Church of St Mary, Rolleston-on-Dove

St Mary's Church is the Church of England parish church of Rolleston on Dove in Staffordshire, a Grade I listed building whose oldest fabric dates from 1130 — and a church with one architectural eccentricity that immediately announces its history: the main entrance is on the north side, because the southern door was reserved for the Mosley family, the local landowners and key donors who dominated village and parish for three centuries.

A church is thought to have stood on the site since at least the early Norman period — a priest is recorded as residing at Rolleston in the 1086 Domesday Book — though the present structure is later. The advowson belonged to the lords of the manor: in 1261 Robert de Ferrers, 6th Earl of Derby, gave it to the priory at Tutbury, but it was reclaimed in 1272 by his successor Edmund, Earl of Leicester, passed to the Crown in 1399 as part of the Duchy of Lancaster, and remained in royal control until the early seventeenth century, when Sir Edward Mosley, 1st Baronet, acquired it shortly after becoming lord of the manor in the 1620s. The Mosleys' connection with the church ran deep: several family members, often younger sons, served as rector; they held their own private entrance on the south of the building — the pent-porched Mosley door of 1821 — along with rights over seating and the erection of monuments in the south aisle; and the family, which remains extant, still retains the right of burial in the churchyard, which otherwise closed in 1974 when the local authority built a cemetery north-west of the village. The advowson passed to Sir C. A. King-Hardman in 1929 and in 1939 to the Martyrs Memorial and Church of England Trust, now part of the Church Pastoral Aid Society, which retains the right to present clergy. The church's endowments tell their own economic story: a glebe of forty-four acres in Rolleston and twenty-two in Anslow, with tithes from both settlements, yielding around £36 in the thirteenth century, £60 by the early seventeenth, and more than £700 by 1831; the tithes were commuted in 1837 and 1844, and most of the glebe was sold in 1881.

The current building dates to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, with a major restoration in 1892 by Sir Arthur Blomfield. The oldest surviving portion is that unusual north entrance, in Romanesque style and dating to 1130. Built of ashlar sandstone, the church consists of a nave — much of it thirteenth-century, almost entirely enclosed by its north and south aisles — a chancel, and a fourteenth-century west tower of three stages, buttressed at the corners to full height, crowned with a crenellated parapet, gargoyles, and a stone spire added in 1892. Two nave bays are exposed on the south, one holding the twelfth-century round-arched doorway, the other a three-light pointed window; the single exposed bay on the north contains a window of unusual seventeenth-century construction, with three trefoil-topped lights under a criss-cross panel. The chancel has a three-light pointed east window and a cinquefoil-headed window on the north wall; nave and chancel are roofed in red tiles, the aisles in lead behind stone parapets. The north aisle — also designated a lady chapel — was added in 1892 in three buttressed bays, the easternmost larger and holding a priest's door, while the south aisle was extended the same year by demolishing an external vestry.

Inside, the chancel features stained glass by the great Victorian designer Charles Eamer Kempe, and a south aisle window preserves medieval glass. The chancel roof rides on scissor trusses, the nave's on collar and arch braces. There are two octagonal pulpits at the western end — one of fretted oak on a stone base, the other nineteenth-century stone with quatrefoil panelled sides — and an octagonal font; the tower stands behind a wooden screen. The interior was extensively remodelled in 1884, when new pews were installed recycling oak from the former seats, rendering and whitewash were stripped from the walls, the tower arch was exposed and a gallery removed; the Mosley family provided an organ during the 1892 renovation. The tower houses eight bells spanning three and a half centuries — dated 1586, 1622, 1652, 1701, 1803, 1908 and two of 1929 — and an electrically operated clock. The monuments are exceptional for a village church: a 1536 monument to Robert Sherborne, Bishop of Chichester, who was born in the parish; memorials to Thomas Caldwell (died 1554), an unknown couple of about 1600, William Rolleston (died 1682) and one Wilman (1692); and plaques to numerous Mosleys, including Sir Edward Mosley (died 1638), whose monument is the largest in the church, and Sir Oswald Mosley, 4th Baronet (died 1915).

The churchyard, enclosed by a sandstone wall and now protected as a scheduled monument, was extensively remodelled in the nineteenth century, with entrances stopped up, walls moved and rebuilt. In 1897 Sir Oswald Mosley, 4th Baronet, erected a Saxon cross here — a stone with a wandering history, having previously served as a paving slab in the porch of St Michael's Church, Tatenhill, and before that stood in the grounds of Rolleston Hall. An iron fence followed in 1900 to keep cattle out, the 5th Baronet extended the churchyard with a grant of land in 1923, floodlighting arrived in 1996 and a millennium yew was planted in 2000. The monument to George Ridgway and some of the railings with a gate are separately Grade II listed. At the northern entrance stands the lychgate of 1919 — erected by public subscription with a Mosley donation, designed by the Lincolnshire architect Cecil Greenwood Hare and built in Lichfield — which doubles as the village war memorial, containing a bronze crucifix and the names of villagers killed in both world wars; its pierced side panels were renewed in oak in the 2000s. In the churchyard's south-west corner stood the access to St Mary's Grammar School, first endowed by Bishop Sherborne in 1520 and rebuilt by Sir Edward Mosley, 2nd Baronet, in 1640; it closed as a school in 1909 when a council school opened in the village, and the Grade II listed building now serves various village organisations. A substantial rectory of six bays was built north of the church in 1612, complete with stable block, tithe barn, dovecote and kiln, rebuilt in brick in 1700 amid extensive gardens and fish ponds, improved through the nineteenth century, and finally sold and replaced by a smaller house on church grounds in 1953.

St Mary's remains the parish church of Rolleston on Dove in the Diocese of Lichfield, within the deanery of Tutbury and the archdeaconry of Stoke-upon-Trent, its vicar by 2018 also serving Holy Trinity, Anslow and St Mary's, Tutbury. The pattern of worship keeps a traditional rhythm: holy communion on the first and third Sunday evenings of the month, choral evensong on the others, early communion on the first Sunday, morning prayer on the third and fourth, and a midweek communion every Thursday morning — the old church of the Mosleys still at the heart of its Dove-side village.