Our Lady of Brewood
Sacred Staffordshire is an exploration of places of that have been sacred to people in the county for whatever reason - historical, legendary, or because of a special "Spirit of Place."
Notes by Michael Fisher:
Brewood (pronounced 'Brood') has a fine medieval church containing tombs of the Giffard family of nearby Blackladies. The inscriptions on some of the post-Reformation monuments indicate that the Giffards were recusants who remained loyal to the Catholic Faith in spite of the Penal Laws. Blackladies - a former Benedictine nunnery - was the location of a private Catholic chapel used for clandestine worship prior to the first Catholic Relief Act of 1781. The whole area is steeped in post-Reformation Catholic history, and it was Catholic families in this area who provided refuge for King Charles II after his defeat at the Battle of Worcester in September 1745.
Just over the Shropshire border are the remains of a convent of Augustinian nuns, popularly known as White Ladies, but more correctly named the Priory of St Leonards at Brewood.
Even after Henry VIII's suppression of the monasteries White ladies remained a place of burial for Catholic recusants, and a number of their memorials are still in place, notably those of the Penderel family who played a key role in the concealment and escape of Charles II.
The Catholic graves delighted the architect A. W . N. Pugin who, after visiting the site in 1843, wrote excitedly to the Catholic 16th Earl of Shrewsbury, '...no protestant has ever polluted the consecrated ground, & this in England. Delightful.'
It was Pugin who built the new Catholic Church of St Mary on the west side of Brewood, in 1844, partly at the expense of Lord Shrewsbury who was a major landowner in the area.
Over the Lady Chapel altar in this church, housed in an alabaster shrine of twentieth century date, is a statue of the Virgin and Child locally referred to as 'Our Lady of Brewood'. Tradition has it that this statue was kept at the house - also known as White Ladies - built close to the priory ruins. It was here that Charles II first took refuge after the Battle of Worcester. The house was later ransacked by Parliamentary troops. They failed to find the King, but they discovered the statue, and it was allegedly a blow from a soldier’s sword that made the gash still visible on the left side of the figure.
It would appear that after the house of White Ladies was demolished in the eighteenth century the statue was taken to Chillington Hall, home of the Catholic Giffards, and thence to the Catholic Chapel at Blackladies, where it remained for some time, even after the opening of Pugin's new church.
Writing in the 1860s James Hicks Smith (Brewood, 1867) makes mention of ‘a ponderous little statue of the Blessed Virgin, carved in wood', which continued to occupy the place of the former altar piece. The statue was presumably moved to St Mary's when Blackladies chapel was finally demolished in 1872.
Whatever the truth of the story of the damage caused to the statue by a parliamentarian's sword the gash is indeed there, and from it has exuded a resinous-looking substance.
This occurrence led some to believe that the statue was miraculous, and similar to other well known weeping or bleeding Madonnas. A collection of documents in the Birmingham Diocesan Archives (BAA P99/14-20) records investigations into the age of the statue, and sampling of the substance exuding from it. In the 1960s parish priest of St Mary's, Fr. Grady, wished to establish the 'Shrine of Our Lady of Brewood' as a place of pilgrimage, but Archbishop Dwyer of Birmingham advised against it. Nevertheless the statue remains in the church as a focus of private devotion, where the Blessed Virgin’s prayers are sought under that title, and at the heart of an area so rich in Catholic history. Boscobel House, where Charles II famously hid in the oak tree after his sojourn at White Ladies, was built by the Giffards as a hiding-place for priests, and it was the Giffards who gave Longbirch House as the residence of Vicars Apostolic of the Catholic Midland District, an office first held by one of their family, Bonaventure Giffard, from 1688 to 1703.
St Mary's Brewood: