The story of Abbotsbury church begins, like a biography, at the font. This is a mixed piece of work: the base is Victorian and the bowl is of the fifteenth century, while the stem could at first sight be of any date. Before the restoration in 1886, however, this stem belonged to a Purbeck marble base, surrounded by sockets for eight columns of Purbeck marble, which must have been lost when the bowl was added. Fonts of this sort were being produced by the masons of Swanage and Corfe Castle from 1200 onwards; normally they have four legs round the central stem, but this one at Abbotsbury was grander with eight. Cranborne, another town-village with a neighbouring Abbey, has a similar font.

Where there is a font, there must be someone to administer the sacraments of baptism and holy communion. The site of our church lies within the precinct of Abbotsbury Abbey, and during the middle ages the ultimate responsibility for the souls of villagers here lay with the Abbot, who was therefore rector (director, as we should say) of the parish. Being a busy man, he appointed a delegate, which in Latin is a vicar, to administer the sacraments and do the work of a priest. The first document to refer to this arrangement is a tax assessment of 1291, in which the office of vicar is rated at £6113 4d. Every year the incumbent had to give the Abbot a small silver jug, as a sign that he owed the position to his superior. To avoid a surplus of silver jugs on the Abbot's table, the payment was usually commuted to two shillings per annum. The first vicar known by name is William of Hakington, who was appointed here in 1312.

The church of those early days has disappeared, although its shape ~ a simple nave and chancel, about eighteen feet wide ~ can be made out from the history of later alterations. It is possible that the low doorway set in the present south aisle and looking out of place there, was the south door of the original church. Today it leads nowhere: the space behind it is occupied by a cupboard where the flower-arranging materials are kept. The original church must have been built some time after the establishment of the Abbey, for when the floor of the porch was lowered in 1886 a stone coffin was found under the surface ~ proof that the graveyard of the monks formerly extended this far away from the Abbey church of St. Peter, and that there was no building in between. The coffin may be seen now opposite the porch; it is the smaller one, on the left hand side. Again, the rules for a guild of Abbotsbury traders, drawn up in the early eleventh century, arrange for services to be held in "St. Peter's Minster", showing that there was no parish church as such at that date. It must have been built when the font was commissioned in about 1200.

The parish church served by William de Hakington had to accomodate the people of a large village with a growing population. More space was needed and during his incumbency ~ or that of his successor, William de Sherborne, the nave was extended to the north, creating today's north aisle. Masons from the Abbey must have been employed, for the two original windows in this wall (the thinnest ones, a matching pair) are like those carved for the Abbot's lodgings to the east of the churchyard. Two other windows of the same style and material are set in the chancel of Portesham church. The masons built in local yellow stone, which comes from the Corallian beds and was quarried out of the hills south of the Portesham road. Here and there you may see blocks of white stone quarried near Portesham itself, on Rocket Hill, where there are good beds of Portland and Purbeck stone. These blocks must have been re-used from some demolished building, for often when they occur in the church they are fitted in haphazardly, not cut to shape or even bedded horizontally. The Abbots preferred to build in Portesham stone until the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when they switched to the Abbotsbury quarrries: as the lords of both villages they were in a position to choose. The builders of our north wall took whatever was closest to hand and indeed, if you look carefully to the right of the porch wall, you can see the head of an old window or door used along with the other blocks of stone. Here and there in the wall holes were left for scaffolding poles to be set into the fabric, and were later filled in with new stones. When one such block of stone ~ to the bottom left of the western window ~ was removed for restoration, the broken top of a human skull was found cemented in behind it. Masons do some strange things.

The vicar William de Sherborne died in the Black Death, a week after the Abbot: plague had landed at Weymouth in the summer of 1348, and mortality was high. The loss of life in the village put all ideas of building out of the question for five decades. Then, in 1400, work began on a prestigious expression of the village's return to strength ~ the tower. It has three stages and is climbed by clockwise stairs whose central column has been polished smooth by generations of hands: eight grotesque heads of men and beasts ~ carved in Portesham stone and now much weathered ~ look down on the village from the topmost string course. At the top, fifty feet above ground, are battlements carved partly of Ham stone from the Somerset quarries, and partly of local Corallian. Many years ago a young man of the village got up the tower on the morning of his wedding day and walked all round it, balancing on these battlements; not something I would like to do myself. There are smaller battlements on top of the stair-turret, worked in Portesham stone ~ they are not keyed into the stonework, and may be an afterthought. When the tower was new, a peal of five bells rang out through the louvred windows of the third stage; one of the beams which supported the bell floor (which is now quite restored, and rests on new corbels) survived in the clock room. It is of oak, carved with a long panel ending in a trefoil head. When building the tower, the masons made extensive use of white Portesham stone, presumably from a demolished Abbey building: certainly the carving over the west window must have come from the Abbey, since it has been trimmed to fit its present position. The carving represents the Holy Trinity ~ the Father is the main figure, while between his knees the Son is nailed to a cross, and the Spirit hovers whispering by his right ear.

At this time the font was given its new bowl, which is decorated with arcading possibly meant to echo the design on the beams supporting the bell floor, and the panelled arch linking the tower to the nave. The nave had a single-span roof, more steeply pitched than the present roof of the north aisle: the chancel, which had not been widened when the nave extension was built, was consequently off-centre to the nave and tower.

While the tower was being built, the church was given a north porch ~ a place for worldly business to be conducted at the entrance to the sacred fabric. The old fourteenth-century door was re-used as the entrance to the porch, and a new door was inserted leading into the church: above it is a little carving of the crucifixion, now made shapeless by too many coats of whitewash. The stonework includes, at the join of porch and north wall, a small piece of Purbeck marble, probably from some column discarded by the Abbey. The construction of the porch made the nave a little darker, and to compensate for this a window was put into the wall just to the east of it. This is from the same hand as the larger west window ~ both have Perpendicular tracery in the white Portesham stone. The two windows have needed repairs over the years: two of the lower stones in the windows by the porch are replaced in blocks of Corallian, and part of the upper tracery of the west window is renewed by a piece of Ham stone, perhaps left over from the battlements of the tower or the later ones along the north wall.

The tower, font and porch were commissioned by the villagers. The rebuilding of the chancel which came next, in the late fifteenth century, was financed by the Abbot who, as rector, was responsible for maintaining that part of the church. It is consequently less ambitious. A new east wall was built in front of the old one, thus shortening the chancel but giving it new light from the wide east window. Here, as elsewhere, a certain amount of stone was reused from demolished Abbey buildings, and one block of Portesham stone was keyed into the head of the window. It had originally, in the twelth century, been a double capital for a pair of pillars, with a delicately carved beaded pattern between the capitals. Time has not treated this part of the chancel well. It was found to need a large buttress just by the window to stabilise the join with the older south wall. The chancel was not widened when the nave was enlarged and so remained off-centre, while the later alterations of the sixteenth century made the east window off-centre to the chancel itself, so it must have been something of an embarassment. After it was blocked internally by the altar-piece in 1751, the stonework of the east window began to decay, and it had to be taken down in 1973: most of the tracery now lies against the churchyard wall.

This east window was plain compared to the next addition to the church, the fine north chapel. This was built to fill the angle between the north aisle and the chancel ~ another buttress had to be added to cover the join of chancel and chapel. The buttress is clearly an afterthought, as it cuts off the edge of the chapel's east window. The two windows are of Ham stone with ornate Perpendicular tracery and little heads in period costume facing out from the edges. The walls of the chapel are mostly in Portesham stone. It seems likely from its position and sophistication that it was a special gift to the church, either from a pious villager or a group of tradesmen. There is a bracket inside the chapel, to the left of the eastern window: it is of Ham stone, carved in the form of an angel holding a shield. The angel wears a sort of suit of feathers, a stylistic idea which originally came from the mystery plays. The individual or group who commissioned the north chapel also built a roodloft stretching across both the chapel and chancel to unify this end of the church. A flight of steps, set into the wall of the north chapel and now blocked by the organ, led up to the wooden stage of the roodloft some six or seven feet above ground.

After the north chapel was built, and perhaps as part of the same donation, the wall of the chapel and northern nave was given a continuous parapet. It is of Ham stone again, with battlements and a charming sequence of eight gargoyles. >From east to west, there is a great head with gaping mouth flanked by two little figures; another head on a hunched-up body; a man wearing a tight cap and sitting cross-legged, holding a hammer over his shoulder; another head, serving as a waterspout; a winged man-lion; a head with one little figure by it; another head with two; and a bat-winged creature squatting on its haunches. The third of these, the man with the mallet, is evidently meant to portray a stonemason. Exactly the same carving can be seen on the west front of the church at Cerne Abbas ~ it must have been the signature, so to speak, of a gang of masons; perhaps a caricature of their foreman. Gargoyles in the same general style riot over the towers and parapets of many churches in central Dorset from Piddletrenthide (1487) to Cerne (about 1500). There used to be pinnacles rising from every other battlement on our north wall, one above each gargoyle, as is done on the tower of St. Peter's in Dorchester: but these had to be taken down in 1973. The softness of Ham stone ~ you could carve it with your teeth, they say ~ makes it less enduring, and when examined the whole parapet was found to be leaning outwards, and the pinnacles had been ruined by a previous repair with iron dowels. They were removed and went for safe keeping to the yard of the restoring masons, whose present whereabouts is not known.

We can imagine a group of men in 1510 or thereabouts bending over plans by the east end of the church, while the bells in the great tower of St. Peter's Minster ring for matins, and the sun comes up over Linton Hill. There is the vicar, Richard Newson, and the Abbot, John Portesham: he was John Peasing before becoming a religious, but afterwards as usual he took a new surname from his native village. Beside them is a second monk, John Exeter the "supervisor of works". The name of the architect is unknown: perhaps he was the great-grandson of that William of Abbotsbury, master builder, who had been requisitioned for the King's works in the year of the Black Death.

They have worked out the plan of the new church. Firstly, after the furnishings have gone into store at the Abbey, the whole building will have its roof stripped off and the south wall will be demolished. Then the church will be made wider by the building of a new wall, further out, forming a combined south aisle and chapel lit by eight windows. At the same time a double arcade will split the nave as it is into a new, thinner nave and a north aisle ~ the arches of the arcade supporting a clearstorey with five windows on each side to flood the nave with light. The architect has promised to open a new quarry on Rocket Hill which will yield a good creamy-coloured Portland stone for the columns and tracery, and the carpenter will give the nave and aisles a new pent roof divided into panels. The double arcade will cut the tower arch on the northern side, and the east window will be off-centre to the south of the reshaped chancel, but that can't be helped.

This programme of rebuilding was supported by the Abbot although in principle, like his predecessors, he was only responsible for the chancel. His initials ~ IP ~ occur on the capital of the first of the new columns to the south of the chancel: on the capital of the second column is the monogram MR, which stands for Maria Regina, Mary Queen of Heaven: while on the opposite side is a grotesque sort of dog-cum-lizard with a frill round its waist. The other capitals have conventional foliage. There was also a wall-painting in the south chapel showing two monks, which makes it seem likely that John Portesham contributed to the rebuilding of the church on condition that the new south chapel was set aside as a place where prayers could be said for his soul. Moreover, he was a local man ~ the Peasings were a family of some repute in Portesham and Abbotsbury ~ and this may have persuaded him to make a contribution. The work dragged on for some time, for the westernmost window of the south aisle and its neighbour ~ the first two to have been done ~ are flanked by floral designs while all the others are plain; as if the builders had started to economise.

Since John Portesham finished his rebuilding, the fabric of the church has stayed almost unaltered ~ but everything within it has changed. The fittings and ornaments of the church were despoiled by neglect, official disapproval, embezzlement and restoration throughout the sixteenth century, and as you look at today's building you must take away much of what you can see, and put in a lot more, before you can recapture the mediaeval church. Take away the pews and the chancel seats, the pulpit and organ, the altarpiece, the modern glass and electric light, the bookstalls, the tiles on the floor and the whitewash on the walls. Think instead that the walls are the same yellow and white stone inside as out, and that the empty nave and aisles are floored with great flagstones. The east window of the chancel is bright with glass where silver-grey faces look out from pinnacled canopies: the central panels represent the Annunciation, with the archangel Gabriel to the left and the Blessed Virgin to the right. Elsewhere in the design are white roses and fleur-de-lis, with heraldic shields including a red cross on a silver background, the arms of St. George. (You may still see the face of the Virgin in the second window of the south aisle, mixed in with the roses and fleur-de-lis, and broken fragments of the old south aisle glass).

Beneath the east window is the stone altar, such as you may still see in the little chapel at Corton, but draped with front cloths of painted canvas, with green silk curtains at the sides and towels and table-cloths stored ready for the sacred feeding of the mass. The wine is consecrated in a silver-gilt chalice, and the bread on a silver paten: there is a pyx of brass in which the consecrated host can be reserved. The light of two candles reflects back from a copper-gilt cross, and the smell of incense comes from a hanging brass censer. The vicar of Abbotsbury, as he stands before the shining altar, wears the vestments of the church. There are four chasubles in store ~ red silk for the feasts of the martyrs and the Passion of Christ; white silk for the feasts of Mary, the virgin saints and the angels; green satin, from Bruges, worn between Trinity and Advent; and black worsted for the burial service and masses for the dead. Two surplices are also available, and for processions the vicar can wear one of the church's two red copes, either the silk one or the velvet.

Through the decorations of the church, perhaps, or through the vicar's sermons we learn of the life of St. Nicholas, patron of the church (this building is first recorded as St. Nicholas' church in the will of Thomas Hilary, who died in 1514). St. Nicholas brought three boys back to life, after they had been killed by a villainous innkeeper and salted in a brine-tub. St. Nicholas tossed three bags of gold secretly, at night, through a poor father's window so that he could give dowries to his three girls and not make them walk the streets ~ St. Nicholas stood in a ship at the height of the storm, ordering the winds and waves to be at peace. It was probably this last miracle which made the fisherfolk of Abbotsbury originally choose him as their patron saint: the fishing villages of Chaldon Herring, Worth Matravers and Arne also have churches dedicated to him. The voice of bells, like that of the saint, can subdue the aerial demons who cause storms, and so one of the bells in the church tower bears the legend Sancte Nicholae, ora pro nobis. (This bell was melted down in 1773, but the saint is not forgotten. He appears on a panel of the window set in the south chapel in 1910, and the church banner shows the three golden money-bags of the story against a red background, like an heraldic charge).

Running before the chancel and its two flanking chapels is the rood-screen, a wooden arcade whose pillars end in carved foliage supporting a walkway and the dominating statues of Christ on the cross, his mother, and St. John. On festival days the choristers line up along this walkway to join in the singing before processing down again, through a doorway newly cut in the north wall and down the wooden steps ~ for the rebuilding has made the older, internal stairway to the roodloft impractical. Another similar doorway is cut to lead from the tower stairs onto the north aisle roof. (A roodscreen like ours, but with the statues gone, survives in the church at Trent).

The two chapels have their own altars. The northern one is flanked by the image of a saint standing on the angel carved in Ham stone; the southern one has a double piscina to its left, where water is poured away after it has rinsed the sacred vessels, and to its right is another saint on another stand, this one being carved with flowers. Above the southern altar is a wall-painting which later on, in the year of its destruction, is described as follows: ~ "An ancient painting of our Saviour rising out of the tomb: on each side of him the words Ecce Homo. Under the tomb an altar, with a book, chalice, paten, two crewets &c.; two monks in their habits kneeled before the altar; a stream of blood issuing out of Christ's side, received by a monk in a chalice".

Abbot John, commissioning that painting for the rebuilt church, must have thought that masses would be said for his soul beneath it in perpetuity, as he himself said requiem for Thomas and Eleanor de Luda, John and Elizabeth Matravers, Humphrey Stafford Earl of Devon, and all the other benefactors of the Abbey. He died in 1534, before the changes came. His successor, Roger Rodden, was elected in that year: at the same time the vicar died and a new man was appointed, Angel Hill. Five years later the Abbey was dissolved, and subsequently the last Abbot ~ now bearing his family name, Roger Hardy ~ was appointed as vicar of Hilton, a former property of the Abbey; while Sir Giles Strangways became possessed of the Abbey itself. But the two men had been friends, and remained friends. Already in the 1530s Roger had been supported by Sir Giles in disputes over the management of monastic lands, and after the dissolution the former Abbot could rely on the influence of the new landlord. In 1545 he wrote to Sir Giles about his fishery rights in the village, where the fishermen ~ taking advantage of a new landlord ~ were witholding their dues. Roger also mentions the vicar's rights ~ each Saturday when the net came in, the fishermen divided up their catch on the shore, and a portion equivalent to that of each fisher was reserved for the vicar, "for his owne sustenaunce".

The reign of Henry VIII, which brought the total destruction of St. Peter's Minster, meant little to the church of St. Nicholas beyond the loss of the saints from their pedestals and the cessation of Mass for the dead. When his son came to the throne there were fresh Acts of Parliament which must have caused the destruction of the statues on the roodloft, the burning of the church's missals and processionals, and the winding-up of the guild of St. Peter ~ if indeed that body had survived since its inception in the days of Cnut and Edward the Confessor. In 1549 a commission was issued for an inventory of church goods in England which, as further orders two years later made clear, was to be delivered to the King. Sir Giles Strangways was among the Dorset men charged with listing these goods and seeing that they were not embezzled instead of being sent to court. It is from his inventory that I have described the mediaeval altar and vestments: probably the brass and gilt plate surviving in 1551 was second-best, the finest work having been quietly converted into a cash repair fund before the Commission came round. They picked out the chalice, the two copes, the surplices and table-cloths to remain with the church: the rest regarded as more superstitious because it was set aside for the mass ~ was left in the charge of the vicar John Thomson and five parishioners including Hugh Pysing, nephew of Abbot John. But in 1553 the young king died and was succeeded by Mary who, as a Catholic, wanted the church goods returned and the old manner of worship restored here as elsewhere. Next year the vicar lost his post, like many other priests who were known to have been sympathetic to the Protestant regime, and was succeeded by Thomas Wattys. A series of official letters sent Sir Giles to London to render account of his actions: some of the Dorset church goods had in any case already been sold or melted down.

The silver~gilt chalice remained in the church throughout the Catholic reign of Mary and saw the first years of Elizabeth and Anglicanism: but in 1574 it was replaced by a new one, without any history of Popery. This was in turn replaced in 1748; for a time the church had two chalices, but after about a century the old one got lost.

Two years after giving his church a bell, Sir John added to the beauty of holiness by re-roofing the chancel. The new barrel vault was designed to display an elaborate ceiling ornamented with plaster reliefs. The main panels show stars and angels ~ three holding scrolls, and three whose faces are surrounded by six wings. The angel to the north holds a scroll saying 'Glory to God in the highest' and the two on the south answer 'And on earth peace', 'Good will towards men'. The plasterer must have been inspired by the old idea that the chancel roof should represent heaven. At the corners of the panels he has put lilies, papyrus leaves, a design of leaves with faces on, and (of all things) tortoises. The leaf-faces might imitate the green man carving from the Abbey, now set into a wall across the road from the churchyard, but they are more likely to be standard baroque ornaments.

The ceiling is evidently from the same hand as that in the room above the Breakfast Room in the Strangways family seat at Melbury, where we meet with the tortoises again; and the artist might possibly have been that Eaton of Stogursey in Somerset who in 1615 decorated the ceiling of a chapel, now destroyed, at Chantmarle with stars, cherubim, and four angels. The six plaster shields beneath the angels tell, in the concise language of heraldry, the story of Sir John's family in Abbotsbury. To the left of each shield are the Strangways arms ~ two lions, which should be striped in silver and red ~ and to the right those of a succession of wives, for each shield comemmorates a match with some daughter of the gentry. Sir Giles, the first to be lord of the manor, is here with his wife Joan Mordaunt. Their son Henry appears with Margaret Rutland, whom he married in 1526; Henry never came to possess Abbotsbury, for he died in the siege of Boulogne, a victim of Henry VIII's foreign policy. Sir Giles the younger married Joan Wadham in 1547, and they are both here, as is their son John and his wife Dorothy Thynne of the Longleat family. Their son Sir John appears with Grace Trenchard and the inscription 1638, which may date the ceiling, the marriage, or both. Finally comes the heir apparent, Giles ~ later to be made Colonel Giles in the Civil War, and his wife Susanna Edwards. The six smaller shields set above the chancel arch carry the story further back in time, for amongst these are the arms of Strangways and Arundell to commemorate the first marriage of Henry, father of Sir Giles the elder, while those of Strangways and Stafford are there to remind us of the marriage of Thomas in 1460 with Alianor, grand-daughter of Humphrey Stafford of Hooke, and a distant cousin of that Earl of Devon for whose soul the monks had prayed. Above these shields ~ though it has since been moved to the tower ~ was the full heraldic achievement of Sir John, in which appear the two Strangways lions quartered with the arms of five other ancestors and flanked by two supporters ~ a silver greyhound and a silver wolf ~ beneath the crest of a boar's head between wings.

Having re-roofed the ceiling, Sir John gave the church a new pulpit (it was set up one arch further west than it is now). The style of the woodcarving, with rows of dumpy classical arcades marching around the faces of an octagon, is typical of the period. Sir John seems to have picked it up second-hand, for the arms painted on the sounding-board at the top of the pulpit comemorate the marriage of an eldest son of the family of Egioke ~ who lived in Worcestershire, with a daughter of the family of Denham ~ who lived in the home counties and gave the world an Irish politician and a translator of Virgil.

The sermons that Thomas Payne and Edward Osborne, his successor as vicar in 1640, preached from their new pulpit were doubtless loyal enough; elsewhere the Civil War had begun. Abbotsbury, being an undefended settlement, was incapable of sustaining a siege. In 1643 a Parliamentary garrison occupied the manor house, which had been abandoned by the villagers and servants; they met only with strong language from Lady Grace, and did £200 worth of damage. The house was afterwards re-occupied by a Royalist garrison under Colonel James Strangways ~ the younger son of Sir John, who was himself engaged in the defence of Sherborne Castle ~ but in November of 1644 Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper was sent with an expedition from Dorchester to fight the matter out. They marched down Bishop's Lane and through the village, coming into Church Street just as night was falling. A trumpeter, giving summons to surrender, was met by the jeers of the Royalists, who hung out a blood-red flag, which meant that no quarter would be given. And so, according to the letter that Sir Anthony later sent to Parliament, 'immediately we drew out a party of musketeers, with which Major Baintum in person stormed the church, into which they had put thirteen men because it flanked the house. This, after a hot bickering, we carried, and took all the men prisoners'. If you look closely at the canopy of the pulpit, you will see two bullet-holes in the wood, at a height just above the left shoulder of a man standing in the pulpit, and these were made during the fight. The firing must have been pretty wild, because when the roof of the north aisle was restored in 1930 two flattened bullets were found embedded in one of its beams. Once the church had been taken, the Parliamentary troops moved in on the manor house: they burned down an outhouse and kept a fire of small shot, grenades and shells on the windows of the upper floor. Finally they succeeded in throwing bundles of blazing furze in through the lower windows and so set fire to a magazine of gunpowder, which blew up with loss of life on both sides and the almost total destruction of the house. One gable end survives. The force of the blast also damaged the church, for the young and gallant Parliamentary Captain Gorge was hurt in the head by a block of carved stone falling from the tower. Samuel Ford was among the Abbotsbury men on the Royalist side, with John and William Hardy, James Pittman, and seven others. Two years after the Restoration of Charles II these men, who had 'behaved themselves loyall and faithfull', received pensions from a fund administered by Colonel Giles after the Strangways had been restored to their lands.

The war was not easily forgotten. As late as 1841 there was a service on 30th January to comemmorate the 'Martyrdom of the Blessed KIng Charles the First': you may read from the prayer-book presented to the church in that year, now in the vestry, how God 'was provoked to deliver up both us and our King into the hands of cruel and unreasonable men'. Even in Abbotsbury, where one in thirty villagers had been identified by the Commonwealth as potentially subversive Royalists, a Puritan Baptist meeting had come into being. But the Restoration brought power back to the church. Six years later a new bell was purchased, cast by Thomas Purdue of Closworth in Somerset, who worked for many other churches including Sherborne Abbey. This may be the 'great bell' which was mended twenty years later, when Richard Henville and Ralph Miller were churchwardens, and paid the man and his boy eight shillings for their four days spent on the job. At the same time the old lead was stripped off the tower and sold to a Dorchester plumber who had previously been persuaded to this contract with a shilling's worth of beer. In subsequent years the bells were oiled at a cost of 6d per annum. The third of the existing bells is the work of William Night, 1724; finally in 1773 the mediaeval bell calling on St. Nicholas was melted down and Thomas Bilbie ~ the youngest of three bell-founding brothers ~ cast new ones to complete our peal of six. Bilbie may have been engaged for the task because he lived at Cullompton in Devon, a property of the Strangways; but he was also founding bells for Dorchester and Cerne Abbas around the same time. Five of the original clappers from these bells, made in the old thistle shape, were laid aside in a recent re-hanging and now lie on the floor of the clock room.

In 1726 the inheritance of Sir Giles Strangways, having passed through seven male heirs, came to a daughter, Susanna. She had previously married Thomas Horner of Mells in Somerset, from a family who like the Strangways had profited greatly from the Dissolution. Thomas and Susanna had one daughter, Elizabeth, who in 1736 married Stephen Fox, a young man later to become Earl of Ilchester. So the village of Abbotsbury became Ilchester property and the Earls, as successors to the Abbots, held the office of rector ~ despite being laymen.

Thomas Horner had quarrelled with Madam Susanna when she welcomed Stephen Fox as a son-in-law, and after Elizabeth's clandestine marriage he vowed never to speak to his wife again. Five years later he died: and in the years of her widowhood, moved by repentance or simply by piety, Madam Susanna began an ambitious series of donations to the churches of her tenants, including Abbotsbury. In 1748 she gave a new set of communion plate (now stored in the diocesan repository at Salisbury). There were four pieces, all silver-gilt, bearing the monogram IHS ~ a contraction of the Greek form of JESUS surrounded by rays and, slightly less prominently, Madam Susanna's arms and motto. The flagon was made by Paul Lamerie, and the two patens and chalice by Daniel Piers after Lamerie's designs: he had made communion plate on commission for three other churches on the estate before. In 1755 Madam Susanna added a further piece to the set, a silver-gilt bread-cutter with a blade forged by Gillo.

The next stage was the 'beautifying', as it was described at the time, of the church ~ 'particularly the chancel'. After the churchwardens had paid 'for taking Rubbish out of Church' (l/6d to John Coward, 1749) the architects took down the mediaeval rood-screen, blocking its external window, and put in box-pews. In 1751 the east window, which being off-centre was distasteful to classical ideas of symmetry, was blocked: in its place the church received the massive dark brown decorated altarpiece which now dominates the view down the nave. It is regarded as a fine specimen of what was then thought fitting for churches, with its ten commandments picked out in gold and flanked by Corinthian capitals, and its adoring cherub faces above. Something similar, though less overpowering, can be seen at the old church in Bothenhampton.

There were other donations in the years after Madam Susanna's death in 1758. Three new candelabra came to replace the simpler fixtures from which candles had lit Evensong and (at special expense) celebrated the defeat of the western army at Sedgemoor in 1685. The largest of these hangs in its original place in the middle of the church; it has two tiers of eight candles each, and at the top there is a flying dove. Another candelabrum of the same design lights the church on Brownsea Island. The two smaller ones, of six lights each, having been moved from their original positions, over the chancel, to the gallery. These candelabra are like many others exported from London, and as such they are the first donation to our church from outside of Dorset and its adjoining counties.

At the same time many of the windows were newly glazed, incorporating designs in subdued yellows, reds and browns. The tracery of the two north chapel windows was filled with various symbols and coats of arms ~ heraldically meaningless while an imported panel in the south aisle shows St. Thomas leaning on the spear which is his emblem: in the west window the risen Christ bears a banner; the tracery of the large window by the porch has the monogram IHS again, and Christ distributing the elements of the last supper ~ a small, gentle, golden figure.

Stepping inside this church of the early nineteenth century, you would have seen a building where simplicity and order had eclipsed the miscellaneous splendour of the middle ages. The people sit in box pews of panelled oak, each one entered by a little gate on a latch held open for you by the verger (the same arrangement as may be seen today at Holnest and Puddletown). On either side of the nave, at the front, the pews are about three feet taller and the panelling is more imposing: here the Strangways family sit. The mediaeval font has been built into a pew, and a new one is installed halfway up the nave ~ it is designed as a thick classical pillar surmounted by a small round bowl, and the lid is similarly round, ending in a knob like those which ornament the box pews. These seats are insufficient for the growing population, and a west gallery has been provided by the Revd. William Alleyne Barker in 1823, the second year of his incumbency. It, too, is of panelled oak and bears on its front the Royal Arms. (In fact the arms blazoned are those of the Hanoverian kings, which became obsolete in 1800. Either Abbotsbury was behind the times, or the Royal Arms were transferred from some earlier use. Today they are flanked on either side by the flags for the men's and women's branches of the British Legion. Barker, the joint incumbent of our church and that of Winterborne Monkton, died in 1831 and is comemmorated in the south aisle by a marble urn beneath a weeping marble willow.

Space is made in this gallery for a barrel-organ, which stands at the back against the blocked tower arch. It is designed as a delicate compromise between classical and mediaeval styles ~ the central pipes terminate in a Doric column but those to the right and left end in simplified gothic pinnacles. This organ has rendered obsolete the church band, that motley group of players who dominated our music for many years. There was a 'tenor viol' or viola to play the alto part; their bass viol and wooden pitch-pipe are kept in the ringer's loft, and the bass viol, at least, dates back to 1799 when John Boatswain spent 5/- on new strings for it. His request for repayment, like other church matters, was carried out either in the porch or underneath the tower where, since 1835, the parish officials have had a cast-iron chest for their papers. It is set with the names of the churchwardens ~ Tullidge and Groves ~ and of the overseers of the poor Kellaway and Green. (This chest is now in the vestry. The organ was later destroyed; the musical instruments survived until the 1930s, and no further).

The West Gallery being insufficient for the increase in people, another one ~ the Children's Gallery ~ has been built along the side of the church. It runs from the eastern side of the door to the western side of the first window in the north chapel, and extends forward almost to the nave arcade, supported by four pillars. Under this gallery, and in front of the tallest box pews, runs a simple communion rail to separate the chancel from the nave. The east end of the church is plainly furnished, decorated only by the great altarpiece: the vicar of Abbotsbury may be celebrating communion here from the silver-gilt service, or he may be in the pulpit, preparing his sermon while the clerk intones the lesson for the day from the reading-desk fixed in the next pew and lit by two candles.

Which vicar shall we imagine in that pulpit ? Perhaps the Revd. James Harris, who died in 1773 and whose memorial in the south aisle tells us to 'learn his character from his family, his parishioners, his acquaintance;and imitate in thy own life the virtues which shall appear to have been displayed in his conduct'. His virtues were less appreciated elsewhere, since he was the incumbent of whom a Londoner wrote in 1752: 'All the people of Abbotsbury, including the Vicar, are thieves, smugglers, and plunderers of wrecks'. The last illicit cargo to be landed in Dorset, by the way, was brought ashore at Abbotsbury by some enterprising smugglers from Chideock in 1882, which would place the event in the thirty year long incumbency of the Revd. G.H. Penny. His memorial brass ~ a lozenge embellished with gothic flowers at the corners ~ was erected by the parishioners 'as a token of their love and respect for one who had endeared himself to them by his kindliness of heart and by his long and faithful labours for their spiritual and temporal welfare'.

Other funerary monuments celebrate the virtues of Madam Susanna's descendants. Giles, the third son of the second Earl, became captain of a regiment of hussars and died aged 28 in 1827. His mother Maria 'lived upwards of thirty years an inhabitant of the parish of Abbotsbury, an example to her neighbours, a blessing to her family, and a devoted servant of Christ' before she died in 1842 and was comemmorated by a monument whose florid gothic panelling contrasts with the grey marble of Giles' classical memorial. The church contains a memorial of another kind to the third Earl, Henry Stephen, the stepson of Maria: his hatchment hangs in the tower. A hatchment (properly speaking, an achievement) is the representation on a diamond-shaped frame, painted black, of the arms of a dead person. From the time of the funeral in January 1858 until the period of mourning was over, it hung above the entrance to Strangways Castle looking down over the sub-tropical gardens; then, although the Earl himself was buried with his ancestors at Melbury Sampford, the hatchment was taken into Abbotsbury church. In 1865 the fourth Earl ~ William, Maria's son ~ also had his hatchment hung above the Castle door; he lies buried under a grave-slab, in the shape of a cross with a pitched roof, outside Sir John's door into the south chapel, and when the time of mourning was over his hatchment too came into the church. In the restoration of the fabric both were moved into the tower.

The meetings to discuss alterations in the winter of 1885 cannot have differed so greatly from the conference of the 1510s. In place of Abbot John was the Earl, his fourteenth successor as rector and manorial lord of Abbotsbury. The vicar was the Revd. William Murray Fairbairn, twenty-first incumbent after Richard Newson. James White and John Adams were churchwardens, and Arthur W. Blomfield was the architect commissioned for the job. He got to work rapidly; in February 1886 permission was given by the Bishop of Salisbury for the changes, and the building was reopened on Sunday the 7th of March.

At half-past ten the bells summoned Abbotsbury pople to their church. A procession set out from the vicarage just across the road, headed by the Bishop. The vicar, acting as chaplain, was carrying his crozier for him, and they were followed by the churchwardens, all singing a psalm: ~

'The stone which the builders refused is become the head stone of the corner.

This is the Lord's doing: it is marvellous in our eyes'.

As they came to the door the Bishop stopped and said: -

'Open me the gates of righteousness that I may go into them and give thanks

And James White answered: -

'This is the gate of the Lord: the righteous shall enter into it'.

There followed the dedication service, prayers (in which special mention was made of the fifth Earl and his support) and communion, after which the bells were rung throughout the afternoon until the children's service at three o'clock, when the vicar's daughter was christened. The villagers re-assembled for evensong, a choral service led by the twenty-four members of the choir in their new cassocks and surplices. They sang "Onward Christian Soldiers" to the accompaniment of Mr. Tennant on the harmonium, since the old organ had been demolished and its pipes had not yet been fitted into the new one ~ this was done by J. W. Walker & Sons in the following September.

The church in which we stand today is the same as was viewed by that Abbotsbury congregation a century ago. They sat in the new open pews, designed to accomodate 350 people. They saw the new chancel rail and communion table, and the new ornamented stalls in which the vicar and the choir could sit after they had robed themselves out of sight, under the tower. The floor was laid with red and black tiles, and in the south chapel and around the communion table the tiles were decorated with fourfold patterns ~ rose windows, fleurs-de-lys, oak twigs or vine scrolls; in the north chapel the tiles bore lions rampant. The communion table itself bore an altar-cloth of crimson Saxe velvet with designs of a cross, passion flowers and lilies, worked by the careful fingers of the Countess of Ilchester. On it were flowers in brass vases given by the curate, candiesticks donated by J.F. France, and a brass jewelled altar cross given by the family of the vicar in memory of his mother; they also gave the embroidered mat on the altar steps.

The lesson was read from a brass eagle lectern which, like the brass hanging lamp behind it, was given by Charles Crew of Evershot in memory of Mrs. Ann Jennings. Afterwards he gave a new Bible, bound in crimson morocco with a gilt cross, corners and clasps, to the glory of God and in memory of Charlotte Jennings. (This is now in the vestry, as is the memorial of Mrs. Jennings, where the marble has fallen off the background and been lost, leaving only the name of the mason, Hellyer of Weymouth. Beneath it is a brass plaque to Crew, who died on board the 'Mexican' in 1893 and was buried at sea).

The vicar, stepping into his newly moved pulpit, read notes from a sermon desk marked SNA ~ St. Nicholas, Abbotsbury ~ and lit by two candlesticks, all given by Thomas Cooper. The collection was taken in velvet bags worked by Mrs. Hawkins. Thomas Cooper also gave the font ewer with whose water the vicar's daughter was baptised. The font in which she received the sacrament ~ the oldest thing in Abbotsbury church ~ had been rescued from obscurity and fitted with a new base.

The clock which struck three to announce the children's service was an earlier acquisition, having come from E.L. Dent of London in 1884. It is a horizontal bed clock on a cast iron base, and keeps good time. A series of pencilled notes on the clock cupboard record occasions when the clock was stopped and weights altered ~ initially by James White, the churchwarden in 1886; Iater by his son James, who was in charge of making our clock conform with British Summer Time from 1916 onwards; more recently by his nephew Mr. Charles White, who has also welded on three cast-iron teeth to replace those worn out by a century of ticking.

That century has seen few changes to the church, for the impulse of our age is towards restoration rather than novelty. The bells were re-hung in 1897. The roofs were restored throughout, at a cost of £1800, in 1930 during the churchwardenship of James Hutchings and the younger James White ~ whose names appear cast in lead on the north aisle roof, the earlier leaden records of 1693 and 1807 having been lifted from their original sites and set alongside them.

It was the Whites who gave Abbotsbury our first woman churchwarden, in 1925. Electric light was installed in 1938. In the following years war came to the church for a second time in the more innocuous form of a machine-gun post on top of the tower, where two bored soldiers could scan the sea in case Hitler should invade down by the dragon's teeth of the tank barriers and the gun emplacements on the beach. On a hot July afternoon in 1942, C.F. Wright and A.F. Head were lazing on duty and carved their names in the leaden roof.

Some alterations have taken place in the south aisle, where the present vestry was demarcated by an oaken screen in 1925, and four windows were added. The easternmost was commissioned in 1910 by the widow of the fifth Earl, in memory of her husband and of two children. The, figures, by Anning Bell, show St. Nicholas on the left for the church dedication, St. Catherine in the middle for our hilltop chapel ~ the fifteenth-century face of the Virgin was at the time identified as Catherine's ~ and to the right St. Andrew, who was deemed suitable for a fishing village. The first window in the south wall comemmorates Dr. Richard Burdett Sellers, and was inserted in 1923: it shows St. Luke, because he was the patron saint of doctors, flanked by two images of mercy from his gospel ~ the visiting of the sick, and the feeding of the hungry. In the tracery you may see the heraldic badge of the St. John Ambulance Brigade, of which Dr. Sellers was a member. This window is the work of Messrs. Clayton & Bell, as is that further to the west of the south aisle. This was put up by Dr. Sellers in 1922, in memory of his only son Norman who had died two years before. The figure to the right is St. George, armed as a knight with spear and shield, but the face is that of Norman Burdett Sellers. To the left is St. David, to emphasise a Welsh connection: in the centre Christ holds out a victor's crown. The glass in the tracery reconciles the heraldry of England and Wales, and of Abbotsbury Abbey, whose shield shows the keys of St. Peter repeated three times over against a background of heavenly blue. Finally comes the window to Sophie, wife of Dr. Sellers and mother of Norman, who died in 1952 and is portrayed in the likeness of the woman from the Acts of the Apostles called Tabitha or Dorcas: 'this woman was full of good works and alms deeds which she did'. On either side are biblical scenes in a style partly gothic, partly archaeologically real. To the left 'they laid her in an upper chamber', dead and mourned;to the right St. Peter, as the type of Christ, is bringing her back to life.

The latest additions to the furnishing of our church are less elaborately made, being two book-tables of chipboard covered with plastic veneer, one white and one imitating the grain of wood. They were introduced during the vacancy of the benefice after the Revd. Humphrey Jacques had left, and before the Revd. Roy Wyatt was instituted as joint vicar of Abbotsbury, rector of Portesham and rector of Langton Herring in 1983. The books over by the organ are for sale; those by the vestry are for loan, having been given for that purpose by parishioners. They are stamped with the Revd. Wyatt's Portesham address so that they can be posted back, as usually happens ~ sometimes with a letter of thanks. A thirteenth century vicar, could he browse along the shelves, would feel at home with the retold biblical stories (Queen Esther Saves Her People) and the devotional guides (Prayer for Beginners, The Oratory of the Heart). Free To Be Myself and The Story of Youth With a Mission might shake him up a bit.

Abbotsbury church today serves many different ideas of faith. At the great festivals it affirms the unity of the village in membership of the Church of England, but each Sunday it serves only the nucleus of committed Christians in the neighbourhood. The attendance at the midnight mass on Christmas Eve is about a hundred and fifty people, and the seats are filled as was intended a century ago ~ but at an ordinary communion or family service in the mornings, held jointly with Portesham and Langton Herring, there will be some thirty people, and the evening service held for Abbotsbury alone usually sees the dozen members of the parochial church council. The choir was disbanded in 1984. The worshippers at the Methodist and Congregational chapels elsewhere in the village had simply died out by the 1980s, leaving their buildings behind: the former has been demolished to make way for a house extension, and the latter is being used as an arts centre. But the parish church is still live.

The love that once gave stone and plaster angels, brass ornaments and silk embroidery now shows itself in flowers. For the past decade or more there has been a flower rota ~ it is currently drawn up by Mrs. Margaret Jee ~ ensuring that out of about twenty-six women each one brings flowers to the church on two Sundays of the year; there is a similar rota for polishing the brass. The flowers are from village gardens, except in the dead season between winter and spring when some may be purchased. The arrangers come, in about equal numbers, from established village families and from those incomers who have retired to Abbotsbury in increasing numbers since about 1960. A special effort is made for three festivals in the year ~ Christmas, Easter and the Harvest Festival. For the last few years it has been customary to put a hanging bracket of greenery up at the beginning of Advent, and then place place four candles in it, one each week, leading up to Christmas. Another new custom is the christingle, an orange speared with cloves and angelica to represent the pains of the Passion at Christmas time; this is a Danish custom, and was introduced by a newcomer to the village, Mrs. Trish Holburg, who married a Dane. They built a new house up Back Street, but moved away again in 1986 after a few years' residence. More greenery is brought into the church by all those concerned at Christmas, and chrysanthemums are sometimes purchased. The flowers available at Easter depend on the date of the festival and the state of the weather, but a special effort is made to provide yellow blooms like daffodils and forsythia. At Harvest Festival there will be Michaelmas daisies, and emblematic groups of natural things ~ bread and coal and wine and grain ~ in the chancel, with a sheaf of wheat on either side of the steps, and the gallery hung with oars and fishing nets; for the boats still go out, although the practice of hauling nets directly onto the beach has been discontinued. At one Harvest Festival a series of token offerings were made ~ one person brought eggs up into the chancel, another one bread. Mr. Ted Pittman walked up with his scythe, and Mr. Gordon Hanson, who had recently had an extension built to his house, came with a brick.

Wherever this land has been broken, it has yielded relics of the Abbey. The east ground was fomerly part of the monk's graveyard, and the burials of the 1870s disturbed older ones laid out in cists of rough stones: these ante-dated the laying of the water supply to the Abbey, for one of the leaden pipes had broken through an earlier cist. The old churchyard wall was raised on the lower courses of the north wall of the Abbey church, and so the transept protruded from that wall into the south ground of our churchyard, where its pavement could formerly be seen.

The coffin to the right as you leave the porch has been above ground since at least 1846 and so must have been exhumed from either North or West Ground. That to the left was found under the porch in 1885. A third is built into the southern churchyard wall, by the little gate, having been dug up from Abbey Ground in 1902: it has rough zigzag ornament at the bottom and ~ our ancestors being realistic about these things ~ a hole halfway along through which the liquids could escape as the body decayed. Hereabouts, by the way, there is some kind of vault. Two men went out a few years ago to set up a new gatepost: they were carrying a crowbar to make a firm hole for the new post. One of them held the bar, and the other hit it with his sledge: the bar slipped down into the ground, and there was a clang as it hit the floor of a stone chamber underneath.

Beside this little gate for some time there was a blue fertiliser bag containing the bones of monks. In 1983 the new owner of the Abbot's lodgings had ordered alterations to the house, including the construction of a conservatory extending into the garden, which encroaches on the precinct of St. Peter's Minster. The workmen set to and dug a sunken area for this conservatory, throwing up bones from cists in the process, until they came to a wall of fine ashlar which must have been the fifteenth-century chapel, south of the minster's chancel. Consulting their instructions ~ the owner was absent at the time ~ they thought that they should carry on for a foot or so, and reduced the wall to rubble. The burials south of this chapel may already have been disturbed, for one was found in the wall itself, and it had two heads. About three or four skeletons were laid out while work carried on: they were small in stature, and may have been the remains of novices. Afterwards these bones went into the fertiliser bag and stayed by the gate until public attention was drawn to them, when they were buried with a short funeral service.

Again, in 1934 the sexton came across a stone coffin, four feet down, without any lid. A crozier had been laid beside the body: the right to carry a crook like this belonged properly to Bishops, but they often granted it to the principal Abbots in their dioceses. The leaden head of the crozier survives, quite plain to look at, and probably dating from the twelth century.

Of slightly later date is the figure of an Abbot, now in the porch, which was taken from Abbey Ground in 1788 before this field was attached to the churchyard. Some village masons, busily wrecking the floor of St. Peter's nave, paused to remove this monument (breaking off the end as they did so). It lay flush with the floor, without any surrounding inscription. The style is of 1200, more or less, but as several Abbots died round about that time we cannot put a name to the face; in any case the carvers in Purbeck marble, from whose workshops this effigy came, merely took orders for 'an Abbot' without attempting personal likeness. According to them, an Abbot was a man of calm and gentle gravity, clothed as if to celebrate Mass. In his right hand he should bear a crozier as an emblem of authority;in his left should be a book, the Rule of St. Benedict, by whose precepts he governed his monks. Exposure to the weather has turned our Abbot a soft grey, but originally he was a shining black like the effigies of Abbots which may still be seen in their own church of Sherborne Abbey. Another grave, lined with stone slabs, was disturbed in Abbey Ground in 1906: it yielded a chalice and paten of the early fourteenth century, which must have been used to celebrate mass at the altar by a monk who was also a priest.

Inside the church, to the north of the communion table, there formerly stood another hollowed stone. Gerard, who had often seen it in the 1620s, describes it as 'a daintie Marbill coffin'; Hutchins, a century later, calls it 'coarse black marble', which only goes to show how tastes change. Both writers repeat the local tradition that it was the coffin of Orc, minister of Cnut and founder of the Abbey. But the dimensions of the thing, as given by Hutchins, are 4½ foot by 2 foot by 1½ foot deep;and unless Orc was a very fat dwarf, he cannot have been buried in such a squat rectangle. It is more likely to have been a tank of some kind. The 'black marble' of which it was composed may have come from the quarries at Tournai, which also produced fonts in the twelth century. Its secret lies under the chancel, for the restorers of 1750 regarded this tank or coffin as so much lumber and buried it where it stood.

The nave of St. Peter's, in which the most honoured burials were placed, was paved with tiles of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. Some were observed by the masons in 1788, and others were exposed when the Abbey foundations were exposed in 1871. After the generous but destructive gift of Abbey Ground as an extension to the churchyard, destruction began in earnest, for each new grave simply cut a hole in the nave floor. By and large, the sexton would drop carved stone back in if he disturbed it while grave-digging; decorated tiles might be sold off, and their discovery noted in the burial register.

More recently, archaeological excavations have also found tile fragments. There are lions and griffins, fleur-de-lys and rose patterns, as well as a scene of two birds facing each other through a central tree. None of the designs are unique to Abbotsbury, several being recorded from Shaftesbury Abbey as well, and it seems that itinerant tilers set up their kilns for each Abbey in turn, using wooden design moulds until they wore out.

Here and there in the churchyard can be seen pieces of carved stone from the Abbey. The piece in the wall facing the church would be thirteenth-century, since it has sockets for Purbeck marble pillars; the base of one of these pillars can be seen, if you search, down the lane leading to the Grove. Behind the piece with sockets is the fragment of a grooved edge for a doorway. Then, by the kissing gate where the wall has been rebuilt, is a corner-piece from the outside of a roof. Over where East and South Grounds meet is a large fragment from the springing of a fan-vault, and where three paths meet at the edge of South Ground there is a pile of many more shafts of pillars and fragments of vaulting, mixed up without regard to date and extensively covered with ivy. In the south wall below Abbey Ground, just before the gate, is a fine piece from the top of a Perpendicular arcade, like the tracery of a window but with blank stone to the right. The arch marked 1791 to the right of the gate is a red herring: it comes from an old beach hut built in that year to serve Strangways Castle and afterwards demolished. But next to it is a little coffin lid, only three feet long, with a cross on it in relief. There are more large carved blocks at the western end of the old wall between South and Abbey Grounds, and finally two corners of pillars flank the main gate, while lining the path from it are what may be the bevelled edges of stone seats; they are very much worn.

The old south wall of the churchyard was laid on the north wall of the Minster and so preserved it from being torn apart by villagers quarrying for building material in the eighteenth century, when so many of the monastic fragments were taken to decorate Abbotsbury homes. In 1967 a stretch of this wall was cleared it is still exposed ~ and enough was found to make a reconstruction possible; the wall was cleared at the point halfway along the nave, where a plain wall was succeeded by a sequence of piers flanking low stone benches. The piers, which are about ten feet apart, were ornamented by round shafts, perhaps of Purbeck marble to contrast with the yellow corallian stone of the main build. The style suggests a mid-fifteenth century date, in the Abbacy perhaps of William Wooler. At the foot of the wall were found worn tiles, like those excavated at earlier dates, which had been reset in a haphazard fashion and the spaces filled in with plain red tiles or flagstones. Evidently the tiles, which had originally been made in the late thirteenth century, were used again after the nave was rebuilt: it was the last major building project at the Abbey, and must have dwarfed the adjoining church of St. Nicholas.

To the north of this stretch of wall, by the blocked south door of the church, is the base of a cross. It does not belong to the churchyard, being a market cross ~ the whole monument must have been ten or fifteen feet high, and I imagine it at the junction of Market Street, Church Street and Rodden Row, surrounded by the noisy crowds attending the fair which was, from at least 1401, held on the feast-day of Sts. Peter and Paul. There were complaints from Bridport traders, in those days, that Abbotsbury was eclipsing the commercial life of their town.

There is another monumental cross in the churchyard, the war memorial. This is of grey granite, polished on the side facing the village, and is some eight feet high;it was put up at the end of 1919 with the names, set in leaden lettering, of the thirteen Abbotsbury men who died in the Great War. One of them, Edwin Louis Benbow, also has a brass tablet in the church: he was born here in 1895, the son of a former head gardener at the sub-tropical gardens, and died twenty-three years later at Ypres, where he remains. Nobody from the village died in the Second World War, a fact recorded ~ as a dispensation of Providence ~ on a stone tablet in the north aisle of the church.

Our graveyard ~ considered as the home of the dead, and not just as an archaeological site ~ has been well cared for. The present layout dates back to 1837, when the paths were paved with Purbeck stone. The north gate put up at that time, has been replaced by a simpler design;there were iron railings which surrounded the grassy patch at the junction of the tower and south aisle until they were taken away for munitions in 1941. Everyone in Abbotsbury comes here in the end, seven feet deep as was agreed in 1876 ~ unless you are a widow or widower, in which case your coffin gets to rest directly on the one that has done before (stories of the wrong wife being laid on the wrong husband are probably apocryphal). The graves are now dug by a couple of men sent down by the undertaker involved, but until the War there was a regular sexton. It was he who tolled the bell for people, an hour after the moment of their death; for ten minutes there was a knell, which meant either slow ringing or one stroke a minute. Then the bell was allowed to fall silent, and a sort of code was rung, consisting of a single stroke for a child, two for a woman, and three for a man.

Here is history in abundance, and love. 'This stone is erected by Foresters and other friends to the memory of William Gibbons, who died 28th August 1892 aged 48 years after 22 years faithful service to 'Court Ilchester Lodge' no. 5024, Abbotsbury'.

'John Nicholas Mundy, late chief officer coast guard who departed this life November 6th 1898. He died as he lived, a humble and consistent follower of the Saviour, resting his hope of everlasting salvation on the merits of his redeemer alone'.

'S.C. Towills Ordinary Seaman RNJ/87647, HMS Powerful, 2nd July 1918 age 18'.

'For love of Eilidh, darling, daughter of Elsa and David Boadella, born Dec.16th 1961, Who died, aged eighteen in the Kilburn fire after twelve hours in London as a co-worker of Mother Teresa of Calcutta, March 18th 1980. 'For mercy has a human heart/Pity, a human face' ~ Wm. Blake'.

'Fred Lexster, Swanherd, 1902-1982. All things bright and beautiful, all creatures great and small, he loved them all'. This grave is planted with a white rose-bush, and above the inscription there is a carving of a swan.

'In loving memory of Norman Giles who dies 25th February 1983 aged 75 years. 'The corn is sown again, it grows/The stars burn out, the darkness goes/The rhythms change, they do not close'. Also of Winifred Janet his beloved wife, who died 30th March 1986 aged 72 years'.

The style and language of headstones, like everything else, changes over time. The old, blunt formula 'Here lies the body of ...' occurs on a single grave of 1780 in North Ground, surmounted by a pattern of leaves and a cherub head; but next year when the same carver comemmorated Ann, daughter of Ann and William Pittman, he used the gentler phrase 'In memory of ...', and added a rhyme, now worn away, about the 'harmless Maid'. Seven early headstones with these cherub heads and oval cartouches are set against the wall of West Ground, having presumably been moved when this ground was levelled at a cost of £27 in 1934. They are apparently of local workmanship, being carved in Portesham stone. The oldest standing headstones in West Ground date back to the cholera epidemic of 1820; they are tall ~ four or five feet high ~ and at the tops, instead of the flattened domes of the primitive shape, there are wavy patterns of convex and concave curves, giving the stone a classical flavour ~ as does the italic script of the inscriptions and the new formula 'Sacred to the Memory of ...'. Ornament is initially confined to little rosettes at either end of a shallow curve; later on scrolls, urns and weeping willows make their appearance.

>From the 1860s onwards the masons of Weymouth and Portland, who seem to have acquired a monopoly of the tombstone trade due to the superior lasting powers of Portland stone, became influence by the Gothic Revival. Instead of a domed or curved top, the headstones end in peaked gothic arches, and as the masons experiment with this form, they come to set the inscription on a panel lower down the stone, and to fill the peak of the arch with ornament ~ carved cartouches showing an angel, the monogram IHS, or the anchor of Hope. Other stones imitate woodwork instead of architecture and end in a poppy-head like a fifteenth-century bench-end. The headstones in East Ground, from the last decade of the nineteenth century, have much more elaborate ornament in the top section, which sometimes grows into a panel as large as the inscription, imitating window tracery or perforated heraldic crosses. To the earlier motifs of design are added wreaths of flowers, hands holding scrolls, and doves bearing olive branches. The texts, which are now regularly added after the description of the dead, have been taken from the Bible to express their beliefs or virtues ~ 'The memory of the just is blessed', 'The God which fed me all my life long unto this day', 'Her children rise up and call her blessed', 'And thou shalt be missed because thy seat is empty'.

The same iconography continues in South Ground, where the first marble headstones and kerbs appear with Wilfred, son of Edward and Vida Vine, 1902; these have the inscriptions let in with leaden lettering, not carved. At the same time the designs on top of the earlier headstones evolve into the monumental cross, usually in marble although the tallest example imitates a churchyard cross in sandsatone. By the 1930s, as you move west across the ground, white marble or grey granite have become the norm, and in response to the different qualities of these materials the stones have become much lower ~ two or three feet high and the grave is surrounded by a stone kerb, filled with gravel or coloured stone chips. The headstones are squared off at the corners with no designs beyond roses or wreaths at the corners and pilasters at the side;some stones (Gabriel Mundy, 1929, being the first) are in the form of an open book, and Olive Pitman, 1940, has the statue of an angel. The texts chosen are briefer, and much concerned with rest ~ 'Peace perfect peace', 'Called home', 'Life's work well done', 'Reunited'.

Some of the monuments of the 1960s at the edge of South Ground, where the land dips down, choose simpler designs. The kerbs disappear ~ they are inconvenient to mow around ~ and white marble is abandoned for grey granite or Portland stone; but the headstones remain quite short, three foot at best, and the top reverts to being either a shallow dome or a slight wavy curve. At the edge of West Ground where the oldest and latest stones are side by side, the contrast in height is very noticeable. The modern headstones seldom have ornament, and the text is brief, although for the first time people are recorded by their short, daily names ~ Monty Gibb, 1977; Viv and Jim Trevett, 1983. Instead of biblical quotations, the texts show the love of the living for the dead ~ 'Sadly missed', 'A dearly loved husband, father, grandfather and greatgrandfather'. The shortness of both tombstones and texts is largely due to diocesan regulations which are aimed at repressing any extravagance in funerary art; naturally the monumental masons like to play safe. When I met Mr. Abel Whittle, who carved the swan on Fred Lexster's headstone, I found that he would have liked to do a larger design but was concerned not to break the rules. Again, when Winifred Giles selected the poem quoted above as her husband's epitaph, there was much discussion as to whether it should be allowed.

Now Winifred is dead too, and under the same stone in this churchyard where her husband lies, with many of their contemporaries and all of their predecessors back to the days of the first monks of Abbotsbury. They are waiting, under the grass and burdock and squills, for the end of time ~ that twinkling of an eye when, St. Paul tells us, we shall all rise together, as contemporaries; and there will be no more history.