Churches of Bowden: St Mary-in-Arden

Geo-Physics Results Are In!
The results of our geophysical survey of the churchyard are back. Click here for details.

St Mary-in-Arden church today is a ruined shell of what is largely a late 17th century mortuary chapel, however it was once much more significant. On the south side of the ruined building is a medieval porch, mostly of the 14th century but including an ornately carved Norman doorway. This porch is far too big for the current building which suggests that the medieval building was considerably bigger. In his History and Antiquities of the County of Leicester John Nichols tells us that until about 1660 St Mary had a tower and spire, presumably of a similar style and scale to St Dionysius' church in Market Harborough. It appears that this was damaged in an earthquake in 1626 and it seems it finally collapsed in a severe storm in about 1658 and destroyed, or rendered unsalvageable, the rest of the medieval church. It remained in this state until about 1694 when it was rebuilt in its current form. Nichols claims that the current building was first built in 1066 a date for which there is little or no evidence and can probably be ignored. The VCH puts the date of the south door as 12th century. Except that Great Bowden was a royal manor at the time of the Conquest and remained so for several decades afterwards until it was subdivided. The Normans made a point of rebuilding significant churches in the Norman Romanesque style and in stone where previously many were wooden or wattle and daub. We know that the south door is Norman and fairly early to so it is at least plausible that the King and Lord of the Manor instructed the reconstruction of his church in stone at this time.

St Mary's first appears in the written record in 1220 when it is confusingly referred to as both Capella (chapel) and Ecclesia (parish church). At that time the advowson (right of presentation of the priest) belonged to the Rector of Sts Peter and Paul, Great Bowden. However, St Mary's held land in both Great Bowden and Little Bowden, which tends to imply that its estates were awarded before the two were split by the county boundary. The county boundary seems to date from about AD920 when King Edward the Elder accepted the surrender of the defeated Danish army and to submission of all the Danes who held lands to the south of the Welland. Since the Danes were, by and large, unconverted to Christianity at this point, they were not likely to have been endowing churches on their patch and the nearest bishop was holed up in Dorchester-on-Thames and would not have been consecrating them if they were, so it seems that St Mary's predates their invasion in the about 860s. So we have a earliest foundation date for St Mary-in-Arden of around AD850.

Furthermore, St Mary's had a burial ground and chapels do not tend to have burial grounds. The church got the rights to perform burials in the 10th century and it was a jealously guarded privilege, not something casually dished out to mere chapels.

Another feature of St Mary is the shear size of it's church yard. As it currently stands, it measures just over 2 acres, which is quite substantial and quite easily the biggest in the area. It is possible that this was reduced by the encroaching railway, although probably not much since the burial ground was still in use at that point. However, the current line of Great Bowden Road cuts a diagonal line through the church yard and goes quite close to where the tower and spire might have stood. Clearly it just follows the line of an existing right of way through the church's land. It seems likely, therefore, especially when looking at the shape of the current plot, that it was even bigger in the past, maybe even twice the size. This would give an enormous plot and substantially bigger than the other two church yards in the Regio (St Nicholas in Little Bowden and Sts Peter and Paul in Great Bowden). The larger church yards tend to be older and tend to be more important. This might imply that for many years St Mary was the most important church in the area.

The fact that it the advowson was with the Rector of Great Bowden in 1220 implies that it was not an Eigenkirche — a local creation for the Lord of the Manor's own purposes, although the VCH suggests that it might have been built for the Countess Judith's estates in Bowden. If it isn't an eigenkirche then two possibilities arise: first that it was the daughter church of a Minster church and its canons, or that it is the Minster church itself. The Minster churches of Leicestershire are not well known so no previous candidate has been found for this area. Could St Mary's be it? That is what we intend to find out!

In the south porch lies a mutilated effigy, apparently one of three which were lying in the churchyard in 1740 and which probably came out of the demolished church. It appears to be female, although we recently measured it at 1.8m which is around 6'6"! Quite a woman!

In the churchyard lies a recumbant monolith, a large sandstone block. It is often described as a “Peter's Pence” stone, but what is it? The Geology Department of Leicester University have examined it and it comes from the Wilbarston area so it's not a glacial erratic, it was deliberately moved there. It may have been part of the foundations of the old church, left unworked on the site, or maybe even an upright marker stone. We don't currently know. In the late 18th century serveral urn burials were discovered to the north of the present building, so it may have been a Roman cemetary before a church was built on the site. Maybe, just maybe, this site has had some ritual significance for longer than the present buildings might imply.

As for the name Mary-in-Arden, what does this mean? The commonly attributed English form is “St Mary in the fields”, it was described as such in 1382, but this is not a translation. This merely refers to the fact that by the high days of the Medieval period, St Mary's was an unfashionable backwater stuck out in the middle of the Great Bowden open fields. So what does the Arden bit mean? Is this a reference to the forest of Arden? Maybe, but even then, what does it actually refer to? Well the word is derived from the same root as the Ardennes forest in Belgium and comes from a British word which means “The High Place”. It is a fairly high point, a fact which is not so obvious now with the railway station and biuldings all around, but it would have stood out as a prominant feature in the landscape in the past. But of course it is not the highest local point: the Ridgeway and the old Mill hill are both considerably higher, so could it have meant high as in high status?