This week
Of fires, replicas and choristers in May
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| Churchill's church tower is a landmark in this part of the Cotswolds |
Magdalen College is not the only place where choristers have been heard on May morning, writes CHRIS KOENIG
Anyone concerned about the fairness or otherwise of tax bands should perhaps spare a thought for the inhabitants of Churchill, near Chipping Norton - their village was burned to a cinder as a result of an ill-fated tax avoidance scheme.
Four people died in the conflagration of 1684 and at least 20 houses were destroyed, along with several barns and other outhouses. As a result the village was rebuilt further up the hill - of stone this time instead of timber frame and thatch.
The tax that caused the tragedy was the chimney tax, introduced by Charles II in 1662 in a bid to be fair, his thinking being that richer people in bigger houses would have to pay more, and poorer people less.
In Churchill the tax backfired, so to speak, when an enterprising baker decided to knock his hearth through to next door to enable himself and his neighbour to share the same hearth!
The tax was levied at one shilling (5p) per hearth, payable twice a year on the quarter days of Michaelmas (September 29) and Lady Day (March 25).
The Churchill fire became notorious in the debate about the charge which was never popular, not least because it involved tax inspectors nosing about in people's homes. It was abolished by William and Mary in 1689.
When the village moved up the hill after the fire the original church, built in 1348, was left increasingly isolated on its original site.
By 1825 the church had become sufficiently run down for the rich but eccentric philanthropist lord of the manor, James Haughton Langston, of Sarsden House, to obtain permission to pull it down.
Now only the chancel remains in the old graveyard.
He built the present, replacement church of All Saints in the middle of the 'new' village. Its tower is a two-thirds scale replica of Magdalen College tower in Oxford. There is even an outdoor pulpit, similar to the one at Magdalen.
But fire seems something of a hazard in Churchill. This year the church is closed thanks to one that swept through it in September 2007. Scaffolding, necessary for repair work, takes up most of its typically late Georgian interior, which incorporates a hammerbeam roof modelled on the one at Christ Church, Oxford.
Architect James Plowman seems to have enjoyed his brief of bringing Oxford to the country. The buttresses of Churchill Church are modelled on those of the chapel at New College.
Churchill's church tower is a landmark in this part of the Cotswolds, designated an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, but near it stands a fountain that some think a monument of outstanding unnatural ugliness. It was described in Nicholas Pevsner's Oxfordshire book as "memorably ugly".
Put up in 1870 by Julia, Countess of Ducie, daughter of Mr Langston, in memory of her father, it certainly does not seem so bad to me. Indeed, it reminds me of the water conduit removed from Carfax, Oxford, in 1786 to Nuneham Courtenay where, to this day, it does duty as a folly in the grounds of Nuneham House.
In some recent years the mini-Magdalen imitation did not stop with architecture. Churchill choristers sometimes assembled at their tower on May morning to sing in the dawn, like their Oxford counterparts. I am told the last time they did so was about five years ago.
10:12am Thursday 1st May 2008
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