St.
Maurice Church, opposite the Grammar School, is
an appropriate point for the visitor to conclude
a tour. Here people have worshipped from Saxon times.
It was by the Church that the first recorded village
homes were located. In Exeter Cathedral library
documents dating from the early 1300's tell us that
a Henry Palmer paid a yearly rent of a halfpenny
for a shop with a solar here, Gilbert the tailor
had a |
|
|
cottage
and a Joan lived in a tenement with a latrine in
the yard. The Church itself not only represents
many centuries of parish life, but also recalls
the early associations with the Augustinian Priory
at Plympton St. Mary. A Saxon Monastery there, dating
from King Alfred's time, was dissolved when the
priests would not turn out the women who lived with
them. In its place, a Priory was established which
came to be rich and influential. It was the Priory
that created the borough on Sutton Pool which became
known as Plymouth. The priests established and served
a chapel below Plympton Castle dedicated to St.
Maurice, a Christian Centurion who was martyred
in the year 290 for refusing to sacrifice to the
pagan gods after a Roman victory over the Gauls
in Switzerland. With the growth of Plympton, the
chapel became the parish church, and its dedication
was changed to St. Thomas of Canterbury (Thomas
Becket), who was murdered in Canterbury Cathedral
in 1170. John Brackley, who lived in the Ridgeway
and was a Member of Parliament in 1382, paid for
a small chapel on the south side dedicated to St.
Maurice. In 1446 the parishioners successfully appealed
to the Bishop of Exeter to have the tower made higher.
The dedication of the church reverted to St. Maurice
in 1538, the year before the destruction of Plympton
Priory at the time of the dissolution of the monasteries,
when the name of Thomas Becket was out of favour.
There is a small statue of St. Thomas outside the
church above the north door, placed there in 1859.
|
|
|
Inside
the church, the oak screen is a reproduction,
carved by Alfred Moultrie of Tavistock, of the
original screen, and incorporates some of the
old fragments. The Jacobean oak pulpit stood,
until 1846, on the stone base which forms part
of a pillar in the nave and it is probable that
a stone pulpit once stood there before that. The
font and its cover are Victorian, but an early
seventeenth century octagonal oak cover, with
doors, can be seen near the north door. There
are several memorials to famous Plympton families.
On the north wall is an alabaster monument in
memory of Sir Joshua Reynolds, unveiled in 1904
and there is a memorial to his father, Samuel
Reynolds, beneath the tower. Their very close
friends, the Mudges, are commemorated by the west
window of the north aisle. During the eighteenth
and early nineteenth centuries, music was provided
in the Church by three violins, a bass viol and
two wind instruments. There is a full peal of
eight bells. When one bell cracked in 1833, bell
founders from Cullompton set up a furnace and
mould outside the Church and recast it there.
Outside the south door stands a stone cross, dating
from about 1380. While making alterations to the
Guildhall in 1861, workmen discovered the shaft
of the cross incorporated in a wall.
|
|
It
is thought that it had been placed there in the
1680s when the Guildhall was rebuilt. It may have
been the market cross, as it is known that such
a cross stood in Fore Street at the junction with
Church Road up until the middle of the seventeenth
century. It was placed by the south porch of the
Church in 1900. The churchyard was extended in
the early years of the nineteenth century by the
acquisition of adjacent gardens, but earlier,
in 1765, nine large elm trees there had to be
felled. They were rotting and were considered
to be a danger, not only to the Church itself,
but to the cottages clustered around. The south-east
corner of the churchyard was rounded off about
1840 after a carriage, in which Mrs. Yonge of
St. Maurice House and her maid were travelling,
grazed the wall and overturned, injuring the maid.
A great number of infant deaths are noted in the
churchyard, for example, the monument by the north
wall of the church to the little son of the Reverend
Grey, Curate and Headmaster of Plympton Grammar
School, who died in the cholera epidemic of 1832.
The parish registers record the deaths of many
parishioners in 1626, 1643 and 1644 from the plague,
and 40 marriages which were solemnised by proclamation
in the market instead of by church ceremony during
Cromwell's time.
Based on:
© MILLS, Audrey F, 1981: Plympton St.
Maurice Guide, First Edition, Plympton
St. Maurice Civic Association
|
|
