Christianity in Hickling.

It is likely that the church and priest’s residence/rectory have been located in roughly the same area of the village throughout Hickling’s Christian history. However, their precise locations will have shifted gradually over time; archaeological records identify an early mediaeval (Anglo-Saxon/Anglo-Scandinavian) graveyard slightly east of the current church building and this is a possible original location for the early mediaeval monuments now resting in St. Luke’s. 

The first church building would probably have been a wooden structure with an earth floor and the congregation would have been served by visiting/nomadic priests. The first recorded rector was Adam, son of Robert de Hicklinge, who was instituted under the patronage of Sir Roger de Hareston on 21 July 1217 and he stayed in Hickling for seventeen years (ref: Chris Granger, A History of Hickling & All its Clergy).

The oldest surviving part of the Church building in its current location is the south section which dates from the early C14th; the south aisle has a pitched roof possibly indicating an original stand-alone structure and an older sandstone buttress with stone walls is identifiably different to the mudstone walls of the rest of the building (which, unusually, appears to have been built alongside and attached to this older structure instead of around it). The lead was swept off the roof in a gale in 1887 and dry rot led to the collapse of the roof in 1915, it was finally restored in 1924. The outline of the original pitch of the roof can still be seen on the East wall of the Tower.

The Church was originally dedicated to St. Wilfrid and was re-dedicated to St. Luke, probably during the Reformation in the 1530s. Links with Queens’ College, Cambridge were formalised after the Civil War when the Will of Mrs Sarah Bardsey put Hickling under the perpetual patronage of Queens’ College; links which continued late into the C20th.    

Extensive renovations were carried out in the mid-1700s, during the Victorian Period (including the rebuilding brick-by-brick of the Church Tower) and also in the 1920s. Four squinches survive in the Tower and they may represent the remains of an earlier spire.

The Southwell Diocese Church History Project: click here

Galleries

St. Luke’s Parish Church, Hickling (2017/2018)

Church Tower Photos (4/11/2020)

Snowy January (25/1/2021)