History of Rotherham
Convent of St. Wandrille
Farrer¹ suggested it was possible that the church of Ecclesfield was given to the abbey of St. Wandrille by the countess Judith widow of Earl Waltheof at the time when she gave to it, with the consent of William I, part of her manor of Boughton.
In Hunters Hallamshire²:
Saint Wandragesilius, Saint Wandrille, or Fontenelle, a Benedictine convent in Normandy, situated near the banks of
the Seine, about six or seven leagues from Rouen. It was founded in the earliest period of the French monarchy by the saint
of that name, who was a near relative to King Pepin, and constable to Dagobert. By the desire of his friends he married a
lady of noble birth; but they separated by mutual consent on the day of the ceremony, and took religious habits in
different monasteries. After moving for some time from place to place, a great lord gave Saint Wandrille a beautiful
piece of ground near the Seine for the purpose of erecting a monastery; and Batilda, queen of France, made him large gifts
for the support of monks who resorted to him from all quarters to the number of three hundred. Saint Wandrille presided
over his monastery till his death in the year of Christ 685, on the 22d day of July, the day consecrated to his memory in
the Roman Catholic calendar. Such is his legend extracted from Ribadeneira.
This house suffered much from the Normans when they settled in the north of France but after a while it became popular among them, and in 1033 the church which had been burnt was rebuilt. This was thirty-three years before the great emigration from Normandy to Britain. Many of the chiefs who attended the duke of Normandy in his expedition, brought with them an attachment to this religious house, and were scarcely warm in their new possessions when they endowed it with tythe in England and even entire manors.
At the time of the Domesday survey, among the benefactors to this foreign monastery was the countess Judith, widow of earl Waltheof and owner of the manor of Hallam. This lady endowed Saint Wandrille with a part of the manor of Boughton in Northamptonshire; and it may be submitted as no improbable conjecture, that it was to this lady rather than to one of the de Lovetots that the monastery owed its great interest in Hallamshire.
The monks of Saint Wandrille placed a small colony at Ecclesfield; and in the time of Dodsworth the effigies of the saint was to be seen in one of the windows of Ecclesfield Church.
This house continued to enjoy its two thirds of the whole tythe of Sheffield till the time of Edward III or Richard II. Those princes began what Henry V completed to detach from the foreign monasteries their English possessions. Richard II. in the ninth of his reign transferred to the Carthusian convent of Saint Ann without the walls of Coventry, which he had lately founded, all the interest which the house of Saint Wandrille had enjoyed in this neighbourhood. In the possession of this house they continued about a hundred and fifty years. Thomas Ricard, the prior of the Carthusians of Coventry, inscribed his name in one of the windows of the church of Ecclesfield when they were restored so magnificently with painted glass at the beginning of the sixteenth century. Among Dodsworth's Papers is a commission from that convent directed to John Mounteney of Shiercliffe, to collect certain arrears of tythe of corn and other things in the parishes of Ecclesfield, Bradfield, and Sheffield. And in the return which was made by the commissioners for a general ecclesiastical survey in the 26th of Henry VIII. the rectory of Sheffield is said to belong to the monastery or house called the Charter-house at Coventry.
References in early Charters mentioning St. Wandrille, de Furnival , Lovetot family, Ecclesfield, Sheffield and the Revel/Ryuel family:
1161:Agreement between Roger, abbot, and the convent of St. Wandrille, and Richard de Luvetot, that the riddings on the right-hand side of the road leading from Sheffield to Ecclesfield shall remain to St. Wandrille, and those on the left-hand side to Richard de Luvetot, with further provisions as to the woodland on the left-hand side of the road leading from the church of Ecclesfield to Birley, the riddings of Wardsend, and common rights ; also grant by Richard de Luvetot to St. Wandrille of tithe of his venison of Hallamshire. 1161.
Reference:
1. Early Yorkshire Charters edited by William Farrar
2. History of Hallamshire by Joseph Hunter
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