At last the sun has decided to come out!!!!! Had been planning this outing for a while. This Church is on the edge of the marshes at Higham in Kent. There are many intresting things to photograph in the church and churchyard.
The village first appears in the historical record in AD 774. This is the date of an Anglo-Saxon charter which mentions the village. Offa, king of the Mercian kingdom in the midlands and in control of enough of the south to call himself 'rex Anglorum' (King of the English), gave land there to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Jaenberht. There is no reference to any church in the charter, but we do know one existed at the Norman Conquest. Domesday Book (1086) notes that a certain Adam held Higham on behalf of Odo, Earl of Kent and bishop of Bayeux. The entry mentions that the land included a church and a mill and a fishery worth 3 shillings.
This pre-Conquest church must have been rebuilt before long and some evidence of the subsequent early-Norman structure can be found at St Mary's today. The present church's unusual double nave was completed later with the addition of the south aisle. This building of this aisle and therefore a large part of St Mary's architectural history may be linked in some way with a neighbouring institution, now lost but acknowledged on OS maps as the 'Site of Priory
Tags: Church
Architecture
Churchyards
Architectue
St mary
S Higham
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