The Essex Churches Site

 

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St Peter, Wickham Bishops

Wickham Bishops old church

Wickham Bishops Wickham Bishops old church Wickham Bishops old church
over the bridge Wickham Bishops

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  This is an oddly situated church, along a track across a ploughed field off of the road to Maldon. A Victorian railway bridge carries the track over the now vanished Witham to Maldon line. Essentially a small early Norman church with little evidence of much else happening until the 16th Century. The church fell into disuse in the late 19th Century after a replacement was built in the village centre, but was not officially redundant until 1970, when it became the first church in England to be declared so under the new legislation. By then it was pretty much a ruin, as you may imagine. The Friends of Friendless Churches took it on in 1975 and restored it. It is now the workshop of Benjamin Finn, the stained glass artist. I understand that it is still furnished as a church inside, but it has always been closed on the occasions I've visited.

St Peter has one odd claim to fame. During the Commonwealth, when the Church of England was suppressed and all manner of weird and wonderful fundamentalist sects were let off the leash, the intruder minister here was the puritan preacher Joseph Billio. It is said that his sermons were delivered with such speed and gusto that they gave rise to the expression 'to go like Billio'. Whether this is true or not I don't know, but it must be said that he actually achieved his fame as a preacher at the nearby Maldon Congregational chapel.

Simon Knott, December 2021

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Wickham Bishops

               
 
               
                 

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