Bintree – St. Swithin’s Church
Next on the tour that Richard and I took around was to visit St. Swithin’s Church in Bintree, which was unfortunately another one which was locked up which achieved protection against anyone stealing anything and also protection against anyone seeking religious solace. Its dedication to St Swithin isn’t the most common and there’s a fascinating list of the numbers at https://www.blanchflower.org/cgi-bin/qsaint/qsaint.html, showing Swithin at 47th. The village of Bintree is listed in the Domesday Book, so it’s likely that there was some sort of religious building in the village during the Saxon period.
The bulk of the church dates from the fourteenth century, but there are some twelfth century elements so perhaps that was the date of the first stone building on this site. It’s all quite clean and ordered without the usual mismatch of windows and features that are evident in churches. Whether that’s because it was all constructed at the same time, or rebuilt in the late nineteenth century, I’m not entirely sure. George Plunkett has a 1992 photo of the church taken from a similar angle to this one.
The chancel is quite stubby and not very interesting from the exterior, but this is primarily as it fell down in 1806 and a smaller replacement was completed in 1815, which was then faffed about with by the Victorians in 1865. It was mentioned in the local media in 1903 that the church was in a poor state of repair, but enough money had been found to reroof the nave, so this feels like it has been a slightly neglected arrangement at times and I wonder whether it wasn’t given the same extensive modernisation (effectively often entire rebuilds) that other buildings were given by the Victorians. It has been a rather High Church arrangement in the past, but I’ll come to that separately as there are some interesting stories relating to that.
This is quite exciting, it’s a grave cover that is thought to be that of Richard de Langbrigg, a parish priest who died in 1270. It’s an impressive survivor and it has its own Grade II listing, although he’s a little unlucky as he was located within the former larger footprint of the chancel and he’s now stuck just outside of it.
The end of the chancel, representing the rebuild after the previous one fell down. It’s all neat and tidy to be fair.
Helpfully dated, but I don’t yet know who those initials relate to.
I don’t know what this is, perhaps a stone-mason’s mark?
This church has seemingly endless contradictory dates in various sources and there doesn’t seem to be as much information about its history in common sources as some other nearby churches, even taking into account that it was historically often called Bintry Church to add extra confusion. It appears that they’ve been reluctant to routinely open this church for some time, but it is now operated by the Diocesan Churches Trust which is effectively a sign that it has fallen out of use but they just don’t want to deconsecrate it. It’s an intriguing building, hopefully I’ll be able to get to see inside at some point. This is one of those churches that I have a suspicion I’ll find out a lot more about at some stage, but at the moment it feels like something of an enigma.
