The Bells of Great Oakley, Northamptonshire скачать в хорошем качестве

The Bells of Great Oakley, Northamptonshire

St Michael’s Church in Great Oakley, Northamptonshire, is a small medieval parish church whose story begins in the early 13th century, when a simple stone building was first raised to serve a rural farming community on the edge of the old Rockingham Forest. Over time, what started as a modest chapel developed into the main spiritual centre of the village, with the earliest parts of the nave and chancel still hinting at those first centuries of worship. For a long period the church functioned in a rather limited role, lacking both a graveyard and a permanent font, so that burials and some sacraments had to take place in neighbouring parishes until its status was gradually regularised in the later Middle Ages. Once that happened, St Michael’s became a fully fledged parish church in practice as well as in name, marking all the key moments of village life from baptism to burial. The life of the church was closely bound up with a nearby Cistercian monastery, whose monks were responsible for supplying clergy and shaping the pattern of services for many years. Their influence was felt not just in the way worship was conducted but also in the look and feel of the building, from the arrangement of the chancel to details of woodwork and tiling. When the monasteries were dissolved in the 16th century, this relationship came to an end, but echoes of it remained in reused materials and in the overall character of the church’s interior, where late‑medieval forms sat alongside the newer fashions of the Tudor and Jacobean periods. Across these centuries the structure was repeatedly altered and repaired: windows were reshaped, the tower and roof were strengthened or rebuilt, and the building slowly took on the mixture of styles that now make it a visual record of changing English church architecture. Inside, St Michael’s holds a rich collection of furnishings and memorials that chart the fortunes of local landowning families, especially the Brookes and later the de Capell Brookes, who resided at nearby Great Oakley Hall and acted as patrons of the church. Their hatchments, plaques, and monuments line the walls and chancel, and their gifts and restorations helped preserve the building through periods of both prosperity and hardship. Alongside these later additions, visitors can still pick out older features such as carved seating, stonework from the church’s earliest phases, and patterned tiles that evoke its medieval past. In the 19th and 20th centuries, as with many English churches, careful restoration aimed to repair weathered fabric and adapt the interior for contemporary worship while respecting the historic layout, so that the building could remain both a working parish church and a cherished historic site. Today St Michael’s stands within its peaceful churchyard as a layered record of more than seven centuries of faith, local power, and village memory, embodying in one small Northamptonshire church the long continuity of English rural life. The tower holds a ring of five bells, that were until 2022, a ring of three. The treble was cast in 1911 by John Warner & Sons, the 2nd in 1948 by Gillett & Johnston, the 3rd in 1626 by Hugh II Watts, the 4th in c1595 by Newcombe & Watts and the tenor in 1634 by the same founder as the 3rd. The back three bells retain their canons, and hang in their original frame for three which was constructed of cast iron in 1953 by John Taylor & Co. The augmentation to 5 in 2022 was undertaken by Matthew Higby & Co, at which time a new frame capable of housing 3 bells was constructed of steel and installed in the tower, allowing for an augmentation to six in the future. The tenor weighs 5-2-18cwt and is tuned to B. There is also a sanctus bell, cast in 1953 by John Taylor & Co. Weighing 0-2-11cwt and tuned to E. 5 bells, 5-2-18cwt in B.