Description
What is a “stabmonk”. The short answer is someone from Chalvey, today a part of Slough, but once a village in its own right. But simply living in Chalvey doesn’t make you a “stabmonk”. Not even being born there does that or I should be one myself since I was born in Ledgers Lane on the eastern edge of Chalvey.
To be a “stabmonk” one must have been born in the village proper, and of stock that has lived there as long as anyone can remember, and to have fallen or been pushed into the Chalvey Brook.
The Chalvey Stab Monk itself, after which the villagers are named, is a painted plaster figure of a monkey, around which legends and ceremonies have collected, and which used to be kept in the village and brought out on occasions to be paraded about the streets. The earliest printed reference to the Stab Monkey occurs in an 1865 issue of the Windsor and Eton Express.
Details
- Title of journal: Berkshire Old and New
- Article title: The Chalvey Stab Monk.
- Author: Michael Bayley
- Year: 1992
- Volume: Number 9
- Pages: 5-12
- Identifier: ISSN 0264-9950