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Posted 4 hours 43 min ago

 

Posted 4 hours 44 min ago

The Church of St Margaret and All Hallows at Orford near Warrington struck me as entirely ordinary and predictable. A late-Victorian building in leafy grounds, it is built of brick in a 'blended gothic'. It has a decent online presence and the array a services which one might expect of an active, Anglican church. Nothing at all struck me as extraordinary. The website reports:

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Gerard ter Borch’s The Messenger, known as 'The Unwelcome News' was painted in 1653 and hangs at The Hague’s Mauritshuis Gallery.

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I called at the site of St Leonard’s Priory in London’s Bromley-by-Bow in the summer. Little remains, but some old foundations and a romantic, Victorian gateway. Geoffrey Chaucer, the great writer of the Canterbury Tales, once mocked its Prioress for the inaccuracy of her French and the old fashioned pronunciation of its words:

Ther was also a nonne, a prioresse,