Header Image: St Michael’s, Stone, Staffordshire
16 December 2020
The county of my birth is responsible for many significant cultural achievements – the humble Staffordshire Oatcake, the late mediaeval poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the embodiment of rock’n’roll Ian “Lemmy” Kilminster of Motorhead. It is a county of great contrasts ranging from the urban sprawl of the West Midlands in the south, the fringes of the Welsh Marches in the west and the Peak District to the north. I left Staffordshire, when I was 18, to head off to study archaeology at Nottingham, but I still feel a strong pull by the county – in particular towards its folklore.
My parents ran a pub throughout the 1980s and 90s in the small market town of Stone. I grew up listening to the tall tales of various locals propped around the bar supping from pints of Draught Bass, Marston’s Pedigree or Banks’s Mild. One of the stories that was seared into my impressionable mind was the tale that there was a secret underground tunnel running from St Michael’s parish church (built on the site of St Wulfad’s Priory) to Aston Hall – located in a satellite village nearly two miles to the south-east.
It wasn’t just the boozy topers in the pub either, my Dad (the landlord) relayed similar yarns: ‘It’s always been known that there was a tunnel between the priory and a house where retired priests used to live at Aston – my mum and gran told me the stories, as did our next door neighbours. I really believed them when I was a child.’ Dad was a nipper in the 1940s and 50s so we can get an idea of just how long-lived these stories are. However, when I stuck my nose into the archives I found that the tales were way, way older…
The earliest known mention of the town’s tunnels comes from a correspondent of the antiquarian Thomas Hearne – Mr Arblaster – who visited the ruins of St Wulfad’s Priory (on the site of St Michael’s parish church) in 1719: ‘I descended into the Cellars which were very spatious and large. There are many stone Arches almost like Church windows. Under one there is part of a vault, which is said to have been half a mile in length, and that it was made for the monks to walk in’ (Doble 1906, 122). Arblaster was almost certainly referring to the vaulted cellars, constructed c 1300, which can still be seen underneath an eighteenth century house known as The Priory.
Rumours gained pace in 1789 when it was reported in the pages of The Topographer that ‘‘about 14 years ago, when that new road [i.e. Lichfield Road] was made, a considerable piece of wall was demolished for that purpose, and also in the foundation several subterraneous passages were discovered by the workmen’ (Brydges 1789, 118). This same story then entered wider circulation, in 1834, when it was repeated in William White’s History, Gazetteer and Directory of Staffordshire: ‘The priory stood at the south end of the town, in what is still called the Abbey-court, here a small fragment of the foundation walls is still visible; and at the construction of a new road, about 60 years ago, several subterraneous passages were discovered’ (White 1834, 672).
Here, then, we seem to have documented evidence for the existence of underground passages leading out from a mediaeval monastery in a Staffordshire market town. Until the evidence is looked at in detail. Firstly, what Arblaster described is a vaulted basement that would have been a perfectly regular part of monastic architecture across the land. Notably, Arblaster refers to: ‘a vault which is said to have been half a mile in length.’ Crucially, he did not see the tunnel for himself. This then becomes a pattern as neither the anonymous author of The Topographer article nor William White laid eyes on the alleged tunnels that were discovered c 1775 during the construction of Lichfield Road – they are merely reporting local tales after the fact. Although the reports may have been genuinely based on actual observations, monastic sites were frequently served by large drains and conduits (Aston 2000, 24-27). These may have looked like “secret passages” to the untrained or romantic eye when in fact they were perfectly prosaic and functional structures.
Second-hand reports of passages are apparently very much the norm. Philip Leason, the Chair of the Stone Historical and Civic Society, told me that: ‘I quite often get enquiries about the tunnels in Stone. I had one person recently who told me that their grandfather had walked in a tunnel from under St, Michael’s Church to Aston when he was a boy.’ The great cataloguer of such things, Jeremy Errand, noted that: ‘The existence of many passages is vouched for only by the memories of boyhood exploration’ (Errand 1974, 105) – which takes us right back into an age of frolicking innocence rather than hard-headed and peer reviewed archaeological discovery.
Little did I know it when I first encountered the stories of Stone’s passage, but virtually every hamlet, town and city in the land is alleged to be riddled with underground tunnels. Entire books have been written on the subject and internet discussion groups are alight at the prospect. However, local archaeologists Debbie Taylor and Michael Shaw concluded that: ‘Antiquarian reports of tunnels and passages are a common phenomenon and in this case probably refer to the vaulted undercroft or perhaps to a large drain’ (Taylor & Shaw 2012, 20, fn60). Perhaps Jeremy Errand put this more poetically when he concluded that ‘a large proportion of stories of secret passages contain more moonshine than a fisherman’s boast’ (Errand 1974, 156).
The engineering difficulties of an underground tunnel between Stone and Aston seem insurmountable. As the crow flies, Aston Hall is fully 1.8 miles (2.9 kilometres) distant from Stone Priory and the geological landscape between includes free-draining gravels and the small matter of tunnelling under the River Trent. Such conditions would have troubled even the prowess of the Cornish tin miners of White’s day, despite their vast experience, let alone a mediaeval sapper. Moreover, why would a monastery actually require an underground line of communication with a secular manor house? What purpose could the proposed tunnel have possibly served? How would such a vast construction project be kept secret? Where would the spoil be put? How would the passage be maintained, ventilated and kept dry? At this point we could probably write off the stories and stop digging (pun intended), but something else was lurking beneath the surface…
It is notable that none of the three earliest citations for the Stone tunnels – 1719, 1789 and 1834 – referred to the connection with Aston. As we have seen, from my Dad’s post-war memories, those tales were already a firm fixture by at least the mid-twentieth century, so at what point and why did that link get made?
Aston Hall was designed in the mid-nineteenth century Neo-Gothick style by Edward Welby Pugin, for the Reverend Canon Edward Huddlestone, and has strong associations with the Roman Catholic faith. The hall sits within a much older moat that was presumably the mediaeval manorial enclosure. By the time of the Reformation this manor was held by the staunchly recusant Catholic Heveningham family and later owners also continued a stubborn adherence to the faith (Greenslade & Stuart 1984, 54).
Just a decade after the Roman Catholic Relief Act of 1829 the bones of the seventh century churchman St Chad were, somewhat miraculously, rediscovered at the hall by a mission priest. Following the Reformation the saint’s bones had been removed from his shrine at Lichfield Cathedral and were apparently passed through the hands of a number of prominent Catholic families in the midlands, including the Fitzherbert’s of nearby Swynnerton, prior to reappearing at Aston-by-Stone in 1838 (Tavinor 2016, 75-76).
The hall then became pivotal in the re-establishment of Catholicism in the wider area when the luminaries Father Dominic Barberi and Mother Margaret Hallahan based themselves at Aston from 1842. Hallahan eventually founded a church and convent at Stone in the 1850s and such were her endeavours that the Catholic population of the town increased from just 50 to 1300 by 1868 (Taylor & Shaw 2012, 38).
The period of the mid-nineteenth century seems to be key in understanding the development of the Stone-Aston tunnel story. Firstly, in 1829, the Relief Act garnered interest in the Catholic faith. Then, just five years later, White relayed the tale of the discovery of the passages at the priory site. St Chad’s bones were then recovered at Aston-by-Stone in 1838. According to Stone’s origin legend, the churchman had been a mentor to the young St Wulfad, who is alleged to have been martyred and buried at what became the priory site (Taylor & Shaw 2012, 16). Finally, the foundation of the new Catholic complex at Stone, in the 1850s, was part of an increased local awareness of the faith.
This congruence of events may have concentrated the minds of Stone’s people to consider the links between the two notable Catholic sites of the priory and nearby hall. With talk of underground passages spreading further after White’s publication the perception of the two sites became connected both conceptually and physically.
As a child I found the tales of a secret passage between the mediaeval sites of Stone Priory and Aston Hall very seductive, but as a researcher I have come to appreciate the social history behind the development of the folklore far more deeply. If anything, I find the demonstrable realities far more compelling than the myth.
References
Aston, M., 2000, Monasteries in the Landscape. Tempus. Stroud.
Brydges, E. (ed.), 1789, The Topographer for the Year 1789: Containing a Variety of Original Articles, Illustrative of the Local History and Antiquities of England, Volume 1. Robson & Clarke / J. Walker. London.
Doble, C. E. (ed.), 1906, Remarks and Collections of Thomas Hearne Vol. VII. Oxford Historical Society. Oxford.
Errand, J., Secret Passages and Hiding Places. David & Charles. London.
Greenslade, M. W. & Stuart, D. G., 1984 (2nd edition), A History of Staffordshire. Phillimore. Chichester.
Tavinor, M., 2016, Shrines of the Saints in England and Wales. Canterbury Press. Norwich.
Taylor, D. & Shaw, M., 2012, Stone: Historic Character Assessment. Staffordshire County Council / English Heritage. Stafford.
White, W., 1834, History, Gazetteer and Directory of Staffordshire. William White. Sheffield.
About the author
James Wright is an award-winning buildings archaeologist. He has two decades professional experience of ferreting around in people’s cellars, hunting through their attics and digging up their gardens. He hopes to find meaningful truths about how ordinary and extraordinary folk lived their lives in the mediaeval period.
He welcomes contact through Twitter or email.
The Mediaeval Mythbusting Blog blog is the basis of a forthcoming book – Historic Building Mythbusting – Uncovering Folklore, History and Archaeology which will be released via The History Press on 6 June 2024. More information can be found here:
