Church of St. Mary the Virgin, Baldock: A Medieval Parish Church
Site at a Glance
- Rating
- 4.6
- Popularity
- Very Low
- Country
- United Kingdom
- Primary era
- Medieval
- External website
- Open
- Eras represented
- Medieval, Modern
- Civilizations
- Crusader, English, Knights Hospitaller, Knights Templar
- Site type
- Religious
- Remains
- Church
On this page22 sections
History
Church of St. Mary the Virgin is a Church of England parish church in Baldock, United Kingdom, founded by the Knights Templar around 1150 in the late Romanesque period. Dedicated to the Virgin Mary, it preserves parts of that early building and was substantially enlarged by the Knights Hospitaller in the fourteenth century.
Templar foundation and Hospitaller expansion
The original church was built on land given to the Knights Templar by Gilbert de Clare, Earl of Pembroke. The Templars were a medieval military-religious order, and they held the church’s advowson, the legal right to appoint or present its priest. The eastern end of the chancel and probably the lower part of the west tower belong to this first church.
Reginald de Argentein, who died in 1307 and is believed to have been a Knight Templar, is commemorated at St. Mary’s as the person responsible for rebuilding the church. The Templars were suppressed in 1308, after which the manor of Baldock and the advowson passed to the Knights Hospitaller. This separate military-religious order inherited many Templar properties and substantially enlarged the church around 1330.
The Hospitallers granted the advowson to John de Blomvill for ten years in 1335. In 1343, Blomvill granted it for two years to Sir Walter de Manny, after which it presumably returned to the Hospitallers. The church’s changing patronage reflects the wider movement of authority over medieval parish churches between religious orders and secular holders.
Crown patronage and parish religious life
In 1359 the Crown claimed St. Mary’s as part of the church of Holy Trinity, Weston. The claim appears to have been accepted, since the Crown presented to St. Mary’s in 1383 and apparently continued to do so until after 1822. The patronage passed to the Lord Chancellor before 1829, to the Bishop of Rochester in 1865, and to the Bishop of St. Albans in 1877. Since 1902, presentation has alternated between the bishop and the Marquess of Salisbury.
A Fraternity or Gild of Jesus was founded at St. Mary’s in 1459, and its charter was confirmed in 1533. The brotherhood had a master, churchwardens, brethren, and sisters. It maintained a priest who assisted the parish priest, and William Tybie was serving as the fraternity priest in 1548. In 1550 the fraternity and its lands were granted to John Cock.
Rectors and religious memory
The Reverend Josias Byrd was rector from 1613 to 1662. He is remembered for giving Charles I wine from the church chalice when the king passed through Baldock in June 1647, travelling from Newmarket to London under the escort of Cornet George Joyce. Charles I, king of England from 1625, was executed in 1649. Byrd’s former gravestone remained in the churchyard for about two centuries before disappearing.
William Sherwin served for a time as Byrd’s assistant or lecturer and was either silenced or ejected. The Reverend John Smith was rector from 1832 to 1870 and is buried in the churchyard. Between 1819 and 1822, he worked on the complete decipherment of Samuel Pepys’s diary. Pepys was a seventeenth-century English civil servant and diarist, and Smith’s transcription, now held in the Pepys Library, became the basis of the first published edition, issued in two volumes in 1825.
Repairs and modern parish history
Major repairs during the nineteenth century improved the roofs and windows. The spire was rebuilt in 1816, and the north porch was substantially repaired and altered in 1826. The belfry stage of the tower was restored in the early twentieth century. The Norman and Beard organ was installed in 1913 and restored during the 1990s.
St. Mary’s is a Grade I listed building. A new rectory, built beside the church in 1871, was designed by William Butterfield. It is now called Butterfield House and is used as a nursery, while a more modest modern rectory stands in Pond Lane. A lych gate was also built in 1871. St. Mary’s Infant and St. Mary’s Junior Schools share a site on St. Mary’s Way.
The original parish registers are arranged in six books covering baptisms, marriages, and burials from 1558 to 1812. They are held by Hertfordshire Archives and Local Studies, preserving a long record of the parish’s religious and social life.
Remains
Built of flint rubble with stone dressings, the church consists of a chancel, north and south chapels, nave, north and south aisles, west tower, and north and south porches. The tower is coated with Roman cement, a hard nineteenth-century cement covering, and pieces of moulding and columns from an earlier building have been reused in the walls. The north chapel and north aisle have slate roofs, while the other roofs are lead. The church and tower have embattled parapets, which are parapets finished with raised sections resembling battlements.
Chancel and chapels
Chancel
The eastern end of the chancel belongs to the late twelfth-century church. It has a five-light east window, with a fourteenth-century niche below it on the exterior. The niche has a three-lobed head, a rebated edge, and surviving iron-hinge remains. The remainder of the chancel was built around 1330 and includes two fifteenth-century three-light windows in the north wall, whose tracery has been repaired.
The present five-light east window contains fragments of probably early fifteenth-century coloured glass in its upper part. Other eastern stained glass dates from 1849 and shows Jesus Christ at the centre with the Four Evangelists, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. A finely carved late-fourteenth-century oak rood screen separates the chancel from the nave. A rood screen traditionally marked this division and supported or represented a depiction of the Crucifixion. The screen has three main bays and two half-bays at its north and south ends.
The chancel roof dates from the fifteenth century. Its moulded wall plates, ties, and trusses contain tracery in the spandrels, the spaces between the framing elements. The wall plates rest on corbels carved as heads.
South chapel
The south chapel was begun in the later fourteenth century and completed in the early fifteenth century. Its three-light south window has restored tracery. Between the window and the south-east corner are a thirteenth-century piscina, a shallow basin for washing sacred vessels, and sedilia, seats traditionally provided for clergy beside an altar. Their flat head is probably a nineteenth-century alteration.
Traces on the chapel’s east and north exterior walls indicate windows probably dating from the early thirteenth century. These surviving traces show that the chapel’s fabric incorporates evidence of earlier arrangements as well as its later medieval completion.
North chapel and vestry
The north chapel, now the vestry, contains a fourteenth-century niche at its north-east corner. It is elaborately carved and was probably moved in the fifteenth century, when the wide east window was inserted and the north wall was recessed. The vestry also contains a fourteenth-century piscina without a visible bowl; a slab was inserted at its back in the nineteenth century. Its communion table is seventeenth century.
Nave, aisles, and porches
Nave and clerestory
The nave has six fourteenth-century bays, differing slightly from the two bays of the chancel. The two easternmost nave bays are lower. A blocked doorway for the former rood loft survives in the north wall. The fifteenth-century clerestory, a high row of windows above the main arcades, runs continuously above the arcades of the nave and chancel and has seven windows on each side.
The nave roof is fifteenth century and resembles the chancel roof. It rests on corbels carved with heads. At the top of the nave, in front of the chancel screen, lies a stone slab commemorating Reginald de Argentein.
South aisle and porch
The south aisle has three fifteenth-century three-light windows in its south wall and another in its west wall. Their tracery has been repaired. A fourteenth-century south doorway lies west of the three south windows. Farther west is a small fifteenth-century doorway that formerly led to the staircase of the porch’s upper room, or parvise. Its fifteenth-century oak door retains a scutcheon, a decorative plate associated here with a door ring.
The south porch has two-light east and west windows containing restored Victorian stained glass. Its north-west stair turret and parvise floor have been removed, leaving the porch open to the roof.
North aisle and porch
The north aisle has three fifteenth-century three-light windows with restored tracery. Its north doorway, dated 1826, lies west of the windows and opens into the north porch. The three-light west window contains mostly modern stonework, together with some older stones.
The north porch was substantially repaired and altered in 1826. A small nineteenth-century north-west porch replaced the former staircase to the rood loft. Its blocked upper doorway survives, as does part of the lower doorway in the aisle just outside the screen.
Tower, bells, and clock
West tower
The west tower rises 130 feet to the top of its spire. Its lower walls probably date from the earliest church, around 1150, while its fine lower arch was built in the fourteenth century. The tower’s three-light west window is also fourteenth century and has a two-centred rear arch. Its tracery and the belfry windows have been extensively restored in cement.
The tower is crowned by a lead spire rising from an octagonal drum and topped by a gold cockerel weathervane. The belfry stage was restored in the early twentieth century.
Bells and clock
The church has eight bells. Bells 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, and 7 were made by Taylor of Loughborough in 1882. Bell 5 bears the inscription “Miles Graye made me, 1650,” while bell 8 has a Latin inscription and names William Goodwyn and James Manison, churchwardens, dated 1711.
The present clock mechanism was made by Potts & Sons of Leeds and set in motion on 25 November 1882. It weighs two tons. An earlier tower clock appears in churchwardens’ accounts from 1711 and 1819. Bells 2, 3, 4, and 7 sound the Westminster Chimes on the quarter-hours, and the tenor bell strikes the hours. The ringing chamber contains a peal board dated 1737, described as one of the earliest in the country.
Monuments, glass, and furnishings
Fonts, chests, and medieval stonework
The font is a late-twelfth-century transitional Norman example from the earliest known church. Transitional Norman describes a late Romanesque phase developing toward Gothic forms. The font has an octagonal bowl with beaded edges and a circular stem flanked by octagonal shafts with moulded bases. Its steps and paving date from about 1901. Beside it stands a medieval iron-bound chest known as a Peter’s Pence chest, a strongbox for offerings traditionally made to support the papacy.
Outside the vestry is a thirteenth-century Purbeck-marble coffin lid with a cross in relief. Purbeck marble is a dark limestone from Dorset that was widely used for medieval church furnishings and monuments. A fourteenth-century recess with an ogee arch, an arch with a doubly curved S-shaped profile, is set in the exterior wall of the north aisle. Its jambs have been restored, and it contains a fourteenth-century coffin lid bearing a raised cross. Two probably fifteenth-century recesses in the exterior wall of the south aisle have renewed stonework.
Brasses and memorial slabs
On the north wall above the coffin lid is a brass, an engraved or inlaid memorial, showing a man and woman from about 1400. The man wears forester’s clothing. The lower part of his figure, the dog at his feet, and the inscription are missing. The same wall also has a brass of a man and woman dating from about 1470, a brass with shrouded figures of a man and woman from around 1520, and an inscription to Margaret Benet dated 1587.
At the west end of the nave is a brass with a three-quarter-length figure of a nun, dating from about 1400. Its inscription plate is missing and has been replaced by an inscription to a rector of Baldock from 1807. The nave also contains a slab with an indent for a floreated cross and, near the north-aisle doorway, a fourteenth-century slab bearing an inscription in Gothic capitals. The south aisle contains the indents of a man and his two wives, dating from the fifteenth century.
Later glass and statue
The north aisle contains a window by Charles Eamer Kempe dated 1881. Three clear-glass windows replaced poor-quality Victorian stained-glass windows. Their replacement was funded by proceeds from covered coat hangers made and sold by Dorothy Arbury in the 1960s.
The resulting Coathanger Window, beside the vestry, commemorates Arbury and includes miniature coat hangers arranged around a cross. Its original design was scratched onto the glass, but vandals destroyed the window in the late 1990s. It was replaced by a window in which the image was acid-etched into the glass, designed by the then churchwarden Glenn Christodoulou.
A statue of the Virgin Mary and Child stands on the north wall of the north aisle. Sir William Reid Dick made it in memory of the Very Reverend Albert Victor Baillie, Dean of Windsor, who died in Baldock in 1955. Baillie had received the statue on his retirement from Windsor.
Churchyard
The churchyard contains the graves of the Reverend John Smith and his son, Josiah William Smith, an English barrister, legal writer, and judge. The former grave of the Reverend Josias Byrd was in the churchyard for about 200 years before it was lost.
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