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Significant villages

 

I conducted a church service yesterday at St Mary's, Hardington Mandeville. You get a sense of the historic significance of the church and small village by doing so: the large and well appointed church, the impressive architecture of many of the houses around it, the spacious fields where the keeping of sheep contributed to village income in medieval times. Inside the church is a large neo-Norman arch - or pseudo Norman - paid for by a curate in the mid 1800s. It's partly obscured by choir pews, though there is now no choir at the church. The churchwarden told me the village story that the Rev John Hancock, who funded the work, had a relationship with a local woman in the village, but when the relationship ended, it wasn't only his ardor that cooled, since the arch was never fully finished. It sounds psychologically plausible. A church like this was once the centre of community and cultural life in the village, but now it is so much more marginal.