An Audience with an Elephant by Byron Rogers

Author:Byron Rogers [Rogers, Byron]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781845138509
Publisher: MBI
Published: 2015-11-29T16:00:00+00:00

Norman St John Stevas Chooses a Title

S YOU WOULD expect, he chose his new title with care, Lord St John — adding ‘of Fawsley’. It must have appealed to the romantic in him, for this is a name out of mediaeval chivalry. But there is something else. Because of his title, the former Mr Norman St John-Stevas now enters English history forever linked to one of its blackest moments.

You find that place-name on road signs in the lanes south of Daventry and on the green footpath markers, but it is only when you follow these that you find there is no Fawsley. There is a lake, yes. And a manor house. And a church. Nothing else. Even a century ago the Northamptonshire Gazeteer was puzzled. ‘There is no village in this parish; it contains but four houses altogether.’

When I first saw it I thought it one of the most beautiful places on earth — the lake at sunset with the swans upon it; the Tudor mansion with its great oriel window; the medieval church, its door so tiny you stoop to enter, standing in grassland with no road leading to it. But nothing prepares you for what is inside the church, the alabaster and brass of the tombs which occupy two-thirds of it, one of them taking up most of a wall. And all to one family, the Knightleys. They were as proud as the Hapsburgs, these Knightleys, with the 334 armorial quarterings to show their descent. At the edge of the woodland the stone arch shows where their world began, the 700 acres of their park.

And yet there is something odd about it all. For instance, the church is centuries older than the manor house, so Fawsley was there long before that. Also nobody built a church in a field. In a closed little world like this, no grandee would have walked 300 yards across his park to worship in his own family church. But there is one clue. When the sun is at the right angle you can see bumps in the grass near the church — not many, for the lake has covered most of the evidence, but enough to show that there were once buildings here.

You have to go to the records for the rest. At Domesday there was a village at Fawsley, and an old one, for the courts of justice had met at the foot of a great beech tree, 19 feet in diameter, chillingly called Mangrave. In the poll tax of Richard II’s reign there were 90 taxpayers, which would have made Fawsley one of the largest villages in the county.

Then in 1415 the Knightleys came; and the Knightleys were sheep farmers, whatever their tombs may proclaim. The evictions began in the late fifteenth century and two generations later there were 2,500 sheep. No village. No people. Nobody knows what became of these, it is too long ago and they would have been illiterate. Most of them would have starved, pathetic bundles of rags blown here and there.

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