Church of St Mary Magdalene

The Church of St Mary Magdalene is the Grade I listed parish church of Great Burstead, a village about a mile and a half south of Billericay in Essex, its churchyard standing two hundred feet above sea level with views over the Crouch and Thames river valleys. The present building dates back to the twelfth century, but a wooden church may have stood on the site as early as the seventh — and few village churches anywhere can match the sweep of history that has passed through this one, from a Saxon king's burial to the Peasants' Revolt, the Mayflower, and the fiery fall of a German Zeppelin.

The site was originally a Saxon settlement, its name compounded of burgh — a fortified place — and stead, a farmstead, with the topography still showing a raised boundary and a ditch and stream to the west. The Saxons under King Æscwine arrived in Essex in 527, and in 653 St Cedd converted Ebba, the thane of Great Burstead, to Christianity. Sæberht, the first Christian Saxon king — converted by the mission of Mellitus, first Bishop of London, and dead by 616 — is said to be buried in the grounds. After Ebba left amid family quarrels, his successor Edwy was persuaded by Bishop Earconwald to build a church in 669, dedicated to Theodore, Archbishop of Canterbury; around 680 Bishop Cedd blessed a well on the site and placed a cross, and a wooden building rose whose foundations may yet remain beneath the present church.

After the Conquest, William gave thirty-nine Essex lordships to his half-brother Odo of Bayeux, and Great Burstead became his capital manor; by 1147 the lordship belonged to the Cistercian monks of Stratford Langthorne Abbey, who — flooded out by the Thames — moved their monastery to Great Burstead Church in 1338 and remained until 1551. The Norman church's nave walls, forty-four feet by twenty-three, were built of probably local stone rubble; the north wall, with its single arrowslit window, dates to the twelfth century — arrowslits coming into church use later in that century, in the time of Richard the Lionheart. In the south chapel stands a remarkable survival of that crusading age: a twelfth-century oak crusaders' chest, used to collect funds for the Crusades under Henry I. The fourteenth century added the west tower — fourteen feet square, of ragstone dressed with limestone, in three stages with angle buttresses, a castellated parapet and a shingled spire built around a timber spire, its original putlock holes still in place. The south aisle and north-east chancel followed in the fifteenth century, the south chapel and the two crown-post-roofed porches in the early sixteenth — the north porch with heavy oak beams, the south with ornate carvings. Recent renovations revealed wall paintings of the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth centuries along the south aisle, which also keeps restored fifteenth-century benches. The tower's five bells hang in an oak cradle of 1650: the oldest cast by Balcombe in London in 1458, two by Thomas Gardiner of Sudbury in 1724 and 1731, one by Thomas Mears II at the Whitechapel Bell Foundry in 1814 — all recorded in Stahlschmidt's 1884 Surrey Bells and London Bell-Founders, though structural problems with the timbers mean they cannot currently be rung.

The churchyard is a history lesson in itself. At the rear stands the oldest yew tree in Essex, estimated at about eight hundred years. Here too lie many of the Essex men killed in the Battle of Billericay at dawn on 28 June 1381 — the last stand of the Peasants' Revolt, when, after Wat Tyler's death in London, the fleeing rebels barricaded themselves with wagons in Norsey Woods north-east of Billericay, only for Richard II's forces under Thomas of Woodstock and Thomas Percy to ride straight through; an estimated five hundred died.

The church's American connection is among the most direct of any English parish. Christopher Martin, Billericay's best-known resident, born around 1575 and a prosperous merchant, was churchwarden of St Mary Magdalene in 1611–12. Turned Puritan — and investigated by the church for misusing funds at Ingatestone Hall — he became treasurer of the Mayflower against the advice of its Dutch backers, bankrupted the ship, survived a near-mutiny that ended only when land was sighted, and signed the Mayflower Compact on 11 November 1620, dying at Plymouth, Massachusetts, on 8 January 1621. He had married Mary Prowe in this church on 26 February 1606; she died three days after her husband. Her son Solomon Prowe, baptised at the church and a member of the Puritan-leaning King's Watch militia, survived the voyage only to die on Christmas Eve 1620, just as the exploration of Plymouth Harbour was completed.

The First World War brought the church's strangest chapter. In the early hours of 23 September 1916, the Zeppelin L 32, one of four raiding London, was attacked by Second Lieutenant Frederick Sowrey of the Royal Flying Corps, whose incendiary bullets set the airship blazing from end to end. Shedding burning debris over Billericay's High and Chapel Streets — residents said it sounded like a train rattling the windows, its fire lighting the countryside for miles — the ship's stern struck an oak near present-day Greens Farm Lane and it ploughed into the fields at Snails Farm. Its captain, Oberleutnant Werner Peterson, jumped clear clutching the ship's log and was found dead in the field; all twenty-two crew perished, and two days later they were buried in Great Burstead churchyard, where they lay until exhumed in 1966 for the German Military Cemetery at Cannock Chase. German visitors came quietly for half a century; the museum curator Ted Wright recorded how a local man, Frederick Eales, once guided a high-ranking German officer to the grave and weeks later received from Germany a glass bowl engraved with a Zeppelin and a letter of thanks.

Today St Mary Magdalene is a parish church in the Deanery of Basildon and the Diocese of Chelmsford, worshipping in the Anglo-Catholic tradition, with Sunday services, weddings, funerals and baptisms, its grounds — and their thirteen centuries of memory — tended by volunteers from congregation and community. The church has stood at the heart of the Great Burstead Conservation Area since its designation in 1983.