A memorandum in the Parish Register by John Bennet records that, The little Gallery in Penn-Church over against the South door was finished March 5th 1703, being built at the charges of the young men that had learned to sing Psalms, it was painted at their charge July 8th 1709.

View of the South Door

The gallery is no longer there, but when we look above the south door we can see timbering and unevenness in the wall and plaster which shows where one of its supports was fixed to the wall. However, there is not nearly enough room for a man to stand up in the gallery so clearly the ceiling is now much lower than it once was. The question is settled by the marks of a cross-gabled roof high up in the centre of the south wall of the nave. This tells us that there was once a taller south porch running right across the aisle up to the main nave wall of the church and that it was easily high enough to allow head room for Mr Bennet’s gallery.

The Royal Commission for Historic Monuments completed an inspection of Penn Church exactly a century ago and reported that there appeared to have been a south porch of the 15th century. There would have been a still earlier porch, but by the 14th century it was common for porches to have an upper room which was used for many of the functions now carried out in the vestry. In other churches the upper room was used for the Sexton to sleep in or even as a school room. Presumably there would have been a door or arch through both of its side walls to allow a continuous south aisle and a high window in the south wall overlooking the graveyard to light the upper room.

The clerestory window above the central
arch showing the marks of the cross-gable.

Victorian ‘restorations’, inspired by the Oxford Movement, aimed to restore a church to a 13th/14th-century Gothic perfection and this included removing any galleries. Penn’s ‘restoration’ was carried out in c.1863 at the expense of the Earl Howe of the time. This is when the little gallery would have been removed. The high gabled roof and side walls of the medieval porch were also taken down and judging by the ‘modern’ smoothness of the plaster, caused a partial collapse of the central arch below the clerestory window. The present external south porch would have been constructed at that time.

Thomas Grove (born 1774), the father of Sir George Grove, remembered as a boy playing the hautboy (an older form of oboe often played with violin and bassoon) in Penn church, and was all his life a great singer of hymns. One can perhaps imagine him in the little gallery singing and playing his hautboy.

© Miles Green, Penn Parish Newsletter, No.25,  May 2012
Photographs courtesy Eddie Morton ARPS

In the same entry in the Parish Register, dated July 8th 1709, in which he records that ‘The Arms of Queen Anne were hung up’, our energetic Vicar added the note, ‘& the Sentences in the Church were writt, and new Painted’.

From the mid-1500s onwards, after Henry VIII’s Reformation, Protestant zeal regarded the coloured paintings which adorned the walls of every village church as idolatrous, to be white-washed over. Later, in Elizabeth’s reign, scriptural texts were painted over the white-wash.

Clive Rouse, a national expert on medieval wall-painting, who re-assembled and conserved the Doom painting, reported that after the walls of the nave had been cleaned and peeling distemper removed, in the early 1950s, ‘considerable evidences of painting were found’. In particular, ‘traces of a probable 15th-century wall-painting were found on the south wall, but unfortunately it was not considered possible to restore it as so much had been removed in earlier repairs to the church’.

Ann Ballantyne, who started her career as a conservator of medieval wall paintings by assisting Clive Rouse, inspected our only visible wall paintings in the area behind the pulpit in January 2002, and reported that there are four visible layers and likely to be more still hidden. According to Clive Rouse, a well-cared for church was redecorated every 25 years or so.

The four layers are:
Medieval – The red band is part of a very typical medieval decorative dado pattern, representing a skirting along the lower part of the wall. They were able to be placed lower on the wall because they were not holy like drawings of saints etc, which had to be protected, high out of reach. There is also a typical six-petalled (sextile) flower.

Stuart – the long orange vertical decoration with black letter script.

18th century – The Lord’s Prayer. Parts of ‘Trespass against’ can be read, and this is almost certainly one of John Bennet’s contributions in 1709.

Indeterminate – Another layer of script.

Penn Parish Newsletter, No.26, June, 2012 © Miles Green, Penn

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Outside the south porch of Penn Church stands an impressively large tomb with a long, now largely indecipherable, inscription. It reads as follows:

‘Here lyeth the body of John Bennet born in the City and County of Coventry Feb 2nd 1663. Bred up a Schollar at the free School there went afterwards to ye University of Oxford from thence to be a teacher & instructor of Roger Penn Esqr. & his nephews, Sons to S. Nathaniel Curzon Baronet of Kedleston in Derbyshire. after he had done with these Gentlemen and they were removed from under his care the aforesaid Roger Penn Esqr, (the then worthy Patron of this Parish) Gave to him the Presentation to this Vicarage Sept. 9th 1700 into which being inducted Sept 29th following he continued Vicar to Feb ye 2d. 1715 on which Day he Dyed.’

John Bennet was only 52 when he died. The apparent contradiction in the date of his death is because, until 1752, the year was deemed to start from 25 March, so February 1715 on the tomb is today’s February 1716.

The tomb is in a place of honour right outside the south door, as perhaps one would expect for the much respected teacher of the Patron’s family and the subject of the only portrait of a Vicar to hang in Penn House. John Bennet was not ordained as a priest until 1700, the same year he became Vicar, and so Roger Penn must have offered him the job before he was even ordained.  There was no consultation with parishioners or selection process in those days! Perhaps further evidence of his Patron’s high regard is that the Register entry shows that he was to have been inducted as Vicar by the Bishop of Lincoln, but this was crossed out and so presumably cancelled shortly beforehand.

I was pleased to discover that John Bennet got married in 1708 to Mary Redrope. He was then 45, she was 28 and a particularly appropriate match as her great-grandfather Robert Rudrope had been Vicar a century earlier. There is no record of their having any children.

And so a very productive term of office came to an end. He has been occupying these pages for over a year and deservedly so.

© Miles Green. Penn Parish Newsletter, No.27,  September 2012
Photographs courtesy Eddie Morton ARPS

Penn children in 1656 by F van Hees.
The eldest son, John, carrying the small hawk,
is still in skirts. Elizabeth, next to him,

Roger Penn, who died unmarried in 1731 was the last male heir of the Penn family so their name disappeared after over six centuries as lords of the manor of Penn. Only one of Roger’s four sisters married. Sarah was 22 years older than him and before he was born she had married Nathaniel Curzon from Kedleston in Derbyshire in 1671, aged 16. At that time she had no brothers and was the heiress to the Penn Estate. There were very generous marnage settlements of £5,000 from each family. Comapre this with an annuity of £15 which Samuel Pepys gave to a much-loved servant at about this time.

The Knoll, behind Penn Church, It was built
for the Curzon family in 1670

According to an early 18th-century account, Nathaniel’s father, Sir John Curzon the first Baronet, ‘built a pretty house at Penn for his younger son Nathaniel’. This was The Knoll behind Penn Church where the newly married couple presumably lived and had their first four or five children. Sarah’s mother was still having children of her own after 25 years of marriage and her youngest son, Roger Penn,’ was an exact contemporary of his nephew, the third Curzon boy, and two or three years younger than the older boys. In 1680, presumably because they needed more space, the Curzons paid £477 for the old timber-framed house with 48 acres at Tyler End Green by Widmer Pond where William Penn the Quaker had courted his future wife a few years earlier. Compare this price with a nearby cottage sold for £53 a year later.

The old house in Tyler End Green overlooking Widmer Pond
which the Curzons purchased in 1680
{Bodleian Library, Oxford}

They spent the first 20 years of their married life in Penn and five sons and three daughters of their nine children were born here. The boys boarded at Berkhamsted school between the ages of about 8 and 16 and in 1691, 1692 and 1694, the three younger ones variously carved and dated their names on the stone mullions of a school dormitory which I went to see at Berkhamsted many years ago.

Nathaniel inherited the baronetcy in 1686, but the children were still young and the family remained based in Penn for many years afterwards. Even after they sold their TyIer End Green house in 1691 and moved to Kedleston, four of their five boys were still of school age and stayed on, presumably living at The Knoll (which the Curzon family kept until 1960) or perhaps staying with Sarah’s much younger brother, Roger and her sisters at Penn House. The youngest Curzon, Charles, was at Berkhamsted until about 1700 and John Bennet, who had taught all the Curzon boys, was appointed as Vicar of Penn.

© Miles Green, Penn Parish Newsletter, No.17, November 2010
Photographs, courtesy Eddie Morton, ARPS

We saw in the previous article that the 2nd Sir Nathaniel Curzon inherited Kedleston Hall in Derbyshire in 1686, but he and his wife Sarah (née Penn) had been living in Penn since 1671 and their younger boys were still at school at Berkhamsted. He does not seem to have moved to Kedleston until 1691 and in c.1700 commissioned Francis Smith of Warwick to build the red-brick house with stone dressings shown in the painting (attributed to Jan Griffier I), keeping its older brick and timber-framed outbuildings and simple walled garden enclosures. The church was the only building shown in the picture to survive when the old hall was pulled down. This house was in turn pulled  down in 1759 to build the present Kedleston Hall.

On the west wall of the north transept of Kedleston church, the ambitious standing wall monument by Peter Scheemakers, a noted sculptor of the day, shows husband and wife in Roman dress and was put up by their youngest daughter, Eleanor (the only child born at Kedleston rather than Penn), in 1737. The monument is the only surviving record of what either the second baronet or his wife looked like, although, as we have seen, a portrait of Sarah as a child survives.

Peter Scheemakers (1691-1781) was from Antwerp where his father was a sculptor. He spent several years studying in Rome, settled in London in c.1730 and rapidly became very successful. One of his very earliest monuments was to Montague Drake of Shardeloes in Amersham church and his most successful work was the statue of Shakespeare in Westminster Abbey.

Penn Arms: Note that the three roundels on the Penn arms are silver, not  the mistaken gold on the Penn arms in Penn church.

© Miles Green, Penn parish Newsletter No 18: February 2011
Photographs courtesy Eddie Morton ARPS

A member of the Jordans Quaker Meeting alerted Earl Howe to the following notice of a sale by a Cardiff auction house:

“An antique Charles II oak chest made to commemorate the marriage in 1671 of Sir Nathaniel Curzon of Kedleston in Derbyshire and Sarah Penn, daughter of William Penn, who founded the U.S. state of Pennsylvania, will be sold in a sale at leading South Wales auctioneers Rogers Jones Co. The sale is on Friday December 5”.

Making the chests was considered a privilege for the carpenter tasked with the commission and great pride went into their construction. Similarly, the more important – and rich – the couple, the more grandiose the chests became. The example to be sold at Rogers Jones is a tour de force of the wood carver’s skill. The chest is estimated conservatively at £700-1,000, but could sell for more.

The heavy oak carcase is embellished on all sides and its lid with romantic and religious symbolism. The profuse carving includes two pairs of confronting dragons and hearts, Christian crosses and anchors representing Faith, Hope and Charity on the pair of panels on the façade, while the lid is decorated with a trio of panelled rosettes. Among a number of inscriptions is one across the front, flanked by the date 1687, which reads ‘We Once Were Two – We Two Made One / We No More Two – Through Life Bee One’. Above and below the panelled rosettes in the lid is an inscription which reads: ‘Comfort One Another And My House Will Serve The Lord’.”

The advertisement for this lovely oak chest is seriously misleading. Sarah Penn was indeed the daughter of William Penn, but he was not William Penn, the Quaker, who founded Pennsylvania. Nor was it a marriage chest since it is dated 1687 and the couple were married sixteen years earlier in 1671. Sir Nathaniel Curzon, the 1st Baronet, died in 1686. At that time, his son Nathaniel and Sarah (neé Penn) were living in Penn and their five sons were at Berkhamsted School. It seems more probable that the chest was a farewell gift to the couple who had inherited a large estate at Kedleston and were leaving Penn.

Sarah was to inherit the Penn Estate and Earl Howe is her direct descendant. The chest is central to his family history and it was therefore very disappointing that his bid for up to £2,000 was not sufficient. This historical information was passed to the auctioneers before the sale, but one wonders whether the purchaser was aware that it had no connection whatsoever with the Quaker or with Pennsylvania.

© Miles Green, Penn Parish Newsletter, No.38,  January 2015
Photo courtesy of Rogers Jones Co, Auctioneers, Cardiff