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| Kettlethorpe Churchyard |
Last week I had the pleasure of leading a walk for the Lincoln Bailgate U3A Walking Group around Kettlethorpe, Fenton and Laughterton, following a route closely connected with Katherine Swynford and the landscape she knew more than six centuries ago.
We gathered beside the medieval cross base at St Peter’s Church, Kettlethorpe, before stepping inside a building that, although much altered since Katherine’s lifetime, still serves the community that once formed the heart of her estate. From there we crossed the fields to Fenton, continued to Laughterton, walked down towards the River Trent and finally returned across what was once Katherine’s deer park to Kettlethorpe.
As always, I arrived with pages of notes.
Dates, charters, grants of land, church history, estate boundaries and the remarkable 1383 licence that allowed Katherine to enclose 300 acres of land and create a deer park. Those details matter. Accuracy matters. Anyone who follows this blog will know that I believe history deserves careful research and respect for the evidence.
Yet somewhere between Kettlethorpe and the Trent, the notes found their way back into my pocket and I simply began telling Katherine’s story.
Not an invented story, but a reasoned one.
The records tell us a great deal. They tell us where Katherine lived, the lands she held, the family she created and the extraordinary journey that took her from knight’s daughter to Duchess of Lancaster. They tell us about documents signed, estates managed and marriages arranged.
What they cannot tell us is what it felt like to stand where we stood, looking across the open Lincolnshire landscape.
Did she pause beside the Trent and watch the traffic on the river? Did she find comfort in the relative peace of Kettlethorpe when court politics became overwhelming? Did the deer park represent status, security or simply home?
No historian can answer those questions with certainty.
Our task is not to invent, but to interpret. We take the surviving evidence, place it within its historical context and, with care and honesty, build the most reasonable picture we can. Facts provide the foundations, but understanding creates the house.
Writing my biography of Joan Beaufort, Katherine’s daughter, has reinforced that lesson every day. Medieval records rarely hand us complete lives. Instead, they leave fragments: a payment, a licence, a will, a passing reference in a chronicle. The challenge is to connect those fragments without ever losing sight of the evidence.
Perhaps that explains why I find history so endlessly fascinating.
I have always been open about my dyslexia. Less well known is that I also have a mild form of Tourette’s syndrome, which manifests itself through motor tics.
For much of my adult life I tried to hide them, convinced that other people noticed far more than they actually did.
Age has a wonderful habit of changing perspective.
The tics have not changed, but my relationship with them has. What once felt like something to conceal has become simply another part of who I am. There is a quiet freedom in that realisation. Energy once spent worrying can instead be devoted to curiosity, conversation, research, writing and sharing stories.
Perhaps that is why I am increasingly drawn to the people behind the records. Medieval men and women were not names on family trees or figures in chronicles. They were individuals with ambitions, loyalties, griefs, humour and resilience. Katherine Swynford was certainly all of those things.
As we walked from village to village, history became something more than dates and documents. The church remained. The fields remained. The River Trent still flowed northwards as it did in Katherine’s lifetime. Even the outline of her deer park can still be traced across the landscape.
For a moment, six centuries seemed a very small distance indeed.
Crossing the old parkland on our return to Kettlethorpe, I was reminded that history is often found in the spaces between certainty and imagination. Not imagination that invents, but imagination disciplined by evidence and informed by place.
That is where Katherine still lives.
Not simply in charters or chronicles, but in the landscape she knew and in the stories that careful research allows us to tell.
Finally, my thanks go to the members of the Lincoln Bailgate U3A Walking Group, a group that has contributed enormously to my wellbeing over the years. Their friendship, support and enthusiasm have enriched far more than my walking. Their questions and observations on this walk were a reminder that history is not confined to archives, libraries and books. Sometimes it is found beneath our feet, in familiar fields and forgotten paths.
And that, perhaps, is why I keep returning to Kettlethorpe and to Katherine Swynford—a remarkable woman whose story still rewards those willing to slow down, look carefully and walk in her footsteps.B
