SNN111481 - Historic Building Record on Old Moravian Church, Parsons Street, Woodford Halse, Northamptonshire

Heritage Services were asked to quote for a report on the Moravian Church at Woodford Halse (NGR SP 54358 52639), and only belatedly after work had commenced to produce the required report for the planning authority. Woodford Halse was located in the medieval parish of Woodford-cum-Membris, a parish that contained Woodford Halse, where the church was located, and which contained the settlements of Hinton and West Farndon. The parish was located in the hundred of Warden and in the historic county of Northamptonshire. The parish and thus the site is now located in Daventry District in modern Northamptonshire. The manor of Woodford Halse was held at the time of the Domesday Book by Hugh de Grentesmaisnil (Morris 1979, 23.13) along with Farndon (Morris 1979, 23.1). The manor of Woodford was held as part of the larger manor of Halse, which is assumed to have been an early medieval development, but this has to be established more precisely. The church of St Mary at Woodford Halse dates to c 1200 (Bailey, Pevsner and Cherry 2013, 682-683). The priest and burial ground at this time appears to have served the settlements of Woodford Halse, Hinton and West Farndon, thus giving rise to the parish name of Woodford-cum-Membris (Gover, Mawer and Stenton 1933, 37). Meanwhile, the Moravian Church developed in Moravia and Bohemia in the early 15th century, and it was the earliest form of Protestant descent predating Martin Luther by some 50 years. The Church was established by Jan Has (1369-1415) as a reaction to Roman Catholic doctrine. In 1609 Rudolf II produced a letter of religious freedom in the Kingdom of Bohemia. The Catholic Church challenged the position of the Moravian Church and in 1619 there was a Bohemian Revolt against the Catholics. The revolt was brought to an end in 1620 at the Battle of White Mountain. This led to a suppression of the Moravian Church and the eventual dispersal of some of the followers and the people being forced to abandon their faith or practice in privacy. In the 1722 Nicholas Ludwig von Zinzendorf established a religious commune at Hernhut in Germany. The Moravian Church were officially recognised in England under the Toleration Act of 1742. Moravian Christianity had reached Northamptonshire by the late 18th century. In 1788 William Hunt licensed the School House as a Moravian preaching place. Subsequently to this a in 1798-9 a chapel and minister’s house were built in Parsons Street. A new chapel was built some 100 years later, being opened in 1906. The new chapel was a structure that was built in a Gothic style, it is normally described as being a structure of Decorated Gothic but in reality it appears to drawn from a variety of Gothic periods with Early English lancets and plate tracery designs, along with Decorated Gothic geometrical windows, and also some windows obtaining their stiles from either the Perpendicular or Tudor traditions. The church is orientated north to south with the front façade to the north and a tower in the northeast corner. The chapel’s orientation was determined by the available space on the site on the west end of the old chapel. At the south end further additions were made to the church. The phasing of the site was largely laid out in the listing of the building, and as part of the old chapel walls are evident on the east side of the new chapel it is apparent that phasing of the whole listed site (old chapel and manse, and new chapel) should be included in this interpretation. The earliest phase of the site covers the construction of the old chapel and the attached manse on a rough east to west orientation, which is dated 1798 to 1799. The next phase has been classed as phase 1a because it redesigned internal features and saw the construction of a gallery at the west end of the chapel. Phase 2 of 1875 saw the blocking of two doors on the south side of the old chapel and the construction of a porch and Sunday School. In 1906 (phase 3) saw the demolition of the Sunday School and porch and the construction of a new chapel. The final phase 4 saw the addition of the single storey extensions on the south side of the new chapel at some time between 1955 and 1979.