The vicars of Lewisham

A list of vicars is the most continuous record a parish has. Buildings burn and are rebuilt, registers begin late, monuments commemorate whoever could afford the marble — but the succession runs on. Read down this one and you get the Reformation, the Commonwealth, Georgian pluralism, the aristocracy’s grip on church patronage and its loosening, and the twentieth century, without anybody having to narrate them.

Who chose them

The interesting question about any vicar before about 1900 is not who he was but who put him there, and in Lewisham the answer changed four times.

• The Abbot and Convent of St Peter’s, Ghent. Lewisham was given to the Flemish abbey in 918, and for centuries the vicar of an English parish on the edge of London was named from across the Channel.
• The Prior and Convent of Shene. The alien priories were suppressed and the living passed to a Carthusian house in Surrey.
• The Crown, from the Dissolution. This is the stretch that produced Saravia and Colfe.
• The Legge family, Earls of Dartmouth, from 1673. Reynold Graham — the only lord of the manor buried in this church — had no children, and by a deed of 30 May 1673 conveyed the manor and the advowson together to his nephew George Legge, afterwards Baron Dartmouth. The family presented its first vicar four years later, and for a century afterwards it appointed its own relations.

And the Earl of Dartmouth is still the patron today. The arrangement that began in 1677 has never lapsed. It no longer means what it meant when Edward Legge was presented by his own father’s family — a modern patron is one voice in an appointment process with the diocese and the parish representatives, not a landowner disposing of a piece of property — but the link itself is unbroken, and is now approaching three hundred and fifty years.

How a man got this living

Reading Duncan’s notes on the medieval vicars, three things become obvious that the bare list hides.

Livings were swapped. Not resigned and filled, but exchanged, directly, between two priests who each wanted what the other had. John de Lee left Lewisham in 1345 by exchanging with James Pundrick of Stepney; Thomas Twenghe held it for a few months in 1353–54 and exchanged out to a parish in Wiltshire; William Frome exchanged to Chiddingfold in 1441 and John Witton exchanged in from it. The record-holder is John Keylmarsh, vicar here from 1396, who by then had moved through South Mimms, Birchanger, Radwinter, Aldham, Great Bardfield, Abberton, Cookham, West Wickham and Gingrave. Duncan, having traced all of it, notes drily that he resigned in 1405 — most probably from old age, if all those appointments really are the same man.

War with France put the King in the patron’s chair. Because the abbey was foreign, the Crown seized the parish whenever the two countries were fighting, and while it held it, it appointed. Thomas Twenghe was presented by Edward III on exactly those grounds in 1353, and Keylmarsh by Richard II in 1396 by reason of the war with France. Two of Lewisham’s vicars owe their jobs to the Hundred Years’ War.

And the abbey worked through a man on the spot. Three vicars in the fourteenth century — Ralph de Olneye in 1321, John de Lee in 1327, James Pundrick in 1345 — were presented by James de Doura, Prior of Lewisham and procurator for the Abbot and Convent of St Peter of Ghent. He is the only prior of the lost priory this site can name.

Two of the earliest names on the list are here only because Ghent kept its files. Duncan found Geffrey, chaplain of Lievesham, witnessing an agreement about appointing a priest to Greenwich in about 1200, and Robert, vicar of Lievesham, witnessing another at Bromley in February 1239 — both in a survey of the Flanders archives published in Belgium in 1842, which he noted had escaped every local historian before him. The two oldest vicars we can name are known from documents that were never in England.

What they were vicar of

The job changed out of all recognition, and not because anybody changed the job. Until the 1830s St Mary’s was the only church for the whole of Lewisham — Blackheath to Sydenham, Brockley to Bellingham. Every one of the men above, down to Henry Legge, was responsible for all of it.

Then, in eighty-four years, twenty parishes were carved out of it. Augustus Legge inherited a fraction of what his uncle had begun with, and the vicars since have served a parish smaller again. It is the single biggest difference between the top of that list and the bottom — the ancient parish, and what became of it.

Eight worth stopping at

Out of fifty-five names, in the order they held the living. The rest are on the list below, which is not a slight — most parish priests leave no trace but the entry recording that they were instituted, and that is true of most of the good ones.

Where they lived

The parish has been obliged to house its vicar since 1218. Stanhope rebuilt the house at his own expense in 1692 and wrote down what every part of it cost — and the accounts survive, along with a survey of the glebe that explains why there is a street called Vicars Hill. The vicarage house has the photograph and the ledger.

And the other list

Every vicar since about 1200 is known. The parish also keeps a list of its churchwardens — the lay officers, elected by the parish, who held the money, the fabric and a good deal of the power — and it makes a sharper point than the clergy list does, because of what is missing from it.

It opens with William Grenerig in 1498, and has Richard Dyngley and Richard Howlett in 1552. Then it stops. The next name on it is John Baker in 1743.

A hundred and ninety-one years of churchwardens are gone. The vicars survive that stretch because a bishop’s registry recorded every institution and those registries are still in Rochester and Canterbury; the churchwardens were the parish’s own business, recorded in the parish’s own books, and the parish’s own books burned in the vestry in 1830. The clergy are remembered by the institution above them. The laypeople were remembered by themselves, and it was not enough.

From 1743 it runs unbroken to the present. Some of them stayed: G. W. J. King served thirty-one years, from 1893 to 1924, and E. C. Sinkler eighteen alongside him. And in 1776 the parish elected a Paul Valentine — the surname of the Lewisham tanner Margaret Colfe had married before she married the vicar, a hundred and sixty years earlier.

A. J. French, whose 1920s pamphlet is quoted on the music page and whose photograph of the chancel is the only picture the parish has of the organ in place, is on this list too: vicar’s warden from 1921.

Where the record argues with itself

Three places, all of them stated rather than tidied:

• John Glyn’s institution. Hasted says 11 October 1545; the parish’s own list says October 1546. One year apart, both in October.
• The Commonwealth. Hasted goes straight from Colfe’s death in 1657 to Alexander Davison in 1677 and omits Edward Trotter altogether. The parish’s record keeps him.
• The twentieth century. The parish’s own list and the captions to its portraits give different forms of the same names — Perry or Percy Robb, Scott Anderson or Peter Scott-Anderson. The list above follows the list; the portraits have not been reconciled with it. Longworth-Dames is not settled, and this site said it was. The 1963 appeal is signed in his own hand and the signature reads Francis Longworth-Dame. — hyphenated, a final e, then a full stop, with no s. On that alone this page called it decided. But the parish directory printed during his own incumbency has him as Canon F. R. LONGWORTH-DAMES, and the parish’s list of vicars agrees with the directory. Two printed records against one signature, and a man’s signature is a habit rather than a spelling. The list above now follows the printed form and records that his own hand disagreed.
• Lowth, not Louth. Duncan uses both spellings within a single book, and the parish’s list has Louth. But the tablet set up on the south porch when the church was finished reads The Revd. Wm. Lowth, D.D., Vicar, and Hasted agrees. The site follows the stone, which is the oldest witness and is still in the building.

And for the medieval entries, “named in a document” means exactly that. The parish knows a man was called vicar in some record of that year, not when he came or when he left.

Elsewhere on this site

Colfe’s foundations are still going: the schools and the Leathersellers follows the money from Glyn’s £100 to six schools today, and the linked charities covers the almshouses. Margaret Colfe and George Stanhope both have monuments in the church — see the monuments — and the peal boards for Augustus Legge and Samuel Bickersteth are in the tower.

The last two names on the list have more behind them than a line in a table. David Garlick’s twenty-eight years took in the re-ordering of the building and the memorial service for the thirteen young people who died in the New Cross Fire, held here in 1981 with Pentecostal, Methodist, United Reformed and Roman Catholic ministers all taking part; his predecessor’s span covers most of the rest. Both are on the twentieth century, which is the least recorded part of the parish’s history and not the least eventful.