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Copyright of Alf Beard

St Katherine's (or Holy Trinity) Church,
Wormington Village,
Wormington, Gloucestershire.

Cemeteries

This Church has (or had) a graveyard.

Note: any church within an urban environment may have had its graveyard closed after the Burial Act of 1853. Any new church built after that is unlikely to have had a graveyard at all.

Church History

This Place of Worship was founded in 1475, and we understand it is still open.

Kelly's Directory of 1923 describes St Catherine's Church as "a building of stone in the Anglo-Norman or Transitional style, consisting of chancel, nave of two bays, aisles and a small embattled tower of wood on the western gable containing one bell". On the south chancel wall there is a curious brass with figures of a woman and child in bed, erected in memory of Ann, eldest daughter of Richard Daston, and wife of John Savage, who died June 17th 1605. There are also several mural tablets to the Gist family. The parish registers begin in 1615.

Evidently Wormington had a small population. The return for the Religious Census of 1851 (HO 129/343/2/2/2), for St Catherine's Church recorded an average attendance of 25 to morning service, and 30 in the afternoon, with 10 Sunday Scholars to both morning and afternoon classes. It was completed by J.R.F. Billingsley, the Rector, who recorded his address as "Wormington Rectory, Evesham".

Note: St Katherine (or St Catherine)'s Church is recorded on the British Listed Buildings website with Dumbleton parish, as also are Great and Little Washbourne. It certainly deserves its Grade II Listed status, set as it is in a strategic position against the backdrop of the village green. According to their account, it was built (or rebuilt) in 1475 by the Abbot of Hailes, probably on the site of an earlier 12th century church.

Above the altar at the east end of the south aisle is a stone Saxon crucifix, which has been dated to the 9th century. It was found in the grounds of Wormington Grange, and it is thought originally to have belonged to Winchcombe Abbey prior to the Dissolution.

In 2013, when I prepared this account originally, I quoted the entry for Wormington in The National Gazetteer of Great Britain and Ireland (1868) (when S.G. Gist, Esq. of Wormington Grange, was lord of the manor) since it recorded the church as dedicated to the Holy Trinity or St Catherine. I have now (in 2018) discovered Samuel Rudder, in his New History of Gloucestershire of 1779, expressed a similar ambiguity - a dedication of "Holy Trinity, or as some say, to St Catherine, whose figure, with her wheel, appears in one of the pointed windows". From this, I would deduce that the Church may once have had either a joint dedication, or have been dedicated to Holy Trinity alone, but this has proved impossible to establish with any certainty.

As a spin-off from the above (2018) research, I discovered a very nice set of photographs, including one of the stained windows depicting St Catherine, evidently not the one that Samuel Rudder reported, as it is by William Morris & Co., dated 1912, for which see Guy Thornton's Flickr Photostream.

There may be more information available by by selecting one or more of the accompanying images on the right.

Denomination

Now or formerly Church of England.

If more than one congregation has worshipped here, or its congregation has united with others, in most cases this will record its original dedication.

Maps

This Church is located at OS grid reference SP0389336428. You can see this on various mapping systems. Note all links open in a new window:

• St Katherine's (or Holy Trinity) Church, Wormington shown on a Google Map.
• Places of Worship in Wormington shown on a Google Map.
• Streetmap.co.uk (arrow on map shows the Place of Worship's location) (verified 2018-10-15)
• Bing (Ordnance Survey option) (verified 2018-10-13)
• Bing Maps ('Bird's Eye' View) (verified 2018-10-15)
• Ordnance Survey "getamap" (NB some of the 'Change Map' options may require a subscription) (verified 2018-10-15)
• OpenStreetMap (Maps © OpenStreetMap contributors, CC-BY-SA) (verified 2018-10-15)
• A Vision of Britain Through Time - useful for Boundary Changes (verified 2018-10-15)
• www.magic.gov.uk (Modern Maps with various overlays) (verified 2018-10-15)

Resources

I have found many websites of use whilst compiling the information for this database. Here are some which deserve mention as being of special interest for Wormington, and perhaps to Local History and Places of Worship as a whole.

• Learn more about Buildings of special or historical interest on the British Listed Buildings (null) (verified 2018-09-19)
• Overview of Guy Thornton's Flickr Photostream (null) (verified 2018-11-07)

The above links were selected and reviewed at the time I prepared the information, but please be aware their content may vary, or disappear entirely. These factors are outside my control.