A return to the fold during Easter week with a visit to the peacefully ancient Church of Our Lady at Warnford in Hampshire. The church’s situation is within the grounds of the former Warnford Park Estate for which the manor house once stood directly adjacent, though unfortunately demolished in the 1950’s now giving the location a genuine eeriness as if the estate had been forgotten or abandoned with time.
The church itself predates the estate and is thought to have origins as far back as 682 AD being one of the churches established by Saint Wilfred within the Meon Valley, during his conversion of the local populace. My principal interest with the church however comes some time later in 1577 when one William Neale Esq, Auditor of the Exchequer to Elizabeth I, acquired the Manor of Warnford and began construction of a large country house nearby, having supposedly resettled a peasant community that were already occupying this specific piece of land in Warnford.
William passed away in 1601 and he is commemorated with a rather restrained and conventional altar tomb monument of the period, boasting the arms of the Neale family at the top as well as the arms of his two wives either side. Rather fascinating, is that in 1591 Elizabeth I and her court stayed in Warnford Park with William for at least 6 days as part of her summer progress of that year through Surrey, West Sussex and Hampshire.
William’s son Sir Thomas Neale, who also served as Auditor of the Exchequer under both Elizabeth I and James I, would succeed to the estate and it is he who is immortalised by an elaborate memorial featuring recumbent effigies of himself between his two wives Elizabeth and Mary underneath an imposing canopy, on which you still see some of the original paint and gilding, as well as their numerous offspring, some of whom were predeceased, depicted along the base of the monument. Remarkably, this particular monument was first restored in the 1920’s by American descendants of the Neale family and upon its second restoration and disassembly in the 1980’s a medieval niche was found behind it, hidden for around 350 years.
