Driving the back roads on my way from the quaint Suffolk village of Lavenham to Norwich in the neighboring English county of Norfolk I came across a small and rather unusual countryside church.
I wouldn’t have stopped in tiny Shelland (population 100 or less for most of the last 340 years) had it not been for the dedication of the parish church, the Church of King Charles the Martyr.
King Charles the Martyr is better known as Charles I, the English monarch beheaded in 1649 during the English Civil War. Just how unusual is the dedication? Only six churches contemporary to the 17th century in the entire Church of England have this dedication, according to a listing kept by the Society of King Charles the Martyr.
What makes it even more unusual, at least historically speaking, is the fact that Suffolk wasn’t a county whose sympathy was with the royalists, as Charles I’s forces in the English Civil War were called.
The Shelland parish was given its King Charles the Martyr dedication during the interregnum — the period between Charles I’s execution and the restoration of the monarchy — by Thomas Cropley, the local squire who also held the advowson, which was the perpetual right to select a parish’s clergyman. (As recently as 1896 the advowson for Shelland…
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