Patrick Comerford
During my recent walkabouts in Bicester, I have visited both Saint Edburg’s Church, the Church of England parish church, and the Church of the Immaculate Conception, the Roman Catholic parish church.
I also went in search of the site of the pre-Reformation Augustinian priory in the Oxfordshire market town. Little remains of the original Priory but excavations and written accounts have provided a picture of the priory and what life was like there.
Old Place Yard with its turreted dovecote, is believed to occupy part of the site of the 12th century priory. The present dovecote at Old Place Yard was heavily altered in the 1960s after the original structure and stable buildings were damaged in a fire in the 1960s.
But as I walked around I found four other churches or chapels in Bicester: two Methodist churches, one still active and the other now a shop on Sheep Street; a former Congregational church on Chapel Lane; and the unusual Dissenters’ chapel in the cemetery beside Saint Edburg’s Church.
Bicester Methodist Church in the centre of the town is at the end of Sheep Street on the corner with Bell Lane. It was built in 1927 to replace the original Methodist church on the opposite side of Sheep Street, and was originally known as the Grainger Hargreaves Memorial Church.
Methodism in Bicester began after a Mrs J Bowerman was ‘awakened’ while she heard John Wesley preaching in Brackley in Northamptonshire, close to Banbury, Bicester and Buckingham, in 1748. When she and her husband settled in Bicester, they first attended Saint Edburg’s Church, but they soon arranged for the Methodist minister in Brackley to visit Bicester. A room in a farmhouse on what became the site of the later Wesley Hall was used for those early services, and a building in Sheep Street was licensed as a chapel in 1816.
As the Methodism grew in Bicester, it was threatened with schism. In May 1843, preachers of the Primitive Methodists or ‘Ranters’ in Oxford began to preach in the Market Square and attempts by local people to stop them preaching created a disturbance.
Over time, two separate branches of Wesleyanism emerged in Bicester. One stayed on the site of the farmhouse and eventually built what became the Wesley Hall; the other bought a site in North Street and built a chapel there in 1840. A schoolroom was added 40 years later. The chapel was enlarged, new seats were installed in 1892 and the gallery was added, and an organ was installed in 1904.
The two separate churches eventually outgrew their buildings and outgrew their differences. They came together in 1890 and formed the United Methodist Free Church. They decided to build one shared church, a site was acquired by 1919 and a row of cottages at 72-78 Sheep Street was demolished to clear the site for the church. The old chapel in North Street was sold in 1925 to the Jersey Lodge of Masons and became the Masonic Weyland Hall.
The Wesley Hall in Sheep Street continued to be used as a church until the new one was built. It was then used as a church hall and as a Sunday School until a new hall was built behind the new church. Wesley Hall was sold to Woolworths in 1955. It later became Coxeters furniture shop and is now Home Comforts.
When the new church opened in 1927, it was named the Grainger Hargreaves Memorial Church in memory of the Revd Grainger Hargreaves (1855-1923) who had spent many years of his ministry in China and then in Australia and New Zealand. He was chair of the Oxford District and Superintendent of Wesley Memorial Church for 18 years. He moved to Bicester in 1921 but died on Christmas Day 1923.
The foundation stone was laid on 23 September 1926, and new church was opened by Mrs J Vanner Early of Witney on 23 June 1927. The builders were Cannon, Green and Co of Aylesbury.
The architectural historian Sir Niklaus Pevsner, has described Bicester Methodist Church as ‘an extraordinary mixture’ of architectural styles and motifs. The three tall lancet windows in the centre of the front façade harken back to the earliest mediaeval Gothic design, the flowing curvilinear tracery at their heads is typical of art nouveaux, while the central fielded panel with its very unusual flanking geometric pilasters has art deco styling.
Methodist churches were often built as rather simple chapels, with a single main entrance opening into an open meeting hall. The form of the building in Bicester, however, is much more complex with small projecting wings on the side elevations and an imposing façade with decorative stone and brickwork. A tower was originally planned for one corner.
Inside, the central hall or nave faces a raised platform with pointed arches and carved foliate capitals and it looks like a Victorian gothic revival chancel in all but name. The ceiling is fashioned like a Tudor hammer-beam roof. The curvilinear motif outside is repeated in the pierced wooden panels between the collar beams. The windows have domestic Edwardian stained glass flower motifs, but great swags of art nouveau tracery.
A two-manual organ by Albert Keates of Sheffield installed in 1942 was a gift from George Layton, one of the church the organist for 50 years. He had opened the first garage in London Road in Bicester in 1910.
The planned tower was never built, but an extension, built at the rear in Victoria Road in the 1950s, hosts many community events.
The Revd Jocelyn Bennett is the minister of Bicester Methodist Church. Sunday services are usually at 10:45 am and 6:15 pm, and the church provides opportunities through the week for times of prayer and worship. The church is also used by Bicester Elim Church on Sunday afternoons.
The story of Dissenters in Bicester goes back to the reign of Elizabeth I, when a dispute over doctrinal matters broke out between the vicar and his parishioners. Order was restored, but Nonconformity resurfaced in 1654 when the Cromwellian commissioners appointed as vicar William Hall, a ‘godly and painful’ preacher who had been the curate in Bicester for some years.
The Bicester Congregational Church emerged after Presbyterians and ‘Independents’, the heirs of the Puritan tradition, were ejected from parish churches in 1662.
A Presbyterian congregation met secretly before being formally licensed in 1672 after a meeting in Bicester with John Troughton, who had been ejected from Saint John’s College, Oxford. Troughton was licensed as a preacher under the Declaration of Indulgence, and when he died in 1681 he was buried at Bicester parish church.
By 1669, ‘separatists’, said to be 100 to 200 in number, met in the barn of a baker, Thomas Harris. Samuel Lee, an eminent Puritan divine who lived at Bignell in 1664-1678, also ‘sometimes kept conventicles at Bicester’. Nevertheless, the Compton Census of 1676 and Bishop Fell in a report ca 1685 recorded no dissenters.
Henry Cornish became the first pastor of the congregation in 1690. A contemporary, critical pamphlet said he preached ‘for profit’s sake to silly women and other obstinate people’. Cornish died in 1698.
A chapel was first built Water Lane, now Chapel Street, and was licensed for public worship in 1728. The chapel became an important centre for Nonconformists in the surrounding area and a Sunday school was established in 1794. The chapel was enlarged and licensed for marriages in 1839 and a schoolroom was added in 1873.
The exterior front of the chapel is built of chequer brick with a hipped roof and broken pediment. There are some ashlar dressings and Welsh-slate roofs. There are tall round-arched windows and the left bay has been altered to form a rose window above an added pedimented porch, with a round-arched doorway surrounded by rusticated stone blocks. The arched windows in the front gable walls have wooden Gothic-style tracery.
The denominational labels used by the Bicester congregation are interesting. After the Toleration Act of 1689, Presbyterians and Independents in England formed what was known as the ‘Happy Union’ until it ended in acrimony in 1694.
In Bicester, on the other hand, Presbyterians and Independents continued to work together late into the 18th century. In 1738 and 1759, the vicar described them as Presbyterians; in 1808, he said they described themselves as Independents. The earliest surviving minute-book, from 1771, refers to ‘the Congregation or Society of Protestant Dissenters from the Church of England commonly called Presbyterians’.
John Ludd Fenner, who was the pastor in 1771-1774, was a Unitarian, but later returned to the Congregationalists; Edward Hickman, who died in 1781, was a Calvinist; another minister was from the Countess of Huntingdon’s Connexion; while other preachers and ministers included Calvinists, Arminians, Arians, Socinians, Baptists and Methodists.
In the 19th century, the church was served by Independents or Congregationalists, as they were beginning to be called. The seven young men who entered the ministry from Bicester chapel in 1810-1855 included three became Baptists.
Some of the colourful pastors from the past included: Samuel Park (1739-1766), who was ‘gay and light in his practices, fond of convivial company’; David Davis (1768-1771), ‘a slave to his ale and pipe’, who absconded with unpaid debts; and TH Norton (1899-1902), who abandoned his wife and ran away with the wife of one of the deacons.
The Revd SG Burden was appointed to a part-time post in Bicester in 1952 and was also the pastor of Launton. When the Presbyterians and Congregationalists united, it became Bicester United Reform Church in 1972.
The church closed in 1978, the building was converted into a private house, and the war memorial was moved to Bicester Methodist Church. The building was later used as a snooker hall and is now a restaurant.
The Dissenters’ Chapel in the cemetery beside Saint Edburg’s Church in Bicester, was built in 1861 to accommodate non-conformists in the town. The ground was separate to the main Anglican churchyard, but the Bicester Herald reported concerns among some residents that dissenters would be allowed access through the main churchyard entrance.
To mollify the parishioners and the congregation of Saint Edburg’s, it was agreed that the dissenters would instead use the Piggy Lane entrance.
