From late Anglo-Saxon times England had a single Christian faith that followed the belief and practice of the Catholic Church headed by the Pope in Rome. In this parish, that religion centred on the parish church, which was the focus of communal life through the Middle Ages. After Henry VIII’s break with Rome in the 1530s and the subsequent Protestant Reformation, the character of belief and practice changed but the parish church’s absolute centrality remained until the upheavals of the Civil War a century later.[1]
Thereafter the Anglican Church’s predominance was challenged by a series of dissenting sects that insisted on holding their own services and building their own meeting places. These various denominations thrived in Hook Norton from the mid-seventeenth into the twentieth century, even though they were long discriminated against and the Anglican Church retained its privileged position.
The first half of this section on religious life looks at St Peter’s as the Hook Norton home of the official Established Church, initially through its Catholic period in the Middle Ages and then into its Anglican supremacy from the 1530s to, nominally, the present day. The second half deals with the seven Other Faiths that have appeared and flourished in the parish since 1640. Their enriching presence has been both a testimony to the village’s openness and a cause of its variety and vitality.
The Established Church
When Margaret Dickins published her pioneering History of Hook Norton in 1928, some local people complained that there was far too much in it about the village church. She replied that the history of St Peter’s is the history of Hook Norton. In important ways she was obviously right. Religion was central to people’s lives: about 1610, in a house close to the centre of the old village, the householder had religious texts painted on the plaster of his bedroom wall, which still survive as a rare (and protected) example of this domestic practice. So too the Church itself was central to the life of the village, for centuries not just the spiritual home of parishioners but a significant legal, social, economic and cultural institution. Only in the nineteenth century did it lose that predominance.
Physically, the church is the single most important surviving expression of past experience; it stands as the most important historical artefact we have. As a building, the church dominates Hook Norton; its tower springs into view from the most surprising angles. It is the only Grade 1 listed building in the parish. It dates back before the Norman Conquest but with little new building after 1500; what we see now is primarily the creation of the fifteenth century. Many things can be learned from the church building, but first and foremost it provides key evidence for what happened in Hooky in the Middle Ages.
For nigh on a thousand years the Church played far more than a religious role in the life of the parish. Great legal power was exercised by episcopal authority, which through the Middle Ages meant the Bishop of Lincoln and then, after 1542, the Bishop of Oxford. Through the parish’s involvement in the business affairs of first Oseney Abbey and then the Bishop of Oxford, the Church was involved in our land management and agricultural production. The church courts exercised considerable influence over secular affairs until the nineteenth century, especially over family life and inheritance; it could also govern the private behaviour of individuals. The compulsory services in St Peter’s were a means of communication whereby leaders of church and state nationally could make their will known to the community. St Peter’s, in short, was central to the social, cultural and political life of the parish, and the essays in the first half of this section outline the different periods of the Church’s development in this parish, and its ultimate decline in influence.[2]
Other Faiths
Since the seventh century England has always had a single official Church. The country has been divided into parishes and dioceses, and for centuries every person was a member of their parish church, which they had to attend. Through the Middle Ages the Church followed the rule of the Papacy; even after the Reformation the structure remained intact, but now with the monarch as head of the Church. In both periods dissenting movements, be they Lollards or Anabaptists or some other, were denounced as heretics, persecuted and driven underground. But in the seventeenth century the Church of England’s supremacy became more limited as it gradually came to accept the existence and legitimacy of a number of independent Protestant denominations.[3]
This Nonconformist tradition was established in a series of separate bursts. During the Civil War of 1642-1646, various sects that previously had an underground existence began to flourish openly. Most prominently, the Baptists (originally called Anabaptists) rejected traditional theology and insisted on the need to gather together congregations of true believers regardless of parish boundaries. Their rejection of the comprehensive state church made such “sectaries” seem especially dangerous to the political and social stability of the country, as the victorious Parliament endeavoured to re-establish a national church without a hierarchy of bishops.
The 1650s saw a period of toleration for Protestants of “tender conscience” like the Baptists, but even Oliver Cromwell’s Protectorate (1653-58) found it difficult to tolerate George Fox’s Society of Friends (popularly known as Quakers) because they refused to recognise any authority, social or political, as higher than their conscience. After 1660 the restored Parliament’s Clarendon Code attempted to suppress these dissenting sects, but they proved irrepressible: in 1669 there were reported to be about 60 Anabaptists in Hook Norton, led by persons who had been officers in Cromwell’s armies. In 1683 the Bishop of Oxford was told that this parish had 36 Baptists and 18 Quakers.[4]
The crisis of 1688 persuaded Parliament that the support of these nonconformists was essential to preserve the safety of Protestantism, and in 1689 it passed a Toleration Act allowing them to meet for worship. Though still discriminated against, the sects continued to thrive in the eighteenth century mainly in those places where they already existed: in 1738 there were 18 families of Baptists in Hook Norton, and fourteen families of Quakers; both sects now had their own meeting houses here. In other words, about a fifth of the parish belonged to one of the old Dissenting sects.[5]
The second burst of Nonconformity came in the eighteenth century with John Wesley’s itinerant preaching and the creation of Wesleyan Methodist churches, though one was not established in Hook Norton until near the end of the century. An account of its beginnings was published forty years later in the United States by a Hook Norton native, Dinah French; its detailed accuracy may be doubted, but it is so interesting that we print as Appendix 3. The Methodists became so successful they began to behave like a second established church, which soon provoked breakaways, notably the Primitive Methodists, who appeared in Hook Norton in 1845. In 1851 a religious census showed that more worshippers went to the four Nonconformist chapels than to the parish church: on the census Sunday, 277 people attended Anglican services, 160 Wesleyan Methodist, 120 Baptist, 100 Primitive Methodist, and 11 Quaker.[6] Later the Baptists, too, suffered a secession, when the Strict Baptists set up their own chapel in the 1890s.
These dissenters all came out of a radical Protestant tradition and continued to suffer civil and legal disadvantages until 1828. Roman Catholics were considered more subversive and suffered heavier penalties, but bans on public worship and organising schools were removed in 1778 and 1791 and all civil penalties finally removed in 1829. Not till a hundred years later did a Roman Catholic community appear in Hooky, opening its own church in 1932, which lasted until 1997. All these non-Anglican churches contributed to Hooky’s life and character, and each has its own history to recall, from a period not so long ago when religion was central to everyone’s lives. Nowadays only the Baptist Church survives in the parish as an organized Christian community alongside the established Anglican Church.
With the broadening of British culture, non-Christian denominations have also begun to appear. There seems to be no tradition of organized Judaism or Islam in the parish, but an active Buddhist group has been meeting regularly in the village since about 1989. Their spiritual aspirations maintain a local tradition going back over 370 years of fostering religious movements that fall outside the Anglican mainstream. Nowadays some locals say they have become Buddhists because they feel that the Christian churches have acquired layers of ceremonial and hierarchy that obstruct the expression of religious truth as once expressed by Christ; these sentiments are exactly the same as those expressed by successive generations of Protestant dissenters before them. These religious movements have all sought God and salvation according to the best lights of their conscience, as, indeed, have the Church of England and the Roman Catholic Church.
Something similar may be true of the nine local people who in the 2011 census declared themselves to be Jedi Knights. Perhaps they did adhere to the 16 teachings and 21 maxims of the Jedi Church, which believes that there is one all-powerful force in the universe and that a sense of morality is innate within each of us. But if their claim was simply a tongue-in-cheek response to the census question on religion, they should be numbered with the growing proportion of the population – thirty per cent in 2011 – who counted themselves as belonging to no religion.
© Donald Ratcliffe
May 2022
[1] See the “Great Civil War, 1642-1646”, in the Reformation, Revolution section of this website.
[2] The best printed source of information on St Peters before 1928 remains Margaret Dickins’s History of Hook Norton, pages 106-142, as corrected in the Victoria County History of Oxfordshire, vol. 21, draft chapter now available at https://www.history.ac.uk/research/victoria-county-history/county-histories-progress/oxfordshire//oxfordshire-vol-xxi-chipping-norton-and-environs). For the role of Oseney Abbey, see the two chapters in the Middle Ages section of this website.
[3]Martin Greenwood, Pilgrim’s Progress Revisited: The Nonconformists of Banburyshire, 1662-2012 (Charlbury: Wychwood Press, 2013).
[4] Mary Clapinson, ed., Bishop Fell and Nonconformity, Oxfordshire Record Society, vol. 52 (1980), pages xiv-xv, 38-39, 44-45.
[5] H. H. Lloyd Dukes, Articles of Enquiry Addressed to the Clergy of the Diocese of Oxford at the Primary Visitation of Dr Thomas Secker, 1738, Oxfordshire Record Society, vol. 38 (1957), pages 83-84.
[6] Kate Tiller, ed., Church and Chapel in Oxfordshire, 1851: the Return of the Census of Religious Worship, Oxfordshire Record Society, vol. 55 (1987), pages 51-52.
