The Biggest Grave in The Churchyard

Image: © Ian Dodds Taken: 21 Aug 2021

From this angle it might appear that this is the front of a mausoleum; it is in fact just an enormous gravestone. There were churches on this site for hundreds of years before the present one was built in the 1700s and this grave dates from the 1630s, a tribute to Matthew Lichton (or Leighton or Letham, depending on the source), the church's second post-Reformation minister. The gravestone fell down in the 1880s while a wall was getting moved - the rebuilding is noted on the dark stone in the centre. The Latin inscription at the bottom is really just a long-winded way of saying that he was a good hard-working sort who has now gone to heaven. The Reformation occurred in the early 1500s when some members of the Catholic Church, unhappy with certain aspects of it, broke away to form their own branch of Christianity, Protestantism. Obviously there are thousand word books covering this subject, none of which I have read! But in a nutshell, it all started in what is now Germany when a priest called Martin Luther published a few essays about what changes he thought the church should make, then gained some followers and got in trouble with the authorities, and ultimately The Pope. Things then snowballed. A law was made banning people from following his teachings, called 'The Edict of Worms' (Worms is just the name of a German town). His followers then issued the 'Letter of Protestation' in response, and a new church was born, taking its name from the title. An interesting fact about Martin Luther is that he ended up marrying one of several nuns he organised to have smuggled out of their convent in herring barrels. It is not stated anywhere whether he knew the nun before she emerged from the barrel or not.

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