A Brief History of Crayke : Rectory and Rectors

As recorded above, the church has been dated to 1490, but the priest’s house is of uncertain origin.  The lower part of the house, now The Old Rectory, is built with thick stone walls which may have come from the ruins of the castle located nearby.  Brief descriptions are found in the Glebe Terriers [23] which date back to 1663 and an earlier Parliamentary Survey [22] of 1647 which states that ‘the parson hath a handsome house in good repair’.  In spite of the predominantly Georgian character of the present house then, it appears to date back at least to the middle of the 17th century and possibly earlier. 

In 1647 the rectory had ‘one stable, one hayloft, and one barn or laith; one garden and a croft; two closes of land called Carleygates, containing 20 acres or thereabouts; and one close or parcel of ground called the Shaire, containing 25 acres or thereabouts’.  The Carleygates were on either side of the Oulston road just outside Crayke, beyond Gallows Hill.  The Parson’s Shaire was off the Brandsby road just beyond Wyndham Hall (now known as Crayke Manor) and included a barn marked as Crayke Glebe on the Ordnance Survey map and accessible today by a public footpath.  The locations of the rectory house and land are given in detail in the 1716 Glebe Terrier [23]. 

The rector in 1716 was John Turner who was born in Crayke in 1659 [18].  His predecessor was Luke Mawbarne (rector 1665-1668).  The Diocese Book of 1793 records that there were then 90 houses in Crayke, all occupied by farmers and labourers except John Bowman Esq. and the rector Thomas Bowman [24].  The records of the parish tithes include such items as ‘Every house pays a hen at Christmas or else sixpence’ and ‘Everyone pays 2d for his or her Easter offering who then receives ye Blessed Sacrament of ye Lord’s Supper’.  The Tithe Commutation Act of 1836 formally replaced tithes with a rent charge to be paid to landowners, including the church; these were converted by the Tithe Act of 1936 to annuities to be paid to the state, were transferred to the Inland Revenue in 1960 and finally ended by the Finance Act of 1977. 

Detailed Accounts of expenditure on alterations to the rectory house in 1803-6, organised by the outgoing rector Robert Gray (who then became Bishop of Bristol) for his successor Powell Colchester Guise, show how £717-10s (c. £42,000 in today’s money)[25] was spent on improving the house.  The builder was John Cobb and the work, perhaps inspired by the multi-storey hall of the neighbouring castle, included adding a 3rd storey to the house.  In 1820 Guise had an underground reservoir built to contain around 6,000 gallons of water, its location being ‘in a direct line from the butler’s pantry window, about 5 yards from the back kitchen wall and 2 yards from the great tree’ [26].  He laid wooden pipes to carry water from the church roof to this reservoir in March 1824 and increased its capacity to 11,196 gallons in June 1826.  When the wooden pipes rotted they were replaced by tile ones in October 1834.  The reservoir ensured a supply of soft water to supplement that drawn from the deep well located at the north-west corner of the house.  Now it has been adapted to form a small swimming pool on the west side of The Old Rectory.

The Revd P C Guise died in 1835 and was succeeded by Edward Churton, then aged 35 and rector of Monks Eleigh in Suffolk [27].  Churton soon had trouble with the house.  Its location on the crest of the hill exposes it directly to the prevailing south-westerly winds and  heavy gales in 1836 blew away the zinc water spouts on the south and west sides and damaged the poorly built bow windows carried up the whole south side.  Churton replaced the spouts with wooden ones in March 1836 and restored the bow windows with new cementing, spending £60 (c. £4,200 today)[25] on these repairs to the house and another £25 (c. £1,750 today) on building a porch to the north door, ‘very important to the internal warmth of the house’.  However, his troubles were far from over.  A ‘great storm’ in January of 1839 did so much damage to the house that Churton determined to take down the ill-advised and vulnerable 3rd storey, to build an equivalent for it to the west of the main building, and to rebuild the bow windows in a more substantial form.  He also had the whole of the south and west sides of the house rendered with Roman cement to protect them from the weather.  This major building modification was completed at a cost of c. £500 (c. £31,500 today) in the summer of 1839 with financial support from friends: the Venerable John James Watson, archdeacon of St Alban’s and former rector of Hackney where Churton was his curate in 1831-35 and married his daughter Caroline in 1834, and Joshua Watson Esq. of Park Street, Westminster [27]. 

In 1840 the Crayke living was worth £900 a year (around £57,000 today)[25] to Churton who also had private means [28].  He was made Archdeacon of Cleveland in 1846 and later recruited William Inge, then a Fellow of Worcester College, Oxford, to come to live in Crayke and tutor his sons and his nephew.  Inge took holy orders, became Churton’s curate in 1854 and married his daughter, Susan Mary, in 1859.  A substantial wing was added to the curate’s house, known as Crayke Cottage, in 1868; this is located lower on the hill, facing the village green.  Three of Churton’s sons won open scholarships to Eton, testifying to the tutorial abilities of William Inge who remained Churton’s curate until 1874 when he moved away to Alrewas near Burton-on-Trent.  In 1860 Inge’s son William Ralph was born, later to become a distinguished and scholarly Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral in London.  Dean W R Inge spent the first 14 years of his life in Crayke and later wrote warmly of this time, recalling as one of his earliest memories the view of York Minster 12 miles away from the south-facing windows of the rectory, ‘seeming like a ship at sea on the plain of York’.  After one term in a prep school (Mr Perry’s in Slough) the young Inge went on to Eton and Oxford.  The eldest of Churton’s sons, also named William Ralph, was a Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge, from 1859 to 1899 and was Godfather to Inge (his ‘uncle Willy’).  Dean Inge wrote of the Churtons as being academically distinguished, ‘excellent scholars and notable divines’ [28]. 

The average number of people attending Crayke church services in 1865 was around 200, with some 30 or so of these being communicants [29] (this compares with 50 reported for 1793)[24].  Churton stated that the total church attendance for a typical Sunday in 1865 was 300, i.e. more than half the total population of the village which at that time was around 500.  He commented on ‘some cases of irreligion and immorality’ which were ‘I trust, not on the increase.’

Edward Churton died aged 74 years in 1874 and is buried with his wife Caroline in Crayke churchyard.  During his 39 years as rector he was responsible for reseating the chancel of the church in oak, scraping the walls, erecting a raredos behind the alter and installing new stained glass windows in 1848 at a cost of £490 (c. £37,000 in today’s money)[25], building a new north aisle, making roof repairs, a new seating arrangement and a  new floor in 1863 at a total cost of £1156 (c. £75,500 today).  He also added a new piece of land to the north of the churchyard in 1864.  It was Churton who, together with Dr Henry Yates Whytehead, sponsored the building of the first village school house in 1846.  Whytehead lived in the house to the east of the church (now Crayke Hall), built by John Bowman who died aged 82 in 1799.  The Illustrated London News of 1 Feb. 1846 pictured and described the school [30]; this became the Village Hall for some 20 years after the opening of the new primary school in 1979 and is now a private house on the north side of West Way.      

Following Churton’s prosperous period, the condition of the rectory house declined to a state where by May 1947 it was considered by the archbishop of York to be semi-derelict and uninhabitable.  A grant of £468 (c. £12,220 today)[25] from the Queen Anne’s Bounty [26] was needed to fund the demolition of a wing of the house which was built by Churton as his servants’ quarters, and reconditioning of the remainder according to plans drawn up by the architects Biscomb and Ferry of York [31]. The work completed in 1951 by J Smith and sons of Chapel Street, Easingwold, included converting the old pantry into a back entrance porch, retiling the kitchen floor and capping the well.  In 1947 the 57-year old Revd W F Cotton had accepted the Crayke living, by then worth only £528 (£13,780 today), on condition that the house was repaired.  Cotton had worked for many years in Rangoon and India before coming to Crayke, the population of which had dwindled to just 393.  The church authorities sold off pieces of the rectory land over the years, including a stretch extending down the hill to the south which included two grass tennis courts close to the present Easingwold Road, the adjoining land to the west where the house named West End now stands, and finally sold the old rectory house itself at auction on 10 December 1969 after building a smaller new house for the priest in what previously had been the rectory’s kitchen garden.