St Mary

St Mary’s has had a long association with the Lechmere family whose family seat at Severn End is less than a mile away from the church. The Lechmeres were reputedly given lands at Hanley by William the Conqueror and they are still very much a part of the area nearly 1000 years later. Following damage caused in the Civil War, it was Sir Nicholas Lechmere who, in 1674, rebuilt the eastern end of the church in brick with sandstone dressings, including a chapel and a central tower. It is said that this possibly unique feature resulted from the Lechmeres being on the ‘wrong’ side after the Civil War and, after paying money to the restored monarchy, finding they were unable to afford a complete rebuild.

A couple of centuries later it was Sir Edmund Lechmere who stepped in to pay for the Victorian ‘restoration’ of the church in 1858, engaging GE Street to undertake the works which included a splendid tall reredos of alabaster, stone and marble and some fine stained glass windows including ‘The Last Judgement of Christ’ by Clayton & Bell, considered to be one of their finest works.

Evidence of worship on the site of St Mary’s in the early 9th century is indicated by the ‘Lechmere Stone’ a grave marker of that era, now kept at Severn End. The altar of the Anglo Saxon church was consecrated by Wulfstan, Bishop of Worcester, in 1068 at just about the same time as the Lord of the Manor of Hanley, Brictric, was being arrested on the orders of William I and at the instigation of his wife Matilda whose advances Brictric had apparently scorned many years earlier.

The Norman Lord of the Manor built a new church, sweeping away the Saxon one but all that remains of the early Norman church is the masonry arch over the South doorway. The church was enlarged early in the 14th century with the building of the wide north aisle after a ‘new’ altar was dedicated by a later Bishop of Worcester, Godfrey Giffard, in 1290.