St Ivo

St Ivo

Talk given to the Huntingdonshire Local History Society by Dr Susan Edgington, Honorary Research Fellow at Queen Mary, University of London, in 1986.

St Ivo

The story begins exactly a thousand years ago, with the death of a local Saxon landowner, Aethelstan Mannessons. He left ten hides of land at Slepe, as St. Ives was then called, to the recently founded Ramsey Abbey. The monks saw that Slepe had advantages Ramsey lacked. It was more conveniently situated with good communications both by road and river, and there may have already been a fair there. In order to make the most of these advantages they needed to attract more people to Slepe.

An opportunity was soon forthcoming. The year 1000 A.D. had been awaited with apprehension as the Second Coming was expected then. Superstition grew, and the cult of relics was at its height. So much so that the monks of Eynesbury conducted a raid into Cornwall and returned with the body of St. Neot.

Then in 1001, a villager ploughing near Slepe uncovered a stone coffin containing a human skeleton with what were interpreted as priestly relics. The body was identified by St. Ivo himself appearing in dreams to the local smith, and then to the bailiff who had derided the discovery suggesting that the bones were those of a cobbler. St. Ivo punished him with a "pair of leggings that will last" - perhaps an attack of gout - and he was crippled for life, but from that time proclaimed the truth of the discovery.

Though there was no corroborative evidence the identification of the body as that of a Persian bishop is not impossible, but it is more probable that it and the coffin were Roman. The bones and the objects found with them disappeared at the time of the Dissolution of the Monasteries in 1539 so further investigation has not been possible.

The monks of Ramsey Abbey however did not doubt the truth of the story. For them the discovery of the body was literally a Godsend. The bones of St. Ivo, and those of the companions found buried with him, were borne to Ramsey. A shrine was also built at Slepe based on a spring supposed to have appeared when the bones were dug up and a Priory cell was established there.

Of the various miracles attributed to St. Ivo, there were many chastening wrong-doers, and particularly those who did not accept him. There was also the maurading "Britons" (perhaps this word was used as a general term, as we might say "vandals") who pillaged the Priory church, one of them falling to his death from a beam. St. Ivo's healing miracles were the usual ones of mediaeval saints, lepers being particularly popular.

There was sometimes no doubt an element of faith-healing in the cures. It is significant that most pilgrimages took place in the spring, when people were beginning to recover from the vitamin deficiency caused by the poor winter diet of the Middle Ages. But not all can be explained in these ways.

Nearly a century later, when the Domesday records were compiled, Slepe was still no more than a large village. Then in the following year, 1087, Herbert Losinga became abbot of Ramsey and very quickly amassed great wealth by dubious means. He seems to have been active in developing Slepe. He employed Goscelin to write a life of St. Ivo in polished Latin, replacing an earlier, rougher, version written by Abbot Andrew. He also evidently had an interest in fairs, and an appreciation of their potential, and from that time Slepe developed rapidly.

In 1101 the remains of the saint's companions were transferred back to St. Ives; and in 1107 occurs the first reference to a bridge over the river, replacing the earlier ford. In 1110 the first fair charter was granted. It was for eight days instead of three which was more usual, a strong indication that it was already in existence and thriving before the formal grant of a charter.

The cult of St. Ivo seems to have been inseparable from the St Ives fair. It grew with the fair and declined with it, and its manifestations after the 14th century are very slight. The cult appears to have spread only very little beyond the local area, though a case of witchcraft reached the London courts in 1528 when one Margaret Hunt admitted using charms for healing. She instructed her patients to recite, when they went to bed, "one pater, one ave and one crede in the worshypp of Seynt Ive, to save them from al envy ..."