Daily prayer in Ordinary Time 2026: 71, Friday 17 July 2026

‘At that time Jesus went through the cornfields on the sabbath’ (Matthew 12: 1) … walking through fields in Hopwas, between Lichfield and Tamworth (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2026)

Patrick Comerford

We are in Ordinary Time in the Church Calendar and the week began with the Sixth Sunday after Trinity (Trinity VI, 12 July 2026).

Before today begins, I am taking some quiet time this morning to give thanks, to reflect, to pray and to read in these ways:

1, reading today’s Gospel reading;

2, a short reflection;

3, a prayer from the USPG prayer diary;

4, the Collects and Post-Communion prayer of the day.

Walking through the fields near Comberford Hall, between Lichfield and Tamworth (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2026)

Matthew 12: 1-8 (NRSVA):

1 At that time Jesus went through the cornfields on the sabbath; his disciples were hungry, and they began to pluck heads of grain and to eat. 2 When the Pharisees saw it, they said to him, ‘Look, your disciples are doing what is not lawful to do on the sabbath.’ 3 He said to them, ‘Have you not read what David did when he and his companions were hungry? 4 He entered the house of God and ate the bread of the Presence, which it was not lawful for him or his companions to eat, but only for the priests. 5 Or have you not read in the law that on the sabbath the priests in the temple break the sabbath and yet are guiltless? 6 I tell you, something greater than the temple is here. 7 But if you had known what this means, “I desire mercy and not sacrifice”, you would not have condemned the guiltless. 8 For the Son of Man is lord of the sabbath.’

The Bread of the Presence in the Temple depicted in the Kupa Synagogue in Kraków (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Today’s Reflections:

Summer is a beautiful time of the year in the countryside, with ripe fields of green and yellow under blue skies. In the past few weeks, I have walked through ripe fields and meadows by Stony Stratford and Winslow in Buckinghamshire, near Lichfield, Tamworth and Rugeley in south Staffordshire, in Oxford, and I have passed through beautiful fields on bus journeys in Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Oxfordshire, Staffordshire and Norfolk.

As I read this morning’s Gospel reading at the Eucharist (Matthew 12: 1-8), I imagine Christ and his disciples walking through fields of green and gold such as these when they are confronted with the bureaucratic rules of the day and are accused of breaking the Sabbath.

Christ responds by stating that plucking grain on the Sabbath does not profane sacred writ. In doing so he reinterprets the Torah and clarifies the true nature of sacred endeavour.

Matthew 12:1-8 may be a retelling of Mark 2: 23-27. An analysis of this passage shows:

• verses 3-4 are an historical analogy found in I Samuel 21: 1-6, where David’s hunger supersedes the Law;

• verse 5 is a reconfiguration of Numbers 28: 9-10 and Exodus 35: 3;

• verse 7 is a reworking Hosea 6: 6: ‘For I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt-offerings’ (NRSVA).

The reference to David’s story (I Samuel 21: 1-6) associates the temple with the alleviation of hunger and makes the point that hunger supersedes form and tradition.

Hosea 6: 6 repeats the principle that human need is pre-eminent over tradition.

Christ presents his own teachings not as a replacement for Torah but as a guide to its fulfilment. Ultimately, the Torah is to reflect God’s character of love, mercy, and generosity, and human need has priority over religious observance. Mercy was, and is, more in line with God’s intentions for the Sabbath rather than the strict obedience of the Sabbath demanded at the time.

This morning’s Gospel reading offers an interesting challenge to oppressive bureaucracy and rule-making, an important insight at a time when oppressive rules and regulations are being made day-by-day by capricious decision-makers in the White House.

This passage also offers insights into how Christ looks to a future beyond both Torah and Temple. It is a reading that looks forward to a new era of mercy, beyond compliance to the narrow interpretations of laws and regulations.

Fresh bread welcoming guests at the Captain’s House in Panormos, near Rethymnon in Crete (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Today’s Prayers (Friday 17 July 2026):

In Pray with the World Church, the prayer diary of the Anglican mission agency USPG (United Society Partners in the Gospel), the theme this week, from 12 to 18 July 2026 (pp 18-19), is ‘The Land of the Highlanders’. This theme was introduced on Sunday with a reflection by the Most Revd Mark Strange, Primus of the Scottish Episcopal Church.

The USPG prayer diary today (Friday 17 July 2026) invites us to pray

Lord God, strengthen your Church in the Highlands as it ministers across great distances. Sustain our leaders, clergy and congregations with perseverance and hope.

The Collect of the Day:

Merciful God,
you have prepared for those who love you
such good things as pass our understanding:
pour into our hearts such love toward you
that we, loving you in all things and above all things,
may obtain your promises,
which exceed all that we can desire;
through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord,
who is alive and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.

The Post Communion Prayer:

God of our pilgrimage,
you have led us to the living water:
refresh and sustain us
as we go forward on our journey,
in the name of Jesus Christ our Lord.

Additional Collect

Creator God,
you made us all in your image:
may we discern you in all that we see,
and serve you in all that we do;
through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Yesterday’s reflections

Continued tomorrow

Walking through the fields at Hawkesyard Hall in Armitage, near Rugeley in Staffordshire (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2026)

Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible: Anglicised Edition copyright © 1989, 1995, National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide. http://nrsvbibles.org

Remembering Wittgenstein’s links with Cambridge, Dublin and Co Wicklow 75 years after his death

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) … died 75 years ago on 29 April 1951

Patrick Comerford

Today marks the 75th anniversary of the death of Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951), one of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century, who died in Cambridge 75 years ago, on 29 April 1951.

Wittgenstein was a Viennese-born Cambridge philosopher who had been influenced at an early stage by Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. He taught at the University of Cambridge from 1929 to 1947 and worked primarily in the fields of logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language.

During his lifetime, he published just one small, 75-page book, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921), one article, one book review and a children’s dictionary. His major work, Philosophical Investigations, was not published until two years after his death, yet it has become an important modern classic.

Bertrand Russell said he was ‘the most perfect example I have ever known of genius as traditionally conceived; passionate, profound, intense, and dominating.’

A plaque at the Ashling Hotel in Parkgate Street, Dublin, recalls Wittgenstein’s time as a guest (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Ludwig Wittgenstein was born in Vienna in 1889. A family tree shows his paternal great-great-grandfather was Moses Meier, a Jewish land agent who lived with his wife Brendel Simon in Bad Laasphe in the Principality of Wittgenstein, Westphalia. Napoleon decreed in 1808 that everyone, including Jews, must adopt an inheritable family surname. Moses Meier’s son, also Moses, became Moses Meier Wittgenstein.

His son, Hermann Christian Wittgenstein (1802-1878), took the middle name Christian to distance himself from his Jewish background. He married Franziska (Fanny) Figdor (1814-1890), who was also Jewish and a first cousin of the violinist Joseph Joachim (1831-1907), who worked closely with Brahms. They both became Protestants before they married, and the couple began a successful wool trading business trading in Leipzig.

Their 11 children included the philosopher’s father, Karl Otto Clemens Wittgenstein (1847-1913), who became an industrial tycoon. By the late 1880s, he had an effective monopoly on Austria’s steel cartel and was one of the richest men in Europe. The Wittgensteins became one of the wealthiest families in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, second only to the Rothschilds.

Karl Wittgenstein married Leopoldine ‘Poldie’ Maria Josefa Kalmus in 1873. Her father, Jakob Maximilian Kalmus (1814-1870) was a Bohemian Jew from Prague; her mother, Marie Stallner (1825-1921) was a German-speaking Catholic born in Sevnica in present-day Slovenia, and was Ludwig Wittgenstein’s only non-Jewish grandparent.

Ludwig Wittgenstein was born on 26 April 1889 in the ‘Wittgenstein Palace’ at Alleegasse 16, now the Argentinierstrasse, near the Karlskirche in Vienna. He was one of nine children who were all baptised as Catholics and received formal Catholic teaching. Gustav Klimt painted Ludwig’s sister for her wedding portrait, and Johannes Brahms and Gustav Mahler gave regular concerts in the family’s many music rooms.

In an interview, his sister Gretl Stonborough-Wittgenstein said their grandfather's ‘strong, severe, partly ascetic Christianity’ was a strong influence on all the Wittgenstein children.

While Ludwig Wittgenstein was at school at the Realschule, he decided he had lost his faith in God and became an atheist. But his religious faith and his relationship with Christianity and religion in general would change over time. He resisted formal religion, saying it was hard for him to ‘bend the knee,’ although he once said, ‘I cannot help seeing every problem from a religious point of view.

With age, his personal spirituality deepened, and he wrestled with language problems in religion. At a time when he was finding it difficult to work, he wrote in 1947, ‘I have had a letter from an old friend in Austria, a priest. In it he says that he hopes my work will go well, if it should be God’s will. Now that is all I want: if it should be God’s will.’

In Culture and Value, Wittgenstein asks, ‘Is what I am doing really worth the effort? Yes, but only if a light shines on it from above.’ His close friend Norman Malcolm later wrote, ‘Wittgenstein’s mature life was strongly marked by religious thought and feeling. I am inclined to think that he was more deeply religious than are many people who correctly regard themselves as religious believers.’

Ludwig Wittgenstein’s steps in the Great Palm House in the National Botanic Gardens, Dublin (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Wittgenstein visited his Irish friend, the psychiatrist Dr Maurice O’Connor (‘Con’) Drury (1907-1976) in Dublin in August 1947. They first met in the chapel Westcott House, Cambridge, when Drury had been an Anglican ordinand.

When Wittgenstein returned to Cambridge he resigned his professorship, planning to move to Dublin. From December 1947 to April 1948, Wittgenstein lived at Kilpatrick House, the home of the Kingston family near Redcross, Co Wicklow, where he worked on one of his major treatises, Philosophical Investigations, now accepted as a classic of 20th century philosophy.

By April 1948, he had moved from Kilpatrick House to Dr Con Drury’s holiday home in the west of Ireland, Rosro Cottage in Renvyle, Co Galway, and stayed there until the following October. This is now the Killary Harbour Youth Hostel.

From Co Galway, Wittgenstein moved to Dublin and to Ross’s Hotel, now the Ashling Hotel in Parkgate Street. A plaque by steps in the Great Palm House in the National Botanic Gardens in Glasnevin recalls how Wittgenstein liked to sit and write there in the late 1940s.

He remained in Dublin until June 1949. In all he spent 18 months in Ireland before returning to Cambridge.

Kilpatrick House near Redcross, Co Wicklow … Wittgenstein lived and wrote there from December 1947 to April 1948 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Back in Cambridge, Wittgenstein became very ill on the evening of 27 April 1951. When his doctor told him he might live only a few days, he reportedly replied, ‘Good!’

Four of his former students arrived at his bedside – Ben Richards, the Limerick-born philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe, Yorick Smythies, and Con Drury, once an Anglican ordinand at Westcott House, Cambridge, and later a regular communicant at Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin.

Anscombe and Smythies were both Roman Catholics. At their request, the Dominican friar and philosopher, Father Conrad Pepler (1908-1993), also attended; he was the founding warden of the Dominican retreat centre at Spode House near Rugeley, Stafforshire, which I revisited in a posing last week (22 April 2026). Wittgenstein had asked for a ‘priest who was not a philosopher’ and had met Father Conrad several times before his death.

His friends were unsure at first what Wittgenstein would have wanted. But they remembered he had said he hoped his Catholic friends would pray for him, and so they did. He was pronounced dead shortly afterwards, 75 years ago, on 29 April 1951, and was given a Catholic burial in Cambridge.

A plaque in the chapel of Trinity College Cambridge recalls Wittgenstein’s time as a fellow and professor (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Wittgenstein’s influence reaches almost every discipline in the humanities and social sciences, and he has influenced many current Anglican theologians, including Andrew Davison and Alison Milbank.

On his religious views, Wittgenstein was said to be greatly interested in Catholicism and was sympathetic to it. However, he did not consider himself a Catholic. According to Norman Malcolm, Wittgenstein saw Catholicism as a way of life rather than as a set of beliefs he personally held.

So, did Wittgenstein see himself as Jewish?

Wittgenstein wrote repeatedly about Jews and Judaism in the 1930s, and many biographical studies present that his writings about Jewishness as a way in which he thought about the kind of person he was and the nature of his philosophical work.

On the other hand, as David Stern points out, many philosophers regard Wittgenstein’s thoughts about Jews as relatively unimportant, and many studies of his philosophy do not even mention the topic.

Yet, some writers have referred to Wittgenstein as a ‘rabbinical thinker’ and a far-sighted critic of anti-Semitism.

There is much debate about the extent to which Wittgenstein and his siblings, who were of three-quarters Jewish descent, saw themselves as Jews. The 1935 Nuremberg laws in 1935 defined as Jewish someone with three or four Jewish grandparents.

In a diary entry shortly after the German-Austrian Anschluss, he described the prospect of holding a German Judenpass or Jewish identity papers as an ‘extraordinarily difficult situation’ and compared it to hot iron that would burn his pocket.

In his writings, Wittgenstein frequently referred to himself as Jewish, at times as part of an apparent self-flagellation. For example, while berating himself for being a ‘reproductive’ as opposed to ‘productive’ thinker, he attributed this to his own Jewish sense of identity.

He wrote, ‘The saint is the only Jewish genius. Even the greatest Jewish thinker is no more than talented. (Myself for instance).’

While Wittgenstein would later claim that ‘my thoughts are 100% Hebraic,’ as Professor Hans Sluga has argued, if so, ‘His was a self-doubting Judaism, which had always the possibility of collapsing into a destructive self-hatred (as it did in [Otto] Weinberger’s case) but which also held an immense promise of innovation and genius.’

Wittgenstein once wrote, ‘Bach wrote on the title page of his Orgelbüchlein, “To the glory of the most high God, and that my neighbour may be benefited thereby.” That is what I would have liked to say about my work.’

In a letter to Bertrand Russell in 1912, he said Mozart and Beethoven were the actual sons of God – both composers died in Vienna.

The plaque at the entrance to Kilpatrick House marking the 50th anniversary of Wittgenstein’s death (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

‘Tea and Oranges’ as I ‘hear the boats go by’ on the canal between Armitage and Rugeley in April sunshine

‘You can hear the boats go by … and she feeds you tea and oranges’ … ‘Tea and Oranges’ on the canal below Hawkesyard Hall in Armitage (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2026)

Patrick Comerford

As I was walking one day last week by the canal towpath between Rugeley and Armitage in the April sunshine, I noticed that one of the boats I saw below the pinnacles and turrets of Hawkesyard Hall is called ‘Tea and Oranges’.

I found myself singing the lyrics of Leonard Cohen’s ‘Suzanne’, with its images of lovers walking hand-in-hand by boats and the water and of ‘tea and oranges that come all the way from China’:

Suzanne takes you down
To her place near the river
You can hear the boats go by
You can spend the night beside her
And you know that she’s half-crazy
But that’s why you want to be there
And she feeds you tea and oranges
That come all the way from China
And just when you mean to tell her
That you have no love to give her
Then she gets you on her wavelength
And she lets the river answer
That you’ve always been her lover

‘Suzanne’ is a haunting composition and over the years it has become one of the best known works by the Canadian poet singer and songwriter Leonard Cohen, who died almost ten years ago on 7 November 2016.

Like many of Cohen’s songs, ‘Suzanne’ began as poem. He published his first book of poetry, Let Us Compare Mythologies (1956) at the age of 22. This was followed by The Spice-Box of Earth (1961), Flowers for Hitler (1964), and his novels The Favourite Game (1963) and Beautiful Losers (1966).

‘Suzanne’ was first published 60 years ago in 1966 as the poem ‘Suzanne Takes You Down’ in his third poetry collection, Parasites of Heaven (1966). Judy Collins recorded ‘Suzanne’ for her album In My Life, released in November 1966. A year later, Cohen included the song as the first track on Side A of his debut album, Songs of Leonard Cohen, released on 27 December 1967.

The album’s front cover depicts a sepia tint photo of Leonard Cohen. The back cover is a Mexican religious picture of the Anima Sola depicted as a woman breaking free of her chains surrounded by flames and gazing towards heaven. In a Rolling Stone interview, he described the image as ‘the triumph of the spirit over matter. The spirit being that beautiful woman breaking out of the chains and the fire and prison’.

‘Suzanne’ was released as a single in 1968, but only reached the charts after Cohen died in 2016.


‘You can hear the boats go by’ … 90 seconds on the canal between Armitage and Rugeley (Patrick Comerford, 2026)

Suzanne has become one of the most covered songs in Cohen’s catalogue. Far Out and American Songwriter ranked the song No 4 and No 2, respectively, on their lists of the ten greatest Leonard Cohen songs. In 2021, it was ranked at No 284 on Rolling Stone’s ‘Top 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.’

Leonard Cohen had a lengthy relationship with the Los Angeles artist Suzanne Elrod in the 1970s. But he later said ‘cowardice’ and ‘fear’ prevented him from ever marrying her. They had two children, a son Adam (born 1972) and a daughter Lorca (born 1974) named after the poet Federico García Lorca.

Leonard Cohen and Suzanne Elrod had split up by 1979. But, contrary to popular belief, ‘Suzanne’ in the song is not Suzanne Elrod, but the dancer Suzanne Verdal, the former wife of his friend, the Québécois sculptor Armand Vaillancourt.

The song’s brilliance lies in its pairing of a spare, hypnotic melody with evocative lyrics:

Now Suzanne takes you down
To her place near the river
You can hear the boats go by
You can spend the night beside her
And you know she’s half crazy.

In Cohen’s version first recorded in 1968, the mood is underscored by a lilting female chorus and Cohen’s own subtle, insistent guitar playing. Cohen recalls ‘Suzanne,’ the enigmatic title figure, who wears ‘rags and feathers from Salvation Army counters.’

‘Suzanne’ was inspired by Cohen’s platonic relationship with Suzanne Verdal and the lyrics describe the rituals that they enjoyed when they met. She would invite him to visit her apartment by the harbour in Montreal, where she would serve him Constant Comment tea, and feed him ‘oranges that come all the way from China’.

Together, they savoured the beautiful view of the St Lawrence River from her waterfront apartment in Montreal, and they would walk around Old Montreal past the Church of Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Secours, where sailors were blessed before heading out to sea.

Other details speak of a romantic longing that, seemingly, remained unfulfilled:

And you want to travel with her
and you want to travel blind …
for you’ve touched her perfect body
with your mind.

The hunger these two gifted people had for one another illuminates the lyrics, giving them a spark that seems to resonate from the inside. On a human level, the song is about the mysterious forces that bring people together and, then, just as inexplicably, move them apart. ‘Suzanne’ can be heard or read as a statement of human frailty, representing a special moment in time, created by two people whose mutual attraction was not fulfilled in a physical sense, but still fulfilled in an emotional, deeper, way.

Verdal went on to travel the world, going from Montreal to France to Texas, and, finally, by the early 1990s, to Los Angeles, where she worked as a choreographer. Cohen said in a BBC interview in 1994 that he only imagined having sex with her, as there was neither the opportunity nor inclination to actually go through with it.

A fall and injury ended her career as a dancer. By 2006, she was living in a converted truck in Venice Beach, California. That year she told a CBC interview that she had ‘put the boundaries’ on the relationship with Cohen. She said then that they never had a sexual relationship, contrary to what some interpretations of the song suggest: ‘Somehow, I didn’t want to spoil that preciousness, that infinite respect that I had for him … I felt that a sexual encounter might demean it somehow.’

‘She is wearing rags and feathers from Salvation Army counters’ … the Salvation Army shop on Market Street in Lichfield (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Despite beginning as a story of love and infatuation, Suzanne turns to a religious theme in the second verse:

And Jesus was a sailor
when he walked upon the water …

His ‘lonely wooden tower’ is, of course, the cross. Cohen is so fascinated by Jesus that he writes:

And you want to travel with him
you want to travel blind
and you think maybe you’ll trust him
for he’s touched your perfect body
with his mind.

The stanza ends in the most tragic and cryptic lines of the poem, as the voice returns to a third person of Jesus:

But he himself was broken
Long before the sky would open
Forsaken, almost human
He sank beneath your wisdom like a stone

This must refer to the crucifixion and the burial. He was ‘forsaken almost human.’ Despite being divine he is also human.

‘And she feeds you tea and oranges that come all the way from China’ … oranges in the Tua Pek Kong Chinese temple in Kuching (Photograph: Patrick Comerford,)

Leonard Cohen, Suzanne:

Suzanne takes you down
To her place near the river
You can hear the boats go by
You can spend the night beside her
And you know that she’s half-crazy
But that’s why you want to be there
And she feeds you tea and oranges
That come all the way from China
And just when you mean to tell her
That you have no love to give her
Then she gets you on her wavelength
And she lets the river answer
That you’ve always been her lover

And you want to travel with her
And you want to travel blind
And you know that she will trust you
For you’ve touched her perfect body with your mind

And Jesus was a sailor
When he walked upon the water
And he spent a long time watching
From his lonely wooden tower
And when he knew for certain
Only drowning men could see him
He said ‘All men will be sailors then
Until the sea shall free them’
But he himself was broken
Long before the sky would open
Forsaken, almost human
He sank beneath your wisdom like a stone

And you want to travel with him
And you want to travel blind
And you think maybe you’ll trust him
For he’s touched your perfect body with his mind

Now Suzanne takes your hand
And she leads you to the river
She is wearing rags and feathers
From Salvation Army counters
And the sun pours down like honey
On our lady of the harbour
And she shows you where to look
Among the garbage and the flowers
There are heroes in the seaweed
There are children in the morning
They are leaning out for love
And they will lean that way forever
While Suzanne holds the mirror

And you want to travel with her
And you want to travel blind
And you know you can trust her
For she’s touched your perfect body with her mind.

The Chetwynd murders in Rugeley: but did Dorothy strangle her husband, and was she burned at the stake?

Brocton Hall, between Rugeley and Stafford … home to generations of the Chetwynd family of Rugeley

Patrick Comerford

In my visits to Rugeley and Brereton in Staffordshire over the past week or two I heard again the stories of a number of murders or supposed murders in the area from the 16th to the 19th centuries, including a murder on the canal, the murderous spree of a local doctor who became known as the ‘Poisoner of Rugeley’, and the story of two sisters said to have been buried alive by Cromwell.

I came across these stories of intrigue and plotting, murder and supposed murder, once again in the churchyards of old Saint Augustine’s, the ‘Old Chancel’, and the new Saint Augustine’s, its 19th century successor.

But a story that truly caught my imagination is one that has tangential links with the Comberford family, a drama with links with two women called Dorothy Chetwynd – one the granddaughter of William Comberford of the Moat House, Tamworth, the other a young 16th century teenage ‘beauty’ who, according to local lore, was burned at the stake for murdering a husband three times her age, although all the historic evidence denies there was ever such a murder or such a grizzly execution.

I first became aware of this gruesome story through links provided by Dorothy Comberford, a daughter of William Comberford (1551-1625) of Comberford Hall, who entertained Charles I, as Prince Charles at the Moat House on Lichfield Street, Tamworth, in 1619. She married Walter Coleman of Cannock, a partner with the Comberford family in iron ore and mining interests in Wednesbury.

And so, I came across some family links with Rugeley: Dorothy’s youngest half-sister, Anne Comberford, was born in 1609, and in 1634, she married Benjamin Rugeley, who was closely related to the Rugeley family of Hawkesyard in Armitage.

Dorothy (Comberford) and Walter Coleman were the parents of two sons and two daughters, and their elder daughter Dorothy married Thomas Chetwynd (died 1633) of Rugeley, ancestor of the Chetwynd baronets. It was this marriage that introduced me to the supposed story of the Chetwynd murder.

Before all this, there was an earlier murder in the Chetwynd family: Thomas Chetwynd’s immediate ancestor, William Chetwynd of Ingestre, a courtier and one-time Master of the Guild at Lichfield, was murdered in 1494. A rival courtier, Sir Humphrey Stanley of Elford, the Sheriff of Stafford, had set the trap and was clearly responsible but was never brought to trial or punished.

William Chetwynd’s son, another William Chetwynd (d 1546), married Elizabeth Ferrers, a daughter of Sir John Ferrers of Tamworth Castle, and they were the parents of Thomas Chetwynd (d 1555) of Ingestre, who was 16 when he married Jane Salter. They, in turn, were the parents of three sons and three daughters.

The eldest of these six children, John Chetwynd (d 1592), was the Sheriff of Staffordshire. His first wife was Mary Meverell, the daughter of Ludovic Meverell of Bold; his second wife was Margery Middlemore of Edgbaston, Warwickshire. It was John’s son, Thomas Chetwynd of Rugeley, who married Dorothy Coleman, a granddaughter of William Comberford of the Moat House in Tamworth.

The youngest of William Chetwynd’s six children was Dorothy Chetwynd, an aunt of Thomas Chetwynd who married Dorothy Coleman. And it is this aunt who is said in many accounts to have murdered her husband, Sir Walter Smyth (1501-1526), and to have been burned at the stake for the murder 27 years later on Wolvey Heath on 15 May 1553.

Dorothy Chetwynd was not the first nor was she the second wife of Sir Walter Smyth of Elford, six miles from Comberford in Staffordshire. In 1505, Smyth married his first wife Anne Staunton. They were the parents of one daughter, Margery, who married her step-brother, Richard Huddleston, the younger son of Walter’s second wife, Lady Isabel Neville.

Lady Isabel Neville was a daughter of John Neville, Marquess of Montagu, and a niece of Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, the ‘Kingmaker’. She was twice married: her first husband was William Huddleston of Millom, Cumberland, and they were the parents of two sons, Sir John Huddleston and Richard Huddleston.

Isabel then married Sir Walter Smyth of Elford in what was the second marriage for both partners. When Isabel died in 1516, she was buried at Elford, and Walter soon married his third wife, Dorothy Chetwynd. In what may have been a source of gossip in the day, Dorothy was only 16 or 17 when she married Walter Smyth, and he was 50 – although Dugdale says that at 50 he was an aged man, he was certainly more than three times her age and 33 or 34 years older than her.

Walter Smyth first met young Dorothy when he was trying to arrange a marriage for his son and heir, Richard. He approached Thomas Chetwynd of Ingestre, who was willing to endow Dorothy with a dowry of £500. But when old Walter set eyes on young Dorothy, he was captivated by her beauty and became a suitor himself. The odd couple were quickly married, and young Richard had to seek another bride.

Dorothy was regarded as one of the beauties of her day. But Dorothy and Walter did not live happily ever after. It is said that soon after the marriage her affections wandered after younger men, especially William Robinson, a 22-year-old from Drayton Basset, and began plotting to get rid of her husband. She induced her housemaid and a stable groom to help her and Robinson in a scheme to strangle Walter in bed.

On the night of the planned murder in 1525, Robinson failed to show up, but Dorothy went ahead with her plans. She waited until her husband was asleep, and then let the maid and the groom into the room. Dorothy tied a long towel about the sleeping man’s neck, got the groom to lie on him to keep him from struggling, and then she and the maid strangled Walter until he stopped breathing. As he was being strangled, Walter woke and cried out his last words, ‘Help, Doll, help!’

Once he was dead, they carried Walter into another room and sat him upright on a stool before the maid and groom tip-toed out of. Only then did Dorothy raise the alarm, wringing her hands, pulling her hair out, and weeping and wailing. She told the others in the house that she had noticed Walter was not in bed and when she went looking for him she found him dead and sitting up.

Sir Walter Smyth was buried in Saint Peter’s Church, Elford, with his first two wives, Annie Staunton and Lady Isabella Neville. But his third wife, Dorothy Chetwynd, is not named on the elaborate alabaster monument, nor is she buried there.

The effigies in Elford of Sir Walter Smyth and his first two wives, Anne Staunton and Lady Isabella Neville, in Elford … but what happened to his third wife? (Photograph Mike Searle, 2015, CCL licence)

Some years after the supposed murder, the former groom told the story to Walter’s son, Richard Smyth. The groom was taken prisoner to Warwick, where he was joined by the housemaid and William Robinson. They confessed to the deadly deed and were executed in Warwick.

Eventually, it is said, Dorothy was arrested, convicted, sentenced to death and burnt at the stake on Wolvey Heath, five miles from Nuneaton – according to local lore retold as historical fact by the historian William Dugdale. It was 1555, 30 years after her husband’s death or murder and the same year her father Thomas Chetwynd died.

Dugdale says the source for his account of the murder of Sir Walter Smyth was a letter from Sir John Smyth, a grandson of Sir Walter Smyth, and a son of Richard Smyth, Dorothy’s first intended husband. But the contents of the letter amount to little more than a detailed but second-hand account of the groom’s confession to Richard Smyth, and all this was denied by the groom and the maid at their trial in Warwick.

The story later provided the plot for an historical novel by the Revd BW Gibsone, a former Vicar of Wolvey. But Gibsone admitted that Dugdale’s story is mostly apocryphal, and he suggested that Dorothy was burnt – if, at all, she was burnt to death – for heresy rather than murder.

Sir William Dugdale (1605-1686) wrote his History of Warwickshire in 1656, a full century after Dorothy’s supposed trial and execution. There are no primary sources or contemporary records of her trial or for her execution.

If the Smyths had set up a charge of heresy when they were unable to substantiate the accusation of murder, there is no record of that either in the several lists that became sources for Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. Foxe makes no mention of the case and there is no contemporary evidence for the charges against her, her trial and conviction, or of her being burned to death at the stake.

Perhaps the story of Dorothy Chetwynd’s crime and conviction was the one final and successful revenge by Richard Smyth wreaked on his young beautiful step-mother who had spurned him for his twice-widowed ageing father.

The descendants of the Chetwynd family continued to live in the Rugeley and Lichfield area for many generations after and derived their wealth chiefly derived from the iron industry. Dorothy’s nephew Thomas Chetwynd and his wife Dorothy, granddaughter of William Comberford, were the parents of William Chetwynd (1628-1691) of Rugeley, MP for Stafford from 1661 and wrongly described as a ‘burgess for Lichfield’.

Dorothy and Thomas Chetwynd were also the great-grandparents of Walter Chetwynd (1680-1732) of Rugeley, MP for Lichfield, who was impoverished when he died before taking up an appointment as the Governor of Barbados. Other descendants of this branch of the Chetwynd family (and descendants of the Comberford family too), the Chetwynd baronets, lived for generations at Brocton Hall, half-way between Rugeley and Stafford, until 1923.

A second branch of the Chetwynd family in the Rugeley area lived at Ingestre Hall

A second branch of the Chetwynd family in the area lived at Ingestre Hall, between Stafford and Rugeley, and they derived their wealth from coalmining and the collieries they owned in Rugeley, Brereton and Cannock. Ingestre Hall also gave them one of their titles.

Their wealth and estates eventually passed by marriage to the Talbot or Chetwynd-Talbot family, who held the title of Earl Talbot and eventually succeeded as Earls of Shrewsbury.

They were the heirs and successors of the Chetwynd family, they provided the site for both Saint Michael’s Church and the Red Lion pub in Brereton, and they gave their name to a pub in Rugeley that has been known variously as the Talbot Arms, the Shrewsbury Arms and more recently ‘The Shrew’. It had to change its name because of the embarrassing associations with a more infamous and actual 19th century murderer, the ‘Rugeley Poisoner’, Dr William Palmer.

But more in the days to come, perhaps, about Walter Chetwynd, who never became Governor of Barbados and who was pursued even after his death by gruesome debt collectors. And more too of Dr Palmer and some of those other murders and supposed murders.

Saint Michael’s Church, Brereton … the site was provided by Earl Talbot almost 200 years ago (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2026)

A return visit to Spode House and Hawkesyard Esate, with memories of philosophers and folk masses in the 1970s

Hawkesyard Hall and Spode House in Armitage, where the Dominicans had a priory until 1988 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2026)

Patrick Comerford

In recent days, I have been visiting a number of churches in the Rugeley area that I first got to know when I was about 19 or 20. They include Saint Michael’s Church in Brereton and the now-closed Brereton Methodist Church; the old and new Saint Augustine’s Church, the ruins of the early mediaeval parish church, now known as the ‘Old Chancel’, and the early 19th century church across the street that replaced it in the 1820s; and Saint Joseph and Saint Etheldreda Catholic Churchin Rugeley, with its many associations with the Wolseley family.

Some of my most cherished memories from those youthful days in the 1970s are of Hawkesyard Hall and Spode House in Armitage, where the Dominicans once had a priory, only ten minutes from Lichfield and five minutes from Brereton and Rugeley, and on the edges of Armitage village. My friends from Rugeley and Brereton often brought me there with them to the Folk Masses on Sundays.

So, when I was on the bus from Brereton to Lichfield last week, I hopped off near Armitage, went for a walk along the canal towpaths, and visited Hawkesyard Hall and Spode House.

Hawkesyard Hall and Spode House were known for the Folk Masses and gatherings of the Philosophical Enquiry Group (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2026)

Hawkesyard has been known over the generations by a variety of names, including Hawkesyard Hall, Armitage Park, Spode House and Hawkesyard Priory. The estate dates from the 13th century, and has links to the Rugeley family, the poet and author Nathaniel Lister, Josiah Spode the potter, and Sir Robert Peel – and even some tenuous links in the dim distant past through the Rugeley family with the Comberford family.

The story of the estate dates back to 1270 when the land was used for hunting. Simon de Rugeley commissioned the construction on Hawkesyard Hall in 1337. The first house owned by the Rugeley family was a moated manor closer to the River Trent, about half a mile west of Armitage Church.

Anne Comberford of Comberford, Tamworth and Wednesbury, who was a daughter of William Comberford, and was born in 1609. In 1634, she married Benjamin Rugeley of Dunstall in Tatenhill, a younger brother of Colonel Simon Rugeley, a key leader of the Parliamentarians during the English Civil War.

Benjamin Rugeley was a younger son of Richard Rugeley (1564-1623) of Shenstone and his wife Mary Rugeley, daughter and co-heir of Thomas Rugeley (1539-1623) of Hawkesyard. Benjamin’s father, Richard Rugeley, died at Hawkesyard in 1623 and was buried in Mavesyn Ridware.

Benjamin’s eldest brother, Colonel Simon Rugeley of Shenstone and Tatenhill (1598-1666), was a member of the parliamentary committee at Stafford. He inherited Hawkesyard but sold it to Sir Richard Skeffington of Fisherwick, whose family eventually acquired Comberford Hall. The original Hawkesyard Hall lay in ruins by 1660, and was pulled down in 1665.

The towers and turrets of Hawkesyard Hall and Spode House rising above the canal between Armitage and Rugeley (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2026)

The estate was bought in 1759 by Nathaniel Lister (1725-1793), poet and author. Lister renamed the Hawkesyard estate as Armitage Park in 1760, and in 1761 in Lichfield Cathedral he married Martha Fletcher, a Lichfield heiress and daughter of John Fletcher, Senior Proctor of the Diocese of Lichfield. They rebuilt the house in its present location as a Gothic-style mansion in red-brick stuccoed with ashlar and standing on the sandstone hill above the site of the original hall.

Lister also bought a house on Beacon Street in Lichfield in 1780, and in 1791 he acquired the lease on Erasmus Darwin’s house beside the Cathedral Close. When he died in 1793, Armitage Park was inherited by his son, John Fletcher Lister.

Mary Spode, widow of the potter Josiah Spode III, bought the estate in 1839 for her six-year-old son Josiah Spode IV (1823-1893), great-grandson of Josiah Spode and the fourth generation of the pottery dynasty but the first not to work in the family business.

The hall was altered and extended, and the cast-iron orangery was added, as well manicured gardens, statues and other buildings. Cellars and six underground tunnels were cut out of the rock by Richard Benton to allow the estate workers to move quickly around the locality, and two tunnels were said to lead to Lichfield and Armitage.

When the Spode family lived there, the hall was known as Spode House and Josiah Spode was appointed High Sheriff of Staffordshire in 1850. Mary died in 1860, and Josiah’s wife Helen died eight years later. Both are buried at Saint John the Baptist Church, Armitage, where Josiah was the organ player and warden. Josiah Spode of Hawkesyard also gave a new organ to Lichfield Cathedral that was installed in 1860 to complement the restoration of the quire by Sir George Gilbert Scott.

Despite these links with Lichfield Cathedral and Saint John’s Church, Armitage, Josiah Spode became a Roman Catholic in 1885, along with his niece Helen Gulson who lived with him at Hawkesyard. At the beginning of Lent 1886, they attended a parish retreat at Saint Joseph and Saint Etheldreda Catholic Churchin Rugeley given by Father Pius Cavanagh. Father Pius soon became in Gulson’s words ‘our best friend and advisor’. Towards the end of 1888, both Josiah Spode and Helen Gulson were clothed as tertiaries by Father Pius in their private chapel, becoming lay Dominicans.

The elaboratre reredos above the High Altar in the former Domician chapel (Photograph: Dominican Archives)

WhenJosiah Spode died in 1893, he asked that Helen should continue to live at Hawkesyard until she died, after which the estate would pass to the English Dominican Order.

However, Helen decided to move out of the hall in 1894 and into Gulson House on the estate, and work on the new priory and church began immediately. Some accounts say her decision was inspired by an apparition of the Virgin Mary in the grounds of the estate, and that the altar of the new priory church of Saint Thomas Aquinas was placed over the site of her vision.

The Dominicans built a new priory within the grounds in 1898, and the priory church was designed by the architect Edward Goldie (1856-1921). Josiah Spode and Helen Gulson were buried in a small chapel within the priory church, and outside in the gardens simple concrete crosses marked the graves of the Dominican community.

The priory was home to a community of nuns until the early 20th century. The convent then became a priory, and the Dominican monks or friars ran a boarding school for young aspiring Dominicans and a theological college.

The towers and turrets of Hawkesyard Hall and Spode House rising above the canal between Armitage and Rugeley (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2026)

I knew Hawkesyard Priory and Spode House well in my late teens and early 20s, when the Philosophical Enquiry Group was still meeting there with Father Columba Ryan and involved the Limerick-born philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe (1919-2001). At the time, the Folk Masses in the priory chapel were popular with many of my friends from Rugeley, Brereton and Lichfield.

The friars there in those heady days in the early 1970s included Father Conrad Pepler (1908-1993), the founding warden of Spode House, where he ran the first Catholic conference centre in England. We did not know then that it was he who provided a Catholic funeral in Cambridge in 1951 for the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, a mentor to both Elizabeth Anscombe and her husband Peter Geach.

The Dominicans at Spode in the early 1970s also included Father Columba Ryan (1916-2009), philosopher, university chaplain and peace activist, who took part in many CND marches and protests in London. He was also the bursar at the Hawkesyard Priory, and in the 1950s and 1960s he set up the Philosophical Enquiry Group at Spode in 1954.

He was born Patrick Ryan, a son of the Cork-born diplomat Sir Andrew Ryan (1876-1949), the last dragoman in Constantinople (1907-1921). He joined the Dominicans at Woodchester Priory, Gloucestershire, in 1935, took the name Columba, was ordained in 25 July 1941, and completed his DPhil at Oxford in 1946.

He was one of the friars who was on the Peace Pilgrimage to Vézelay in Burgundy, selecting ‘30 strong men’ to carry a heavy wooden cross across France in thanksgiving for the end of World War II. On his return he was instrumental in founding Student Cross, the annual Holy Week pilgrimage to Walsingham.

The drive from Armitage Lane leading up to the former Hawkesyard Priory (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2026)

Father Columba was teaching philosophy at Hawkesyard Priory when he set up the Philosophical Enquiry Group in 1954. This annual meeting for Catholic philosophers continued to take place at Spode House for 20 years, until 1974.

Elizabeth Anscombe and Peter Geach were among the first philosophers invited to those gatherings at Spode House. They remained leading figures of the group for the 20 years it lasted. They were Wittgenstein’s literary executors and were buried beside him in Cambridge. Other participants the Philosophical Enquiry Group included Sir Anthony Kenny of Oxford and Father Herbert McCabe (1926-2001), editor of New Blackriars. Father Columba had been the novice master of Herbert McCabe, who is attributed with once saying, ‘If you don’t love, you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you.’

Father Columba remained true to his values and joined the hundreds of thousands of people who marched in London on 15 February 2003 in protest at the invasion of Iraq. He continued preaching until shortly before he died at Saint Dominic’s Priory at Haverstock Hill, London, on 4 August 2009, aged 93. It was then the Feast of Saint Dominic, and it was the church in which he had been baptised as an infant; he had just celebrated 68 years of priesthood. His brother John Ryan (1921-2009), who had created the character of Captain Pugwash for the Eagle in 1950, had died two weeks earlier on 22 July 2009 at 88.

Meanwhile, the priory and conference centre at Spode House had closed and the last Dominicans moved out in 1988. When they left Hawkesyard, the hall had fallen into disrepair and had been boarded up. Still, in June 1998, the choristers of Lichfield Cathedral, directed by Andrew Lumsden made a recording, Begone Dull Care (Lammas Records, LAMM 107D), in Hawkesyard Priory.

The emblem of the Dominicans is recalled in the logo of the Hawkesyard Estate (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2026)

Hawkesyard was bought in 1999 by Relaine Estates Ltd which was determined to return the building and the estate. The company returned to the original name of Hawkesyard and set about restoring the building, partly relying on photographs from the collection at Shugborough Hall, the seat of the Earls of Lichfield, halfway between Rugeley and Stafford.

The transformation of the hall and other buildings was completed in 2007. The former priory building has been a nursing home since 1989, and the grounds have been turned into Saint Thomas’s Priory Golf Club. Hawkesyard Estate is now a popular venue for civil weddings, golf, conferences, and for three successive years it was the home of the Wolseley National Car Rally.

After visiting Hawkesyard estate, I lingered for a while by the canal towpath, sipping a glass of wine in the April sunshine at the Ash Tree, before continuing on the bus journey to Lichfield, for lunch at the Hedgehog and Evening Prayer in Lichfield Cathedral.

I remember a lengthy lunch in the Hedgehog in Lichfield a few years ago, when some of us recalled so many of our friends who loved Hawkesyard, the folk masses there and the extended Sunday afternoons that inevitably followed.

We talked that afternoon about the underground tunnels at Hawkesyard, including the tunnels said to lead to Lichfield and Armitage. We never seemed to wander down to the canal, as far as I recall. But was I really the one who was so fearless to lead a group of us through those unexplored tunnels and vaults? And are the tunnels still there?

A glass of wine in mid-April sunshine by the canal at the Ash Tree (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2026)