We are all used to the idea of our church having just one main altar under the east window and, more recently, a side altar in the chapel, but this has not always been so. In the Middle Ages, even modest country churches could have perhaps a dozen altars, many of them in the nave and under the control of the parishioners. The Protestant Reformation in the mid-16th century swept them all away and there was, in effect, no altar at all for three centuries. There was just a low table with cushions and a bible and no crucifix (see the Ziegler painting of the chancel, c.1850, in the church). It was not until 1865 that our own Victorian ‘restoration’ set out the church much as we see it today.

We can identify many of Penn’s medieval altars from bequests made in wills before Elizabeth I’s accession in 1559 marked the very end of any Catholic practice. I have seen 12 out of the 16 wills that survive from this period, the earliest dated 1492. They show bequests to 8 named altars or to the ‘lights’ that were burned in front of them.

Those named are shown in bold:
The stone High altar was where the main Mass was celebrated, and as prescribed by Canon Law, it had curtained niches on each side for the principal image of the Virgin (to the south), described as Our Lady light, and for the patronal image, in our case, of the Trinity (to the north), represented in another church by an old man, a crucifix and a dove. The Rood light was on the Rood loft below the Rood, which dominated the nave beneath the painting of the Doom. Candles were kept burning there all the time, tended by a Roodman. The Sepulchre lights were for the Easter sepulchre, an elaborate carved stone tomb in bigger churches, but probably a moveable, painted and gilded, wooden timber hearse in a country parish, around which dozens of candles were burned and a continuous watch kept over Easter.

In 1505, Thomas Alday of Nattetok (Knotty Green) left a swarm of bees to provide wax for these candles as well as 6s 8d to repair the roads of the parish. Thomas Eggam (Eghams Farm) was a witness.

Roger Playter left 4d to the priest ‘to say Mass in the chapel for my soul at a time convenient’, and John Salter left 12d to the Chapel of the Blessed Mary. There was a separate altar, somewhere, to Our Lady of Pity, which typically represented Mary as a grieving mother holding the crucified Christ and was a very popular image in late medieval England. John Puttenam left instructions that he was to be buried in the churchyard ‘nigh unto the aulter of the holy appostylle.’ This altar could have been in the south aisle, perhaps in front of a carved wooden screen to the Lady Chapel.

Three bequests to the High altar were for ‘for tithes forgotten’. The Church prudently taught that debt to the Church would result in excommunication, nullify the benefits of prayer and alms-giving and leave the soul for longer in purgatory.

The amount of the bequest to each light varied between 1d and 12d, usually 2d or 4d, and this totalled 46d for John Salter, quite a considerable sum when 1d was the daily rate for a labourer. The smallest total was 3d from Nicholas Asshwell. William Grove gave a sheep each to the Rood light and the Trinity light. All the earlier wills made a bequest to the ‘Mother Church of Lincoln’, Le., Lincoln Cathedral. Most testators named only two or three lights, adding a general bequest to each of the other lights, and it is very likely that there were more unnamed side altars in the nave and south aisle which reflected the particular devotional choices of the parishioners. St Anthony, the healer of men and farm animals, St Anne, believed to be Jesus’s grandmother, who could help with women’s fertility, and various apostles, were popular choices. A simple Mass would be celebrated at a side altar on weekdays, not the elaborate ritual of a Sunday Mass at the high altar behind the Rood screen.

The images and their niches or tabernacles were painted and gilded, and offerings of flowers, money candles, rosaries, kerchiefs and rings were made to encourage their interest and intercession.

© Miles Green, April 2005

My previous article established that five centuries ago, in the years leading up to the Reformation, Penn Church had at least eight altars, very probably several more, and that bequests of sheep, bees and money were left for their maintenance. So how was all this organised? What was the medieval equivalent of today’s PCC?   Churchwardens’ accounts would be useful, but very few have survived for this period and none for Penn.   However, all is not lost because we still have some useful clues and we have Morebath.

 The Vicar of Morebath , a parish in Devon on the Somerset border, 25 miles north of Exeter, kept meticulous records from 1520 to 1574 and Eamon Duffy’s The Voices of Morebath, uses them to provide an unrivalled picture of life in a late medieval parish. Penn and Morebath were remarkably similar: both were 4,000 acres, mainly sheep country, with about 200 inhabitants in scattered farms and hamlets on the edge of a large heath (Wycombe Heath/Exmoor). Their churches were roughly the same size and both had a small Augustinian Priory as their patron. Where evidence from Penn is available it invariably confirms that from Morebath, as we shall see in my next article, and so you can read the following description much as if it were for Penn.

 The lights burning in front of the twelve altars in Morebath Church were maintained by various ‘stores’ or devotional funds provided in various ways – by the return on wool from small flocks of sheep which were literally ‘earmarked’ for that purpose, as well as from church ‘ales’, devotional gatherings, and gifts and bequests such as money, sheep and bees to provide the wax for the lights. Each store, there were eight in Morebath, was maintained by a different group of parishioners who accounted for them every year in detail.

Two Church Wardens, known as High Wardens were elected annually. They had to account for the central funds of the parish, including the surplus from other stores and expenditure on purchases, repairs and projects. They also accounted for the two stores of the side chapel. They were elected together and served for just one year with election travelling in a rota round the farms and cottages of the parish. The head of every household was expected to serve in their turn, the poor as well as the prosperous, even if a widow. On a few occasions, both wardens were women. The junior of the two was responsible for the High Warden’s parish ale, the most important fund raising event of the year.

 The store of Our Lady was the most important in the parish and owned the largest flock of sheep, up to two dozen, each with a distinctive mark cut in its ear. It was managed by its own two wardens and existed to maintain a light in front of the principal image of the Virgin, which was next to the high altar in the chancel, with profits going to other needs of the church. The wool from these sheep, which were all looked after and accounted for, by individual parishioners, produced 30 to 40 shillings every year.

 The Maiden store was run by all the unmarried women of over 12 or so, who elected two of their number as wardens every year with fathers occasionally serving in their place if they were too young or inexperienced. They maintained ‘a taper be fore our Lady and a nother a fore the hye crosse’( ie the Rood) and another before a local female saint. They had no sheep and raised a few shillings from an annual gathering.

The Young Men’s store, consisting of all the bachelors of about fourteen years and above, maintained a taper (candle) before the patronal image of St George (for Penn, it would have been the Trinity) and two more before the Rood. They too elected two wardens every year, with fathers or mothers standing in if necessary, and they raised most of their money, several pounds a year, from an annual ‘ale’.

There were also four smaller stores for the remaining images.

© Miles Green, June 2005

W e saw in the previous article that all the inhabitants of Morebath in Devon, a parish remarkably similar to Penn, were directly and actively involved in the life of the church. The head of every household, rich or poor, male or female, served for a year as one of the two churchwardens, with the rota travelling methodically around the parish. In anyone year, twelve parishioners held office of some kind, including women and teenagers. Sheep were the basis of the economy and two thirds or more of the households looked after at least one of the church sheep, a parochial obligation that if refused, and it seldom was, resulted in a fine of 3d or 4d. One family looked after the church bees. It was an unexpectedly democratic society. Decisions were reached by consensus rather than by majority and great efforts were made to overcome objections even by the poorer parishioners.

We can reasonably assume that it was much the same in Penn, where the evidence, although much sparser, nonetheless invariably confirms the same picture.

For instance:
The importance of sheep in Penn, is confirmed by wills . Thomas Alday’s only bequests in 1505 were one sheep to each of his five older children, with a lamb to his youngest daughter. William Grove, in 1513, bequeathed ‘unto the rode Iyght of Penne 1 shepe‘, ‘to the trinite 1 shepe‘. Nicholas Asshwell left no sheep to the church but two sheep and a bullock were his only bequests to both his son and daughter, and he left a sheep to three other beneficiaries.

A swarm of bees was bequeathed by Thomas Alday for the sepulchre light of Penn in 1505.

Penn also had two churchwardens, who were named, in 1520, as John Grove and Roger Playter. The 1522 Muster Return shows that Roger Playter held no land at that time and John Grove only a modest holding. This fits the Morebath model as does the reasonably close neighbourly placing of the two men on the 1524 and 1546 tax returns.

The most important parishioners in Morebath were a small group of the more senior and most prosperous, who were elected for as long as they were willing to serve, to act, in effect, as bankers for the parish. They were separate from the two churchwardens and held any surplus money from the church stores and provided financial continuity and stability. They met extraordinary demands for money imposed by the manorial or Hundred Courts, setting parish tax levies afterwards to recoup their outlay. The number varied from three to six, and they are referred to in the records accordingly as the ‘Three Men’ , ‘Four Men’ etc. Together with the Vicar and occasionally under the chairmanship of the Lord of the Manor or his Steward, they helped resolve parish disputes. They also appeared at Visitations by the Bishop or by royal Commissioners.

They became even more important after the radical Protestant reforms, following Edward VI’s accession in 1547, removed the whole basis of the parish’s traditional methods of raising and administering money for the church. The Six Men took over the effective financial management of the parish. We catch a glimpse of a similar Six Men system in Penn in the pivotal moment of the inventory and sale of the remaining Catholic church goods, which was drawn up in 1552. The inventory notes that ‘there is solde by the consentes of Richard Bovington, John Grove, John Bovington, John Balam, Thomas Robertes, Richard Wright and the churche wardens‘

Contemporary tax returns and wills show that the first four named were the most prosperous in the parish after the gentry families of the Pennes and Puttenhams and Ugnalls, who were not apparently required to take on these parish responsibilities. The Groves of Stonehouse and the Bovingtons of Glory Farm continued to be prominent in the parish for centuries afterwards. Thomas Robertes was also prosperous and Richard Wright was described as a yeoman in his will of 1556.

Miles Green August – September 2005

The location of an earlier church at Church Knoll, suggested in the first instance by the place name, is supported by the convergence of many roads and footpaths on the large area of common land adjacent to the knoll. Further support is given by the fact that, until c,1840, the 350 yard stretch of the present main road between The Crown and the former manor house at Penbury Farm, did not exist. A journey from Penn to Beaconsfield, before 1840, would have taken you down Crown Lane, The earlier direct road link was between the manor house and Church Knoll. (See sketch map).

Local folk lore has the church being moved uphill, stone by stone, despite the devil’s best efforts to prevent it, and our church very probably does rest on sarsen stones from Church Knoll, which is itself the result of a natural accumulation of stones after the ice age. The church at Church Knoll was almost certainly of wood and very unlikely to have had its own graveyard since burials would have been at Taplow, then our mother church. In 1177, according to the date on a foundation stone reported by a reliable earlier vicar, the new church was built. It was sited precisely on the highest spot of ground closest to the manor house, to which it was linked by a track, still a footpath, that comes out between the cottages on Pauls Hill and heads for the south porch door,

Whereas Saxon churchyards were usually roughly circular, the Normans introduced a rectangular form, usually of one customary acre. A medieval acre varied considerably from place to place, but I have concluded from other researches that Penn’s medieval acre was not much different from today’s standard acre (4,840 sq yds), In fact, our churchyard, after removing a 1904 addition on the western boundary, is very close to both a rectangle and a standard acre.

The church’s position was decided by the highest ground, but it is also very precisely in the middle of the N-S axis of the churchyard, This seems more likely to have been deliberate than fortuitous, and suggests that the churchyard was drawn around the church, after the church was built, and therefore that the present lines of both Church Road and Pauls Hill were decided by the churchyard boundary, This suggestion is borne out by the sudden jink of Pauls Hill at the entrance to the former vicarage, away from the direction of Crown Lane and Church Knoll and towards the new church boundary, Its earlier route could be marked by an unusually long and narrow field with ponds, which was called Hatchetts Mead in 1838,

Pauls Hill was called Old Pauls Lane on the 1855 Inclosure map, and a farm and four field names below the former vicarage were called Old Pauls on the 1838 Tithe map, This all fuels my belief that our church was dedicated to St Paul before it was rededicated, as often happened after a major rebuilding, to the Holy Trinity, perhaps in the early 14th century after the tower and south aisle had been added, or a century later when the new roof was put on, Chacombe Priory, then Penn’s proprietor, was dedicated to St Peter and St Paul. The earliest reference to Holy Trinity noted so far is in a will of 1505, The earlier name for Pauls Hill could well have been Gatemoor Hill, a name shown on older maps and still borne by a former common, a wood and a field at the bottom of the hill.

The drawing of the churchyard boundary to put the church at its western edge, may well have been deliberate to permit more space for burials around the chancel, the holiest part of the church, The normal prejudice against the north as the devil’s side, did not seem to have been very strong, because although there have been visibly more burials to the south, the favoured sunny side where every medieval church had a tall churchyard cross, two important graves lined with 14th century Penn tiles were found immediately outside the north porch door in 1967, The north was also the village side, which would have made it less threatening.

© Miles Green, October 2005

One of the many surprises from the detailed records of Morebath in Devon a parish which was remarkably similar to Penn, is how actively Catholic they remained in the years from the first break with Rome in 1529, until the Protestant tidal wave of 1547. In that short period, Morebath put up new carved wooden screens for both the chancel and side chapel; installed a new Rood group and Rood beam on which to stand the Rood cross; renewed all the pews using ten local oaks; renewed or rebuilt nearly all the images and tabernacles with painted ‘ceilings of honour’ over them; put in new choir stalls; retiled the whole of the church floor; repaired the bells; the chancel and high altar were re-ordered, whitewashed and re-roofed and re-consecrated by the bishop.

This all represents a staggering investment for a small parish and shows the Catholic Church in its most favourable light as the focus of both religious devotion and community spirit. However, a general visitation of Buckinghamshire in 1519 had revealed a contrasting and melancholy picture of forlorn and unkempt churches and church property. Some graveyards were desecrated by browsing cattle; priests were not always very conscientious, or even fully literate. One was reported as living outside his parish and when he did say mass it was too early in the morning for his parishioners to attend. In Beaconsfield, the rector was non-resident, the rectory house in ruihs and the churchyard not properly enclosed.

Where did Penn fit into this widely contrasting picture? Probably somewhere in the middle, because whilst the visitation made no specific criticisms, it did note that the Vicar was non-resident. He received an annual stipend of £9 (Morebath was £8) and paid £6 of this for a curate, and it seems unlikely that the curate would have inspired the ceaseless activity recorded in Morebath where the Vicar was clearly the leader of his community.

In the last generation before the Reformation, many of the religious houses had deteriorated beyond all measure. The patron of Penn Church was not yet the Penn family – it was still Chacombe Priory in Northants, a small Augustinian priory with an annual income of about £100, mainly from the lands and tithes from four churches, one of which was Penn, which it had been given two centuries earlier (Chacombe Place in Knotty Green is named after the Priory).

The Priory provided the vicar of Penn from amongst its own friars, for more than a century, but then seems to have sold the right of appointment to a third party. An inspection or ‘visitation’ by the Bishop of Lincoln’s Commissioner, on 15 June 1520, found the Priory in a dreadful state.

The Prior had only five brothers under him and he kept all the offices in his own hand offering no account of his expenditure: providing the brothers with inadequate food, drink and heating and making no provision for their illness. Even the Prior was not a graduate and none of the brothers was sufficiently learned or skilled – one was singled out as ‘not expert in grammar’ – they had no pens or writing materials and they were not given any instruction. The Prior was very severe and beat them, on one occasion drawing ‘an effusion of blood’, and they were in trouble if they made any Gomplaint during a visitation.

The strict routine of five daily divine services, one every three hours from 6am (prime, terce, sext, none, vespers) was not followed since the Prior usually kept the brothers waiting so long that one service ran into the other. The brothers did not sit in silence in the refectory as they were supposed to and went out drinking and visiting lay people’s houses. The Prior was enjoined to put all these things right and to recruit more brothers, but he was left in office and ten years later another visitation reported, rather improbably, ‘omnia bene‘, except for repairs needed to the chancel of the Priory church.

Missenden Abbey was another Augustinian foundation with close connections with the Turville and Penne families in the 12th and 13th centuries. One of the Abbots was also rector of Penn and appointed Hugh de Penna as Vicar in 1274. Visitations in 1530 and 1531 revealed a far worse situation even than in Chacombe Priory. The Abbot had been having an affair with the wife of a villager, his sister had been appointed the Abbey’s brewer and her daughter was a woman of ill-repute. One canon had keys to every lock in the Abbey, shared the Abbot’s mistress and went out at night in a doublet and jerkin with a sword at his side. Yet another canon had been found guilty of buggery. The canons were so ignorant of Latin that the Bishop’s injunctions had to be drawn up in ‘our vulgar English tongue’. An unscrupulous bailiff had kept no record of expenditure and brought the Abbey into debt. All the buildings were in need of repair, and every place needing to be preserved from filth and stench. The Abbot was suspended but later restored.

It was this type of visitation report that Henry VIII was able to use to justify dissolving the monasteries and Chacombe Priory was closed in 1535 and the Prior pensioned off.

© Miles Green, December 2005

Ecclesiastical law and custom required a church to face to the east, the direction from which Christ, symbolised by the rising sun, was supposed to come on Judgement Day, and graves are still always aligned east-west for that reason. But where is east? The direction of sunrise in England moves through 80° between midwinter and midsummer, at about 3° every week, so it depends what date is chosen. In addition, there are topographical questions about whether there is any horizontal view of the horizon from the site of the church that is not obscured by trees or blocked or enhanced by hillside or valley; or whether the sun was shining at all at dawn on the day when the line of the church was first laid out.

Durandus, a 13th century French bishop and leading canon lawyer, reported an early tradition ‘that the head of the church lies exactly to the east, that is to the part of the sky in which the sun rises at the equinox.’ The vernal equinox was supposed to be 21 March. If this was the rule, then we would expect all the medieval churches in our area to be pointing in roughly the same direction, at 90o to tru North, but they do not. Measuring from a large scale map, Amersham is 76°, Beaconsfield is 82°, Penn is 86° and High Wycombe is 96°. When we look countrywide, we find a spread of some 75° around true east (Lichfield cathedral is 40° W, and Rochester cathedral at 35° E).

Several ingenious explanations have been proposed to explain this lack of any uniformity; that it was the choice of sunrise on the day of the saint to whom the church was dedicated (but note that re-dedications were common and that feasts like Holy Trinity are moveable because they depend on Easter and the full moon); that it was sunrise on the day of important church festivals (there were 40 or 50 important enough to be observed as feast days , spread throughout the year); that a magnetic compass was used, thus introducing the very variable factor of magnetic variation over time, which medieval man did not realise (e.g. magnetic north was 11.5° E oftrue north in 1576 and 24.3° W in 1815); that the medieval Julian calendar was running a week or more behind solar time (medieval scholars were aware of this, and 11 days had to be added to catch up with the sun when the present Gregorian calendar was adopted in 1752). One or other of these explanations will often fit a particular church or sometimes a group of churches, but there is no single satisfactory explanation.

In Penn church, the medieval nave and south aisle and the 18th century chancel are all in alignment, but the walls of the chancel arch and outer walls of the Lady Chapel and are 3° out of line to the north. (An accurate check was made by Eddie Morton, measuring off a laser line running along the centre of the nave, set parallel with the north wall of the nave, and confirmed using a chalk line along the outside walls of the Lady Chapel) This tells us that the Lady Chapel was not built at the same time as either the nave (late 12thC) or the south aisle (early 14th C). Typically, the 13th century saw a rounded sanctuary enlarged to a square-ended chancel with the addition of a chapel in the SE corner where our Lady Chapel is. This presumed 13th C chancel (the walls of the present chancel arch are not square to the nave either) and our Lady Chapel were unlikely to have been built out of alignment with the older nave as a result of careless workmanship nor, as the mere fanciful would have it, to create a ‘weeping chancel’ as a symbol of Christ’s head on the cross inclined northwards towards the penitent thief.   It is quite common to find a nave and chancel on different alignments and it appears to have been a deliberate attempt to correct the ‘mistaken’ direction of earlier builders – which shows that they were trying to achieve a medieval church in our area to be pointing in roughly precise alignment of some kind, although for Penn it was about 83° and so still further away from true east.

© Miles Green, April 2006