Great Gransden

St Bartholomew, open, is large and full of interest with excellent glass, lots of good woodwork and oddly placed Lombardic ledger slab. It was without doubt the church of the day.

ST BARTHOLOMEW. Of brown cobbles, and Perp throughout. Embattled throughout as well. W tower of four stages with pairs of two-light bell-openings and a spike. Three-light windows and a rising NE turret in the clerestory. Doorways with traceried spandrels. Arcade piers (four bays) with capitals only to the shafts towards the openings, not to the moulded projections towards the nave. Handsome roof with figures. - PULPIT. Of c.1660, with characteristic cartouches on the panels. - SCREEN. Partly Perp. - BENCHES. The simple buttressed type of ends, and fronts with plain arched panels. - STAINED GLASS. Old fragments in one chancel window. - CLOCK. The carillon and chimes mechanism is said to have been added in 1683. - PLATE. Cup, Paten, and Paten on foot of 1634-5. - MONUMENT. Very large indent slab with Lombardic lettering to Thomas de Neusum, priest, c.1330.

GREAT GRANSDEN. Blessings on the head of Barnabas Oley for all he did to make it what it is. He gave it its vicarage and its almshouses, made many gifts to the church, and helped to keep it beautiful with trees everywhere and thatched cottages, a row of great beeches, fields down to a winding stream, and Rippington Manor which has kept company with the church since Elizabeth’s day and is delightful with its stone chimneys and its barn. It is so that the first recorded lord of the manor here was the son of Lady Godiva and brother of Hereward the Wake.

The church is one of the noblest of its kind. It has a 14th century tower with a spire covered with lead, and a group of astonishing gargoyles. There are strange stone animals on each side of its west door. Nearly everything is 15th century, the font a little older.

There is a little winding stair by the chancel arch to the old roodloft, and a piscina with a beautiful canopy and a lovely finial. A few fragments of old glass in a chancel window have in them a lady in a yellow robe.

The pulpit, the sole relic left of Barnabas Oley’s gifts, is charming with 17th century carving of fruit and foliage, a screen has 15th century tracery in it, and some of the pews have 16th century panelling of birds, fishes, and beasts; we noticed also a dog with a collar, some ferns, and curious faces. In the tower is a door still on its hinges probably made by the same carpenters, and the roof has some of their angels still looking down.

An odd possession for a church is one of the long poles with hooks for pulling thatch from burning roofs which we have come upon in many other villages. There is also a heavy ancient chest with four handles.

We do not wonder that two rectors of this charming place have stayed more than half a century. Frederick le Grice was here 52 years last century and Barnabas Oley himself was here for 53 years, all through the Civil War and long beyond it. A thousand times he must have looked up at the clock still keeping time in the old tower. It is said to be one of the oldest, perhaps actually the oldest parish church clock still going in the country. The carillon and chimes were added about 1683 in honour of Barnabas Oley’s jubilee as vicar.

Barnabas Oley did not spend all his 53 years here. When he issued George Herbert’s Country Parson and other glories of our prose, he was a fugitive, lurking hidden in the North. A Yorkshireman of whom Wakefield may be proud, he attained high distinction at Cambridge, where he began and supervised the rebuilding of Clare College.

The Civil War turned all things awry, but he was true to his royalist principles, and, quiet, ailing man though he was, he rode stealthily by dangerous byways to Nottingham to carry the University plate to Charles. He became vicar here in 1633 at 31, but now his parish saw him no more for seven years..Ejected from Cambridge, his property confiscated, he roamed from place to place in dire poverty, now at Oxford with the Cavaliers, now at Pontefract preaching to the beleagured garrison. It was while his hopes were faintest that he managed to publish Herbert anonymously, 15 years after the poems had appeared. He rejoiced in the good English, for here was work unlike the early Latin poems, for which, as he said, the poet had “made his ink with water of Helicon.”

With the Restoration Oley’s fortunes revived; he was reinstated in his University dignities and resumed duty here as vicar. Then, when nearly 70, he brought out his second and final edition of Herbert, with a preface thanking God for the “stupendous mercy” that had brought the change from the “sad times when violence had gotten the upper hand.” Izaak Walton drew on the veteran’s preface for his life of Herbert.

Oley edited other works of less importance, but recognised that he was destined to produce no original writing of his own. He was fully occupied as it was, at Cambridge, Worcester, and here. His will left widely distributed benefactions, a model of forethought and kindliness, for the promotion of religion and knowledge. He died in 1686, aged 84, and was buried quietly at night in the church he had so long served and loved.

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Waresley

St James, open, has to be the unluckiest church I've visited to date - the original building was destroyed by a storm in 1724, rebuilt in 1728, was demolished and rebuilt by Butterfield in 1856 on a new site and then the 1987 storm brought down the spire which was replaced with the extraordinary broach spire which exists today. Normally I'd be unimpressed by a Victorian rebuild but I actually really liked it.

ST JAMES. By Butterfield, 1857. Built together with the Duncombe Mausoleum, which connects with the interior of the church by a wall with a window of three stepped lancet lights with foiled circles over. The E wall of the mausoleum has two strange blank arches with blank sexfoiled almond-shapes hanging from their apex. This is the only oddity of the church. Otherwise it is all normal late C13 detail, and the N porch tower (which is unexpected) is slender and noble, with its sheer, steep shingled spire with just a suspicion of broaches. Gothic well-house by the street. Inside, the chancel is one of the most perfect examples of Butterfield’s structural polychromy: stone, red tiles, green tiles, and a little yellow - all in elementary geometrical patterns. - (FONT COVER and BENCHES are excellent and typical. GMCH) - STAINED GLASS. The E and s windows of the chancel, judging by their style, must be by Gibbs, but the N window is a mystery. The background of broad patches of ruby, lilac, and dark mauve is entirely out of the ordinary. Young Bume-Jones is the name that would come to mind, but the style of the figures is not his.

WARESLEY. Here we found still living the two daughters of old William Paine, whose grave is in the churchyard. He was a fine old man born in the first half of the 19th century. He lived through every year of the Victorian Era and through all the Great War, and he lies in a grave under a stately avenue of limes which his own hand planted in the old churchyard of Waresley.

Waresley is a small village on a little hill among the trees, and some of its cottages have thatched roofs, some tall chimney stacks, and some charming Dutch gables. With them stands the inn and the little church, which was not so old as William Paine; he would watch the builders at work on it when he was a boy. It took the place of the old church on the edge of the village which was destroyed in 1724; a cross marks the site of the church in the old churchyard.

But what interests us about William Paine is the little tale of himself that he would tell a hundred times to the village folk as he sat in his old armchair talking of the past. He had a longing to see the Great Exhibition of 1851 which was to usher in the peace of the world, and one morning he got up early and set out to walk to Hyde Park. He left Oliver Cromwell’s county, passed through John Bunyan’s county, walked through the lanes of Charles Lamb’s county, and at last reached the great city and the gate of the Crystal Palace, fifty miles or more from his home. He arrived without a shilling in his pocket, and, not able to pay his way in, he walked round the Great Exhibition and set off home again. He had had his long walk to London, and at the end of it the little walk round the Crystal Palace, and then he trudged home again.

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Tetworth

St Silvester is, as far as I could see, inaccessible being located in the private grounds of Tetworth Hall. I drove around hoping for either a sign or a footpath but found neither.

ST SYLVESTER. By St Aubyn; consecrated in 1886. Red brick. Nave and chancel in one, bell-turret a little E of the W gable S transept, polygonal apse, small lancets.

Abbotsley

St Margaret, locked keyholder listed, is a rather peculiar set up in that the nave and tower are accessible under the auspices of the CCT while the chancel is still in use but is kept locked. As you'd expect with a CCT building, the accessible part is stripped back and the Butterfield chancel, not admittedly normally my cup of tea, looked interesting - particularly the windows. Any way despite the irksome arrangement this is a charming building and one of the best of the day.

ST MARGARET. Of brown cobbles; Dec and Perp. Dec the N aisle, according to the two-light windows with reticulation units, and the four-bay arcade with quatrefoil piers and thin shafts in the diagonals. Dec, though much restored, the S aisle too. The doorway anyway is reliable, and the S arcade with standard motifs looks in its detail even earlier than the N arcade. In the aisle is an ogee-headed recess with crockets and buttress-shafts. The long tendril with flowers in one moulding is reminiscent of Swineshead and Yelden in Bedfordshire. In the vestry W wall outside a re-set niche of very pretty details. Perp W tower, the figures of the pinnacles supposedly Elizabethan. The chancel is by Butterfield, 1861, with the N vestry and N porch, but there is nothing that could reveal him at once. - SCREEN. Under the tower arch. Partly (dado) Perp. - PAINTING. Interesting Flemish late C15 Adoration of the Magi. The scene is in demi-figures, which is rare. -  STAINED GLASS. In the N aisle E window old bits. - The E window and the one N and two S windows in the chancel must be by Gibbs, Butterfield’s protégé. - PLATE. Cup of 1564-5, an early date.

ABBOTSLEY. Whoever comes here and looks up to the church tower’s battlemented parapet may see two enemies who fought in Scotland and two who fought in England. It is long since they drew their swords, and now they watch over this pleasant countryside, looking down on thatched cottages that have been here perhaps ten generations. They see manor farm and its 17th century dovecot, with old timbers and a tiled roof, all very quaint; they look beyond Caldecote Manor, with its moat still full of water, to a road the Romans made. Caesar’s men, the Conqueror, and a great page of Shakespeare we are moved to think of here.

Old houses gather round the church, finely placed on a little hill, its noble chancel arch 13th century and its font perhaps new when Bishop Grosseteste was rector here soon after Magna Carta. He was a brilliant scholar and a famous mathematician, and in his zeal for church reform he defied the Pope himself.

The graceful arcades are 14th century, and, though the roofs are modern, they are borne on stone angels that have been spreading their wings 600 years. There are more angels on 15th century brackets which may have been carved by the craftsman who made the beautiful niche in the vestry, and under the tower is a 16th century oak screen. On the altar is a 16th century Flemish painting on wood showing very serious Wise Men coming to worship the Holy Child, who is in the arms of a Madonna of rare charm.

One of the most beautiful things in the church is a magnificent tomb recess with an arch richly carved between canopied buttresses. Time has been unkind to it, but its exquisite roses and foliage, its wonderful little faces with tongues hanging out, make it a treasure of great price.

But we see the oddest things Abbotsley has to show from the churchyard where William Heylock has been lying under a quaintly carved tomb since 1688. The massive tower (with two bells still ringing in it older than the Spanish Armada) has stood here 600 years and has fierce gargoyles on the battlements as well as the four warrior kings on handsome pedestals, two modern and two perhaps 16th century. The modern figures stand for the Conqueror and our Saxon Harold, looking over the England one lost and the other won; and the old figures are said to be Macbeth and Malcolm, who met on that day when Birnam Wood came to Dunsinane. We may imagine that the schoolboys of Abbotsley like to look up to these four soldiers on their church tower and remember the great pages of history and literature in which they figure.

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St Neots

St Mary the Virgin, open, is huge and magnificent and is, probably rightly, referred to as the cathedral of Huntingdonshire. It plays host to some very fine Hardman and Clayton & Bell glass and in the chancel is the extraordinary Rowley monument.

ST MARY. One of the largest, most uniform late medieval churches in the county. Apart from one early C13 lancet window in the N wall of the chancel, better visible from the vestry, all is Perp. The body of the church was apparently complete by 1486, the porches were added in 1489, and the W tower begun at about the same time. Wills refer to work on the top pinnacles in 1526-35. The tower is the most impressive element of the church, 130 ft high and broad, with uncommonly high and substantial pinnacles. There are intermediate pinnacles on merlons as well, decorated with the signs of the Evangelists. The parapet has faces and paterae. The buttresses are of the set-back type and have gablets applied to them. They end in their own pinnacles, detached from the body of the tower - a Somerset trait. Doorway with tracery spandrels and little double-X motifs in one moulding. They repeat in the moulding of the broad middle mullion of the large four-light W window which has a castellated transom. Large blank three-light N and S windows. The bell-stage has pairs of two-light openings, again with a castellated transom. There are decorative friezes as well at base, top, and in between. It is all entirely of a piece and done without faltering. The rest of the church is embattled. All the windows are large, the buttresses have gablets, the S porch is two-storeyed with pairs of windows to the E and W, and the S doorway has traceried spandrels. The N porch is similar but a C19 rebuilding, with much original material re-used. Both it and the N doorway have traceried spandrels. Three-light clerestory windows. Short chancel. The arch from the tower to the nave is extremely high. The nave is separated from the aisles by high five-bay arches with piers of the standard moulded section. The arches still have the two sunk quadrants of the Dec style. At the E end of the S arcade an arch starts into the chancel arch. How did that come about ? It is probably the one-bay S chapel which interferes. To the N its W arch dies into the impost, to the S there is a respond, so it may be that the chapel was there earlier and a plan existed to do away with it. However, if so, it was given up; for the arch to the chancel is Perp like the arcades, and also like the corresponding and the W arch of the N chapel. Original, exceptionally ornately decorated roofs in the nave, the N and S aisles, and both chapels. They have crested cornices and ornaments, plenty of angels with shields, and in addition in all sorts of places angels, monsters, a mermaid, camels, dogs, lions, fishes, an eagle, an elephant, fox and goose, hare and hound, and so on. Pretty niche with a nodding ogee arch in the N wall. - PULPIT of 1846-8. - STALLS of 1860, but a few of the C15 or early C16 from Milton Ernest. Carved arms, misericords with shields and inscriptions. - COMMUNION RAIL. C18, of wrought iron. - SCREENS. Several Perp screens, the most attractive the W screen of the N chapel, with lovely transparent vine scrolls over the entrance. - The others have broad ogee-arched one-light divisions. - In the N aisle moreover a few fragments from painted panels of a screen dado. - STAINED GLASS. Much by Clayton & Bell (e.g. tower W c.1868-70) and by Hardman (e.g. Woman of Samaria, S aisle, exhibited at the Paris Exhibition in 1878). Also by Clayton & Bell the Transfiguration, also by Hardman the Widow of Nain. - PLATE. Set of 1754-5. - MONUMENT. The monument to G. W. Rowley and his wife is a fabulous piece of display. The recumbent effigy of Mrs Rowley d 1886 by Thomas Earp is hardly visible behind a grille of the closest, most ornate decoration, and the canopy rises, with statuary and canopies and pinnacles, to the roof. It was designed by Frederick A. Walters and put up in 1893. - (In the N chapel on the floor a defaced C13 slab with a foliated cross supported by a dog; cf. e.g. Pavenham, Beds.)

CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH, High Street. 1887-8 by Edward J. Paine (GS). Red brick with a W steeple. Perp. (Original fittings.)

ST NEOTS. Its fine stone bridge, with some of the stones the 14th century men put there but with 17th century walls, leads out of Bedfordshire into the most spacious marketplace in Huntingdon, one of the biggest in England. At one end is what is often called the Cathedral of Huntingdonshire as a tribute to its elegant and symmetrical design and its magnificent roofs.

They have in them a crowded medieval zoo, for the 15th century craftsmen gave their patron saint some of the best of their carving. He is supposed to be the man on the famous jewel King Alfred used to wear, now in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, and he has two remarkable tributes paid to him by medieval artists in the two towns named after him; they are the wonderful windows at St Neots in Cornwall and the wonderful roofs at St Neots in Huntingdon. It is believed that St Neot was a brother or kinsman of Alfred, and that when the Danes invaded the eastern part of England he with Alfred was driven to flee to the west, where he founded the priory of St Neot in Cornwall.

Angels with crosses, books, and chalices hold up the great beams, while the smaller beams are carved with angels, beasts, and birds. Some of the angels have musical instruments; we noticed the bagpipe and the lute. A regular procession of animals runs round the cornice among the foliage of the vine; there are lions and eagles and wyverns, camels and griffins, dogs and hares, harts and rams.

The roofs are low-pitched and have open tracery work resting on the beams, and everywhere in the two chapels and the two aisles, -as in the nave and chancel, is the same richness of carving, with saints and angels, beasts and monsters, with something here like an elephant and something there like a unicorn, and at the feet of the beams always angels with crowns or books or scrolls. It is one of the most astonishing collections of wood-carving we have seen. The chancel roof has saints and apostles on the wall-posts and 96 panels painted with hundreds of gold stars.

The eye is drawn as we enter by the glow of colour from over 20 windows, but the spacious pageantry does not stand the artist’s test. The windows .have about 450 figures in them, and one or two of the groups are attractive, such as the window in which the fishermen are drawing in a net full of fishes, with Christ looking on; that in which Simeon is receiving the Child in the temple, with the Madonna kneeling; and the two windows showing feasts, with spectators looking down from the galleries. The windows are all modern, and the only old glass in the church is in the small room over the porch. We reach this room by a nail-studded door with strap hinges and a wooden lock. The room has an old library of about a hundred books, some 16th century, and a chest which was stolen one day in that year of revolution 1848 and was found the next day in a brook. The walls of this little room have traces of painting, and in the windows St Lawrence with his gridiron and St Stephen with stones are painted on old glass. There is another fragment of old glass with an angel in blue in the south aisle tracery.

On one of the aisle walls is an elegant canopied niche resting on a charming bracket with vine ornament; it is 500 years old and has dainty tracery, spandrels carved with oak leaves and acorns, and a vaulted ceiling. Much older, looking rather Saxon yet supposed to be 13th century, is the colossal font which was once the top of a column in an earlier church. On another wall is a lovely little fragment of carving begging us to pray for the soul of Saint Neot, whom some imagine to have been buried here, though we believe him to lie in the Cornish St Neots.

Behind a gilded iron screen in the chancel, wrought into Tudor roses along the top, is the alabaster figure of a lady well remembered here last century: she is Mrs Rowley, and she has a huge canopied tomb with angels climbing to the roof. Facing the tomb are three 15th century misereres, probably made by the man who carved the beautiful tracery of the old oak screen. There are two other misereres in the sanctuary and facing them is a fine altar table 300 years old, lightly carved with faces. The table has been away and has figured in the courts; the story we are told is that it was given by a vicar to another church, which declined to part with it until £1000 had been spent in getting it back.

Herons are seen flying over St Neots, there being a heronry with about ten nests at Ford House. Priory Hill, the home of the lord of the manor, is reached through a fine avenue of elms. There are many 17th and 18th century houses and splendid views of the river, but we find ourselves drawn most of all along the narrow trackway that leads to fields in which we found a deep moat filled with water. We crossed the moat and found ourselves on six acres of a farm round a house known as Monks Hardwick, a fragment of Elizabethan England which was the home of Cromwell’s cousin Henry. But long before his day it was the home of a company of monks.

A minute’s walk among the great oaks in the field brought us to a thrilling place, for we were walking in the trenches of the Civil War. It is said that the Royalists shut up in the church would amuse themselves by firing at the roof of the nave, and certainly they had abundant targets for their bullets. Here Cromwell must have been; here were fired some of those shots that shook a throne and established our English freedom for all time.

Perhaps we should remember here that St Neots has a new claim to fame in our time, for it is the birthplace of the four Miles children, affectionately known as the Quads, whose welfare has naturally enough become a national interest.

The Cradle of a Revolution in Fleet Street

LITTLE do people dream of the part the paper mill at St Neots has played in the modern development of the world. It is known throughout the paper trade as Mill Number 24, but it was sad, at the end of so long a history, to find the mill fallen upon bad times.

Even when the Conqueror’s Domesday Book was being compiled in 1086 there was a water mill on this site, and we find the mill mentioned in medieval days as grinding corn for the monks of St Neots. When the Priory was dissolved by the King in 1539 the mill passed into possession of the Cromwells, and from 1631 to 1800 it remained with the Sandwich family. For 700 years it was used for grinding corn and at last was rebuilt in 1799 and leased for paper-making by Henry Fourdrinier, who set up here the first satisfactory paper-machine ever built. It was in the year after Trafalgar, when this Frenchman had for some time been experimenting with the clever engineer Bryan Donkin in mills at Dartford.

Till the close of the 18th century every sheet of paper was made entirely by hand, a laborious process involving moulds. In 1798 a Frenchman named Louis Robert invented a machine with a continuous wire web on which the pulp could be run into as long a band as required.

Fourdrinier had learnt the trade in his father’s business in Lombard Street, London, and at 35 he took out his first patent. Years of experiment and failure followed, and it was only in 1807 that paper came freely from the machine in the St Neots mill. Though Parliament extended the patent for 14 years, the law was so bad that when Fourdrinier was not spending money on his machine he was fighting for his rights. After having spent £60,000 he became bankrupt.

What he had to contend with we may imagine from the story of his treatment by the Tsar. When Tsar Alexander was in England in 1814 he went to see the new machine at work. He was one of the few progressive rulers of Russia, and ordered two machines. Fourdrinier sent his son to erect them at Peterhoff under an arrangement that for ten years the Tsar should pay £700 a year for them. Nothing was paid, and after many years Henry, when 72 years old, went to Russia with his daughter to hand his petition to Tsar Nicholas. His petition was ignored and the old man seemed doomed to poverty; but so great was the benefit he had conferred on his generation that he was voted a sum of £700 by Parliament, and for the last 14 years of his life was able to live quietly, reading each morning the big newspapers which the industry of his earlier years had made possible.

So it may be said that St Neots was the cradle of the invention on which the character of the modern newspaper is based, the continuous roll of paper (the five-mile roll which everybody sees today in the streets) which is put on one end of a printing machine and comes out at the other complete for the breakfast table, instinct with good or ill for mankind.

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Eynesbury

St Mary the Virgin, locked no keyholder listed, is, other than its unusually placed south tower, is externally run of the mill. The interest appears to be locked away inside.

ST MARY. Of brown cobbles. The S tower has the date of 1688, but it was in all probability rebuilt with E.E. materials. E.E. also the S doorway. Otherwise mostly Perp and much re-done in the C19. But on entering one is at once faced with much more ancient history. The N arcade is partly Late Norman and partly earliest E.E. Round piers, square abaci, five bays. The Norman part has multi-scalloped capitals. Then follows one capital with flat stylized pointed leaves and then stiff-leaf. The capitals are low, and the stiff-leaf is on a small scale with the arrangements symmetrical. The S arcade is of the late C13, with octagonal piers, arches with two hollow chamfers, and broaches at the start. The aisle is narrow, as the S tower determined its width. The arch from the tower to the aisle is C13 too. Small nailhead in the respond abaci. Again of the same time the chancel arch.* - PULPIT. An unusually beautiful late C17 piece, the panels with a little inlay, the angle posts carved with cherubs’ heads and garlands. - BENCH ENDS. An excellent set (N aisle). Traceried fronts and ends modestly decorated with palms or an edging of fleurons and with bold poppyheads of leaf in plain outlines far from the usual fleur-de-lis type. Also human heads, stags, a sitting hen, a camel, and other animals and birds and monsters.

* The Rev. P. J. Bond tells me that before the restoration of 1857 the chancel had a flat roof and the nave an E window. He wonders whether the details of the chancel arch are not of 1857. Mr Bond also mentions ballflower decoration of the lintel of the N doorway.

EYNESBURY. The quiet charm of St Neots is over it, and its old-worldness seems to have crossed the stream and fallen on its 17th century rectory, its 18th century cottages, and the timbered inn older than all.

It has a queer bit of history, for there used to walk down these streets a man eight feet high, James Toller, who has lain in the churchyard since a year or two after Waterloo; and it has as queer a collection of men and beasts as any village we have seen.

They are, of course, in the church, a place to delight us all. We come to it through a porch put up as a thank-offering by a man who came safe home from Waterloo, Colonel William Humbley, who fought in 22 battles in five countries and lies under the porch he built. There is a fragment of the old Norman work in the chancel and the north arcade, but the church is 13th century, and its tower, queerly placed at the east end of a narrow aisle, is as young as the 17th century. One or two capitals in the nave have bold carving.

But it is the wooden zoo that brings us here, an astonishing collection carved on pews and bench-ends. Dull would he be of soul who could come here without a smile; we can almost hear the 16th century carpenter chuckling as he carved these little figures to amuse posterity. Some of his bench-ends have magnificent foliage and dozens of them have fine poppyheads, rather like handfuls of leaves. It is these poppyheads that surprise us so. They are crowned with pieces of splendid carving, some with heads of men and women, some with bulls, some with terrifying monsters. There is a camel lying down, a horse and a goat, a queer creature with a nut in his mouth, a sitting hen, a pair of stags with horns pressed back, and a crouching animal ready for a spring. It is the best free show that ever was for the boys and girls of Eynesbury.

Yet it is not all, for in this church is something like a small museum. We found here, in a case of curious possessions, an old iron padlock, a 17th century weathervane, and old pewter. There is a small carved chest of Shakespeare’s day, an 18th century table with an inlaid top, and cherubs and festoons of Queen Anne’s time on the handsome pulpit. In the churchyard is an ancient cross.

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Eaton Socon

St Mary, open but holding a toddler session which made an interior visit impossible, is imposing and rather splendid albeit being a mid C20th rebuild following a devastating fire in 1930. A revisit for interiors is required [I returned this week, 31.10.17, and found it to be full of interest].

ST MARY. The church was gutted by fire in 1930 and restored and partly rebuilt by Sir Albert Richardson.* The S arcade of five bays remained, with early C14 (re-used) arches, but otherwise Perp, and the S clerestory, and of course the W tower. It is a high tower with setback buttresses and pairs of transomed two-light bell-openings. The SEDILIA consist simply of a seat with as its back wall the window above having its jambs and sill taken lower down. - FONT. Square, Norman, of Purbeck marble, painted white. The decoration is intersecting arches. - COMMUNION RAIL. Of c.1640, curving forward. Balusters, and between them sharp pendants.:|: - In the N chapel SPIRAL STAIR by Richardson in a very enjoyable wooden cage. - ARCHITECTURAL FRAGMENTS. Found after the fire. Large parts of the arch of a main doorway with zigzag. - Also E.E. pieces. - STAINED GLASS. In the S chapel window four Flemish (?) roundels. - TAPESTRIES. One large scenic Flemish C17 piece, and one smaller foliage piece with a pelican. They were obtained for the church in 1932 by Sir Albert Richardson. - PLATE. Cup and Cover Paten, inscribed 1609; Plate dated 1609; Paten 1635; C17 Cup and Paten. - BRASSES to a Civilian and his wife, c.1450. Also scrolls. The figures are 19 in. long.

* The consecration took place in 1932
:|: This is the rail for the Lady Chapel.

EATON SOCON. It has a great green, a fine church, and a picturesque old inn to which Charles Dickens brought Mr Squeers and his party in Nicholas Nickleby. It is the church which tells the best story. The village has lost a noble treasure in our time, for the old church was burned down, but it has given itself a marvellous new possession. Hard on the heels of a great calamity has come a mighty inspiration and an achievement probably unparalleled in any English village in our century. In our ten thousand places we remember no 20th century village achievement that can compare with the church of Eaton Socon.

It is like walking into a medieval church made yesterday. Even children here remember the bitter sounding of the great church bells when they crashed from the tower in the fire of 1930. It swept away the wonderful roofs of the nave and chancel, destroyed the fine carved benches and the medieval chancel screen, melted down the ancient glass, and crumpled up the brasses. It gives us something to think of to remember that in an hour all that medieval loveliness could vanish from the eyes of men.

But it is something to think about also that it has risen again, that from its ashes has sprung a new thing worthy of the old, and more than worthy, a great church noble in conception and of exquisite beauty. Our people have not lost their ancient power. Our craftsmen have not lost their touch. The faith that does triumphant things is not yet dead. From the first days after the fire the motto of the vicar and his people was Resurgam, and as the wonderful help to rebuild came along the motto grew from “I Arise” to Resurgo Splendide - “I Arise Gloriously.”

Eaton Socon is the answer for ever to those who say that we are done for. It is like a medieval artist’s dream come true today. For two years the churchyard was a workshop. The ruins of the fire were sorted and such materials as could be used again were numbered and set aside. New stone was brought to be worked on the spot by the most skilled masons available. Oak was brought from Suffolk and worked on the ground with the adze. Never was a happier band of workmen, and they seemed inspired in their great task, which was to replace the whole of this church except the walls of the tower and the chancel which remained, and the south arcade of the nave, which was saved from the fire and seemed, as somebody said, to be held in space while from day to day and from year to year the rebuilding went slowly on.

The men worked as men worked in the old days of the guilds, and the result is what we should expect such work to give the world, a church of great strength with an interior of rich simplicity.

We found carvings of the architect and the builder’s foreman on a corbel, the foreman holding a little model of the church. The architect is shown with his spectacles, as is also the Archdeacon of Bedford on the tower end.

Though 600 years separate their work from the work of the builders of the south arcade, it is hard to say which is which in this great place where all is well and fair and nothing mean. The whole interior is white and light; everything is good to see and can be seen.

The two corners enclosed in oak screens with angels on them are perfectly charming, and in one of them (the choir vestry) rises an oak spiral staircase leading as in olden days to the top of a glorious chancel screen crowned with a carved Crucifixion scene. In the other corner (the south chapel) is a medieval piscina snatched from the fire. The great oak screen is magnificent with fan vaulting, a cornice of grape vines, and angels mounting the doorway. The chancel roof is painted in red and blue with gold bosses, its panelling separated by black and white ropework, and the whole resting on ten lovely corbels. There are ancient brass portraits of an unknown man and woman on the wall, covered with molten lead in the fire but unharmed; and on the floor of the sanctuary is a Tudor brass. The stone reredos is simple and beautiful with Christ on the Cross looking calmly down, clothed and with a kingly crown, angels kneeling on each side of him, Mary with folded hands and John with a chalice, and figures acclaiming Christ the King.

On the chancel walls are two old tapestries, one showing the martyrdom of St Alban and one a pelican feeding its young. There is a fine new priest’s seat with angels on the canopy, and fine 17th century chairs, and standing proudly in front of this beautiful chancel is a carved eagle on which the Bible has been read for 400 years. The Norman font is safe in its place again.

The rich sculptures on the walls, like the reredos, are the work of Mr P. G. Bentham, and no praise of ours can be too high for them. There are choristers singing praises, Truth pulling out the tongue of Scandal, Gluttony and Temperance, the Pipes of Pan, animals fighting, a winged creature crushing a serpent, beautiful heads of women and angels, two choristers singing from one book, and a wise old owl. It is all very like medieval craft, and the sculptor has done what the medieval craftsman did - he has put in stone some people he knew. Here is the Bishop of St Albans who dedicated the church anew. Here is the Archdeacon of Bedford, and here is the vicar of Eaton Socon with his churchwardens. There is a small wall painting of the Madonna by the font, and a small oak figure by. the door in the porch.

Among all this richness the timber roofs stand out with a splendour crowning the whole. Their arches spring from carved stone corbels and the beams rest on open parapet work which is perfectly charming. All six roofs (nave, aisles, chapels, and chancel) have a rare dignity and beauty, and all are new. In the east window of one of the chapels are four medallions of 16th century glass from the continent showing the Ascension and the Annunciation, and another piece of old glass shows the three men in a tub who were saved by St Nicholas. They are at prayer, as if begging for the saint to come to save them. These and a few coats-of-arms are all the stained glass in this church of fine clear windows.

It is pathetic to stand in the corner of the church among the fragments rescued from the fire. There are carvings let into the walls, half an arch, a crumpled-up brass which was recovered from the flames, six clappers of the ancient bells, and part of one bell which still bears an inscription boasting that it is the rose of the world. The half-arch has a remarkable history, for all the stones of which it is made were found separately embedded in the walls which collapsed, and on being brought together they actually formed a half-arch. Another interesting discovery among the ruins was a piece of the old thatch roof embedded in the stone-work. While the tower was burnt out like a chimney this thatch remained intact.

In a glass case is a copy of the Bible, its pages withered in the fire and it seemed odd to us that the last words on the burnt page we saw were that “He shall rend them and cast them down headlong.”

It is hard to feel thankful for adversity, but we cannot help feeling that Eaton Socon has nobly faced misfortune and proved her high spirit. She is no worse today for the catastrophe as far as beauty goes, and she still has the ruin of her old Priory of Bushmead, with a 12th century refectory still standing. It was given to the controller of Wolsey’s household when the monasteries were dissolved. The old house called Basmead has three acres enclosed by a moat in which the water still lies.

One of the great days of Eaton Socon was in 1658, when a well known evangelist came this way. He was John Bunyan, and for his preaching he was arrested here and charged at the assizes with being a witch, a jesuit, and a highwayman. He was found innocent of all three crimes and was released, continuing his career as a highwayman, galloping on his horse about the countryside capturing men’s souls for his Celestial City.

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