Church of St John the Baptist, Frome

The Church of St John the Baptist is the parish church of Frome in Somerset, a Grade II* listed building whose foundation reaches back to the very beginnings of Christianity in the Saxon West Country — and whose churchyard holds two things found nowhere else in Anglican England: a stone-sculptured Via Crucis climbing beside the entrance steps, and the deliberately empty tomb of Bishop Thomas Ken.

The first church here was founded by Aldhelm around 685 AD, after he obtained a grant from Pope Sergius I to establish a foundation of mission priests to spread the faith in Selwood Forest — the church dedicated "in honorem sancti Johannis Baptista". That earliest building, probably of timber, likely stood on the same rocky platform as the present church, between two streams running down the hill on either side, in line with Blindhouse Lane and Gentle Street. By the second half of the eleventh century a stone church on the site was one of several held in plurality by Regenbald, and the church lands earned their own entry in the Domesday Book. William of Malmesbury, writing in the 1120s, described the old building as having survived the centuries; archaeological work in 2021 located that earlier church within the eastern half of the present nave. In the nineteenth century, fragments of masonry possibly dating from the eighth or ninth centuries — one perhaps part of a standing cross — were found on the site and set into an old hagioscope near the entrance to St Andrew's Chapel.

The late Saxon building was replaced at the end of the twelfth century, and the church grew through the addition of chantry chapels — to St Andrew, St Nicholas and St Mary the Virgin in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries — until a major extension around 1420 brought it to its present footprint, with tower and spire; William Starke was vicar around 1418. The Puritans ordered the removal of the stained glass in 1643, and a long period of neglect followed: by the early nineteenth century the church badly needed restoration. The chancel and its adjoining side chapel — now the Ken Chapel — were restored in the 1840s at the expense of the patrons, Longleat, and when the south aisle was rebuilt in the 1860s, stonework interpreted as arcade foundations and possible Saxon burials came to light, quickly covered over so as not to delay the work.

The church's modern character was forged by one remarkable and controversial man. William James Early Bennett, appointed vicar in 1852, was a leading member of the Oxford Movement who had resigned St Barnabas, Pimlico in 1851 after accusations of ritualism and a theological dispute with his bishop, Charles Blomfield; he is celebrated for having provoked the legal decision that the doctrine of the Real Presence is not inconsistent with the creed of the Church of England. At Frome, Bennett transformed both parish and church. Within a few years he abolished the system of pew privilege by which the wealthy bought their seats, removing many pews and the galleries; he divided the parish into twelve districts and established schools, classes, a dispensary and other charities, a choir school for twelve boys, and crèches for the children of the town's factory workers. He bought property adjoining the grammar school founded at the dissolution of the chantries, merged the sites and built a new school — now the church hall, known as the Bennett Centre. His publication The Old Church Porch, issued at Frome from 1854 to 1862, became the prototype of the parish magazine, even if its format was rather academic in parts.

Bennett's restoration of the 1850s and 1860s, with Charles Edmund Giles as principal architect, gave the church its richly adorned interior. The sculptor James Forsyth carved the statues of saints and the reredos, and the medallions set in the spandrels of the nave arches were inspired by Donatello's work in the Old Sacristy in Florence, which Bennett had seen on his European excursion of 1851. Most extraordinary of all is Forsyth's Via Crucis beside the steps on the north side of the church, added in the 1860s after several buildings were demolished to make way for it — unique in the Anglican church in England. Its seven stone-sculptured scenes from the Stations of the Cross unfold as you climb: Christ condemned by Pontius Pilate; Christ carrying his cross; Christ falling beneath it, supported by Simon of Cyrene; Christ meeting his mother; the stripping of his garments; Christ nailed to the cross; and finally his death, displayed on the gable of the north porch.

The interior holds a chancel, Lady chapel and baptistery with a nave of seven or eight bays, retaining fragments of Norman work in carved stones at the base of the tower and parts of the arch into the Lady Chapel. Most of the stained glass is by Charles Eamer Kempe. The medieval font, recovered in the nineteenth century from under the floor at the west end, was restored first in the middle of the nave and then moved by Bennett to the Chapel of St Nicholas, now the baptistery, where it stands on a Clayton & Bell pavement depicting the seven virtues and seven deadly sins; an earlier font from the Ken Chapel was given to Christ Church, Frome after that church was built. The brass gates to the chancel and the forged metal screen to the Lady Chapel — complete with a gas lamp feature — were locally made by John Webb Singer, whose works may also have produced the fine brass lectern and candlesticks: Frome's famous art metalworks, literally furnishing its parish church. The large three-manual pipe organ has parts dating from around 1680 by Renatus Harris, with later work by Young, Richard Seede and Vowles, and was rebuilt in 1923 by Hill, Norman and Beard. The screen and gates at the forecourt entrance were built in 1814 by Jeffrey Wyatt, when Bath Street was cut as a new road.

Outside the east end lies the tomb of Thomas Ken (1637–1711), one of the fathers of modern English hymnology and the most eminent of the seven bishops who refused the 1689 oath to William and Mary, for which he was deprived of his See of Bath and Wells. The symbolism of his resting place is deliberate: an empty grave and empty coffin, outside the church — the deprived bishop excluded even in death. Ken is remembered in the Church of England with a Lesser Festival on 8 June, and in the Episcopal Church (USA) on 20 March. Near the northern corner of the churchyard, a holy well is fed by a spring rising near Gentle Street at the churchyard's south-western corner — still the site of well dressing each May. Designated Grade II* in 1983, the church and its benefice of Frome St John the Baptist lie within the archdeaconry of Wells and the Diocese of Bath and Wells, thirteen centuries after Aldhelm's mission priests first raised a church between the streams of Selwood.