This is the church my partner was christened in. A little history below.
It is intriguing to note that this church dates from Norman times and it is widely believed that William the Conqueror would have visited Clewer Church to worship.
HOW OLD IS IT?
The question which everybody asks about Clewer Church is “How old is it?” No precise answer is possible.
Rector William Elwell, writing in the 192Os, wrote that the nave of the present church was built around 1100, the north aisle and the tower being added at the end of the century, but we do not know how he came to this conclusion.
We do know however, that the arches and pillars are Norman (though those on the north aisle were substantially restored in the 19th century) and the font has been identified as Saxon.
This means that the font stood in an earlier building which was probably a wooden one. Elwell thought that this stood on the site of the present south aisle. There are grounds for supposing that he was wrong. Until the 1850s, the font stood in a most improbable place (as a print in our museum shows) surrounded by pews at the west end of the north aisle. In ancient churches fonts are invariably by the entrance. It is possible, therefore that the original church stood on the site of the north aisle, with the font just inside its door, and that when the present church was built the font was left standing in the same position.
Rector Elwell records as a fact the local tradition that William the Conquerer “was accustomed to hear Mass in Clewer Church” – and certainly there would have been no chapel in the simple wooden fortification which he built on Castle Hill. Reconstructions of William’s “castle” done in 1986 (for the 900th anniversary of Domesday Book) showed the church enclosed in the castle’s outer palisade.
Clewer existed as a small settlement by the river long before Windsor came into being, with its church, mill (mentioned in Domesday Book) and fisheries. The Mill Stream provided a safe harbour with access to the Thames. The name Clewer, which appears in old documents as Clyfware and Clyvore, is said be mean “people of the cliff”, the reference being to the bluff on which Windsor Castle stands which was in the manor of Clewer. The bluff consists of chalk, and this was the building material used for Clewer Church.
FACT OR FICTION?
From time to time enthusiastic visitors assure us that Clewer Church is built on a ley line, and two men once “proved” this to their own satisfaction by carrying out a pendulum test inside the church. Ley lines are said to be lines of cosmic energy which join up ancient sites.
Whatever the truth of the “ley line” theory, something else which has been pointed out to us is fact. If you draw a north/south line through Clewer Church on a map the line goes through a tumulus to the north – west of Beaconsfield – and another to the south – by Chobham Common. The suggestion is that Clewer Church is on the site of a third tumulus. Two facts lend circumstantial support to this idea. The first is that it was the policy of the early Church in this country (under instructions from Rome) to build churches wherever possible on pagan sites so as to “disinfect” them. The second is that in an area of total flatness Clewer church stands on a rise in the ground level. This is scarcely noticeable but it was enough, in 1947 when Windsor was flooded, to keep the church dry even though boats were going up and down Mill Lane.
