Shipton Sollars St Mary

Shipton Sollars St Mary from the east. It stands in a square churchyard which is not consecrated. Photograph by Patrick Joel, available to view at localstory.myportfolio.com.

The shortest way into the village of Shipton is to turn east at the junction of the Oxford and Gloucester roads; it is a narrow lane and runs downhill to the stream which flows into the river Coln a short distance away. After crossing the stream, the road turns through a right angle and soon you are in a village; Shipton Oliffe church, St Oswald’s, with its distinctive double bellcote, stands beside the road. On the way down the hill, you may not have noticed the church of St Mary, Shipton Sollars, on the bank above you. The modern parish is called ‘The Shiptons’; the civil parish of Shipton contains Hampen, a little to the north, Shipton Oliffe and Shipton Sollars, which were all within the two ancient parishes of Shipton Oliffe and Shipton Sollars.

Push open the gate, climb a few steps and go up a steep path to the north door. A plaque records that the church is cared for by the Churches Conservation Trust. On a fine day, with north and south doors open and clear glass in the large perpendicular-style west window, the church is flooded with light. It is simple and uncluttered, a two-cell church of nave and chancel, no aisles, no tower, no transepts. There are traces of wall paintings, some memorial slabs on the walls and the floor of the nave, and a Jacobean pulpit with an old hourglass at the side. This squire did not want a longer sermon than one hour. The large old south door leads into the churchyard which has never been consecrated. There is a small gate into a field. Down the east side of the churchyard is a long, low old barn, and beyond it Shipton Sollars Manor house.

In the 800-year history of St Mary, Shipton Sollars, the radical restoration of 1929 has determined much that the visitor sees today. Ernest Francis Fieldhouse, the owner of Shipton Sollars Manor, found the church disused, although a rector in the later 19th century had repaired and re-opened it for services. Some of that work probably did not seem tasteful or appropriate to Mr Fieldhouse. In 1927, he had become sole patron of the united Shipton benefice: Shipton Sollars had been combined with Shipton Oliffe in 1776. This enabled him in 1929 to embark on restoration of the church in memory of his parents (his father, William John Fieldhouse, had bought Shipton Sollars Manor in 1910). He commissioned an ecclesiastical architect, William Elbert Ellery Anderson, for whom Shipton Sollars was one of his first commissions in Gloucestershire after coming to Cheltenham. Anderson was a member of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, so was well-suited to restore this church, which he obviously embarked on with enthusiasm. ‘Restoration’ meant not just repairing but returning the building to how his antiquarian interest suggested it may have been at a much earlier time.

Ernest Fieldhouse died in 1962, his wife Evelyn in 1986; their grave in front of the pulpit is marked with a simple monumental inscription. The Jacobean pulpit had been painted blue; under Ellery Anderson’s supervision, it was stripped and polished. There was an hourglass on the wall beside it – one of the features which remained in 1870 when the church was in a state of severe decay. Unhappily, the original has been stolen but in 1998 it was replaced by the present one. ‘Fieldhouse’ was also commemorated by a rebus in the stained glass in the perpendicular-style window in the south wall of the chancel, and beside it a ship, a rebus for ‘Shipton’ (historically, of course, Shipton was not named from a ship but from sheep).

Thick blue paint, on top of 16 layers of whitewash, covered the plaster throughout the church. When removed, traces of wall paintings were found, and consecration crosses on chancel and nave walls. Candleholders were installed below them to illuminate the dark ochre painted crosses. More were later found, and traces of consecration crosses on the plaster on the outside of the south wall of both chancel and nave, now very worn; plaster has generally been removed from outside walls. Benches were removed, and the chancel panelled.

Ellery Anderson’s work was thorough. In the course of excavating around the walls, a 13th-century stone pattée cross was found and erected as a finial on the east end of the chancel. The priest’s door into the chancel was probably removed at this time and the outside wall repaired, while the north door into the nave was opened. North doors were often blocked up when processions no longer left the church that way and entered at the south door. At Shipton Sollars the north door faced the road; worshippers walked round the west end to reach the south door, which led across the churchyard into the manor house grounds. A lantern had been installed to light the walk round. The south door is in part an old one, the north door had to be newly made.

Excitement was generated by the discovery of the original stone mensa or altar table under the chancel floor. Stone altars were removed after the Reformation, although often not destroyed but hidden. A wooden table for the communion was considered more in keeping with Protestant theology. Ellery Anderson was keen to reinstate the ancient altar. The Church of England was completely against it. After Anderson described the exact shaping and dimensions of the altar, that he had also found the base which exactly fitted it and one support, that it had a consecration cross, and exactly fitted the space on the east wall visible when layers of plaster covering the medieval plaster were removed, they agreed that he had found the medieval altar, and it could be reinstated. There was a precedent at Tewkesbury Abbey; the stone mensa had been found during the late 19th-century restoration and restored as the main altar. Services could once again be held in Shipton Sollars church, and indeed there is at least one a year today.

The existence of two churches only a short walk apart in a small village, however, had been considered a problem for centuries. When the Commonwealth parliament surveyed the nation’s churches in 1650, the commissioners recommended that the two parishes should be combined; 18 families lived in Oliffe and nine in Sollars. The appointment of the same man to be rector of both was one practical answer. In St Mary’s chancel there is a plate recording the death in 1706 of Joseph Walker, the first recorded rector of both churches from 1666.

Apart from the manor house, the only other houses in the vicinity of the church on a map of 1764 were the Rectory and the Frogmill. A small village, now simply bumps in the grass, was recorded in the late 13th century in an area near Shipton Sollars church called the Frogmarsh; the Frogmill preserves an echo of the name. The mill was on the River Coln, but also on the road which led from Oxford to Gloucester, where it turns through a right-angle to cross the mill stream and river. It became a notable coaching inn, and today is a flourishing hotel and public house.

The innkeeper was an important inhabitant of Sollars parish; gravestones and wall monuments in St Mary’s church record the burials of innkeepers and their families ‘of Frogmill’. There are other memorials on the wall near the south door. As the churchyard was not consecrated, burials took place in the church. They ceased on in 1856, ‘due to there being no more space available for the bodies under the nave’, the parish register noted. The nave floor was collapsing into the vaults below in 1870, and visitors can notice that the nave floor is higher than the chancel, whereas normally there is a step up to the chancel.

Originally perhaps the manor had a single-cell chapel; one was referred to in 1236 when the advowson of Shipton Oliffe church was reserved to John of Shipton, whose marriage led to the Oliffe inheritance. A chapel did not have a consecrated burial ground. It was enlarged when the lord of the manor, probably a Champflurs, endowed a rectory and raised the status from chapel to that of parochial church. William de Solers had acquired this manor by 1285. Where two or more churches had the same name, each was distinguished by the name of the lord of the manor; by the end of the 13th century these names became fixed. The Solers family acquired more land in Shipton. In later centuries the lord and his parishioners carried out some modest alterations.

Since 1929, Shipton Sollars St Mary has remained largely fit for use, but as parishes were combined in team ministries, it was decided that it should be removed from parochial responsibility, although remaining consecrated and part of the Shiptons parish. It was declared redundant and vested in the Churches Conservation Trust in 2005. With an increasing number of churches to maintain, it is a struggle for the trust to keep it in as sound a condition as it would like, and local volunteers are still the key to the successful survival of the building.

Sources

Gloucestershire Archives (GA) D1930/1 – map 1764 of Shipton Sollars and Shipton Oliffe manors.
Gloucester Diocesan Records GDR/ F1/1/1929/30 – papers concerning the 1929 restoration
The Victoria History of the County of Gloucester IX (2001)
NADFAS Survey of Shipton Sollars St Mary, with thanks for loan to Andrew Evans, a direct descendant of Ernest Fieldhouse
Photographs by Patrick Joel, available to view at localstory.myportfolio.com

This article originally appeared as: ‘The history of a simple church’ in the Institute of Historic Building Conservation’s (IHBC’s) Context 172, published in June 2022. It was written by Anthea Jones, who was head of history and director of studies at Cheltenham Ladies’ College. Now retired, she is the author of several books on Gloucestershire history.

--Institute of Historic Building Conservation