TALES FROM THE HILLS

(Ashmansworth and Crux Easton)

In July 1993, the Crux Easton church brass was stolen. A few days later, a combine driver ran into it, dumped in a field in Binley. No explanation of this event has ever been offered.

Curiously, this echoes an event more than 120 years earlier in the nearby parish of Combe in Berkshire. That tale was told by WH Hudson: “[The vicar of Combe] took me to the church – one of the tiniest churches in the country – and assured me that he had never once locked the door in his fifty years – day and night it was open for anyone to enter.”

”Have you never had anything stolen?” asked Hudson. “Yes”, said the vicar, and recounted how, a great many years before, the church plate had been stolen in the night, but had been recovered. The thief had taken it to the top of the hill and thrown it into the dewpond there, intending to take it out and dispose of it at some more convenient time; but it was found, and it had been kept safe at the vicarage ever since. Nothing of value to tempt a man to steal was kept in the church.

“The church was a refuge and a shelter from the storm and tempest, and many a poor homeless wretch had found a dry place to sleep in that church during the last half century.” Sympathy there for the homeless from Hudson, a man who himself spent so many days exposed to all weathers walking and recording the countryside he loved. In most country places he found the church locked and had to go to the parsonage to “borrow the key.”

Eighty years ago John Betjeman, another insatiable visitor of churches, suggested, rather mischievously, that there was a correlation between access to the church and the style of worship within: he said, “If there’s a slight smell of incense and the English Hymnal is used and the church is open and easy to get into … then the church is ‘High.’ If there’s a bare table at the East end with an alms dish on it … then the church is ‘Low.’ Low churches are often locked.”

Agricola, September 2022