Church of St. John the Baptist, Kirk Hammerton, North Yorkshire
Like many people, I am largely self-educated; my real learning only started after college graduation. I began to read voraciously in history and literature; my imagination feeding primarily on English authors. In short order, I became as much of an Anglophile as someone who had never lived outside of East Texas could be. So, when I first ventured overseas, in 1994, something of a late-bloomer at age thirty-nine, there was really no question about where I would go. It was always England.
I returned as soon as I could two years later, this time adding Scotland to the itinerary. I remember thinking at that time that it would have been pretentious on my part to travel overseas two years in a row—it was not something either my family or my wife’s had ever done. Looking back on it now, I realize how silly my inhibitions and fears were. Though it was unheard of in our circle, the money spent on travel was far less than the accepted hobbies and pursuits in our part of the world—all of which involved guns, boats, trucks and/or other expensive paraphernalia.
I was nothing more than a standard-issue tourist in those days, checking-off sites on my must-see list. I returned twenty years and something of lifetime later in 2016, this time a bit more of a traveler. And with the exception of the two pandemic years, I have been back every year since. These excursions have been particular in purpose, a sort of research, you might say. I was now in search of the obscure, seeking out places where people, or at least tourists, were not. One of the perks of age, at least for me, is that after having spent years acquiring a broad view of things, you can now focus on the footnotes, the cubby-holes, the cul-de-sacs, the dusty unfrequented corners of history. And you are generally left alone as you do so.
This obsession with the obscure was rooted in a curiosity about the English church, which I found fascinating, or at least so up to a point. Always a bit idiosyncratic, things on their side of the Channel were never exactly the way they were in Paris, or Rome. Indeed, it is interesting to compare and contrast English Christianity pre-Schism (>1054) and pre-Norman Conquest (>1066) with that in the Christian East. The romantic notion of the Varangian exodus to Constantinople, post-Conquest, only feeds that story. I realize that some people with agendas to promote can make too much of their differences with Rome, while over-emphasizing some similarities with the East. That is not my intention; I simply believe that American Orthodoxy, finding a foothold in the Americas, can benefit from a deeper knowledge of the early English church. And I wanted to see it up close.
A good friend of mine who visits England from time to time makes a habit of attending Church of England services, something that the English themselves overwhelmingly do not do. He reports that the services can vary greatly across a broad spectrum. I am sure that there are, here and there, vibrant Anglican parishes where the clergy and laity labor mightily to keep the thing going. I commend them. But attending their services does not interest me one whit; nor does their theology, their history, their architecture, nor their hymnology.
All church history is messy–the notion that there was ever a pristine church, or that there ever could be, is the fountainhead of heresy. But, there can be nobility and faithfulness in all the messiness. These virtues are not to be found in divorcing the wife who has borne you six children so you can marry your saucy young mistress before she gives birth to your bastard child. And that, despite all the high church pretension, is the bedrock foundation of the Church of England. The end result is what we find today: churches abound in the English countryside, but those that have not been turned into venue spaces, private residences, gymnasiums, or glamping sites, are often little better than mausoleums, with all the atmosphere of a local museum that nobody ever visits.
Three particular interests connected to the English church have driven my journeys there. They largely concern the period prior to the Conquest, though one of them involves the subsequent centuries up to the Reformation. Thus all predate the Church of England, which again, I do not find compelling. First, I set out to visit as many Saxon churches as possible. In connection with that, I wanted to search out the old Holy Wells. Finally, I wanted to view the few remaining English wall paintings.
By Saxon churches, I am specifically referencing those built prior to the conquest (1066 AD). To be sure, many, if not most English churches rest on Saxon foundations. Some may have a bit of Saxon wall remaining, or a window here and there. But intact Saxon churches themselves are relatively sparse.1 I am not particularly interested in Norman towers or Gothic spires. Just give me an intimate Saxon chapel with timbered ceiling, a sacred space that just as easily be in Greece or Georgia, and I feel right at home. I have visited all but a handful of the noteworthy Saxon sites.
View of the farm where I stayed in Wharfedale
I used Hubberholme, in Wharfedale in the North Yorkshire Dales as my most recent base in England. It has neither Saxon church,2 nor holy well, nor wall paintings, but it does have much to recommend it. First, there is a village pub-if this were indeed a village-as snug and welcoming as you will find anywhere. Pub food is uniformly good. What sets one apart from another is the proprietor; their personality sets the tone. And in that regard, I found none better than The George, which, in effect, is Hubberholme. English pubs are made for conversation; you’ll find none of the caterwauling of Irish pubs. Some people, of course, prefer that sort of thing; but I do not.
The George at Hubberholme
I ate there three or four nights, and enjoyed the conversations every time. The most memorable was with a couple—the woman roughly my age, with what I first thought to be her elderly husband. It turns out that he was her 97-year old father. He had lived an interesting, adventurous life, but stayed rooted to the bungalow south of London that he purchased for 4,000 pounds in 1958. He wryly noted that he supposed he would be a millionaire if he ever sold it, but why would he do that? He had traveled quite a bit, and had driven across the U.S. back in the 1990s. I learned about his piano, on which he continued to play jazz and Benny Goodman tunes, sometimes accompanied by a fellow nonagenarian on the saxophone. The daughter had lived in Texas for over thirty years, in Buda, south of Austin where I had just visited my cousin the week preceding my departure (coincidences like this are not unusual-the world is smaller than we think). She returned to England in 2022 to care for her father, and was then driving him around the country in his 1991 Volkswagen. He had driven alone to Heathrow to pick her up, and only then turned over his keys to the daughter. I am adding this gentleman to my list of people to emulate.
Then there is an arched stone bridge over the River Wharf right adjacent. Across it lies the church and churchyard, which can only be described as squatty, with a clunky Norman tower on the west; not particularly impressive from the exterior. The inside tells a different story. They even have a rare rood screen with a loft, sent here during the Cromwellian Unpleasantness from elsewhere in Yorkshire–it being thought (rightly, it turns out) that Hubberholme was too far up the dale to attract the attention of any Roundheads and their axes. Finally, there is an expansive farm operation hard against the churchyard. And that, along with the gurgling Wharfe River, is Hubberholme.
If you want more excitement, I suppose you could walk a mile or so down Wharfedale to Buckden, where there is another pub and a village shop, where you can buy bottled water and ice cream from the old proprietor wearing the worse toupee I’ve see this side of National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation. I stayed at a farmhouse about a mile in the other direction up Wharfedale from Hubberholme. From there, it was nine miles up Wharfedale and down towards Wensleydale to the next pub; as scenic a stretch of backroad as you will find on the island.
The noted English writer J. B. Priestley, a native Yorkshireman, made Hubberholme his home for many years. At his request, he was buried in a secret location in the churchyard. His I’ll Tell You Everything is as funny a book as I have ever read. Priestley referenced Hubberholme twice in his writings, describing it as “sheer magic, not quite in this world,” and later as “one of the smallest and pleasantest places in the world.” I would not argue with either characterization.
I started seeking out the Saxon churches on my first return in 2016. I began with St. Mary’s and Odda’s Chapel at Deerhurst in Gloucester. St. Mary’s is the largest and probably the most impressive of the Saxon churches, though it is not my favorite. St. Martin’s in the Wall at Wareham in Dorset was memorable, but more for the reclining effigy of T. E. Lawrence, than for any sense of the church’s real antiquity, obscured as it is by whitewash. St. Peter’s in Monkwearmouth retains the west facade of the Saxon church, but the rest is largely reconstructed. St. Mary’s in Seaham, really the very first stone Saxon chapel, is more authentic in that regard, but was locked.
The third in Durham was more to my liking. The Saxon chapel in Escomb has somehow been preserved intact for over a thousand years. It is intimate in feel, much like a chapel would be in the remote Georgian countryside. Maybe this was the template for the fringes of Christianity. I felt the same about the lovely St. Laurence’s in Bradford-on-Avon in Somerset. If England ever returns to faith, perhaps they should start here, in this small space of authentic sanctity, rather than in the stained-glass glories of Holy Trinity across the street.
Church of St. John the Baptist, Kirk Hammerton, North Yorkshire
I added three Saxon churches to my list in 2023, probably closing out my explorations along these lines. I may visit others, if the occasion arises, but it will not be as intentional as heretofore. My favorite has to be the Church of St. John the Baptist in Kirk Hammerton, north of York. It crowns a knoll, in a residential area of what appears to be a commuter suburb of York. It is compact and vertical, with clean Saxon lines. The church, originally named after St. Quentin, dates back to about 950 AD. The Norman North aisle was added about 1150 AD, but this does not mar the sightline as you approach from the South. A placard inside the church informs that much of the Saxon interior work (including evidence of later wall painting) was lost in brutal Victorian restorations in the 1830s and 1890s. That is to be lamented, of course, but you can still appreciate the honest simplicity of the Saxon exterior footprint.
I share with the parishioners of St. John the Baptist their sorrow over what was destroyed in the 19th-century. Victorian restorations are almost universally lamented today. So much was lost. I have just finished reading the Journals of Denton Welch, edited by Jocelyn Brooke in 1952. Welch liked nothing better than to dip into an English church on one of his daily ramblings.
I saw that the church through the rich old chesnuts had either been horribly mauled or completely rebuilt. Perfect early-to-mid Victorian Gothic interior, breathing out inhumanity and a struggling will to rightness…I wondered why the Victorian rebuilders with their lust for destruction had left this or even some parts of the tower…(17 June 1946).
Of all the eras of English history, the Victorian is my least favorite: the haughty, hubristic arrogance, the murderous adventuring in Crimea, in China, in Africa, and the Indian subcontinent, to name just a few. And my distaste begins at the top, with the namesake herself. Again, Welch:
Destruction is much more than a negative power. It is an evil force at work every moment. It is just another form of cruelty. When something beautiful and fantastic that will never be made again is destroyed, one feels that the earth is just that bit drearier, less precious, more worthy of its Surveyor and Urban District Councils. How wonderful it must be to be on the side of the destroyers! Almost everything, sooner or later would fall into your lap.” (26 May 1948)
I feel the same way when I say an old house torn down by a developer for no better reason than it was old.
While maybe lacking structurally the Saxon arches and stonework inside, the plaster had been removed (revealing faint wall paintings in the process), and instead, in 1896 the space had been filled with what I can only call iconography. In something far beyond the English medieval wall paintings, and depicting something much more substantial than the limited expressions of Anglican piety found in stained glass, an artist had filled the church with iconography in the Pre-Raphaelite style.
I admit, the Pre-Raphaelites are not to everyone’s taste. I listened to one Orthodox commentator issue a sweeping denunciation of all art after the Middle Ages—the Renaissance artists, in particular. No doubt he would not approve of the Pre-Raphaelites, either. No matter, I think he is being pedantic, and I am thankfully under no obligation to follow suit. The Pre-Raphaelites and similar artists (such as Puvis de Chavannes in France, Nesterov in Russia, etc.) have fascinated me for years.
I have spent quite as much time in England searching out the Pre-Raphaelite collections as I have Saxon churches. What I see in St. John the Baptist is what I am looking for in all the Saxon churches, or the wall-paintings, or the holy wells: that is, a vision of the English church without the English Reformation. At this small parish, I have a visual to remember.
The Pre-Raphaelite “iconograpby” at St. John the Baptist, Kirk Hammerton
The next Saxon church is, I am afraid, not a vision at all, but a truer reflection of what’s left of the English church today: All Hallows Church in Bardsley, North Yorkshire. The footprint of the church is more expansive than at Kirk Hammerton. Save for the later additions of a North aisle and a South aisle, the church is more or less the 9th-century Saxon construction. Some face carvings in the interior upper arches remain, which are of some interest. But what I found most noteworthy were the too telling signs of modern Anglicanism. The interior boasted a number of placards proclaiming how vital and alive this parish community was. When I am confronted with this sort of thing, I think of the man who has to tell you how honest he is, and when he does, you instinctive reach to ensure that your wallet is still safe in your back pocket. This has the feel of so much special pleading.
A Saxon witness at Bardsley
On the front pew, I found a stack of left-over communiques that had apparently been distributed to the parish. I have forgotten the exact particulars, but it reported the proceedings of a recent U. N. conference about some ecologically virtuous something or another. I leafed through the publication and saw it was heavy on moralistic pronouncements about the long-term evils of colonialism. But of course. On my way out, I noticed a placard advertising a local number for the over-50 LGBTQI community to call if they were lonely and wanted to get together with other over-50 alphabet people.3
My view of church is, of course, informed by my own faith. The church is the Ark of Salvation to we who are drowning; it is the Hospitable for we who are sick and dying; and it is the Refuge for we who are weak and poor. In the midst of all that, it is where we come to confess, repent and receive forgiveness, and above all, where we find and experience Jesus Christ. What it is not, in particular, is the place where we project politicized social policy, nor is it a hook-up forum for senior homosexuals. That is how the church dies, or at least how it ceases to be recognizable as anything resembling a church.
At the end of my trip to England, I stayed for two nights at Farmcote, a few miles from Winchcombe in the Cotswolds. I was a little apprehensive about this as the region caters to the well-healed. But it is really not too bad as long as you stay out of the old market towns, such as Bourton-on-the-Water, crammed to the brim with twee shops and Range Rovers. The two pubs I frequented out in the countryside were no more expensive than the ones I had visited elsewhere.
St. Faith Church, Farmcote
Farmcote is really just a cluster of three residences on an average-sized farmstead. One brother runs the bed and breakfast from the “big house,” an expansive two-story Victorian manse, set amidst flowering terraced gardens. His sister lives next door in a small house where she grows herbs and peppers for sale. The other brother, the sheep farmer, lives in a large farmhouse at the end of the lane. Their parents had purchased the farm in 1954.
Immediately adjacent to the side garden of the manse house is the small St. Faith’s church, where services are still held twice a month. It is a tiny thing, dating back to the Saxon era. The stone effigies of a 15th-century couple occupied the northeast corner of the sanctuary. There’s a grave slab or two in the floor of the church. There’s a small door in the north wall where lepers could approach the church and receive the Eucharist while standing outside. Thankfully, the church has never been restored. A small graveyard adjoins, with a humped area to the east of the church containing a mass grave of plague victims from back in the bad old days. On my last morning there, I stepped through the garden to the chapel and said my morning prayers there.
Two other churches deserve a mention, probably better characterizing the usual experience of Saxon remains in England today: St. Mary the Virgin Church in Dallington, Northamptonshire, and the Orthodox Church of the 318 Godbearing Fathers in Shrewsbury in Shropshire. It was genealogy, rather than Saxon architecture which brought me to Dallington. One of the oldest gravestones in New England is that of Edward Rainsford (1609-1680) in the old burial ground of King’s Chapel in Boston. He arrived with John Winthrop in 1630.
Unlike most Puritans, he was born into the landed gentry. His ancestry, on both sides, is known all the way back to the Plantagenets, those Magna Carta barons, and through St. Margaret of Scotland, the Anglo-Saxon kings themselves. Not that that means anything, of course, everybody else who had at least one ancestor anywhere in the British Isles is descended from them as well. The neat trick, however, is being able to prove it.
I’ve always been a bit sheepish about my grandmother Cowan’s New England forebears. Puritans generally receive pretty harsh scrutiny from me. So what was Edward Rainsford doing with this bunch? The story fell into my lap researching in back issues of the New England Historical & Genealogical Register. Edward was the third son of Sir Robert Rainsford and his wife, Lady Mary Kirton. As the youngest son, he did not have a path to an inheritance, and was thusly apprenticed to a London haberdasher. It was his employer who had the staunch Puritan credentials and served as Edward’s link to the Puritan immigrants. (The haberdasher, remained in London, and went down in infamy as one of the regicides who sign the death warrant for Charles I. This was not forgotten, and upon the Restoration, Charles II returned the favor.)
Edward’s older brother Richard Rainsford, however, was joined at the hip to Charles II, being the Chief Justice of England after the Restoration. He acquired immense wealth, and became a major benefactor of St. Mary the Virgin, as well as building the poorhouse, which remains intact across from the church. Now the sacristy, the Rainsford Chapel is in the northeast corner of the church, containing the graves and monuments to the Richard Rainsford family. It was elaborate and a bit over the top. Again, some lines about a similar situation from Denton Welch:
In the church the great marble memorial in the chapel next to the chancel hung over me…What a world of egoism it was in itself! Family pride sweeping and stinking and swaggering up to God. (24 May 1946)
The kind sexton also showed me an enormous framed chart—at least four feet wide by six feet high. He found a stool and pulled it off its hanger for me to inspect closer. The chart was covered in small script and interconnecting lines, for it was a detailed family tree of the Rainsford family. I squatted down and followed the lines down to my Edward. Not surprisingly, the American Rainsfords were not continued on the chart.
But the sexton was also excited to show me one of the treasures of the church. On the west stone wall, slightly over head high, a portion of a Saxon cross was embedded in the wall. The cross probably stood at the main crossroads of the old village, between the church and what became Rainsford’s Poorhouse. Most of them were busted up by either the Reformers or the Roundheads. So this piece is all that is left, but it is treasured and preserved as a link to the old England, gone so many centuries now.
Part of an old Saxon cross embedded into wall of St. Mary the Virgin, Dallingford
Before I left the area, I also visited the beautiful situated Church of St. Michael and All Saints, in the park at Great Tew. There are several monuments of interest to me there, including the Wilcot effigies in the floor of the church immediately before the altar. These were ancestors of the Rainsfords, about three hundred years earlier.
The Wilcot effigies, St. Michael and All Saints, Grew Tew
This was my second visit to the Orthodox Church in Shrewsbury. having first visited in 2017. The church is a small chapel that once was attached to the Monastery of St. Wilburga at Much Wenlock. It had been abandoned since the early 1800s. When the Orthodox took it over, the building was roofless and in ruins. I visited with the priest on that earlier visit. He said the foundation and the first three feet of wall were Saxon, from what had been a much larger church dating to the 7th-century. The current church dates to the 12th-century. But apparently, the old Saxon site was not chosen at random. In addition to that, carbon dating of posts found on the site indicate that this was a site of pagan worship as far back as 2000 B.C. (a short video of the history, here.) It is a cozy affair, though I hardly see how it holds the number of parishioners who come from all over. The subdivision seems to press it in. There’s a tiny vacant lot adjoining, and as I understand it, a little spot of land on a back adjoining lot. On their website there are plans to build a much-needed church hall. The church seems quite different from all the others I had visited. Holy places are hard to obliterate.
The Orthodox Church of the 319 Godbearing Fathers, Shrewsbury
My second obsession lies with the holy wells of Britain (and Ireland). The pilgrimages to the holy wells, and the general veneration of the local saints, is what set Celtic and English Christianity apart from their continental counterparts. I am not at all troubled that many of these sites had pagan roots, being “baptized” into the Faith, so to speak, by their association with the local saints, A well-traveled web of pilgrimage trails connected the various holy wells and shrines to the saints. The Normans tended to discourage this practice, or to substitute continental saints for English ones (such as St. George replacing St. Edmund as England’s patron saint.) Though you might say the well of English saints dried up with the Norman invasion, the veneration of the Saxon and Celtic saints went on as before and the pilgrimages continued apace. It took the English Reformation and the later the Puritan Protectorate to finally almost kill off the practice. I say almost, because people still seek the wells, though they may not realize why.
I have a few favorite holy wells: St. Clether’s and St. Nectan’s in Cornwall, St. Issui’s and St. Cybi’s in Wales, and now St. Kenelm’s in the Cotswolds. My son and I visited another St. Kenelm’s well near the church of the same name outside of Birmingham in 2019. This was the hill of his martyrdom. The well I visited recently was where his body rested on its way to Winchcombe Abbey for burial. The hagiography about his martyrdom is extensive, if muddled. Suffice to know that this well was a major pilgrimage site in England beginning in the year 819. Chaucer even mentioned it in his The Nun’s Tale. The well takes a bit of investigation to locate, but that just makes its discovery all the better. A simple stone house was erected in 1830, using the stones from the existing 15th-century well-house. A image of St. Kenelm is above the doorway. Inside the original stone rim of the well remains, with a four by four basin of clear water. I dipped my hand into it and then crossed myself with the water.
Wellhouse of St. Kenelm’s Well, near Winchcombe
Finally, I visited three churches to see more examples of medieval wall paintings. Once I discovered that there was such a thing, I endevored to seek them out. I was attracted to the beauty of Orthodox iconography long before I understood its role in Orthodox praxis. That would come later. As I stated earlier, English wall paintings do not really rise to the level of Orthodox iconography, in which the purpose is to reflect Christ working through the particular saint, and to make real the “great cloud of witnesses” of Orthodox worship.
English wall paintings seem to be more instructive in nature, to present certain lessons, or to admonish against particular behaviors. The purpose notwithstanding, their quality is on a much lower level, as well–almost juvenalia in comparison. The English created a great civilization, to be sure, and in the modern age there have been gifted English painters. But simply put, the English did not excel in artistry of this sort. I am reminded of small Orthodox churches high in the remote Caucasus mountains of Svaneti. Nothing I have seen in English wall paintings before the Reformation even remotely approached the subtlety of the 12th-century iconography to be found there.
Most of the wall paintings were destroyed in the iconographic frenzy of the English Reformation. The Tudor iconoclasts were remarkably thorough. Most of what they missed was mopped-up by Cromwell and his wrecking crew. Finally, remaining scraps were obliterated in misguided Victorian restorations. Today, only ten percent of English churches have even a trace of remaining wall painting. The two grand examples are in Pickering in Yorkshire, and Llancarfan in Wales. Everything else is on a considerably lower, and more faded, scale. But these remains all give a glimpse into the nature of pre-Reformation English churches: far from the stone-cold solemnity they adapted under Protestantism, the churches were awash in color.
Like the Saxon churches, parishes with wall paintings are few and far between. I have visited the major ones, and the ones I haven’t, I can generally call off by name. St. Mary’s Church in Kempley in Gloucester is generally accredited to have the best wall paintings. It is a small church, built in 1130, but on the Saxon order, reputed being the oldest timber-roofed structure in England. The wall paintings are not as distinct as the ones at Pickering and Llancarfan, but they are in their own way magnificent. Their distinction is that they are much older; probably dating to the construction of the church itself in 1130, and as such, they are the oldest Romanesque frescoes in northern Europe. If they represent the general quality of wall painting at that time, then the art actually regressed in subsequent centuries.
Christ Triumphant, surrounded by the Four Apostles, Kempley, Gloucester
They were discovered in 1872, when the white plaster was removed. I had to think about it for a while. I simply cannot fathom the theology or politics that would convince someone that they needed to cover this up with plaster. What a cramped, ideological view of the world. The murals are inspiring, as well as a beautiful creation. The small chancel contains an imagine of Christ Triumphant, surrounded by the four apostles (and their symbols), and the archangels. On either side of the chancel are six Apostles, each with their head turned upwards towards Christ.. The church provides a reflecting mirror in the center so as to better view the ceiling.
I was not alone in the church. There was an older gentleman (who was probably younger than me, though only in years), and then a young couple. I was viewing the paintings as they chatted. At one point, the younger man said something to the effect that though reform was needed in the church (the English Reformation was about power and greed, not reform), but that some things were lost in the Reformation. I used this opportunity to inject a bit of Eamon Duffy into the conversation. I said that 90% of English art was destroyed in the iconoclasm of the Reformation. We chatted on a bit. The older man wondered who the men were, and why they were all craning their necks. That was an easy one. I said they were the twelve apostles and they were all looking up to Jesus Christ. Then we talked a bit about the symbology of the four Apostles. The young couple left, and I was able to give the older man a ride back to the village where he had rented a room for the night. He had come down from Lincoln by bus to view the paintings.
Near Farmcote, I visited the small unnamed church across from the entrance to the site of Hailes Abbey. I have seen enough Abbey ruins so I did not feel any compulsion to see these. But I had heard that the church contained some wall paintings. It did, but they were in bad shape. There were a couple of old women in the church with me. I had trouble making sense of the paintings, but one scene contained a number of animals, including a depiction of an elephant, evidently drawn by someone who had never seen an elephant before.
On my last day, when I was to board a flight from Manchester to Dublin, I visited the church of St. Michaels Eschley in far western Herefordshire. I was going on a tip from my friend Mark Valentine who had visited the church and commented on its Roman slab altar table. As it turned out, I was in the wrong place. The St. Michael’s he was referring to was about five miles east of this church, out of the hills, a bit. But this church had something of interest as well. They had uncovered a single wall painting, depicting Christ wearing a loin cloth, surrounded by the implements of the various occupations. This was, it seems, a warning to those parishioners too prone to miss services for work-related reasons.
St. Michael Eschley, Herefordshire
This last trip to England was, in large part, an attempt to tie-up loose ends of all these searches. I will continue, health-permitting, to return to the British Isles. I have made some friends in the North of the country, and subsequent visits will be to visit with them and, in their company, rummage around used bookstores which, thankfully, are still a thing in that green and pleasant land.
The most authoritative guide is: The Greater Anglo-Saxon Churches by E. A. Fischer
The church, St. Michael’s and All Angels, was originally a forest chapel of St. Oswald of “Huberham.” It is said to be built on an Anglo-Norse burial site.
I have never posted anything about this issue, ever. I figure the conversation does not really need my input, as my first impulse is that bedroom issues need to stay there. With an eye towards history and the vagaries of human nature and existence, I have, I think, approached the subject calmly and compassionately; which of course, if known, would have me labeled as a wild-eyed liberal by my rightest friends, and a dangerous reactionary by my leftist friends. But what seemed to me to be a simple matter of equitable protection under the law has now mushroomed and transmogrified into something wholly unrecognizable, in which the original homosexuals of a generation ago are now lost amidst all the noise and confusion and anger.