Evocatively named Holy Ghost Chapel in Basingstoke, Hampshire, captured here in 1772, harbours many a secret. The cemetery it served was created during the Interdict of c1208-14, ‘when King John and all of England was excommunicated by the Pope’. It meant no English burials could be placed in consecrated ground and the chapel and cemetery were created as the ‘stop-gap’ Liten – crudely, an early ‘municipal’ graveyard. It was finally consecrated in 1214, once the Pope’s anger had wilted. Its ruins today still conjure today that sense of unease only ameliorated by a serenity often found in such places of rest - think on the French war cemeteries from the 1914-1918 conflict, where the sound of thundering traffic and modernity seem to vanish the moment you enter its space. Among the jagged remains here survive a barely legible tombstone showing an unknown cross-legged knight. Another reveals an Elizabethan man, believed to be Lord Sandys, founder of this chapel, organiser of Henry VIII’s ‘Field of the Cloth of Gold’ (1520), host to both he and Anne Boleyn – and the man who escorted the unwanted queen to her executioner’s axe in 1536.
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