Crime and Punishment in Stoke St Gregory

Off to North Curry with the parents again today, to meet up with my father's sister.  After lunch we headed for Stoke St Gregory and its eponymous church, which, although I've walked from the village before, I'd never visited. 

 

The information sheet about the Church has this to say: 'The general impression on entering the church is of light and space'. In fact, the church seems devoid of much of its history. We learn from the same sheet that there was a 'restoration' in 1888, so maybe the Victorians finished the process that started with Henry VIII and Edward VI and was continued by Cromwell's men.

There's a fine Jacobean pulpit, however, with carvings of Faith, Hope, Charity, Time and either the Virgin and Child or the Archangel with the soul of Adam.  

I like Time best.  

There were also several carvings on an adjacent screen of a women watering flowers with a watering can, topped by a quartet of rather prim looking angels, but no information about it on the guide sheet. 

I've since found mention of it online, where it says that until the 1960s, the carvings were part of a cupboard and of secular origin.  

Still in place were a couple of impressive 17th century memorials to members of the Court family ... 

... a mid-14th century font, and Elizabethan bench ends. 

But that's about it, really.

Oh, but what's this outside?

Why, it's the stocks under the yew tree opposite the porch. They date from the 17th century, and were 'used by the churchwardens as punishment for offenders at church services.' There's space for three sets of buttocks. 

These miscreants decided it was a pillory. Either way it was the best place for them.  

Curry and Bier in Somerset

Taking my parents (aged 94 and 88) to North Curry yesterday to see my father's sister (aged 92) offered the opportunity for lunch in the really rather pleasant Bird In Hand Inn (sexist signage aside) and then a quick pop into the Church of St Peter and St Paul.  

The Levels are prone to flooding, of course, and along with every other old settlement, North Curry was built on a ridge of land. Good views from the churchyard, then.  

Octagonal towers are quite common around here. as are gargoyles and hunky punks in glorious golden Ham stone.  

 

Inside, a man was tuning an old piano with much stabbing of the keys.  The older members of the party sat and chatted while I fossicked quickly and quietly. 

There's a bier, upon which the mortal remains of Colonel Chard, of Rorke's Drift fame, were borne to their everlasting rest in nearby Hatch Beauchamp ... 

  

Cadaver effigy of an unidentified cleric 

Toma atte Sloo

This is my favourite thing - an old parish chest made of elm that weighs over 600 lbs and is believed, by its form of construction, to date from well before 1200 and possibly even Saxon times. 

Evidence suggests it was at one time forcibly looted. I blame this lot.

1348-9       John Leyat (Seyat) of Harewell

1349           Thomas Dauyntre 

1349-50     John Trowbrugge    

                    John Muleward(e)

We know the Black Death, which arrived in Somerset in early 1349, had a 50% mortality rate in some parts, and that a large proportion of the clergy perished, but I've never spotted quite so many priests appointed in such a short space of time as here in North Curry.    

An entry from nearby Curry Rivel’s court rolls from May 1349:

‘John Pypping who held of the lord a cottage . . . is dead, by whose death there falls to the lord nothing of heriot because there is no live beast. And the said cottage remains empty in the lord’s hands’

It seems the plague had claimed Pypping, his entire family, and all his animals as well.