Walter de Godeton and the Shipwrecked Wine

Walter de Godeton, Lord of the Manor, liked nothing better than supplementing his meals with a large goblet of wine.

And why not?

Life was good. He had land, and it was productive enough. There was trade for those who had a mind to dabble in such things. And living on an island, and close to the sea at that, the sea would often provide: crab, lobster, the oyster beds to the north of the island; and mackerel: on a fair day, at the right time of year, you could fair see the mackerel from the top of the cliff, swimming just above the sea ledge below.

And oh, my, how the sea had provided today. With Easter just a week gone by, bringing with it the end of Lent, the time for self-restraint was over. And whilst it wasn’t the nicest of Sundays – a storm had rolled in after all – the Lord had provided: a ship, the Saint Mary — oh, Hail Mary for providing for us so – sailing too close to shore in an attempt to avoid the worst of the sea, had run aground.

Now don’t me wrong, there was no sign of wrecking in these parts, it was an unfortunate accident, no more no less, God’s doing if anyone’s. And the saving of the crew was surely God’s work too.

The islanders were quick to make the shore, they always were: the law of the kingdom was quite clear: if Man, Dog, or Cat escape the ship alive, it would be judged a wreck, and as such, any goods washing ashore were to be held for a year and a day so that the owner could reclaim them. But the local tradition was also a bit more circumspect: if things washed ashore where your land abutted the sea, well, then those things were rightfully yours.

True, if it looked like there may only be one or two survivors, then maybe, maybe, the sea would reclaim them, and, ahem, well, then maybe things could turn out a little differently. But when it was clear that many of the sailors could be saved, the islanders would be quick to come their aid; and no less quick to help salvage what they could.

Now it was also true that merchant sailors were a resourceful and pragmatic bunch too. After all, goods could be lost to the sea as easily as they could come ashore; and, well, if an agreement could be made to sell, at a discount, what might have been lost were it not helpfully brought ashore, well, then you did what you could to make the best of a bad job and try to recover something having lost your ship.

Who knows whether the sailors were complicit, or profited that day. Nor how many of the 174 barrels of wine on board the St Mary, each containing 250 gallons or so of the finest wine, the finest wine indeed, made it ashore. But many of the barrels did… And so whether a hasty deal was done, right there, right there on the shore, or perhaps more leisurely, in one of island inns when the storm had abated and the salvage accounted for, or whether the sailors had no choice in the matter as the barrels were whisked up the chines, de Godeton had done well for himself: for he had secured near enough fifty of the barrels for himself. 50 barrels. Oh, he’d be able to turn a tidy profit on that, no doubt.

Yes, thought de Godeton. Things were going well.

But… there’s always a but… The merchant who had chartered the ship was not happy; not happy at all.

When he heard of the wreck, he was keen to recover his wine. But those good for nothing sailors - why, by whatever law of the sea you cared to reckon against: that wine was still his. The sailors for sure would not be able to pay him back, but he’d make those pay who had profited from the sale of that wine, God Preserve his soul. The charges were laid, first at the county court, then, when he still failed to get restitution, to a Commission at Westminster. By God, he would take it to the very King himself if he must.

de Godeton played the innocent. First, he claimed to have had nothing to do at all with illegally receiving the wine; then, he claimed he had bought it, fair and square, from the crew of the wrecked ship. He was not a sailing man, after all, and the law of the sea, well, he took it on trust that the sailors were entitled to sell him the wreckage. It had been their ship after all.

The jury, city men, not sailors, not provincial landowners, sided with the merchant. de Godeton, for the 50 barrels or so of wine he had received, should pay for his crime. At five marks a barrel (that’s 13s 4d in new old money), the fine came in at well over 200 marks, £150 or so, maybe £100k in today’s money.

Now there was no way that de Godeton could cover that sort of fine just like that. It would take time to pay off such a sum, even for a relatively wealthy landowner. And the rate he would have got selling on the wine, and perhaps the costs of transporting it for sale to the mainland, would surely not have been the full market price used to calculate the fine.

And so it was, that until such a time as de Godeton could pay off the debt, his goods and half his lands and tenement leases would be used as surety. The horses and oxen to pull his ploughs he could keep: he would need to have some means of paying back the fine, after all.

Now, you might think that was punishment enough. But God works in a mysterious way. For it wasn’t just the merchant who was so affronted by the loss of his wine from the St Mary. The Church wasn’t happy either. De Godeton’s luck was about to get to get a whole lot worse.

For the wine, the very fine wine, wasn’t just any wine. It was intended as communion wine, headed for an Abbey in another Kingdom. And the Abbott who had been looking forward to the arrival of the wine, for religious purposes, of course, was livid. This was plunder. This was SACRILEGE, an offence against the Church, an offence against God, the very despoilation of the Blessed Virgin Mary. No mere county assizes this time. As the story has it, this was a matter for a Papal court.

And so it was: having been convicted once already in a legal court, the Papal Court had no hesitation in finding against de Godeton and his crimes against the Church, his crimes against God: de Godeton would have to pay the ultimate sacrifice, excommunication, his soul damned to burn in Hell for all eternity, unless he atoned for his sins by creating a marker, a beacon, to benefit mariners and warn them of the treacherous nature of the coastal boundary to de Godeton’s land; and de Godeton was also to pay for a chaunting priest in that place to keep the light burning and to pray for his very soul, for his ancestors, and for all those souls lost at sea.

And here the tale does end. The lighthouse was built, although de Godeton was to die before it was fully completed. As to whether his soul was saved in time, or damned to eternity, who can say?

The lighthouse still stands to this day, on the high down just inland from the southernmost point of the Isle of Wight, Britain’s only surviving medieval lighthouse, with only the Roman lighthouse at Dover being older. Known officially as St Catherine’s Oratory, it’s rather unusual octagonal shape gives it its more colloquial, local name: The Pepperpot.

If you are fortunate enough to ever walk up there, you can look down onto the ledge, where on a dark and stormy day in 1313, on the Sunday after Easter, the Saint Mary of Bayonne was blown onto the ledge, and her cargo of communion wine washed ashore.

And de Gotten’s ancestral home: that exists still, too, as Gotten Manor. It’s a B&B now. Tell them I sent you.

Cheers…