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St. Mary's Church, Ewell
The old church of St.Marys was demolished, all but the tower, a hundred and fifty years ago - but historians have been able to study its architecture as if it still stood. This is because a trip to Ewell was a popular outing with Londoners in the years around 1800, so that many artists and antiquarians visited the church. Their sketches and descriptions give an idea of what was lost. The full history of the building is a complex one, since like most parish churches it was altered and enlarged over the centuries. When it was pulled down in 1848, the church revealed signs of 11th-century work - probably in the chancel - and a 13th-century nave. The first written mention of the church dates from 1194, when William de Alezun was vicar. Only one window, in the north wall of the nave, was preserved from the early 13th century originals, all the others having been replaced in the gradual search for more light in the dark church interior. About fifty years later, as the population of the village increased, they crowded out of the building and it had to be enlarged on the south side, with a new aisle supported by an arcade which rested on three pillars along the line of the old wall. This was paid for by the parishioners, but the chancel remained the responsibility of the rector, who was appointed by Chertsey abbey. It was probably the abbey's regular team of masons who came down to Ewell in the early 14th century to construct a new and more elegant chancel, lit by large windows with simple tracery, and fitted with a piscina and sedilia on the south side - a place for the priest to sit, and another for him to wash the vesels used in the mass. Gifts made by the villagers over the years for the service of the eucharist included two silver chalices, a silk altar frontal, and five vestments in materials such as black velvet, Bruges satin and white saye. The Black Death in 1348 marked a crisis for both Ewell and its monastic landlords. In 1380 Chertsey took over the finances of the rector in a cost-cutting exercise, appointing temporary curates who worked on a lesser salary. Eventually, in 1415, the abbey sold their interest in the church to Henry V, and he endowed Newark Priory with it. It was the villagers who, shortly afterwards, returned to the improvement of the church, first by building the tower, and then by replacing the font. The lighting in the north wall was improved. A regular clergyman was appointed again in 1458, and he worked with the parish on strengthening the chancel arch and installing a wooden rood screen to divide it from the nave. But the system of collective fundraising was being replaced by one which put more emphasis on the piety of the rich. When Lady Jane Iwarby died in 1519, she was buried to the left of the altar in a tomb of Sussex marble, on which her brass effigy prayed 'Lady helpe me and you': this tomb was to be used in the ritual of the Easter sepulchre. More extensive alterations were made in 1529 by Richard Bray, who paid for the complete rebuilding of the south aisle. Instead of running parallel with the nave, this now widened at the eastern end to allow space for an altar where masses could be said for his soul. The windows looking on to the aisle were plain, but those lighting the altar were much more elaborate. Richard Bray made a bad bargain with his investment, since by the time of his death in 1559 prayers for the dead had been outlawed for over ten years. The funerary monuments in and around the chancel, for John Tabard and his wife Joan, for Edward Dows, 1510 (Clerk of the Signet to Henry VII) and Balle Treghstynn, 1520 ('Take on my soule pyte/ And pray to God for hys benyngnyte') continued to request the support of the living for the dead, but their appeals fell on deaf ears. The church tower of old St.Marys was built in the early fifteenth century, and it is a tribute to the skill of its anonymous architects that it still stands nearly five hundred years later - the oldest structure in the village. The tower was built on a limited budget, for the people of the village rather than their vicar or landlord. Although not required in the ritual of worship, the tower was a landmark. Its peal of four bells could be heard through the village, and it dominated the view down West Street and the uphill stretch of the High Street. The masons had to work with cheap materials, being unable to bring in fine building stone. So the tower is built of flints from the chalky fields between Ewell and the Downs, mixed with blocks of soft stone from Reigate. It rests on the solid foundations of the old Roman road, Stane Street, which runs underneath the churchyard. Some fragments of tile which are built into the buttresses may have come from Roman ruins in this area. Local flint is not a very good building material - when Epsom's church of St.Martin was rebuilt, three hundred years later, carts full of flint were hauled from the beach at Brighton as a substitute. The mediaeval masons coped by dividing the flints into two piles, the large and the small: large ones were used to build the first stage, up to the top of the west window, then the small. The putlog holes, for inserting scaffolding poles, were left empty in case they were needed for repair work. Better stone was used at the corners, where it resisted weathering. On the second stage there are four small windows to light the ringing chamber. The staircase turret is very similar to the one at St.Martins, and both towers may have been designed by the same team. The belfry chamber has four windows, but as they are in different styles - two square-headed, two round - they may be reused from elsewhere. By 1553 the church must have been a bare place as its fittings and valuables were sold off. Some were acquired at knock-down prices by the Saunders of Bourne Hall, who held onto them in case the old forms of religion should return - and indeed, in the reign of Mary it was possible to offer one of the chalices to the refounded community of Charterhouse. This, too, came to nothing, and the church remained bare of displays other than those relating to family pride. In 1634 a visit by heralds found the old brasses in place, and about this time the surviving helmet and gloves were hung up as martial embellishments to a tomb. Ordinary villagers continued to care for the church. In 1611 Thomas Rodger left money in his will towards the poor and the church; shortly afterwards a new communion table was acquired for the chancel, and a set of kneeling rails were installed in front of it. There was a new pulpit too, and the doctrines preached from it were of an injudiciously High Church character: so much so that the vicar was ejected during the Civil War, and the care of the building neglected. During the Commonwealth 'casually, the Church fell in' - exposing the graves of Bray and his wife. After the rebuilding of the roof, their chancel was converted to a vestry room for conducting church business, and eventually the end window was blocked to make room for a fireplace. The vestry saw to improvements, including the replacement of the church plate and bells in 1764, and in 1780 the local builder Henry Kitchen was brought in to increase the seating space. There was only room for 400, and the village population was growing. He put in a gallery, running from the porch to the tower: it rested on the stumps of the 13th-century arcade, which meant that the south aisle roof now rested on little more than trust in Providence. The 15th-century font was retired in favour of a more elegant Georgian design, and the crowded church was lit by a spider chandelier hung from the ceiling In the 18th century, the archway connecting the tower to the church was sealed off with panelling, and when the church acquired an organ it was installed on the gallery here. This new floor level was carried through to the foot of the west window, and it seems that the village school was held here until its re-establishment in Old Schools Lane in 1816. Certainly the stone mullions of the window are laboriously carved with names and dates, in what looks like youthful writing. The floor above continued as the ringing chamber, and five bells were sent off to Whitechapel to be recast as six in 1767. Some twenty years later Richard Bliss, a blacksmith who had newly arrived in the village, showed his worth by designing the weathervane which stands on the turret. He lies buried within sight of it, to the south of the church path. At about the same time, the original parapet became unsafe, presumably because friable stone had been used: the churchwardens, feeling more confident with brick architecture, had it rebuilt in that material. Brick pinnacles would have been hard to achieve, and so staddle stones from an old barn were used instead. In 1800 the sundial on the south face of the tower was replaced by a clock, given to the parish in the will of Helena Fendall, which has since been removed to the tower of the new church. Sir George Glyn's architect gave his opinion in 1848 that the tower was safe, but this did not calm the nerves of the bellringers, who on one occasion fled in panic to the local hostelry at the noise of a falling clapper. The tower survived the old church as a local landmark, and was used as a mortuary chapel until 1900. It was restored in 1933, but there was still concern about its condition, and a sign warned people that it was a dangerous structure. A stick of bombs, falling in the churchyard in the 1940 Blitz, did no damage to the tower but blew the sign away: it seemed unnecessary to replace it. When Sir George Glyn became vicar in 1831, the church was at a low ebb. About 750 people - the adult population of the village - could have been seated in the pews and galleries, but only half that number turned up on Sundays. The building had been patched where it should have been rebuilt - the south-east corner of the Bray chantry kept falling away. The first thing to be established, in 1842, was whether the tower would fall and crush the rest: a structural report passed it as safe, but cancelled all bell-ringing in case the vibration shook down loose stones. A fuller report, commissioned from a Reigate architect, was very damning. He didn't like the flint and rubble construction, the low ceiling, the box pews or the galleries. Sir George Glyn was rich and influential. He offered a piece of land for a new church - in return for the stopping of a public right of way, which ran from the Spring Hotel to the old church, past his house - and he started collecting for a building fund. Many of the villagers took a different line. They had grown up with the old church, and thought it simply needed repair. The parish vestry opposed the scheme, drawing attention to Sir George's personal interest in it. He was, however, master of the situation. The principal gentry amongst the opposition, including James Gadesden of Ewell Castle, were brought round; the treasurer of the building fund, who had been dragging his feet, was replaced; and after the demolition had been voted for, it was allowed that the old tower could be left standing as a memento of what had been. Henry Clutton, who wrote the report condemning the old church, also designed the new one and its foundation stone was laid in 1847, with work completed a year later. The opening fete, held in Glyn House grounds attracted 1500 people. 'Man is a noble animal, splendid in ashes, and pompous even in the grave'. If you wanted a good send-off in the 17th century, the people to arrange it were the heralds. They would sort out the lying-in, the funeral procession, the guests in order of rank - all the signs of nobility (you had to be well-born to qualify). In 1689 a London coffin maker spotted a gap in the market, many of his clients being lowly born but very rich. He started charging them for a funeral conducted with appropriate dignity, and so the undertaker's profession was born. Many who joined it had relatives who were carpenters (they made the coffins) or carters (they carried them). A grand funeral in the 1870s might involve a coffin of elm, cased in lead and enclosed in oak: it would be covered in black velvet and carried by a hearse and four with ostrich plumes on the horse's heads. A coach and two could carry the mourners, while the attendants, minister, clerk and sexton all expected to be presented with kid gloves and silk scarves as a kind of gratuity. Ewell's churchyard attracted well-to-do Londoners because of its rural tranquillity. Burials in town were a risky business, since the crowded graveyards there were continually dug over for new occupants, but leafy Surrey was somewhere you could rest in peace. From 1751 members of livery companies and other important Londoners took advantage of Ewell connections to be buried here. The fees charged for burying 'out-parishioners' were high - three guineas to the clergy, and one and a half to the clerk, at 1848 prices. The clerk also acted as sexton, digging to a depth of twelve feet where repeated interments were expected. Parishioners were charged much less for their burial (five shillings in all) and there were pauper's graves, and graves for children. Graves could be lined with brick in order to prevent the intrusion of later burials, and a few of the more important families took the further step of building vaults where their coffins could rest undisturbed. Stone monuments were unusual in churchyards until the 18th century, the names of the dead surviving only through village tradition. During Epsom's Spa period, stonemasons set up business to provide monuments for a new class of prosperous residents, and from 1733 onwards these were also commissioned by Ewell people. The first permanent monuments consisted of a tall stone at the head and a lesser one at the foot; afterwards the space in between came to be marked by a rounded body stonem, or a flat ledger. The preferred situation was on either side of the path to the church door, so that the dead would be kept in mind by the living, although a few hardy souls chose to be buried on the unlucky northern side. The rich, who expected to be buried near the church, commissioned chest tombs with engraved panels in classical style. These were at first favoured by incoming Londoners and gentry, but after 1789 they were also chosen by some of the wealthier villagers. By the 19th century monumental masonry was being subcontracted by undertakers, rather than forming a sideline of the building trade. Stonemerchants' yards lay along the delivery routes up the Thames, or from the 1840s besides railway stations. They stocked slabs of stone in various thicknesses, ready to be worked up by the local mason. Most of the Ewell monuments are of Portland or similar limestones, although polished red granite and white marble were used as they became available towards the end of the churchyard's life. Burials continued here for forty years after the demolition of the old church, and several gentry families took the opportunity to set up monuments within the precinct of the building. The churchyard around the new church soon filled up, too, and in 1901 a portion of the former Rectory Farm, linking the two, was consecrated for further burials. The churchyard of old St.Marys is a picture of the village community. It is not a comprehensive picture, certainly not in the early years, when only a few villagers could afford tombstones: there were many who aspired to a cheaper monument in the form of bed boards, oak planks running between two posts along the grave and painted with the details of the deceased. These are vulnerable to weather, and the last Ewell example was lost in the 1960s. Many people went to their rest under plain earthen mounds: even in the 19th century, only a quarter of burials had monuments. Those families who could afford monuments, did so even for their young children, so that the churchyard contains many such sad records - whole generations of up to five children sometimes dying in infancy. The sextons did their best to console parents with scraps of verse - 'Beneath two sleeping Infants lie/ To earth their ashes lent/ Hereafter shall more children rise/ But none more innocent' (Bielby 1773). The old are better represented in the churchyard than the young, for they had lived long enough to save up for a grave. About one in ten of those buried were over 80, the oldest being Helena Fendall of Ewell House whose monument, against the church wall to the left of the porch, recorded her death in aged 99 - no mean achievement for 1799, a time when many people argued that centenarians were naturally impossible. She was the last of the Fendalls, but many gravestones record continuing burials in a family over sixty or eighty years. Because the churchyard is less organised than a modern cemetery, sets of family graves stand out more to the eye - they are parallel, and imitate the same style and materials. Most of them record local business families, who could afford to stay in one house for generations. Gravestones, like works of art, express feelings through words and pictures. In the earliest examples it is the pictures which are distinctive. Copied from the woodcuts which enlivened the borders of contemporary funeral invitations, they are there to remind passers-by of death's emblems - skulls, flying hourglasses, coffins, and the sexton's pick and spade. By the 1790s mourners had come to expect a more sophisticated style, one which took care to stress the hope of immortality. The winged skulls metamorphose into cherub faces. Symbolic props are heavily drawn on to express such ideas as the heavenly crown, the trumpet of fame, and the book of life. Sextons were becoming more careful about their work anyway, so that real skulls and bones were less likely to be thrown up in gravedigging. Instead, the idea of death was expressed more gently by a classical cremation urn - although cremation, as a practical rite of burial, was unknown until 1885. The influence of the classics also affected the wording of insciptions, leading to the replacement of the blunt 'here lies the body of X' by the Latin idiom 'sacred to the memory of Y'. Ewell was becoming a more literate society, and gravestones began to appeal to the living in verses as well as in pictures. Some of the wording was very traditional - 'Pray think on me you who pass by/ As you are now so once was I' (Brown 1775) is a mediaeval formula also found on a brass in the old church, and 'Afflictions sore long time she bore/ Physicians were in vain' (Jubb 1781, Whitehead 1847) was a standard piece of doggerel. The stonemasons varied their tags according to circumstances: 'A tender husband, father dear' (Martin 1807) becomes 'A loving wife and mother dear' (Veness 1825). On the earlier graves the reception of the deceased into Heaven is taken pretty much as a fait accompli, and the messages dwell on their escape from pain. After about 1840 there is more concern for redemption theology, and earnest use is made of Biblical quotations. Most epitaphs dwell on the future state of the dead, not their earthly career, but there are always exceptions. The landlords of the Spring Hotel (Mason 1836) and the Green Man (Wood 1865) went into eternity under a record of their previous occupation, perhaps as an advertisement. James Andrew, 'an old inhabitant of this parish and for 31 years vicar's churchwarden' (1855) stands as an example to posterity. Others of equal distinction go unrecorded,such as George Brooker Stone, chairman of the parish vestry, who is buried prominently at the beginning of the entrance path. It was on this grave that his son slept for three nights, wrapped in his Surrey yeomanry cloak, to foil the attempts of bodysnatchers. Further along the path, the graves of the Willis family record the descent which ended in the village historian Cloudesley Willis (1955), the last individual to be commemorated in the churchyard. He has another memorial in the wrought iron gate on the old church tower. The Kitchens, who felt they merited a table tomb rather than the usual headstone, trace the rise and fall of a village family in three generations from a carpenter through a builder to the talented architect who died just as he was starting a career in New South Wales. A series of other table tombs express the pride of land-owning families - the Gadesdens of Ewell Castle, the Rids of Ewell Grove, and the Bridges of Ewell Court, who made their money from the gunpowder mills along the river Hogsmill. At a dicreet distance from this last is the headstone of two young men 'killed by an explosion at the Ewell Powder Mills' in 1865. Sudden death is also remembered on the gravestone of Catherine Bailey, 'who in consequence of the overturning of the Dorking coach on 1 April 1826 met with her death in the 22nd year of her age' - and there follow eight lines by her husband, full of sorrow and resignation to the Divine will. 'Let the world say what they will/ Speak of me as you find', says Sarah Tichener (1816), but others were more anxious to perpetuate their claims to fame. One villager reminds us that 'he was late of HM Customs' (Legg 1865), while another basks in reflected glory as the widow of the Coroner for Middlesex (Umpreville 1791). Against the tower, the Glyn monument records several military figures including Richard Thomas Glyn (1900), 'Lieut. General GB GMC Colonel of the South Wales Borderers (24 Reg)'. Sir George Glyn, who exercised authority in a different sphere, is buried over the altar of the church which he had demolished, and the tomb features the family coat of arms. Nearby is the prominent monument of James Lowe (1866), 'inventor of the segments of the screw propellor... His life though unobtrusive was not without great benefit to his country'. Some graves advertise the commercial acumen of the deceased, who 'in the spring of life sowed the seed of honest industry which gradually increased to a plentiful harvest' (Clows 1792). Others, more touchingly, attempt to reduce the feelings of survivors to verse couplets - 'to name her virtues ill befits my grief, What was my bliss can now give no relief' (Barnes 1809). There were those who, having purchased a sufficient footage of stone, used it as a soapbox -'attend the counsels of my tongue', says Martha Blishen (1817), commencing twenty lines of morality for her grandchildren, but we do not know if they did. It is instructive to spend an hour or two amongst these village relics, but would they have welcomed a future status as quarries for the local historian? James Jolliffe's parting shot of 1799 suggests not. 'Let not in vain your eyes these tombs inspect/ And still the duty of your soul neglect'.
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