In Christ Church, Warminster, The First 150 Years, a booklet published in October 1980, to celebrate the 150th birthday of Christ Church, the Rev. John C. Day (Vicar) wrote:
Why was Christ Church built way back in 1831?
To answer that question we must begin with a long look back into the earlier history of our district.
At the beginning of the 19th century the whole area around where the church now stands would have been open country; no school, no hospital, very few homesteads and until 1830 Weymouth Street as we know it did not exist as a road. Before that date the main road through the parish was the old turnpike road running up what is now Sambourne Road, being part of the important London to Barnstaple highway.
In those days Warminster town had not begun to climb the hill and spread southwards from the present town centre. But south of the town a large separate village had grown up known by the locals as “The Common” or “Newtown”.
Warminster Common
The history of Christ Church is much bound up with the story of Warminster Common so it will be interesting to recall a little of the background of this part of the parish.
In the old days this large area of waste land south of the town and described as Warminster Heath on the old maps, was not owned privately or required by anybody. Thus anyone could build on and enclose pieces of ground for their own use without reference to authority, and by the end of the 18th century the Common had a population of well over a thousand, huddled along the stream which runs west to east along the Brook Street, Fore Street and Wylye Road valley. Alas, with road widening and new housing, the stream, which for centuries must have been both water supply, laundry and playground for the children, is now culverted underground.
In 1779, the free and easy life of the commoners took a turn for the worse. That year saw the beginning of attempts to force enclosure acts on the people; acts which were to mean the loss of any ancient rights and privileges. Among local landowners desiring to enclose land in this part of Warminster was the Viscount Weymouth of Longleat.
By an award made in 1783 the inhabitants of the Common lost all their old rights of pasturage, fuel gathering, etc. Previously in 1777 an attempt had been made to make them bow their knee to the Lord of the Manor by the voluntary payment of one penny for a dinner at the Bell inn (now known as the Bell And Crown) in the village. But being suspicious of the move, no villager rose to the bait so at least among their many misfortunes they were able to retain the freehold of the homes they lived in.
From accounts by W. Daniell and J. Daniell, the Common in the 19th century must have been a miserable place to have to live in. A description of it obtained from an eyewitness account of 1780 describes the hovels as consisting for the most part of “one ground floor and one bedroom under the thatch, walls unplastered and the floor just as nature made it. Both animals and family lived in the ground floor and the bedroom reached by a ladder doubled as hayloft.” There was no place of worship, no schooling for the children, so it followed that the populace grew up illiterate and godless.
The eyewitness goes on to say that “scarce anyone went near a church and that Sundays were spent in all sorts of games such as bull and badger baiting, cock fighting, boxing, wrestling and drunkenness, oaths and fights.”
Thus the historians give us a picture of a thoroughly squalid, miserable place that few of the residents of Warminster wished to know about. How things have changed. Now the Common has become a desirable place to live in and many of the remaining old cottages renovated and made very attractive. The whole area now has a quaint village-like flavour about it.
But to return to our tale, there can be little doubt that earlier in the last century as Daniell relates in his history of the town that “The inhabitants of the Common were at the lowest level of moral and social life, and, as a natural consequence of their deep poverty, hard drinking and unhealthy homes, typhoid fever made dreadful ravages among them; twenty eight or thirty adults died in a month and when smallpox and measles attacked them also, the mortality was frightful.”
It was this state of affairs that finally awakened the conscience of Warminster.
Towards the end of the 18th century, a blind man, Jeremiah Payne, and a John Pearce began attempting to conduct regular acts of worship on the Common, probably on their home and in the home of a James Gunning.
Mention will be made later of the original Workhouse on the Common. Suffice to say here that it was in that place that we begin to see the real beginning of what later became Christ Church. In the early part of the last century it was here that a curate of St. Denys (in whose parish the Common then was) came to conduct Church of England services and in 1826 the Rev. William Dalby, the new Vicar, conducted a regular afternoon service at a room in the Workhouse. It appears that the authorities did not go out of their way to make things comfortable for the worshippers, a situation which convinced the good Vicar that the only real answer was to set about building a new church in this part of the town.