Metadata
WORK ID: YFA 5155 (Master Record)
Title | Year | Date |
PAGEANT OF MOUNT GRACE | 1927 | 1927-01-01 |
Details
Original Format: 35mm Colour: Black & White Sound: Silent Duration: 4 mins 3 secs Credits: SFC |
Summary This is a film of the pageant held at Mount Grace Priory in 1927, including Sir (Thomas) Hugh Bell and Lady Bell. |
Description
This is a film of the pageant held at Mount Grace Priory in 1927, including Sir (Thomas) Hugh Bell and Lady Bell.
Title – Pageant of Mount Grace
“By kind permission of Lady Bell. Specially taken for the cinemas, Northallerton.”
A man in a black hat, with long sides, leads a parade under an archway. He is accompanied by a woman on either side and followed by a parade of others, including another two men accompanied by a woman on either side, one wearing a similar hat, and the other in a...
This is a film of the pageant held at Mount Grace Priory in 1927, including Sir (Thomas) Hugh Bell and Lady Bell.
Title – Pageant of Mount Grace
“By kind permission of Lady Bell. Specially taken for the cinemas, Northallerton.”
A man in a black hat, with long sides, leads a parade under an archway. He is accompanied by a woman on either side and followed by a parade of others, including another two men accompanied by a woman on either side, one wearing a similar hat, and the other in a hooded monks outfit. All are dressed in white gowns except the hooded man. A parade, with more men in hooded gowns carrying large candles, and including a bishop, makes its way onto an open space of the ruins of Mount Grace Priory, filmed near the church tower and walls. They perform a ceremony for a large crowd, and then there is a staged medieval theatrical performance, including dancing jesters and children in historic costume doing acrobatics and dancing. Among the performers is a Jack in the Green (or "Green Man"). Afterwards the spectators have tea with Sir Hugh Bell walking along chatting with a guest. Lady bell, in a black outfit with a black hat, chats with a vicar. Those in the performance have gathered into a large group to pose for the camera.
Title – SFC The End
Context
Where once medieval eremitic monks lived on bread alone, the world is turned upside down as capitalist Sir Hugh Bell surveys the wearers of the motley in the priory that he now owns.
A fascinating hodgepodge of a historical pageant is performed in the grounds of Mount Grace, the Carthusian priory in North Yorkshire. This 1927 pageant, overseen here by the then owners of the priory Sir Hugh Bell and Lady Bell, reflects the recent influence of Cecil Sharp in reviving folk customs, as we see a...
Where once medieval eremitic monks lived on bread alone, the world is turned upside down as capitalist Sir Hugh Bell surveys the wearers of the motley in the priory that he now owns.
A fascinating hodgepodge of a historical pageant is performed in the grounds of Mount Grace, the Carthusian priory in North Yorkshire. This 1927 pageant, overseen here by the then owners of the priory Sir Hugh Bell and Lady Bell, reflects the recent influence of Cecil Sharp in reviving folk customs, as we see a Jack-in-the-Green among the jesters, country dancers and acrobats, rubbing shoulders with royalty in courtly scenes and ascetic medieval monks. Owned by the National Trust, Mount Grace is described as being England's most important and best preserved Carthusian priory, otherwise known as a Charterhouse. As part of a trend of Victorian gentrification, the priory came into the hands of local iron industrialist Sir Lowthian Bell in 1898. The priory dates back to just after the Black Death, one of the last monasteries to be established in Yorkshire and the last to be supressed by the dissolution of the monasteries by Henry VIII, in December 1539. It was gifted to the National Trust in 1953 and later placed under the care of English Heritage. Sir Hugh Bell died several years after this film in 1931, a year after the death of his wife, Dame Eleanore Bell. |