The Good Cross Chapel

The foundation called the Good Cross Chapel is a lesser-known part of Lowestoft’s religious history, which once stood in the extreme south-eastern corner of the parish near the junction of the present-day Suffolk Road with Battery Green Road – possibly in the location of what is now the Fish Market entrance. It was a wayside place of Christian devotion, not far from the crossing-point (a sand and shingle bank, or bar) over the eastern extremity of Lake Lothing – the mere being referred to in earlier times as the Fresh Water – and it purported to have a piece of Christ’s cross as an object of veneration (it has been said that there were enough of these wooden fragments in Medieval Europe to have built a ship itself!). It is not known when it was constructed, nor who endowed it, but it was an important part of the town’s religious culture and it raised a notable annual income from the offerings made by people resorting to it.

Edmund Gillingwater, in his An Historical Account of the Ancient Town of Lowestoft (1790), pp. 266-7, makes reference to an enquiry into the annual value of the parish vicarage, held on 12 February 1566. While Revd. John Tanner (Vicar from 1708-59) noted it as 31 January 1566 and added its details to the Lowestoft Town Book (Norfolk Record Office, PD 589/112) – a collection of hand-written material relating to the town, contributed by leading citizens of the 17th & 18th centuries. Tanner names five townsmen who gave evidence, all of them merchants of one kind or another: Richard Mighells (aged c. fifty-five years), Anthony Jettour (c. forty-three), John Grudgefield (c. eighty-four), Thomas Webb (c. forty-eight and recently moved to Norwich) and Richard Gooch (c. fifty). After their combined testimonies had been given, the vicarage value (deriving largely from parish tithes) was declared to be £9 4s 5½d per annum.

Gillingwater agrees with this sum, but refers only to the evidence given by Mighells, Jettour and Grudgefield. The last-named of these three was the person who provided information relating to the Good Cross Chapel to the commissioners enquiring into the value of the Vicarage. He gave the Chapel’s demise – caused, most likely, by Edward VI’s Suppression of the Chantries in 1547 – as one of the major factors in the fall in parish income, citing a loss of £8-£9 per annum after it had ceased to function. Being thirty to forty years older than his colleagues, he would have had greater knowledge and experience of its operation and local significance.

As a creator of income for the Vicar, the Chapel would undoubtedly have come under his jurisdiction, but specific parish duties and the observance of daily services would have kept him fully occupied. A chaplainwould therefore have been employed to administer the chapel, holding services there as and when required and seeing to the needs of visitors. There is at least one reference to it as a place of pilgrimage, which has survived from the mid-15th century and it is to be found in the nuncupative will of Thomas Pekerell of Rickinghall Superior, in West Suffolk. In declaring his final wishes, on 25 January 1458, the testator requested (among other things) that his wife do pilgrimage either in person or by surrogate to the following places: Norwich [shrine of the boy-saint, William, at the Cathedral], Ely [St. Etheldreda’s Shrine, at the Cathedral], Walsingham [the Shrine of Our Lady, in the Priory], Bury [the Shrine of St. Edmund in the Abbey church] and Lowestoft. At each stopping-place, prayers for Thomas Pekerell’s soul would have been offered, and it can be seen that the Good Cross Chapel was in elevated company.

During the 1380s, there were complications regarding the appointment of vicars to St. Margaret’s Church – partly because this was the time of the so-called Great Schism (1378-1417), when there were two rival popes, based respectively in Rome and Avignon. Edmund Gillingwater’s An Historical Account of the Ancient Town of Lowestoft (1790), p. 340, names William Smoggett as incumbent after 1383 – but, with no year of appointment attached. Hugh Lees in his The Chronicles of a Suffolk Parish Church (1949), p. 38, has William Smeggett [sic] appointed in 1385. But, Smoggett was never appointed, since the in-service Vicar of the time, Robert Aylesham, deposed on 1 July 1387 that the living was not vacant: see Calendar of Patent Rolls, Richard II, vol. 3, p. 329. Smoggett is described as a chaplain, in these proceedings, and it is therefore possible that he served at the Good Cross Chapel itself.

Twenty years later, there were further problems with the incumbency. John Aylesham seems to have remained at St. Margaret’s until 1410 and was succeeded by Simon Baret – who, like his predecessor, does not appear in the published list of vicars as found in either Gillingwater or Lees. However, he does feature in the Calendar of Papal Registers Relating to Great Britain and Ireland, vol. 6, p. 346 – in a record of 4 April 1413 – where he is described as “Simon, son of Simon Baret of Heacham and perpetual vicar of Lowestoft” – this description being the term used of a clergyman who lived off the small tithes of his parish. He also appears in the same work, p. 417 (in a record of 2 October 1413), seeking papal ratification of his appointment for fear of “molestation” in his post and stating that he had been serving for three-and-a-half years. The request seems to have emanated from the nomination, for Vicar, of a chaplain named Adam Gele – who, again, may have been the priest in charge of the Good Cross Chapel.

After its eventual demise, the building would have been stripped of its fittings and the holy relic most likely destroyed. It seems to have been converted to domestic use, at some point, and it is referred to in the 1618 Manor Roll – Suffolk Archives, Ipswich, 194/A10/73 – as “a house called the Good Cross Chapel”. It was held under copyhold tenure by a man called Thomas Wilson, at an annual rent of 4d, with a tenant named Catide preceding him. Just over 100 years later, in c. 1720, the Revd. John Tanner drew up a list of copyhold properties in the town, together with an accompanying series of court baron transfers relating to each property: Suffolk Archives (Ipswich), 454/1 & 454/2. He does not mention the Chapel in his listing (probably because the property had converted to freehold tenure, which required no transfer details in the manorial records), but earlier transfer material contains the following information, translated here by the writer from the original Latin: “a piece of land from the waste of the lord, with a house built thereon called The Good Cross Chapel, sixty feet in length by fifty in breadth”. Thus, is the size of the Chapel’s plot established. Two details of transfer are given: Laurence Robson, on the surrender of Richard Watson, at the leet court of 1550; Thomas Webb, on the surrender of Laurence Robson, June-July 1563. How long Webb held on to the property, following his move to Norwich, is not known. 

Edmund Gillingwater, pp. 331-2, contains foot-noted information regarding the Chapel – including the transfers of property referred to above. But, he does not give the surname of Richard Watson – leaving this blank. He also refers to “a narrow lane extending from the south end of the town (from the place near where the above chapel is supposed to have been situated) about half a mile towards the west, and called to this day the Chapel-Lane, probably from it leading to that building”. This is a valuable topographical reference, which is able to be connected with what is known of the earlier Lowestoft landscape and can even be traced on the ground today.

The town’s road system (moving in a general direction from east to west), formed by Suffolk Road, Bevan Street East, Bevan Street West and Norwich Road, was once known as Chapel Lane. It had earlier origins as an ancient track skirting the southern perimeter of the township’s agricultural South Field and linking the original centre of population with the route southwards to Kirkley and Pakefield, over the shingle bank separating Lake Lothing from the sea. But, it obviously became named after the Chapel, once the building was up and running. The name continued in use well into the 19th century. And its long period of currency is sufficient to suggest (even confirm) that the Chapel was in operation before the township moved from its original location – somewhere in the north-eastern sector of the West South Field (the Normanston Cemetery area) – on to the cliff during the first half of the 14th century. Otherwise, access to it from the settlement would have been straight down the High Street-Old Nelson Street-Battery Green Road route of today.

It is possible that the building itself stood above ground until the second half of the 18th century – though its fate, thereafter, is not known. A decorative, transfer-print design used on blue-and-white porcelain produced at the Lowestoft factory during that period is known as the Good Cross Chapel pattern. Its provenance or assignation has never been established, but it could possibly date from the 1770s or thereabouts. The scene presented seems to be a composite one of five local buildings of the time. Working from left to right, there is a bridge built of masonry (possibly, the one crossing the meeting-point of the broad at Oulton and Lake Lothing), a tall house of some kind with end-stack, a much smaller building fronting it (which may represent a fish-house), a tower surmounted by a lantern (representing the High Lighthouse) and a large, gabled, one-storey building with end-doorway and three large, ecclesiastical-looking windows (the Good Cross Chapel itself?). There can, of course, be no absolute proof that this architectural combination contains a significant vestige of Lowestoft’s medieval past, but there is more than an even chance that it does. 

And there may be further evidence of its one-time existence, still to be seen today. The free-standing building, located to the rear of Nos. 312-314 Whapload Road (which was once known as Lancaster Place), has been referred to as “The Old Fish House” – but, it was never used to cure red herrings. It was one of two dwelling-houses, located below the cliff and belonging to the Wilde family. Both of which are mentioned in the 1618 Manor Roll, though without precise location details being given for either structure. Later on, during the 1670s, it became converted to a salt-store and eventually (further on, from that) to a net-store. Built originally during the mid-late 16th century, the pieces of dressed limestone – so clearly incorporated and visible in its eastern façade (and so much a feature of it) – could easily have come from the Good Cross Chapel as it underwent conversion to another use.

Obviously, a connection cannot be proved, but it remains a feasible conjecture.

CREDIT: David Butcher