Christianity in Bosley
The history of Christianity in the village goes far back beyond the Church and Chapel. Who can say who the first Christian was? perhaps a Roman soldier from their base at Buxton, or perhaps one of the missionaries who had to re-christianise Britain after the departure of the Romans and the collapse of their empire through a "fortuitous concatenation of contingent circumstances" as the historian Gibbon described it in the eighteenth century. Where might the Dark Ages missionaries have come from? A possibility is the South East and Canterbury. Another is Harlech and the Celtic Christians from the Lleyn peninsula and its holy off-shore island, Bardsey. If you go to Llandanwg, 2 miles south of Harlech you will find what looks like a small sixth century church tucked in among the dunes. It is actually quite big, and strikingly beautiful in candle-light services, with beams carved from ancient wrecks. And if you look westward at low water springs, you will see the Sarn Padrig, St Patrick's causeway, a straight reef of rocks reaching out 9 miles just below the surface towards Ireland. This sarn is sprinkled with wrecks, and was the route, in legend, which St Patrick followed, walking across the sea to Wicklow and Dublin, to convert the Irish.
Walking from Llandanwg across the hills to these parts of Cheshire was probably almost as hazardous in those days as crossing the sea, and if our earliest Christians were from the Celtic church, their task in reaching and converting the Bosleians of the dark ages was probably as dangerous as were the the CMS and Methodist missions from here to Central Africa in the 1850's.
What we can be sure of as regards established building, is that there was in Bosley a "chapel of ease" to the parish church of Prestbury, long before 1402.
In that year the Pope in Rome agreed in a "papal bull", to a petition by the villagers for more independence from their mother church in Prestbury because they were
"A distance of six miles from the parish church, and by reason of the high hills and deep valleys and swollen rivers, it was often impossible without peril, for them to attend divine service there; their prayer therefore that they might have licence to erect a baptismal font, baptise children and have one or more fit priests always serving at the Chapel of St Thomas the Martyr there (now St Mary the Virgin), and have rights of burial in a cemetery to be made near the chapel, was decreed to be complied with."
This ancient church, of which only the tower now survives, served as the focus of religious life in the village for centuries without any major changes. It only technically became a parish church with its own vicar, rather than being a chapel-of-ease with a curate-in-charge, in 1871.
There was however one interesting episode which occurred shortly after the Civil War and the Restoration of the Stuarts in 1660 when Sir Jeoffrey Shakerley of Somerford objected in 1669 to the continuation of Nonconformist and puritanical preaching by John Garside, and having bodily pulled Mr Garside out of the pulpit, he had him carried the next day to Chester, to be imprisoned there according to the law of the day.
It was soon after this sad episode that the first non-conformist activities began (apart from the legend of Ludds Church). Joseph Endon of this village had already been involved with the Quaker meetings at Eaton, where he had been a trustee of the burial ground since 1658, but now not only did other Bosley people attend those meetings and even choose to be buried at Eaton rather than in their own village churchyard, but Quaker meetings began to take place in Bosley at Joseph Endon's home, where Quaker marriages were also performed. Bishop Gastrell of Chester, in his 1718 survey of the diocese, complained about Bosley's Quaker meetings, and further criticism was delivered in 1742 when the curate-in-charge, the Rev John Thornley, published a five hundred page attack on three leading Quaker theologian Robert Barclay. Such antagonism can hardly have improved ecumenical relations, nor did it help the Georgian Church of England in its unreformed state.
In 1771 an appeal was launched when it was admitted that:
"The Chapel of Bosley is a very ancient structure and in most parts thereof bulged and cracked and so much decayed that it is dangerous for persons to assemble therein for the worship of Almighty God, and notwithstanding the inhabitants of the said chapelry have from time to time laid out considerable sums of money in repairing the said chapel, yet the same length of time become so ruinous that it cannot be any longer supported, but must be wholly taken down, and also that the said chapel is too small to contain all the people that would resort thereto, to hear the divine service, and therefore must be enlarged."
The reconstruction of the building was carried out in 1777 when the ancient half-timbering was replaced by the present brick nave. Unfortunately, as with much of the Established Church before the Evangelical Revival, change was confined to the building and did not affect its contents. The new communities growing up at a distance from the older centre of the village were rarely attracted by the conservative Anglican worship and lack of missionary zeal of the old church.
The second half of the century also saw the decline or Quakerism. The Eaton meeting-house was demolished in 1801 after meetings had ceased there about twenty years earlier, and at Bosley itself Bishop Portous's survey of the county in 1778 reported contentedly that the Quaker support was shrinking. Unfortunately, nothing really took its place in the religious lives of many villagers until the early Methodists began to preach Christianity again in the village.
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