Church of St Lawrence

St Lawrence's Church is a Church of England church in North Hinksey, West Oxford, dedicated to the Christian martyr St Lawrence and listed at Grade II*. A simple building of chancel, nave and tower, constructed of uncoursed limestone rubble with ashlar dressings beneath stone-tiled roofs, it dates from the early Norman period, around the year 1100 — and within its thick walls it holds an unusual concentration of stories, from a Civil War rebuilding to the tombstone that fixes a date in the early career of one of the founders of neuroscience.

The chancel is early twelfth-century work, the nave slightly later, the two originally connected by only a narrow opening; around 1850 this was replaced by a larger Norman-style arch designed by John Macduff Derrick, and a reproduction Norman chancel arch was built. The tower was first raised in the thirteenth century, but it and the south wall were rebuilt around 1670 after being partly destroyed during the English Civil War, when the fighting around besieged Royalist Oxford reached even this small village across the river. The north wall of the nave is largely original twelfth-century construction — very deep, with small window openings — and contains a blocked-up Norman doorway. The south wall keeps a twelfth-century door with a Norman beaker clasp carving recorded in the Corpus of Romanesque Sculpture in Britain and Ireland, sheltered by an external porch dated 1786. The doorway and staircase to the former rood loft, reminders of the church's pre-Reformation Catholic past, were reopened in 1913 — the rood loft and rood themselves having been destroyed at the Reformation — and old wall paintings on the north and west walls, though painted over, remain protected beneath the surface. The chancel roof rests on a sixteenth-century queen post truss.

The church was sensitively restored in 1913 by William Weir and Ernest Gimson — the latter among the leading figures of the Arts and Crafts movement, whose three doors remain notable features of the church. The restoration included sympathetic repairs to the roof truss and an external drainage system that still functions; the east and south walls show clear signs of the 1913 repairs, and the north wall bears the remains of a former heating house. An organ loft followed in 1931, built by T. Lawrence Dale with an organ by P. G. Phipps.

On the chancel floor lies the historically important tombstone of the parents of Dr Thomas Willis FRS, the famous physician who pioneered anatomy and pathophysiology through original multidisciplinary work in a clinical setting — the man whose name survives in the "circle of Willis" at the base of the brain. Willis lived at Ferry Cottage in North Hinksey through his schooldays, taking the ferry and walking into Oxford each day. The inscription reads in part: "Underneath lye Interred THOMAS WILLIS Gent. and RACHELL his wife (Parents of ye famous physitian THOMAS WILLIS) She departed this life & was here buried July 5, 1631 And He (in Defence of ye Royal Cause at ye siege of Oxford) August 4, 1643." The stone establishes the otherwise uncertain date of the death of Willis's father — a significant event in his early career — though the year actually predates the engagements now known as the Siege of Oxford, falling after the Royalist forces had withdrawn to their defensive position at the city. In the 1913 restoration the stone was placed "as near as possible" to its original site.

The tower contains six bells, rung by change ringing rather than struck with hammers, for Sunday services and, on request, for weddings. Four bells were installed when the tower was rebuilt after the Civil War; the tenor's inscription shows it was cast in 1614 — before the war — so it may have come from another church. By 1906 the tenor was unusable and was recast by John Taylor & Co. In 1972 the treble and second were recast by the Whitechapel Bell Foundry and two new bells added, using metal from a South Hinksey bell; the new bells became the treble and second, the others renumbered accordingly. The inscriptions read like a parish history in bronze: the treble "The gift of Winifred Toynbee 1972" — a local councillor and social worker; the second naming vicar John W. Larter and churchwardens K. G. Goff and H. Lockwood; the third cast in 1676 by Richard Keene of Woodstock; the fourth "1681 Christopher Hodson made me"; the fifth "RK 1675"; and the tenor "William Yare made me 1614. Recast 1907."

The five painted glass windows each carry a story. In the chancel south wall, Hardman & Co glass of 1890 depicts the Wise Virgins, given by the Reverend Cornish in memory of his unmarried sister Emily Louisa. Opposite, also Hardman work of 1890, Eunice and her son St Timothy commemorate Alexander Low of Dundee, who died at nineteen and may have been an Oxford student, remembered by his mother Jane. The east window, by James Ballantyne Jr of Edinburgh, shows the Risen Christ appearing to Mary Magdalene, making clever use of external light to lend a numinous quality to the figure of Christ and distinguish him from the living Mary. The nave's south window of 1881, again by Hardman, depicts the baptised Christ with the dove of the Holy Spirit, ringed by roundels of the Lamb of God, a pelican and sacred monograms. Most poignant is the small window in the nave's north wall, made in 1920 of fifteenth-century glass recovered from the Western Front. The south wall also has a small clear window set at a height that allows someone outside to watch the service within — whether intended for lepers, an anchorite or some other purpose is unknown, though an anchorite is recorded near Hinksey in 1271, supported by provision in a will.

Among the church's other treasures are a richly carved wall tablet of about 1678, a fifteenth-century carved stone font, and two wooden war memorials. The churchyard holds two Grade II listed chest tombs and the Grade II listed base of a churchyard cross believed to date from the twelfth or thirteenth century — its top became detached before 1800 and fragments were fixed to the church's east wall; remarkably, a piece of it turned up in 1983 at All Souls College, Oxford, where it had been used in nineteenth-century building work to block a doorway, though how it got there is a mystery and the other pieces are lost. Here too lie William Barson, who died in the First World War at just seventeen, his headstone maintained by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, and Sir Walter Raleigh — the English scholar and first Professor of English Literature at Oxford, not his Elizabethan namesake — buried in 1922. Within sight of Oxford's spires yet wholly a village church, St Lawrence's keeps nine centuries of worship, scholarship and quiet memorial in one small enclosure above the Thames-side meadows.