The rector’s gift. Integrating church development and village landscape at Car Colston (Nottinghamshire) and elsewhere

This paper explores the value of combining studies of church fabric with those of their surrounding settlements, which was the theme of the conference jointly-held between SCA and MSRG at Leicester in 2015. Analysis of the unusual village plan of Car Colston in Nottinghamshire identifies an original, very large green at its heart. St Mary’s church formerly sat on it; and the principal block of settlement encroachment, creating the latter-day pattern of two separate greens, lies adjacent to it. The church, on the other hand, is notable for its elaborate chancel and fittings of mid-14th-century date. We identify this elaboration as the action of a last secular rector, as he transferred the advowson to Worksop Priory and became the living’s first vicar: it was ‘the rector’s gift’. We further propose that this change of status opened the way for the monastery to exploit its new asset at Car Colston by creating a block of properties adjacent to their former rectory, now vicarage, which became the core of the encroachment of settlement onto the green, observed in today’s landscape. Further examples of similar ‘rector’s gifts’ are proposed at Heckington and Great Hale (Lincolnshire) and at Wharram Percy (Yorkshire, East Riding), and the extent to which these examples of rebuilt 14th-century chancels are accompanied by the expansion of settlement across former greens is considered. It is concluded that the change of economic status embodied in a ‘rector’s gift’ – significant in its own right for its impact on church fabric and fittings – was sometimes a mechanism that initiated change in the physical form of the adjacent settlement, such as in-filling of greens.