Family-History Pilgrimage: Day 11

The garden at our farm guest house.

Friday, June 16, 2023

We’ve come from Dolgellau, Wales, to the English villages of Leamington Spa, Bubbenhall, and Kenilworth in the West Midlands; and we’re staying at a farm just outside the village of Long Itchington, perhaps my favorite British place name ever. This is Warwickshire, home of Stratford-on-Avon and other Shakespeare sites, but we visited Stoneleigh Abbey in Kenilworth. 

Goose on patrol at Stoneleigh Abbey. 

Stoneleigh Abbey's history follows the pattern we’ve seen elsewhere. Cistercian monks founded a religious community here in the 1200s and managed to find success in worldly terms, too, producing wool for the area villages. Their success enabled them to build an impressive church, wool-production center, and living quarters; and things were good … until Henry VIII and the dissolution of the monasteries in the 1530s. Really, “ransacking” of the monasteries would be a better term. In Stoneleigh’s case, the king’s soldiers were given 10 days to demolish everything before they moved on to the next abbey, and the infrastructure at Stoneleigh was too great to let them get the job done. So, the soldiers broke what they could break, stole what they could carry, and left the rest behind. 

The 1346 gatehouse remaining from the abbey. 

The land and remaining buildings were given to a family supportive of the crown and later passed into the hands of the Leigh family. In the early 1700s, the present manor home was completed, looking much like the setting for Downton Abbey. In 1858, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert visited Stoneleigh, apparently choosing it because Stoneleigh had one of England’s first flush toilets, designed by plumber Thomas Crapper (really). I hope Victoria’s novel plumbing experience was worthwhile because it cost the family the modern equivalent of £9 million to prepare for her two-day visit, including having an entire set of China designed, produced, and then set on the shelf, never to be used again. The estate also helped form the writer Jane Austin, who was related to the Leighs and spent many months visiting the family, hearing about their social dramas, and making notes for later novels.

The 14th-century bell tower
at St. Giles' in Bubbenhall.

After lunch and a stroll through the gardens, we drove 15 minutes to St. Giles’ in Bubbenhall, begun in the late 1200s and still holding its own as a parish church. We came because of a family connection on my mother’s side. The immigrant ancestors here were John Reading and Mary Ann (Annie) Brown Reading. He was born in 1834 in Bubbenhall, and she was born in 1835, her family from Kenilworth. Annie was baptized as an infant and then re-baptized in 1846, when her family was converted to the religious movement sweeping the West Midlands at that time – the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. In the 1820s, Joseph Smith had found buried golden plates near Palmyra, New York, that he translated as the Book of Mormon. His band of followers moved west to Ohio in 1831, then to Missouri (including being driven out of Jackson County in 1833), and then to Nauvoo, Illinois, in 1839. It’s in this period – in 1837, years before Brigham Young led the Saints to what would become Utah – that the tiny movement showed astonishing foresight and faith by sending missionaries to England. And those missionaries had tremendous success. By 1842, there were 8,500 converts in England and 31,000 by 1850, more Mormons than in the United States at the same time. My ancestor John Reading was re-baptized a latter-day Saint in 1853, and he and Annie married in 1856. Two years later, they were on a ship to the States, with a toddler and another child on the way, joining a wagon train on the Mormon Trail to the City of Zion growing in the desert.

Bubbenhall churchwarden Craig Greenway,
an amazing steward of St. Giles'.

We searched the headstones in the well-tended Bubbenhall churchyard but didn’t find any Readings. Helping us with this task were the two St. Giles’ churchwardens, Craig Greenway and Sandra Hoffman. They were very kind to open the church for us on a Thursday afternoon and show us around. But their story of remarkable service only begins with this act of kindness for an emailing stranger. Craig and Sandra are leading their small parish, yoked with another local village church, after bidding farewell to their vicar of 23 years. Sandra, who is retired, was working in the churchyard when we arrived, cleaning and trimming around the graves. Craig – who works full-time, including two days a week in London – said he spends four hours a week cutting grass and maintaining the grounds and the building. He spends another 10 hours a week serving as church administrator and warden – arranging clergy coverage, producing worship leaflets, running parish committee meetings, representing St. Giles’ at diocesan meetings, and tending to the sundry other tasks of the church’s life. That has included maintaining a full slate of weekly worship – including Eucharist, Matins, and Evensong – in this congregation with typically 10 to 15 on a Sunday morning. For Craig, keeping worship going in Bubbenhall is a passion. We also talked about ways St. Giles’ is seeking to connect with the Bubbenhall community, and Craig noted the hiking trail that runs by the church and its ancient bell tower. He said he keeps the church doors open when he’s there and invites the walkers and hikers to enter, rest, and pray. Like our small churches in the Diocese of West Missouri, St. Giles’ can make it, and grow stronger, because of the fierce discipleship of quiet saints like Craig and Sandra.

Decorative boss at St. Giles'.

So, even though I didn’t find any family headstones, I found something better in Bubbenhall: The body of Christ in the persons of Craig and Sandra, welcoming the stranger, connecting with their neighbors, and worshiping God with deep faith.