Old and Eccentric Churches: 3. Broughton, Staffordshire

The phrase "old and eccentric" might have been invented for the Church of St. Peter, Broughton, Staffordshire. After the Reformation, English Church-building styles did not change overnight, so that writers have spoken of a "Gothic Survival" well into the 17th century. St. Peter's is a great example of that survival, built in 1630-34, it could have been constructed a century earlier. The reason for its odd shape is that this is not a Parish Church at all; it is rather a country house chapel intended to serve nearby Broughton Hall, and the servants and tenants of the Broughton family.

 This family Church was spared the ravages of the Civil War, and has developed since then. Owing to the old English custom of younger sons of landowners becoming clergymen, a number of incumbents have also been of the Broughton family. The size of the chancel suggests that the original builder was sympathetic to the ideas of Archbishop Laud. The interior, with its 18th century box pews, two-decker pulpit and various family monuments, is a gem. It is not normally open, but there is a number that you can call to summon a very knowledgeable and helpful Church Warden.

 Being a family Church, it has many family monuments. This one is to Lt. Col. Spencer Broughton, a well-travelled soldier who died at sea in 1702 - hence the warship at the bottom of the tablet. Most of the tablet describes his adventures in the service of the crown.

The font, at the back of the Church, is extremely odd - for one thing, it is so positioned as to be impossible for the majority of the congregation to see it, as it is placed in one of the piers of the tower arch. For another, it is clearly a re-purposed something else - namely a pre-Reformation holy water stoup. Tradition says that it came from a demolished monastic Church. It is quite convenient for small private baptisms, of course, which is what it was meant for!

As you can see, the font is completely invisible from the nave. And no, it is not an optical illusion, the tower arch is significantly out of true. This is one of the last Gothic Churches built in England in the 17th century, but the architect (if there was one) was not as proficient as his Medieval predecessors. Or maybe he was just cheap.

The stained glass of the east window is constructed out of bits of other windows re-used in a patchwork quilt effect. It is supposed to show the patron saints of England, Scotland and Wales, but the man who put it together had never heard of St. David, and so confused him with King David - as seen here. David's legs, head, body and crown are from at least three different stained glass figures, not all to the same scale, thus he looks comically deformed.

Finally, the pulpit and reading-desk are the focal point of the 18th-century furnishings of this 17th century private chapel that has since become a tiny Parish Church.

And so farewell to this eccentric little church, the chapel of the Broughtons of Broughton Hall.

Old and Eccentric Churches: 2. St. John's, Ashbourne

The Church of St. John, on the Buxton Road in Ashbourne, is a very different building from St. Mary, Mappleton, and yet the two are in some ways very similar. Most notably, they are Anglican buildings that are intended to be "Protestant", auditory spaces for the preaching of sermons rather than "Catholic" spaces for the drama of the Mass. While Mappleton was a new Church on an old site, built because of the decay of the old building, St. John's was built as the result of a disagreement in the Parish Church of All Saints in the 1860s. The Vicar, it would seem, was influenced by the ideas on theology and worship coming from Oxford and Cambridge, while one of the the leading local industrialists, Francis Wright, led a Protestant party. Eventually Wright and his friends left the Parish Church, but not the Church of England. They built a grand propriety chapel - a private church not connected to the Parish system - and paid for a minister for themselves

The chapel was of course St. John's. There is nothing terribly unusual in a wealthy man of the period building his own Church - it was done by people of all shades of Anglican theology, and there are also Nonconformist and Roman Catholic places of worship that deserve the title. These buildings, being largely the result of one man's piety, are sometimes very personal in their architecture, and can be theological statements in stone or brick. One example of the theology of St. John's architecture is the tymapnum over the west door, which is also the main entrance. It bears the words of Jesus from Matthew 18:20, "Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them." This is the Protestant (and even Nonconformist!) idea of the "gathered Church" rather than the Parish model, the Church as the company of God's elect, the "little flock" in the midst of the world

There is however nothing little about St. John's. This is Protestantism on the grand scale, a great auditory space like Spurgeon's Tabernacle in London, taking advantage of modern technology - and not coincidentally Francis Wright's own ironworks - to create a huge open worship area.  Narrow columns of cast iron create the minimum interruption, and if the communion table is (as in our picture) occasionally obscured, the pulpit is not.

This is deliberate: The pulpit is the most important item in St. John's, where the Gospel is to be preached from. It would have originally also had a reading-desk beside it from which the service would have been read. By the 1870s the age of the three-decker pulpit was well and truly past, but still the simple woodwork of the pulpit looks back to an earlier age. Though the form of the building is Romanesque externally, even to the apse (which provides a conveniently shallow chancel), the interior is pure Victorian Protestantism. 

Looking west, the effect is even more pronounced. It could be a Nonconformist chapel, and the vicar at All Saints' who provoked the secession would no doubt have pronounced it as good as one. A Nonconformist chapel would, of course, have provided a deeper gallery than the one at St. John's, which seems to have been intended for singers and musicians, but that is all. The singing gallery was also a Protestant statement - the Anglo-Catholics had their robed choirs in stalls in the chancel or Choir of the Church.

The pews of St. John's are said to seat over 600. Tall windows with clear glass flood the wide preaching-Church with light in contrast to the "dim religious light" filtered through stained glass.

Cast-iron windows are another reminder that the man who paid for this was the owner of an ironworks. The style of tracery is one to be found in many Nonconformist places of worship - not coincidentally including Ashbourne's Wesleyan chapel! This is Victorian Anglican Protestant militancy in stone and iron - and a wonderful building it is too.

Old and Eccentric Churches: 1. St. Mary, Mappleton

The 18th Century has given us some of the most eccentric English Parish Churches. Before Sir Christopher Wren, the tendency of English Church architects was to continue in the Gothic style, though there were notable exceptions. Wren attempted to build Anglican Churches that were "properly Protestant", as we might say. He had his imitators and his followers, and until the rise of the Gothic Revival, these produced a number of neoclassical Church buildings.

One of the most fascinating of the post-Wren English Church architects is James Gibbs, who was a pupil of Wren. By far his most well-known Church is St. Martin-in-The-Fields, London. Probably his most obscure Church is the one that we are going to consider - St. Mary's, Mappleton, near Ashbourne in Derbyshire, probably built at some time between 1710 and 1750.

Not much is known about what Gibbs had to work with at Mappleton, though it is known that there had been a previous building on the site since at least the reign of Edward. What this building was like is quite unknown, but the outline of Gibbs' Church is a very traditional English Church, a rectangular nave/chancel and a square tower. Does it reflect the form of the Medieval building? While his London Churches all include a steeple incorporated within the structure of the Church, at Mappleton the tower is a separate structural component, though it is still the location of the front door.

The tower is topped by a dome crowned with a lantern, and the windows are typical round-headed windows that would have originally been filled with clear glass. The whole thing is very reminiscent of Wren's smaller London Churches, though it is smaller than any of them. Of course, the first question that suggests itself to the visitor on finding this rather accomplished little building in the middle of no-where is, "What on earth was James Gibbs doing in Mappleton?" The answer seems to be that he was approached to design St. Mary's while in Derby, working on the rebuilding of All Saints' (now Derby Cathedral).

Internally very little of the original furnishings survive; pulpit and pews have been replaced long ago, the former by one discarded from Ashbourne Parish Church. The roof, which would originally have had a plaster ceiling (note the brackets that would have supported the ceiling beams) has been exposed, thus raising the height of the ceiling. Still, the effect is, like Wren's Churches, auditory - this is a Church primarily meant for hearing preaching rather than for the Medieval drama of the Mass. The pulpit, meant for a much larger building, is therefore actually appropriately dominant, though Gibbs would have provided a three-decker in approved Georgian style.

The organ, which intrudes so markedly into the oblong building, is of course also a later addition. The gallery would have housed the rustic choir and their equally rustic accompaniment, the exact nature of which would have been largely dependent on the varying musical talents of the villagers. A vestry has been created by the construction of a wooden box under the galley on the south side.

The font, which not original, is of a size appropriate to the building. Quite probably the Georgian rector (who was always the Vicar of Ashbourne as well) would have conduced his baptisms using a silver bowl on the communion table. A later Victorian rector is responsible for this miniature font with its incongruent Gothic detailing and Minton tile floor. Since 1974 Mappleton has been part of the United Benefice of Ashbourne. It is still a well-loved and used village Church, open at all reasonable times and very much worth a visit, if only to see a "Wrenaissance" village Church.