Newstead Abbey
Newstead Abbey was originally an Augustinian priory founded between 1165 and 1173. In 1539, during the Dissolution of the Monasteries, the abbey was closed down, and its land and buildings were sold the following year to Sir John Byron of Colwick. It became the seat of the Byron family, and eventually came down to the poet George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788–1824).
The inheritance was a mixed blessing: Byron loved Newstead and its medieval atmosphere (and asked to be buried there beside the monument to his Newfoundland dog, Boatswain, though this request was ignored). However, by his time, the house was almost in ruins, its gardens overgrown, and the estate run down, its woods having been felled for the price of their timber. Without the means to save it himself, Byron sold it to his old schoolfellow, Colonel Thomas Wildman, in 1818 for £95,000.
Like other ancient houses, Newstead had its legends. A carved chimney piece in a bedroom was traditionally explained as showing a Saracen lady who had been rescued by a crusading Byron from her kinsfolk. There was a similar carving in the dining room, thought to depict the same scene.
Byron’s immediate predecessor was known as ‘Devil Byron’, and among wild tales about him was the rumour that he was haunted by the ghost of a sister to whom he had refused to speak for many years on account of a family scandal. Despite her heart-rending appeals of ‘Speak to me, my lord! Do speak to me, my lord!’ they were still unreconciled when she died.
The ‘Corn Law Rhymer’ Ebenezer Elliott (1781–1849), in a ballad on this legend, has the spectres of both ‘Devil Byron’ and his sister sallying forth together in wild weather, he in his coach and she on horseback:
On mighty winds, in spectre coach,
Fast speeds the Heart of iron;
On spectre-steed, the spectre-dame –
Side by side with Byron. …
On winds, on clouds, they ride, they drive –
Oh, hark, thou Heart of iron!
The thunder whispers mournfully,
‘Speak to her, Lord Byron!’
Another ghost said to haunt the abbey was that of its first owner, remembered as ‘Sir John Byron the Little, with the Great Beard’. An old portrait of him that was still hanging over the door of the great saloon ‘some few years since’, according to John Ingram writing in the 1880s, allegedly sometimes at midnight stepped out of its frame and walked around the state apartments. Indeed, one young lady visiting Newstead some years before Ingram’s time insisted that she had seen Sir John the Little in broad daylight, sitting by the fireplace reading an old book.
Newstead Abbey was also credited with possessing a White Lady. The American writer Washington Irving (1783–1859) mentions that a young woman, Lord Byron’s cousin, staying at the abbey, one night when she was in bed saw a White Lady come out of the wall on one side of the room and pass into the one opposite. In 1877, John Potter Briscoe recorded something of her history, saying that old inhabitants of the neighbourhood of Hucknall used to relate that the Honourable William Byron of Bulwell Wood Hall had a daughter who clandestinely married one of her father’s dog-keepers. She had several children by him, and ‘it was further added that the mysterious “White Lady,” who some years ago haunted the grounds of Newstead Abbey, sprang from this ill-assorted match.’
Byron himself had a taste for Gothic fantasy: while he lived at Newstead, a skull was found of large size and unusual whiteness. Byron supposed it had belonged to one of the friars buried there, and sent it to London to be converted to a goblet. When it came back, he instituted a new order at the abbey, with himself as grand master or abbot. The members, twelve in number, were provided with black robes and, when at certain times they assembled, the skull was filled with claret and passed round. The skull is said to be buried at Newstead under the chapel floor.
It is consequently uncertain how seriously one should take the assertion of his biographer, Thomas Moore, that Byron believed his fortunes to be bound up with the life of an oak he had planted on first coming to Newstead, having an idea ‘that as it flourished so should he’. Debatable, too, is Moore’s note on a letter written to him by Byron on 13 August 1814:
It was, if I mistake not, during his recent visit to Newstead, that he himself actually fancied he saw the ghost of the Black Friar, which was supposed to have haunted the Abbey from the time of the dissolution of the monasteries … It is said, that the Newstead ghost appeared, also, to Lord Byron’s cousin, Miss Fanny Parkins, and that she made a sketch of him from memory.
This Black Friar is described by Byron in Don Juan, canto 16:
[… a monk arrayed]
In cowl, and beads and dusky garb, appeared,
Now in the moonlight, and now lapsed in shade,
With steps that trod as heavy, yet unheard.
The ghost served as a hereditary omen, its appearance portending misfortune to the Byrons:
By the marriage-bed of their lords, ’tis said,
He flits on the bridal eve;
And ’tis held as faith, to their bed of death
He comes – but not to grieve.
When an heir is born, he is heard to mourn,
And when aught is to befall
That ancient line, in the pale moonshine,
He walks from hall to hall.
Byron says nothing directly about whether or not he believed in, much less saw, this spectre, or if this was just his fantasy. According to later authors, however, the ghost appeared in ‘the Haunted Chamber’ adjoining Byron’s bedroom, though at night he walked the cloisters and other parts of the old abbey, and Byron claimed to have seen him shortly before his ill-fated marriage to the heiress Anne Millbanke in 1815. All this may have been deduced from Don Juan combined with Thomas Moore’s note.
If authentic, however, the ‘Goblin Friar’ tradition was probably connected with a belief that grew up in the course of the seventeenth century that the descendants of those who had been granted possession of monastic buildings and estates at the Reformation would be punished for this sacrilege, and would never prosper. The idea was strongly argued by Sir Henry Spelman in his History and Fate of Sacrilege (written in the 1640s and posthumously published in 1698), and remained influential even in Victorian times, recurrent misfortunes in landowning families whose seat had once been monastic property being readily interpreted as the result of a curse.
SEE ALSO:
SOURCE:
Haunted England : The Penguin Book of Ghosts – Written by Jennifer Westwood and Jacqueline Simpson –
Copyright © Jennifer Westwood and Jacqueline Simpson 2005, 2008