Exham Priory

Exham Priory is a fictional location in England that features prominently in the H. P. Lovecraft short story "The Rats in the Walls". In the story, it is the ancestral home of the De la Poer family, whose last surviving heir restores it and moves there following World War I. It is located some three miles from the equally fictional village of Anchester.
Lovecraft describes Exham prior to its restoration as "a jumble of tottering mediaeval ruins covered with lichens and honeycombed with rooks’ nests, perched perilously upon a precipice, and denuded of floors or other interior features save the stone walls of the separate towers."
==History==
Lovecraft writes, "Exham Priory stood on the site of a prehistoric temple; a Druidical or ante-Druidical thing which must have been contemporary with Stonehenge"--which was constructed between 3000 and 2000 BCE. In its earliest recorded incarnation, "indescribable rites had been celebrated there."
These rites continued when the Roman Empire conquered Britain beginning in 43 CE, and Exham became a temple of Cybele, "the Magna Mater whose dark worship was once vainly forbidden to Roman citizens." This temple "was splendid and thronged with worshippers who performed nameless ceremonies at the bidding of a Phrygian priest." (Phrygia is a region in Asia Minor, now Turkey.) Inscriptions evoking Cybele were visible in the priory's sub-cellar into the 20th century. The "orgies at the temple" continued unchanged after Rome officially Christianized in 380 CE.
Nor did the collapse of the Empire change Exham: "Saxons added to what remained of the temple, and gave it the essential outline it subsequently preserved, making it the centre of a cult feared through half the heptarchy"--referring to the period between the 5th and 9th centuries CE. Around 1000 CE, a chronicle calls it "a substantial stone priory housing a strange and powerful monastic order".
In 1261, after an apparent decline in its power, Exham was granted by Henry III to Gilbert de la Poer, First Baron Exham. Though the family had an unblemished reputation before that point, by 1307 a chronicler refers to a de la Poer as “cursed of God”. The de la Poers built a castle on the foundations of the temple and priory, and village legend recalls villagers occasionally disappearing into it over generations. It was believed that "a legion of bat-winged devils kept Witches’ Sabbath each night at the priory" at this time. 
One notable de la Poer of the era was Lady Margaret Trevor from Cornwall, who married Godfrey de la Poer, the second son of the fifth baron; she was "a favourite bane of children all over the countryside, and the daemon heroine of a particularly horrible old ballad not yet extinct near the Welsh border". Another was Lady Mary de la Poer, who soon after her marriage to the Earl of Shrewsfield was murdered by her husband and mother-in-law, to the approval of their confessor.
The tenure of the de la Poers at Exham came to an end c. 1610, during the time of James I (who reigned from 1603 to 1625), when Walter de la Poer, with the assistance of four servants, killed all other residents of the castle and the fled to Virginia. Subsequently a hoard of rats emerged from the abandoned castle and ravaged the countryside.
Some 300 years later, the last descendant of the de la Poers, a Mr. Delapore of Bolton, Massachusetts, bought the priory and restored it, moving in on July 16, 1923. After Delapore's breakdown on August 7 and his apparent murder of Edward Norrys, a friend of his late son, Exham Priory was destroyed by explosives and its foundations obliterated.
==In other works==
*In The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, by Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill, Exham Priory is one of the historical British locations mentioned in the New Traveller's Almanac.
Category:Locations Originating From Lovecraft Circle Works
Category:Structures