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Thursday 13 February 2014

Knebworth - SS Mary & Thomas of Canterbury

SS Mary & Thomas of Canterbury appears to be inaccessible when Knebworth House is closed - the two approach roads I found were signed "Private Road no Access" and the church website anyway says that "Unfortunately, due to a recent spate of malicious damage, break-ins, and theft, we have had to take the difficult decision to keep St. Mary's church locked except for when there are services or other events in the church".

Their website does, however, offer contact numbers for non service visits (which is a bit useless if you haven't done previous research) and the Knebworth House Access Statement says that you can make an appointment to visit via the Estate Office prior to visiting.

I've marked it up as a revisit but I'm not sure I can be bothered to jump through the hoops required to gain access - if it was open alongside the house, which seems to me to be a perfectly reasonable expectation, it would be a no brainer.

ST MARY AND ST THOMAS. The church stands in the grounds of Knebworth House, everywhere surrounded by fields but within a stone’s throw of the front terrace of the mansion. The exterior attractive owing to its position but architecturally insignificant: nave, chancel, C15 tower (diagonal buttresses, SE stair-turret higher than the tower, and spike), N chancel chapel (Lytton Chapel) added c. 1705 to house the new sumptuous family monuments. The interior has a low Norman chancel arch with one order of scalloped colonnettes and a blocked Norman chancel N window. - ALTAR TABLE. C18 on classical columns. - PULPIT. C18 with carved panels of Flemish origin; one of them dated 1567. - BENCHES. C15, of plain solid profile. - IRON GATES to the Lytton Chapel designed by Lutyens, also one of c. 1705 under the tower arch. This was originally in the arch between chancel and Lytton Chapel and is of excellent quality. - STAINED GLASS. Three-light window in S wall by Clayton & Bell, c. 1875. - PLATE. Chalice, C17; Paten, 1668. - MONUMENTS. The Lytton Chapel contains the most remarkable display of family pride in the county. The chapel is really far too small to hold the three marble tombs put up in it between 1705 and 1710. On the N and S walls Sir William Lytton d. 1705 and Sir George Strode d. 1707. These two are both by Edward Stanton whose signature on the former is almost too prominent. Both men are represented semi-reclining; they are stout and wear wigs, and their clothes are meticulously portrayed. They tell of much self-confidence and worldly success. Both monuments have reredos backgrounds, the former with detached columns, the latter with pilasters. The former, moreover, has life-size allegories standing outside the columns, which carry a coffered segmental arch. On the W wall is the monument to Lytton Lytton d. 1710, obviously by a different hand and the sign of a change in taste (Mrs Esdaile suggests Thomas Green): more classical and a little less Baroque (e.g. fluted pilasters instead of columns). Mr Lytton stands in the centre, a more than life-size portly figure, against an arched niche. - In the same chapel are Brasses to Roland Lytton d. 1582 and his two wives, a tablet to Anne Lytton d. 1601, with pretty thin ribbon-work on pilasters and frieze, and the epitaph to William Robinson Lytton Strode d. 1732 and his wife, two stiff kneeling figures facing a sarcophagus with a relief of allegorical putti, and another relief above. - This monument is signed by John Annis. - But the highest aesthetic quality and certainly the most discriminating taste is not to be found in the chapel but in the chancel: the epitaph to Judith Strode d. 1662: a surprisingly Roman looking frontal bust without any frills and furbeloes of dress, set against a background of black marble as noble in shape and sophisticated in detail as any by the Florentine Mannerists of the C16. - Also in the chancel Brass to Simon Bache d. 1414, priest, frontal with figures of saints in the orphreys of his cope.

SS Mary & Thomas

Knebworth. Modern Knebworth on the Great North Road has a church on the hillside, reached by an avenue of limes, designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens, with great eaves overhanging the brick walls, and an unusual interior with many pillars and arches, two huge pillars at the crossing reaching to the roof.

Written in Domesday Book as Cheneepeworde, old Knebworth, a mile to the west, has an old church in the 260-acre park, looking from its lawn to the great house with its medley of towers and domed turrets, famous for its beautiful grounds and as the home of Bulwer-Lytton and his ancestors. There have been Lyttons at Knebworth for over four centuries. Many of them sleep in the church, but the most famous of them earned his resting-place in Westminster Abbey.

Beginning as a simple nave and chancel in the 12th century, the church received its tower in 1420, the Lytton chapel 100 years later, and the porch perhaps in the 17th century; but the chapel was rebuilt about 1700 and the chancel in the 19th century. The roofs are of mellowed tiles. The nave has leaning walls, medieval windows, 15th-Century oak benches, and a roof with its old traceried trusses over the hammerbeams. In the old oak pulpit are still older Flemish panels carved with scenes in the Life of Our Lord, one on the stairway dated 1567. The font is about 1480, and one of the old rood stair doorways is blocked. The fine iron screen across the tower arch is 18th century. Still entered by a simple Norman arch, the chancel has the arch of a Norman window in the north wall, a 15th-century piscina, and a 17th-century Italian painting of the Last Supper over the altar. The Madonna and St Thomas of Canterbury, patron saints of the church, are in the west window of the tower.

Crowded with memorials, the small chapel has all the pomp that 18th-century marble monuments can give. Of three which are railed round and nearly reach the roof, one has a lavish canopy on Corinthian columns, under which Sir William Lytton of 1704 lies in his lace cravat and cuffs. In the second monument Lytton Lytton of 1710 stands on a pedestal, under a classical pediment, wearing a long, curling wig and a long, buttoned coat with a cravat; at the sides cherubs are weeping. He died at 21, having changed his surname of Strode on inheriting the estate, which at his death went to the Robinsons, his mother’s family. The third great monument shows his father, Sir George Strode of 1707, in similar dress; he sleeps at Etchingham, Sussex. Sir George’s mother was Judith Lytton, who has a memorial with her bust in the chancel; she died aged 23 in 1662, and by her floorstone is a small stone to one of her three children, with the words: Judith, the one-year-old little daughter qf Nicholas and Judith, lies next to her mother.

The three names were borne by William Robinson Lytton Strode of 1732, who kneels with his wife in a dainty monument with a sarcophagus and three children playing with an hourglass, a skull, and a serpent with its tail in its mouth - symbols of mortality and eternity. A fine brass in the chapel has portraits of Sir Rowland Lytton of 1582, his two wives in gowns with ruffs and brocaded petticoats; we read that he was a gallant leader in war and a worthy magistrate in peace. He was knighted by Elizabeth I, and entertained her at Knebworth. In the chancel is a beautiful brass portrait of a priest, Simon Bache of 1414, with rather sour expression; the engraving is deep and rich; his cope is adorned with saints, wonderful in detail, and on the clasp is the head of Our Lord.

All that is left of the tomb and brass portraits of Sir John Hotoft and his wife are three shields and a few strips of the brass inscription. Sir John, who was given the estate by Henry IV and was Treasurer of the Household of Henry VI, is said to have restored the nave and built the tower; his arms are on the west doorway. One of his daughters married Sir Richard Lytton; the other inherited Knebworth.

An inscription tells of Captain Charles Earle, who fought in the Kaffir War and at the Relief of Lucknow, and served the Lyttons for 20 years. We read of Fraser Campbell Buchanan, killed at Arras when he was 23, and see beautiful Whall glass in a window to Leslie Amott Paterson, who also fell; it shows a knight setting forth to the fight, and unbuckling his armour when it was over.

At the entrance to the chapel is a beautiful iron screen surmounted by a golden cross which bears a winged sword and has 29 stars in its 57 rays of light. Screen and cross are in memory of Viscount Knebworth, who was 29 when he was killed while flying at Hendon in 1933, when his father was 57. Designed by his uncle Sir Edwin Lutyens, the screen was made in Hatfield and the cross in London. On a silver cross on the altar in the chancel are the words, In memory qf Anthony, May 1st, 1933; an offering from his mother.

Sir Edwin designed the beautiful memorial marking the airman’s grave in a garden of remembrance to the east of the churchyard, shaded with silver birch trees. On a flat stone is carved the winged sword emblem of the Auxiliary Air Force, in which he was a pilot. The headstone is a frame for a lovely figure of a woman with her hair in long plaits and a crown of stars on her head. Holding a sphere on which is a falcon, she represents Our Lady of the Sky, sculptured by Sir William Reid Dick. Seven shields on the back of the stone include those of his parents, Eton, Magdalen College, the City of Westminster, and Hertfordshire. A stone with five cherub heads round a star, marking the grave of Annie Louisa Sleath who was “forty years friend and Nannie of the Lutyens family, was designed by Sir Edwin.

The great Tudor house Sir Robert Lytton began to build was completed during the 16th century. Its original plan was of four sides enclosing a courtyard, and so it stood till the 19th century, when three generations of the family made it the house we see. The great transformation began in 1811 with the pulling down of three wings; then came the lavish enrichment of the remaining west wing with battlements, panelled turrets crowned with copper domes, stringcourses dotted with flowers and grotesques, dragons on pinnacles, and faces and gargoyles peeping out everywhere. The south wing with its tower-gateway was added last century. The wall round the other sides of the court is adorned with quatrefoils, and dragons holding shields are on the gateposts. The grounds are delightful with spacious lawns, formal avenues of pollarded limes, and carpets of primroses, daffodils, and narcissi under trees. A great almond tree is an entrancing sight in spring. There are noble avenues in the park, and near the church is a stone mausoleum decorated with urns and crowned with a sarcophagus.

The three rooms in the house which all may see belong mostly to the old mansion. As we enter we come upon a fine bronze bust of the earl of our time, Viceroy of India. In the staircase hall is a saddle and halter embroidered in solid silver, the gift of the Emir of Afghanistan to the first earl when he, too, was Viceroy. Here is a big array of armour of Queen Elizabeth I’s day, and some from the time of Cromwell; the Dutch musical clock is about 1700. Bulwer-Lytton converted the next room into the library, and here we see the novelist’s writing-table with his ink-stand, cigar-case, and blotting-pad. First editions of his works are on the shelves, and in a case are manuscripts of The Last Days of Pompeii, The Caxtons, and My Novel, a cast of the author’s hand, and letters he received from Charles Dickens. In the same case is the manuscript of Lucile, a novel in verse written by his son, the first earl, under the name of Owen Meredith. Treasured in another case are snuff-boxes which belonged to Charles Fox and William Pitt, Lord Byron’s ruler, a crucifix of gold and pearls which belonged to Mary Queen of Scots, the ink-stand used for the signing of the treaty between Charles I and the Commissioners of the Long Parliament, and a ring with a miniature of the king. It was one of three which Charles gave to his friends on the scaffold. Furnishing the library are chairs of the time of William and Mary and Queen Anne, and a 17th-century Spanish cabinet made of tortoiseshell, ebony, ivory, and gilt metal; and there is a long wooden pipe shown in a portrait of the novelist over the mantelpiece.

By a door disguised among the shelves of books we come to the charming white drawing-room, where nothing was lovelier when we called than the window peep of the laburnum trees flowering in a corner like a shower of gold. Here we see Sir Robert, the first Lytton of Knebworth, and among other family portraits are Peter Lely’s Ruth Barrington and Sir William Robinson Norreys. Hepplewhite and Chippendale are represented among the furniture; there are two tortoiseshell and ivory English cabinets of the time of Charles II, and another Spanish one of the same century. By Daniel Maclise’s portrait of Bulwer-Lytton as a young man is a door leading to the banqueting hall, a splendid chamber with an oak ceiling, screen, and gallery from the time of James I, and rich panelling said to have been designed by Inigo Jones. Most of the furniture here is Jacobean, but includes a valuable set of 12 applewood chairs, made in the time of Charles II. Portraits include one of the Duke of Gloucester, son of Charles and Henrietta Maria. Hanging here is a banner with the Lytton arms which hung above the throne from which Lord Lytton proclaimed Queen Victoria Empress of India at the great Durbar of 1877. One of the bedrooms has a noble four-poster richly carved in oak, in which Elizabeth I is said to have slept.

The first Lord Lytton was one of the most versatile men of all time in England. He was a novelist, dramatist, and politician, and succeeded in every ambition, though not to the extent of high and lasting eminence.

He was born in London in 1803, and brought up by his mother, his father dying when the son was four years old. From childhood he wrote poetry, and was expected to become a notable man. At Cambridge he took the Chancellor’s medal for a poem on Sculpture. He found popularity in prose when he was 25 with his novel Pelham, and he needed it, for he had only inherited £200 a year from his father, and his mother, who was well-to-do, had cut him off for marrying against her wishes. That marriage was a complete failure, except that from it have followed two generations of Lyttons honourably distinguished by public service. Lytton and his clever but hysterical wife could not live together, and they separated.

He soon had an ample income from his writings. Eventually the standard edition of his novels was issued in 48 volumes. The most striking feature of this enormous production, which was spread over nearly 50 years, was its variety in character and in style. His first series of stories, beginning when Scott was nearing the end of his wonderful career and before Dickens began his, owed something to the craze of Byronism, but soon became deflected into a study of crime, not unlike the crook element in fiction a century later. It began incidentally in Pelham, and continued in Disowned, Paul Clifford, and Eugene Aram, with Paul Clifford the highwayrnan as its most typical and popular example. Then he turned to history, with an attempt to build up round a central character a picture of a succession of ages past. The Last Days qf Pompeii, Rienzi, The Last of the Barons, and Harold illustrate this phase of his progress, for progress it was. He tried drama, not unsuccessfully in The Lady qf Lyons, Richelieu, and Money, plays that have attracted the public, in later years. In poetry he essayed the satirical and the romantic, but he failed in both. He made a vicious attack on Tennyson, who was then emerging into fame, and Tennyson retorted, in a poem that is not reproduced in his collected works, and (as Andrew Lang has said) knocked Lytton out in the first round.

Lytton now turned to the staple theme of fiction, the ordinary life of the people, and wrote his best novel The Caxtons, which was followed in the same quiet spirit but not with equal success by My Navel and What Will He Do With It? Later he sought to picture society and art as he saw them towards the end of his life in France and England, in contrast with what he had known in more aristocratic days. From time to time all through his life there was a strain of the eerie and abnormal in him, and in one of his last books, The Coming Race, he experimented in imaginative prophecy. He saw mankind’s powers of catastrophic destruction ensuring peace. Such an extraordinary range of interest in so many books could hardly be sustained, and Lytton, especially in his early periods, was often extravagant and melodramatic. He was adept in following popular fashions, and so failed in creating a style of his own. Though unquestionably clever, he never crossed the boundary line of greatness.

He sat in Parliament as a Whig for ten years and was offered a lordship of the Admiralty, but declined it. In 1852 he returned to Parliament as a Conservative, and was decidedly successful as a speaker. He served as Secretary for the Colonies, and was made a peer as Baron Lytton. Thrice he was elected Rector of Glasgow University. He died at Torquay in his 70th year.

Tuesday 11 February 2014

St Pauls Walden

Did I say that Offley was my favourite church of the day? No I didn't, I just checked but had it been open it almost certainly would have been, and so the title goes to All Saints which pipped Offley by being very open. To be honest I think the fantastic Georgian chancel makeover here would have tipped it in All Saints favour anyway but not being able to compare the two it's hard to say.

Great location with stunning views, a pleasing, if not Suffolk fireworks, for Herts an indoor fireworks exterior and there's a bit of everything inside - particularly the chancel screen, the Hugh Easton E window (not to everyone's taste but for me it worked) and a Christopher Webb window alongside a C14 Madonna & Child in the south aisle; what's not to like? It's definitely, to date, in the top five of the county.

ALL SAINTS. A sizeable, low, all embattled flint church. The W tower not high, with a higher SE stair-turret and angle buttresses. The N wall of the nave is so thick as to suggest an older age than the early C14 windows. The S aisle arcade of five bays has octagonal piers also with early C14 capitals and double-chamfered arches. Of the windows only one (with Kentish tracery) goes with that date. The others are Perp, as are the upper portions of the tower and the nave clerestory and also the S chancel chapel (see its blocked arcade to the chancel, with stone piers consisting of semi-octagonal shafts in the main axis and hollows in the diagonals).

The chancel itself is the great surprise of the church. It was remodelled in 1727 by Edward Gilbert of Bury Street, London, and The Bury, St Paul’s Walden. It is separated from the nave by a gorgeous, if decidedly worldly, screen with columns, carrying bits of entablature and arches, and candelabra on top of the cornice. Inside, the chancel is vaulted and stuccoed. On the S wall is a very discreet memorial to the founder, a relief of an urn with putti and E. G., Obiit 1762. - FONT. Octagonal, Perp, with frieze of leaves and embattled top. - SCREEN. Two sections of one light each, l. and r. of the entrance. Each light has a depressed ogee arch and some tiny Perp ‘panelling’ above. - STAINED GLASS. A beautiful Virgin of the early C14 in the tower W window. The figure of the Virgin is mostly brown and olive-green, the child is clothed in red. - E window (Strathmore Memorial Window) by Hugh Easton, 1946. - PLATE. Flagon and Standing Paten, 1680. - MONUMENT. H. Stapleford d. 1631 and wife, small epitaph with the usual kneeling figures (S chapel, W wall).

C18th Chancel screen

C14th BVM (5)

Pulpit

St Paul’s Walden. It is a proud little place, with a distinction never dreamed of when our century began. As long as we live we must remember August 4. as a tragic day, the day of the beginning of the Great War, but it was on the last August 4 in the 19th century that the church bells here were ringing for a happy event with a significance that none could have imagined then.

A little daughter was born at the great house of Walden Bury to the Earl and Countess of Strathmore. One daughter had been born to them 18 years before, Violet Hyacinth Bowes-Lyon. She lived here through her happy childhood, a girl as beautiful as the hyacinths and violets that inspired her name, and when she was 11I years old, in 1893, they laid her in this churchyard. There is a tablet on the wall within showing two small figures holding a wreath.

Seven years passed, and there was born in this same house another daughter, Elizabeth Angela Marguerite. She, too, grew up here through her happy childhood, baptised at the same font as her sister, kneeling in this little church to say her childish prayers, riding her pony through the long avenue that leads to the church from her father’s house. “Lord bless you, I can see her now,” said one of the old villagers, “galloping across with the groom behind all out of breath, and her laughing.”

There was a sad day in her life in 1930 when she stood by the grave of the sister she had never known and saw her brother John laid there to rest. But seven years before that there had been a happy day when she married the Duke of York, and in seven years to come there was to be a day of dazzling glory, for Elizabeth Angela Marguerite Bowes-Lyon was crowned Queen of England in Westminster Abbey. She has unveiled a tablet recording the fact that in this parish she was born, and in this church she was baptised and worshipped.

The church stands with the cottages about it on high ground, approached by a long avenue of great trees from the hamlet of Whitwell on the borders of the River Maran. (We should see the village hall at Whitwell, for it has a timbered storey with 17th-century dormer windows.) The village has two fine parks, Stagenhoe, with 130 acres crossed by avenues of limes and chestnuts and adorned with a great lake, and Walden Bury, with the avenue running to the church where the Queen Mother used to ride her pony. The church is 600 years old, with a bold square tower and a lofty nave; there is an old stone coflin in the shadow of the tower; the gravestone of John Bowes-Lyon in a corner of the churchyard; a gravestone with an aeroplane carved on it in memory of Rodney Clarkson; and a cross with a Calvary in memory of Tristram Valentine, a vicar here, the cross being the last work designed by the famous architect G. F. Bodley.

Though the church is mainly 14th century, the chancel was rebuilt in 1727. It has a barrel roof, and a round arch which is nearly filled by a striking classical screen of the 18th century. Between the aisle and the chapel is a more modest screen with delightful Tudor ornament. The fine pulpit matches the 18th-century screen. The font is 15th century, and near it is a 14th-century coffin lid. In a big table tomb lies Peter Nicol, a clerk in the household of George III, and on the wall of the nave is a monument decorated with war trophies to Captain Fothergill, who fought with Wellington in the Peninsular Campaign, “the first in danger, in retreat the last.” High on the wall of the chapel is a quaint 17th-century monument of Henry Stapleford and his wife, facing each other as they kneel at a prayer desk, with a little daughter holding a skull behind her mother. Henry was an oflicial of the households of Queen Elizabeth I and the first two Stuart kings. The east window of the chapel has the Annunciation, but the most interesting glass in the church is a fragment in rich yellow and crimson; it is 600 years old, and is in a little window of the tower. There are six bells in the tower, one the Coronation bell subscribed for by the villagers.

Kings Walden

There are some churches that no sooner than you have walked through the lychgate, and quite often as soon as you have parked your car or bicycle, you just know are going to be LNK and St Mary was one such; which is a shame as it's an attractive building in an attractive spot. That the interior doesn't sound very interesting - according to Pevsner* (I suspect the Victorian restoration was probably harsh) - is neither here nor there, I'd liked to have gained access if only for the Burne-Jones window.

ST MARY. Flint with stone dressings. Externally, including the W tower with angle-buttresses and a SE stair-turret, mostly C15 and C19 restoration (by Eden Nesfield & Norman Shaw, 1868). The only remarkable exception is the NE vestry of brick with three-light Perp windows. This belongs to the early C17. But inside the N and S arcade reveal a much older age. They are of the early C13, proof (just like those at Kimpton) of the long survival of Transitional forms into the E.E. style. For the short circular piers have capitals with slightly decorated scallops as well as a variety of water-leaf and also with stiff-leaf in two tiers. The arches are double-chamfered. The chancel arch looks late C13. The chancel windows are all renewed. - SCREEN. Two two-light sections on each side of the entrance. Each light has as its tracery an ogee arch and tiny Perp panelling above. - STAINED GLASS, S window by William Morris, 1867. Three arch-angels, wonderfully clear and fresh in the design; none of the mannerism of most Burne-Jones figures yet. The memorial tablet which goes with the window also evidently by Morris. How noble and susceptible to the nature of the glass-painter’s material does such a window appear, if one compares it with other Victorian stained glass, even the work of a man like Kempe (see, for example, his E window of 1901). - PLATE. Tankard, 1736.

* Mee is more enthusiastic however he very rarely does anything but wax lyrical; the more I read The King's England the more I find him a jingoistic hagiographer.

Gargoyle (8)

St Mary (4)

King’s Walden. It has hills rolling round it, and, having a royal name, it has a king and a queen to help to bear up the roof of its ancient church. They represent the unhappy Henry VI and his tragic wife Margaret of Anjou, and are set above the 700-year-old arcades which rest on capitals sculptured by the Normans. The church, which is mainly 15th century with an early 17th-century brick vestry, has a charming 15th-century screen, delightfully painted and equally beautiful on both sides, with exquisite tracery and elaborate little ornaments (some of them tiny gilded heads) picked out in reds and greens against a background of black and white. Keeping this lovely screen company is a modern oak figure of St George slaying the dragon, in memory of the men who did not come back. In the Jacobean vestry is a panelled screen in memory of Thomas Harrison, a shipowner who died in 1916, and the beautiful east window of the Crucifixion is in memory of his wife. They rest together in the shadow of the 14th-century tower, having been brought here from their beautiful home behind the church. The house stands among great trees with acres of gardens, being on the site of an Elizabethan house in which lived many of the Hales family who are remembered in the church.

About a mile away is the hamlet of Breachwood Green, where the Baptist Chapel has a pulpit made and dated in 1658, the year of Cromwell’s death. John Bunyan preached from it.

Preston

I'm not sure why I included St Martin, built in 1900 and utterly without merit, which was LNK.

Pevsner has nothing to say about the village but an online description I found reads “A simple little building set in a formal churchyard, with curiously domestic details reminiscent of C.F.A. Voysey (a prominent turn-of-the-century architect). With a pebble-dashed exterior, steep slate roof and plain nave windows between battered buttresses linked by segmental arches. At the west end is a stumpy towerlet with a gable for bells.”

St Martin (3)

Preston. It has a delightful green with fine elms and a churchyard with four avenues of cypresses, but its attractive church belongs to our own time. In it is an interesting witness to the days when a house of the Knights Templars stood here, founded in the reign of King Stephen by Bernard de Baliol, ancestor of the founder of Qxford’s famous college. The Knights Hospitallers succeeded to the Knights Templars, and held the house until the break-up of the monasteries by Henry VIII, who gave it to his secretary of state, Sir Ralph Sadler. His family held the house till Queen Anne’s day, when the present manor house of Temple Dinsley was set up on the site.

The witness of those days which we find in the church is the lid of a stone coffin with a long-stemmed cross carved in relief upon it. It was dug up with other coffin lids and with human fragments, and there is no doubt that it covered one of the ancient knights. His name is unknown, but all the world knows the name of a humbler soldier of Christ who came this way, for John Bunyan would often come to preach in a dell in Wain Wood, half a mile north of the village. Not far away are the ruins of Minsden Chapel, a 14th-century fabric abandoned for nearly three centuries.

Castle Farm is interesting because it is said to be the site of a home of Lawrence Sterne’s Uncle Toby. It is declared that this famous character in Tristam Shandy was drawn from Captain Robert Hind, whom Preston folk knew as the General. Here he would disturb his neighbours by firing a battery of guns rigged up on the terrace of his castle, which he fitted with portholes, turrets, and a portcullis, and he would parade the terrace with friends and children dressed in scarlet uniforms with blue sashes.

St Ippolyts

Sympathetically rebuilt in 1879 using the old materials St Ippolyts is lovely although perhaps the most unusual thing here is its dedication (there's only one other in England). Named after Saint Hippolytus, but whether or not that was the historical St Hippolytus of Rome, a third century theologian, the legendary St Hippolyts of Pronto supposed to have been torn apart by horses or the equally legendary St Hippolytes of Rome, a soldier martyr, is open to conjecture.

ST IPPOLYTS. On an eminence above the houses of the village. Rebuilt in 1879 with careful re-use of the old materials. Low W tower with much set-off angle buttresses. Nave and aisles with gabled N porch with decorated outer doorway (niches to 1. and r. and above) and S porch of brick and timber. Windows in the chancel and S aisle and a doorway in the N aisle are clearly of the early C14 (see the Dec window). The nave arcades belong to the same date. They are cut into a much older wall and have double-chamfered arches. The inner voussoirs rest on remarkable broad-faced, broad-haired C14 heads. The chancel arch is C15, but the Piscina shows that the S wall at least must be E.E. - SCREEN. Only bits are old. - PLATE. Chalice, 1634; Paten, 1639. - MONUMENTS. Brass of 1594 with small kneeling figures (chancel). - Effigy of a priest, C14 (recess in S aisle).

Alice Hughes 1594 (2)

C14 priest

Ippollitts. Everyone must wonder at its curious name, which is said to be explained by the church on the top of the hill, one of only two in England dedicated to St Hippolytus. He was a 3rd-century martyr and a doctor of horses, and the story goes that sick horses were led into this village church in the hope of a miraculous cure. Most of the church, with its little lead-covered spire, is 14th century, but part of an early Norman window and an arch carved by the earliest English builders are left where the arcades were cut in the old nave walls. It was in the 14th century that this was done, when the stone figure of a priest was laid in a recess. The timbers of the south porch are 15th century, and the central arch of the chancel screen is from the same time. From the 16th century are the brass portraits of Ryce and Alice Hughes, with their three children all kneeling in handsome Elizabethan dress. Some of the old corbels remain with new ones keeping them company, and the old font is in use after 700 years. A lady of our own day, Anne Fletcher, is remembered by a bright window picturing Dorcas with some poor cottagers. A few hundred yards to the south of the village is a little hamlet called Red Coats Green, to which Charles Dickens and 12,000 other people made pilgrimage last century with the morbid desire of seeing a poor madman called Lucas the Hermit. Dickens told his story in All the Year Round, but it is a pitiful tale of one who in these days is taken care of instead of being made a public curiosity and it is better forgotten.

At Ippollitts in 1941 they laid to rest Lord Lloyd, one of the most vigorous of our empire statesmen, a fearless soldier and wise administrator, with a wide experience of the East.

Offley

A very odd jumble of styles and ages which, to my eye, leads to an attractive building, St Mary Magdalene was firmly locked with no keyholder - this is plainly not always the case as chained away in the south porch was an open church sign. It being kept locked is a crime since the interior sounds even more interesting than the exterior, particularly the Georgian chancel.

ST MARY MAGDALENE. Nave and aisles are medieval, built of flint and stone, and now cemented. The W tower is early C19 brick with typical Gothick windows Of that date (e.g. quatrefoils); the chancel was remodelled c. 1750. It is the great surprise of the church, externally of Portland stone with square, pyramid-covered angle pinnacles, no S or N windows at all and only one lancet at the E end. Its interior will be viewed after that of the nave. This with its arcades of four bays must be - c. 1230; that is, the piers are octagonal, on shallow Attic bases, and have capitals of individual upright stiff leaves as well as the usual stiff-leaf formations. The arches are double-chamfered. In the S porch a contemporary window or small opening (Piscina?) is re-used. - FONT. A most interesting C14 piece, stone, polygonal, with tracery panels of which some are still entirely flowing, but others equally clearly Perp. So the date must be second half C14, and an unexpectedly long survival of Dec forms is proved. - BENCHES. C15, of simple, usual outlines, buttressed. - TILES. Two in the S aisle wall with C14 or C15 patterns and an inscription of 1777 that they were found in that year ‘which proves that King Offa was buried here’. The name Offley was supposed to come from Offa, and the tiles were regarded as Anglo-Saxon work. - PLATE. A fine set presented in 1730. - MONUMENTS. Brasses to John Sawmel d. 1529 with two wives and son and to an unknown man with three wives and nine sons, also early C16 (both N aisle). - Spectacular monument in the S aisle to Sir John Spencer d. 1699, big standing wall monument with reredos background. Semi-reclining figure in wig and contemporary clothes and at his feet a Roman matronly kneeling figure with one hand raised, talking to Sir John. Two putti with crown and palm branch above. A piece of the first order, variously attributed by Mrs Esdaile to E. Stanton and Nost. - Epitaph to William Chamber d. 1728, by William Palmer; no figures but good ornamentation.

The chancel of Offley church has to be treated separately. It was rebuilt or remodelled by Sir Thomas Salusbury c. 1750. It has a broad stuccoed chancel arch, a roof altered and provided with a skylight later, and an apse with a draped baldacchino and hanging-down drapes round the E window. On the S wall Sir Thomas Salusbury d. 1773 and his wife, uncle and aunt of Mrs Thrale, have their own monument, very pretentious and self-confident, with the over-life-size standing figure of Sir Thomas and Lady S. Tradition has it that theirs was a romantic story of a troth long kept. They were parted but in the end united. In the background in relief a rather vulgarly detailed tree with big drapes hanging off it. Grey background and a grey sarcophagus. The monument was made by Nollekens in 1777, who also did the busts of Samuel Burroughs (father-in—law of a Salusbury) d. 1761 and of Mrs Maude (friend of Dame Sarah Salusbury) d. 1796 in the chancel arch, and another (unsigned) bust on the S wall (William Offley d. 1789). - Other monuments in the chancel chronologically: Sir Henry Penrice d. 1752, and his son, excellent allegorical figure against a pink obelisk with a medallion with the profiles of father and son. Signed by Sir Robert Taylor (‘invent et sculpr”) on the drapery. - Sir T. R. Salusbury d. 1835, bust by T. Smith. - Two memorials by Sanders, 1847 and 1855.

St Mary Magdalene (2)

LOCKED

Offley. It may be that the village owes its name to Offa, King of Mercia. Matthew Paris says he died in his palace here, but tradition probably goes too far when it tells us that his bones were laid in the stone coffin now lying in the church. Here are thatched cottages and an inn 300 years old, and more than twice that age is the church among the trees of Ofliey Place, where Dr Johnson’s Mrs Thrale stayed as a child with her uncle, Sir Thomas Salusbury. Sir Thomas rebuilt the chancel of the church c. 1750, where his huge marble monument by Nollekens matches the black sarcophagus (with a statue of Truth) of another 18th-century judge, Sir Henry Penrice. The two monuments are too heavy for the old church, as the old roof was, for its weight tilted the 13th century pillars with their beautiful capitals. The nave and both the aisles are 13th century, with later windows and doorways, the north aisle retaining fragments of 14th-century glass, and a record of the consecration of its altar a year or two after the Battle of Agincourt. The judge’s chancel, though square outside, is apsed inside. The tower was made new last century.

There are 16th-century brass portraits of John Samwell, with his two wives and a son, and one of a nameless man with three wives and nine sons. There are some good 15th-century benches, and a grand tomb of 1699 on which Sir John Spencer reclines stiffly in stone in Roman dress, a lady kneeling at his feet. But the treasure of the church is the font, one of the most beautiful in Hertfordshire. Within rose-tipped arches round the bowl a 14th-century mason carved the favourite patterns of window tracery of his day, and a Jacobean craftsman gave the font its cover.

Lilley

An utterly bland, except perhaps for the curiously place SW tower, Victorian built church St Peter is at least militantly open. I struggled to find much of interest inside but the location is good.

ST PETER, 1870-1, by Thomas Jekyll, the Japan enthusiast who designed the woodwork for Whistler’s Peacock Room. Of this un-Victorian sense of romance and delicacy the E.E. exterior of Lilley church betrays nothing (except perhaps for the brick and stone chequerwork parapet to the SW tower). On entering, however, one is puzzled by the fact that the porch under the tower is red-brick lined. The church itself is flint. Otherwise only a few indications of anything out of the ordinary run of churches. The chancel, for example, is not paved with red and yellow Minton or Maw encaustic tiles, as one might expect, but with tiles in two shades of soft green with an occasional sang-de-boeuf. The chancel ceiling is handsomely painted. Of the medieval church one feature remains: the plain Norman N arch in the chancel. It is of red stone, unmoulded, on the simplest imposts.

The real never ceases to be

Shield (1)

Lilley. Rupert Brooke knew it well and brings it into one of his poems; here he would walk when he was at Cambridge University, by

The Roman road to Wendover,
By Tring and Lilley H00.

A rampant lion raises it head on cottage wall and gatepost, the crest of the Docwra family who lived in the fine park of Putteridge Bury generations ago. All that is left of the church they knew is the Norman chancel arch which has been reset in the chancel wall, the linen-fold panels and the old oak of the pulpit, which came from St John’s College, Cambridge, the piscina, and the 15th-century font at which were baptised a 17th-century curate’s two sons, John and James Janeway. John was a mathematical genius; James seemed at one time something like a rival to John Bunyan. They built a chapel for him in Jamaica Row at Rotherhithe, and there he preached while plague and persecution were rife, escaping both to die of consumption in 1674.

Today he is a literary curiosity, and it is almost incredible to read the books he wrote; yet for generations he was Bunyan’s only rival as an author for children. The moral blight that spread through England with the Restoration brought its reaction, and for a time there was a fashion in such books as James Janeway’s, one of which was called by the terrible title, A Token for Children, Being an Account of the Conversion, Holy and Exemplary Lives, and Joyful Deaths of Several Young Children. It was the book that upright parents gave their little ones in those days. To the parents the author would say, “Your child is never too little to go to hell,” and to the children he would warn them to pray and weep by themselves.

His heroes and heroines all die, monuments of piety and virtue, at the tenderest age, and William Godwin (Shelley’s father-in-law) who was brought up on the book, declared that he was so fired to emulation by their example that he felt willing to die with them “if I could with equal success engage the admiration of my friends and mankind.” A six-year-old Janeway hero whose brothers had not said grace before the meal asks them, “Dare you do this? God be merciful to us, this bit of bread might choke us.” He and others make a perfect end, and the author asks his little readers, “Are you like these children? Are you willing to go to hell to be burned with the devil and his angels?” A little girl in the book, surveying herself in a mirror, cries:

What a pity such a pretty maid
As I should go to hell.

It is terrible, but it is English, and the children who read this Janeway book created our Augustan age of literature and played their parts in building up the British Empire.

Hexton

St Faith was submerged in a sea of scaffolding and was, naturally locked. It's undergoing an apparently major restoration and I've marked it as a revisit although I'm not totally convinced that it would be rewarding.

ST FAITH. Early C19, except for some details of nave and W tower. The latter has recently partly collapsed. The nave piers are circular on the S, quatrefoil on the N side. Can that be a capricious C19 invention, as the Royal Commission seems to believe, or must one assume a nave and aisles of c. 1300? Box pews and a reading desk placed symmetrically. The S chancel chapel is nice pre-archaeological Neo-Gothic, complete with vault and the Commandment Boards, etc. - PLATE. Pieces of 1818-27. which probably dates the restoration of the church. - MONUMENTS. Plain tablet to Peter Taverner d. 1601 and his wife, who ‘was a grave, prudent, provident, above her sexe learned, and religious matron’. - One epitaph of 1845 by Gaffin.

St Faith (2)

Hexton. We may wonder if any village in the county has a more delightful setting than this. It lies in the shadow of the Barton Hills (a group of the Chilterns) and we came to it by a street paved with gold, for the laburnums on each side had just showered their bloom. Dark yews surround the church, which inherits from the 15th century its tower and a roof supported by gilded wooden angels. The fabric was much refashioned c. 1825. There is a handsome early 19th-century double-decker seat for the priest and the clerk, and a pulpit to match. A king smiles from one of the arcades, and a woman weeps for Josep de Latour, a Guardsman who rebuilt much of the church. There is a record that the church was dedicated to St Faith early in the 12th century, but it was long before the days of records that men built the earthwork fort of Ravensburgh Castle on a spur of these hills, nearly 500 feet up. Trees now screen the ramparts, which still rise nearly 20 feet high, enclosing more than twenty acres of this steep hillside.

Pirton

St Mary the Virgin is notable for its massive crossing tower (rebuilt) and its stunning location. Internally, however, very little of interest remains. Having said that I really enjoyed this church.

ST MARY. Broad crossing tower of stone with diagonal buttresses (rebuilt 1883). It is crowned by a Herts spike. It is of the C12 as the arches inside prove. The nave has contemporary masonry but Dec and Perp windows. The chancel windows are Perp, but the Piscina inside is C14. The Perp S porch is the only flint-built part of the church. The S transept is new. - GLASS. C14 and C15 bits in the N and S walls.

Corbel (3)

Corbel (6)

Madonna & Child

Pirton. Its houses, now scattered on the Chilterns, are the descendants of a fortified village of the Conqueror’s day, which clustered round Toot Hill, on the top of which a Norman knight built his castle. We can trace the encircling ramparts. The castle has gone, but to the southwest of Toot Hill’s clump of trees is a church with something from the Normans left - two of the old patterned arches of their massive tower, one opening into the nave and one into the chancel. The tower itself has been rebuilt. The rest of the church is a patchwork of medieval and Victorian masonry, with a few fragments of 14th-century glass, an old chest, a bell of 1634., and two doors which have lasted 600 years.

Several of the farms about were the homes of Elizabethans. Hammond’s Farm they would find scarcely altered if they could see it now, and they would recognise the huge barn, 135 feet long, of the moated Rectory Farm. The Grange also has a moat from the days when fortifications were still thought necessary. Away on a wooded hill is High Down, an interesting Stuart house bearing the arms of Thomas Docwra and his wife Jane, who lived and died here, and has a stone to her memory in the church. The oak door which closed on her for the last time in 164.5 still opens to her successors.

Holwell

Last week's trip was to the NW of the county, an area I am unfamiliar with but which I found attractive; particularly as you drive south west out of the northern fenland like plateau and into the foothills of the Chilterns and then heading south and eastwards back towards Knebworth where the country opens up again.

On top of that this was a highly successful journey with 6 out of 10 churches being open (a caveat to that being that most of the churches I visited are either Victorian rebuilds or heavily restored but still and all this is a 'good' area).

St Peter falls into the Victorian build category and a not very good one. Excepting a C16 brass to Robert Wodehouse there's little to no interest here but it was welcoming and open.

ST PETER. Mostly by Ewan Christian, 1877 (GR), but apparently with the use of old materials. - Brass to Robert Wodehouse d. 1515 with no effigy but a chalice with wafer and at the top instead of a coat of arms two wodehouses (sic) or wild men.

St Peter (2)

Robert Wodehouse 1515 (1)

Holwell. It keeps in its modern church a most curious brass designed for the rector of the old one 400 years ago. His name was Richard Wodehouse, and his crest may have been a wild man of the woods, for two of these weird creatures are drawn on the brass, though below them appears a chalice to show that this was a priest and no wild man. The creatures are known as wood-wodes and are probably a play on his name. The church, rebuilt in 1877, incorporates material from its predecessor. We learned here that land in London and other property left as a charity to the village 150 years ago (when it brought in £60) now yields an income of over £1000, so that out of it almshouses and village halls have been raised. Hitchin Grammar School has received grants from it, and £160 a year is spent in helping those who need help.

Flickr.