St Mark's Church
The Lych Gate & Churchyard Cross
Two common features of English churchyards are a lych gate and a stone cross. The original lych gate had but a single purpose and some date back to medieval times. It was at the lych gate that the coffin was rested to await the priest before being the procession into the church for the funeral service. In some older gates the lych stone, or coffin stone, still exists although most were removed in the eighteenth century as a hindrance to worshippers making their way into church.
Churchyard crosses have a number of origins, though usually they mark some significant event involving the death of numbers of parishioners and many were erected as memorials to the dead of the Great War so date from about 1920. That is not the case in Englefield for the war memorial is inside the church and the cross pre-dates that war by about 25 years.
The Lych Gate
The lych gate at Englefield, despite being of the design common four or five hundred years ago is much more recent; as the Tomkins engraving shows there was only a simple field gate at the beginning of the nineteenth century. It was erected in 1894 (although Betjeman and Piper in the 1949 edition of Murray’s Berkshire call it “Edwardian”) and designed by Edward Swinfen Harris, who early the previous year had decorated the interior walls of the church and designed a new super-frontal for the altar. The great majority of Harris’s work was in north Buckinghamshire and it may be that the commissions at Englefield came because he was personally known to the Rector, the Rev Arthur Heigham, who had previously had the living at nearby Newport Pagnell. In 1896 he added a new vestry to St Mary’s, Mortimer for Mr Benyon.
There is an item of £23 17s 0d for “churchyard gates” in the accounts for the rebuilding in 1855 so these may be the same gates in a new surround or yet another pair
The inscription “Let it be your care to go down humbly to your grave” on the lintel over the gate provides a reminder of the original function of a lych gate in words taken from the service of dedication on Sunday 4th November 1894.
The Cross
The churchyard cross was dedicated at the same time as the lych gate to “commemorate the outbreak of illness last year which caused the school to be closed for 3 months, to commemorate the memory of some called to rest, as well as our thankfulness to God for many merciful recoveries and spared lives.” The illness was measles, followed by scarlet fever, which broke out amongst the village children in October 1893, ironically coinciding with a series of six lectures on “sick nursing” arranged by Mrs Benyon. The final lecture was on children’s diseases, including measles, and the number of people attending was reduced from the usual 50 to about 30 owing to the start of the epidemic.
With 36 children absent and four others evidently sickening, the school was closed on 12th October, initially for l0 days in the hope that this would prevent any further spread of the disease. However, when the children returned on October 23rd it was found that seven fresh cases had occurred during the two previous days so the closure was extended until October 26th, at which point the school was closed by order of the sanitary authority. The school remained closed for a total of three months and did not reopen until the start of the new term on 3rd January.
Four of the schoolchildren died from the disease: Margaret and William Eyles from number 3 in the Street and Jesse and Cecil Povey from Malthouse Farm. James Winchcomb from the Lodge Gates, father of Bertha and gardener to the Hon Lodovick Bligh MFH who was at that time renting the Rectory, also died, said by his daughter to be from the same cause.
The inscription on the cross also mentions an outbreak of disease in 1890. This was influenza, which ran through the village in the winter of that year. Although no deaths are known to have been attributed to the disease many were laid low by it, including Mr and Mrs Benyon.
Special collections were taken at both services in church on Sunday 4th March 1894 (Mothering Sunday) and these raised a total of £131 10s 2½d - equivalent to more than £13,000 today based on changes in the Retail Prices Index but a staggering £95,000 based on relative average wages. After paying £110 for the cross and £16 14s 2d to Mr Harris for the design, the balance of £4 16s 1d was handed to Mr Benyon who used it in part payment for a new oak gate for the west entrance to the churchyard, also designed by Mr Harris; the remaining cost he met himself..
