Knox Box of Miscellany

Dawn Knox – A rearranger of words into something hopefully meaningful…

The Fresh Smell of Bread – #MuseItUp #DaffodilAndTheThinPlace

| 0 comments

140727StratfordUponAvon12 If you listed all the items you’d expect to find in a thirteenth century church, I imagine ‘bread oven’ would be some way down the list. Nevertheless, in St. Nicholas Church, Laindon with Dunton, Essex, there is an old bread oven in the Priest House which is a wooden annexe attached to the west end of the church. The Priest House may have been constructed as early as the late 1400s but with a substantial rebuild around 1600 and possibly altered again a hundred years later.

The present windows and door are twentieth century but the frames are probably in the same position as the originals. There was a late seventeenth or early eighteenth century red brick chimney stack that serviced the fire place on the ground floor, by the stairs, which is now blocked up, concealing the bread oven.

Priests’ houses attached to a church are relatively unusual in Essex, they are usually more of a feature in the West Country, which makes St. Nicholas Church highly unusual. It is also similar in design to buildings in New England in the USA, so it is possible that whoever built it had a connection with New England.

The bread oven on the left is a photo that I took in Anne Hathaway’s cottage in Stratford-upon-Avon (yes, the same Anne Hathaway who was married to William Shakespeare!) and I understand (although I’ve never seen the oven in the church) that it is very similar. So, I was very interested to see it and to photograph it.

There are plans to renovate the Priest’s House and to establish a heritage centre to display some of the features that would have been evident in the Victorian times. My ebook ‘Daffodil and the Thin Place’ is set in St. Nicholas Church in the Victorian times and all profits from its sale will go towards renovating the church building and Priest House. You can find the ebook ‘Daffodil and the Thin Place’ here on the Muse It Up Publishing website or from any major ebook seller. The price is approximately £1.80. #MuseItUp #DaffodilAndTheThinPlace

Leave a Reply

Required fields are marked *.