Untie by love

Do not be disheartened, Peter; answer once, twice, yes three time. This threefold confession of love is necessary to recover what you lost three times by your fear. Untie by love the knot that you tied about yourself through fear.

I’m still dabbling in information about Augustinian Canons, as well as remembered this quotation from a sermon of St Augustine’s on which I used to focus often when I had a copy of it up on my study wall.

It turns out that the earliest of Henry I’s Augustinian foundations in Lincolnshire may well have been the one in Grimsby. Wellow Abbey a short distance from here stood where the present Abbey Road and Abbey Drives meet.

The neighbouring Grimsby and Clee churches were both theirs, as were those at Riby, Humberston, Tetney and others further way. In 1444 the Bishop directed that Clee should in future be served by a non-monastic priest rather than by one of the Canons, which is a clear indication of the way at least some of those churches were served over several hundred years before that.

There were also Augustinian Canonesses near by at St Leonard’s Priory near the present Nun’s Corner, and it is this house which held Little Coates (as well as Ravendale), appointing a priest to care for this parish ‘vicariously’. The tomb of a recumbent knight in Grimsby Parish Church today comes from this Priory.

One hopes that the direct and vicarious care of our local churches was more often marked by attention to St Augustine's Rule and sermons than the local drinking and gossip for which it appears the Canons of Wellow were denounced in 1386.

The picture is simply a closer look at the new trees outside St Michael’s.