St Anne’s closes the view up Load Street, which is the first thing anyone notices about it, and it is a handsome Georgian box of a church built between 1745 and 1748. What stood here before was a very different thing, and its story is considerably stranger.
Bewdley was not a parish
For most of its history Bewdley had no parish church, because Bewdley was not a parish. The town was extra-parochial until an Act under Henry VI attached it to Ribbesford, a mile south, and St Leonard’s at Ribbesford remained the mother church for both places until 1853. Every baptism, marriage and burial in Bewdley was recorded in Ribbesford’s registers, and most people who died in the town were carried down there to be buried.
So what stood on the Load Street site was a chapel of ease, and it was made of wood. John Leland, passing through around 1539, put it plainly: “In the towne is but a Chapel of Ease, and that is of Timber, in the heart of the towne.”
The sanctuary town
There is a tradition about why the chapel was built at all, and it starts with the fact that Bewdley was a place of sanctuary.
That much is documented. The preamble to a Bill of Forfeiture passed in the Parliament of 1491 against Thomas Crofte records that Crofte had “commytted a detestable murder within the Marches of Wales, and thereupon is fledde, and hath taken the Sanctuary of Beaudeley”. A man who had killed someone could reach Bewdley and be beyond the law’s immediate reach.
The tradition, which is tradition rather than record, holds that it was these fugitives who first built a chapel in the town, so that they could hear Mass without stepping outside the bounds of their sanctuary and being taken.
Dedicated to the wrong saint
Here is the detail that surprises people who have known the church all their lives. The old chapel was not dedicated to St Anne. It was dedicated to St Andrew.
Inside it were three chantries, each with its own priest, endowed to say Masses for the dead. St Mary’s chantry stood on the south side of the chancel and was worth £8 3s 4d a year in 1545. On the north side were two more: the chantry of St Anne, worth £9 5s 4d, founded by John Washbourn, and the chantry of the Holy Trinity at £9 3s 6d. Two of them had guilds attached, trade fraternities under the protection of a saint, and the Guild of “Cornesers, Cordwainers, or Cobelers”, which is to say the shoemakers, founded the St Mary chantry and put figures of Saints Crispin and Crispinian in it, the patrons of their trade.
So St Anne arrives as one chantry among three, and ends up naming the whole building. The corner of the town near the old bridge was still being called St Anne’s Corner in the court rolls of 1748.
The chapel as it actually was
Forget any picture of a serene medieval church. This was a timber building with houses built hard up against it on nearly every side, so tightly that there were dwellings underneath the chancel. A flight of steps ran up from the street into the chancel between the two northern chantries. The accounts for 1596 record money spent mending “the hole out of the Chancell into Mersour Tavarn”, which means there was a hole between the church and the tavern next door and somebody had to fill it in.
The floor was bare earth until 1592, when four thousand tiles were brought up the river from Bristol to pave it.
It was also, for want of anywhere else big enough, the town’s theatre. Companies of travelling players performed inside it: the Queen’s Players in 1572, the Earl of Leicester’s men in 1573, the Lord President’s company in 1593. The 1572 entry in the wardens’ accounts reads, without apparent embarrassment, “Paid unto the quenes plaiers in the church, 6s. 8d.”
Other entries from the same books give a flavour of parish life. In 1582 twenty shillings went on “glassing” the chapel. Pew rents appear for the first time in 1583. The organ needed extensive repairs in 1585. In 1600 something had to be mended to “stop out the boys in the loft”. The bells were rung for the fifth of November for the first time in 1607. And in 1632, long sermons being the fashion, an hour glass was set up so the preacher could see when to stop.
The building you see
Around 1696 Salwey Winnington, Member of Parliament for the borough, paid for a stone tower to be added to the timber chapel. In 1745 the decision was taken to pull the whole thing down, tower included, and build again in stone. The Rev Thomas Knight, Rector of Ribbesford, paid for the new tower.
The church that went up between 1745 and 1748 was designed by Thomas Woodward of Chipping Campden, and it is the one standing today: Georgian, confident, and built for a prosperous river port at the height of its trade. Not one image of the timber chapel it replaced is known to survive.
St Anne’s finally became Bewdley’s own parish church in 1853, more than a century after it was built, and nearly four hundred years after the town first had a chapel of its own.