A Note Made in the Oratorie at Astley
A single sheet of foolscap, folded thrice, kept in the muniment-box of the FitzHardy family at Astley until the box was opened by the antiquarian Mr. Quintin Allardyce upon the family's removal to London in 1819. The hand is Mr. Allardyce's, made on the night of the seventh of October 1819 by the light of his own lamp.
The threshold-stone of the oratory at Astley was lifted this evening for the carpenter's measurements, the room being to be wainscotted over after our departure. Under the south end of the stone, in a hollow which the masonry concealed by perhaps half an inch, I found a parcel.
The parcel is wrapped in linen of fine weave, much yellowed, and is no larger than my closed hand. The wrapping has not been disturbed for what I estimate, by the linen's condition, to be three hundred years and not less than two. The threshold was last laid, per the manor's accounts of 1618 (which I have examined), upon the rebuilding of the oratory after the great frost of 1614. The parcel was therefore in the threshold at the moment of relaying, or set there from below at the moment of relaying, or transferred from an earlier threshold which I have not seen.
I have not unwrapped it.
I have, however, noted what its weight in the hand suggests. It is somewhat heavier than a hen's egg and considerably lighter than a silver-and-gilt object would be at the size the linen describes. It is, by the feel through the cloth, a single hard object, not metallic, of an irregular but compact form, set in a small mounting of some other substance, the mounting modest beside the thing it embraces.
The cuppe of Dame Margerie FitzHardy is, by the Crown's books of 1538, an item of xviij oz. iij dwt. of silver-gilt with a knop in the foot wherein was set a piece of the holy Roode. The Crown received in that year, from the late priorie of S. Helene in Wenlock, every item save that one. The cuppe is otherwise accounted for in a household paper of the spring of 1538 which I have lately read, in which the silver and the gilding of it appear to have gone into a kitchen-fire upon a Friday in Lent. The chisel and the linen of that same evening are accounted for in the same hand.
The Roode was not for the fire.
I think this parcel is the Roode.
I will write to FitzHardy in London. I will say I have found, in the manor, a small wrapped thing that may belong to the family's older chapel-furniture, and that I have set it aside, awaiting his instruction. He will, I suspect, instruct me to leave it where I found it. I will obey.
The carpenter does not know.
— Q.A., the night of the 7th October, 1819, the lamp turned low, in the oratorie at Astley, which is no longer an oratorie.
[The parcel was returned to its hollow on the morning of the 8th. The threshold-stone was reset. The oratory was wainscotted over by the carpenter Mr. Bullsey's men in the following fortnight, who did not know what lay beneath their feet. The wainscot was removed in 1937 in the conversion of the manor to a girls' school; the parcel was not, by any report this writer has been able to locate, found at that time. The threshold is now beneath a hardwood floor laid for the school's assembly room. The Roode, if it is still in the threshold, is still in the threshold.]