A couple of years ago, Rosy Thacker wrote in Reflections about a Shakespeare First Folio discovered in a Derbyshire house. A recent exhibition at the British Library in London – Medieval Women: In Their Own Words – featured a manuscript which turned up unexpectedly in a family home near Clowne.
A WEB search will bring up any number of academics, especially American ones, who gleefully describe the 15th-century Book of Margery Kempe as being “discovered” during a game of ping pong in an obscure house in northern England. Very few seem to wonder why it was there. Sometimes they cannot even get the name of the building or family right.
The manuscript actually came to light in 1934 in Southgate House on the A619 between Chesterfield and Worksop, whose owner was William Erdeswick Ignatius Butler-Bowdon.
The Bowdon family probably originated near Chapel-en-le Frith, but since the 17th century had lived at Beighton Fields near Renishaw. In 1790, they bought the newly rebuilt Southgate House.
The Butler family had purchased the manor of Pleasington Old Hall near Blackburn in 1777, where they built a New Hall between 1805-7. This estate came to the Bowdons by marriage and from 1840 the names were hyphenated. Both families had retained their Roman Catholic religion.
William Butler-Bowdon spent his childhood at Pleasington New Hall, but the family left Lancashire in the 1890s; by 1901 they were living at Southgate. He said he could remember The Book of Margery Kempe in the library at Pleasington, next to an even older missal of 1340. Visitors would sometimes read a few pages. The manuscript has the bookplate of Henry Bowdon, who died at Southgate in 1833.
William’s son Maurice recounted how the book was rediscovered by chance. He described Southgate as a largish Georgian house with a front hall spacious enough for a full-sized ping pong table. The bats and balls lived in a wall cupboard to one side of the fireplace. One evening someone trod on the ball. His father searched in the cupboard for a replacement. In his way was a clutter of small leather-bound books. He exclaimed that he was going to put the whole lot on a bonfire. He thought they were just old household account books. Luckily, one house guest, who worked at the Victoria & Albert Museum, spotted something far more interesting. He was allowed to take the book to London where an American expert called Hope Emily Allen made the formal identification of a book, known to scholars, but presumed lost for ever.
Its journey into the Derbyshire cupboard cannot be traced fully. On a binding paper is the inscription “Liber Montis Gracie. This boke is of Montegrace”. It is therefore probable that, until its dissolution in 1539, the book was at the Carthusian Mount Grace Priory, near Northallerton, in Yorkshire. Some pages have been annotated by the monks. In a letter to The Times, William Butler-Bowdon speculated that, when monasteries were in danger of being destroyed, they gave valuable books, vestments etc. to Catholic families for safe-keeping. It is interesting that from 1456 Mount Grace owned the patronage at Beighton church. Could one of the dispossessed monks have brought the book to Derbyshire for preservation and thence into the Bowdons’ possession?
In 1936 William published a modern English version of The Book. There have since been many editions. The manuscript itself was sold in 1980 at Sotheby’s to the British Library.
You can still see the hallway in Southgate House. The Georgian building forms the east wing of the Wildes Inns, a wedding venue. You may remember it as the Van Dyk Garden Centre and Hotel. The Butler-Bowdons had sold the house and estate in 1938 to Sir Osbert Sitwell, who sold it on to the Van Dyk brothers in 1955. During World War II it was used by the military as housing and a POW camp.
What is so interesting about Margery Kempe? She was born around 1373 in Bishop’s (now King’s) Lynn in Norfolk. Her father John Burnham was an Alderman, and had been mayor five times. Her husband, whom she married in 1393, was a town Burgess. Although of the merchant class, Margery could not read or write, but she had a good knowledge of the Bible. She dictated her life story to a priest in 1436 and 1438, some of it copied from an earlier largely illegible version. The Derbyshire copy, now the only one known, is perhaps a few years older. The manuscript is celebrated as the first autobiography written in English prose. Extracts were published in about 1501 by Wynkyn de Worde, an early printer. Those intensely religious passages led scholars to believe that Margery was a medieval mystic recluse – far from it!
A great part of the text related conversations Margery believed she had held with “Our Lord” Jesus, Mary and other saints. There were verbatim exchanges with priests, the Archbishops of York and Canterbury, monks and fellow pilgrims she met on her travels. For this housewife from Norfolk did certainly travel: not only the length and breadth of England, but also to Jerusalem, Rome, Santiago de Compostela, and shrines in northern Germany. She actually journeyed during the turmoil of The Hundred Years’ War, returning from Rome only a few months before the Battle of Agincourt.
She only gave her name once. Otherwise, she was “the creature” to emphasise her humility. After the birth of the first of fourteen children she suffered a dreadful depression, self-harming and raving at her family. But one day Jesus sat at her bedside “clad in a mantle of purple silk” and his comforting words restored her sanity. From that point, she was determined to see where he had suffered.
Her journey to Jerusalem began in 1413, through Flanders via Constance where hundreds of clerics were arriving for a now famous ecumenical council. She spent thirteen weeks in Venice waiting for a ship to the Holy Land. Margery’s three weeks in and around Jerusalem would not have disgraced a modern tourist. She was guided by Grey Friars and “well-favoured” Saracens from the ruling Mamluks. She visited the Temple, Calvary, Jesus’s tomb, Mount Sion, the River Jordan, Bethlehem and Bethany. She then moved on for a long stay in Rome via Assisi, travelling back through Germany after Easter 1415.
In 1417 Margery visited Santiago in Spain, about which she had surprisingly little to say. It is interesting that she and other travellers had great difficulty getting boats from Bristol, as they were “taken up for the King”. This was Henry V assembling a huge army to return to France for the siege of Caen.
In 1433, in her sixties, Margery embarked on a final overseas journey. Her son had married a Prussian woman who wanted to go home after both he and his father had died. The ship carrying the two widows was blown off course to Norway. They made it back to Gdansk from where Margery walked and hitched rides for the thousand-mile trip via the shrines at Wilsnack and Aachen to Calais.
One can only admire the perseverance of the woman. Unfortunately, this was not how her contemporaries perceived her. Margery had some very annoying traits. In the Middle Ages the only safe way to travel was as part of a large group. Imagine a companion who spoke only of the Gospel at the supper table; who piously took no meat or wine; who wore white because she had promised the Bishop of Lincoln to have no more relations with her husband; but above all, who wept all the time.
She did not cry quietly, but uttered loud racking sobs for several sessions a day. At Calvary, where she was convinced she was present at the crucifixion, “the crying was so loud and so wonderful that it made the people astounded” as she “rolled and wrested with her body”. At inns, she was sent to eat by herself below the servants. Her companions at Constance cut her robe off at the knees and begged her to leave them. In Venice she ate alone for six weeks because she refused to dine without mentioning Jesus. In Germany her companions were so fed up with her weeping that they strode on too quickly. She, in turn, “ran and leapt as fast as she might till her might failed”.
In fairness Margery was also often met with kindness. She spent several days with the anchoress Julian of Norwich, who gave her the comforting advice that, the more she was criticised, the more merit she gained with God.
Margery was not intimidated by distinguished prelates. Once she “wept full boisterously” through the Bishop of Norwich’s sermon. She criticised the behaviour of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s clerks, although she did converse with him in his garden at Lambeth “till stars appeared in the firmament”. When the Archbishop of York accused her of wickedness, she retorted: “I also hear it said that ye are a wicked man. And if ye be as wicked as men say, ye shall never come to Heaven”. He eventually gave someone five shillings to take her away. To his horror he soon found her again in Beverley, imprisoned by the Duke of Bedford’s men. The Duke was the King’s brother, and later regent to Henry VI. Margery had met his aunt Joan, the daughter of John of Gaunt, and allegedly tried to persuade her daughter to leave her husband. She was arrested several times and narrowly escaped being burnt as a Lollard. The date of her death in Lynn is unknown – perhaps she was on another journey.
The Butler-Bowdons possessed another precious Catholic relic, an early 14th century cope (ecclesiastical cloak) embroidered in gold with pearls on crimson velvet. Described as “undoubtedly the most important English vestment ever to come on the market”, it was purchased by the V & A in 1955 with help from several London guilds, to avoid being lost to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.