The Church of Saint Bartholomew is in a slightly odd place (I mean within the town, I’m not suggesting that Maltby is odd), suggesting that it was built before much else and there might well have been a Saxon church on the site which would explain quite a lot.
It’s an attractive building from the exterior, quite neat and tidy.
The entrance gates.
The nave and chancel of the church are of limited interest, but this tower is quirky and much older than the rest of the structure.
And here’s the reason for the main part of the church being less interesting architecturally, it’s the 1857 plan for the new building. This wasn’t though naive expectations of permanently larger congregations, something which somewhat dominated a lot of Church of England thinking in the late nineteenth century, this was the reality that the building was “too dilipidated to be repaired”. The local landowners, the congregation and the Incorporated Society for the Promoting the Enlargement , Building and Repairing of Churches and Chapels all came together to fund the repairs.
The church isn’t open to the public other than by prior appointment, although it’s still used for Sunday services.
The church came to national attention in May 1830 when body snatchers stole a body from the churchyard. An Irish newspaper reported:
“Some time during the night of Sunday last, the body of a young woman, named Mary Hall, was stolen out of its grave in Maltby Church yard. On Monday morning the clerk of Maltby observed a quantity of shavings scattered near the side of the grave, which excited his suspicion, and he immediately caused the grave to be opened, when the coffin was found broken in pieces, and the body taken away. The Magistrates of Rotherham issued search warrants on Monday last, and the Medical Hall, in Sheffield, and other surgical institutions have been searched, but without any discovery having been made. The friends of the deceased watched the grave for three nights, and on the following night the body was taken away. In consequence of the above unfortunate circumstance, the mother of the girl is in a state of mental derangement.”
The Sheffield Medical Institution had opened on 2 July 1829 and soon had a reputation for body-snatching, so there’s a high chance that’s where the body went, even though it wasn’t found.
Mary was just 25 when she died and the burial record at the church survives. The situation must have been dreadful for her mother, losing her daughter and then knowing that her body was lying likely not that far away being dissected.
It’s an attractive, and soggy, churchyard. As an aside, the congregation gave money in the 1820s to help those in Ireland struggling with famine, a reminder that this had been a long-term problem in the country and wasn’t just limited to the Great Famine.
Anyway, it’s a rather lovely site, although devoid of any signage about the church’s history and I couldn’t see any older gravestones, although the conditions has meant that a fair number of the stones are quite weathered and worn. A little further down the Maltby Dike, which the church backs onto, is Roche Abbey which was a large monastery until the Dissolution of the Monasteries.
