the north chapel, and there is a wonderful selection of monuments.

The instructions to the bell ringers under the tower were written by Edward Conybeare, incumbent between 1871 and 1898. The guidebook describes him as “a typical Victorian gentleman”. “When unemployment was rife after the closure of the old cement works in 1893-4 he employed the men of the village in providing an adequate supply of drinking water and clearing the ditches on the green. A somewhat eccentric character, he was often to be seen riding about the village with his wife perched on the handlebars of his tricycle!”

Conybeare gets a chapter in Brenda Colloms, Victorian Country Parsons, London: Constable & Co., 1977 – wonderful biographies of a selection of wonderful people. This story is on page 257: “MrsConybeare recalled an incident which occurred when the village labourers had been locked out by the farmers during a long industrial dispute. The vicar and his wife sympathized with the men and Mrs Conybeare, while discussing the matter with the lady of one of the grand houses, realized from the tone of the conversation that her companion strongly disapproved of the labourers. The vicar’s wife hurriedly changed the subject to the new Holman Hunt painting, The Shadow of Death, which showed Christ in the workshop at Nazareth. Her companion confessed she had seen the painting at the exhibition in London and condemned it. ‘I do not like having forced on upon me that our Lord was a working man and his Mother a peasant woman,’ she explained forcibly.”