The endless tides of history have washed the green hill-country of Theydon Mount a thousand years. Nothing more important in the life of the parish than the building of its church has happened there throughout that time. With Hill Hall, St. Michael’s encompasses the whole history of the parish in its noblest and humblest dimensions. A great Elizabethan lies within it, adding lustre to the more prosaic memory of parishioners ‘who, like him, worshipped there in the faith for which this pleasant little Essex church was built. We do not know if Godric, who farmed the lands of the Saxon manor, shared this privilege, or if the Fitz-Wimarcs, the powerful Norman magnates who usurped his inheritance at the Conquest, raised a Norman church at the site.
In history there is no church at Theydon Mount until 1236 when, the Essex archives tell us Robert the parson was involved in a dispute about land. But the absence of a reference to one on the manor at the time of the Domesday Survey does not preclude the presence of a church in 1086. The parochial system was well established in Essex before the Normans came and it is at least possible that the first church at Theydon Mount had been built by the end of the twelfth century or even earlier. We have, unhappily, no information that would enable us to describe the earlier church. It is likely to have been largely of timber construction for there is little building stone available in Essex and such a precious commodity would almost certainly have been beyond the resources of such a small community or, at any rate, not readily discarded when the present church was built. Oak on the other hand, stood in abundance on the clay slopes of the wooded ridge that still characterise the parish landscape. That too would explain the apparently complete loss of the old church by fire, as a result, it is said, of being struck by lightning in 1611.
The old church was dedicated to St. Michael and St. Stephen. It enjoyed, like its successor, the present church, the patronage of the lords of the manor who presided at the great houses on the Mount within the shadow of which it stood. Its destruction, like that of Hill Hall 350 years later, was a major event in the story of the parish. It made way, however, for the fine brick built church we now admire, and much, as the most famous of Essex historiographers, Philip Morant, wrote in 1763 ‘stands pleasantly’ in the parkland around the ruined shell of Hill Hall. At the time a note of frustration and impatience, a not unfamiliar experience today, was sounded by the rector who, in the parish register, wrote: –
‘for Two yeeres we had none Christened in or Church because it-was so long building, after it was burnt‘
It was not until 1614, with Margaret Juby, the first of the rector’s four children to be christened at the church, that the entries were resumed in the parish registers. At the time there appears to have been more than a little anxiety to disturb the tranquillity of this remote parish. In the year of the fire the Parochial Visitations note that George Mott, warden, tackled about his deteyning a chest in his custody belonging to the church alleged that the chest was broken open when the church was robde, and that it was cast broken into a field. ‘They want’, it was said, ‘a strong chests or box for the almes for the poore’. No one could deny it! And again, the Visitation of 1638, the new church no doubt still lacking in many respects, reports the need to rail the communion table and provide plate, cloth, a book of homilies, a book of commons, a book for the fifth of November, a new chest for the ‘ornament of the church’, an alms box for the poor with lock and keys, a new cover for the pulpit cushion and a font cover. The churchyard fence was to be ‘repayred and mended’. A new parchment register was to be provided for christenings.
The registers - to which we now return were, the rector was instructed, ‘to be kept in ye chest’. The whole spectrum of parish life is exposed in the fading mundane pages of these documents. Mingled with entries recording the baptisms, marriages and deaths of the great folk of Hill Hall are such as the ‘vagrant’s child’ buried in 1638 and Jane Anderson, ‘Daughter of a travelling stranger’ baptised in June 1642. There is poignant tragedy too. Willyam Doucet had a little son baptised and ‘next day dyed and buried’. And the continuity of family life within the ambit of the parish church was set down for posterity. Thomas Winter and his sweetheart, An Weldon, married in the church in May 1626, brought Thomas and Rebecca their ‘Twines sonne & daughter’ to the font in 1629.
Pre-eminent is the name of Sir Thomas Smith whose burial in the chancel was recorded in the register on 5th September 1571, with an unique verbal flourish in contrast to the normal economy of the rector’s clerical routines:
‘Thomas Smith miles et principalis secretar nobilissime principis Elizabethe Regine Anglie.’
This great man’s name dominates the history of Theydon Mount and Hill Hall. Essex-born, and an intellectual of the first rank in Tudor England, Sir Thomas, after a life of achievement and tribulation, ended his days at Hill Hall the architectural conception of which sprang largely from his fertile inspiration and experience. His tomb in the chancel, elaborate and impressive, is believed to have designed himself. It forms part of a luxuriantly incongruous array of monuments to the Smith family whose members were for more than three centuries closely associated with the church as patrons and rectors. But if St. Michael’s has today outlived its role as a family sepulchre for the Smiths, their stony presence still transcends the otherwise simple piety of this modest church, as if reluctant to relinquish the status they once enjoyed.
The new building was one of fifteen pre-Victorian parish churches in Essex dedicated to St. Michael the Archangel, thus symbolising the triumph of virtue and the church in its militant aspect. It is interesting that this dedication is not infrequently found attached to churches with hill-top sites like that at Theydon Mount. The dedication was made when the new church was consecrated by John Lang, the Bishop of London, in 1614. Not large, the church is none-the-less an unusually complete example of its period which was not prolific in church building in Essex or indeed elsewhere. But for the fire, Theydon Mount is unlikely to have had a new church before the Gothic Revival of the nineteenth century.
We may, perhaps, appropriately pause here to consider the church in its architectural aspects. There is much good brick building in Essex and the church stands comparison with the best although it has not the striking external diaper work of Ingatestone or the scale or elaboration of the towers at East Horndon, Rochford or Layer Marney. Its agreeable red-brick textures harmonise well with its immediate environment. Probably the bricks were made in the kilns which, according to the Chapman and Andre map, still operated in the fields to the north of the church in the eighteenth century. Certainly, it is the homogenise of this medium and the sepulchral edifices which crowd the chancel, that are the most significant feature of the building. I like the proportions of the neatly recessed and shingled spirelet that satisfied but refuses to compete with the sturdy battlemented three-stage tower on which it rests. The fenestration is fittingly simple with moulded labels and unsophisticated intersecting tracery.
Conversely, the porch, with curvilinear sable and classical decoration, is slightly fussy and inconsistent with the architectural idiom as a whole. The Smith memorials divert attention from a plain but well contrived arch-braced roof of the nave and such details as the elegant and unusual marble font reputedly of Italian origin, and apparently contemporary with the main fabric. The benches too must be survivals from the early seventeenth century.
In 1791 Humphry Repton, the famous landscape gardener, was concerned to exploit the aesthetic qualities of the church, its tower ‘imbosomed high in tufted trees’ for the benefit of the vistas from Hill Hall. A glimpse of the church at that time is thus afforded by his brief descriptive reference and the little water-colour with which he illustrates his proposals in the Red Book prospectus he prepared for the Smiths:
‘The church which I now suppose is of red brick, in which there is less harm than in the attempt to ornament it by white windows and a white spire....’
Less harm indeed! It is the use of this sturdy and pleasant medium, characteristic of an Essex building tradition of the period, that we now find so attractive. A less sophisticated view was taken in 1845 in an article in The Penny Magazine describing Hill Hall and the park, then well-stocked with deer, which called it ‘a neat little church’. A present authority, Sir Nikolaus Pevsner acknowledges its architectural quality and rarity in his monumental modern Domesday Book of buildings in England. For the external elevations are suitably described in a lapidary reference to Dr. John Dod whose memorial of 1762 is in the churchyard. Like him, the church was endowed with ‘A simplicity of manners which would have done honour to a better Age’. For the time in which it was built in fact heralded a decline from the cultural and intellectual standards of Tudor England and a period in which the vicissitudes in the affairs of church and state did little honour to either.
Theydon Mount did not escape the pressures of the doctrinal confusion and political turmoil of the seventeenth century. Its rectors, Daniel Whitby, accorded the dignity of appointment by the Crown in 1637 as the patron was still in his minority, suffered, along with many of his contemporaries in Essex, the indignity of ejection during the Civil War and the Commonwealth. ‘Since my Returne to Mount’ as he wrote in the register in 1661, he was faced with restoring the diminished prestige and flagging morale of his church and the pastoral life of the parish. Whitby’s place had been taken in 1643 by Walter Wells. The parochial records bear witness to the supportive role of the parish church, despite the stresses of that time, in buttressing the social fabric of the community. It was thus in the corporate life of the parish that the people of Theydon Mount eventually compounded their political and religious problems under the spiritual aegis of their restored rector and his successors. Not until modern times was the church again faced with a social challenge of the same order as that which confronted Daniel Whitby and his tiny rural community at the Restoration.
Always there were matters of general and local status to attend to. The churchwarden’s accounts express the church’s concern in secular affairs and its own house-keeping. The petty cash was available for assistance to the indigent or for needy travellers. So, typically, we find sixpence provided in August 1752 ‘To several sailors in their passage to Sussex’. In January 1753 to shillings was offered as a ‘thanksgiving for the ceasing of the Contagious Distemper amongst the Cattle’. Half that sum was produced in 1813, according to the Apparitor at the following Easter, for the fee for the ‘Proclamation for General Thanksgiving on the Victories of the Allied Armies’ over Napoleon. A proper sense of local priorities one might think, and, returning to matters of more immediate concern, 10s.6d. was spent by the churchwardens on painting the ‘stiple’ in 1828 and, in 1834, it cost three shillings to mow the churchyard. Such is the pecuniary reality of collective philanthropy, gratitude, and necessity at the parochial level.
In 1755 the rectory of Theydon Mount was joined with that of St. Mary’s at Stapleford Tawney. In the year of Victoria’s accession, during “the incumbency of the Rev Sir Edward Bowyer Smyth, the church was considerably restored after over 200 years of service. In addition to repairing the fabric a gallery was erected at the west end for the use of the musicians who supported the singing and the servants from Hill Hall who could not, with propriety, sit among their masters below. This, the most significant work on the church since it was re-built in 1614, was noted by an inscription on the string-boarding underneath the gallery. Also in late-Victorian times was received, by gift, additions to the church furniture, including the chancel chair, the pulpit, reading desk, and credence table.
In 1926 a Faculty was granted, by the Bishop of Chelmsford for changes that left the church in appearance much as it is today. The plastered ceiling was opened up to reveal the timbered roof and the ‘existing unsightly gallery’, which, as we have seen, had been erected in 1837, was removed. Three years later the church was honoured, as is rarely the experience of our remote country churches, by the visit of the reigning monarch’s Queen. Not since 1400, when Pope Boniface IX, who was liberal with such benevolence, granted a ‘Relaxation of Penance’ for three years and 120 days to pilgrims visiting the church at Theydon Mount on certain days, had the church received notice by such an eminent personality.
On 29th June 1926 Her Majesty Queen Mary travelled by road from Buckingham Palace to Hill Hall where she was entertained by Sir Robert and Lady Hudson. During the visit she was received at the church by the rector the Rev. S.J. Stanley and her royal name thus lends distinction to the annals of this secluded and unpretentious church in the pretty Essex countryside on the slopes above the Roding. It has thus had its moments of conspicuous glory: royal visit, a Papal Indulgence and the memory of a great Tudor statesman and scholar embellish the story of the secular and pastoral life of this little parish church. But, much as we may value its personal associations with the gracious Queen and the illustrious Sir Thomas Smith it is, nevertheless, in its parochial role that its enduring significance lies. St. Michael the Archangel still ‘stands pleasantly’ at Theydon Mount cherished by all who know it. Thus, it continues to sanctify and enrich the lives of the parishioners it serves, quietly and agreeably, in character with the restraint and spiritual qualities of its architecture.
West Chiltington,
March 1973