Last updated 13:34, Thursday, 18 September 2008

YOU have to admire the author JK Rowling. She must have done some impressive in-depth research before launching into her Harry Potter saga, as proved by a little bit of digging into the history of Blanchland on Tynedale’s south-eastern fringe.

Lease up:Blanchland’s White Monk tea room offers a historic business opportunity.

Blanchland, one of only six listed villages in England, takes its name from the 12th century “White Monks” who founded its abbey.

The White Monks were also called the Norbertines, after their founder, St Norbert, whose mother happened to be called Hedwig of Guise.

As any fool knows, Norbert was the baby dragon adopted by Harry Potter’s giant friend Hagrid, and Hedwig stars in all seven Potter books as Harry’s grouchy owl. Thus Rowling is a boffin – Q.E.D.

Norbert of Cologne had a remarkable influence on Blanchland, despite the 1,000km that divided them, and he was an interesting man – for a saint.

Born around the year 1080 with a silver spoon in his mouth, Norbert had a severe attack of piety after falling off his horse in a thunderstorm.

He swapped his velvets and silks for sackcloth and began a new life of holy deprivation, deliberately looking for icy puddles to walk through in bare feet.

Norbert soon attracted like-minded disciples, including Blessed Hugh of Fosses and the quaintly-named Saint Evermode, though sadly some of them quickly died from exposure. One of the highlights of Norbert’s career was discovering the lost bones of St Ursula after a prophetic dream which told him where to dig.

But Norbert’s tough line on luxuries was not popular with everyone. A few even tried to send him early to meet his Maker.

And Norbert’s casual rags and tatters failed to impress when he arrived at Magdebourg to take up his appointment as bishop. He was driven away as a Sturdy Beggar – most embarrassing for His Excellency.

But Norbert’s new Order in their pearly-white robes had charisma when compared to most monks and friars in black, grey or brown.

Around 1130, England’s king Henry I was happy to donate to the Norbertines a plum Northumbrian plot called Blanchard, which later became Blanchland.

Nine centuries later, the snowy clerics have gone and only fragments of their abbey remain, but their name lives on the lips of everyone who pauses for a scone in Blanchland.

The local tea room is called The White Monk, and its lease is up for sale.

The White Monk tea room in the village square, with its paired lancet windows and steeply pitched roof, has a medieval, chapel-like air about it, probably thanks to its designer Samuel Sanders Teulon.

SS Teulon has been called the “rogue architect” of the mid-Victorian era, and he set his gothic stamp on houses and churches up and down the country, leaving them bristling with ribs, spires, arches and columns.

Teulon did some work for the royal residence at Sandringham, and closer to home he designed the whole village of Hunstanworth – just over the Tynedale border into County Durham – in 1863.

But he built in Blanchland first, around 1851.

Teulon’s brief from the Lord Crewe Trust was to provide a school, but he could not resist making the building like a little chapel – cross-shaped, with all the windows and doors tall and pointed, and topped off with a churchly wooden bellcote (removed in the 1970s) to call the faithful to the chalkface.

Blanchland School may have looked charming but it contained a tough regime. No kiss-chase in the playground at Blanchland!

Boys and girls had to enter the school from separate doors and were taught in single-sex groups. And of course there were separate boys’ and girls’ privies – built on the chilly north side of the school and without doors to their cubicles until 1949!

The local education authority refused to stump up cash for such luxuries, so the Lord Crewe Trust was forced to find the money. They drew the line at newfangled flushing toilets, though. The pupils of Blanchland made do with earth closets until 1960.

They mostly coped with Tilley lamps for lighting too, though electricity was connected to the school in 1953.

Conditions at the school may have been spartan, but the post of Blanchland’s head teacher seems to have been popular.

It is not known how much the salary was in 1886 when William Southern was the village schoolmaster, but by 1903 the weekly pay was £6 three shillings and fourpence a week – £441 today – and a rise of £5 was in the offing.

Controversy brewed in Blanchland in 1922, when the powers-that-be wanted to replace their headmaster with a headmistress because the school had fewer than 40 pupils.

It would mean the end of gardening classes... impossible! The local Trust fought for two years before caving-in and accepting a lady head.

By 1936, a man was back at the blackboard. Mr Bowman taught at Blanchland until 1948, when Miss Chisholm took over and stayed for 22 years. In the 1970s came Mrs Swailes and Mr Batey.

Mrs Richards was Blanchland’s last head in 1981, when its tiny class of nine pupils was diverted to Slaley and the village lost its school.

But more than 20 years later, the revamped building was still top of the class.

Blanchland’s new White Monk Tea Room in the Old School was short-listed for the 2005 Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) North-East Building of the Year award.

l The lease of the White Monk tea room in the Old School at Blanchland is on the market with the Newcastle office of restaurant agents, Christie & Co.