The true history of Friar Gate's Headless Cross

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The Headless Cross in Friar Gate, Derby, has had a chequered history, as Maxwell Craven reveals today. Was it really used as part of a precaution to stop inhabitants contracting the Plague? And what does John Speed’s 1610 map of Derby reveal about its whereabouts?

John Speed's 1610 map of Derby

MY efforts to revise Derby, an Illustrated History are still throwing up interesting facts and oddities. Sometimes one finds an oft-repeated tale which fails to stand up to checking against the sources and sometimes one realises that the story is not quite what it seems.

I found this when writing about the Headless Cross in Friar Gate, for instance.

Historian William Hutton, writing in 1791, describes it more or less as it is today.

He tells us that in 1665 there was, as in London, a plague in Derby and that the country folk, keen to sell their wares on market days, would put their goods out near the cross.

The townspeople were not to touch, only look, and once a trade was agreed, they deposited the money in a pot of vinegar set on the top of the cross as a sterilisation measure, although an alternative version states that the vinegar was in the hollowed-out top of the monument.

He also says that the “inhabitants [of Derby] erected [it] at the top of Nuns’ Green” which implied that it was not then in situ, although it was certainly then called the Headless Cross.

It is also well known that it returned to its present position in the early 1980s from the Arboretum, but how did it get to the Arboretum?

With regards to the inhabitants of Derby moving it in 1665, one has to bear in mind that on John Speed’s 1610 map of Derby, there is a cross shown standing on the northern edge of Nuns’ Green, by which I mean the upper part of Friar Gate, but which was not so called until the 19th century.

The part of the green itself, north of the cross as shown, was then called Whitecross Fields – hence the name of the West End street created in about 1850.

A charter of Darley Abbey refers, in 1261-1275 (dating is rarely precise this early), to “albam crucem de Derbeia iuxta regiam viam”, which translates as: “The white cross of Derby next to the king’s highway”. Although “regiam viam” usually refers to King Street in these charters, a further deed of 1426 definitely locates the White Cross in the Whitecross Fields area, so in the 13th-century context, “King’s Highway” means just that – the main road, presumably that to Ashbourne. The Field name crops up in 1611 and a farm called White Cross is later found there too.

Thus we may safely take it that Hutton’s headless cross may be identified as the former White Cross, shown complete by Speed, inclining one to think that the cross and shaft were removed by Puritan iconoclasts during the Civil War, a well-attested phenomenon.

There was, however, no plague in Derby in 1665 – the parish registers make that clear – although there was in 1645-47 and in 1592-93.

The source of the story is the correspondence of the Rev John Allin, a London plague survivor.

It seems likely that either the tale originated in the 1645 outbreak or, perhaps more likely, does indeed relate to 1665 when, with the alarming news from London of the spiralling death rate, the locals merely decided on the vinegar bath for coins, not touching goods before purchase and keeping apart as reasonable precautions.

After all, they had the example of Eyam that year as an awful reminder.

The likelihood is that the Puritans broke up the cross and that the top stone of the base, with its hollowed- out centre where once the shaft was attached, was rescued from where it had been discarded in the grass nearby and put up on the other stones to a convenient height. Certainly expert opinion is that only the top stone is authentic.

It seems to have remained in Friar Gate until the Third Improvement Commission in 1792 laid out the road as it is today. The Commission’s chairman was William Strutt, and he was probably loath to see this venerable relic thrown carelessly away.

He may have had it put in the garden of Exeter House, where his father, Jedediah, then lived.

Thereafter, I believe it went with Jedediah to Friar Gate House, which William built for him in 1793, close to its present site, and thereafter to Joseph Strutt’s home, Thorntree House, 1 St Peter’s Street, when Jedediah died.

It was from Joseph’s St Peter’s Street garden, flanking the brook, where Albert Street and the Corn Exchange are now, that most of the ornaments for his new Arboretum came in 1840, including William John Coffee’s Florentine Boar, several other statues and urns and, I am certain, the Headless Cross.

Which amounts to quite a few moves around over 800 years for what started out as a bright, new-looking stone preaching Vcross recorded in 13th-century Derby, or earlier, for we cannot rule out it having been an Anglo-Saxon one originally, like that found at St Alkmund’s in 1967.