St. James, Stanstead Abbotts.
Queen and countryside.
This church lies hidden in the countryside well away from the village, too far for its congregation, who sensibly decamped to the closer Victorian alternative. It became first a chapel of ease, then redundant, and now rests in the most tender of hands, those of the Churches Conservation Trust. This splendid body keeps such churches in repair and open for all, perfectly presented with an absence of clutter, the bane of many churches. The graveyard is still used for burials and the church remains consecrated for services, but also open to any other uses that will keep the place alive.
Queen and countryside.
This church lies hidden in the countryside well away from the village, too far for its congregation, who sensibly decamped to the closer Victorian alternative. It became first a chapel of ease, then redundant, and now rests in the most tender of hands, those of the Churches Conservation Trust. This splendid body keeps such churches in repair and open for all, perfectly presented with an absence of clutter, the bane of many churches. The graveyard is still used for burials and the church remains consecrated for services, but also open to any other uses that will keep the place alive.
The tower’s octagonal stair turret shows in the trees, drawing us up the path from the road. There’s a spike on top as on most around here, a foil to the solidity of the buttressed tower built by William Stowell, master mason to the abbey of Westminster in the fifteenth century. The nave dates from Norman times, the chancel Early English, but no detail remains. It’s all built of flint, with the odd roman brick in the mix, and the Perpendicular windows in the south wall of the nave have dripstones cleverly repaired in cement, moulded as farmyard animals. The cow and the pig are particularly good, and make a change from the usual angel faces. Over the south door is the old timber porch, dating from the fifteenth century, with the low barred gate giving an agricultural air. The floor inside is made of old stone coffin lids dug out during the construction of the north chapel. This chapel north of the chancel is of brick, and bears the date 1577 over the east window. It was built for Edward Baeshe, the Queen’s Surveyor of Naval Victuals, quartermaster for the Navy.
Inside the homely church little has changed since the eighteenth century, a result of its lack of use. When most churches were modernised and “restored” in Victorian times all of the congregation’s energies were concentrated on the new St. Andrew’s in the village, leaving this one its high box pews and triple decker pulpit. Crown posts pierce the plaster barrel vault, rising from big tie beams that hold the leaning walls from collapse. A hand pumped organ with a spiky little case with toy gothic gables sits under the tower, and hatchments of members of the Booth family –famous for gin – hang on the wall. These diamond shaped boards bear the arms of the dead, and after being carried in the funeral procession, were displayed outside the house of the deceased for a year before being hung in the church. The name is a corruption of the word “achievement”, and the colour of the background denotes the sex and marital status of the dead. The pews are all of differing sizes, some families paying for their own, and they focus on the pulpit rather than the east. Before Tractarian changes churches in England were much more akin to Presbyterian chapels, with altars illegal and sermons the central feature of services, and this was reflected in their internal planning. The Georgian box pews in the nave were made of deal, whilst the set in the north chapel are seventeenth century oak, with holes cut in the panels to keep an eye on the servants in church. High over the wooden Stuart altar table is a small reredos painted in 1694 with the royal arms between the Ten Commandments; the Lord’s Prayer and Creed are written on tablets hanging on either side. One of the few changes made in the 1850s was the addition of a stained glass east window, an early work by Clayton and Bell. There are painted texts on the walls in the north chapel, and original enamelled glass showing the arms of Queen Elizabeth amongst priapic fauns buckled into the strapwork surround. She stayed at the Bury next door on several occasions, visiting Edward Baeshe, who is shown kneeling opposite his wife on the family’s memorial on the north wall of the chapel he built. Later tablets dot the walls like a funerary stamp album and a brass or two remain, including a fine fifteenth century.knight, but it’s the ensemble of a country church almost frozen in time that’s of most interest. Nearly every church in England was radically altered by the change of emphasis away from preaching and back towards ritual that followed in the wake of the Oxford Movement and Cambridge Camden Society in Victorian times, but here the protestant “prayer-book” interior survives almost untouched. Here we can step back on a summer Sunday into a Georgian world of droning parsons and dozing squires as the smell of cut grass and the swish of the scythe waft into the church past the font in which the children of the parish have squalled for 700 years. The Church Commissioners may have no use for this church, but someone cares: there are always flowers here, and a calm that goes beyond lack of noise.
This Churches Conservation Trust church is open on summer Sunday afternoons, 2.30-5.00, or ring the Trust on 0845 303 2760 office hours.
All rights reserved for this entire site. Copyright reserved to stiffleaf for all text and images, which may not be reproduced without my permission.
This Churches Conservation Trust church is open on summer Sunday afternoons, 2.30-5.00, or ring the Trust on 0845 303 2760 office hours.
All rights reserved for this entire site. Copyright reserved to stiffleaf for all text and images, which may not be reproduced without my permission.