ST MARY’S CHURCH NEWMARKET A Guide and History
The Blessed Sacrament chapel (south aisle), possibly the old chapel of St Theobald (pp. 17, 31)
ST MARY’S CHURCH, NEWMARKET: A BRIEF GUIDE AND HISTORY Peter May (d. 1988) and THE STORY OF ST MARY’S CHURCH, NEWMARKET Dorothy Ellis (d. 1968) Edited by John Hardy; cover design and photographs by Denis Martin © St Mary’s PCC 2015
Photo by John Slater The Virgin and Child with St Elizabeth and John the Baptist (attributed to Giovanni Battista Caracciola) Published by BURWELL COMMUNITY PRINT CENTRE
A SHORT WALK ROUND ST MARY’S Guide books are not enthusiastic about St Mary’s church. ‘There is’, comments one, ‘nothing of archaeological interest’. So if you are an antiquarian or an archaeologist or an architect, do not expect to find here anything of absorbing interest. None the less, for several centuries or more people have used St Mary’s church as their place of worship, not only those who live in Newmarket but also the many others who pass through it. And so, archaeology apart, it has its own distinctive beauty and charm, the beauty and charm of an ordinary parish church, in which God is worshipped day by day. You will probably have picked up this booklet from the table near the south porch: sit then for a few minutes in one of the back pews, and get the feel and atmosphere of St Mary’s as it stands today. It is a very symmetrical building, with a central nave, chancel and high altar, and two side aisles with chapels. It was not like this when it was first built; for it seems to have been originally a building with a single altar under one roof span, extended to the south in the fifteenth century, and twice to the north in the nineteenth. The restorations in the nineteenth century were SO thorough that very little of the medieval church now remains; as Dr Nikolaus Pevsner says in his Suffolk guide: ‘It is so restored that practically all is new’. But our Victorian builders tried to be faithful to the past, and so St Mary’s has the appearance of being an old church; in fact only the five pillars in the south aisle, the piscina in the sanctuary and the tower belong to the medieval St Mary’s. Pictures in the choir vestry, one of which is reproduced in this booklet (see p. 22), give us an idea of what it looked like before the nineteenth century restorers got to work; the galleries and the box pews shown in these pictures were then removed and the north aisle added.
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One gallery had in fact only been put into St Mary’s in 1811, to increase the accommodation. The following minute from the parish vestry book tells us of the origin of the other: Monday August 11th, 1766. Pursuant to a Notice publicly read in the Parish Church aforesaid on Sunday afternoon of the 10th Instant a Vestry meeting was this day held at which it was agreed that we whose names are underwritten should build by a joint Subscription a Gallery in the said Church for the Sole use of such Subscribers as are undermentioned. Ten gentlemen signed their names as ‘subscribers’, three as ‘inhabitants’ and James Pigott, the curate. One wonders what lay behind this minute: did the ‘subscribers’ feel that they were a class above the ‘inhabitants’ and did not want to sit with them, or were they just being generous because more seats were needed? However that may be, both galleries were removed in 1887, and the flat lead roof was replaced by the present timbered one: a contemporary newspaper cutting says that ‘this gives a splendid cathedral-like effect to the east end of the church’. It is perhaps a pity that, in a church where elsewhere there is so much light, the chancel and the sanctuary, even on the brightest day, always appear somewhat dull and gloomy. When you have got the feel of St Mary’s, we suggest that you go round it, with the help of this guide, starting with the bell tower.
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The west end today
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The bell tower The wrought iron gates are of modern design and are in memory of one of the Hammond family, who for several generations worshipped in this church and were bankers in the town. The stained glass window, in memory of others of the family, is set in the old medieval tracery and depicts the Archangel Gabriel telling Mary that she is to be the mother of Jesus. As you go round the church, you will find various incidents in the life of Jesus’ mother portrayed in the stained glass, somewhat naturally as the church is dedicated to St. Mary. There are six bells in the tower, still rung on as many Sundays (and major feast days) as possible. Some of these were cast many years ago, as the lettering on them records. The two earliest were cast in 1580. with the following inscription: DE BURI SANTI EDMONDI STEFANUS TONNI ME FECIT (Stephen Tonni of Bury St Edmunds made me: Stephen was doubtless good at casting bells but he was not too good at his letters, for every S is upside down!). Two others were cast in 1619, with the inscription: IOHN DRAPER MADE ME: the others were cast in 1719 and 1923, the tenor bell weighing over twenty-one hundredweight. Wooden boards on the walls of the tower record the names of benefactors who gave to the poor of the parish. Two of these make interesting reading, in the wording and spelling of the late seventeenth century: Mr John Archer gave to the poore in St Maries Parrish a Cade redd Herrings to bee distributed the first Sunday in Lent; and sixty two bend (furze?) Faggotts to bee given out the first working day after Christmas; these guifts are to bee paid out of the Maidenhead Inn. Mr. Richard Pikis gave to the Poore on this Side (All Saints’ parish being ‘on the other side’) Five Stone of Beefe, and five Dozen of twoe peny Bread to bee distributed to the Poore of St Manes Parrish upon St. Thomas Day Annually for ever. The said Richard Pickis gave more to the Poore of St Manes Parrish; 7
Fivetee warps (measure = four) and a halfe of Salte Fish to bee distributed yearly the first weeke in Lent…; these guifts are issuing out of the Greyhound Inn, Now the Kinges House in Newmarkett. The churchwardens’ accounts suggest that the herrings and the faggots were soon ‘commuted’ into bread and beef, which were so distributed until comparatively recently: they are now given out in cash form, as ‘the Bread and Beef Charities’, at the discretion of the rector and churchwardens. The north aisle If you now go round the church clockwise, you will next come to the oil painting on the north west wall, reproduced in this booklet. It is attributed to a seventeenth century Italian painter, Giovanni Battista Caracciola, and depicts the Virgin Mary, with St Elizabeth holding the Child Christ, with the little John the Baptist at her side. Unfortunately it is darkened and dirty, has sustained some clumsy repairs and needs cleaning, but it has an attraction and charm of its own, and St Mary’s is fortunate to possess it. Moving on from Caracciola’s painting, you will find half-hidden behind the heating pipes a piece of lead on which are picked out the following words: THOMAS MILES IOHN HAMMOND CHVRCH WARDIN 1774 IOSEPH LEECH PLVMBER The parish vestry book records that on the 27th day of June 1774 it was then agreed to repair the South Roof of the Parish Church of Snt Marys, the Vestry being call’d for that purpose, when a principal part of the inhabitants of the said Parish met and duly examining into the timber 8
of the Roof found it to be so rotten and decay’d as to stand in need of being immediately repair’d. No doubt when the flat lead roof was replaced by the present timbered one in the late nineteenth century, this ‘certificate’ of the work of the churchwardens and plumber was removed from the roof and kept as a reminder— the accounts record that £35 was allowed for the lead on the roof: one wonders how much it would be worth today! As you move on along the north aisle, you will notice that the stained glass windows, all of which are modern, carry on in sequence to illustrate the childhood of Jesus with his mother; the first depicts her visiting Elizabeth the mother of John the Baptist, the second the shepherds worshipping the Christ child in the stable, and the fourth Jesus as a boy of twelve arguing with the Jewish scholars in the temple at Jerusalem. This last window is in memory of Elizabeth Turner, by whose generosity was built the Turner Hall to the south of the church, which plays such a big part in the social life of the church and the neighbourhood. The third window in the sequence is still plain glass, and is clearly reserved to illustrate the visit of the wise men to worship the child Jesus. Between the fourth window and the organ pipes a curious object is set in the wall. When the church was restored in 1857, among the rubble the builders found an old purse containing three Nuremburg tokens or jettons. In the fifteenth century Nuremburg was the centre of European as well as German trade, and Nuremburg tokens are found all over Europe; on one side they bear an apple within a trefoil and on the other a rose surrounded by crowns and fleurs-de-lis. Both the purse, which was made to be hung round a belt or girdle, and the tokens are dated about 1500 AD and are preserved in their little case as an interesting relic.
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The north chapel As you go through the screen into St Thomas’s chapel, you will notice that it is a war memorial screen, in memory of the men from the parish who were killed in the First World War; little wooden carvings of St Joan of Arc and St George are reminders that France and Britain fought side by side. There is little to notice in the chapel itself, except a large painting on the north wall, by the nineteenth century artist John Wood, of Christ entering Jerusalem, and, perhaps more interesting to some, the Latin inscription in blue and gold cut in wood on the altar top. This reads: Orate pro a(n)i(m)a Thome Wydon qui has sedes fieri fecit A(nn)o D(omi) ni 1494: Pray for the soul of Thomas Wydon who had this building (or these seats) made 1494. Perhaps Thomas Wydon was responsible for the fifteenth century rebuilding of the church, or for making the seats in it (the Latin is unfortunately ambiguous). You will notice that the number 4 is written as a half 8. The chancel and the sanctuary Moving into the chancel, you will be disappointed by the east window (depicting the nativity, the crucifixion and the resurrection of Jesus) not so much by its colours as by the featureless faces of the persons depicted in it. But the most attractive feature of this part of the church is the thirteenth century roofed and arched piscina to the right of the altar in the sanctuary; this was uncovered during the restoration of 1857; it is still used for the disposal of the water at the eucharist. The charming and natural sculptured heads in this piscina are a welcome contrast to the stylised formal Victorian head just above it.
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The south chapel The south chapel, originally dedicated to St Theobald, is now the Blessed Sacrament chapel in which the sacrament is reserved for administration to the sick at home. The east window depicts the risen and ascended Christ; the left hand bay shows him asking doubting Thomas to see the scars in his hands and side, the central bay shows his ascension and the right hand bay the angel telling the women on Easter Day that the tomb in which he had been buried was empty. The window in the south-east corner was erected in memory of a Freemason, and so contains many Masonic emblems; the lodge to which he belonged was that of St Etheldreda (hence the picture of St Etheldreda, foundress of the great abbey of Ely, said to have been baptised at Exning), and of course King Solomon, on the other side, plays a prominent part in Freemasonry. Two paintings, one of the visitation, and the other of Christ being taken down from the cross, are on either side of the doorway. The next window, in memory of a former Victorian rector of St Mary’s, is of the annunciation and of the presentation of Christ in the temple to old Simeon. The south aisle The first window in the south aisle is of the transfiguration of Jesus on the mountain, with his disciples below and Moses and Elijah, law-giver and prophet, on either side. The second window pictures, rather sentimentally, Jesus welcoming the children.
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Perhaps the most interesting if rather macabre feature of the south aisle is the memorial slab to Robert Cook, a seventeenth century rector who, at the age of 30, had a haemorrhage and died while preaching in the pulpit; the elegant Latin phrasing, which unfortunately has been partly obliterated, describes him as having poured out his life-blood for the gospel, and almost ranks him as a martyr! The font at the west end is Victorian and replaced its medieval predecessor, thrown out by our Victorian restorers and used as a birdbath in the rectory garden. As you go out of the church, you will notice a memorial tablet above the door, difficult to read, but the words when deciphered commemorate an early nineteenth century curate of St Mary’s who clearly served them faithfully and lovingly — we suspect his rector was one of those absentee clergy so frequent in those days.
The thirteenth-fourteenth century piscina
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Many a parish priest would rejoice that ‘his flock’ should write like this about him, and show such practical concern for his family (there were no widow’s pensions or children’s allowances at that time!): Beneath this porch lie the remains of Thomas Jesup Abbott, M.A., buried but not forgotten; for nineteen years of this place, curate, comforter and common friend. When tongues shall cease, charity shall not fail To shew the surviving love of his flock and friends for his poor widow and six helpless children by the free will contribution of £1,900. You have now seen round St Mary’s church, and will have noticed the various ‘visual aids’ which the church has used to remind all who enter its doors that Jesus Christ is the focal point of our Christian faith in God. Some of these seem perhaps odd to us today, but the pulpit and the altar still take the central place, to remind us that God is worshipped and preached here today, in word and sacrament, as He has been for over seven hundred years; and the fine organ reminds us that we have our part to play in that worship which is God’s due. The churchyard For some years now the town council has been responsible for keeping the churchyard clean and tidy; the tombstones have been set up against the walls and the churchyard green has become a pleasant place for children to play and their elders to sit in the sun. There are several attractive memorial stones to be noticed. As you come out of the church there is a memorial to John Jackson, with a large family, which, in its dating, characteristically ignores the existence of Oliver Cromwell. On the boundary wall to the west of the tower there is a finely inscribed memorial to another of the Hammond family. On the north wall of the tower you will notice the memorial stone to 13
William Gotobed 1766, with the rather charming lines: The Great Jehovah full of love An Angel bright did send To fetch this little spotless Dove To joys that never end. The parish registers record the deaths of many children in the very early days of their lives. The obelisk memorial to nineteenth century John and Matilda Clark, still standing on the church green, is also in memory of six of their children, one of whom died aged six years, and the other five ‘in their infancy’. Another memorial to two children is on the east wall of the church, facing Church Lane, namely Mary and James Whitrod, who died at the end of the seventeenth century. Finally attached to a buttress on the south wall are memorials to Francis Green, father and son; that to the father is worth reading, with its curious spelling, alignment of words and warning note: HERE LIETH THE BODY OF FR ANCIS GREEN (THE FATHE R) WHO DEPARTED THIS LIFE ON THE 18 0 JULY 1674 Stay MORTA LL Stay depart not from this Tombe Before Thou hast considered well Thy Doome: my Bow stands ready bent: My Arrow drawne Toth head: and aymes at thee. Prepare Thou walking dust Take home this Line: the Grave that next is open may he Thine.
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A BRIEF HISTORY OF ST MARY’S Origins The earliest known reference to Newmarket or Novum Mercatum (in its Latin form) is in a document, dated 1219, which records an agreement between Walkelin son of Richard and Geoffrey of Snailwell and Felicia his wife concerning the ownership of an acre and a half of land in Newmarket. A year later, in 1220, a list of the taxes on ploughs (called carucage) in Suffolk and Norfolk recorded that there were nineteen ploughs in the ‘villa’ of Exning and Newmarket, none of which were owned by the Church. In 1223 King Henry III granted permission to Richard de Argentein to hold a fair at his manor in New Market for three days round the feast of St Giles; it seems certain that he had earlier granted Richard permission to hold a market there, otherwise why the name? On this evidence historians suggest that Newmarket first became a recognisable place early in the thirteenth century, about 1217. The reference to the church (in the carucage) is to the fact that for many years the ecclesiastical parish in which New Market was situated was that of St Martin’s, Exning, and St Martin’s remained the parish church of Newmarket until, apparently, the sixteenth century. The first knowledge we have of an actual church building in New Market is in a document of 1283 when it is recorded that there was a chapel on the Suffolk side of the town. It seems, therefore, that sometime between 1217 and 1283 a chapel was built to serve not only the inhabitants of New Market, but also the many pilgrims who went along the Icknield Way to Walsingham; this chapel probably occupied the area of the nave of our present church. We do not know what it looked like, because it seems to have been re-built in the fifteenth century, and the fifteenth century church itself was re-built in the nineteenth. But it was called the Chapel of the Blessed Mary, and after 1300 or so the Old Chapel of the Blessed Mary.
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The fourteenth century It seems that early in the fourteenth century another chapel was built on the other side of what is now our High Street in the parish of Wood Ditton; and this chapel, the origin of the present All Saints’, was called the new chapel of the Blessed Mary. We know this, because the patron of St Mary’s, John de Argentein, when he died, left the presentation of it to his widow, Agnes, but called it by mistake the chapel of St Simon and St Jude. The record of King Edward III’s ‘inquisition’ into this is now in the National Archives, and states: There was and is a certain chapel in the ‘villa’ of New Market . . . which was called and still is called the old chapel of the blessed Mary ... and is taxed at forty shillings per annum. There is no other chapel in the same ‘villa’ except only one which is called the new chapel of the blessed Mary and is ... annexed to the parish church of Wode Dytton. This inquisition, dated 1337, is the first reference to our church of St Mary, by name. St Mary’s in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries The priests in charge of the Old Chapel of the Blessed Mary were often called the ‘custodians’ or chaplains’ of the Old Chapel. One of them was John Upryght who became parish priest in 1412 and died in 1446. In his will, one of the very earliest Newmarket wills, he recognised St Martin’s, Exning, as his parish church, by leaving 6s 8d to its high altar, 12d to its parish priest and 6d to its holy-water clerk. But his first love was obviously St Mary’s because he left one hundred shillings for its ‘emendation’ or repair; three years later, one of his parishioners, John Josse, left eight marks (over £5) for the ‘fabric’ of St Mary’s. Evidently our fifteenth century forefathers were very attached to St Mary’s for £5 was in those days a large sum of money. 16
Another fifteenth century will, that of Adam Colakyr (1477), bequeathed to St Mary’s church ‘a cauldron to warm the lights of the holy sepulchre’, evidence that like so many other churches of the period there was an Easter sepulchre in St Mary’s. In 1488 John Gryggs left 3s 8d for the ‘reparacion of the Ile of seynt Tebold in the seyd cherche’; no one quite knows who this St Tebold or Theobald was or where his aisle was, but it suggests that the original church had been extended by the addition of an altar and aisle dedicated to St Theobald. An earlier document speaks indeed of four churches in Newmarket, namely of St Ebold, the Blessed Mary, All Saints and St Thomas: All Saints’ and St Mary’s we know, and it may be that St Ebold and St Thomas refer to altars and aisles within St Mary’s. It would seem at any rate that during the fifteenth century the Old Chapel of St Mary was rebuilt and extended: what survives of this fifteenth century building is the tower (with its little ‘Hertfordshire spike’, oak shingles and bell-turret), the tracery of the west window, part of the south aisle and the five surviving original pillars. It would be ‘tidy’ to think that this rebuilding and extension was the work of the Thomas Wydon who is remembered in the inscription mentioned previously: the Latin word ‘sedes’ used in the inscription could mean ‘a building’. But there is no real evidence to connect Thomas Wydon with the re-building, and in any case ‘sedes’ may have its more natural meaning of ‘seats’. One of the more interesting documents of the fifteenth century is the account roll of the bailiff of the Lord of the Manor, compiled in 1472. The only mention of St Mary’s is a reference to a lane leading to ‘the chapel of the blessed Mary’ (presumably the present Church Lane).
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But we get an excellent picture of the little community centred round the market and the church. There were some thirty-six ‘tenements’ on either side of the High Street (called then the Common Way) —the Icknield Way then ran parallel to the High Street and south of it. Among the tenements were the Sword, the Bell, the Hart, the Swan, the Ram, the Bull, the Bear, the Christopher, the Griffin and the Saracens Head, so evidently the pilgrims needed and enjoyed their liquid refreshment as much as Newmarket’s present residents! There were over a hundred shops and stalls in the market, set up in various ‘rows’, where ironmongers and barkers (tanners), cordwainers (shoemakers) and ropers, turners and spicers, mercers and drapers, butchers and cheesemakers sold their wares. The Watercourse, the Millhill, the Cornhill, Market Lane and the Heath are mentioned, as well as the mysterious and enchanting Shraggeryrowe. There was a Cross in the High Street (when did this disappear?), on either side of which a lady with the attractive name of Caterina Popery rented a stall for 6d each a year. It is clear from all this that in the fifteenth century the community centred round St Mary’s church and the market was a very flourishing one, as it catered for the spiritual and material needs of the many folk who lived in the rural hinterland. Until the end of the sixteenth century there are no extant parish records for St Mary’s, except for registers of christenings, ‘burialls’ and ‘mariages’ for a few years: and so we know very little about St Mary’s during the sixteenth century: it is true that we have lists of rectors, chaplains or custodians of the ‘Old Chapel of the Blessed Mary’, but none of these have any claim to fame.
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The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries The first glebe terrier (a list of the property of St Mary’s) is dated 1633, the parish registers proper begin in 1638, and the first entry in the parish vestry book is ‘An Accompt of such Church Ornaments, Bookes and Wrighteinges as are now Belonging to the Church of St Marie in Newmarket this Present Yeare 1672’. Extracts from these will illustrate something of church life in St Mary’s during these two centuries. First then the glebe terrier of 1633 tells us where the rectory then was: Inprimis the parsonage house garden and yard there-unto adioning lying between the home close of Thomas Raven towards the South, part of the Churchyard of the said Parish Church and part of a pitle belonging to the said parsonage toward the North. Thother two sides lyeth between the church yard aforesaid East and the home close of Richard Lancaster to the West containing by estimacion with the seise of the said house 22 poles. In other words the parsonage house lay in the block of land now occupied by the veterinary surgeon’s yard, south of the church. It was still there according to the Enclosure Award of the early 1820s, and it was some years after this that St Mary’s rectory was built on its Fitzroy Street (north) site, which by the Enclosure Award had become glebe land, in exchange apparently for small bits of glebe scattered in Newmarket, Exning, Wood Ditton and elsewhere. Another piece of property that belonged to the church at this period was the church house, called the Nag’s head, for in 1711 the following entry occurs in the vestry book: forth of Octob 1731 Wee the Parishioners of Newmarkett St Marys Doe belive that Wallter Siser is a proper Tenant to Highe the Naggs head in the said Parish and doe alow that he shall be the Tenant from Mickallmas att seven pound p yr and to pay noe Parish Dutys.
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Rent from the Nag’s Head was paid into the churchwardens’ accounts up to 1782. Other receipts during the eighteenth century make interesting reading; one would like to know more, for example, about the following entries which are repeated for several years: Cash reced by D. Bayley (Churchwarden) Cofferer to his Majestys Household to Xmas 1772 £6-l7-0 and 1790 Received from Mr. Hilton for Town Plate 0-13-4 Perhaps the cofferer was responsible for paying the sum of £4 3s 6d ‘due at Crismas 1762 for the Kings House’, formerly the Greyhound Inn. Other annual receipts were l3s 4d ‘for the Lordship’, ‘for the Feathers’ and ‘for ten Acres in the Demesne’! Observant readers will have noticed how often inns and alehouses contributed to the life of St Mary’s. What is more surprising is the rarity of references in the accounts and the registers to horse-racing and that large community in Newmarket which has lived on the sport of kings for so long. One reference we have discovered is the following from the burial register for 1773: April 20th Henry Gregory a Student of Christ Church College Oxford who unfortunately lost His life by attempting to leap his Horse over the third Rail opposite the Rubbing Stables. We have already noticed the presence of the King’s Household in Newmarket in the eighteenth century; earlier references to this can be seen in the following entries from the burial register for 1624-25:
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The east end today
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The west end before 1857
Robert Smith a Courtyer Decemb 2 John Crane one of the King’s Porters Decemb 6 Daniell Blackburne a Yeoman of the Guard Decemb 11 Andrew Little a Courtyer buryed Jan 22 Andrewe Dowglasse a Courtyer Feb 22 It is curious that the only references to members of the King’s Household (in this case King James I) should all occur within three months of the same year; and what happened that it should be so? The latter two sound like Scotsmen, attending on King James at his Hunting Lodge in Newmarket. The vestry book also shows something of the wide range of activities for which the parish was responsible until they were taken over by the secular authorities. Here are recorded for example the annual appointments not only of the churchwardens (who had secular powers as well as ecclesiastical) but also of the overseers of the poor and the surveyors of the highways. 22
Two overseers and two surveyors were appointed each year by the vestry; in theory both jobs were voluntary but as they were unpaid and could entail quite a lot of work they were generally appointed on some kind of rota system so that they were shared around. The surveyors of the highways, for example, had to inspect the roads three times a year, supervise labour (which was compulsory but unpaid except with liquid refreshment) and collect the rate (in 1723 it was 3d in the pound). The entry for 1740 runs: Wee nominate Surveyors for the year ensuing William Thompson and John Miles, and we do hereby order that the Surveyors shall keep a Separate Account with the persons names who carry stone and who gravel and we allow forty shillings to he spent in Beere for the Labourers. The entry for 1741 records that Messrs Thompson’s and Miles’ accounts were not passed, and the significant ‘and no more’ was added to ‘forty shillings’, when their successors James Wing and Robert Mitchell were nominated. By an early seventeenth century act two overseers of the poor and two churchwardens were to be appointed annually for each parish. By virtue of a rate levied on all house-occupiers the overseers were able to make ‘out-payments’ to the poor in their own homes, goods as well as cash and even medical services; and so there are many references in the vestry book to their payments out to poor widows and to their administration of the parish charities for the poor. Later in the seventeenth century, by a Settlement Act, they had to protect the rates of the parish by seeing that no poor people whose true place of settlement was elsewhere became a burden on the rates. The following note dated March 1st 1779 illustrates this: We agree to Indemnify the parish of St Peter Mancroft Norwich from the Expences of Eliz. Richer’s two Children, Elizabeth and Thomas Richer being Bastards the said Mother Elizabeth Richer being removed to the said parish of St Peter Mancroft Norwhich aforesaid by an order of Justices. 23
Evidently the overseers realised that the two children who had been left behind by their mother when she was removed to her place of settlement at Norwich were going to be a burden on the parish rates, and so sent them off after her, charging St Peter Mancroft for the cost of their journey. They sometimes helped poor people who were passing through the parish on their way to their place of settlement, as the following note for 1759 indicates: To a soldiers wife & child with a pass from Exeter to Norwich 0-1-0 and the following for 1746: May 10 gave 2 woman with apas solgers wifes 0-0-6 A Workhouse Act of the l720s authorised the parishes to establish special houses for the maintenance of the poor. On the very same day that the overseers and churchwardens sent off Elizabeth Richer’s two children to Norwich, a full meeting of the vestry authorised the Churchwardens and Overseers of the Poor of the said Parish to purchase a Piece of Freehold or copyhold ground within the same parish for the purpose of Erecting and building Houses thereon for the use of the ’said poor of the said Parish in ease of the Rates and on account of the high Rents paid for Hire of Houses for our said poor.’ We do not know whether this resolution was ever implemented but if it was then these buildings were the predecessor of the Union Workhouse, built in 1836, later known as White Lodge and then part of the Newmarket General Hospital. The churchwardens’ accounts contain much interesting material; the most amusing that we have come across is that for 1746, extracts from which follow (the spelling is clearly phonetic, and we suspect East Anglian!): Tok the Disburstments of John lsaacson & James Wing Churchwardens for the Year last Past as under £sd: April 29 asiteachion (a citation) for the Genrals 0-1-0 May 21 aprayer for the Doctor (the rector) 24
the rebiluon bein sased 0-1-0 July 2 Pd for 3 Lode ston for the Church Lane 0-3-0 for fetchin the ston & a labour to sprad 0-5-6 Sept 22 for 6 Lodes of Gravel for the Church Lane 0-3-0; for Carige of the Grafel & a Labour to sprad 0-7-0 Octo 9 for a Procklamashion for the horned Catle 0-1-0; Mr Buirgis bill for plumen & glasin at the church 1-4-10 Most churchwardens’ accounts however are rather dull pedestrian affairs, with routine entries like: Nov 5 Paid the Ringers for Gunpowder Treason 0-10-0 Paid the Clerk for Ringing the Bell, Looking after the Clock, Washing the Surplus etc 17-6 Bread and Wine for the Sacrament (quarterly) 8-2 Very occasionally we come across an oddity like the following in 1749: Doctor Sandiver for cureing young Floyds Wife of the French Disease 8-8-0 What was it that happened in December 1777 to make the vestry pass the following resolution: The following Persons doth agree that the Poor be inoculated at the Parish Expence; and to make Mr. Thomas Searancke Surgeon agree to inoculate the above mentioned poor for the sum of ten pounds ten shillings, the number not to exceed sixty persons? His inoculations appear to have been successful for the burials for the first two months of 1778 are average in number. None the less the registers do record major disasters in St Mary’s parish; there were for example 85 burials in 1625 and 86 in 1643 (the annual average being something like 18), sure indication that some plague or pestilence had hit the town. In 1738 the rector wrote this note under his register of baptisms for the year 1738: What Xtenings are not mentiond here, may be met with in the Register 25
Book kept for the Parish of All Saints: this parish of St Marys being sorely afflicted with the Small Pox great part of this Year. There are no baptisms recorded in the St Mary’s registers from March 9th 1738 until March 25th 1739; of the 71 burials in that period 41 are marked with a cross. A later entry tells what the cross meant. In 1762 the rector wrote the following note to his list of burials: The Small-pox raged in Town this Year, of which Distemper all with this Mark (+) died; out of 78 burials no less than 41 were so marked, to which may be added 15 of the previous year. There can have been few families (in a population of 600-1,000) which were not hit by such disasters as these. There were other disasters too, as the following entry for 1682 shows: March 12 Elizab: Thomas Ann Kirk both burnt in the fire which happened March 22 1682 by which a great part of this Parish was consumed to the value of £2,000 in goods and houses. Old prints of the church before 1856 show a chapel jutting out to the north of the middle of the nave. When Tom Martin, a Suffolk traveller, visited St. Mary’s in 1779 he noted the existence of a chapel ‘lately used as a school’; we do not know much about this school except that we have a reference to a schoolmaster named John Morley in 1750, and the following comment from the vestry book for 1759: Took the Account of Mr Thomas Scotman and Thomas Hammond Church wardens for the year last past and be it remembered that the firness in the Church School which was Illegally put up is not to be mentioned in the rate. Evidently Messrs Hammond and Scotman felt that the children ought to have some hearing, acted without the authority of the vestry in putting in the ‘firness’, and then found themselves landed with the bill!
There are occasional references to the ministrations of the clergy. A note 26
in the bishop’s visitation book early in the seventeenth century says of Mr William Lewis (the curate in charge of St Mary’s): He readeth homilies but preacheth not, he is not liccenced to preach; they have no monthly sermons. It was evidently different in 1775, for the vestry agreed to give the Rev. Mr. Crowe ten guineas yearly for preaching a Sermon every Sunday afternoon from Lady Day to Michaelmas; standards had clearly risen. But in 1784 the vestry was not so enthusiastic about the ‘continuance of the afternoon Sermon’; when it came to a vote there were 9 in favour and 4 against their continuance; Mr Crowe seems to have left by then, so perhaps his successor in the afternoon sermon was not such good value for money! In 1791 the Rev Mr Hemstead received £15 for his sermons. Perhaps since all the preachers concerned were poorly paid curates this was the parish’s way of showing how much or how little they appreciated them! St Mary’s today Space does not permit us to continue beyond 1800, and there is too much material available to summarise at all adequately the history of our Church in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It will however have been clear from what we have already written that the nineteenth century was, in Newmarket as elsewhere, the church building period; we note the major rebuilding and restoration of 1857, the addition of the north aisle in 1867, the provision of a new organ in 1876, the restoration of the porch and the tower in 1877 and the major extensions in 1887. The twentieth century has not seen much new building. except the Turner Hall, and the practice of churchgoing which occasioned the great building exercises of our nineteenth century forefathers has declined. There has been much time and money spent in preserving what we have 27
got, and handing on to our successors the church which we have inherited and value, not just because it is an attractive building but because it is the house of God in which He comes to meet us day by day in Word and Sacrament.
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THE STORY OF ST MARY’S CHURCH, NEWMARKET Dorothy M. B. Ellis The eleventh to thirteenth centuries Newmarket is one of the comparatively few ancient towns of England originating after 1086. the date of Domesday Book, in which Exning appears, for the only time in all its records, as a Cambridgeshire manor probably because William the Conqueror gave that Saxon township, which had belonged to the Kings of East Anglia in the time of St Etheldreda’s father, to one of his followers who took the name de L’lsle from another manor in the isle of Ely. The manor of Exning passed by marriage from the de L’Isles to Richard de Argentine, lord of the manor of Great Wymondley in Hertfordshire, in 1088. Great Wymondley was (and in theory still is) held by the Grand Serjeantry (or service) of offering a silver cup to the new Sovereign at his coronation banquet. The Argentines and their successors continued to exercise this office of cup-bearer at every coronation into Hanoverian times. The manor of Great Wymondley is now in the hands of a syndicate, and it is interesting to know that their representative duly put in a claim to offer a silver cup at the coronation of her present majesty, but because the coronation banquet has been abolished he was, with other claimants of obsolete rights, given a special seat inside the Abbey. In 1227 Reginald, descendant of Richard de Argentine, obtained Letters Patent from Henry III for the founding of a ‘New Market’ on the boundaries of his Exning Manor where it ran down to the Icknield Way now, as then, the main road between London and Norwich, and in the thirteenth century a highway for pilgrims to Walsingham and merchants travelling to the great port of Norwich, to which sea-going ships could then sail. The often-repeated story that a market was ‘transferred’ from Exning to the roadside because of an epidemic originated in what was admittedly pure conjecture. 29
The Annunciation Some time after the grant of his new market, de Argentine departed for the crusade led by St Louis, King Louis IX of France. He was killed in the Holy Land while Louis was still in Cyprus on his way thither in 1245. This Reginald may well have been the first of his house to bear the punning arms of three covered cups argent (or silver) which his family adopted in token of the serjeantry from which their name was already derived, for formal heraldry dates from the first quarter of the thirteenth century. These arms can be seen among the quarterings on the tomb of Alington in the museum of the Record Office in Chancery Lane, for the Alingtons were the heirs of the Argentines, and this monument is one of those memorials to great lawyers which are the only remaining traces that the most interesting little museum was once the chapel of the Master of the Rolls. Reginald de Argentine the crusader was also in all probability the founder of the ‘Chapel of the Blessed Mary’ to which our present parish church of St Mary is the direct successor. He was a person of importance 30
both at the court of St Louis and at that of the king of England. It is often forgotten that even after King John lost the duchy of Normandy many landholders in England also held fiefs across the Channel. Reginald not only held several manors in this country besides his capital manor of Great Wymondley, but was probably better known at the court of St Louis than at that of Henry III, for when he joined the crusade he was Justiciar of Normandy as well as a vassal and personal friend of the saint. This fact may throw some light on a feature of the present church of St Mary which has survived the drastic ‘restoration’ of the nineteenth century. The chapel on the south side of the high altar has been identified with ‘the aisle of St Tebold’ mentioned in a will made by one John Gryggee not long after the murder of Simon of Sudbury, Archbishop of Canterbury, whose family name was Theobald, while ‘the church of Ebold’ mentioned in the will of Thomas Wydon who gave the seats still remembered in the inscription dated 1494, has been identified with much less reason with a building which stood in the churchyard until
The font in its former (south aisle) position 31
about the middle of the last century. There is every reason to believe that this building was the ‘ankerhold’ of a recluse nun, of whose enclosure at St Mary’s we have documentary evidence. A chapel within the church might have been called a ‘church’ in 1494, but a cell built on to a church—and there are traces of many of these ‘ankerholds’ all over England —could not possibly be described as an ‘aisle’. Moreover the only ground for connecting the murdered archbishop with this ‘aisle of St Teobold’ is that one chronicler alleged that miracles were wrought at Simon’s tomb in Canterbury cathedral. There was never any question of his being canonized. On the other hand there was a St Theobald of Valoignes who was a nobleman at the court of St Louis, and, like Reginald de Argentine, the king’s personal friend. While Louis himself and our de Argentine believed themselves called to free Jerusalem, Theobald of Valoignes retired from the world, became a hermit and, soon after his death, was canonized. It is tempting to believe that the altar, at the end of the south aisle, which was partly rebuilt and enlarged during the first half of the fifteenth century, always bore the dedication to the founder’s contemporary and friend, though there may have been a revival of interest in the saint who could be considered in some sort the patron of Simon Theobald, the Suffolk-born archbishop of Canterbury. To return to the family history of that founder, Reginald de Argentine was succeeded in his English manors by his son Giles who was Constable of Windsor in 1263 but with his son, another Reginald, was involved in the so-called ‘Rebellion in Ely’, when the Isle took the side of Simon de Montfort in the Baron’s War. He lost his Cambridgeshire manor of Melbourn after the battle of Eversham, but got it back by the Dictum of Kenilworth, while his capital manor together with Exning, Halesworth and Newmarket either escaped altogether or were restored to him in the same way. When Reginald succeeded his 32
The organ
father he continued his patronage of Newmarket and obtained from the king the right to hold a fair there on the eve, day and morrow of St Barnabas and the four days following. Market Street and the recently demolished Drapery Row marked the site of both market and fair, as did the little square, now almost obliterated by slum clearance and new building, which was clearly to be seen some years ago: it appears in 1707 as Market Place. By 1293 when the second Reginald received his grant of a fair, the little hamlet of Novum Mercatum had become quite an important little town, and during the next century the surname ‘de Novo Mercato’ becomes fairly common in local deeds and wills.
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The fourteenth century In 1296 a sale of land is recorded as being ‘in the town of Newmarket and in 1327 the largest amount of tax paid in Kedington was paid by one Amice de Novo Mercato. Until 1837 the whole of Newmarket was in the diocese of Norwich, and in 1300 John Salmon, bishop of Norwich, returned from Rome, where he had been in connection with a dispute about his election, probably bringing with him two indulgencies for chapels in his diocese, one of which was the Chapel of the Blessed Mary in the parish of Exning. This indulgence was in favour of penitents who visited the chapel at Christmas, Easter, Ascension Day, Whitsunday, any festival of the Blessed Virgin, and All Saints’ Day, and also of benefactors who gave towards the fabric, lights, vestments or ornaments, and all who prayed for the good estate of Henry Hamer of Freston and Robert of Markham and his wife Beatrice, also of Norwich diocese. It was issued by three archbishops and nine bishops, all Italians, or bishops in partibus. Possibly further research would show that they were cardinals. In 1301 Bishop Salmon confirmed the indulgence when he was at Mildenhall. Newmarket was becoming a place of some importance ecclesiastically as well as for its market, for not only had the pre-Roman track of the Icknield Way become in the eyes of mediaeval Christians the Walsingham Way, the counterpart on earth of the Milky Way which legend declared to have been put in the heavens to guide pilgrims to the Holy House, but there was now a rival shrine at Thetford to which the widowed Countess of Pembroke had a special devotion, and that part of the ancient trackway which is now our Newmarket High Street leads directly to both shrines, the road branching about a mile north of the church. About 1336, this Countess of Pembroke, Mary de St Pol, founded another chapel known as the New Chapel of the Blessed Mary on the other side of the Icknield Way to serve the little Manor of Monkswyk, which she had carved out of her manor of Ditton Valence and given to the monks of Thetford. This new chapel was in the parish of Woodditton but in the patronage of the prior of Thetford. 34
The fifteenth century Monkswyk was forgotten at the Reformation, but the chapel and its conventional district survived and afterwards the church which succeeded it became the parish church of All Saints. The fact that two chapels in one little town were both dedicated to Our Lady, and that there was no other consecrated building in it seems to have led to some confusion from the first. As late as 1459 John Ray of Newmarket made bequests in his will to both the ‘New Chapel’ and the Old Chapel of Blessed Mary, but by 1509 John Perfay of Bury St Edmunds bequeathed ten shillings to the church of All Saints by that name. The Peasants’ Revolt, which was particularly strong in East Anglia, seems to have passed the de Argentine manor by, but it brought some trouble to Newmarket from other places. The vicar of Mildenhall was arrested for having threatened and insulted the escheator ‘in his house at Newmarket’, and the prior of Bury tried to escape to Newmarket from the mob which attacked the abbey, but was betrayed there and beheaded on Mildenhall Heath. During the reign of Henry VI the Argentines died out in the male line and there was a disputed succession to their estates. A violent family quarrel broke out and when the prior of Great Wymondley was making his way to the funeral of his patron at Halesworth - another Argentine manor by way of Newmarket, he was attacked by the rival faction ‘on Newmarket Heath’, here mentioned for the first time in our records. Eventually the patrimony passed, once again by marriage, to the family of Alington, who have a distinguished later history. With the coming of the Alingtons, who retained the arms and ‘Serjeantry’ of the Argentines the history of our present church of St Mary may be said to have begun. It was during the fifteenth century that the new patron must have set about rebuilding the Old Chapel of St Mary. The tower, with its odd little spire and the beautiful tracery of the west window, part of the south aisle and the five surviving original pillars remain of his work. 35
Most of the rest of the church dates from the restoration of 1850. Probably from about this time dated also the building of a little house or cell for the solitary enclosed nun as ‘anchoress’ who was attached to the church. Some old engravings of the Newmarket churches which were sold in the town some years ago show this little building in St Mary’s churchyard. It must have been structurally attached to the east end of Alington’s church for these anchorites and anchoresses (and there were many of them all over England) made their Holy Communion through a small window into the church, moreover it is said to have been used as a vestry until it was pulled down at the restoration. Like the well-known aisle with sums on the wall in the lovely Lady chapel at Long Melford it was used at one time as a school. The only anchoress who lived here of whom we have definite knowledge has an interesting link with the economic history of the market town. In early Tudor days the fashion for saffron in cooking which had given its name to Saffron Walden spread from Hertfordshire into Suffolk. Perhaps the Alington tenants brought it here, in any case when our anchoress was enclosed her father gave her for her dowry a field of saffron in Exning. The church had very strict rules about recluses, who were enclosed by the bishop with a special service only after it was fully established that they had a sufficient dowry to maintain them or a regular supply of food or alms from an approved patron. A surviving link with Great Wymondley is the spire, which, although a little larger than some of those in the county is unmistakably a ‘Hertfordshire spike’. Probably the whole church was built by men from the Alingtons’ capital manor, almost certainly the wooden spire with its oak shingles and lead cap was made by a Hertfordshire carpenter. To him we may owe the turret containing the clock bell, which until the Reformation housed the sanctus bell.
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The earliest Newmarket will extant is dated 1439, and from this time on, wills (as they almost always are, in those parishes where they have survived) are among the chief sources of information about both St Mary’s and All Saints’. We owe our knowledge of both the side chapels in St Mary’s to wills: that of St Theobald to the wills of John Gryggee and Thomas Wydon, that of St Thomas to Adam Colakyr who mentions a guild of St Thomas in his will dated 1477. It has been stated that the dedication of the modern altar in the north aisle to St Thomas the Apostle was made ‘in accordance with long tradition’, but the tradition seems only to have started well within the present century when the will of Cardinal Wolsey’s father was misread to bequeath his body for burial before the altar of St Thomas in St Mary’s church Newmarket - the correct reading seems to have been St Mary’s church Stowmarket. At that time the will of Thomas Colakyr was unknown, but it seems to refer to a guild and altar of St Thomas of Canterbury.
Christ entering Jerusalem: St Thomas’s chapel
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The sixteenth to seventeenth centuries The Wars of the Roses, basically civil war between rival noble families, did not disturb the life of little market towns much, unless they were in areas where there was severe fighting, but something must have caused trouble over church affairs in Newmarket towards the end of the fifteenth and beginning of the sixteenth centuries, for in 1503 the bishop of Norwich sent the vicar of Hoxne to enquire into the matter, and as a result the tithes of ‘the Chapel of the Blessed Virgin Mary of Newmarket under the parochial induction of Exning’ were sequestered by the consistory court of the diocese and, the sequestration having been violated, the chapel was put for a time under an interdict. The interdict cannot have lasted very long and from the end of 1507, when John Calvard became incumbent of the ‘church or chapel’ of Our Lady, St Mary’s began to be called a church. In the Valor Ecclesiasticus, William Bolton is actually called ‘rector of Newmarket’. His successor, John Walden, a graduate of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, was presented by Sir Giles Alington, the patron, in the year of Henry VIII’s fiercest attack upon the monasteries, pilgrimages, and shrines (1530) and remained apparently undisturbed until about 1552, the date of the second Act of Uniformity, when he was deprived, and one Oliver Mather appointed. Walden must have had leanings to the ‘old religion’ since he survived Henry VIII’s Six Articles and the reign of Queen Mary and lost his living probably as a result of Edward VI’s most drastic Act of Uniformity. On the accession of Queen Elizabeth, Mather took the oath of Royal Supremacy. We may not know much about the impact of the Reformation upon the ordinary parishioners of the ‘small parsonage of Newmarket’, but the changes in the royal attitude to the faith are faintly reflected in the list of the first rectors of St Mary’s to bear that title.
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By the return of the Archdeaconry of Sudbury for 1603 it appears that at that time there were no recusants (that is, Roman Catholics) in the small parsonage of Newmarket’ and that the number of communicants was 160. ‘The rector (by this time there seems to have been no question of his right to that title), William Lewis MA, reported that there was no vicarage or impropriation and that the Alingtons were still patrons. It is noteworthy that from this time on all the rectors of St Mary’s held the degree of Master of Arts or Doctor of Divinity so long as the Alingtons appointed them. In the middle of the eighteenth century the patronage was sold to the Manners and in 1753 the Marquis of Granby gave the living to a Bachelor of Divinity, Thomas Barnard, then with only three exceptions the long list of MAs begins again. One of these exceptions, Plumpton Wilson, held a degree in law. He became rector in 1834, and has an important looking memorial in the church. In the last year of the reign of James I, who discovered Newmarket as an ideal centre for the hare-hunting of which he was passionately fond, there are signs in St Mary’s register of burials of the king’s addiction to this sport which caused him to hire a house in what was coming to be thought of as All Saints’ parish (although parochial status was not legally attained by the Cambridgeshire church until 1837) and to visit the town frequently. Both he and his son, King Charles I, the Martyr, brought their court to Newmarket and kept ‘running horses’ here, first for hunting and then for those ‘matches’ which, under Charles II, developed into racing more or less as we now know it. The entries in St Mary’s registers which mark the early days of royal patronage for the town are the burials of Andrew Dowglass and Andrew Little, both described as ‘courtier’ early in the year. Probably both were Scotsmen who had followed their king from Holyrood. Other entries for the same year, 1625, included John Crane ‘one of the king’s porters’ buried on December 6th and Daniel Blackburne, Yeoman of the Guard, buried on December 11th. 39
The nineteenth to twentieth centuries In March 1625 James I died and on July 16th, while the first of Charles I’s ill-omened Parliaments was still sitting, the burials register records what must have been a terrible outbreak of plague in Newmarket. It is not until November 24th that the Register can record Finitur Pestis; the plague came to an end. There had been 85 burials during the period. The extensive, zealous restoration of the mid-nineteenth century greatly changed the church’s internal appearance, and from that restoration date the pews and choir stalls and many other fitments. The rather plain font at the nave’s west end and the neat and simply carved pulpit by the chancel arch are also of this same century. One notable feature, however, that was revealed during the restoration was an early piscina in the chancel. Of great beauty and skilled craftsmanship, this piscina dates possibly from the thirteenth century and is the oldest and rarest treasure in St Mary’s. Close by, under the east window, is the altar with its tall candles and simple but dignified design. Most of the glass in St Mary’s is comparatively new and of no great significance although the windows by Christopher Webb are notable and the window tracery is quite beautiful. The aisle windows are generally in the style of the early English period and those in the chancel, including the large east window, are perpendicular in conception. The east window, with its beautiful hues, floods the chancel in a gentle and subdued light. At the west end of the nave is a tall and comparatively narrow arch and one whose lower part is filled with exceptionally good modern wrought iron gates of intricate and superbly beautiful craftsmanship. Memorials, plaques and brasses are found in the nave. aisle and chancel walls hut they are, in the main, to quite local worthies or to those who gave long service to this church. St Mary’s also has registers which are complete from 1638. These tell a 40
fascinating story not only of the royal visitors to the town and of the many famous personalities who have come here through the centuries, but also of the day to day events of the church. Newmarket, today, is synonymous with racing and, of course, this is as it should be for horses are the town’s very lifeblood as they have been for nearly 350 years. Nonetheless, those who come here to visit the races or who pass along the busy main street en route to or from the coast might well pause, turn aside, and visit St Mary’s. They will find a church of great beauty, of no little interest and will find, too, a reminder that Newmarket’s origins go back long before the days when the whole royal court assembled here for the racing season. Indeed in St Mary’s, despite the vicissitudes of two great town fires in the eighteenth century and of over-drastic(?) restoration by the Victorians, one can find reminders of seven hundred years of the town’s story told in flint and stone. INCUMBENTS OF THE ANCIENT CHURCH OF OUR LADY OF NEWMARKET
Date of institution 2 July 1300 Robert de Burnesdisch to the Chapel of Our Lady 25 April 1315 John de Bedeford to the Chapel of Our Lady 11 Jan. 1335 Nicholas Pimnok to the Chapel of Our Lady 16 April 1356 John de Burghton to the Chapel of Our Lady 25 Sept. 1366 John Samnoun to the Old Chapel 4 August 1402 Magister Peter Rolfe to the Old Chapel 21 Feb. 1412 John Upright, rector (custodian) of the Old Chapel 26 April 1446 Nicholas Leycester, rector (custodian) of the Old Chapel 27 Oct. 1449 William Cromwell, perpetual chaplain (custodian) 11 July 1445 Lucas Row to the Old Chapel 9 Nov. 1507 John Calvard to the church or chapel 28 Jan. 1509 Albert Herryes to the church or chapel 8 August 1527 William Bolton to the church or chapel (rector of Newmarket in Valor Ecclesiasticus, III, p. 495)
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LIST OF RECTORS AFTER THE REFORMATION 1534 1551 1562 1570 1574 1585 1615 1646 1663 1677 1682 1694 1717 1753 1782 1806 1834 1847 1851 1856 1869 1878 1900 1903 1904 1913 1921 1939 1945 1951 1959 1969 1978 1985 2001 2003 2008
John Walden AB (res.) (patron: Sir Giles Alington) Oliver Mather William Morfett William Morgan Thomas Arwyn (res.) William Thomas MA (curate-in-charge: William Hawen) John Chapman MA (with the Chapel of All Saints) John Deken MA Greenough Carter MA (with Exning) Robert Cooke MA Elisha Cunliffe MA Bardsey Fisher (res.) DD John Dighton DD (patron: Hildebrand, Baron Alington) Thomas Barnard BD (patron: John, Marquis of Granby) Hen(ry?) Turner (res.) (patron: Charles, Duke of Rutland) James Barker MA (patron: John Henry, Duke of Rutland) Plumpton Wilson LLB Francis Sands Bradshaw MA Robert Robinson MA James Isaacson MA John Denman MA (tablet and window in south aisle) John Imrie MA Henry Campbell Bourne MA Arthur Reeve MA Henry Brook Young MA Newmarket transferred from diocese of Ely to diocese of St Edmundsbury and Ipswich John Prankerd MA (patronage bought by parishioners and given to diocese) Isaac Morris MA Harold Cecil Eves MA MC Morris Charles Russell AKC Kenneth Child BA (Canon of St Edmundsbury) Canon Peter May MA Roger Julian Hawkins Geoffrey Cobley Smith (Canon of St Edmundsbury) David William Prout FRSA Edmund James Newey MA John Christopher Hardy MA
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The Masonic window, Blessed Sacrament chapel St Mary’s PCC gratefully acknowledges vital assistance received from the Heritage Lottery Fund towards re-roofing the nave of St Mary’s church
The chapel of St Thomas of Canterbury (?) (north aisle) (p. 37)