Church and Chapel

There are clear signs of Christian practices in Dorset during the Roman occupation, and the earliest known portrait of Christ in Britain comes from the tesselated pavement found in a villa at Hinton St Mary. A strong native paganism still persisted, though. Much later, Scandinavian invaders not only brought their own new and warlike gods with them, but so impressed these on our language that we still invoke Woden and Thor when we speak of Wednesday and Thursday. Even Easter gets its name from a pagan festival held in honour of the goddess of the dawn.

Anglo-Saxons who reached Dorset had already been converted to Christianity, and the organisation of the Church on the lines we know to-day was in hand. In the 7th century Theodore of Tarsus, who was Archbishop of Canterbury during the last twenty years of his vigorous life, oversaw the division of the county into bishoprics. Dorset came within the see of Sherborne, which was set up in 705 AD with Aldhelm (of St. Aldhelm’s Head in the Isle of Purbeck) as its first bishop. Since then, Broadmayne has been successively in the Dioceses of Sherborne, Old Sarum, Salisbury, Bristol, and back to Salisbury.

At first the Church’s missionary activities were exercised largely through ‘minster’ churches – as in Charminster – where several priests lived together and jointly looked after a wide area. By the time of the Norman Conquest, to-day’s system of parish churches, each with its own priest, had been mapped out. The Saxon parish churches would mostly have been modest timber or wattle-and-daub affairs which disappeared in the spate of church-building that followed the Norman Conquest. Broadmayne’s church, dedicated to St. Martin of Tours, dates from the late thirteenth century, and there is no knowing whether there was an earlier church on the site.

St. Martin was a highly popular saint in the early church. Over 150 churches in England, including three in Dorset, are dedicated to him, and several parishes are named after him. He is a less shadowy figure than many of the early saints, for his friend Sulpicius Severus wrote his biography. He was born about 316 AD near Pesth, on the borders of Hungary, the son of an officer in the Roman army. When he was ten years old, he ran away to a monastery but was brought back home and in due course followed his father into the army. He not only lived on his army pay, but spared some of it for charities, and he treated his personal servant as more a brother than a servant. Like most soldiers, he travelled around, and he had various adventures – such as getting lost, and meeting a band of robbers – while he was crossing the Alps to visit his parents. After his own conversion, he persuaded his mother and sister (but not his father) to become Christians. He was appointed Bishop of Tours in 371 AD. A number of miracles are attributed to him, but he is best remembered by the more human story of how, one cold winter when he was stationed at Amiens, he cut his cloak in two and gave half of it to a beggar. It is this story that has given us the word ‘chapel’, from the Latin word capella or little cloak, and the first chapel was the sanctuary in which his cloak was kept as a relic. His day is Martinmas, November 11th, and in France the hen-harrier is known as l’oiseau de St Martin, because it makes its passage at about that time.

Broadmayne’s first rector was appointed in 1301. As one might expect, the chancel is the earliest part of the church’s fabric. The nave and tower were added soon afterwards. Almost every church in Dorset had improvements of one kind or another in the 15th century, as the wool and cloth trade grew and the country prospered. Broadmayne’s share in this movement was the building or re-building of the top part of the tower, in the 15th or early 16th century – the time when the Wars of the Roses had just ended, and England was settling down to Tudor rule.

In 1795, Broadmayne and West Knighton parishes were united at the request of the patrons and rectors of the two churches on the grounds that, with only 40 families in Broadmayne and 15 in West Knighton, the livings did not allow more than one rector to live in reasonable comfort. In the next century, however, the growing population, prosperity and piety of the Victorian era led to such an increase in church building and restoration as had not been seen since the Middle Ages. Major works were carried out in 158 parish churches in Dorset between 1840 and 1876, under the encouragement of the two vigorous bishops who held the Salisbury diocese in the middle years of the century. A great deal of the work was carried out by one or other of the Dorchester architects John Hicks and G K Crickmay. Broadmayne church was enlarged and restored in 1865-66 by Hicks; some of the drawings for it were done by the novelist Thomas Hardy, who was working in Hicks’ office at the time. Galleries on the north and west sides of the nave were removed, a north aisle and vestry were added, and the north and east walls of the chancel were rebuilt. At the same time, the churchyard was extended to the east, and a village school was built next to the church.

Throughout the Middle Ages, social life was dominated by the church. Besides being the centre for baptisms, marriages and burials, it fulfilled much the same function as the present-day village hall. To do business in the churchyard was not a desecration, but a sign of honest dealing. Sometimes there was a church house where the medieval equivalent of the whist drive and village social could take place, but where there was no church house the nave of the church did very well. At the Church Ales which were a popular way of raising money for church repairs or other good causes in the 15th century, people sold and drank ale in the churchyard or church. Even as late as the early 1800s, the church was the place where most villages stored their reserve of pikes against a possible Napoleonic invasion. The churchyard, not being encumbered with grave-stones until the 17th century, offered a temptingly open space for football and other lewd games. The archery butts which provided villages with their sport in the 14th century were very commonly situated behind the church. Archery practice was not, however, solely for recreation: the victories of Crecy and Poitiers were founded on the supremacy of the English longbow, and Edward III sought to encourage archery practice by a proclamation prohibiting handball, football or hockey, coursing or cockfighting, or other such games.

With the Reformation, a new note of secular control crept in. Henry VIII’s chief minister, Thomas Cromwell, ordered parish priests to keep a register of baptisms, marriages and deaths – an order which was resented as an infringement of personal liberties, much as proposals for a national identity card have been resented in our own day. After 1559, non-attendance at church was punishable by a fine and imprisonment. A century or so later, burial shrouds had to be of English cloth, for the good of the home cloth industry. Not everyone cared for this: Alexander Pope’s lines “Odious! in woollen! ’twould a saint provoke; Were the last words that poor Narcissa spoke” were said to be founded on the true story of a lady who would have preferred her shroud to be of “charming Chintz and Brussels lace.”

Attitudes to the churchyard changed. The Puritans disapproved of its use for games, and in the 17th century memorials to the dead began to be erected there as well as in the church itself. Broadmayne’s earliest churchyard monuments are the table-tomb of William Gatch and his wife Ann, who died in 1691 and 1698, and a headstone to Jeremiah Pount, 1692/3. Several similar monuments followed them in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Meanwhile, the established Protestant church was giving birth to an ever-wider variety of nonconformist sects. The Presbyterians, Quakers, Baptists and Independents (later to become the Congregationalists) all grew to vigorous life in the 17th century. Various civil penalties were imposed on them, but the Toleration Act of 1689 – described by Trevelyan as a “curious patchwork of compromise, illogicality and practical good sense” – gave them freedom of worship, more or less. Nonconformist chapels grew in numbers, and England acquired its popular reputation as ‘a nation of a hundred religions and only one sauce’.

At first, dissenting congregations were rarely to be found outside the cities, industrial areas and market towns – such as Dorchester, which was commended by Defoe for its live-and-let-live attitude in matters of religion. “Here,” he wrote in the first quarter of the 18th century, “I saw the Church of England clergyman, and the Dissenting minister, or preacher, drinking tea together and conversing with civility and good neighbourhood like catholick Christians.” Methodism took its message into more rural areas. John Wesley, who founded Methodism in 1738, was a prodigious worker; at the end of his life he confessed that in the last fifty years he had wasted fifteen minutes in reading a worthless book. It seems that unsophisticated Broadmayne was not quite as tolerant of Dissenters as Dorchester, for one Sunday in October 1775 there were some riotous goings-on when a young preacher called Molland –described as full of zeal but lacking in discretion –took up his station near the churchyard. There a mob, “inflamed with beer, brandy and other liquors,” and led by a Mr. Pierce and the local publican, derided and scoffed at him, blew loud blasts on trumpets, and finally escorted Mr. Molland out of the village.

Broadmayne’s Methodist chapel was built in quieter times, in 1865. It was registered as a place of religious worship in1867, but was not ‘licensed for marriages’ until 1919. Its builder, Mr W Hammett of Tolpuddle, was related to James Hammett, one of the six ‘Tolpuddle martyrs’ who were transported to Australia in 1834 on a trumped-up charge of administering illegal oaths, but in fact as a reprisal for forming a trade union to resist cuts in the agricultural wage. The leader of these six men was a Methodist lay preacher made this statement – a model of dignity and sobriety – from the dock:

“My Lord, if we have violated any law, it was not done intentionally; we have injured no man’s reputation, character, person or property; we were uniting to preserve ourselves, our wives and our children from utter degradation and starvation.”