Stanton, Gloucestershire

 

Sheepdogs, or, Odd things in churches (16)

I can’t remember when I first went inside the church of St Michael and All Angels, Stanton, in the north Cotswolds, but I think I already knew the story behind the bench-end in my photograph. Perhaps I knew the story from the Gloucestershire volume of Arthur Mee’s series, ‘The King’s England’, probably the only book that my parents had that would have held such a historical tidbit: ‘It may be that when Wesley preached in this place there listened to him shepherds from the hills who would tie their dogs to the ends of the benches, which still have the marks of the chafing of the chains which held the dogs.’ Such marks can certainly be seen on the bench end in my picture, perhaps from the chains themselves or from a metal ring to which chains were attached.

Can this be true? It’s certainly plausible. For centuries, Cotswold farms were the sheep farms par excellence of England. For years I’ve lived in this part of the country and there are still plenty of sheep farmed around here. Shepherds might these days ride around on quad bikes or in 4 x 4s, and wherever they go their dogs go with them. In church, in the 18th century or earlier, one can imagine the chained dogs excited on their weekly meeting with the neighbours pulling on their chains and chafing at the woodwork before settling down quietly by the time the service began. We’re often told that Cotswold churches (like many in Suffolk and other areas) were built from the proceeds of the wool trade. It’s good to be reminded that none of that money could have been made without the people who raised the sheep – and the animals that rounded them up.

Mildenhall, Wiltshire

Two hundred years on

Dedicated church crawlers will have guessed when I did my previous post about the barn at Mildenhall that I was making for the parish church of St John the Baptist, a short distance along the same lane. This is a medieval building with a charming stone exterior that does nothing to prepare one for what is inside – a set of fittings of 1816 that is by any standards a remarkable survival.

The church boasts a full set of box pews, a tall pulpit and reading desk with backboards and canopies, and wooden panelling to dado level around the walls. Above the chancel arch are the painted royal arms of George III. That's appropriate as George was still nominally king when the church was refitted in 1816, although the Regency of his son, begun because of the king's illness, was underway by this time. The style of the fittings is Georgian, in that hybrid of classical and Gothic that is typical of this kind of work of the period, and if one didn't know the date, one might easily suppose that they were a couple of decades earlier.

In the chancel there are more fittings of 1816. As well as choir stalls and more panelling, there are boards inscribed with the Lord's Prayer and the Commandments, these boards rising to an ornate ogee-carved centrepiece behind the altar. At the west end of the church there is also a matching organ gallery. 

Fittings like these were not the kind of thing that the Victorians generally liked. Increasingly as the 19th century went on, the Anglican church focused on ritual in an appropriate setting – a setting that was more correctly Gothic than what we see at Mildenhall. As a result, items such as inscribed panels and Georgian box pews were frequently removed and replaced with fittings more obviously Gothic and more in accordance with Victorian views of beauty and holiness. Churches like Mildenhall, with their different, more Georgian (and more word-based) beauty, are therefore rare.

It's fair to say that something was lost when fittings like this were removed. There is something practical about the preaching facilities, the texts, the neat seating. It's also attractive, and winningly domestic – it's God's house, if not even God's drawing room. As the light poured through the largely clear glass windows on the morning I was there, it was easy to see how well it all works.

Little Washbourne, Gloucestershire

Hidden among fruit trees in the low-lying country between the Cotswold escarpment and Tewkesbury, Little Washbourne is easy to miss. There’s not much here: a farm, a house, a roadside inn, and this tiny church, approached along a grass path through an orchard. But there’s more to this building than the passing motorist, speeding between Stow and Tewkesbury, might imagine.

Some details of masonry and a small window around the back shows us that this is a Norman church, but the big window to the right of the doorway tells a different story. It’s Georgian, and the 18th-century has left a lasting and wonderful imprint on this building, as we see immediately on opening the door.

Filling the nave is a complete set of 18th-century box pews, including four big family pews at the front and smaller ones behind, plus a two-decker pulpit (a piece of furniture fashionable in the 18th century, combining a pulpit for preaching and a desk for reading the lessons). Beyond, in the chancel, are matching altar rails and communion table. Candles provide the only artificial light. As Pevsner says, the whole lot doesn’t look as if it’s been touched since 1800.

These are not, let me make clear, the kind of furnishings I’d remove from a church to make it suitable for dance classes or village bean-feasts, although, as I’ve said in another post, I’m sometimes in favour of removing pews. No, the furnishings at Little Washbourne are in a special class and, as there’s no longer a congregation to use them regularly in this scattered community, the building is now vested in the Churches Conservation Trust. Thanks to their care, we can now visit this place and appreciate how a Norman building and Georgian interior can come together to create a unique atmosphere, taking us back to the time of Jane Austen and her predecessors.

The weakest go to the wall

There are rumblings in the Church of England. Up and down the country, pews are being removed from parish churches and not everyone likes it. Press reports that stress the new uses to which pewless churches can be put - yoga classes and the like - make yet more hackles rise. We know the C of E is a broad church, but yoga classes? Really? There's the stuff of comedy and soap opera here, and Ambridge is already debating the question. But, as so often, the soaps are airing a real issue.

In many places, the church is used by a handful of people for an hour a week, and such a group finds it hard to raise the money to maintain an often old and listed building. Meanwhile, there's frequently the need for a comunity building to house all kinds of activities from drama groups to, yes, yoga classes. Not all villages have a village hall and removing pews from a village church frees up space for such activities. To many, opening up the church in this way is a chance to bring the building back to the wider population - and to give the church the chance to raise money for costly repairs too. To others, such a move seems like heresy.

Well, it's a bit unfair to condemn it when, for hundreds of years, churches have been used for so much more than services. In the Middle Ages, church buildings were used, amongst other things, for court sittings, village meetings, charitable handouts, and sealing business deals. Later they became in addition repositories of records or schoolrooms, or provided garaging space for the local fire engine. Most of these things took place in the nave, the main body of the church, while the chancel, the domain of the clergy, was reserved as the truly sacred space.

Many of these secular uses of church buildings required flexible space, and early medieval churches had little in the way of seating - mainly seats for the infirm near the walls (hence the expression 'The weakest go to the wall'). In the later Middle Ages, many churches fitted pews (though not always throughout the church) and pews were also the staple of church fitting in the Georgian period. The Victorians too were great pew-builders, and many of the pews now slated for removal are Victorian. By the Victorian period something else had happened too. People were thinking of the whole church as an exclusive 'sacred space', devoted entirely to God. Business dealings, fire engines, and the like just weren't appropriate here.

And that's still one reason why, for many, pews are sacrosanct. They define sacred space - as well as being old, traditional, what people are used to, and better looking than the insitutional chairs that so often arrive as pew replacements.

In my opinion, there's often a case for removing pews (though I'd keep historical fittings like medieval benches and Georgian box-pews) from at least part of many church buildings. A clear, uncluttered pewless area can enhance the spatial dignity and grandeur of a church interior as well as making it usable for all kinds of activities and so bringing more people in. But if you do scrap the pews, for goodness sake find some decent chairs for parishioners to sit on. Then open the building up to the groups that need the space, introduce people to the church, and get them raising cash for the roof repairs. Then the building itself won't go weakly to the wall.