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above and below:
Exterior views of St Bertoline
Below:
Interior view of nave looking west
towards the tower arch and base of
the west tower.
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Cromwellian Britain - Barthomley
Church - Cheshire
The village of Barthomley lies near the south-eastern
boundary of Cheshire, close to the border with Staffordshire. Although
it is less than a mile from junction 16 of the M6 and is bypassed by the
busy A500, it remains a small, peaceful, rural village. Agriculture has
long dominated the life of the village and Barthomley is encircled by
farms which work the now enclosed heath and mossland of the area. The
Wulvarn Brook, running through the settlement, is named in memory of the
last wolf in England, supposedly killed in Barthomley Wood. The village
itself, with its seventeenth century black and white half timbered
cottages as well as more modern houses, clusters around the junction of
two country lanes. At this junction stands The White Lion Inn, dating
from 1614 and formerly the home of the parish clerk. But by far the
largest building in Barthomley, overshadowing and dominating the
village, is St Bertoline’s Church.
The church, with its very rare dedication to an eighth century saint who
performed a miracle here, stands on an ancient barrow mound. There may
well have been a church here in the Saxon period, but the present church
apparently contains nothing older than the late eleventh century. A
Norman doorway, with its distinctively patterned round arch, survives
from the rebuilding of c 1090; now blocked, it is set into the north
wall. Most of the present church dates from the fifteenth and early
sixteenth centuries. Built of local red sandstone, it comprises a heavy
western tower, nave, southern and northern aisles and a chancel. Slight
variations in the design of windows and pier capitals suggest that,
although everything is essentially Perpendicular in style, the church
was not of one build, but was extended and added to over several decades
or generations. St Bertoline’s was restored, sympathetically and without
the drastic alterations to the existing fabric, in the mid nineteenth
century. In the 1920s the chancel and chancel arch were largely rebuilt,
but otherwise the main structure remains in essence as it would have
been in the Tudor and Stuart period, complete with the carved oak
ceiling above the nave. However, with the exception of the carved
Elizabethan altar, most of the fittings – font, pews, pulpit and
coloured glass – are fairly modern.
The church retains several important links with the early and mid
seventeenth century, many of them connected with the Crewes. In the
seventeenth century the parish was dominated by a branch of the powerful
Crewe family, whose seat of Crewe Hall lies less than three miles to the
north-west. Sir Ranulphe Crewe (b 1558), who built the present Hall in
the opening decades of the seventeenth century, was a serjeant-at-law
under James I, served as Speaker of the House of Commons in the brief
parliament of 1614 and was knighted in the same year, and was created
Lord Chief Justice of the King’s Bench in 1625, just before James I’s
death. However, he was one of a number of senior judges who questioned
the legality of forced loans during the opening year of Charles I’s
reign and was dismissed by the king in November 1626. The aged Crewe
took no active part in the civil war. He died in London in January 1646
but chose to be buried at Barthomley church, in the new chapel which he
had built for his family on the south side of the chancel, abutting the
east end of the south aisle. Although Sir Ranulphe himself has no
visible funereal monument, the Crewe chapel contains mural monuments to
several of his descendents, as well as fine recumbent effigies of
earlier and later figures. At the north end of the north aisle is a
second Crewe enclosure, a late Elizabethan oak screen, carrying carved
inscriptions, which formerly surrounded the family pew. It now encloses
the nineteenth century organ.
Affixed to the wall by the door of the Crewe chapel are four brass
plaques, dating from the seventeenth century and commemorating members
of the Malbon family of Bradley Hall, Haslington; the Hall, which no
longer exists, stood about four miles to the north-west. A stone tablet
now affixed to the south wall of the south aisle records another Malbon,
Thomas, sometime attorney at Chester, who died in 1658. Born in 1578,
Thomas Malbon practised law in both Nantwich and Chester, and rebuilt
Bradley in the opening decades of the seventeenth century. Like Sir
Ranulphe Crewe, he was too old to fight in the civil war, but Malbon
clearly supported the parliamentary cause, playing a minor role in the
wartime administration of the area. In 1651, after the war was over, he
wrote ‘A breefe & true Relacon of all suche passages & things as
happened & weire donne in and aboute Namptwich in the Countie of Chester
& in other plac[es] of the same Countie’. A lively and colourful history
of the civil war 1642-48, focussing on the area around Nantwich, but
encompassing most of Cheshire, Malbon’s account is one of the principal
sources for the history of the civil war in Cheshire. It was almost
immediately paraphrased and plagiarised by Edward Burghall, vicar of
Acton in the 1650s, who cobbled together his own manuscript account of
the war in Cheshire, ‘Providence Improved’. In 1889, both accounts were
edited by James Hall and published by the Lancashire and Cheshire Record
Society.
We know a little about Barthomley’s incumbents at this time. For part of
the war years, the living was held by George Mainwaring, member of
another old Cheshire family with tentacles in many parts of the county;
the Crewes had married into a branch of this family in the sixteenth
century. From 1649 until 1684 the incumbent was Zachary Cawdrey. In
1647, while a fellow of St John’s College, Oxford, he had been in
trouble with parliament for ‘using the Prayerbook against Protestant
orders and praying to the King’. But Cawdrey retained the parish
throughout the 1650s and the Restoration period. A silver chalice and
paten which he gave to the church are still in use. The author of a
number of minor religious works published during the 1670s and early
1680s, Cawdrey died in 1684. A brass plaque, now affixed to south
chancel wall, records not only his own death but also that of his wife,
three years earlier.
Barthomley church has a much stronger and darker claim to fame and has
an infamous niche in the history of the civil war, for it was here that
one of the most notorious massacres of the war took place. The basic
facts are clear enough. Bolstered by newly arrived reinforcements from
Ireland, in the closing days of 1643 the Chester royalists sent out
parties to harry the parliamentarians, who controlled much of the
county. On 23 December royalist troops entered Barthomley. Malbon gives
a graphic account of what followed:
‘The Kinges p[ar]tie comynge to Barthomley Churche, did sett upon the
same; wherein about xxtie Neighbours where gonne for theire saufegarde.
But maior Connaught, maior to Colonell Sneyde,...w[i]th his forces by
wyelcome entred the Churche. The people w[i]thin gatt up into the
Steeple; But the Enymy burnynge formes, pewes, Rushes & the lyke, did
smother theim in the Steeple that they weire Enforced to call for
quarter, & yelde theim selves; w[hi]ch was graunted them by the said
Connaught; But when hee had theim in his power, hee caused theim all to
be stripped starke Naked; And moste barbarouslie & contr[ar]y to the
Lawes of Armes, murthered, stabbed and cutt the Throates of xii of theim;...&
wounded all the reste, leavinge many of theim for Dead. And on Christmas
daye, and Ste Stevens Daye, the[y] Contynued plu[n]dringe & destroyinge
all Barthomley, Crewe, Haslington, & the places adiacent...’
Of the twenty ‘neighbours’ who had been smoked out of the steeple,
twelve (all males, named in Malbon’s account) were killed on the spot
and many of the remaining eight badly wounded. They seem to have been
cut down at the base of the tower, and thus within the church itself. By
26 December Lord Byron, royalist commander in Chester, was crowing to
the Marquis of Newcastle:
‘the Rebels had possessed themselves of a Church at Bartumley, but wee
presently beat them forth of it, and put them all to the sword; which I
finde to be the best way to proceed with these kind of people, for mercy
to them is cruelty.’
Malbon’s account, largely followed by Burghall, portrays the event as a
completely unprovoked and unlawful attack upon villagers who had
surrendered at Connaught’s promise of quarter. Other accounts, however,
suggest that the sequence of events may have been rather different. In a
letter of 9 January, John Byron claimed that the royalists had initially
issued a summons to the men inside the church but that it had been
refused. Only then did the royalists attack and capture the church,
possibly having to fight their way in. Although in the civil war quarter
was usually then given at that point, there was no legal obligation to
spare defenders who had spurned a formal summons and had pushed the
issue to violence and bloodshed. Although very unusual, the capture of
Barthomley church was not the only occasion during the civil wars when,
in such circumstances, the attacking force proceeded to put the
defending force to the sword. Some historians have suggested an
alternative sequence of events to explain the bloodletting – that having
initially agreed to surrender on offer of quarter, one of the villagers
wounded or killed a royalist soldier, thus negating the agreement and
provoking what followed.
Whatever the exact sequence of events at Barthomley church on 23
December 1643, the killings became notorious. Eleven years later, at the
Chester assizes of October 1654, vengeance was exacted. John Connaught,
formerly a royalist major, was tried for his life. Although he was
charged with murdering ‘several persons’ in the church, the trial
focussed on the death of just one of them, John Fowler. The jury heard
that Connaught, with a battleaxe (valued at 6d) in his right hand, had
caught hold of Fowler and struck him on the left side of his head,
inflicting a wound which, though only one inch long and one inch deep,
was instantly fatal. The jurors found the case proved, Connaught offered
nothing in mitigation and John Bradshaw, who five years before had
presided over the king’s trial, passed sentence of death. Connaught was
hanged at Boughton, on the outskirts of Chester, on the aftemoon of
Tuesday 17 October 1654. According to the diarist, Henry Newcome, he
went to the scaffold protesting his innocence:
‘The matters he died for were clearly proved, and yet he seemed to take
a great glory in his innocency, and would freely tell of his other sins,
as gaming, drinking, nay
conjuring, which were some of them not known, and yet would stand in the
denial of a thing that was proved.’
It is now hard to believe that this attractive church in its quiet rural
setting once witnessed such horrors as those of Christmas-time 1643. St
Bertoline’s is still in regular use for services. It is in good
condition and is well kept. It stands amidst an equally interesting
churchyard, and an unusual number of well preserved early eighteenth
century gravestones – a handful date from the latter half of the
seventeenth century – are now laid to form a path around the outside
walls of the church. St Bertoline’s itself is generally unlocked and
open to visitors during the day. Sadly, because of the threat of
vandalism, the Crewe chapel is normally locked, though a notice directs
visitors to the adjoining modern rectory, where the key may be sought.
By Dr Peter Gaunt.
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