Bloody British History: Coventry E-Book

David McGrory

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Serie: Bloody British History
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 176

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

The decapitated Lord: Medieval slaughter at the castle! Yellows vs Blues: Coventry's most violent elections revealed! Kings, rebellions and rioters! Civil war comes to the city! Boiled in beer! Baked in his oven! The most dreadful Christmas calamities in Coventry's history are inside! Coventry has one of the darkest histories on record. With sieges, battles, crimes, riots, disasters, all-out attempts at demolition and some truly dreadful punishments to boot, you'll never see the city in the same way again.

Leseprobe

The phoenix rises.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

THE SOURCES FOR this book have been gathered over a number of years. However, I would like to particularly thank Rob Orland; Mark Twissell; John Hewitson; Nicola Norman; Coventry Local Studies; John Ashby; Tony Rose and the Coventry Police Museum; Colin Walker; Derek Lee; Holy Trinity Church; the Sealed Knot; Warwick Archives; and the British Library.

Note: All images are from the collection of the author or the publisher unless otherwise credited.

CONTENTS

Title  

Dedication

Acknowledgements

A Brief Word on the Blitz

AD 1002

Death to the Danes!

AD 1142-1153

‘Glittering in Arms’: Civil War Conquests in Coventry

AD 1185

Crushed by a Stone from Heaven: The Horrible Death of a Coventry Monk

AD 1398

Trial by Combat

AD 1423-1557

The Coventry Martyrs

AD 1642-1662

‘Assault the Said Cittie’: Civil War Comes to Coventry

AD 1665

Storms, Black Death and the Great Plague

AD 1754

Murder Most Foul

AD 1756-1830

A Soldier’s Life

AD 1780-1832

Yellows vs Blues: The Strange and Surprising History of Coventry’s Elections

AD 1813-1850

The Great Prize Fights

AD 1831

The Weavers’ Riot

AD 1899

Christmas Catastrophes

AD 1900

Deadly Sherbourne: Watery Disasters and the Great Flood

AD 1915-1916

Zeppelins and Plane Crashes

AD 1919

Get the Germans!

Copyright

A BRIEF WORD ON THE BLITZ

COVENTRY HAS A long and sometimes bloody past.

Its origins lie in the mists of time, but there is evidence of Roman activity, including ditches and tracks in the centre. What the Romans were doing here we do not know, but they left statues, coins, brooches and pottery behind them. At the nearby Lunt, outside of Coventry, lay a fort, home to Roman cavalry who at one time trained captured Iceni horses after the Boudican Revolt.

During its early history Coventry was sacked by the Danes. Then, during the medieval period, the city grew to prominence because of its dealings with wool and cloth and became particularly known for its long-lasting, blue-dyed cloth, called Coventry True Blue. During this period the city grew in status, becoming the fourth largest city in England. It was also during this period that St Osburga’s grew into the massive cathedral and priory of St Mary. The city has welcomed many monarchs, including Henry VI (who based his royal court here for three years during the Wars of the Roses). The city’s strong wall held out against Yorkist forces, as it later did against Charles I during the Civil War in 1642.

After the war, Coventry took on more the appearance of a town than a city, crammed full of timbered houses. The principal trades of the city up until the nineteenth century were mainly cloth and silk ribbon weaving. Later, however, after these industries collapsed, things turned more mechanical with the introduction of cycle, and then motor-car manufacture. The mechanisation of the city’s industries led to it being a main centre for war production in both the First and Second World Wars.

The Second World War, of course, held major consequences for the city when it became the target for Nazi bombing from June 1940. Many people living in Coventry today lost family members and friends during those terrible years. For this reason, I have decided not to discuss these events in detail in this volume, a decision which I hope my readers will understand. However, it was certainly a time we should look back on and remember for the suffering and the strength of the people of Coventry. Indeed, it is almost impossible to overstate the devastation caused to Coventry during the Second World War, or the bravery of its inhabitants during those dark times.

After Coventry-built Whitley bombers attacked Munich, the birthplace of the Nazi party, Hitler ordered retribution – and Coventry was chosen as the target, codenamed Corn.

Operation Moonlight Sonata began from airfields in France on the evening of 14 November 1940. Beams that intersected over Coventry led the Luftwaffe pathfinders, the first of 500 here, and they began to lay a firestorm. The first of 30,000 incendiaries dropped that night. The city burned and the heavy bombers that followed continually dropped their devastating loads for eleven long hours.

Some squadrons were given factories as targets, but most were simply instructed to bomb the heart out of the old city. Stories still persist that Churchill sacrificed Coventry to protect the Enigma Code, even though these stories have been proved to be untrue for over forty years. But plays and tales still keep the story alive, and many now believe it. The air-raid sirens screamed the all-clear at 6.16 a.m. on the following morning. The people of Coventry walked out into the devastation: their city would never be the same again.

During the previous night the Luftwaffe had unloaded 500 tons of high explosives, 30,000 incendiaries and 50 land and oil mines. Amongst the ruined city, 554 people lay dead and 865 injured. This was the worst of forty-one actual raids on the city, though the following April raids were nearly as bad (lasting eight and nine hours respectively).

Despite their suffering, the people of Coventry proved resilient and took, time after time, what the Nazis threw at them. By the end of the war over 1,200 citizens were dead, but still the city’s spirit was unshaken. The results of this devastation have shaped the city ever since, and Coventry today still lives with the consequences of those dark times.

Beyond those dark nights lay another Coventry, a Coventry of 1,000 years, where Vikings burned a nunnery, knights attacked a castle, bishops were bad and religious martyrs were murdered by the Church. Plague raged through old Coventry, as did floods. The city was placed under siege by a King himself – more than once, too. Elections, meanwhile, weren’t the sedate affairs they are now: they were traditionally a time in which men with big sticks fought to control the vote. Amazingly, these wars were usually led by the Corporation itself.

In the pages that follow lie that city beyond the Blitz, beyond the phoenix rising. Old Coventry, a city full of real, ‘bloody’ brilliant history. Enjoy.

David McGrory, 2013

AD 1002

DEATH TO THE DANES!

ON 13 NOVEMBER 1002 Coventry took part in one of early history’s bloodiest events – the St Brice’s Day Massacre. Coventry at this time was a small settlement in the kingdom of Mercia, scattered around the nunnery of St Osburga. St Osburg’s, as it became known, probably stood off present Priory Row. The buildings from this earliest incarnation were built over by the later priory. By St Brice’s Day, this house was long established: during excavation work in 2000 a curved wall, possibly of the apse, was discovered on the site of the later priory which had green mortar. Beneath this wall was a burial dating back to around AD 690, proof that this area had been occupied for more than 300 years by the eleventh century.

Much of this history was violent: we are informed that in the days of this nunnery, in AD 829, Ecgbryth, King of Wessex, overcame the Mercian kingdom. In AD 910 the land of the Mercians was again under assault, when it was ‘ravaged’ by the Danes. We do not know whether this attack affected the small settlement that would become Coventry. However, there was one obvious result of the raids: this time the conquering Danes settled in Coventry and its surrounds – and indeed some Danish names remain, such as Biggin, part of Stoke, which comes from a Danish name meaning house, and Keresley and Allesley, both Danish names for settlements.

A late Anglo-Saxon door jamb, probably from St Osburg’s, which was dug up early in the last century in Palmer Lane.

Danish communities, and Danish attacks, had by this time reached such numbers that they began to threaten the safety of the realm. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records that the King, Æthelred II (‘the Unready’), was told that unless he removed the Danish menace they ‘would faithlessly take his life, and then all his councillors, and possess his kingdom afterwards.’ He therefore ‘ordered slain all the Danish men who were in England.’

On the night of St Brice’s Day, 13 November, according to a message passed in secret through the realm, every Danish man, woman and child in the country was slaughtered. This command was carried out with ruthless efficiency. The King’s Royal Charter in Oxford, where weapon-scarred skeletons from the period have been found, describes the massacre in that city:

A Victorian engraving of the St Brice’s Day Massacre, when possibly all the Danes in England were killed by the English.

… all the Danes who had sprung up in this island, sprouting like cockle amongst the wheat, were to be destroyed by a most just extermination, and thus this decree was to be put into effect even as far as death. Those Danes who dwelt in the aforementioned town, striving to escape death, entered this sanctuary of Christ [St Frideswide’s], having broken by force the doors and bolts, and resolved to make refuge and defence for themselves therein against the people of the town and the suburbs; but when all the people in pursuit strove, forced by necessity, to drive them out, and could not, they set fire to the planks and burnt, as it seems, this church with its ornaments and its books.

Centuries later, in 1565, Queen Elizabeth arrived in Coventry. The city recorder gave a speech, and the St Brice’s Day Massacre was the first topic on the agenda: ‘after the arrival of the Daynes who misrablye afflicted the people of the Realme,’ the recorder announced, ‘the inhabitants of this Citie with ther neighboures utterly overthrewe them in the laste conflicte with the Saxons.’

The memory of this massacre in Coventry was commemorated for centuries yearly on St Brice’s Day, when the men of Coventry would perform a re-enactment of the massacre which they called the ‘Hoc Tuesday Play’. This they performed to Elizabeth herself during her next visit, this time to Kenilworth, in 1574. During this knockabout performance Elizabeth is said to have ‘much laughed’, an ironic finale to the memory of a massacre!

This wasn’t the city’s last tussle with the Danes, however, for in the year 1016 the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle informs us that, ‘In this year came Cnut with his host, and with him ealdorman Eadric, and crossed into Warwickshire, and harried and burnt and slew all they found.’ This army was led through the county by one who knew it well: Eadric Streona, also known as ‘Eadric the Traitor’ or ‘Grasper’. The fifteenth-century priest and antiquarian John Rous, who had access to now-lost documents, described how this army destroyed a Saxon stronghold at Stoneleigh. He also wrote, ‘even the abbey of Nuns at Coventry is destroyed, of which in times past the Virgin St Osburg was the Abbess.’

Though this army obviously burned and sacked the original St Osburg’s, some of her relics remained – for her skull, and some of her bones, were re-housed in new reliquaries and survived up until the Dissolution in the sixteenth century. King Canute later added another major relic: the arm of St Augustine of Hippo. Such a gift, it was said, ‘would gain him many friends and prayers.’ A Viking iron axe, decorated with bronze strips of this period and of the type used in warfare, was unearthed in Coventry by John Shelton after the war and still remains in the museum’s collection. Canute became King and later, in 1027, he vowed to make up for the destruction he had brought down on so many religious houses. The sixteenth-century antiquarian John Leland, quoting ancient sources, states that Coventry Priory was formerly the place where ‘Kynge Canute the Dane made [a] howse of nunes. Leofrike, Erle of the Marches, turnyd it in Kyng Edward the Confessor’s days into a howse of monkes.’ By all accounts Canute ruled well and agreed to rule under one God and to avoid heathen practices.

Canute with his Queen, Emma, gifting a large cross to a church. Canute spent many years trying to make up for the devastation he had previously caused in England.

AD 1142-1153

‘GLITTERING IN ARMS’

Civil War Conquests in Coventry

COVENTRY SEEMS TO disappear from history after the convent became a monastery – until, that is, the building of a motte-and-bailey castle here by the 4th Earl of Chester, Ranulf Gernon (1129-1153). Ranulf is described in a contemporary source as, ‘a consummate warrior, glittering in arms.’ Gernon, a French nobleman and a supporter of Matilda during the Baron’s War, was a legend of the era, particularly famous for his valour at the Battle of Lincoln, where his army captured King Stephen.

One source describes the capture of Stephen thus:

Knights skirmish during the twelfth century in what was effectively the first Civil War. This time, however, no one fought for the people, but for Stephen and Matilda.

[Stephen] remained on the battlefield, fighting on foot, though assaulted by multitudes, which he repelled with incredible valour … His battle-axe was broken by the force and frequency of the blows he dealt around him. He then drew his sword and for a considerable time continued to defend himself, until his sword flying into fragments, and he being at the same instant struck down with a stone, William de Keynes, one of the soldiers of the earl of Gloucester [Gernon’s father-in-law, who led the reserve], rushed in upon him, and seizing hold of his helmet, set his sword against his throat, and threatened him with instant death if he did not yield himself prisoner.

Gernon’s greatest enemy was Robert Marmion II of Tamworth, a supporter of Stephen. The pair’s enmity swiftly followed them to Warwickshire.

Walter of Newburgh wrote that Marmion ‘had no match for boldness, cunning and fierceness.’ In 1142 Marmion came to Coventry and expelled the monks from the monastery – ‘locking out the servants of God and introducing to it the hired hands of the Devil’ – and fortified it, placing the castle under siege. His plan was to cut off the food supply, starving the occupants into surrender. This siege is said to have continued until 8 September 1143, when the earl’s men broke loose and a bloody fight ensued outside the fortified monastery. Sir William Dugdale, Warwickshire’s most noted seventeenth-century historian, describes the surprising result of this battle:

THE HISTORY OF THE CASTLE

Ranulf’s title was inherited by his six-year-old son Hugh Kevelioc. Kevelioc received his inheritance when he was eighteen years old, in 1162, and rebuilt the castle in stone. In his boundary charter we get the first mention of Broadgate, ‘the broad gate of my castle’. Within the wall of this castle stood the chapel of St Michael in the Bailey, later to become the old cathedral. In 1173, now twenty-nine, Hugh Kevelioc joined a rebellion against Henry II. Henry sent a force to besiege Coventry Castle led by Richard de Lucy. Hugh was taken prisoner and was deprived of his land. The castle may have sustained considerable damage during this attack.

During the period when the fortress was in the hands of Kevelioc’s son, Ranulf Blondeville, it began to fall from use. In a charter dated between 1199 and 1204 Blondeville forbids his constables from bringing the burghers into the castle to plead their causes.

After this date the castle disappears from history, leaving us with just stones, rubble, ditches and tales. Names also survived such as the Stiltyard (tilt yard), fossatum castelli, the castle ditch, and Castelbachous (castle bake house). The bake house was by St Mary’s Hall, which stands in the former site of the castle and was constructed out of the old castle’s stone.

A Norman stone castle keep. Although Coventry’s first castle was a wooden motte-and-bailey structure, it was later replaced by a stone keep.

[Marmion] fortified the church with the buildings belonging thereunto, making deep trenches in the fields adjacent, which he so covered, that they could not be seen. … But it so happened, that as he sallied out with some forces upon the Earl of Chester’s drawing near, and not remembering where those places had been digged, he fell with his horse into one of them himself, and by that means, being surprised by a common soldier, had his head presently cut off.

Other versions have it that the fall broke Marmion’s thigh bone. While struggling on the ground, it was said, he was dispatched by a cobbler with a knife.

SKELETAL MONKS

Skeletons were unearthed in Coventry in August 1936:

In the process of underpinning the walls of Blue Coat School as part of the work necessary in connection with the development of Trinity Street, excavations have brought to light a number of skeletons. The bones were found huddled against an old stone wall which had lain buried for hundreds of years. Their position suggested that the bodies of which they had once formed the framework had been buried together, while cleavages of the skulls of several of them appeared to have been caused during lifetime and not since the burial of the bodies. (Coventry Herald)

Apparently the teeth showed most of the skulls to be of young men, and local antiquarian John Bailey Shelton suggested that they had died in battles around the city. It was thought that the skeletons were about 700 years old, giving a suggested death date of around AD 1200 or before. This would put the men into the period of the sieges involving Coventry Castle, during the Baron’s War. As we know, when Robert Marmion put Coventry Castle under siege in 1142-3 it is said he turned out the monks from the monastery and fortified it. There is of course a possibility that the monks never left the precinct of their house. However, if these skeletons are not those of the monks, it is probable that they were the skeletons of Civil War soldiers.

A medieval skeleton being unearthed in Coventry in 1932 on the site of the present Central Hall.

Later on in the war, in 1145, Ranulf Gernon changed sides. He defected from Matilda’s cause, and switched to Stephen’s. However, he quickly fell out with the King and was captured, and forced to swear on holy relics that he would give up all of his castles and never again resist the King. Stephen therefore took possession of Ranulf’s castle at Coventry. It was not an oath that Gernon was to keep: Gesta Stephani, ‘The Life of Stephen’, tells us that in 1146, on being released from his chains, Gernon ‘burst into a blind fury of rebellion, scarcely discriminating between friend or foe’. He gathered a force and ‘reduced the country to a desert’:

The earl also established a strong post in the face of the castle of Coventry in which the Royalists had taken refuge. … Whereupon the King, marching there at the head of a gallant force, threw a convoy of provisions into the garrison, which were much needed, though he had frequent skirmishes with the Earl, who lay in wait for him. … In these, some of the King’s troops were captured, and others driven to flight, and the King himself received a slight wound. … But shortly afterwards recovering his strength, he had an engagement with the Earl, in which he took many prisoners, and some of the enemy were wounded, and the Earl himself flying shamefully and scarcely escaping with his life, his fortified post was taken and destroyed.

SIEGE WEAPONS IN POOL MEADOW

The attacks on Coventry by Danish armies and by the forces of the King were not to be the last. The year 1395 saw Sir William Bagot of Baginton Castle, with 100 armed men, trying – and failing – to breach two of the city gates. This appears to have been an organised rising against the mayor and an attempt to take control of the city. Other attacks seemed to have been made on the city, for in the past four trebuchet balls have been unearthed, the last two in the 1960s below Pool Meadow. These were cast over the city walls by massive trebuchets, huge and devastating siege weapons that flung huge balls of rock to smash the walls and cause terror beyond.

Ranulf did later regain Coventry, but his victory was short-lived as he died under mysterious circumstances, just six months later, in December 1153 – according to many sources, he drank wine poisoned by one of Stephen’s stoutest allies, William Peverel the Younger, a knight whom Gernon had captured with King Stephen all those years before.

AD 1185

CRUSHED BY A STONE FROM HEAVEN

The Horrible Death of a Coventry Monk

THE NEARBY PRIORY