An Alvediston Horror Story

When I left London to live in Wiltshire and settled in Tisbury, I got a map and drew a circle with a 13-mile radius from my bungalow and decided to explore each village inside the circle one by one. I gave each of them a ‘strangeness-rating’ based on whether anything odd had happened there.  

Top of the list was Wilton with its story of the Four Witches whom the villagers blamed for a smallpox epidemic and murdered in Grovely Wood. Next came Hindon with its Mad House.Then Odstock with its Gipsy Curse.  And then Fonthill Gifford with its fallen Abbey and legendary dwarf. Not forgetting on the same spot 200 years earlier, the 2nd Earl of Castlehaven’s house of debauchery which turned the world of masters and servants upside down in1601. All of which we have written about for Weird Wiltshire. But then I discovered a village I’d missed because it was hidden in a fold in the downs on the other side of the Old Shaftesbury Coach Road.  I’d missed Alvediston and after half an hour’s research I realised it had the highest strangeness rating of all, and it took the form of a horror story.

We all know that if you scratch  the cosy-cottage picture of the past you can find awful things that went on. There ARE some charming, boring  places, where nothing interesting has ever happened but something has rocked the surface of most of the others. It needn’t have been on the scale of the two Fonthills where aristocrats went a bit crazy inside the walls of their estates. In fact it was usually something less dramatic like petty feuding that could go on for generations and tear villages apart. And it was feuding between a tenant farmer and a local landlord that got out of hand that led to the Alvediston horror story.

You can sit in one of these villages on a sunny day having a drink and the thing in its past – whatever it was – can make the scene go dim for a moment before brightening again. In the case of Alvediston, when you remember its particular incident from the past, the sunny meadow in front of the church doesn’t just go dim for a second. It’s as if a main switch has turned off the sun and the whole meadow goes dark.

But the feud at Alvediston only got out of hand and ended like it did because of a bigger feud – the Catholic-Protestant one that split the country in the 1600s.  Even in places as cut off from the world as a village in the downs, the trauma and anxiety upset village life and turned people against each other.  The worst thing was that no-one could escape.  You were forced to take sides and being on the wrong side was seen as treason, which was punished by fines and imprisonment. We can get a hint of it in the way the country now is split into FOR or AGAINST things like Brexit, Trans and Immigration and how it can divide friends and neighbours and even cost people their jobs. The difference between then and now though is that nobody gets burnt at the stake.

Alvediston was strongly Protestant and next door to it at Norrington Manor lived a fiercely stubborn Catholic  family called the Gowans who were enraging the neighbourhood by not attending church.  The family naively believed they were descended from King Arthur’s knight Sir Gawain and Thomas, the head of the family, was as loyal to the Old Religion as his fictional ancestor was to the Round Table and its vows.  For refusing to back down the Crown imprisoned him and seized his manor and two-thirds of his lands and they were leased to a tenant farmer called Richard Kennell.  Kennell comes across as a nasty character with all the spite of a small farmer towards the landed gentry. He seized his chance and moved into the Manor, kicking Thomas’s wife  Katherine and her servants out.

 One afternoon, while Kennell and his servants were at church, Katherine Gowan broke back into her home and got her servants to lock all the doors.  When Kennell tried to break back in, she and her servants held them at bay for several days by firing arrows and guns from the windows, before being ousted again.  Five days later, on 12 August 1604, Thomas who had now been released but was broken by prison and by being dispossessed, died.  Katherine secretly took his body at night and buried him in the Gawen aisle of Alvediston church, which in her eyes was still Catholic and his rightful place of burial even if it was temporarily tainted by the new religion. Weeks later, Kennell, in a rage at the burial and at Katharine trying to get back into her home, marched into the church with his men and broke the tomb open. They wrenched Thomas’s fresh corpse from the tomb and dragged it in its coffin into the meadow in front of the church. To quote a contemporary account ……

‘They tumbled the body out onto its face and bellie upon the ground, rolling it with a pole. One of Kennell’s men then tore open the burial shroud exposing the decaying body.  After mocking and violating the body on the meadow,

They left it exposed for several days. When the stench became unbearable, they forced it back into the coffin but instead of returning it to the vault inside the church, they dug a ditch outside the graveyard and stood the coffin on end and shovelled dirt to bury it.  As they did it, Kenell declared, ‘He was athwart men in life, so shall he be athwart them in death.’  

In C17th Wilts dialect ‘athwart’ meant ‘crosswise’, used to describe how Gowan had been a stubborn man living at cross-purposes with the Church of England, at an angle opposite to everybody else.  Leaving his corpse standing vertically was a deep cultural insult which denied the deceased a peaceful rest till the Day of Judgment.

But Kennelly had gone too far and the villagers had been so disgusted by the horrifying treatment of the body that it sparked outrage across the community. The regional authorities intervened; the upright grave was dismantled and the coffin recovered from the dirt and put back in its proper resting place in the church.  Sadly, James Wyatt – ‘the wrecker of Salisbury Cathedral’ and jerry-builder of Beckford’s Fonthill Abbey, was also hired to ‘restore’ Alvediston church and his restoration has destroyed the Gawen aisle where their family tombs were.

Katherine and her son, also called Thomas, never gave up hope of returning but Kennell’s spite never stopped. When he realised she was close to getting Norrington back, he tried to spoil as much of her land as he could.  He ploughed up twenty-five acres of meadow and planted woad which was known to ruin the soil, though God knows what he thought he was going to do with gallons of blue dye.  The Gowans sued him in retaliation and thus village life returned from the glaring horror and stench of what had happened in the meadow to the tit-and-tat of suing and counter-suing that was par for the time.  It was seen as a moment of madness that the village either tried to forget or made bearable by turning it into legend. After a series of other tenants, Norrington WAS returned to the Gowans. But stubborn as ever they stuck to their faith and went on being fined as recusants until they were bankrupt and in1658 Thomas sold it to the Wyndham family.

As a footnote, in 1966 a famous prime-minister whose mistake on the world stage had cost him his job and made him into a sick man, retired for a bit of peace to Alvediston. If he hoped no-one would find him there he succeeded.  A string of people from the political world like Harold MacMillan came to see him and got hopelessly lost in the surrounding lanes. The exception was the no-nonsense Mrs Thatcher who took a helicopter.  He died from cancer ten years later, believing till the end that he had been right about Suez and his tomb stands in front of the church, facing the meadow where it had all happened.  

Note.The Gowans may have been right about Sir Gawain after all.  Modern historians now believe that King Arthur’s knights weren’t just fictional creations but were based on real people.

David Aneurin Morgan