Last updated at 14:48, Thursday, 12 April 2012

OUR last event of the winter season, at an appropriate venue nearby in Captain Shaw’s School Bootle, was a talk on the history of Seaton Priory and its estate.

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Our speaker was Robert Baxter, senior archivist at Cumbria Archive Centre Whitehaven, and he explained that records recently deposited with the archive service revealed more about the history of the estate of the former priory from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries.

Robert gave an introduction to St Benedict and his Rule (the nuns of Seaton were Benedictines) and a brief history of the medieval Priory. Unfortunately the Priory left little in the way of documents which survived the Reformation. For instance, we only know the names of some ten prioresses and nuns of Seaton during its entire existence.

The Priory was founded in the late twelfth century and because it was so poor various patrons endowed it with the revenues of Irton Church, with income from a leper hospital in Lancaster and with lands in the south of Cumberland granted by Holmcultram Abbey. In 1536 the Priory was suppressed during the first wave of dissolutions by Henry VIII.

The Prioress Joanna Copeland suffered like many other religious in being accused by Henry’s officers of immorality or superstition; she was alleged to have had an affair with a priest. During the great Northern uprising or ‘Pilgrimage of Grace’ against Henry VIII, the rebels restored the Priory.

The Crown had leased the Priory and its estate to Hugh Askew, a Lincolnshire courtier, who petitioned the King that the Prioress and rebels had reoccupied the site and sought recompense against them. Askew was said to have been Officer of the Cellar to Queen Catherine of Aragon, and had lost his position after her divorce.

He apparently brought himself to Henry’s notice by carrying a bag of charcoal in his best clothes as evidence of his willingness to work for the King. Henry was said to have remembered that Askew knew about good wine and brought him back into his service! Askew built Seaton Hall from the Priory buildings and acquired other properties to add to the former Priory estate.

After Askew’s death, his wife Bridget married William Pennington of Muncaster Castle. Their first son Joseph continued the Muncaster line while the second son John inherited the Seaton estate. Most of the Penningtons’ Seaton tenants bought the freehold of their lands when the Penningtons sold many of the properties to Daniel Steel, the Rector of Bootle, in 1759.

They sold the Priory and Hall and its lands in 1779 to John Lord Muncaster, who used the estate as security to borrow money. He had been unable to pay the mortgage off and so sold the estate on to John Wakefield, a wealthy Kendal merchant, in 1802.

The noted local antiquarian Mary Fair visited Seaton Hall in 1944 and described the buildings and the interior. She also recalled some of the legends attached to the place: the “Nuns’ walk” above the Priory where the nuns walked to Corney church, the “Nuns’ Pool” where some were said to have drowned and which is haunted by their ghosts, and the band of smugglers who were said to have used the Hall during the eighteenth century.

The first of our Summer Outings will be a visit to Swarthmoor Hall on Sunday, June 24. Further details from Len Watson 019467 24634.

First published at 11:58, Thursday, 12 April 2012
Published by http://www.whitehavennews.co.uk