Bandit Priests and Gunpowder Plotters

"Do join us for coffee".

Chris and I, in the second of the eleven churches we were to visit that day, were only too ready for a drink and so joined the half-dozen members of the Belton-in-Rutland ladies' coffee morning at the back of the nave. After a pleasant quarter of an hour's chat, in which we discovered that house burglary was the scourge of rural living, we paid our 20 pences, bade the good ladies good day and pressed on with our mission.

Some have called it "church crawling". I prefer to see it as a visit to a different world: medieval churches with wondrous architecture that contain fascinating stories from an age when villages were where most people lived, not just wealthy commuters. And there is no denying that Rutland, England's smallest and most rural County, is a world away from life in Nottingham.

Chris, who lived in Rutland as a teenager, had planned a route that covered much of the southern part of the County along with the adjacent edges of Leicestershire and Northamptonshire.  As on our first foray last year, it was a chance to peer into history, discover the unexpected, look at some fine landscape and find a decent country pub.

Ah yes, those stories. How about these.

In the fourteenth century the poor folk of east Leicestershire were bedevilled by a gang of kidnappers and cut-throats, the Folvilles, who just happened to be the lords of the manor in a village near the Rutland boundary. Their behaviour was so outrageous that the local Keeper of the King's Peace decided to round them up. One of their number, Richard, was the rector in the Rutland village of Teigh. The authorities caught up with him in his church tower, from where he started to fire arrows at his pursuers, killing one. He had no chance of escape, of course, but met a grisly end when he was summarily beheaded in the churchyard. A colourful history, has Rutland. Teigh church has the original tower, much repaired, but an 18th Century nave and chancel.

At the village of Stoke Dry the lords of the manor were the Digbys. When James I came to the throne, Sir Everard Digby, a Catholic, was persuaded by Robert Catesby to lend support to the Gunpowder plotters. The story has it that they met in the room above the porch in the parish church. The plotters were betrayed and Sir Everard confessed. He was held in the Tower of London, to be hung, drawn and quartered. The family prospered, however. Sir Everard's son, Sir Kenelm Digby, an alchemist, glassmaker and one-time privateer, became one of the founders of the Royal Society in 1660.

Inside some of the old churches there are features that mystify, like carvings of local village characters in the form of grotesques on the walls and columns. One, in the church at Wymondham, has intrigued me ever since I saw it. The poor man looks terrified. This is one story I think I'd rather not know more about!