The Anglican Church in Aust existed in the period when I created my fictional heroine, Lady Apollonia of Aust. Before Henry VIII’s 16th century departure from the church of Rome, it was a Roman Catholic church in the Diocese of Worcester. John Wycliffe, Oxford scholar and reformer of the church, also had a connection with the Aust Church when in 1362 he was granted a prebend at Aust which meant that some of his income during the years when he was at Oxford came from this source. It is not known how much time, if any, Wycliffe spent in Aust.
Nevertheless, since Wycliffe’s connection with Aust would have been during the years when Lady Apollonia and her second husband, Edward, were raising their five sons in the village, I could not resist using John Wycliffe as a character of my first story, Effigy of the Cloven Hoof. I have also worked some of his ideas of church reform, as well as those of his followers, the Lollards, into other books in the Lady Apollonia West Country Mysteries.
The church in Aust is mentioned in the Domesday Book as having ties to Westbury on Trym which is a suburb of Bristol some nine miles away. In the 14th century we are told that the parish at Aust was part of the Church of Westbury. There was no way to see inside the church when I first visited the village. It was not open to visitors because it had been declared redundant. Aust church had no patron saint because I was told it was due to its having been built on a pagan site. On our first visit to Aust in 1986, the village seemed to be in decline due to the replacement of the Aust ferry with a motorway bridge in 1966.
When I visited Aust with my husband in 2014, the village seemed more welcoming and prosperous, and best of all, the church was being used for worship once again. It is now called the Chapelry of Saint John and is used for services two Sundays a month. The term “chapelry” is a Church of England title meaning a daughter church of another parish, in this case the church in nearby Olveston. For the first time in my family’s experience we could get the key and go inside. The church is simply charming, still lit by candles and oil lamps.
For more information on John Wycliffe, click on
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Wycliffe .
For more information on the church in Aust, click on
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aust .
Tags: Chaucer's England, historical fiction, medieval mysteries