There is something peculiarly appropriate in the refectory of a monastic house becoming an inn. Such is the history of the “Lord Crewe Arms,” at Blanchland.
It is a far cry to that picturesque and quiet village, in stern and rugged Northumberland; but you may be sure that, however wild and forbidding the surrounding country, the site and the immediate neighbourhood of an ancient abbey will prove to be fertile, sheltered, and beautiful; and Blanchland, the old home of an Abbey of Præmonstratensian canons, is no exception to this rule.
Whichever way the traveller comes into Blanchland, he comes by hills more or less precipitous, and by moors chiefly remarkable for their savage and worthless nature, and it is a welcome change when, from the summit of a steep hill, he at last looks down upon the quiet place, nestling in a hollow on the Northumbrian side of the little river Derwent, that here separates the counties of Northumberland and Durham.
Down there, still remote from the busy world, the village is slowly but surely fading out of existence, as we learn from the cold, dispassionate figures of the Census returns, which record the fact that in 1811 the inhabitants numbered 518, while in 1901 they were but 232.
It is a compact little place. There is the ancient bridge, built by the monks, across the Derwent, still, in the words of Froissart, “strong and rapid and full of large stones and rocks”; and there are the church-tower, the old Abbey gatehouse, the “Lord Crewe Arms,” and some few houses, forming four sides of a square. “The place,” as Walter Besant truly says in his novel, Dorothy Forster, “has the aspect of an ancient and decayed college.”
Blanchland owes everything to its old abbey, conducted under the rules of the original brethren of Prémonté, and even derived its name of Blanche Lande from the white habits of the monks; just as Whitland in Carmarthenshire, took its name from a similar history.
The Abbey of Blanchland was founded here, at “Wulwardshope,” as the place was originally named, in 1163, and, rebuilt and added to from time to time, flourished until the heavy hand of Henry the Eighth and his commissioners ended it, in 1536. In all those long centuries it had remained obscure, both in its situation and its history; and was indeed so difficult to come to that tradition tells a picturesque story of mediæval Scottish raiders failing to find the place and so returning home, when its situation was revealed to them by the bells the monks were ringing, to express joy at their deliverance. Alas! it was their own funeral knell the brethren rang; for, guided by the sound, those Border ruffians entered Blanchland, burnt its Abbey and slew the monks.
Shortly after the suppression of the Abbey under Henry the Eighth, the monastic lands became the property, and the domestic buildings of the Abbey the home, of the Radcliffe family, and afterwards of the Forsters, who, according to the wholly irreverent, and half-boastful, half-satirical local saying, were older than the oldest of county families, for “the Almighty first created the world and Adam and Eve, and then He made the Forsters.”
Blanchland was at last lost to that long-descended race by the treason of General Forster, who was concerned in the rising of 1715, and so forfeited his estates; and in 1721 the property was purchased by Nathaniel Crewe, Bishop of Durham, who at the age of sixty-seven had married Dorothy Forster, at that time twenty-four years of age.
