St Brelade's is one of the loveliest churches in the Channel Islands: a low, lichen-covered granite building right down on the shore of St Brelade's Bay, with the medieval Fishermen's Chapel beside it and the tide lapping at the churchyard wall. Francesca Bihet notes that it is traditionally said to have been consecrated in 1111. Its position is strange enough that people wanted an explanation, and the one they found was fairies.
The oldest printed version is short. William Plees, in An Account of the Island of Jersey (1817), wrote that the church was intended for the east side of the bay, but that whenever materials were collected at the proposed spot, fairies carried them away, together with the workmen's tools, to the place where the church now stands. Plees was a sceptic and hinted that the rector might have been behind it. The Guernsey and Jersey Magazine mentioned the moving stones again in 1836.
By the 1840s the story had grown. A verse account in A Week's Visit to Jersey introduced Grondin, the overseer of the building site. The men spent their days setting the foundation stones; each morning the stones were gone, moved to the shore. On the third night Grondin kept watch, and under the full moon the fairies came, moved the walls, and scolded him for trespassing on their ground. A legion of elves danced round him, tore his cloak to tatters and tied him up. Octavius Rooke's 1856 version makes the fairy an ancient, angry little man who hits Grondin in the face with his own flask, and Thomas Williams' Jersey Legends in Verse (1865) turned it into a lament for a fairy race about to leave the world for the moon. Visit Jersey today says the church was first planned at Les Quennevais, considered fairy territory, and that the materials were moved about a mile to the beach overnight.
Moving-church legends are common across Britain and France, and Guernsey tells similar ones about several of its churches. Some retellings blame the Devil or God rather than the fairies. What makes St Brelade's version useful is that we can watch it grow, from Plees' dry two sentences in 1817 to a full Victorian fairy tale within fifty years.
Comments