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Diocese of Canterbury |
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Saint Martin of Tours – Guston Parish Church
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News from Guston |
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(To read about the church in
French, please go to: pour lire l’histoire de l’église,
merci de suivre ce lien:
http://www.saintmartindetours.eu/patrimoine/royaume-uni/kent/ The Church is dedicated to St Martin of Tours, one of the
Patron saints of France, preceding St Joan of Arc by many centuries. He was
probably born in 316 AD, in what is now Hungary, then part of the Roman
Empire. He was the son of a Roman
Army Officer and followed his father into the Army when he was old enough to
do so. However, at the age of 20,
his life was dramatically changed when, on seeing a beggar freezing in the
cold, he cut his Army cloak in two and shared it with the poor man. That night, in a dream, Martin saw Christ
as the beggar whom he had helped.
Martin converted to Christianity and refused to continue in the Army,
although, in order to rebut the charge of cowardice, he offered to stand
alone and unarmed between the Roman and enemy lines. Perhaps fortunately, he was not put to
the test and so lived to continue his new work preaching, first in Italy and
then in Gaul, modern day France, and devoting his life to Christ as a hermit. He was eventually given land for a
hermitage at Ligugé near Tours, and he was elected Bishop of Tours in 372
AD. He continued to live in a
monastic cell near his cathedral, and later at nearby Marmoutier, until his
death in 397 AD. Such was the
respect in which he was held that his shrine at Tours soon became a major
centre of pilgrimage and many towns and villages in France to this day bear
his name, taken from the dedication of their local church. From his generosity in sharing his cloak,
he has been taken as the patron saint of innkeepers, so that for Guston, it
is perhaps appropriate that we hold our Harvest Supper in the Chance Inn! St Martin is also, not
surprisingly in view of his early career, held to be the patron saint of
soldiers, and his festival day is the 11th November, which is also Remembrance
Day. The Frankish Kings preserved his
cloak (in Latin - Cappella) as a sacred relic that was carried before them
into battle. The cloak was kept in a
sanctuary in the care of cappellani, or chaplains, and the word chapel
came to be extended to any building being used for worship, which was not a
church - again a link to our church in Guston, when it was a chapel for the
Archbishops of Canterbury. The current church building is listed by English Heritage
as Grade II*, one of only 6 per cent of the most architecturally significant
buildings in the country. As we see
it today, it has probably changed relatively little since Norman times, as
the ‘crusader crosses’ incised on the door way indicate. These crosses were carved into the
stonework of churches by knights giving thanks for their return from a
crusade, and to blunt their swords to symbolise their adoption of a new,
peaceful, life. The roof line may
have been altered somewhat in the 17th Century, when the false ceiling over
the Nave may have been put in; the last repairs, in 1997, and which cost
£35,000, saw the replacement of some of the coping stones which were the
original Caen stone. Hasted’s
description of the church, published in 1800, describes the church as having
no tower or steeple, but a drawing in 1807 shows it as present; this addition
probably necessitated the construction of the buttress against the end wall
of the nave, which contains the original Norman windows, although these have
been filled in, perhaps at the same time.
In the Victorian period the interior of the church was re-ordered -
the arch that screened the chancel was removed, leaving only vestigial traces
of the arch, and the pews, wooden rood screen and reredos added. The stained glass windows in the chancel
date from that time; the lower two show St Martin as Archbishop and Soldier,
and were made by the firm of Worral & Co, costing £11 in 1887. Worral’s, formerly Saunders & Co,
made the windows for many other churches including Cork Cathedral and Studley
Royal. The Doomsday Book, William of
Normandy's record of the England which he had recently conquered, refers to
Guston as Gocistone, part of the possessions of the Canons of St Martin, and
in view of its proximity to the Roman Road from Dover to Richborough, it is
not surprising that the settlement here would have been well developed by
Saxon times. The Church may have Saxon origins, but the present building
dates from about 1097, contemporary with the Norman development of Dover
Castle. The full entry of 1086 reads
thus: “Lands of the Canons of St Martin
of Dover. In Guston Wulfric holds 1
yoke (of oxen) and there he has a villan (higher status peasant) and 1 bordar (lower status peasant)
with 1 plough (unit of ploughland) . To this land belong 25 acres of
land in Cornillo Hundred (near Eastry) and there are 5 bordars with
half a plough. All together it is worth 20 s (shillings) : TRE 10s. (Tempore Regis
Edwardi; i.e. pre-Conquest). Alric
held it as a prebend. (income to support one of the canons of St Martin,
Dover).” After the Norman conquest, Guston belonged to the
Augustinian Canons of St Martin, Dover, but about the time of King Henry I,
ownership was passed to the Benedictine’s who took over St Martin’s as a
Priory, a dependency of St Augustine’s Abbey, Canterbury. There is an Act of Archbishop Stephen
Langton dated July 1227 that confirms this ownership, and about 1377 a record
for Richard II reports ‘the abbot’s land at Gonstone was 109 acres of
pasture’. The chancel of the chapel
in the manor would have enabled those monks working locally to maintain their
round of daily services and in addition, the nave would have provided the
local inhabitants with a parish church.
A tax return for the Papal dues of 1291 shows the value of the church
as £10 and the vicarage as £3/6/8d.
(For information on Dover Priory click here ) Prior to Henry VIII's dissolution
of the Monasteries, his Chancellor Cromwell’s report on the state and
condition of the monasteries, the Valor Ecclesiasticus, reported that
the Manor and Spiritualities of Guston were still owned by St Martin’s
Priory, and this was eventually surrendered to the Crown in 1535. On 31st July 1538, the King passed
(sold?) ownership to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, who was
later to become one of the first martyrs of the Anglican Church when he was
burnt at the stake by Henry's successor, Mary. From that time, though, the
church was classed as a Chapel, with the Archbishop of Canterbury having the
right of nominating a "perpetual curate" with a stipend of £4 and
to this day, the Patrons of the church with the right to nominate the parish
priest are the Archbishop and the Dean of Canterbury Cathedral. The present Archbishop kindly agreed to
join us for our St Martin’s Day service in 2005, probably the first time any
Archbishop has visited the parish, and in 2006 the Dean, Dr Robert Willis,
paid us a similar complement.
The Archbishop of Canterbury, The Most Rev’d Rowan Williams with Rev’d
David Ridley However, going back to the 16th Century, the
effects of the Protestant Reformation may not have been all to the good in
Guston. During the brief period of
the return of the Catholic faith during Mary’s reign, the record of the
Visitation by Archdeacon Nicholas Harpesfield on the morning of Monday 16th
August 1557 reports a state of sad neglect.
There was no vicar or vicar’s house, the curacy was vacant, and
‘Master Craford had the parsonage in farm and receiveth great gain’’, which
probably means that the income from the land endowed to the church to
maintain the curate had been taken over by this Mr Craford and diverted to
his own enrichment. The church also
showed signs of neglect. The Archdeacon
required repairs to ‘the chancel of tile and glass by All Hallows, with
timber work.’ There was no mass
book, nor altar even, and the font needed a lock and key for its cover, all
no doubt sold off during the latter stages of Protestant reform under Mary’s
brother, Edward VI. The Archdeacon
also instructed that ‘a veil and covering cloth for the rood be provided
before Lent’ and that the new altar should have ‘an altar frontal and
curtains before Christmas’. The
reference to curtains suggests that this is to revive the old pre-Reformation
canon law that by the altar should be, suitably curtained, statues of the
Virgin Mary and the Patron saint, in this case St Martin. One other entry in this Visitation
gives us a glimpse of what the church might have looked like in
pre-Reformation days. The parish is
to ‘provide a framework of candles for the sepulchre’ and ‘provide a streamer
for when it be occupied’. The
sepulchre was used in the liturgy of Holy Week, when Christ was symbolically
entombed in the form of the Sacred Host that had been consecrated on Maundy
Thursday. The streamer would then be
placed outside the tomb until Easter day, when the liturgical drama ‘Quem
Qæritis?’ (‘Whom seekest thou?’) was enacted, to convey the importance of
Christ’s resurrection. The sepulchre
was one of the many examples of medieval piety that were largely swept away
in the Reformation, but elaborate examples remain in Hawton (Notts) and
Heckington (Lincs). One example of a
sepulchre that gives us a possible clue to the use of the recess on the south
wall of the chancel is that in St Giles, Cheadle (Staffs). This church was the reconstruction by the
architect Pugin of his ideal of a medieval church, and the form of the
sepulchre there does have echoes of this recess, which like Pugin’s, may have
been similarly decorated with a painting of the resurrection. We can also grasp from this a little of
the facility with which the Medieval mind, in a way that is almost lost to us
today, could penetrate the veil between this world and the next. Through Christ they knew themselves to be
united with the Church in Heaven, where he was enthroned in glory, and at the
same time present in the Host in their sepulchre, thanks to what the Prayer
Book still calls even now ‘these holy mysteries’. No numbers for communicants were
given in the 1557 Visitation, which, in view of the lack of mass book and
altar is perhaps not surprising, but by 1588, there were said to be 38
communicants, and since religious practice was almost universal, that gives
us some idea of the number of adults in the village. Guston was, however, as a Parish exempt
from Archdeacon’s Visitations once Mary’s return to the earlier ways had been
ended, following her succession by her sister, Elizabeth I; hence further such reports are
lacking. There was a Commissary’s
Visitation of Exempt Parishes on 25th November 1561, seeking to
determine if the protestant reforms had been re-instituted, and we read that
Guston certified that the parish had complied with the Commissary’s
requirements. These requirements
focused on finding out if churches had pulled down the rood loft and if the
newly required parish reading had been provided, in this case probably
homilies by Calvin; however it is not clear whether Guston had complied with
both, or, in view of the small size of the church and since it might well not
have had room for a rood loft, the gallery by the crucifix over the entry to
the chancel, it was simply a question of having bought the homilies. At the
Restoration of Charles II in the mid-17th Century, which brought the 1662
Prayer Book that is still in use today, there were 39 communicants and the
stipend had risen to £10: by way of comparison, as we start the 21st Century,
the Church has 14 on its electoral roll of communicants, and the Quota, which
is the Parish share of stipend, and other Diocesan costs, is £1,600 per
annum. Perhaps the
outstanding features however, are the main doorway and also the original
Norman windows in the Chancel behind the altar, which are of particular
note. In the Middle Ages, the Church
would have been decorated by wall paintings, now obscured by the cement
rendering but probably first vandalised during the Protestant zeal of the
Reformation. At the same time the
statues to Our Lady and St Martin in the chancel and St Nicholas and St Roke,
probably in the nave, each with their votive candles and recorded in the 1531
Will of Edward Prescott, would also have been stripped from the Church. In the south wall of the Chancel is an
alcove, which might have been the sepulchre and perhaps earlier a door to the
chancel for use by the priest and monks when the nave was used by the laity
as the parish church. St Roke, or Roch, is a French Saint who, during the
Middle Ages, developed a following as a result of his care for those ill from
the plague. When he fell ill
himself, he isolated himself in a forest, where a dog found him and brought
him food each day from its master's table.
Statues of St Roch, always with his faithful dog, can still be found
in many French churches. In
the churchyard you will find many old headstones, some dating back 300 years;
a more recent Commonwealth War Graves Commission headstone and also the area
dedicated for the use of Duke of York's Royal Military School This School is within the parish
boundaries that stretch down to the Eastern Docks, which makes Guston one of
the closest English parishes to France.
Guston Church of England Primary School, until recently in the
buildings in the Street which now serve as a Village Hall, has new premises
in the area of the former Connaught Barracks, since military families then
made up many of its pupils. As then,
so now, it still offers good primary education to the children of the Parish,
as it has done since formal schooling first started in Guston early in the
20th Century. You will find photographs and a plan
of the building elsewhere on the web site Thanks are due to the staff of
Canterbury Cathedral Archives, who hold
such past parish records as are available, together with Diocesan
records: http://www.canterbury-cathedral.org And the Franciscan International
Study Centre library for other details of the pre-Reformation parish and
during the time of Queen Mary: |
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