Epworth Old Rectory, North Lincolnshire

It’s not uncommon to hear American voices in the small North Lincolnshire market town of Epworth.

Indeed, when I visited Epworth Old Rectory with a British friend one summer afternoon, the other visitors, a coach-party of around twenty and a couple on a pilgrimage, were without exception Americans.

Epworth is seen, quite literally, as the birthplace of Methodism, because the rector in the early eighteenth century was the Rev Samuel Wesley (1662-1735) of whose nineteen children three boys and seven girls survived.  The three boys were Samuel the Younger (1690 or 1691-1739), a minor poet, John (1703-1791), cleric and theologian and founder of the Methodist Church, and Charles (1707-1788), the hymn-writer.

Rev Samuel Wesley was not popular in his Epworth living:  he was a high Tory and a high churchman, and didn’t get on with his parishioners.

The existing parsonage was burnt down in 1709, a particularly alarming incident in which his son John, known within the family as Jacky, was trapped in a second-floor bedroom and rescued only with difficulty.

Had he perished, there would have been no Methodist church as such.

The Wesley children’s upbringing was meticulous.  Their mother Susanna educated the boys and girls to the same level, and found time to teach each of the ten individually on a weekly basis.

This methodical approach to mundane as well as intellectual tasks was distinctive of John Wesley’s university life, and led him and his friends to be scornfully labelled “methodists”, an epithet which they joyfully accepted.

Throughout his long life of preaching, John Wesley encountered furious opposition from clergy of the Established Church, not least in Epworth where, on return visits to his birthplace, he was denied access to the parish church and took to standing on his father’s grave to preach.

“Consumed by the thought of the shortness of time, the great work to be done, and the need for haste in doing it, on he marched, preaching, pleading, warning and guiding…” until, by the time of his death, he had unwittingly created an alternative Protestant church to Anglicanism.

And that is why visitors come from all over the world to an elegant Georgian parsonage in North Lincolnshire:  http://www.epwortholdrectory.org.uk.

All Saints’ Church, Brixworth, Northamptonshire

If I could only have one subscription to a historical association it would be with the Ancient Monuments Society:  http://www.ancientmonumentssociety.org.uk.  Their periodic newsletter is a fount of information about historic buildings and books about historic buildings, listing events and tours, including mine.  The annual Transactions is learned and authoritative:  the 2014 edition, for instance, ranges from Birmingham Town Hall to parkland buildings associated with hunting, Catholic buildings in Norwich, parsonages and the early conservation movement in Edinburgh Old Town.

The book-review section of the Transactions delves deep into the realms of scholarship.  The titles reviewed usually cost tens of pounds;  the reviewers make learned distinctions between ‘axiometric’ (which hasn’t yet reached the dictionary) and ‘axonometric’, and ‘homogenous’ and ‘homogeneous’, and express enthusiasms that would not be understood in my local pub:  “Parochial benching is more than ever a hot topic just now”  “…a fascinating account of the decorative use of the iron punch, which woodwork aficionados will find riveting”.

Richard Halsey’s review of the latest study of Brixworth Church, Northamptonshire, [http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Anglo-Saxon-Church-Brixworth-Northamptonshire/dp/1842175319/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1399276060&sr=8-1&keywords=The+Anglo-Saxon+Church+of+All+Saints%27+Brixworth+Northamptonshire+survey+excavation+and+analysis] reminds me of how much further investigation of historic buildings can go than would ever occur to the casual visitor.

The late-eighth century church of All Saints’, Brixworth, is the largest surviving Anglo-Saxon building in England.  Though it was altered in the tenth, thirteen and nineteenth centuries, it’s our best opportunity to appreciate the scale of long vanished Saxon cathedrals such as Canterbury and Winchester.  It’s a supremely important monument in the catalogue of buildings, not only in England but in northern Europe as a whole.

The 2013 study edited by David Parson and Diana Sutherland is the result of forty years’ research by the Brixworth Archaeological Research Committee [BRAC].  Part of Diana Sutherland’s contribution to the knowledge about the church involved using a scaffold to map each stone in the Saxon masonry to determine its geology and petrology.

That’s aeon away from walking in, taking a few photos and buying a guidebook, as I did.

Richard Halsey points out that forty years of funded research yields sufficient data to pack a 326-page book and still leaves significant questions unanswered:  what was the Saxon roof like?  why was the original west end demolished and replaced by the tenth-century tower?  why was such a huge church built in this place?

There’s so much more to learn that feeds into scholarship about the distant past, and particularly about other surviving pre-Norman churches:  http://www.interestingtimestours.co.uk/index.php?mact=CGBlog,cntnt01,detail,0&cntnt01articleid=44&cntnt01returnid=87.