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Revision as of 15:07, 30 September 2006 by Arrievaulx (talk | contribs)(diff) ← Previous revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)St Bees is a village and civil parish in the Copeland district of Cumbria, England, about five miles south of Whitehaven. The parish had a population of 1,717 according to the 2001 census. Within the parish is St. Bees Head, the most westerly point of Northern England.
St. Bees has a Norman Priory and an Elizabethan School and is the start of the famous Wainwright Coast to Coast Walk. St. Bees Head is the only major sea cliff between Wales and Scotland, and is the only Heritage Coastline in Cumbria. It is the spectaular location of one of England's most important seabird colonies.
The name St. Bees is a corruption of the Norse name for the village "Kirki-Becoc", which can be translated as the "church of Bega", relating to the local saint, St. Bega.
The Priory
The Normans did not get to Cumbria until 1092. When eventually they took over the local lordships, William le Meschin, Lord of Egremont, used the existing church site to build a grand monastic building to house a Prior and six monks from about 1130 onwards. It was subordinate to the great Benedictine monastery of St Mary at York. The magnificent Norman doorway of the Priory dates from this time.
The Priory had a great influence on the area. The monks worked the land, fished, and extended the Priory buildings. The ecclesiastical Parish of St Bees was huge and stretched to Ennerdale, Loweswater, Wasdale and Eskdale. The coffin routes from these outlying areas to the mother church in St Bees can still be followed in places.
The Priory was closed in the English Reformation on the orders of Henry VIII in 1539. The church building became a simple parish church and the extensive monastic buildings fell into decay.
Remarkably, the small West Cumbrian village of St. Bees produced two of the Archbishops of the reign of Queen Elizabeth I; Archbishop Edmund Grindal of Canterbury and Archbishop Edwin Sandys of York.
In about 1519 Edmund Grindal was born at Cross Hill House, and was probably educated by the monks. A devout Protestant, he made his mark in the reign of Edward VI, but had to flee to Strasbourg when the Catholic Mary I ascended the throne. On Mary's death the country once again became Protestant, and Grindal became Bishop of London, Archbishop of York, then Archbishop of Canterbury. His undoing was standing up to Queen Elizabeth I over liberal religious meetings and he was suspended. He died in 1583 still in disgrace, but virtually on his death bed he founded St Bees School.
In the 1970s an excavation at the priory revealed a lead coffin containing an astonishingly well preserved body - now known as the St. Bees Man. The male occupant is though to have been a Knight, and may have died in the Crusades. Although he was over 600 years old, his nails, skin and stomach contents were preserved in near perfect condition!
Expansion
The 1800s saw the start of great changes. In 1816 St Bees Theological College was founded. It was the first theological College outside Oxbridge for the training of Church of England Clergy. The monastic chancel was re-roofed, and additional lecture rooms were built. At one time the College had 100 students, and over 2,600 clergy were trained here before it closed in 1895.
St. Bees School started its era of expansion with the building of the quadrangle in 1846 with compensation from the mine-owning Lowther family, who had illegally obtained the lucrative mineral rights for Whitehaven from the school at a derisory sum. This was the first step in St. Bees School's rise from a local institution to becoming one of the new “Public Schools” on the fashionable model of Dr Arnold’s Rugby. By 1916 numbers had reached 350, many new buildings had been erected and the school had become known nationally. The school still exists today.
Perhaps some of the greatest change was after 1849 when the Furness Railway reached the village. St. Bees attracted the professional classes who commuted to businesses in Whitehaven or Workington. This led to the building of many of the larger houses and Lonsdale Terrace.
The railway brought tourists, and as early as 1851 the Lord Mayor of London stayed at the Seacote Hotel. This long history of attracting tourists for “Bucket and spade” holidays has continued to this day.
The railway made possible the export of the fine red St. Bees sandstone, which is an excellent and durable building material. Huge amounts of stone were exported, much of it for building the boom town of Barrow-in-Furness. This industry died out in the 1970’s, but has since been revived, and there are now two working quarries in the parish.
Agriculture was originally the mainstay of the village economy. Gradually during the 1800s, service employment for the School and lodgings for the College gave additional income, and with the advent of commuters, the Village’s social mix was becoming more middle class. Tourism and quarries also provided employment, and many village men found work in the iron ore mines at Cleator. Thus the 1800s saw the change from a rural backwater based on agriculture, to a more diversified base of dormitory village for professional and industrial worker alike, and it grew into a minor academic centre.
The start of the 20th Century saw yet another decline in agriculture, and this has continued to today, when there are only a few farms left. Industrial decline also hit West Cumbria, particularly after the boom years of both wars. However, following the Second World War, two major industries were established which have had a profound effect on the community. Marchon products at Kells, and UKAEA/BNFL at Sellafield both soaked up village labour released by the declining heavy iron and mining industries, and brought a large influx of the technical and scientific university-educated middle class into the village; rather like the first arrival of the professional classes a century earlier.
External links
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