The Wellfields: A novel. Vol. 1 of 3

The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.
To MY FRIENDS AT LOWESWATER, IN REMEMBRANCE OF SOME PLEASANT DAYS SPENT THERE WITH THEM.
CONTENTS OF VOL. I.
PRELUDE.
In very early days, in the beginnings of Saxon Christianity, a certain Saxon potentate erected a church at Wellfield, now a village in the north-east corner of a great and wealthy English county. This church he called, as many churches in those times were called, the White Church; and since it stood in a peculiar situation, in close proximity to the foot of a lovely wooded rise, he added the further distinguishing title of ‘under the Hill,’ and for hundreds of years it was known as the ‘White Church under the Hill.’ Generations came and went, and worshipped there, and led lives pious or otherwise: it was a wild race of people that dwelt in that well-watered valley, and the White Church under the Hill was known far and wide, long before such things as monasteries and cloisters, with their attendant good and evil, were thought of. It was a wild and lovely region, watered by three fair streams well stocked with fish, while venison and game abounded in the woods and on the moors around. Gradually a village clustered around the White Church. Wealthy and pious persons made gifts to it, and built houses in the vicinity of it, until the Normans came, and soon after that changes took place. Monasteries and abbeys and nunneries sprang up, here and there, throughout the land; and it so chanced that a certain pious baron presented to a company of Cistercian monks a very fair site by the river, and not far from the White Church. There they began to build themselves an abbey, the fame of which soon spread far and wide in the land. Its farms were fat, its lands productive, its abbots proud, its hospitality unbounded; for three centuries they built at it and lavished upon it all manner of beauty, in the shape of rare carvings of oak and stone. Its church was as large as many a cathedral; it stood on an exquisite site beside the river, and the size of the abbey-grounds soon exceeded that of the whole village and the White Church counted into the bargain. Then, while it was still in its glory and still unfinished, while the proudest and most domineering of its abbots was ruling the land around with a rod of iron, and hunting out witches and chasing them over Penhull, the great hill hard by, and burning them when he caught them, and was rioting in power—then, under the ferocious auspices of the Eighth Harry of glorious memory, a reform was effected—a reform which took the shape of a sack of the glorious abbey. Its church was demolished, the friars disbanded, the proud abbot was gibbeted in full view of his birthplace over the water, on a wooded mound called to this day ‘The Abbot’s Knoll.’ All the church plate and jewellery was confiscated by the royal robber; while the abbey and the lands thereof were magnanimously presented by him—what was left of them—to two of the neighbouring gentry, one John de Wellfield and one Ralph de Burnshire, which gentlemen had gallantly espoused the cause of the king, and had assisted in driving forth the monks from the abbey at the end of the pike. The families of Wellfield and Burnshire presently were united by the marriage of the sole heiress of the Burnshires with the sole heir of the Wellfields, and it was at this juncture that another great property called Brentwood, some three miles away, lapsed, through lack of direct heirs male, from the Burnshire family to a collateral branch of the same, named Waddington, which Waddingtons continued to be devout Roman Catholics, while the Wellfields turned heretics, to the great distress of the reverend fathers, the Jesuits, who about this period in the family history were beginning to make a great noise in the world, and to exert their power and make it felt. Wellfield Abbey, then, got into heretic hands, and the heretics continued to be men of mark; while the pious and devout Waddingtons had the ill luck (or the ill grace) to die out, and their representatives, in the year of grace 1794, let their ancient abode on the hill-side at a nominal rent to those Jesuit fathers who were driven from their French college at L—— by the Revolution. They were thrifty, these Jesuit fathers, and eventually bought the whole estate, and their representatives possess it to this day, and have made of it the first Roman Catholic seminary in the north at any rate, if not in the whole of England. Indeed, that corner of this favoured land is a Catholic stronghold.