The Church Before 1800
An Absent Priory
St Michael’s dates to at least the twelfth century but no early features survive. Unfortunately, it has not always had a happy history.A distant priory, the Abbey of St Augustine in Bristol, held the patronage of the Church, until 1560. The abbots were unable to maintain proper care of a parish as distant as Finmere. When Bishop Atwater of Lincoln held a visitation—inspection—of the churches in his diocese in 1520, Finmere church was in a dire state:
The chancel is out of repair. Two women live in the rector’s house. The seats of the church are broken. A girl acts as a server to the rector at mass except on festivals. The rector puts beasts in the churchyard and they make it fowl.[i]
The Bishop resolved to summons the Rector, Richard Elyot, to explain this unhappy state of affairs but this was apparently to no avail. Little had improved more than a hundred years later when Finmere was swept into the Civil War.
In 1643, Cromwell marched on Buckingham and swept away the Royal base at nearby Hillesden. Only a few ill-disciplined troops remained:
12 or 14 Cavellyers lye about Thaneswick [Tingewick] and Finmore and constantly rob all that pass by at Baynard’s Greene in the day tyme.
They had moved on shortly before Charles I marched on Buckingham in June 1644 from Oxford, arriving via Finmere. Temporarily, at least, the Buckingham area was back in Royal control.
A year later, Captain Andrewes, an officer in the Parliamentary garrison at Newport Pagnell, was ordered to take 20 troopers to Stowe. His task was to obtain intelligence about Royalist activities in the area. When ridign towards Stowe, he was told about a party of Cavaliers at Finmere and he quickly rode to the village and ordered an immediate charge. Taken by surprise the King’s men fled south across the open fields, only to be overtaken at Fringford, where they surrendered. The routing of the Cavaliers would not have pleased Finmere’s Rector, Richard Horn, who may well have sheltered the Cavaliers. The village was now under Cromwell’s control and Horn was, in his words, ‘sacrificed to a three-halfpenny minister.’ A Parliamentarian, Richard Warr, occupied Horn’s ministry from until 1647 until 1662, while Horn remained in the village in miserable destitution.Relationships with his patron, Sir Richard Temple, who sat as an MP in Cromwell’s Protectorate Parliament, undoubtedly turned sour, even though Temple later became a Royalist. There was little hope of action over the church soon it was on the verge of collapse. On 29 May 1651, Richard Horn noted:
The Church walls of Finmer propt with timber.[ii]
Horn’s Eccentric YearsWith the end of Civil War, Horn was reinstated in 1662. Two years later, the Bishop of Oxford, pressed for action to repair the church. On 14 May 1664, he summoned Finmere’s unhappy churchwardens and demanded an explanation as to why the church was still in disrepair. Barnabas Chappel and Thomas Smith:
Acknowledge[d] that their parish church in Finmere is in decay and ready to fall.
But, they argued, the majority of villagers rented their land and were too poor to pay for the repairs.
Sir Richard Temple, whoe liveth at Stowe in Buckinghamshire, and Serjeant Waller, who liveth at Holborne in London did double their rents at the time of enclosure [of the open fields], and did p[ro]mise between them, and covenant with the p[ar]ishioners that they would build up the said p[ar]sihe Churche.
The Bishop called on the landowners to undertake repairs and at last, remedial work got under way. A stone in the church porch (now lost) commemorated the first phase of repairs:
John Arch-
er is my name.
I laid this ston
and rit the same
1666[iii]
Richard Horn supervised the repairs and retired a year later. He has the reputation of being Finmere’s unluckiest Rector. In his forty-five years in Finmere, his home had been wrecked in a storm then consumed by fire. He had been ejected from the office by the Cromwellians and forced into destitution for fifteen years. He was certainly impoverished and after his restoration, took to marrying people from a wide area.In Horn’s time, Finmere was a small parish of perhaps about two hundred people and about two marriages were celebrated at St Michael’s church each year. But in 1670, seventy-five year old Richard Horn presided over nine marriages, and a further seventy-one during the next seven years.Finmere had become the popular place to be married and couples came from Adderbury, Bicester, Buckingham, Grendon Underwood, Waddesdon and many other places. Temperantia Horn, possibly a relation and the daughter of the Rector of Bidleston [Biddlesden] married Issaac Yates “without parents’ consent.” Another couple were married without the required certificates.Why Horn presided over these weddings in not known. His notes in the parish register, however, suggest that he was becoming increasingly eccentric. Certainly, he was Finmere’s unluckiest Rector and he may have been relieved to retire in 1671.
Ells and Long
The next Rector, Richard Ells, continued the repair work. Amongst his other good deeds, Ells established a charity to provide apprenticeships for poorer villagers.
More work was done in the 1760’s when Thomas Long refurbished the interior of the church. This disrupted services:No Duty could be done by reason of being embarrassed by much scaffolding employed in repairing and ornamenting my church and chancel.
The Cleavers
There were two William Cleavers at Finmere. The first was the son of a gentleman, John of Boddington, Northamptonshire.[iv] After gaining a BA at Lincoln College, Oxford, Cleaver’s first living was at Twyford, Buckinghamshire. Later he was appointed Master of Buckingham School. He became Rector of Finmere after retiring from the school in 1771. He was then sixty years of age. His wife, Martha, died in May 1796 and Cleaver himself in July 1783. They are both buried at Finmere. The parish register records William’s death:1783, July 9th. The Revd William Cleaver, A.M., Rector of this parish, and Vicar of Stowe, in the County of Bucks; whose merit and abilities were not only an ornament to his profession, but worthy of its highest honours.[v]
While these accolades were deserved, it was his son who substantially improved church services at Finmere. George Grenville (Nugent Buckingham) of Stowe instituted the second William Cleaver as Rector shortly after his father’s death. Cleaver had been tutor to Grenville’s son, Richard, and proved to be an active and zealous Rector of Finmere.[vi] Before his arrival, communion had been celebrated just five times a year and Cleaver immediately increased this to eight celebrations. Musical instruments had long been absent from church services largely due to their earlier association with Catholicism and ‘Popery.’ Cleaver swept aside these concerns and introduced woodwind instruments in 1785. The instruments were a base Bassoon and an Hautbois. The latter, which translates from the French as loud or high wood, was a treble instrument first used in Paris sometime after 1650.After just a year at Finmere, in the midst of his improvement programme the younger Cleaver was elected President of Brasenose College where he would have met the young Robert Holt (below). He remained Rector of Finmere despite his new responsibilities and day to day pastoral care in the parish fell to his curate, Wooley Leigh Bennett. Son of a gentleman from Elsham, Norfolk,[vii] Bennett had been appointed curate to William Senior in 1771. When Cleaver was appointed Bishop of Chester in 1788,[viii] Bennett became Rector. He did not to enjoy his promotion long and died in July 1790, aged 57 years.
Robert Holt
When Robert Holt arrived in 1790, the church needed little repair work.[ix] He arrived to find a plain but comfortable church. At its west end, stood a three stage tower capped by battlements and a pyramidal roof. There was a clock in its south face with octagonal face and a single hand. The nave lacked aisles, there was a small south porch and a modest east window lighted the chancel. Thomas A gallery at the west end had been erected by Thomas Long.[x]
Holt continued the improvements of his predecessors. He maintained eight communions a year: ‘pd for bread and wine 8 times £1 16s 6d’[xi] Music accompanied church services and new reeds for the ‘bassoon and hoboy’ were purchased each year at a cost of 5 shillings. His main innovation was to establish a church choir.[xii] On 6 February 1791, Joseph Parrott advanced Holt 5 shillings. This was to pay for John Heley to train the choir.[xiii] This was in existence by the beginning of 1791, a year after the Holt family arrived, when John Heley, who was the singing master at the Temple’s Wooton estate in south Buckinghamshire, was paid 5s. A year later we learn that two pounds of candles for ‘the singers’ were purchased from Mrs Elinor Mumford at a cost of 1s 3d.[xiv] A further two pounds of ‘candels for Singers’ cost 1s 4d in 1795.[xv]For Holt’s first three years at Finmere, young parishioners were confirmed at Ardley, some way to the south of Finmere. Thereafter, confirmation was at Finmere.
[i] Oxfordshire Archaeological Society Report for the year 1925, 70, p75.
[ii] Parish Register. Oxford County Archives. PAR/105/1/R1/1. This date does not square with Horn period of exclusion from the church.
[iii] Finmere Rector’s Book, Oxfordshire Archives PAR/105/9/MS/1.
[iv] Alumni Oxonienses: The Members of the University of Oxford 1715–1886. John Foster, Oxford, 261–2.
[v] Finmere register of baptisms, marriages and burials. Oxfordshire Archives, PAR/105/1/R1/1.
[vi] History of Finmere, J.C. Blomfield, 1887 (reprinted by Finmere and Little Tingewick Historical Society 1998) 64.
[vii] Alumni Oxonienses: The Members of the University of Oxford 1715–1886. John Foster, Oxford, 95.
[viii] Bennett’s wife, Ann, died on 28 August 1835 aged 80. She is buried at Finmere.
[ix] William Paxton paid Geoffrey Mansfield, mason, 6 shillings to repair the churchyard wall on 28 September 1794. He deducted this from his rent to Stowe on Lady’s Day 1795. The churchyard wall was mended in 1790 when parish clerk John Fox was paid 3 shillings three days cleaning the churchyard. Board was purchased for the gallery bench in 1790 at a cost of 1 shilling. Churchwardens account book. Oxford County Archives. PAR/105/4/F1/1.
[x] Churchwardens account book. Oxford County Archives. PAR/105/4/F1/1, folio 39 recto
[xi] Churchwardens account book. Oxford County Archives. PAR/105/4/F1/1, 1795 folio 41 recto. A similar record for 1800 shows the price had risen to £2. Folio 44 verso.
[xii] Churchwardens account book. Oxford County Archives. PAR/105/4/F1/1, folio 39 recto and after.
[xiii] Parrott Estate Day Books, ST 196. Huntington Library
[xiv] Elinor Mumford lived in Finmere in a cottage rented from the Stowe Estate at £1 10s a year. Blomfield reprint, 67. Parrott Estate Day Books, ST 196. Huntington Library
[xv] Churchwardens account book. Oxford County Archives. PAR/105/4/F1/1, folio 41 recto.