Patrick Comerford
Elm Hill is one of the more picturesque streets in Norwich with its cobble stones and mediaeval jettied and timber-framed buildings. Behind each of those buildings, I imagine, is a story that is unusual and unique to Norwich.
Elm Hill was a thriving area at the height of the weaving trade. But when the industry fell into decline, the merchant houses were abandoned and Elm Hill soon became a slum. Elm Hill was set for demolition a century ago in 1926, but Norwich Society stepped in and saved it – by one vote – and the street was renovated.
Since its renovation, Elm Hill has been a location for a number of films, including Stardust (2007) and the Netflix film Jingle Jangle (2020). Elm Hill runs from the Church of Saint Peter Hungate, where the top of Elm Hill meets Princes Street, to the Church of Saint Simon and Saint Jude at the bottom of Elm Hill on the corner with Wensum Street. In the Victorian era, Elm Hill was also the location for a real-life ecclesiastical drama that is almost stranger than fiction and characters who are captivating and engaging.
Joseph Leycester Lyne, who was known as Father Ignatius, was a colourful and controversial character in Norwich in the 1860s. A preacher and a mystic, he lived at No 16 Elm Hill, where he built his own church and monastery, but who was forced to flee the city in 1866. He is remembered in Norwich as a keen street preacher who would reputedly curse those who refused to join him in prayer.
Within three years, however, his monastery was closed amid accusations of fraud and allegations of degenerate behaviour and brutality behind closed doors. Shady property deals and rent arrears brought about his eviction and Father Ignatius was hounded out of the city in 1866.
Father Ignatius was born Joseph Leycester Lyne at Trinity Square, in the parish of All Hallows-by-the-Tower, London, on 23 November 1837, four years after the Oxford Movement began. He was the second of seven children of Francis Lyne, a merchant whose father had been Welsh and whose mother was Italian; his mother was Louisa Genevieve (nee Leycester).
He was a fragile child and suffered ill health for most of his life, suffering repeated nervous breakdowns and bouts of what appears to have been nervous exhaustion. At Saint Paul’s School, he suffered a severe beating at the hands of ‘an elderly clerical pedagogue’ that resulted in a nervous breakdown and with the perpetrator being dismissed. He was known to the other boys as ‘saintly Lyne,’ and he became oppressed by a fear of hellfire that haunted him for 30 years until it vanished with a revelation of the saving power of Christ.
As a young man, he came into repeated conflict with his father, who disliked his High Church tendencies. But he was accepted as a theology student at Trinity College in Glenalmond in Scotland in 1856, and it appears his fees were paid by a female admirer after his father refused to find the money.
He left the college because of illness, and later held positions in churches in Scotland. His eccentricity and impatience of discipline during a year’s lay work as catechist in Inverness, brought him into collision with Bishop Robert Eden.
Lyne was ordained deacon in 1860, but with the express condition that he should remain a deacon, and refrain from preaching for three years.
He moved to Plymouth, where he became an unpaid curate to Canon George Rundle Prynne, Vicar of Saint Peter’s, Plymouth, a Tractarian and a friend of Edward Bouverie Pusey. There, Lyne had scruples over his baptism as an infant, and he was conditionally baptised by Prynne and took a vow of perpetual celibacy.
Lyne founded a monastic order he called the Society of the Love of Jesus, and called himself Father Joseph. His behaviour brought him into conflict with the church authorities and with some of the parishioners.
He received sympathy and encouragement from Pusey and Mother Priscilla Sellon, who re-established the religious life for women in the Anglican Communion. Pusey was frightened by his erratic ways, but Mother Priscilla made him his first habit. When this was intercepted and destroyed by his father, she made him a second.
His time in Plymouth ended following another bout of illness. He went to Bruges in Belgium to convalesce, and during that time studied the Rule of Saint Benedict. After his recovery, Lyne spent nine months in 1862 in a poor part of the East End of London, where he assisted Father Charles Lowder at the mission of Saint George-in-the-East. He got to know all the people who lived on the infamous Ratcliff Highway.
He was both fearless and tactless, and once confronted the customers in a rowdy public house in the East End, declaring: ‘We must all appear before the Judgement Seat of Christ.’
By then he was wearing a monk’s habit and that, along with his religious zeal, attracted opposition and support in equal measure. He threw away his chance of ordination to the priesthood by refusing to abandon the unusual habit that he wore on all occasions.
He moved to Claydon, near Ipswich, in 1862, where he established a Benedictine community in an unused wing of the rectory. Lyne was now calling himself Father Ignatius, and with his preaching and proselytising provoked strong local reaction, including threats of violence. Within a few months of arriving in Claydon, the Bishop of Norwich, John Thomas Pelham, refused him a licence to preach and then inhibited him, and the rector asked Father Ignatius to leave.
His next venture was setting up a Benedictine community in a monastery in Norwich l. No 14 Elm Hill was bought for £500 with money raised by Father Ignatius in a speaking tour across England and Wales. A deposit of £50 was paid and the balance was to be paid in small instalments.
The property on Elm Hill was in poor condition and needed much work to make it habitable. The house became known as the Priory of Saint Mary and Saint Dunstan and opened in January 1863. The first residents were Father Ignatius, one of his colleagues and a dog. Money was short and at first they seem to have lived on a diet of bread and potatoes.
Through his preaching, Father Ignatius soon attracted support and the donations kept, fed and clothed him and his colleagues. He also attracted opposition, particularly when he and his supporters processed to special Masses arranged for them on Saint Laurence’s Church on Saint Benedict’s Street, and services at the monastery were often disrupted by protesters.
Miracles were attributed to him in Norwich, including a reported curing of an epileptic, of toothache and insomnia, and the restoration of hair to a young boy. The less benevolent side to these ‘miraculous events’ included the sudden and unexplained death of a woman who allegedly blasphemed Father Ignatius as he passed by in the street.
The Benedictine community in Elm Hill held a procession through Norwich on Ascension Day 1864 followed by a service on Saint Andrew’s Plain and a pilgrimage of 400 people to Saint Walstan’s Well outside Norwich.
Work began on a new church building to accommodate these worshippers and a building known as the Monastery Hall. However, progress soon ground to a halt. Newspaper reports of a ‘Norwich Scandal’ in 1865 spoke of an inappropriate relationship between a novice monk and a young boy in the care of the monastery. James Barrett Hughes, known as Brother Stanislaus, rebelled against Lyne’s authority, and then fled with a boy, Francis George Nobbs, who eventually became known as ‘ex-monk Widdows’.
Both men were charged with of drunkenness and public disorder, and the magistrate heard that when they both lived at Elm Hill Priory they had a sexual relationship.
Two Norwich youths ‘made frightful charges, utterly unfit for publication, against a monk’ who was identified as Brother Augustine.
At times, the priory was surrounded by angry mobs. Police and armed supporters would camp around it. One day he set out for Rome, in search of health, with a quaint retinue that included Brother Philip, Sister Ambrosia who came along to nurse him and a small four-year-old child he had adopted as an oblate to the order.
When Father Ignatius returned to England in 1866, he found his community at Norwich was dispersed and his priory had been put up for sale. Some accounts refer to a flaw in the title deeds, but his ‘official’ biography by Baroness Bertouch calls it fraud. He struggled in vain for 12 years in legal actions and spent his inheritance of £12,000 trying to recover the property.
He also took more direct action, twice taking possession of the building, once gaining access by what he described as ‘miraculous intervention’. But his actions proved fruitless and he was ejected on both occasions.
Dr Pusey invited the broken-down and lonely monk to stay with him in the Isle of Wight. Father Ignatius set up another Benedictine convent in a house at Laleham, near Staines, but the women soon seceded to the Roman Catholic Church.
Within three years, Father Ignatius bought land in south Wales in 1869 and built Llanthony Abbey, paid for by his supporters and the proceeds of his speaking tours.
His abbey attracted pilgrims. But he would vanish on preaching tours for months while his monks and nuns were inadequately provided for, spiritually and materially. He was summoned before the Vice-Chancellor, Sir Richard Malins, in 1873 for detaining Richard Alfred Todd, a ward in chancery, as a novice at Llanthony, and was ordered to release the young man.
His difficulties were increased by family quarrels. His father, who had persistently opposed his son’s extreme religious practices, repudiated him altogether after his mother died in 1877, and publicly denounced his conduct and doctrines.
There were claims of an apparition or vision of the Virgin Mary in August and September 1880, and a statue of ‘Our Lady of Llanthony’ was erected in memory of the vision.
Father Ignatius accepted ordination to the priesthood on 27 July 1898 by a wandering Old Catholic bishop, Joseph René Villatte, who described himself as Mar Timotheus, Syrian Archbishop and Metropolitan for the Old Catholics of America. This finally discredited him in the eyes of the Church that denied him the priesthood and ignored his appeals for the sacraments for his followers.
Throughout these years, Father Ignatius retained some support in Norwich and returned to speak on several occasions. He held a mission service at the Agricultural Hall in March 1890, before preaching to ‘a crowded congregation at the Church of St John de Sepulchre’ in Ber Street. His last known public visit to Norwich was in March 1894, when he spoke to ‘a crowded audience’ at the Agricultural Hall.
He died on 16 October 1908, murmuring, ‘Praised be Jesus for ever and ever.’ He was buried in the abbey grounds in Llanthony.
Llanthony Abbey was left to the few remaining monks, subject to the right of an adopted son, William Leycester Lyne. It passed into the hands of the Anglican Benedictine community of Caldey Island in 1911. At one point, an Anglican priest, Father Richard Courtier-Forster was appointed to succeed Father Ignatius as Abbot, but following the ordination of Father Ignatius’s designated prior, Asaph Harris, by Vilatte, the Abbot-designate resigned and all real hope of regularising the Llanthony Benedictines as an Anglican foundation ended.
Father Asaph Harris lived on until 1960. The Benedictines in Caldey collectively submitted to Rome in 1913 and the Llanthony monastery eventually passed into the hands of Eric Gill, the sculptor and typographer.
Father Ignatius is little more than a footnote in histories of the Oxford Movement. He has been described as ‘a fool like Saint Francis, a hero like Saint Benedict, a revivalist like Moody, a lover of souls like General Booth, an ascetic like Saint Anthony the hermit, an orator as golden as Lacordaire, but withal a poor theologian, and as simple as a child.’
Norwich Society worked hard to save Elm Hill from the deterioration it had suffered by the 1930s.
Today Elm Hill is a picturesque mixture of private dwellings, offices, shops, restaurants and cafés and its old-worldly character. It is a famous Norwich landmark and features the Briton’s Arms coffee house, the Stranger’s Club, Pettus House (Elm Hill Collectables), the Tea House (in Wright’s Court) and the Dormouse Bookshop.
The buildings of Father Ignatius’s Monastery Hall still stand today, between the Norwich School of Art and Design and the Monastery car park.
