Great Munden

St Nicholas was firmly locked with no keyholder listed, probably explainable by Mee's opening paragraph. Actually I've just discovered that it is redundant and privately owned (22.04.13).

ST NICHOLAS. Unbuttressed W tower of the C15 with spike. The body of the church with much restored walls and windows. The masonry goes back originally to the C12: see the simple Norman N doorway (an order of colonnettes, and roll moulding in the arch) and one small Norman N window in the chancel. At the E end of the S aisle one fine Dec three-light window, at the W end a similar one of two lights. The interior bears out the exterior impression. Of the Norman chancel arch the N side survives with one primitive volute or rather spiral capital and one with a face either with fingers pulling the mouth open or with sprays of foliage growing out of the mouth.* The S side of the Norman chancel arch was destroyed when the arch was widened in the C15. The S arcade is of three bays and has C!4 detail, and there are besides in the aisle two ogee-headed recesses and a fine stone reredos at the S end, also with little ogee niches. The top is castellated. - PULPIT. Jacobean, with two tiers of the usual blank arcades. - CHANCEL STALLS with a few rather starved poppy-heads. - PLATE. Chalice of 1696.

* A Norman arch in the N side of the chancel was found at the restoration in 1865 but not left exposed.

Great Munden. It is little more than a farm, a duck pond, a cottage, and a church. The cottage is a frail looking wooden one yet it has lasted more than 300 years, as long as High Trees Farm, which has 17th-century stacks and a heavy screen carved in Cromwell’s day.

The church proclaims its Norman ancestry with a blocked doorway, a deep window, and a pillar with a carved capital left in the chancel arch, but succeeding generations have obliterated the rest of the Norman work and left their own windows, doorways, arches, and the four stone angels holding up the nave roof, two playing lutes. The aisle was added in the 14th century, and for years its small niched reredos was hidden beneath plaster. The worn tower with fantastic faces outside its windows was added in the 15th century, and in 1621 Robert Oldfield made for it four bells which are still ringing here. It is almost within living memory that one was rung as a gleaning bell each morning and evening during harvest time, to call the gleaners to the fields.

Two choir pews have poppyheads which have outlasted 15 generations of choirboys, and in the small arcaded Jacobean pulpit John Lightfoot, whom some consider the greatest Bible scholar of his day, preached his first sermon as rector here in 1544, and his last 31 years later. He was often to preach before Parliament during the Commonwealth, but when he wrote down the entry of the execution of Charles I in Great Munden’s register he added the word Murdered.

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Great Amwell

St John the Baptist was locked but keyholders were listed (or rather their phone numbers are) but I didn't have time to track down the key, so this was exterior only; which is a pity as it sounds interesting.

ST JOHN THE BAPTIST. A small church of great antiquity, distinguished by its Norman apse, a feature very rare amongst Herts parish churches (cf. Bengeo). Of the same period the low roundheaded chancel arch, of two orders on the simplest imposts and one window whose equal splays outside and inside suggest an C11 date. The other architectural features are of less interest. C15 W tower with diagonal buttresses and pyramid roof behind the battlements. The W DOOR is of the same date as the tower. - PULPIT. Mid CI7 with termini caryatids at the angles. - PLATE. Chalice and Paten, 1620; Paten, 1786. - BRASSES to a priest (nave), and to a man with two wives and children (nave), both C15.

Amwell. Through the park and down the valley flows the New River, its waters divided by an island on which stands the statue of its creator, Hugh Myddelton. It was his indomitable will which carried the waters from these chalk hills to the London of the Stuarts. London had long been running short of water, but nobody did much but complain about it till this London goldsmith, Sir Walter Raleigh’s friend, bestirred himself with the blessing of the City Corporation he made a new river for London, turning the waters round Amwell and Chadwell into a channel which twisted for nearly 40 miles and emptied itself into a reservoir at Islington. On Amwell’s monument to Myddelton are these lines by John Scott the Quaker poet who lived here a century later:

Amwell, perpetual be thy stream

Nor e’er thy springs be less

Which thousands drink who never dream

Whence flows the boon they bless.

Too often thus ungrateful man

Blind and unconscious lives,

Enjoys kind Heaven’s indulgent plan,

Nor thinks of Him that gives.

It was John Scott, hater of war, who wrote these familiar lines:

I hate that drum’s discordant sound,

Parading round and round and round.

He was not Amwell’s first poet, for in the churchyard lies William Warner, who wrote of Albion’s England, "a poetical history of England from the time of Noah till the reign of James the First." He may have been a friend of Shakespeare, for in London he visited the same haunts, and it is even thought by some that Shakespeare saw his translation of Plautus’s Menaechmi before it was published, and in this way got hold of the plot for his Comedy of Errors. Warner lies in the churchyard, and not far from his grave lies Isaac Reed, a London solicitor better known as an editor, who brought out two editions of Shakespeare and died among his books at Staple Inn, soon after the “drum’s discordant sound" had rung out at Trafalgar.

The old church, with a new spire rising from its 15th century tower, was here before the first poet wrote in King’s English, for the walls of the nave and apsidal chancel, and the chancel arch itself, are Norman. We enter by a 15th century oak door, and find among the church’s antiquities a brass of a friar of 1400 and another of a 15th century man with two wives and seven children. A new tower screen has the traceried doors from the lost medieval chancel screen. There is a Jacobean altar table, and an oak pulpit with six heads carved on graceful pilasters by an unknown craftsman of 1696. On each side of the chancel arch is a peephole to the altar.

The village stocks stand by the church, and at Amwellbury is the squire’s old pigeon house, with wooden cots and new brick walls safeguarding it after nearly 300 years.

A mile or two away is the modern church of Little Amwell on Hertford Heath, which flanks the grounds of Haileybury College. Haileybury arose in 1862 out of an 80-year-old college for Civil Servants of the East India Company, and it has become one of the public schools of England. An avenue of tall chestnuts leads to the fine classical building designed by the architect of the National Gallery, William Wilkins, and a dome conspicuous for miles rises over the handsome chapel. In the chapel is a tablet to 40 Old Boys who fell in the Indian Mutiny, some under the command of those famous Haileyburians, Sir John Lawrence and Sir Henry Outram. In the chestnut avenue is an obelisk in memory of Old Boys lost in the South African War. But the school’s greatest sacrifice was its bitter loss of 577 boys in the Great War. Hundreds were awarded the DSO, and four the Victoria Cross, some of them fighting under the command of the most famous Haileyburian in the Great War, Lord Allenby.

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Gilston

Most, if not all, churches I visit leave some abiding memory - either good or bad - but St Mary has left absolutely nothing. I visited in May and despite the fact that it has memorials to family tree members (the Gores) I don't remember it at all. It's a perfectly pleasant enough church, typical of this part of Hertfordshire and perhaps that's the problem - it's just typical.

ST MARY. Basically C13 ; see the W doorway of three orders, the chancel lancets, and the N doorway and one N window of the nave, the latter with elementary plate tracery. The upper parts of the tower probably late C16 (brick with S stair-turret; cf. Sawbridgeworth). The N aisle is old, the S aisle C19. The arcades are low and have quatrefoil piers with later arches. - FONT. Hexagonal, C12, of Purbeck marble, with shallow blank arches. - SCREEN. A survival of first-rate importance. Evidently late C13 and well enough preserved to have made reconstruction possible. Tall dado, shafts thin and only 2 ft long, trefoiled pointed arches and stylized flowers in the spandrels. Straight top. - PLATE. Chalice and Paten, 1562; Paten, C17; Flagon, 1697. - MONUMENTS. Two good big mid C17 epitaphs: Bridget Gore d. 1659, white standing figure in shroud in front of an oval black niche, drapes l. and r., and weeping putti wiping their eyes with them. The type had been made popular by John Donne’s tomb in St Paul’s Cathedral. - Sir John Gore d. 1659, black and white, with long inscription flanked by blank columns; thin curly broken pediment with small figures on it; signed by Joshua Marshall.

Gilston. It has homes on the highway near the River Stort and others on the byway skirting the park of the great house, once the home of the Plumer family, described with such charm by Charles Lamb in his essay on Blakesmoor. It was one of the kind hearted squires here, Colonel John Plumer, who befriended poor Jane Wenham of Walkern, the last Englishwoman sentenced to death for witchcraft.

In the gently undulating park is a lake through which the Fiddlers Brook plays its way to the river in tune with the surrounding calm, and high up beyond a group of giant walnut trees is the church, basically 13th century and though much changed with the centuries still keeping a fine doorway (now blocked up), a coffin lid with a cross, and a font bowl, all 700 years old. Almost as old, but of a rarer beauty, is the oak chancel screen with roses carved above its trefoil arches and graceful pillars only an inch wide. The upper part of the tower is of 16th-century brick. In the west window is a coloured shield of Sir William Estfield, Sheriff of London in 1429, and in the chancel are monuments to the Gores, forerunners of the Plumers at the great house, among them being a tablet to Sir John Gore who sat in Cromwell’s Parliament, and a quaint figure of his four-year-old Bridget who fell asleep two years before him.

The village inn, 300 years old, boasts the proud name of Plume of Feathers, but stands humbly at Pye Corner.

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Eastwick

St Botolph was locked, which seems a shame given that it contains "the best C13 effigy in the county".

ST BOTOLPH. A short yew avenue leads to the church which was rebuilt in 1872 by Blomfield, except for the chancel arch and the W tower. Blomfield’s church consists of nave and chancel only and is of no interest. The chancel arch is an astonishingly ambitious piece of C13 design with three orders of tall Purbeck shafts and a complexly moulded arch, as if for a cathedral (cf. Standon). - PLATE. Paten, 1705; Chalice, 1719; Paten, 1735. - MONUMENTS. Under the tower the best C13 effigy in the county, a marble Knight in chain mail with long surcoat. His legs are crossed. - Brass to Joan Lee d. 1564. - Epitaph to Mary Plummer d. 1700, good, of diptych type, with three Corinthian columns. - Epitaph to Walter Plummer d. 1746, so good that it may well be by Rysbrack (see the delightful cherubs’ heads and the exquisitely carved classical details of frieze and pediment).

Eastwick. Behind its few cottages are meadows with high and solitary trees and a distant gleam of the River Stort as it turns south into Essex. The church, reached between walls of clipped yew, has changed much; but, though it was rebuilt last century, except the tower, the richly moulded stones of its first chancel arch were set up again as they were 700 years ago and the old gargoyles are back on the tower. In the tower hang two medieval bells, and a third which was new when it tolled for Queen Elizabeth I; and below them is the portrait of an Elizabethan lady, Joan Lee, looking down from her brass on a stone knight of the 13th century who lies cross legged in chain mail with his long sword. They are an interesting couple, both showing in detail the costume of their time.

Cottered

St John the Baptist is, on the face of it, a fairly run of the mill, bog standard Hertfordshire spiked church, heavily restored but not devastatingly so. It doesn't create a flutter of excitement  when encountered but a sense of fondness, like greeting your maiden aunt.

Except that St Christopher, the patron saint of travellers, is depicted on the north wall of the Nave opposite the main doorway. Thought to date from the second half of the 15th century, it was discovered under a thick coat of whitewash when the Victorians carried out an extensive restoration programme in 1886. However, the mural was not completely uncovered until the time of Rev Arthur Granger, Rector here from 1915 to 1925.

Depicted on each side of the main figure are zigzag roads and various roadside crosses along them. On the left at the bottom of the painting is a youth wearing pointed shoes near a tree. A hermit, dressed in a surplice, stands at cross roads with a large red lantern, rather like the old type of telephone kiosk. He is also pulling a rope attached to a bell in a turret high above his head.

On the right hand side of the picture at the base are two men with drawn swords, and high up are some timber framed buildings and two churches. The borders are decorated with flowers connected by a tendril like pattern.

ST JOHN THE BAPTIST. The outstanding feature is the spacious aisleless nave with large three-light transomed Perp Windows with four-centred heads. It makes the church appear a palatial Hall. The masonry of the nave is older (see the C14 doorways). Of the C14 also the W tower (see the W window and tower arch). The tower is unbuttressed and has a lead spire. The chancel is lower than the nave. Its windows are Perp but the chancel arch looks early C14. - FONT. Early C18, of lovely grey Derbyshire marble, with baluster stem and fluted bowl. - DOORS. Nave, heavy oak, C15 (?). Vestry, with Late Medieval ironwork. - PAINTING. On the nave wall large figure of St Christopher with indications of river surroundings and much incidental drama of the medieval highway. - PLATE. Chalice and Paten, 1711.

 

Cottered. It gathers about its green, on which cows and donkeys graze in the shadow of tall elms. There is an ancient farmhouse and a church 600 years old. We open the 500-year-old door of the church and find the faded figure of St Christopher greeting us, the background of the scene like a medieval map, with castles and roads, a horseman riding, and a countryman stepping through the meadows, like a picture of our countryside when this church was built in the middle of the 14th century. The lofty nave has a 15th century timber roof and is lit by six medieval transomed windows, some with fragments of their original glass. There is a second old door to the vestry with 16th century ironwork, and the vase-shaped marble font is 18th century. The chapel was built 500 years ago by Edward Pulter of Broadfield Manor, a house that has been made new but keeps the 17th century stables.

Here is one of the oldest houses in the county, a farmhouse known as The Lordship, built 500 years ago and interesting as showing the changes of the 17th century. It has many of its original doorways and much 17th century panelling, but the front door which the village knew for nearly five centuries is now in America.

There died in this village in 1926 a brilliant surgeon who spent his life in public causes, Sir James Cantlie. Here he lies in the churchyard, and on the wall of the church is a white tablet with a bronze medallion showing his kindly face, with the words: Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy. Merciful indeed he was, a Scotsman who went out to China in 1887 as a surgeon, and also spent many years in India, mastering the mystery of tropical sickness and founding the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine. The tablet was set up by the Chinese Minister in London, Dr Alfred Sze, in appreciation of the noble services Sir James Cantlie rendered to China. In the critical days when Dr Sun Yat Sen was kidnapped and held a prisoner in the Chinese Legation in London it was Dr Cantlie who saved his life and enabled him to become the Christian President of the Chinese Republic. Sir James was knighted for his work in the Great War.

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Clothall

St Mary the Virgin is an absolute gem of a church with a quirky design, good brasses and outstanding glass.

The glass in the east window is the glory of the Church; it is thought that there are only two others like it in England, possibly the work of the same man.

It consists of six late 14th century medallions, with the Heads of Christ, the four Evangelists and Mary Magdalene. That of Mary Magdalene is reputed to have come from the Chapel of St Mary Magdalene in the Leper Hospital which stood at Hooksgreen, at the top of a hill about half a mile to the South of the Church. The Hospital was suppressed in 1547. That medallion is of interest for the prominence of Mary's hair, which is probably due to the belief that she was the same Mary who anointed the feet of Christ in the house of the Pharisee, having washed them with her tears and dried them with her hair; but some modern scholarship has rejected that belief.

The medallions are surrounded by small 15th century diamond-shaped quarries, depicting many of the birds of English countryside together with others more exotic. Of the English birds, hawks, partridges, peewits and ducks are all recognisable.

The Canopy Work in the top of the window is pot metal glass of the earlier thirteen hundreds, and the whole has been made up, with some insertions, within a border of 15th century glass.

ST MARY. The church has a SW tower in which is the N porch. This is C14; so is the S chapel. The latter is the most interesting part, with an arcade to the nave on unusual piers with semi-octagonal members and a Piscina characteristic of the period. - FONT. C12, of the tabletop type, Purbeck marble, square with shallow blank round-headed arches. - BENCHES. Some bench-ends with poppyheads. - DOOR. In the S doorway, with long iron hinges, probably C14. - STAINED GLASS. Christ, the Virgin, and Saints in medallions, only fragmentarily C15, ornamental quoins with flowers and delightfully drawn birds; thick canopies above; hardly before 1400 and perhaps later. - BRASSES (in the chancel). Early C16 priest, c. 3 ft long; John Vynter d. I404, Rector of Clothall, c. 3 ft long; John Wryght d. 1519, Rector of Clothall, with scrolls and the Trinity above the figure; two more brasses covered by the chancel stalls. of the church a nice Georgian brick house of the usual five-bay, two-storey type.

Clothall. It is a lonely spot that any traveller must love to see, with a few old thatched cottages and a wonderful little church on a hill, looking over cornfields red with poppies when we called. It is only here that they have crept in, for all round we found fields with some of the finest wheat in England, and there are terraces still to be seen on which men were growing their food in the days before history.

We come into the church by a door studded with the nails of hundreds of church notices, and painted with the name of John Warren - perhaps the name of the proud man who made it in the 14th century. The door opens on a quaint group of old seats raised in tiers to the back of the church. Among their poppyheads stands the little panelled font on pillars, 800 years old with a cover made 300 years ago. The chantry chapel is now the children’s chapel and is 14th century. They saved their pennies to buy vases for it and they keep them filled with flowers. The images have gone from the brackets, but here is still an Old French inscription to a man who died when the chantry was new. The children must love the east window, for it is filled with birds of the countryside, all in glass of the 14th and 15th centuries. There are six heads of saints in the window and every inch of space between is filled with hawks and peewits, ducks and partridges, and all the birds from the fields around. One of the bells has been ringing while all these birds have been singing.

Yet more treasures has this small place, five brasses. They show four rectors of the 15th and 16th centuries, and a mother with her 16 children. The oldest rector here is John Vynter of 1404, shown in his robes, and the three others are John Wright of 1519, Thomas Dalyson of the 16th century, and William Lucas who died in 1602. Unfortunately, his brass and that of Anne Bramfield, with her very big family, are hidden by the pews^*.

* The group of seats with poppyheads and the pews obscuring the last two mentioned brasses are no longer extant which in many ways is a shame but does mean we can now see the brasses.

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Buntingford

Having often been to Mass at St Richard I knew that it was a new build but hadn't realised quite how new -  it having been built in 1914. I wasn't going to include it but changed my mind whilst searching for Layston church.

Pevsner doesn't mention it.

Last week (Feb 2014) I visited my 915th, and final, in area church and so completed my mission.

At its heart St Peter is a C17th building which was built under Alexander Strange's direction to accommodate those people who could not attend mass at nearby Layston. Not the best of churches but open.

ST PETER. Built in 1614-26 as a chapel-of-ease to Layston. Brick, on the Greek cross plan to which in 1899 a porch and apse were added. The windows were also altered. Kept in the church is a C17 BRASS PLATE showing the interior of the church.

St Richard of Chichester

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St Bartholomew at Layston was a most peculiar experience. Having entered Layston into my sat nav I was presented with something to the affect that no such place exists. Now I knew this was not the case as I had marked it on my google map, so I bravely parked the car and proceeded on foot. As I entered the High Street the first sign I noticed was that of Church Street and, thinking to myself that that's where I'd put a church, walked down it but failed to find a church. Somewhat bemused I decided I needed height to survey the town for a steeple so I started uphill until I came to a sign saying Layston Cemetery.

Thinking to myself that where there's a cemetery there's bound to be a church I continued, walking further and further into the countryside until eventually I spotted the Spire emerging from a pretty dense wood. When I got to the church I found it surrounded by hoardings, covered in scaffolding and with a seriously overgrown churchyard. So I took a few pictures and returned to my car.

When I got home I Googled it and came across www.layston-church.org.uk which tells the story of the extraordinary restoration project being under taken by Martin and Mandy.

Basically Layston is a lost village and St Bartholomew was inconveniently placed for the good folk of Buntingford and so was allowed to fall in to disrepair. As a result of the fantastic research that they have undertaken on the 'inhabitants' of the chancel monuments I have found out all sorts of connections back to my 12th GGrandfather, John Crouch, as well as ancillary connections to the Freman family.

So what I had regarded as a failed trip actually turned out to be a huge success!

Buntingford. A small town on the River Rib, it has a wide stretch of a Roman road for its High Street, full of quaint houses with gables, overhanging storeys, deep archways, and red roofs turned yellow here and there with creeping stone-crop.

By a group of lime trees are the 17^th century almshouses, standing round a court filled with flowers; they are the homes of four old men and four old women, founded in 1684, by that famous man of his day, Seth Ward. His portrait hangs inside, and outside are his arms and mitre, carved in stone. He was born at Aspenden, and walked over here every day to the free school till he left for Cambridge. He lost his fellowship there by refusing to take the Covenant, but later was made Professor of Astronomy at Oxford, and, branching into philosophy, started his long controversy with Hobbes. After having been Bishop of Exeter, he became Bishop of Salisbury, and one of his first acts there was to call on his friend Christopher Wren to survey the cathedral. Wren’s report is now in the possession of the Royal Society, of which Seth Ward was the second President.

Close to his almshouses is a red brick chapel, built about 1625 to gather in more of the people of Buntingford than could attend the old church on the hill. Inside is a picture drawn on brass soon after the chapel was finished, showing it, with its vicar Alexander Strange in the pulpit, as it was before the apse and porch were added in 1899; and hanging in the vestry is a charter giving the town permission to hold a market. It has a portrait of Henry VIII on the seal hanging from it.

In a garden farther down the street is a Roman Catholic chapel and priest’s house, with roses climbing up the walls. Robert Hugh Benson lived and wrote many of his novels close by, at Hare Street, and now lies in the graveyard. Son of the Archbishop of Canterbury, he became a priest and private chamberlain to Pope Pius X.

All round are fine old houses. Hare Street has many and near it is the 17th-century Alswick Hall. The Court was the Grammar School 300 years ago, and the Old Manor is a little way out at Corney Bury. In the main street are many 16th- and 17th-century houses and hostelries, one with its sign hanging from magnificent ironwork. An old turret over the archway of the Angel Inn has a clock with one hand, and a bell which the Charity Commissioners (who own the inn) used to have rung whenever there was a service in the chapel down the street or in the church on the hill.

The church on the hill is still called Layston, though nothing else is left of that lost village. The chancel is now used only occasionally, and the nave has, unfortunately, been deprived of its roof. The bells still hang in the 15th-century tower. The chancel is 13th century and the rest mainly late medieval, but the thickness of the nave walls suggests an earlier origin. During repairs a few years ago pieces of carved alabaster work were discovered which when reassembled were found to portray the Crucifixion with the Blessed Virgin and St John. These fragments are now in the Hertford museum, where also is part of the 15^th century font.

Close by, in a new little graveyard which we found as bright with flowers as his own decorative work, lies Claud Lovat Fraser, a delightful artist of our time. He was the son of a Buntingford solicitor, and he loved beauty over all. Very early he began to make drawings for books and rhyme sheets - long slips of paper with a poem or a ballad printed on them. People loved them partly because of the verses and the artist’s work, and partly because many hundreds of years ago the same kind of sheets were printed, and balladmongers walked the streets selling them as fishmongers sell fish. Looking at these works of art, some of them not much bigger than a postage-stamp, it would seem that the artist’s greatest genius lay in drawing minute head-pieces and tail-pieces for poems. They look as if he did them with one hand while he was waving the other about, telling a story; they look as if he had just thought about them that minute, and must put them down before he forgot. They are little images of people and places, not as ordinary people see them but as Mr Fraser saw them. He knew that at night tree trunks become "little old men with twisted knees." He knew what a lovely colour a highwayman’s cloak ought to be. He knew exactly, down to a spar, the kind of ship that went a-sailing, a-sailing on the sea.