Monks Kirby
Monks Kirby is a village and civil parish in north-eastern Warwickshire, England. The population of the parish is 445.
Monks Kirby is located around one mile east of the old Fosse Way, around 8 miles north-west of Rugby, seven miles north-east of Coventry and six miles west of Lutterworth. Administratively it forms part of the borough of Rugby. One of the largest and most important villages in this part of Warwickshire from the Anglo-Saxon to the early modern period, by the nineteenth century Monks Kirby had become a small farming community. Monks Kirby is today an attractive, wealthy commuter village with many residents working in Coventry, Birmingham, Leicester and London.
Monks Kirby is dominated by the priory church of St Edith, a site of Christian worship since at least the 10th century AD. The priory is long since gone but the church remains, seeming out of proportion to the size of the village.
History
Monks Kirby has been inhabited since at least Roman times, with evidence found around the Church suggesting either a Roman cemetery or villa on the current Church site.The good soils, strategic location and size of the parish suggest it was the dominant village in this part of Warwickshire before the Norman Conquest. The pre-Conquest church of Monks kirby was the mother church for the surrounding area, connected to the important aristocratic estate of Newnham.
In the tenth century the village was on the frontier between the Viking controlled Danelaw and Anglo-Saxon Mercia. "Kirby" is a Norse place name roughly meaning "church town" but the village is just on the west side of Watling Street, which was the formal frontier.
At the time of the Norman Conquest, the neighbouring estate of Newnham Paddox was owned by Leofwin, nephew of Leofric, Earl of Mercia. After the Conquest, the land around Monks Kirby came into the ownership of Geoffrey de la Guerche, a Breton knight who married Aelgifu,Leofwin's daughter. Geoffrey rebuilt the Anglo Saxon church and gave it as a priory to the Benedictine Abbey of St Nicolas in Anjou in France, naming it in honour of the Virgin Mary and St Denis. Unusually, the text of the founding Charter for the Priory survives: the dedication took place on 1 July 1077 and the Charter tells us the names of the first monks – Geoffrey, Ranulf, Stephen, Maurice, Roger and Herman.
In 1266 Henry III granted the monks a fair at Midsummer and a weekly market. The church was substantially rebuilt in around 1380 and in 1415 Henry V transferred the priory to the Carthusians of the Isle of Axholme, Lincolnshire. The 100 years war with France also caused the dedication of the church to be changed to St Edith of Polesworth, a Warwickshire Saint. The church was again altered in the late fifteenth century, and an octagonal spire added: this blew down on Christmas night, 1722.
In the reformation, King Henry VIII confiscated the assets of the priory, granting the manor of Monks Kirby to the Bishop of Ipswich, and the rectory and the advowson of the vicarage to his foundation of Trinity College Cambridge in December 1546. The manor then changed hands several times over the following eighty years until the powerful Buckingham family passed to it to the Feildings who had been lords of neighbouring Newnham Paddox since the fifteenth century.
The Feilding family owned most of the village and the land around it until the mid-twentieth century. Trinity College retains the benefice and continues to be involved in the church's affairs today but divested itself of substantial landholdings around Monks Kirby following the Second World War.
Up to the industrial revolution and the coming of the railways, Monks Kirby was one of the most important villages in this part of Warwickshire. Early in the 17th century the hundred of Knightlow was reorganised on a basis of four High Constables' divisions – Kenilworth, Monks Kirby, Rugby, and Southam. Monks Kirby retained its high constable until 1828.
The ecclesiastical parish of Monks Kirby still includes several neighbouring villages and hamlets: Pailton, Stretton-under-Fosse, Newbold Revel, Copston, Brockhurst, Street-Ashton and Easenhall. Historically, there was also a further hamlet in the parish of Monks Kirby: the village of Cestersover, abandoned in the Middle Ages.
Roman Catholic Community
Monks Kirby has been a local centre for the Catholic faith since the conversion of the 8th Earl of Denbigh to Catholicism in 1850. St Joseph's convent and girls school/orphanage were established in the village in the 1870s and in the 1980s was converted into the first congregation of Mary, Mother of the Church by Sister Catherine Mulligan as a new convent for mature women looking to enter religious life. In the early 2000s the Mater Ecclesiae congregation moved to Street Ashton House in the neighbouring hamlet of Street Ashton, where it was based until recently. Over the next few months the Jesuits will move into the former convent which will become a temporary house of formation.The old convent buildings in Monks Kirby have now been converted to housing but a new church, St Joseph's Church, was built in the 1990s to a design by the architect John Holmes. This church was consecrated by the Archbishop of Birmingham, Bernard Longley, on 11 July 2012, the feast of St Benedict. St Joseph's continues to be a vibrant worshipping community today, with a large congregation gathering on Sundays from the parish which spreads well beyond the small village of Monks Kirby.
Highlights during the year include the well attended Annual May Procession when the parish process in honour of Our Lady ending with the crowning of the statue and Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament. There is also a Corpus Christi procession in June from the Village Green to St Joseph's.
In July 2018 St Joseph's fitted a new bell system which allows the Angelus to be rung at 12noon and 6pm as well as calling the faithful to Mass. At special times of the year and at the end of the school day Hymns are played on the automated carillon.
The present parish priest is a priest of the Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham. The Ordinariate Use of the Mass is celebrated weekly and St Joseph's has become a focus for members of the Ordinariate from the Leicestershire and East Warwickshire area. Evensong and Benediction are celebrated monthly.
The cemetery on the outskirts of Monks Kirby is a Roman Catholic burial site, originally a private graveyard for the Feilding family. Today the Catholic cemetery is used for burials from St Joseph's.
The Revel School
Children from Monks Kirby and surrounding villages attend the Revel School, which is possibly unique in that it is a Church of England school with Catholic provision and Catechesis. Children from the school regularly visit the Church for worship and are prepared through the school for their First Holy Communion. Both the Rector and Catholic Parish Priest lead worship in the school. School Masses take place regularly.The Earls of Denbigh and Monks Kirby
The Feilding Family have been Lords of Newnham Paddox since 1433. In 1622 James I made William Feilding first Earl of Denbigh: Feilding primarily owed his rise at court to his brother in law, the Duke of Buckingham, who was the King's confidante and lover. The Buckinghams also purchased, as a gift for the second Earl of Denbigh, the manor that had belonged to the pre-reformation priory of Monks Kirby.Despite almost certainly being of Warwickshire origin, in the middle of the seventeenth century, following their elevation to the peerage, the Feilding family began to claim descent from the European royal house of Habsurg, a claim that has been ridiculed and debunked several times in the subsequent centuries. The Habsburg double-headed eagle appears on Denbigh coats of arms and as a symbol around the village of Monks Kirby.
Newnham Paddox
In 1754-68 Lancelot "Capability" Brown built a large mansion house for the fifth and sixth Earls. At the same time, Brown laid out landscaped garden. The house, which was further substantially developed in the nineteenth century, was demolished in 1952 after receiving water damage resulting from the thawing of frozen pipes at a time when the family was hit by heavy death duties. The grand gates, stables and Brown's landscaped gardens remain and the current Earl still lives in a twentieth century, wooden house in the grounds.The Denbigh family have - since the mid-twentieth century - steadily sold off most of their local land holdings.