Windows into England's Past

Been feeling a bit blah, but I'm on the mend, in fact, practically as good as new!  With the blazing weather we've been having, I'm glad not to be cycling all day, and it's been really nice doing absolutely nothing in London.

In the idle moments,  I've been looking through my photos, and see how I keep coming back to pictures of parish churches.  I'm not particularly religious, but for me the fascination of these churches is the startlingly authentic glimpses they can give into life in the past. Yes, The Past, that foreign country when the same sun shone upon the same places, but the world was so very different ....

(Here's the parish church at Aldbourne, Wilts, presiding over a fete on the village green).

Parish churches can easily date back to a thousand years on the same site, and although they've usually been changed drastically over that time, some things do hint at great age. Huge yew trees, for instance, traditionally a sacred plant, are very long lived.   Many modern churches don't think to plant them, but an old church will usually have them, harking back to times of pagan tree worship, and their dark, often-clipped shapes are very characteristic.  Here are the steps leading up to the yews at sunset in Shobdon, Shropshire.

You don't always find a church that tells its history quite as much as that of Covehythe, in Suffolk.  Here, when Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries, the local people acquired a bit of old abbey to use as their church. But they couldn't look after it, and built a smaller, humbler church inside the grand abbey ruins.   Can you see it, with its rustic thatched roof, behind those grand ruined windows?     It's an unusual sight, and will one day be covered by the sea, as the coast at Covehythe is being eaten away and the road past the church now ends at a cliff top.

You'll often find bequest and charity boards hidden away in church towers, like these, in Turville, Bucks. which not only details benefactions to the church itself but also to the local poor.

Looking after the poor was an important duty of the church.Here, in Nynehead, Somerset, is the churchyard's "poor table."     Offerings for the poor of the parish, or sometimes poor travellers, would have been laid out here. Poor travellers needed to show a certificate to say they were being sent back to their home parish, which  generally meant they had been "deported" for their own folk to look after them.  How glad some of them must have been to be directed to this stone.

Usually the church is either next to or actually in the grounds of the local "Big House" where the lord of the manor lived, as here, also at Nynehead.

There will usually be imposing monuments to the important families who lived at the Big House.My favourite monuments are usually the highly realistic Elizabethan ones.  I feel I might recognise this man if he bounced through the door - brisk, clever, a bit arrogant but full of life would be my judgment, which is a strange thing to say about someone who's dead. He's hidden away in what looks like the broom cupboard of the church at Pitminster, by the way - and I do wonder why!

You'll also see coats of arms, hatchments, hung in many old churches, like these up in the roof in Clandon, East Sussex.  These painted boards would have been hung over the door of an important person's house after he died, and they show his coat of arms.   After a decent interval, the might be put into the church for permanent display.



Sometimes you also see Royal coats of arms, which might represent the village's political views, though this one in Culmstock, Devon, from 1800, is probably just loyal. I think it's a beautiful bit of folk art.

There are often odd carvings on church pew ends or, as here, on misericords under the choirstall seats. Misericords are often subversive and mischievous and may show comic scenes of domestic life or  people getting up to no good, although I think this character, in Faversham, Kent, is only having a bite to eat and a drink.

Many very old churches were modernised by the Victorians and their quaint features removed.  Even so, I don't despise the Victorians and those who came after.  Anyone who has visited one of my favourite churches, in Huntingfield, Suffolk, can't fail to be overwhelmed by the roof which took 23 years to paint by its creator, Mildred Holland, the wife of a Victorian vicar. This is just a tiny part of it.

The parish church will also hold examples of modern work - these horse-themed kneelers from St. Ippolytts  in Hertfordshire, refer to the church's most unusual Horse Blessing service every year.

I could go on, and on. But I won't, because I don't like making my posts too long.   The fact is that there is SO MUCH interesting stuff in English parish churches, and such a variety of it,  if you care to look and find out about it.  You could spend a lifetime on it, and some people do.  

I know how expensive these old buildings are to maintain and the burden of it falls upon the villagers, and so I always give a donation every time I visit a parish church.   I feel this is part of our heritage that is worth paying for.