THE ESSEX CHURCHES SITE

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Friends Meeting House, Stebbing

Click on the 'play' symbol in the second image to see all my photographs of this church as a slide show, then click on any image in the slideshow to see it large in a new page. Alternatively, if you don't have flash enabled, you can go straight to the set for this church on flickr. This pretty squarish brick chapel is situated on the High Street in the utterly delightful north Essex village of Stebbing. Moulded terracotta bricks form a plaque which give its date as 1674, a date when the Society of friends, or Quakers as they are better known, were at the height of their popularity (perhaps two per cent of the population of England) but were still technically outlawed, and subject to official persecution. The Society dated back to a quarter of a century earlier, founded by George Fox as an anti-clerical sect devoted to a relationship with God without any need for a formal Church. In 1688, fourteen years after this chapel was built, the Society received some relief in the form of a Declaration of Indulgence, and then full religious freedom at the time of the Act of Toleration in 1689. There must have been dozens of chapels like this in backwater villages, and most of them are lost to us. This one, of course, is no longer used for worship, but serves a useful function as a parish hall for lovely Stebbing. Simon Knott, May 2014

 

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home - index - latest - e-mail
links - small print - about this site
Norfolk churches - Suffolk churches
www.simonknott.co.uk