St. Mary's Church is a Grade I listed Anglican church in Chesham, Buckinghamshire, and is part of the Diocese of Oxford. Built on the site of a Bronze Age stone circle of puddingstones, parts of the church building date to the 12th century. Remodelled in the 15th and 17th centuries, the church is architecturally a mixture of English Gothic styles. Weakened by additions to the church tower and undermined by burials in and around the church, by the 19th century the building was structurally unsound. The church was remodelled and strengthened in the 1860s by George Gilbert Scott and again in the 20th century by Robert Potter.
Formerly part of the Diocese of Lincoln, it served what was historically the largest parish in Buckinghamshire, and the church traditionally had two vicars. Initially the advowson (the right to appoint the vicar) was held jointly by a pair of prominent local families, but in the wake of the 12th century civil wars of the reign of King Stephen (1135–1154), the advowsons were granted to the monks of Woburn Abbey and to the Abbey of Saint Mary de Pratis in Leicester, each of whom appointed their own vicars to the parish. After the dissolution of the monasteries Woburn Abbey, together with its half of the advowson, was granted to the Earls of Bedford, while the half that had belonged to Leicester Abbey passed through a succession of private owners. In 1769 the Duke of Bedford acquired the Leicester half of the advowson and unified the parish, and from then on the parish was served by a single vicar.
The town of Chesham grew rapidly in the 19th century. After the parish was transferred to the Diocese of Oxford, reforms introduced by the Bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce, led to the parish being partitioned, eventually becoming four independent parishes (Chesham, Latimer, Waterside and Ashley Green). In 1980 it was decided to reverse this decision, and over the 1980s and 1990s three of these parishes (Chesham, Waterside and Ashley Green) were reunited under St. Mary's Church.
Historical background
Chesham is a Buckinghamshire town of around 20,000 people, located in the Chiltern Hills at the head of the River Chess, about north-west of London and south-east of Aylesbury.
There is archaeological evidence of human habitation during the Mesolithic period circa 8000 BC, of Neolithic farming circa 2500 BC and of Bronze Age settlement circa 1800 BC, during which time a stone circle of puddingstones was built at Chesham. The Catuvellauni tribe occupied and settled the area in around 500 BC, and at nearby Latimer there are remains of a Roman villa and archaeological evidence of Roman vineyards. Following the departure of the Romans the area appears to have been depopulated until Anglo-Saxon colonisation in the 7th century AD.
The first recorded mention of Chesham dates from 970 in the will of Lady Ælfgifu (identified with the former consort of King Eadwig of England), bequeathing Cæstæleshamme, "the water meadow at the pile of stones", to Abingdon Abbey. The Domesday Book of 1086 lists Cestreham as containing four mills and comprising three adjacent estates, the most important of which were held by Odo of Bayeux and Queen Edith, the widow of Edward the Confessor.
As with much of England, Chesham suffered serious religious unrest in the 16th and 17th centuries, and in 1532 Lollard radical Thomas Harding was burnt at the stake in the town for heresy. From the 17th century Chesham was a focus for dissenters. The first Baptist chapel in the town opened in 1701, Quakers have met in Chesham since the late 17th century, and John Wesley preached in Chesham in the 1760s.
Chesham Old Town, to the south-east of the present-day town centre, is the oldest part of the town and was the centre of Chesham until the late 19th century; in 1851 the population stood at 2,496. In 1889 the Metropolitan Railway reached the area as the first phase of a planned extension from Rickmansworth to Berkhamsted, and Chesham railway station was opened to the north-east of the Old Town. Following the Metropolitan Railway's acquisition of the Aylesbury and Buckingham Railway (A&B) in 1891, the extension to Berkhamsted was abandoned in favour of a connection between the Metropolitan Railway's station at Chalfont Road (now Chalfont & Latimer) to Aylesbury and over the A&B's route to Verney Junction, and Chesham station was left as the terminus of and sole station on a branch from the mainline, a status it retains today.
The new town of present-day Chesham grew between the railway station and the Old Town, leaving the architecture of the Old Town almost untouched. In June 2009 the Old Town and the present-day town centre were added to Historic England's Conservation Areas at Risk Register, although the local authority claimed that this was owing to a misunderstanding of its responses to English Heritage's questionnaire.
Architecture The existence of the stone circle indicates that a pagan place of worship existed in the area since prehistory, and although no archaeological evidence exists of any pre-Conquest structure on the site of the present-day St. Mary's Church other than the stone circle itself, it is considered likely that a wooden church was built on the site by the Anglo-Saxons. The earliest evidence of there being a church in Chesham is in the registers of the Diocese of Lincoln, whose 1153 registers mention "the church in Chesham". In 1257 Hugh de Vere was granted the right to hold an annual three-day fair and a weekly market in Chesham by Henry III. The annual fair was to be held on "the eve, the day and the morrow of the Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary", strongly suggesting that Chesham's church was already dedicated to Mary.
The church is built on the Bronze Age puddingstone circle, which has been incorporated into the foundations of the church. Built of knapped flint with limestone dressings, it has a roughly cruciform shape. The present day church building comprises a chancel, a clerestoried nave, north and south aisles and transepts and a south porch with a tierceron vault. The church is topped by a square central crenellated steeple with an octagonal wooden spire covered with lead. Although the current stone church of St. Mary's contains a mixture of architectural styles, mainly Gothic and dating from later periods, a Romanesque window between the north transept and north aisle has been dated to the 12th century, indicating that the church was already a stone building by this time.
The building as a whole is long from east to west and wide from north to south. The nave (excluding the aisles) is long and wide; English Gothic aisles and the arcades of the nave were added early in the 13th century. The arcades consist of five bays with octagonal piers and arches with half-pyramid shaped springers, a design described by Nikolaus Pevsner in 1960 as "baffling". In 1270 the eastern arch of the tower was widened, and in around 1320 the other arches of the tower were also widened. In about 1370 the chancel was rebuilt in the Decorated Gothic style, and a doorway added in the south aisle at around the same time.
15th- and 17th-century renovation
In the 15th century the clerestory was added to the nave, along with the Perpendicular two-storied south porch; these reconstruction works necessitated the repositioning of the door on the south aisle, and the building of the present-day western wall of the nave, with a great window and door also in the Perpendicular style. Stained glass windows were installed in the clerestory, but their contents were not recorded, and only small fragments of the mediaeval glass survive today: the arms of the Cheyne family, a human figure, and a shield with fragments of coloured glass, possibly the impaled arms of Woburn and Leicester. A staircase in the porch led to a parvise above; local tradition holds that Thomas Harding was held in the parvise prior to his execution in 1532. The porch also contains a stoup dating from the late 14th century, which although much damaged has survived all subsequent restorations and remodellings unaltered.
While the stone tower was completed in the 15th century, the date of the spire is unknown and has been dated to periods ranging from the 16th to 18th centuries. The church is known to have possessed a ring of bells by the 16th century, as the 1552 inventory of church possessions carried out on the instructions of Edward VI lists "v bells in the stepill". A bell cast in around 1450 by John Sturdy is still used as a Sanctus bell and is regarded as having national historic significance.
In the chaotic climate of religious upheaval during and following the Reformation of the 16th century many of England's churches fell into disrepair, including St. Mary's; the great door of St. Mary's was damaged during the Civil War and bullet holes from the conflict remain visible today. In 1606 it was decided to renovate St. Mary's. Two of the bells were re-cast, the pews were replaced, and "a fair new gallery" was built along the south aisle. In the 18th century two further galleries were added to the church; a north gallery reserved for the exclusive use of "maids and maidservants", and a west gallery for the use of St. Mary's band of musicians and choristers, later used to house the church's organ. The wooden communion table was sold for 3s and a new table added at a cost of 10s 6d (about £ as of ).
19th-century renovation Since the widening of the tower arches in 1270 and 1320 the tower of St. Mary's had been structurally weak. The subsequent addition of the bells and belfry and the lead-covered spire added to the weight of the tower, and the number of burials of local notables within the church and of parishioners immediately outside the church building weakened the structure further. By the 18th century the problems had become severe enough that the west arch of the south transept was blocked up in an effort the strengthen the structure, and a hollow pillar which housed the stairway to the rood loft was filled in. The tower continued to weaken, a situation made worse by the addition in 1812 of a new ring of six bells with a 17 cwt (860 kg) tenor bell, cast by Thomas Mears II of the Whitechapel Bell Foundry. Iron bands were wrapped around the tower to strengthen it but these soon snapped, and by the 19th century large cracks, which had appeared in the tower, were filled with broken bricks and rubble and covered over with roughcast as an interim solution.
By 1867, church authorities deemed the problems with the tower as severe enough to warrant a major reconstruction of the church. George Gilbert Scott, who had recently designed the monumental London buildings of the Foreign Office and St. Pancras Station, was chosen to lead the project. Scott was a leading advocate of the Gothic Revival and saw the renovation as a chance to return St. Mary's to a state nearer to its earlier Gothic design.
Scott removed the galleries, the high-sided 1606 pews, and the three-tiered pulpit. The tower was strengthened, the building's exterior facing of flint and limestone was restored, and the chancel, which had been remodelled in the late 17th century, was restored to its original shape and given a new east window in the Decorated Gothic style, containing Ward and Hughes glass depicting Faith, Hope and Charity, donated by the Duke of Bedford. New wooden pews were installed together with a Gothic style pulpit, and a font of Mansfield Woodhouse stone donated by the Lowndes family.