Wantage Parish
A Parish Note by John Betjeman
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Our parish church in Wantage is the history of this ancient place in stone and wood and glass. It is the oldest and grandest building in the town and soaked in the prayers of many generations. However recent or remote, strong or weak our bonds with Wantage, whatever our creed, the parish church belongs to us. Look at the things in it which tell us of its past. As you go into the south porch there is a piece of carved stone on the window sill on your left. It is probably pre-Conquest and reminds us that King Alfred the Great was born here in 849 and that Wantage was important in Saxon times. The Saxon church has disappeared, as has its Norman successor which stood on the south-west corner of the churchyard and was converted into a Grammar school in 1597. But the Norman building remained until 1850 when the school was refounded on another site as King Alfred's School, and the Norman door, much restored, was incorporated in the pleasant Victorian buildings.
The present church was begun about 1250. It was a great cross-shaped building which probably looked inside something like Uffington church, in the White Horse Vale, looks today. Its tower, its arches and the transept walls survive and are the chief relics of this early church. In the next century, the fourteenth, they took down the nave walls and broadened the whole thing by adding aisles to the nave and erecting the pillars and arcades where we sit in the nave. They made openings at the east end of the aisles so that people could walk through into the transepts. They also lengthened the chancel. The church was then a monastery-like building. It had been granted by Henry I to the Abbey of Bec in Normandy which had the presentation of the living until Henry V's reign, when it was given to the Duke of Bedford. In 1422 the Duke surrendered it to the Dean and Canons of Windsor who have owned the living and appointed the Vicars ever since. In the fifteenth century this part of England was becoming prosperous with the wool trade. The Trade brought riches to the Fitzwarin family who were lords of the manor of Wantage and one of them, a rich mercer, is the supposed father-in-law of Dick Whittington.
Naturally there was much rebuilding at the church, for the church was the most important building in the town. First the north transept was rebuilt with a north chapel. This chapel is now filled by the organ. It was probably the chantry chapel of the Fitzwarin family, whose tombs and brasses are on this side of the church. They employed a priest to say Mass for their souls. Then chapels were added to the south transept and one of these is where the Blessed Sacrament is reserved today. These may have been built by trade guilds in the town, of which cloth workers and tanners were the chief. They would have dedicated the chapels to the patron saints of their guilds and paid for a priest to pray for them. The north and south porches were added at this time, and the clerestory and magnificent hammer-beam roof were raised on the nave. The carvers enjoyed themselves carving figures and faces which can be seen throughout the church. A great wooden screen was erected between the nave and chancel in front of the western tower arch. Wooden side screens divided off the chapels and the present fine choir stalls and tip-up seats were carved at this time. They were made for the Vicar and chantry priests to say daily offices together, just as today we may hear the Vicar and Curate and a few lay people saying evensong on a week day.
All the medieval church is still there. It is possible to imagine it as it was in those pre-Reformation days. The church was the centre of the life of the town. The nave was the people's part of the church and all the houses of the town, except the manor house, would have been so poor and mean that the church was where people came not only to pray, but to conduct daily business on wet days. Before the small church in the Churchyard was turned into a school in the seventeenth century, children were taught by a priest in the south porch. In the nave you would have found people walking about or praying, the walls covered with paintings of lives of the saints and stories to teach the Faith; the windows were filled with stained glass, rather like those still to be seen at Fairford - our only medieval glass to survive is in the lancet window in the wall of the south transept. And through the screen you would have glimpsed the rich altars with lights burning in front of them in the transept chapels in the priests' part of the church. The cloth trade died out in the seventeenth century.
The Reformation was not so much a changing in what the Church taught as in making the services audible to the congregation and by using English instead of Latin, making them more comprehensible. Our parish church was not an easy building to adapt to congregational worship, as it was planned for daily Masses at small chapels and occasional nave services on feast days. Those who dissented from what the Church taught left in the seventeenth and later centuries and erected buildings where they could have their own ministers. Baptists, Strict and General, and Presbyterians have had their meeting places in the town since the seventeenth century.
Joseph Butler, the famous divine, was the son of a Wantage Presbyterian draper and born here in 1692. When he was twenty-two he joined the Church of England and died as Bishop of Durham in 1752. The importance of conscience is the beginning and end of his teaching and this insistence on moral goodness is something Nonconformity has taught the Church. The effect of the Reformation on the look of Wantage church was not so great. The whole building was kept in repair. The offices of Litany, Morning Prayer and Evensong were said in the nave from a three-decker pulpit which stood in front of the tower arch where the screen had been. The nave was lit by the beautiful brass candelabra which survives. The aisles were crowded with galleries so that people might hear the nave services and sermon. On Communion Sundays, those who wished to make their Communion passed through into the chancel, the priest preceding them to the altar. For most of the time the chancel, transepts and their chapels, once so rich, were deserted or boxed off into high pews for the more important people in the town.
In 1846 John Butler, no relation of the Bishop, was appointed Vicar of Wantage. He was a Tractarian to whom the high pews and galleries of the church were anathema. He wanted people to see the altar and not to have it shrouded in mystery by a pulpit or screen. He employed a brilliant young architect, George Edmund Street (later to be the architect of the Law Courts in London) who was living in the town and a Tractarian like himself and a member of the church choir, to restore the church completely. Street largely rebuilt the chancel and himself designed the east window; he removed the high pews and put low benches in the nave. The result was the church very much as we see it today, except that in 1881 the nave was skillfully lengthened by one bay westward, the south porch being moved westward at the same time. The architect of this was William Butterfield who also designed the font cover. Butler founded the Community of St. Mary the Virgin for mission work in the town in 1848. In a hundred years it has grown into the biggest Community in the Church of England, with daughter houses all over the world. Butler was made Dean of Lincoln in 1885 and died in 1894. In the next year the south transept chapel was restored in his memory.
The curfew bell still calls over the downs at eight o'clock at night in winter months; the bells ring out over Letcombe Brook and the old red roofs of Wantage Sunday by Sunday and more and more people come to church. If you love Wantage, if you are indebted to the town for your education, for the prayers of the Community, for ancestral ties with the place or even if you have no connexions with Wantage but want to help the Church to continue its missionary work in the atomic age and at this significant time in the town's history, send us a subscription, however small, to put the chief house of Wantage in order.
This page last modified: Tuesday 03 March 2009
Office Address:
Ss Peter & Paul
The Vicarage, The Cloisters
Wantage
Oxon
OX12 8AQ