St Cuthbert’s Church, Aldingham

Despite the tower of St Cuthbert’s Church at Aldingham in Furness (once Lancashire, now south Cumbria) being rather grey and foreboding, the place is a Christian treasure house. Enjoying a mixture of Norman and pointed arches within, there is a leper squint (bottom picture) into the chancel through which medieval sufferers of that dreadful disease could observe the service without having to enter the building and scaring everyone off. According to some record at Durham cathedral, this is one of the places where the Saxon monks of the Kingdom of Northumbria took Cuthbert’s bones in 875 to prevent the pagan Danes from violating them.

If this remote church’s association with a famous Christian saint was not enough, the parish's current custodians also saw fit to remind visitors of a link to another of the great and good: Lady Jane Grey. Her father, Henry Grey, was lord of the manor; whether the title passed to her, or whether she was even aware of this remote village and the relatively small income it would have provided her family, I cannot say. Lords and ladies possessed many lands up and down the nation, and keeping track of them all was usually entrusted to stewards or lawyers. Nevertheless, Aldingham has connections to a saint whom the Vikings would have been dearly pleased to despatch, and a woman whom a Romanist queen, Bloody Mary, was equally pleased to behead.

The sages come and go, the martyrs live and die, but still the church of Jesus Christ remains, until such a time as she meets Him in the air.

For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. 1 Corinthians 13:12

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