Simon White Returns 3 Tiles to English Heritage After 60 Years
Simon White returned three 700-year-old floor tile fragments to english heritage after keeping them for nearly 60 years. He took the pieces as a 9-year-old while visiting Wenlock Priory with his family in the 1960s.
White later found the red clay fragments in an old toffee tin while sorting through his belongings at 68 years old. He said a family diary let him pinpoint one day in 1967 and connect the tiles to the Shropshire priory.
Wenlock Priory Tiles
White said, “So I read them again … and I was able to pinpoint one day in 1967, a summer’s day, when we came to Wenlock Priory. And I thought, ‘This has got to be the best bet.’” He also said, “Of course, back then there was no visitor center or CCTV, and you could wander around these places willy-nilly, for free.”
He described the theft directly: “[My father] literally stood over me while actively encouraging me to take these tiles; I stole three of them—which, in hindsight, was a dreadful thing to do.”
English Heritage Return
White contacted english heritage after identifying where the tiles came from. Matty Cambridge said the organization was “thrilled to see the safe return of these pieces of history.”
Cambridge added: “Tiles of these designs are only known at Haughmond Abbey, Bridgnorth Friary and Wenlock Priory and would have been locally made in Shropshire.” That narrow group of surviving examples is what let the fragments be linked back to Wenlock Priory.
Wenlock Priory Provenance
The priory was founded more than 1,300 years ago as an Anglo-Saxon monastery and refounded in the 11th century as a Cluniac monastery. Monks from La Charité-sur-Loire, France, replaced the Anglo-Saxon church with a new abbey between 1225 and 1260, and White’s tiles belong to the floor of the 13th-century church and library.
For White, the return closes a decades-long mistake and puts three fragments back where they belonged. For English Heritage, the pieces now sit with the site rather than in a household tin.
