April 2010

By Avril Lumley Prior

Bridget Hirst’s interesting article on Torpel Deer Park (‘Beyond the Pale’, Issue 59) has stirred me into retrieving some research on Robert de Torpel that has been hibernating inside my computer for several winters.

Robert de Torpel had an illustrious yet bewildering pedigree. He was one of only two male heirs of the ‘Honour of Torpel’ [several manors held by one lord] that did not bear the name Roger, which makes it exceedingly difficult to distinguish between the generations. Robert’s father or grandfather, Roger Infans [‘the younger’], had fought for William the Conqueror at Hastings in 1066 and three years later had joined the retinue of Peterborough’s first Norman Abbot, the belligerent Turold de Fécamp (1069-98). Holding lands in Torpel, Helpston, Ufford, Bainton, Ashton, Ailsworth, Glinton, Lolham, Maxey, Northborough, Nunton, Southorpe, Pilton, Cotterstock and Glapthorn, Roger de Torpel was one of the foremost knights of Peterborough Abbey.

A ‘Description of the knights of Peterborough Abbey’ copied into a twelfth-century charter-book, suggests that Robert inherited his father’s estates c.1130. Unfortunately, scant information survives relating to his career. However, it is feasible that as part of his knightly duty Robert embarked upon a Crusade to the Holy Land, for in 1146 he began to manifest symptoms of leprosy, which was rife in the Middle East, and as a result he was obliged to withdraw from society. There must have been other cases of this contagious and erstwhile incurable disease in the region. A second document preserved in the same charter-book reveals that a leper hospital had been established on the outskirts of Peterborough close to a ‘healing spring’ before Abbot Ernulf’s rule (1107-14). The colony was virtually self-sufficient with its own farmstead, chapel dedicated to St. Leonard and the right to levy tolls on people and goods entering Peterborough from the west.

Perhaps impressed with his treatment in the hospice and, doubtlessly, concerned about his prospects in the afterlife, early in 1147 Robert decided to make his peace with God by surrendering the profits from his manors at Glapthorn and Cotterstock with their woods, meadows and arable land to the ‘infirmary at Peterborough at the chapel of St. Leonard’. He also pledged his body and soul to St. Peter, the monastery’s patron saint, and vowed to live on ‘the diet of a monk’, declaring that he wished to be buried in a monk’s habit. As Abbot Martin de Bec (1133-55) was in Rome seeking an audience with Pope Eugenius III, the charter was witnessed by two eminent brethren, Hugh Candidus, who compiled the ‘Peterborough Chronicle’, and the master scribe, Galfridus [Geoffrey] of Ufford. It is possible that Robert de Torpel only intended the tithes from the Cotterstock and Glapthorn to be paid to St Leonard’s hospice for his lifetime or for that of his brother, Roger II, to whom the ‘Honour of Torpel’ passed. By the time of Abbot Benedict (1177-94), both manors were under the monastery’s direct control and remained so until Roger III, brokered a deal by which Benedict relinquished his Cotterstock and Glapthorn concessions in return for the church at Maxey, an arrangement that was confirmed by Richard I’s charter to Peterborough of 1189.

By 1535, the medieval leper hospital had become an almshouse for eight poor men and now has long been demolished. Nevertheless, Peterborough continues to combat the disfiguring and debilitating disease and improve the lives of sufferers through the excellent work of the Leprosy Mission, which has its headquarters at Orton Goldhay.

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