Tag: Brackenfield

Mather’s Grave

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Mathersgrave near Brackenfield

Just north of the Matlock-Alfreton road (A615), the hamlet of Mathersgrave commemorates both a family tragedy and a medieval mindset. Set in the retaining wall to a cottage garden is a block of stone inscribed ‘SM 1643’ and nearby is a guidestoop with three inscriptions: ‘Matlack (sic) Road’, ‘Bakewell Roade’ and ‘Alfreton Road 1730’. The presence of the guidestoop shows that this was a significant crossroads in the early eighteenth century; building the turnpike bypassed the junction.

Guidestoop and grave stone

Christian teaching in the Middle Ages insisted that suicide was a serious sin, and this was reinforced by English law which viewed it as a crime, punishable by the forfeit of property to the crown. Suicides were denied burial in consecrated churchyards, and thereby lost their chance of going to heaven. Instead they were buried at crossroads, where it was thought their spirits would be unable to choose the right route back to the land of the living, and so be unable to plague their kin. To make doubly sure, a stake might be driven through the heart of the sinner to further immobilise them. Incredibly, the last case of a crossroads burial was in 1823, while suicide remained a crime until 1961.

Trinity Chapel near Brackenfield

Apparently SM was Samuel Mather, a local man who had fathered an illegitimate daughter, and social condemnation forced him to kill himself, and possibly kill his wife also. (Details of the story are vague). This happened in 1716, so the date on the marker stone is wrong. This occurred well before the Matlock-Alfreton turnpike was constructed, and further evidence of the shift in road pattern is the romantic nearby ruin of Trinity Chapel. Half a mile to the north, (see map above), this was in use before Brackenfield Church was opened in 1857, but is now quite deserted. In the past this must have stood on a busy lane, but today is only reached by footpath.

A wandering minstrel I …

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There is plenty of evidence that minstrels travelled around the country in the Middle Ages, performing in halls and taverns, and at fairs. But very little is known of the material they performed for their audiences, whether lordly or peasant. Nor do we know how far afield they travelled. However, James Wade of Cambridge University has recently published an article which may provide some answers. He has studied a manuscript in the National Library of Scotland which dates from about 1480, known as the Heege Ms. It was written by a Richard Heege, presumably a native of Heage, near Belper, who was a tutor to the Sherbrooke family at Tibshelf. The manuscript consists of three pieces which might well have formed part of a minstrel’s repertoire.

The items recorded are mainly comical/ nonsensical: a poem called The Hunting of the Hare, a mock sermon, and a nonsense verse called The Battle of Brackonwet (thought to be Brackenfield). The style is clearly suited to oral performance and contains plenty of drinking references, which point to delivery at a feast or celebration: Christmas, a wedding, etc. The place names mentioned are Holbrook, Radford (near Nottingham), Brackenfield and Codnor, which suggest that the minstrel had a circuit or regular beat since all these places are within a couple of hours’ walk of each other.

It is hard to imagine how dull the long winter evenings must have been five hundred years ago, when even for the literate there was little reading material available, and certainly no internet! So the arrival of a minstrel must have been welcome, for both rich and poor. The material that Wade has studied was clearly intended for a mixed audience, since it satirises the behaviour of both landowners and peasants. Although this small collection of minstrel material cannot provide a full picture, it does allow us to imagine how a possibly part-time entertainer could amuse his audience with jokes about local communities behaving badly.

Source: James Wade, Entertainments from a Medieval Minstrel’s Repertoire Book, The Review of English Studies, 2023;, hgad053, https://doi.org/10.1093/res/hgad053