Patrick Comerford
The Church of Saint Peter and Saint Paul on Witton Lane in Aston, Birmingham, is the parish church of Aston. It is grade II* listed and is in the Aston Hall and Church Conservation Area, is close to Aston Hall and Park and to Villa Park, the home of Aston Villa Football Club, and near the Aston Expressway and Spaghetti Junction.
The church is a landmark building for Aston Villa fans making way from Aston station to Villa Park and the church spire is visible from the nearby M6 motorway.
There was a church on the site when the Domesday Book was compiled in 1086. The earlier history of the site is uncertain, although an archaeological excavation of the original village in 2013 suggests this was the site of a British Roman settlement.
The Domesday Book gave Aston (Estone) five times the value of nearby Birmingham. The area was wealthy during the agricultural era, and it was overtaken in economic importance by Birmingham only with the advance of the industrial revolution.
Because of its antiquity and lengthy history, the church has links to many well-known names in the history of Aston, including the Holtes who built Aston Hall in 1618, the Arden family who were related to William Shakespeare, and the Ansell family of Ansell’s brewery.
When Anglo-Saxon England was divided into seven smaller kingdoms, Aston was part of the Kingdom of Mercia with its political capital in Tamworth and its ecclesiastical centre at Lichfield Cathedral. The church was probably founded in the ninth century, and the original church would have been wooden, as the Domesday Book records.
The area of the parish was extensive, with chapels of ease in Yardley, Water Orton and Castle Bromwich, and it is likely that Saint Peter and Saint Paul was a minster church.
The first masonry structure was completed in 1120. It was the second largest church in the West Midlands, the original Coventry Cathedral being larger. The church has many impressive monuments dating from the 14th century, including three chest tombs commemorating the Arden family. The oldest monument is the tomb of Ralph Arden, who died in 1360, a direct ancestor of William Shakespeare, and the church also has a Shakespeare window.
Two tombs are associated with the Wars of the Roses: the effigy of William Harcourt (died 1483) shows him in armour; Sir Thomas de Erdington (died 1449) took his name from the Erdington district of Birmingham, between Aston and Lichfield.
There are memorials too to members of the Holte family of Aston Hall. The oldest remaining Holte family monument is to William Holte (ca 1460-1514), and it includes one of the earliest known heraldic depictions of the Comberford coat of arms.
William Holte was the son of William Holte (ca 1430-post 1498). The elder William Holte was a merchant of the staple, and he married Margaret Comberford, a daughter of William Comberford of Comberford Hall, halfway between Tamworth and Lichfield in Staffordshire. She was living in 1477, and he was still alive in 1498. William Holte’s father-in-law, William Comberford, was MP for Newcastle-under-Lyme (1442-1447) and Staffordshire (1449-1450).
Margaret (Comberford) Holt was a sister of John Comberford (ca 1440-1508), of Comberford Hall, who was a Justice of the Peace and MP for Staffordshire 1502-1508. John Comberford extended the family’s estates and land holding when he married his father’s ward, Johanna Parles, the only daughter and heir of John Parles of Watford Manor and of Shutlanger, near Stoke Bruerne, Northamptonshire.
Margaret (Comberford) Holt was still living in 1477, and her husband William probably died ca 1498.
Their eldest son, William Holte, inherited the Holte family estates, including Aston, and married Joanna Knight, daughter of Adam Knight of Shrewsbury. When this William Holte died in 1514, he was buried in the north aisle of Aston Church.
Sam Evans, the Parish Administrator, helped me to locate the altar tomb with its life-size effigy of William Holte. It is the oldest remaining monument of the Holte family and shows William Holte clad in a suit of mail armour, a surcoat covering the upper part of his body; his hands are joined prayer, his head rests on a helmet, and at his feet is a resting lion.
This tomb displays one of the early examples of an image of the Comberford coat-of-arms. The front of the tomb is divided by buttresses into four compartments, each with a cinquefoil panel. In each panel, crowned and robed winged angels hold heraldic shields charged with these arms: 1, Holte impaling Knight, for William’s wife Joan; 2, singly Delabere, for William’s grandmother, Margaret Delabere; 3, Holte impaling Comberford, for William’s parents; and 4, de Wolvey.
However, the depiction of the Comberford arms is an anachronism in heraldic terms. They are shown as: Gules, a cross engrailed or, charged with five roses of the first (a red shield, with a golden, engrailed or jagged cross that bears five red roses).
These arms were adopted by descendants of Margaret’s brother John Comberford; they are originally the arms of the Parles family, and were adopted partly because of the wealth inherited from the Parles family, and partly to display the Comberford family’s political allegiance to the House of Lancaster. The original Comberford arms used by Margaret’s immediate family are: Gules, a talbot passant argent (red, with a white, walking talbot hunting dog).
The inscription around the ledge of this tomb has long been obliterated, but was transcribed by Sir William Dugdale: ‘Of your charity, pray for the soule of William Holt, Esquire, sometime Lord of this towne, and Joane his wife. Which William dy’d the XVIII September, the yeare of howre Lord MCCCIII.’
The date 1303 is an obvious mistake, and should have read 1514. The error was made either at the time the monument was made or, more likely, in a later transcription.
The Priory of Tickford or Newport Pagnell in Buckinghamshire, had some property in Aston which seems to have constituted a rectorial manor. After the suppression of the priory in 1525, its possessions were said to have included ‘the manor of Tickford in the parish of Aston’, which was given to Cardinal Wolsey for his college at Oxford, now Christ Church Oxford.
The manor was granted to Christ Church Oxford in 1532. The estate included the advowson of the vicarage and a pension of 40 shillings from Aston church. The rectorial estate seems to have passed into the possession of the Holte family between 1535 and 1552, and was united with the manor of Aston.
During the English Civil War, six soldiers were killed in the siege of Aston Hall and were buried in unmarked graves in the churchyard.
Meanwhile, there was a major reordering of the church in 1480. The tower and spire remain from this time, although the spire was renovated in 1776-1777 by John Cheshire, who also rebuilt the spire of Saint Martin in the Bull Ring, Birmingham. Cheshire’s spire in Aston made the church the tallest building in Birmingham from 1838 to 1855.
A 19th-century bust commemorates John Rogers, who was born at Deritend, then in the parish of Aston, ca 1505 and was burnt at the stake in Smithfield in 1555. He was responsible for the Matthew Bible, the first translation of the complete Bible from Greek into English, published under the pseudonym Thomas Matthew.
The Aston area became residential and industrial in the 19th century, and to cope with the growth in population the church was again reordered in 1879. The architect Julius Alfred Chatwin (1830-1907) was a Birmingham architect who specialised in both neo-gothic and neo-classical styles.
The brass eagle lectern is a memorial to Joseph Ansell, founder of Ansell’s Brewery, who was churchwarden from 1867 to 1883.
The Victorian stained glass windows in the church include the renovated window in the south aisle in memory of Joseph and Francis Plevins, depicting four episodes in the nativity narrative.
The three manual pipe organ was built by Banfield in 1901 and rebuilt by Nicholson in 1967.
The monuments in the churchyard include 31 Commonwealth war grave memorials, the grave of Alfred Wilcox VC, the Ansell family vault, and the Aston War Memorial which is grade 2 listed. The churchyard was partly cleared in the 1950s as a memorial to a former vicar and Archdeacon of Aston, Henry McGowen (1891-1948), who was Bishop of Wakefield in 1945-1948.
The Aston area prospered until the slum clearances in Birmingham in the 1960s, the construction of the A38(M) motorway and the collapse of British industry in the last quarter of the 20th century.
A full immersion baptism pool was added in 2008. This pool in the shape of a cross was added as part of an extension of the front platform. When the pool is not in use, it is covered by a thick layer of glass but is still visible.
A mosaic monument installed in 2019 commemorates Charlene Ellis (18) and Letisha Shakespeare (17) who were killed in a drive-by shooting on 2 January 2003. The community was outraged and their mothers led a campaign against gun and knife crime.
There has been a Bishop of Aston as a suffragan bishop in the Diocese of Birmingham since 1954. Previous bishops include the liturgist Colin Buchanan who died in 2023. Bishop Anne Hollinghurst is due to retire next month (September 2024) when she becomes Principal of the Queen’s Foundation, Birmingham.
Today, Aston is one of the most deprived areas in the UK , the church is at the centre of a very diverse community, and the congregation is made up of people from many cultures – European, African and Asian. The church is also used by the Debre Selam Saint Mary’s Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church.
• The Revd Dr Fiona Gregson is the Vicar of Aston and Nechells. Sunday services at 10:30 include Service of the Word (first Sunday), Holy Communion (second and fourth Sundays), All-Age Worship (third Sunday), and Morning Worship (fifth Sunday).
