Lihou - an island of murder and heresy

Lihou has new tenants - and more than a few skeletons in its history. In the latest of her Dastardly Deeds series, Glynis Cooper uncovers a series of medieval murders that remain shrouded in mystery. LIHOU. A small rocky island of mystery and romance offering beauty, peace and tranquillity. A place of pilgrimage to a priory which was the perfect religious retreat, looking out across the waters of Rocquaine Bay.

So near and yet so far. On a summer's day with sunlight glinting on the rippling waves and the causeway between it and Guernsey uncovered at low tide, the little island lies 10 minutes' walk away, welcoming, beckoning. At high water on a dark stormy night with 20ft-deep tide raging across the causeway, it is one of the loneliest places in the Channel Islands.

It sounds idyllic but the treacherous serpents of murder and mystery lie in wait to disturb the peace and tranquillity in this medieval Garden of Eden.

In 1304 Thomas Le Rover, a servant of the prior, killed one of the Lihou monks, Brother John de l'Espin, in the priory. When the body was discovered, the prior sent for the Bailiff, Ralph de Havilland, who went to Lihou.

Le Rover had been quickly caught. In the small force of men which de Havilland brought with him was a former bailiff named Ranulph de Gautier.

When they tried to arrest Le Rover, fighting broke out and Le Rover, trying to defend himself, was killed by Gautier, who then fled to the church of St Sampson and claimed sanctuary.

The prior, Brother Calfridus, and the remaining monks panicked, took to their boats and sailed with all speed to their mother church at Mont-St-Michel, leaving the two corpses sprawled in the priory precincts.

The next day two local men, Richard Paysent and Johanna Le Veylette, went to Lihou and discovered it to be deserted, food lying half-eaten and tasks left half-done. It was like the Marie Celeste, with two unburied corpses lying just as they had been left.

Thoroughly scared, they hurried home and said nothing. However, when Brother Calfridus finally returned, their visit was discovered and they were fined for not having reported what they had found.

The grim task of clearing up began and the bodies of Brother John and Le Rover were finally removed and given a proper Christian burial. Lihou tried to return to some sort of normality but this was far from the end of the story.

De Gautier eventually escaped from Guernsey and went to England, where he managed to obtain a letter of pardon from the king. He returned to his lands in the parish of the Vale, but he was not a popular man and a few days later he was imprisoned in Castle Cornet. One of the charges laid against him was his part in the death of Le Rover.

While in the castle, de Gautier was 'put to death by many divers tortures ...' at the hands of three men: Gautier de la Salle, William l'Ingenieur and the ironically-named John Justice. The two last-named were pardoned for this crime but de la Salle was tried by the bailiff, Peter Le Marchant, and hanged in 1320. Thus the Lihou murder had claimed a total of four lives.

The motive for the murder of Brother John has never been established. Perhaps he caught Le Rover pilfering from the priory or poaching rabbits. Maybe they had a row that got out of hand, or did Le Rover witness Brother John doing something a man of the church should not have been doing?

Almost 700 years after the untimely death of Brother John, discoveries were made which show medieval Lihou in a very different light.

In 1999 the programme, Meet the Ancestors, assisted in excavations led by the States at the priory. What they found was unexpected and startling. Fifteen human skeletons were discovered buried there. Five of these, including a child, were interred beneath the nave. Of the remainder, three lay outside the walls (indicative of suicides) and two were buried in stone-lined cists.

Three skeletons were excavated and all three had brooches in their pelvic area. The brooches had been placed there for a symbolic reason and such grave goods are not usually associated with Christian burials.

In February 2000 one of the skeletons, nicknamed Mr Lihou, or the Monk of Lihou, was reconstructed using similar techniques to those used to reconstruct Lindow Man, the 2,500-year-old sacrificial victim found in a Cheshire peat bog about 20 years ago.

The Monk of Lihou was a tall man (6ft 2in or 1.9m) aged between 25 and 40, a good-looking Englishman who had died around 1250. He was suffering from syphilis. Small children and sufferers from sexual diseases are not the normal incumbents of dedicated monastic graveyards.

There is also an epic poem about an incident which took place in October 1595 when a local rector found himself cut off on Lihou with half-a-dozen island girls. The writer of the poem named him the Prior of Lihou and the girls he called the nuns of Lihou. Unlikely as it sounds, the rector was persuaded to bed all of them. However, worse still were the tales of the monks cavorting with local girls and, according to some, even the witches.

Certainly the general conduct of the priory inmates on Lihou seemed to be not very exemplary and in 1484 the prior was charged with heresy by the Abbot of Mont-St-Michel.

This was not all. A small, carved face on a piece of Caen stone, measuring some five inches by two (13cm x 5cm), was also discovered. It was pre-12th century and therefore pre-dated the excavated graves. The little face was said to be 'very human' in appearance with something feminine about it and the facial features bore some resemblance to La Gran'mere at St Martin's.

This suggested the possible existence of a mother goddess cult on the island. The Celts, from nearby Brittany and across the Channel in England, worshipped a mother goddess and had a tradition of carving freestanding human heads and faces. This survived into the 20th century in the English counties of Derbyshire and West Yorkshire. The intriguing question is, what was the likeness of a pagan goddess doing in the middle of a Christian priory on this tiny and remote Channel Island?

Paganism and witchcraft are said to have long been associated with Lihou and devil worship is supposed to have taken place at Le Catioroc, not far from the island. There is, however, a good deal of confusion as to the meaning of these terms. Pagan simply means non-Christian, although the word usually implies something not quite nice.

Witches belong to the religion of Wicca, based on the mother goddess and the agricultural fertility cycle revered by the Celts who worshipped the feminine as the giver of life. Wiccans practice white magic and believe in the rule of three, which basically means that if they do anything unpleasant to people, they will get it back three times over.

Devil worshippers pay homage to Satan and practise black magic, often for their own selfish or evil purposes, and this can involve the sacrifice of a live animal.

Legends abound of witches dancing with the devil - who took the form of black goat-like creature - on Le Trepied, the megalithic tomb at Le Catioroc (near L'Eree), and screaming abuse at Notre Dame de Lihou. Cries of 'Que hou hou Marie de Lihou!' raged out every Friday night from the capstones of Le Trepied as the witches whirled in their frenzied dances, sometimes led by the Queen of Hell.

Friday is alleged to be the witches' sabbath, though this must refer to practitioners of the black arts, because white witches have only eight sabbats a year: on the four quarter days (21 March, June, September and December) and the four main Celtic festivals (Imbolc/Candlemas; Beltane/May Day; Lughnasadh/Harvest thanksgiving; Samhain/ Halloween) which can fall on any day of the week.

Someone once raised the question of why a reasonably-sized priory should have been built on such a small island, rather than a hermitage cell for a single monk.

Undoubtedly the answer lay in the fact that the Church was making a statement aimed at those who had worshipped at Lihou's former pagan shrine and at those who mocked Lihou from across the water. Despite the stories, the scandals, the murders and the mysteries, Lihou did become a renowned place of Christian pilgrimage. The priory itself did not survive the dissolution of the monasteries in 1536 by Henry VIII, but its reputation survived the destructions of those times.

In 1656 Dr Peter Heylin recorded in his Survey of Guernsey that while 'little more than the priory's steeple remained ... those sailing past struck their topsails ... such a religious opinion have they harboured of the place that, though the saint be gone, the walls shall yet be honoured ...'