We visited the relatively modern church of St Mary, Freeland on the 18th September 2025. The Church was consecrated in 1869, by Bishop Wilberforce, had initially 4 bells with 2 more added as recently as 2010 - there was surprise that at this - they willnot have been cheap, casting, and then installing them. Most churches are struggling with maintenance, yet here was new vision and improvement.
Theres information about the Architect, the interior designers, and the sponsors - the Taunton Family, who bankrolled the Church, the Parsonage, and the village school - very generous indeed. We discussed that prior to this church, the Methodist Chapel had been built (1807) and the villagers attended there, with its subversive theology and teachings. Linn, lives in the Village, said that the Church was built and then the villagers were encouraged, coerced, cajoled, persuaded to attend the new Anglican Church rather than the Methodist Chapel - the school will have been a draw, and the landowners would have been big local employers, so employment would have been prejudiced.
The Church is quite spectacular as are its decorations - and the building was built at the time of the "Oxford Movement" where there was emphasis on the ceremonial in worship - High Anglican, AngloCatholic style rather than the plainer Book of Common Prayer services that would have been in many churches. "Pongs and Gongs" or "Smells and Bells" as we used to quip when I went to such a church in my adolescence!
The Wesley's founders of the Methodist Church, were ordained Anglican Priests, (one Ordained at Christ Church Cathedral in Oxford) and never wanted to split from the Anglican Church - but their teachings were sufficiently different that the CofE could not accommodate them, and hence the Methodist Church was founded, and the Chapel built in 1807; Linn told us that is is now closed and the Community hope to buy it for community uses.
Bishop Wilberforce was, of course one of the "stars" of the "Oxford Evolution Debate, 1860, at what is now the Oxford Museum of Natural History where, according to Wikipedia,
The debate is best remembered today for a heated exchange in which Wilberforce supposedly asked Huxley whether it was through his grandfather or his grandmother that he claimed his descent from a monkey.. Huxley is said to have replied that he would not be ashamed to have a monkey for his ancestor, but he would be ashamed to be connected with a man who used his great gifts to obscure the truth.
A splendid put down. Huxley was a great proponent of Darwin, and nicknames "Darwin's Bulldog", which speaks of both the strength of his conviction that Darwin was right, and the tenacty of his arguments!
