Among the lanes of the Ribble Valley, in a field a short walk from Ribchester, stands one of the most evocative survivals of the crusading age to be found anywhere in our county. The little chapel of St Saviour at Stydd, low and plain and not unlike a barn from the outside, was once part of a religious house held by the Knights Hospitallers, the Order of St John of Jerusalem. It is the only building of that house still standing, and it carries the best part of nine centuries of Lancashire history within its walls.

The Order of St John in Lancashire

Many people have heard of the Knights Templar, yet fewer know of the order with which Stydd is most closely associated, the Knights Hospitallers. Like the Templars, the Hospitallers were a religious and military order born of the Crusades, with their origins in Jerusalem and their later homes on Rhodes and Malta. Their particular calling combined the bearing of arms with care for the sick and the poor, and across Europe they held manors and estates whose revenues helped to fund their work in the Holy Land. Stydd was one such Lancashire holding.

A foundation of great age

There was a settled community at Stydd from at least the twelfth century, and a place of worship on the site by the thirteenth, possibly as early as 1190. The oldest records, a set of undated medieval deeds, describe a hospital of St Saviour beneath the Long Ridge, served by a master and brethren, language that suggests the foundation was already well established when those documents were drawn up. By the second half of the thirteenth century the property had come into the hands of the Knights Hospitallers; a clearer deed of 1292 records their acquisition of the land at Dutton from a man named Adam of St Saviour.

A cell of the Order

Stydd was never a great preceptory, but a modest cell, administered for much of its life as a subsidiary of the Hospitaller house at Newland in Yorkshire. Even so, the Order left its mark. Among the carved stones inside the chapel are initials thought to belong to a sixteenth-century preceptor of Newland, a quiet signature of the brethren who once held this corner of the valley. Local tradition remembers the Knights of St John as skilled herbalists as well as fighting men, and it is still said that medicinal plants they once cultivated, among them willow and toothwort, may be found about the churchyard. Whether or not the tale can be proved, willow bark does contain a natural forerunner of aspirin, so the story is at least a charming one.

Suppression and survival

The hospital’s usefulness faded over time, and by the later Middle Ages its original purpose had largely passed. When the Order of St John was suppressed in England under Henry VIII, the Stydd holding passed into private hands, being sold in 1543 to Sir Thomas Holt of Grizehurst, on condition that a small sum still be set aside each year towards a chaplain at the chapel. The surrounding buildings were lost over the centuries that followed. During the First World War, staff and pupils of nearby Stonyhurst College excavated the site and found traces of them, though their exact purpose could not be established. The chapel alone remained.

The chapel today

St Saviour’s survives as a Grade I listed building and is cared for today in partnership with St Wilfrid’s Church in Ribchester. Within its simple interior lies the medieval grave of a knight, Sir Adam de Cliderow, and his lady Alice, dated to about 1350, together with old fittings and heraldic stones that reward a careful eye. The chapel stands in a field beside Stydd Manor Farm and is open for worship during the summer months.

Visiting Stydd

There is no parking at the chapel itself, and the lane up to it is rough, so visitors are advised to leave their cars in Ribchester village, or at the nearby Roman Catholic church of Saints Peter and Paul, and to walk the half mile up Stydd Lane, passing the eighteenth-century almshouses on the way. Service and opening times are best confirmed beforehand through St Wilfrid’s, Ribchester, at saintwilfrids.org.uk.

For those of us who treasure the Christian and chivalric heritage our Order keeps alive, Stydd is a remarkable thing to have on our own doorstep: a true crusader chapel, set in quiet Lancashire fields, where the brethren of St John kept the faith and tended the sick more than seven hundred years ago.