Odd things in churches
Doing the previous post about the lookers’ huts of Romney Marsh reminded me of my last trip to the Marsh a couple of years ago, in the company of friends and marshophiles from Hastings (you know who you are and how grateful I am for your hospitality). A favourite building from that trip was St Augustine’s church at Brookland, with its extraordinary detached belfry shaped like an overgrown candle-snuffer.
Brookland church also has some curious contents – a set of late-18th century weights and measures, a chest said to come from the Spanish Armada, and the odd item shown in the photograph above. What could it be? If you think it looks rather like a sentry box, you’re quite close. It’s apparently designed to provide shelter for a priest taking a funeral service in the churchyard when wind and rain are whipping across the Marsh. The name for this miniature portable building is a hudd or hud, obviously the same word as ‘hood’, although I can’t find a reference in the OED to the term being used in this way.
The funeral hudd is a piece of plain and practical joinery that is just about light enough to trundle out into the churchyard when needed and has just enough space for a person to stand up in. I’m not sure when it was made or when it was last used – it seems redolent of Georgian clergymen wanting to keep their wigs dry, or slightly later ones keeping the mud off their cassocks. Maybe Jane Austen’s Mr Collins would have used a hudd – though he might have worried that it concealed him from the watchful gaze of his patron. Lady Catherine De Bourgh.
I live and work in LA and I have just found your blog. Am so intrigued by it! I am doing a home for a client in Chelsey Green so finding out all I can about UK as I will have to be London quite a few times this year.
ReplyDeleteThat's fascinating, it does look quite funereal; by the way, I've never come across a hudd before, apart from Roy (sorry!)
ReplyDeletePeggy: Thanks for your comment. Keep coming back to the blog. I usually try and post one or two buildings per week.
ReplyDeleteVintage Knitter: Oh dear, I nearly mentioned Roy Hudd myself. Nothing like a good pun with my morning cup of tea, I find!
I have seen three of these before. One was in Hampshire, another Lincolnshire and a third at Ivychurch in Kent. Maybe they are more common than I thought.
ReplyDeleteIncidently, have been following this Blog for some time as we love tracking down the quaint and unusual ourselves.
AW: Glad that you enjoy the blog. Interesting about these other hudds. If you look at this, can you tell me where the Lincolnshire one was?
ReplyDeleteThe Lincolnshire example was in the church at Deeping St. James. We were there to photograph the lock-up which is in the street nearby. The hudd was not labelled or on display as such - and we only realised what it was when we found another labelled example elsewhere.
ReplyDeleteMany thanks for the information, AW.
ReplyDeleteIn my Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology it says 'hud' meaning hide probably from Low German origin. If that helps.
ReplyDeleteThere is such a hudd in the church of All Saints, Odhiam, Hants. Some strange objects that have nothing to do with religious celebrations have sometimes found their way into churches. My favourite ones must be the two small fire engines now preserved in Aldbourne, Wilts.
ReplyDeleteOut on the Marsh, eh? So atmospheric and you render it beautifully...I must get over there again soon. In Rye two weeks ago I purchased a copy of Russell Thorndike's Dr Syn. All save this (the first published, but interestingly the last of seven volumes chronologically) are out of print, and even this is a bit of a scissors and paste reprint. A strangely haunting place, Romney Marsh, if you'll forgive the pun...
ReplyDeleteSebastien: Fire engines were often kept in churches because these buildings were central and easily accessible.
ReplyDeleteAlso, up on interior church walls, long handled hooks for dragging burning thatch off roofs.
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