How do we find out about our heritage?  We have to search for and piece together clues or evidence that people leave behind. These may include: objects & artefacts; visual evidence - drawings, paintings or photos; buildings & monuments - above and below ground (archaeology); eyewitness accounts (oral evidence). Finally, there may be written evidence; the existence of this is dependent on at least some people being able to read and write.

Did you know?

On 9 February 1186, in a copy of a letter to Prior Guy of Southwick Priory, Pope Urban III confirmed certain rights and privileges upon the Priory and its possessions including ‘the church of Portesia and its chapel’.  This letter is valuable written evidence as it is dated, confirming that the chapel of St Thomas (forerunner of Portsmouth Cathedral) was already built by February 1186. In another letter to Prior Guy, Richard Toclyve, Bishop of Winchester, reinforced ‘the holy papal authority’: ‘Anyone presuming to attack or disturb the aforesaid churches or chapel of the blessed martyr Thomas would incur the wrath of God’.

This information comes from the records or copies of charters and gifts of land known as the Cartulary of Southwick Priory, available in the Hampshire Record Office. A cartulary is essentially a register-book belonging to a monastery or other institution. Historian Sarah Quail tells us that the Southwick Cartulary is ‘the single surviving source of information on Portsmouth, for the town’s early records do not survive, destroyed it is believed in French raids in the 14th century’. Southwick Priory was a foundation of Austin canons, who followed the rule of St Augustine while doing charitable work in the community. They set up their original church about 1130 in the outer bailey of Portchester Castle; twenty years later they moved up the hill to Southwick, there establishing their priory, which lasted until the Dissolution of the Monasteries in 1538.

Jean de Gisors, founder of the Church of St Thomas, is also mentioned several times in the Cartulary. A wealthy Norman landowner and merchant - and family friend of Thomas Becket - he bought land between 1164 and 1177 in the south western part of Portsea Island, including the area known today as Old Portsmouth. Then he went to the Prior of Southwick, gave him a great sum of money and asked him to organise the building and running of a church. He stipulated that it should be dedicated ‘to the glorious honour of the martyr Thomas of Canterbury, one time archbishop’ – that is, to St Thomas Becket, who had been martyred in 1170.  In addition, it had to be built of stone, to survive French raids! This church was to be for the spiritual benefit of himself, his family and the new community he was setting up to trade with his native Normandy.

The chancel and nave were consecrated by Bishop Toclyve in 1188, and the transept, side chapel altars and churchyard by Bishop Toclyve’s successor Godfrey de Lucy in 1196. De Gisors notified de Lucy of the ‘whole gift of the tithe of my mill by the water’ to the Priory - providing income or rents which were to be used for maintaining the church in a good state of repair. From the invaluable written evidence contained in the Southwick Cartularies, we can chart the founding, building and securing of St Thomas’s Church, generally accepted as existing from 1185.