Patrick Comerford
I visited Christ Church, Stantonbury, earlier this week, so that I would not miss out on the first opportunity to visit the 50-year-old church, which is based on the Stantonbury Campus in North Milton Keynes.
Christ Church is the parish church for Stantonbury and Bradville and is part of the Stantonbury Ecumenical Partnership, the first Local Ecumenical Project (LEP) in Milton Keynes. It is part a group of six congregations in the north-east area of Milton Keynes and supported by the Church of England, the Baptist Union, the Methodist Church and the United Reformed Church.
Stantonbury is about 3.2 km (2 miles) north of Central Milton Keynes, between Great Linford and Wolverton, and south of Oakridge Park. The name Stantonbury comes from Stanton-, referring to the Old English for a stone-built farmstead, and -bury, referring to the Barre or Barry family who owned the land in 1235.
After my afternoon visit to Christ Church, I went in search of the original Stantonbury and the ruins of Saint Peter’s Church, now isolated in a park area between the River Great Ouse and the Grand Union Canal.
The area of the deserted mediaeval village that gives its name to Stantonbury is now known as Stanton Low, and the name Stantonbury has become the name of the modern district at the heart of the civil parish, which includes Stantonbury, Bancroft, Bancroft Park, Blue Bridge, Bradville and Linford Wood.
Modern Stantonbury lies on land historically known as Stanton High. Stanton Low lies between the banks of River Great Ouse and the banks of the Grand Union Canal. The deserted village of historic Stantonbury was one of the villages in rural Buckinghamshire included in the area designated in 1967 to become Milton Keynes. Today it is an uninhabited agricultural area near the river.
Little if anything remains of the deserted village other than the ruins of the parish church of Saint Peter. The ruins of a Roman villa were discovered there in the late 1950s but were completely destroyed by gravel extraction.
The former parish church of Saint Peter in Stanton Low is Norman, with a mid-12th century nave and an earlier chancel. There was a squint in the south wall of the chancel, but this was later blocked up. Saint Peter’s was extensively rebuilt in the 13th century. The Decorated Gothic east window and piscina were added in the 14th century.
There had been a manor house in Stantonbury since the mediaeval period. Sir John Wittewrong (1618-1693), a Parliamentarian colonel, bought the decaying manor from Sir John Temple (1632-1705) in 1658. Wittewrong was High Sheriff of Hertfordshire that year, and after the Caroline restoration he was made a baronet in 1662. He began to remodel the manor house in 1664, and the house was completed in 1668.
The mansion was 28 metres long, 15 metres long, and portioned into three large rooms, including a great hall and two parlours. In addition, there were landscaped gardens, a large pond, footpaths and viewing terraces, a plantation of native and exotic trees, and a prospect mound with views across the Ouse Valley.
By the latter part of the 17th century, Stantonbury was almost deserted, but the church was still in use. The Puritan poet and hymnwriter John Mason (1645-1694) was the Vicar of Stantonbury in 1668-1674. But by then the village was virtually deserted and had no vicarage, Mason may, in reality, have been chaplain to Sir John Wittewrong. He left to became the rector of Water Stratford, Buckinghamshire, in 1674, when he was presented by Anne Roper, wife of Thomas Roper, 2nd Viscount Baltinglass, and a daughter of Sir Peter Temple.
In Water Stratford, Mason ceased to administer the sacrament in the church, and preached on no other subject than that of the personal reign of Christ on earth, which he announced as about to begin in Water Stratford, and he predicted that the prophet Elijah and that he would be raised from the dead three days after his death.
On the other hand, Mason is also remembered as a hymnwriter. He wrote more than 30 hymns, including ‘How shall I sing that majesty’, which remains a popular hymn.
Meanwhile, Stanton Manor passed through a succession of Wittewrong baronets, each named Sir John Wittewrong, until the fourth baronet, Sir John Wittewrong (1695-1743) ran into financial difficulties. He never had a chance to live in the house and fled abroad after murdering a local con man. The house was sold to the Duchess of Marlborough in 1727, and Wittewrong later died fighting a fellow inmate in the Fleet debtors’ prison.
Only four houses remained in the village by 1736 – three farmhouses and the manor house. The manor house was badly damaged in a fire in 1743, and was eventually demolished in 1791.
The arrival of the railways brought some new life to the church. But by the late 19th century, Saint James’s Church in New Bradwell was more convenient for local people, and Saint Peter’s fell into further decline.
Over 1,000 marriages had taken place in Saint James’s by 1909, when the vicar discovered that the church had never been licensed to weddings. Two planned weddings were quickly moved to a crumbling Saint Peter’s. The unusual spectacle encouraged hundreds of parishioners and railway workers to fill the churchyard for what became a real community event. Soon after, hurried legislation was rushed through Parliament to legitimise the older weddings.
Saint Peter’s was still in use in 1927. John Piper (1903-1992), best-known for his Baptistry window in Coventry Cathedral, and who also designed the east window in the chapel of Saint John's Hospital in Lichfield, painted a watercolour of Saint Peter’s ca 1940. The church was in very poor condition by 1948, the windows were removed, and many of the fixtures and fittings were removed, stolen or vandalised.
By 1955, the church had been disused for a number of years, and when the roof collapsed in 1956, it was not repaired. Quarrying destroyed what was left of the village in the 1960s, and the east window and ornamented Norman chancel arch were removed in 1963 and placed in to Saint James’ Church, New Bradwell.
Saint Peter’s was a ruin by 1973, but the building is now a Grade II listed building. Because the civil parish boundary runs along the canal, Saint Peter’s is actually in Haversham-cum-Little Linford civil parish.
A geophysical survey in 2015 pinpointed the location of the long-lost manor house and excavations have continued since then. The ruins of Saint Peter’s Church and the archaeological dig at the site of the manor house are all that remain of the abandoned village of Stantonbury, although Saint Peter’s is also remembered in street names in New Bradwell.
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