The History of the Pepperpot#
If you look at map of the Isle of Wight, you’ll see it takes the form of a diamond sitting just off the south coast of the Big Island, mainland England, across the Solent from Portsmouth and Southampton.
The southernmost tip is known as St Catherine’s Point; it’s flanked by the village of Niton to the East, and Blackgang Chine to the West.
Looking inland, you’ll see St Catherine’s Hill looming in front of you, topped off by St Catherine’s Oratory, commonly known as the Pepperpot.
In the early 1300s, in the reign of Edward II, the sea provided as much of an income to the Islanders living thereabouts as the farming. And not just from fishing…
…but also from wrecks.
In year of 1313, on the Sunday after Easter, the Saint Mary, of Bayonne, went down on Atherfield Ledge in Chale Bay. Carrying 174 tuns [large casks, each containing approximately 252 gallons] of white wine from France, the majority of the crew survived, and many of the barrels were washed ashore.
According to chapter of IV of Edward I’s Statute of Westminster of 1275, CONCERNING Wrecks of the Sea, it was agreed “That where a Man, a Dog, or a Cat escape quick out of the Ship, that such Ship nor Barge, nor any thing within them, shall be adjudged Wreck”; any goods washing ashore from them would be held for a year and a day so that the owner could reclaim them.
Some stories have it that the survivors proceeded to sell the wrecked barrels at a discount rate; but whatever happened that night, the barrels made their way into the hands of the Islanders.
The merchants who had lost their goods were, unsurprisingly, not very happy about it, and took the case to court in Southampton at the start of June; they appealed their £1000 loss, perhaps three quarters of a million pounds in today’s money, perhaps more, with charges laid against those who ended up receiving the goods.
The case dragged on in further sessions until a hearing in the first week of Lent the following year, February 1314. Islander Walter de Godeton, of Gotten Manor, was charged with receiving over fifty barrels of the salvaged wine and fined a considerable sum: 150 pounds or so in the money of the time. To compel the payment of such a hefty amount, much of his goods and lands were seized until payment could be made.
The fine does not appear to have changed his attitudes much though: his name appears again court records of 1323 regarding receiving goods from the wreck of the Jesus Christ, a Portuguese cargo vessel wrecked off Brighstone in 1318.
But the story doesn’t stop there for de Godeton. At least some of the cargo that had been lost from the St Mary had been destined for a monastery in Northern France; to plunder it was sacrilege. According to web legend / some accounts, the Pope summoned de Godeton to the ecclesiastical court in Rome, where he was told that he would be “excommunicated from the church and his soul would be damned to burn in Hell for all eternity” unless he performed an act of penance. To atone for his sin, he agreed to provide a ‘chaunting priest’ to say masses for his soul, for those of his ancestors, and for all those souls lost at sea, along with ‘a light for the benefit of mariners, to be lit every night for ever’. The site was to be on Chale Down, where a smaller hermitage had been established the previous year. Although only the foundations of the oratory have survived as earthworks still visible today (??), the lighthouse remains in the form of the 35 foot high tower known locally as “the Pepper Pot”, Britain’s only surviving medieval lighthouse. (Only the Roman lighthouse at Dover is older.)
The old lighthouse itself has an eight-sided pyramid shaped roof with eight rectangular openings, unglazed windows, you might say, to allow the light from a fire set at the top of the tower to be seen at sea. The four buttresses that strengthen the lower part of the tower were not part of the original lighthouse, but were added in the 18th century.