James Knollis was from Burford in Oxfordshire. He had an Oxford MA and BD, and was a Fellow of Lincoln College from 1795-1815. Besides being resident Vicar of Penn from 1823, he was also perpetual curate of Maidenhead from 1819 until his death. He straightaway built the Old Vicarage for the very considerable sum of £1,400, at his own expense, in 1825, noting that it had ‘Ground floor, 4 rooms, 2 kitchens, 2 pantries; on first floor, 6 bed chambers, 2 dressing rooms and a water closet.’
He also noted that the churchyard had been fenced-in with rails at the charge of the parishioners.

‘The Old Vicarage’
See also ‘A secret passage’

The excitement of two visits by King William and Queen Adelaide, in 1833 and 1835, is recorded in two long letters from his wife, Frances. In her first letter, she records that they received the King and Queen at the Old Vicarage with Earl Howe and his wife. They remained only a short time in the Drawing Room and were then accompanied to the Church for the christening of Adelaide Ida, the Howe’s eldest daughter. After a visit to The Knoll, to admire the view towards Windsor, The King and Queen and Mr Knollis were later entertained to dinner at Penn House.

In 1845, Knollis had to surrender his Penn Street parishioners to Earl Howe’s desire for a new church there, and so when, in 1852, Philip Rose was looking for more parishioners to justify his proposal to build St Margaret’s Church, James Knollis was not in the least inclined to see the process repeated and understandably dug in his toes at the prospect of ceding any more of Penn parish, despite pressure from Earl Howe. Eventually, the beleaguered Mr Knollis offered up only “the 51 households on the Hill” i.e. from Potters Cross up Dog Hill. The final boundaries were not agreed until after his death.

Casimir de Genouillac, who was one of the boys at the French School in Penn, left the school in 1808, aged 17, with only 12 guineas to see him on his way, and eked out a living as a teacher in small schools around Penn. He had to endure the widespread, indiscriminating and sometimes violent hatred of all things French and Catholic. “No Jews, no wooden shoes, no Popery” was a popular cry of the day. He was also permanently in debt and at times despaired for his future, but eventually found a more agreeable post, at a small school near Newbury, under the Rev. James Knollis who became a good friend, long before he was to become Vicar of Penn.

In 1814, Napoleon was exiled to Elba and Casimir was at last able to return to France. Not long after his return, James Knollis wrote to Casimir to report that ‘As to the peace, there were great rejoicings everywhere and there was plum pudding at Newbury drawn by oxen and boiled by steam, 28 feet long.’ He wrote again the following year after Waterloo, ‘Let us now pray that the two finest nations in the world may not be permitted to ruin first each other, and ultimately themselves.’ Truly glad will I be to see you – and whenever you like to come over and can do so – let this be your invitation!‘

His widow Frances Knollis, lived in The Knoll behind the church, for 20 years after he died.

© Miles Green,Penn Parish Newsletter No.49, March 2017
Photographs courtesy of Eddie Morton ARPS

We have already noted that In 1845, the Revd James Knollis had to surrender parishioners to allow Earl Howe’s desire for a new church at Penn Street, and again, in 1852, when Philip Rose was looking for more Penn parishioners to justify his proposal to build St Margaret’s Church. The reason for all this church-building was a widespread view that the Anglican church was in a bad way. Churches were often in a poor state of repair and held staid Prayer Book services, with few hymns, long theological sermons and seating arrangements with pew rents which reflected a rigid social pecking order.

One of the corbels supporting the nave roof in Penn Church, dating from c.1400. It is a medieval Bishop thought to be St Hugh of Lincoln. Photograph by Eddie Morton. St Hugh was Bishop 1186­1200. A French nobleman, he was an exemplary bishop and is the Patron Saint of the sick, shoemakers, and swans.

The second Sir Philip Rose, recalling his boyhood in the 1840s, remembered Penn Church, “It was a dreary old Church in those days with richly cobwebbed windows in the corners of which huge spiders lurked and a Service as dreary as the Church, the spiders being much more interesting than the sermons:’ He also remembered the church in London to which they used to go. ” Twice every Sunday to Church ….. And woe betide any servant who did not put in an appearance …. .It was bad for any of us who did not remember the text of the long sermon when we got home. No music, toys or games were allowed on Sunday, and cards were looked upon as the ‘devil’s plaything’, and were under no circumstances to be allowed in the house.”

St. Hugh

Sir George Grove, Editor of the Dictionary of Music and Musicians, and the first director of the Royal College of Music from its foundation in 1883, whose father came from Penn, remembered the Church of England in 1830 as having been, “a mass of deadness and stiff dullness. The old Wesleyan Evangelical movement had died down and the clergy were a body without a soul”.

Inspired by the Oxford Movement, the Anglican Church instituted radical reforms. The diocese of Lincoln, which had stretched unchanged from the Humber to the Thames, was split up and henceforth Penn was to come under the Bishop of Oxford. 106 churches were built in the new diocese of Oxford during the time of the first new Bishop, Samuel Wilberforce, between 1845 and 1869, including those at Tylers Green, Penn Street and Hazlemere. Churches all over the country were encouraged to restore the medieval arrangements of the Decorated period (c.1280-1380). A good deal of unnecessary damage was done to many old churches and Penn Church did not escape, as we shall see when the next Vicar arrives in 1860.

Miles Green, Penn Parish Newsletter No.51, September 2017

The stained glass window in the tower also depicts St Hugh and sits in the lancet window in the tower, of c.1325 in memory of a parishioner who died in 1946. Photograph by Michael G. Hardy from the ‘Stained Glass of Buckinghamshire Churches‘ website.

The next Vicar was John Grainger who was to be in office for 38 years. He had a Cambridge degree and was evidently interested in the history of his parish contributing an informative paper on the subject to Records of Bucks (Vol V, pp.271 et seq.). He presumably implemented many of the changes encouraged by the Oxford Movement, designed to shake the Church of England out of what was perceived to be its 18th-century lethargy. They advocated brighter and livelier services, elaborate ritual, vestments, surplices, choirs, crosses and candlesticks, lecterns and even incense, few of which had been seen since the Reformation three centuries earlier. Elsewhere, these changes were often accompanied by bitter controversy and accusations of popery. In some parts of the country, preaching in a surplice or having a cross and candlesticks on the altar were enough to start a riot. Penn was never so extreme and the parish register records the wearing of a surplice as early as 1707 and the gift of a brass branch candlestick in 1749.

HB Zeigler painting, of interior ca.1850

Hymns Ancient and Modern were first published in 1861, replacing metrical psalms announced by the parish clerk in many churches. It was often at this stage that organs were introduced to replace village musicians in the gallery and the earliest surviving churchwardens’ accounts for Penn, which run from 1857, show that an organ had already been installed by 1859, standing at the west end of the nave. It was worked by bellows and an annual payment was made for ‘organ blowing’.

We are on firmer ground in recording the structural changes introduced by the new Vicar, again inspired by the Oxford movement with the aim of restoring the appearance and arrangements of the church to their ideal of the medieval Decorated period (c.1280-1380). The new Vicar recorded in 1863 that ‘the interior was to a certain extent restored’, and listed the changes that had been made. Fortunately, our mainly 14th century nave and tower were seen as ‘correct’, but significant changes were made.

• The 18th century public gallery, which had been put up on the west wall of the nave by public subscription in 1733, was removed.
• The small choir gallery over the south door, put up in 1703, was removed. It had been paid for by the enthusiastic band of young men with their musical instruments, ‘that had learned to sing psalms’. We know that Sir George Grove’s father had had played the hautboy* in Penn church as a youth in the 1780s and 90s , but the gallery was no longer needed with an organ.
• The two-storey medieval south porch, with its side walls arched across the south aisle, which had provided the headroom for the choir gallery, was taken down. Judging by the ‘modern’ smoothness of the plaster, this removal resulted in a partial collapse of the central arch of the south aisle below the central clerestory window.
• The three–decker pulpit and any remaining covered private pews for the gentry families, some 7 ½ foot high, blocking both the central aisle of the nave and the chancel itself, which were noted in the 1637 Visitation, were removed.
• The east wall of the chancel, which had been completely rebuilt in brick with a new east window in the 1730s, was rebuilt with the knapped black flints fashionable at the time, and a more suitably Gothic east window was installed.

* A hautboy was an older form of oboe, often played with violin and bassoon

© Miles Green, Penn Parish Newsletter No.52, October 2017.
Photograph courtesy Eddie Morton ARPS

Transcription from the Bucks Herald, Saturday December 2nd, 1899

To the Editor of the Bucks Herald

Sir, – I have been waiting for some little time fully expecting that your attention would have been drawn by other persons more directly interested, or by the Buckinghamshire Archaeological Society, to the extraordinary proceeding – I can call it nothing less – on the part of the Vicar of Penn Church, the Rev. Benjamin John Short Kirby. A few weeks since I received a catalogue from a firm of London booksellers offering for sale, at the price of 175 guineas, the following: –

PENN RELICS

“The pulpit of Penn Church, the pulpit cloth (worked by Martha Penn), and the ancestral pew of the Penn family.

The vendors offered as guarantees of the genuineness of these historic relics of one of our most celebrated Buckinghamshire families the following declarations, which, Sir, you will note are attested by the reverend gentleman: –

“I, Benjamin John Short Kirby, Vicar of the Church of Holy Trinity, in the parish of Penn, in the County of Buckinghamshire, known as Penn Church, do hereby solemnly declare that the properties hereafter specified were formerly part of the ordinary furniture or fittings of Penn Church, a structure dating from the year 1213, wherein the Penn family the ancestors of that William Penn who settled in Pennsylvania, were wont to worship, and that they were sold by me to Messrs J and M L Tregaskis.

“1. The complete parts of a pulpit which stood in the north-east corner of the nave, next against the chancel (as shown in the view annexed), which was the pulpit of Penn Church from some remote period, no record of any alteration therein having been found in the registers of the said Church, which date from 1560, until the date of its removal under a faculty, by my direction, in August 1899.

“2. The doors, seats, cheek, and other sound parts of a high-backed pew, presumably the ancestral pew of the Penn family, Lords of the Manor, situate at the east end of the south aisle (as shown in the view annexed), facing the 16^th and 17^th century tombs of the Penns. Under the flooring the coffin of William Penn, who died in the year 1638 was discovered. In later times the pew had been divided by a partition, and had been repaired with a panel, containing the Creed, taken from the walls of the Church. These were removed under a faculty, by my direction, in August, 1899.

“Witness my hand this 23^rd day of September in the year of our Lord eighteen hundred and ninety-nine.”
(Signed) BENJAMIN J S KIRBY, “Vicar of Penn”

“I, Benjamin John Short Kirby, Vicar of the parish of Penn in the County of Bucks, do hereby solemnly declare that the red velvet pulpit cloth is the pulpit cloth referred to in the following extract from “A Terrier for the Vicarage of Penn” dated 27^th May 1726, and attested by the vicar and wardens of the parish of that date:-

“There is an old green pulpit cloth, with a green cushion, both of which are fringed round with a green silk fringe, and were constantly used till ye year 1721, in which year Ms Martha Penn, sister to Roger Penn, Esq, patron of ye Church, was so kind as to give a handsome pulpit cloth of crimson velvet, with a broad gold lace all round it, and also a cushion of ye same, bound with ye same sort of lace, and a gold fringe tassel at each corner, and letters and figures upon ye pulpit cloth are these – M. P. 1721”

“Witness my hand this 5^th day of October 1899″
(Signed) BENJAMIN J S KIRBY, “Vicar of Penn”

Now, Sir, I ask this reverend gentleman the meaning of this act of vandalism on his part, for these relics, are valuable beyond price. For, Sir, these are not only relics of antiquity, hallowed by their age and association with the sacred edifice from which they have been so sacrilegiously divorced by the person, of all others, who should most have cherished them, but, historical and national, from their connection with that family of Penn of whom our county is so justly proud. Possibly their future and last resting place is to be across the Atlantic in that State founded by and taking its name from the great member of the Penn family – William Penn. Thus, we are possibly for all time the losers, while those things thought of such little count here by their custodian will be in their new resting place a revered, a most precious, and a prized possession. Sir, where was the Patron of the Living of Penn, where the Lay Rector, the Churchwardens, and the parishioners, that this most monstrous procedure on the part of the Vicar of Penn should have been possible or permitted. Had he the right to do this? I suggest it was his duty to have prized and preserved these relics, and have handed them on as he received them, safe-guarded and kept, in the fullness of time, to his successor. I trust, Sir, that public opinion will be so roused in the matter that the Vicar of Penn will be forced to obtain again these relics and replace them in their ancient and proper resting place.   Yours truly, ‘OLD MORTALITY’

Transcription from the Bucks Herald, Saturday December 2nd, 1899