being performed, they refresh themselves with a morning’s draught there, and retire to Oxford before sermon.
I felt this might offer scope for some fun, and a lively encounter with the past, so a colleague and I revived the custom in 2009, and repeated it in 2013. I’m not sure it survives to this day as an annual event – so it was more of a splutter than a regular gig, but great fun, nonetheless. I happily recall that Christopher and Sarah Franks (Bartlemas Farmhouse) were important aiders and abettors, providing a delicious breakfast after the event.
The singer, Clemmie Franks, grew up in Bartlemas Farmhouse and still lives nearby. She writes:
My grandfather, who used to live in Bartlemas Cottage, was very involved in helping to raise money for the upkeep of the chapel. I used to do my singing practice in there when I was younger, and so it feels all the more special when I perform there now. Not only does it have a gorgeous natural acoustic; you can also somehow feel its history as a place of special sanctuary..
Professor David Griffiths FSA, led the community archaeology project to excavate the site fifteen years ago. He writes:
It was an incredible experience digging there, in the beautiful, sunny early autumn of 2011, with volunteers of all ages and backgrounds from East Oxford and beyond. The dig happened because a drainage trench needed to be dug around the outside of the chapel. There was no money in the chapel’s coffers to pay a professional archaeological unit to do it, so we offered.
Everybody loved working there. It is such a special place with a unique atmosphere. We had many visitors, including monks who wanted to kneel and touch the bones. The human remains were re-interred in the chapel graveyard in 2013, following a service conducted by the Vicar of Cowley, with a local choir singing the offices of the dead. The other finds from the site went to Oxfordshire County Museum Service.
You can download (free) the report, which is Chapter 4 in the Archeox project book (go to ‘Downloads’):
https://archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/archives/view/archeox_hlf_2020/
The Bishop of Dorchester conducted the nonacentennial service, as featured in The Oxford Clarion.
As a graduate student Maddy Morris lived in OX4:
There’s a striking piece of wall art on the corner of the Cowley Road and Leopold Street near the entrance to Bartlemas Lane. I used to walk past it every day for two years and always drew inspiration from it. I met many fine people in this ‘leper-heritage tolerance zone’.
