A 17th century Gloucestershire wonder – by Kirsty Hartsiotis

KirstyTHartsiotis2 • 9 April 2016

lj smSo who was Norman Jewson’s ghost , Lady Juliana, who haunts the church and house if her vault is disturbed? She was born Juliana Hicks, and was the daughter of Sir Baptist Hicks, who was the first Viscount of Chipping Campden. He was a self-made man, a silk mercer, who was fortunate enough to be in the right place at the right time. He became a moneylender to King James I, supplying him and the new court with luxurious fabrics and loans… This gained him, in time, a knighthood, baronetcy, and he became Viscount Campden in 1628, the year before he died. He was a major benefactor to Campden, donating the almhouses, the market hall and a water supply. But despite all this, Baptist Hicks was unlucky in one thing – none of his sons survived to manhood. When he died, his titles passed to his son-in-law, Edward Noel, who was the wife of his eldest daughter, Juliana. [i]

As always with history before the 20 th century, we know a lot about the men of the gentry and aristocracy, but the women are more shadowy. We know she was 19 when she married Edward Noel in 1605, and that they had six children. We know she lived a long life by the standard of any age, dying in 1680 aged 94, and that only one of her children outlived her (and by only two years!). She lived in Edward Noel’s home county of Rutland, in a place called Brooke, where she “maintained great state and dispensed much hospitality”. Her eldest son, another Baptist, inherited the estate after his father died fighting in the Civil War. [ii]

That’s about it. But Lady Juliana lives on in story, albeit as a bit part, in one of the most famous tales of Gloucestershire: the Campden Wonder. Briefly put, it tells of how, in 1660, Lady Juliana’s steward in Campden, William Harrison, set off to collect rents in the nearby village of Charingworth … and never returned. His servant, John Perry, set off to look for him, but eventually only found some of his possessions. He was arrested for his master’s murder, but he claimed to be innocent. He laid the blame at his mother and brother’s door, saying that they killed him for the money. They denied this. In end, John Perry pleaded insanity, saying that he, his mother and his brother were all innocent. The judge thought otherwise – they were all hanged, the mother first as she was thought to be a witch who had bewitched her sons so that would not tell the tale.  Her death did not loosen their tongues…

And that might have been the end of the story, but in 1662 William Harrison returned. Not as a ghost. He was very much alive. He claimed to have been snatched by Turkish pirates and had only recently escaped from slavery! The case was never resolved – but certainly the Perry  family didn’t kill a man who was still alive. There are theories that it was all related to the Noel family – and the burning down of Old Campden House by the Royalists. When Charles II was restored to the throne, he investigated the destruction of property during the war. Did Harrison know something that would have harmed the family? [iii] But then why didn’t the family step in to stop the killing of three innocent people?

In the story, Lady Juliana is said to be living in Campden. Not in in the now destroyed house her father built in 1612, but in Court House, the converted stable block. Unfortunately, this is unlikely, as she seems to have spent her time in Rutland, but maybe she visited … and maybe she knew exactly what was going on.

Lady Juliana lived through a tumultuous period of history. She lost her husband and a son, Henry, to the Civil War, and saw her own side, the Royalists, destroy her father’s house to stop the Parliament troops from taking it when they had to withdraw from Campden. She lived through the Commonwealth and the Protectorate, when people who had been on the Royalist side were fined and charged with ‘delinquency’, and she saw the Restoration and her family return to favour [iv]. But what she was like as a person we shall never know. But did she feel guilty for the death of the Perry family … so guilty she had to rise from the grave?

[i] See the Chipping Campden History Society website to find out more about Sir Baptist Hicks: http://chippingcampdenhistory.org.uk/page_id__77.aspx

[iii] Lewis-Jones, June Folklore of the Cotswolds (Tempus, 2003), pp. 99-100

[iv] [iv] Find out what happened to her son, Sir Baptist Noel, here: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Noel,_Baptist_(1611-1682)_(DNB00)

Holiness and profanity? A visit to Cerne Abbas

by Kirsty Hartsiotis • 15 May 2018
We all know what to expect from Cerne Abbas, don’t we? A picture speaks a thousand words on this one. Shall I give you a close up? No? We all know that by the 19 th century he was associated with fertility and that it’s said that as a woman either sleeping alone in the phallus or, er, doing a bit more than sleeping there with your partner can cure infertility. No surprises there… But there’s another fertility boost in the very same village, and this one was probably the one used in the medieval period, and, perhaps, before.

The Treasure Seekers: finding (or not) gold and wealth in local folklore

by KirstyTHartsiotis2 • 15 March 2018
If there’s one trope of folklore that appears over and over again, it’s schemes to get rich quick. Jack and the Beanstalk is, of course, one of the most universal – who wouldn’t want a goose that laid golden eggs? Lazy but often kind boys charm princesses into marrying them; pretty and resourceful maids do the same with princes. These fairy tales are a daydream, a wish-fulfilment to those stuck in a seemingly inescapable round of poverty and want. It’s something we can easily recognise in lottery ticket buying and the poring over the lives of celebrities and the royals even as austerity pinches pockets a little further and privatisation erodes the services we once had. But get rich quick stories didn’t always take place in the never-never land of fairy tales. Sometimes they take place right here, in our local area.

Ghosts of the Mounds: prehistory and ghostlore in Gloucestershire and Wiltshire, a beginning

by KirstyTHartsiotis2 • 15 January 2018
Lately, I’ve been intrigued by the different ghosts that emerge from the many, many prehistoric barrow mounds in the west. I’m doing talks on Gloucestershire’s ghosts and Wiltshire’s folklore , and I’ve been reminded of how, here in the west, they form an important part of the folklore of the region. This blog, probably the first of a few, explores some of the hauntings and their tales – if you’d like the full tales, you’ll find some of them in my books Wiltshire Folk Tales and Gloucestershire Ghost Tales .

The Secret Disclosed: ghostly riots in Bury St Edmunds

by KirstyTHartsiotis2 • 7 December 2017
I’m all about ghosts at the moment, what with Suffolk Ghost Tales coming out next week. But this blog is a bit naughty, as it’s actually inspired by the background to a story in my previous Suffolk book, Suffolk Folk Tales . The question is, how do ghosts come to be? You’d think that it would be by someone dying and proceeding to haunt a place, wouldn’t you? But that’s not always the case … sometimes they are conjured up out of the collective mind of the people, and such is the case for the Grey Lady of Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk.

On Downham Hill … a fairy story for Halloween

by KirstyTHartsiotis2 • 11 October 2017
It’s the ghost month, October. The month of Halloween and Samhain, when, once again, the veil is thin between this world and the Otherworld of the fairies and the dead. The nights are drawing firmly now, too – at the end of the month, we’ll be changing the clocks and suddenly the evenings will be short. It’s a month for storytelling, for telling tales of that Otherworld. I’ve got a number of gigs coming up in the next few weeks to do just that, and to reveal the hidden places where you might find … something else …

Ancient flying machines!

by KirstyTHartsiotis2 • 7 September 2017
I’m telling stories about ancient technology at Gloucester History Festival on Saturday , and flying machines do come into it…

Roman Wonders! Heron of Alexandria and Ancient Automata

by KirstyTHartsiotis2 • 21 August 2017
In a couple of weeks on Saturday 9 September I’m telling stories, Roman Wonders, as part of the Gloucester History Festival . Last year I was there telling Gloucestershire tales with Inkubus Sukkubus , but this is a little different – the brief was to tell stories of Roman invention and innovation for a family audience. So what did the Romans invent? I didn’t want to tell stories of siege engines or roads, so I looked further afield until I found what I wanted – steam engines, vending machines and robots!

A Ballad Lovers Tale: The Famous Flower of Serving Men

by KirstyTHartsiotis2 • 31 July 2017
The ballad I chose certainly is out there, and remains a favourite ever since those early days more than 30 years ago. My stepdad wasn’t convinced I’d like Martin Carthy straight away, thinking his singing and playing rather an acquired taste for a Duran Duran aficionado, but I loved him immediately. My stepdad played me his own favourite, and it was this ballad, from Carthy’s album Shearwater , 1972 , that I chose to retell for the Ballad Tales book: The Famous Flower of Serving Men.

The Maid, the Maggot and the Saints

by KirstyTHartsiotis2 • 11 April 2017
On National Dragon Day this year – you might know it better as St George’s Day, the 23 April – two agents from DCHQ (Dragon Conservation Headquarters, not the Other Place) in Cheltenham Agent Green and Agent Krisa will be coming to the Museum in the Park , Stroud, at 3pm to teach dragon tracking and to tell dragon tales straight from the archives – and straight from the dragon’s mouths…

Is John Ball a dream?

by KirstyTHartsiotis2 • 28 November 2016
It’s a tough one, this. William Morris’s novella A Dream of John Ball paints a heroic picture of one of the most complicated and contested episodes in English history: the so-called Peasant’s Revolt of 1381. The main character, dreaming his way back to the 14 th century from Morris’s dirty, depressed and over-populated London to a clean and well-kept Kentish village, discovers he has arrived at exactly the moment when John Ball, the excommunicate priest recently sprung from Maidstone jail by a growing body of rebels, arrives to preach and incite the locals to take up their weapons and march on London. The villagers are decent, happy to share what they have with the stranger, and all too glad to follow John Ball to bring down the feudal system and reinstate the primordial communism known by the first men and women, when there were no gentlemen. But was it like that?
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