Stories from Heighington church when women brawled with hatpins

But perhaps the best story has left nothing physical behind, just a mental image of two ladies brawling in the pews with hatpins for weapons.

The stories came tumbling out of St Michael’s Church in Heighington, a Norman church on a Saxon site near Darlington. 

Looking into Heighington on an Edwardian postcard, with the church high on top of the hill

THE church was built around 1130. It is one of only two in south Durham that have Norman towers. The other is Kirk Merrington.

Heighington’s name probably comes from the fact that it is a “heah”, or high place. If you climb to the top of the church tower in this high place, to the south you can see over lowly Darlington to Barton in North Yorkshire, to the north you can see over Shildon to Kirk Merrington.

If you were to stand on the top of Kirk Merrington’s tower, you would be able to see the top of Durham Cathedral, so the belief is that three towers are all beacons, passing on a fiery message from Durham to Merrington to Heighington and on to the Tees Valley – perhaps a warning that the Scots were coming.

The one problem with this theory is that the nave of Heighington church used to have a thatched roof, probably made of heather. If you have a great beacon blazing away on the tower above the roof, it would seem likely that you were soon going to set your thatch below on fire.

Durham County Council's mobile maternity unit and child welfare clinic visits Heighington near Darlington in April 1967

THE Norman church was built on the site of a much older building – churches dedicated to St Michael the Archangel have often been found to have replaced earlier, pre-Christian places of worship.

There are some Saxon stones kicking about as hangovers from the earlier church, most notably a crudely carved stone bowl which is believed to have been a Saxon font. It may well have had a hinged lid on it to keep the holy water inside clean and to prevent parishioners from pilfering it.

The remains of Heighington's Saxon font

Perhaps England's only surviving horn window at Barley Hill in York

IN the early church, the windows would have been very small, largely because it was not possible to manufacture big panes of glass until the 17th Century.

Indeed, any glass centuries ago was very expensive, so substitutes were used. Most likely, it was the horn of a cow, which, once the cow had finished with it, was soaked in water for three months, heated and then flattened and separated into thin, translucent strips that could be used for glazing.

One of the few surviving horn windows in the country is in Barley Hall at York, a rebuilt medieval town house.

So churches were very dark, although Heighington has a very unusual form of lighting: a cresset (below).

A cresset is a fire stone. Hollows in the stone were filled with oil or wax in which a wick was placed and then lit, and it shed just about enough candlelight to conduct a service.

There are only about a dozen cressets known in this country, and a handful more in Scandinavia, although the best description of a cresset in action is to be found in the 16th Century book, The Rites of Durham, which described life in and around the cathedral: “At each end of the dorter [dormitory] was a square stone, wherein was a dozen of cressets wrought in each stone, being fill’d and supply’d by the cooks, as they needed, to afford light to the monks and novices on their arising to their matins at midnight, and for their other necessary uses.”

Heighington’s cresset is believed to date from the 14th Century.

Heighington in the 1960s

PEWS didn’t really become a feature of English churches until the Protestant Reformation when sermons became more important so the congregation needed somewhere to sit and snooze.

Some churches charged pew fees. An area’s important families might buy up their preferred pews, with the wealthiest sitting down the front while the poorest had to make do with being stuffed out the back.

Consequently, there could be disputes about who could sit in which pew, and no dispute is more colourful than the one that occurred in Heighington in 1603, when Eleanor Richmond found Eleanor Hutchinson sitting in the pew that she considered to be hers.

So Mistress Richmond sat on top of Mistress Hutchinson.

Mistress Hutchinson retaliated by using her hatpin as an offensive weapon.

The two women were charged with brawling in the church, and were ordered to do penance: they had to wear a white sheet – “a penitential habit” – and holding a rod had to stand in a prominent place during the Sunday service. At some point, the service would stop and the naughty women would in a “distinct and audible voice…in a most penitential and sorrowful manner” confess their sons, ask God for forgiveness and promise never to be naughty again.

After the brawl, the church authorities in Heighington introduced a first come, first seated rule, to prevent any future fights.

BROUGHT out specially for the history day was Heighington’s coffin carrier (above) – a remarkable, steerable trolley which once rolled the dead into the church for their final service.

The church records suggest Heighington has long had a bier and one of the out-buildings is traditionally known as “the hearse house”, so the village has for centuries had a mode of transport for the dead.

The coffin carrier has a plaque on it saying it was dedicated to Frederick Grey, who was a churchwarden for many years until his death in 1935. Whether the carrier was bought new in his memory, or whether it is an old carrier fully restored, is not known, although it does have hard, rubbery tyres on it which look to be from the 1930s.

It is obviously a top-of-the-range coffin carrier as it even has wooden rollers on the top to enable the undertakers to smoothly move the coffin along.

The carrier was last used for a funeral in the 1970s and is now just a fabulous curio.

An Edwardian postcard showing the pond at the bottom of the green and the church in the distance. The pond was fed from the overspill from the pant, which was once the village's main water supply

A gazebo or an infirmary, can you tell us?

THE history day did not provide any answers, though, to a query about a Grade II listed building which is built into a garden wall on the edge of the village.

Historic England refers to it as an early 18th Century “gazebo”. Most sources reckon that “gazebo” is a mid-18th Century joke that joined “gaze” with the Latin “ebo” meaning “I shall” to create the name of a fashionable garden feature in which the well-to-do could sit and gaze out admiringly onto their estates and also, importantly, onto the countryside around.

However, in Heighington the building is known as “the infirmary”.

So have you got any clues about the story of this curious building?

Are there any other interesting gazebos that we should be gazing at?

And churches are fascinating repositories of an area’s history. What secret stories does your church hold? What is your neighbourhood’s equivalent of the Heighington cresset, coffin carrier or brawling ladies armed with hatpins?

All stories welcome: please email chris.lloyd@nne.co.uk

Heighington in November 1966