Great Bardfield, Essex
Historical Description
Bardfield, Great, a small town and a parish in Essex. It stands on Blackwater river, 7 miles NW of Braintree station on the G.E.R. It has a post, money order, and telegraph office under Braintree, a town-hall, police station, and a fair on 22 June, and is a seat of petty sessions. The parish comprises 3666 acres; population of the civil parish, 956; of the ecclesiastical, 931. The living is a vicarage in the diocese of St Albans; net value, £145. The church is an ancient building of stone in mixed styles. There is a Primitive Methodist chapel, a Friends' meeting-house, and some small charities.
Administration
The following is a list of the administrative units in which this place was either wholly or partly included.
Ancient County | Essex | |
Ecclesiastical parish | Bardfield St. Mary | |
Hundred | Freshwell | |
Poor Law union | Dunmow |
Any dates in this table should be used as a guide only.
Churches
Church of England
St Mary (parish church)
The church of St. Mary is an ancient building of stone in the Norman and Perpendicular styles, consisting of chancel, nave of four bays, aisles, a fine south porch and an embattled western tower with spire, containing 6 bells, all rehung in 1887, when a treble bell wes added, and a clock: the chancel and nave are divided by a fine stone screen: there are piscinæ in the north and south aisles; William Bendlowes, serjeant-at-law, who held this church and the advowson of the living, obtained a licence in 1556 to convert the vicarage into a rectory, and having leased out the great tithes for 500 years at 20 marks yearly, settled on the rector and his successors the yearly sum of £6 13s. 4d. being one moiety of the 20 marks; the other moiety he employed in founding a chantry in the church, dedicated to the Holy Trinity; he died 19 November, 1584, and, with his wife Elizabeth, was buried under the south window of the chancel, where are their figures in brass with a Latin inscription: there are several memorial windows in the church to members of the Lampet family, which has furnished two vicars to this parish. The church has 250 sittings.
Methodist
Primitive Methodist Chapel
The Primitive Methodist chapel here was erected in 1862, and has 250 sittings.
Directories & Gazetteers
We have transcribed the entry for Great Bardfield from the following:
- Samuel Lewis' A Topographical Dictionary of England, by Samuel Lewis, seventh edition, published 1858. (Bardfield, Great (St. Mary))
- Kelly's Directory of Essex, Hertfordshire, and Middlesex, 1914
Land and Property
The Return of Owners of Land in 1873 for Essex is available to browse.
The Essex pages from the Return of Owners of Land in 1873 is online.
Maps
Online maps of Great Bardfield are available from a number of sites:
- Bing (Current Ordnance Survey maps).
- Google Streetview.
- National Library of Scotland. (Old maps)
- OpenStreetMap.
- old-maps.co.uk (Old Ordnance Survey maps to buy).
- Streetmap.co.uk (Current Ordnance Survey maps).
- A Vision of Britain through Time. (Old maps)
Newspapers and Periodicals
The British Newspaper Archive have fully searchable digitised copies of the following newspapers covering Essex online: