Continuing immediately on the last blog, Alice had married into the Griffith family while Agnes the St. Quintin family. Surely both were the descendants of Norman knights and almost certainly in both the households of Alice and Agnes Norman French would normally be spoken, unlike in the households of the surrounding peasantry.
The picture above shows St. John’s church, Harpham viewed from the south. Although I have guided a couple of church visit parties to Harpham have never taken my own pictures (can’t do two things at once!) so this is from Barker C.R. Churches of the Yorkshire Wolds (2), (Hutton Press, 1985, p. 11). The fact that this medieval church is there shows that Harpham rapidly developed into an independent parish from Burton Agnes (this assumption would not be valid if the church were a chapel of ease, some such chapels even had burial rights e.g. Holy Trinity, Hull up to the 1660s).
Successive generations of the St. Quintin family were lords of the manor of Harpham from the early 14th century to the 19th century and the earliest of a famous cluster of monuments, inscriptions and engravings dedicated to members of the family and housed at the east end of the north aisle is for William St. Quintin who died in 1349. His majestic alabaster tomb may be roughly contemporary with the rebuilding of much of the church, the simple reticulated tracery seen in the south aisle windows (see above) being one part of the evidence to support this hypothesis. This assumed, by the mid 14th century Harpham had been pushed forward and was, through the patronage of the St. Quintin family, asserting greater independence from the traditional mother church and parish of Burton Agnes. Bryony (s.p.b.s) writes of this process.
The dedication of Harpham church is not from the Evangelist but from St. John of Beverley who founded the first Anglo-Saxon monastery on the site where Beverley Minster now stands. John died in 721 and was praised by the Venerable Bede as Bishop of York. John was not canonised until the early 11th century.
(to be continued).