To Pleshey this week at the invitation of Simon Coxall, to see the dig he’s running there in the churchyard, exploring the remains of Pleshey College. The college was founded in 1394, with the church, by Thomas of Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester and his wife Eleanor de Bohun, who were seated at the castle. It housed nine priests and formed a large complex with the church to which it was physically and legally attached. The dig is limited in scale, with trenches sited to reveal and confirm the positions of walls and so to define buildings of the college.
The present church is only a fragment of Thomas’s original, which had a chancel longer than its nave and a tower and spire at the crossing. To the south were the buildings for the canons and the chapterhouse under which they seem to have been buried. To the north-east the outline of a great chapel which housed the Plantagenet tombs: not only Thomas and his wife, but the Duke of Exeter (d 1400), the Earl of Wiltshire (d 1473) and others. It must have been a magnificent place, full of plainsong and heraldry, now totally vanished above ground-level.
It was demolished at some point after 1546 when it was surrendered to commissioners, Sir John Gate of High Easter and William Bradbury of Littlebury. Masonry, tombs and heraldry were taken away for reuse elsewhere and what must have been one of the great ecclesiastical and heraldic glories of mediaeval Essex simply disappeared. The church fell into disrepair and the nave was bought in the 18th century by the parish. They demolished the chancel, all but a stumpy choir and sanctuary and had the nave and tower rebuilt in brick. A century later, Victorian gothicisers, dismissing the Georgian brick, gave the whole church a rather uninteresting flint skin, so that the only visible remains of the mediaeval church today are the crossing arches.
The present project will define much more clearly the extent of the collegiate buildings and ducal chapel and their form, and will allow a history to be written that integrates building and documentation. The first publication will be archaeological, but subsequent work will explore and report the furnishings of chancel and chapel, the very extensive heraldic content relating to the Plantagenet high nobility, that was recorded by antiquaries in the 16th and 17th centuries when the whole complex was probably already at least semi-ruinous.
This will perhaps allow the writing and publication of a church guide book (signally lacking in such an important and interesting church), for which the splendid vicars’/rectors’/masters’ board is no substitute.