History

Moccas Church is a rare example of a two cell early 12th century Romanesque church and shares a sub Roman/Celtic background with a number of other churches in south west Herefordshire. It was built to the same ground plan and by the same masons as Kilpeck’s church, but it is constructed from tufa rather than sandstone. Its predecessor was originally dedicated to St Dubricius who founded a monastery at Moccas, while the present 12th century building is dedicated to St Michael and All Angels.

The early history of the church intrigued the Revd Sir George Cornewall (1833-1908), the rector and owner of Moccas Court and its associated estate, who restored the church in 1870-71. He employed George Gilbert Scott Junior (1829-97), a fastidious Anglo-Catholic architect who worked within an Arts and Crafts milieu and collaborated closely with his knowledgeable patron. St Michael’s has an outstanding interior: an early Christian chancel and apse and, from the hand of Charles Eamer Kempe (1837-1907), a ravishing organ case for the large Walker organ (built in 1871) which, together with the case and Bailey’s hydraulic engine, was restored in 2020.

Moccas has probably been inhabited since Neolithic times at the latest, with a number of significant Neolithic findings documented in the surrounding hills, including the spectacular barrow, Arthurs Stone, and the more recently discovered Neolithic Halls of Dorstone Hill. More information on this can be found in the Archaeology section.

Roman Britain begins with the conquest by Emperor Claudius in AD 42. For a few decades in the middle of the first century AD, the Marches formed the western boundary of the Roman Empire. It is difficult to know just how deeply Romanised the Welsh Borderland became. However, there was a Roman town of Magnis at Kenchester on the Wye, some ten miles away from Moccas. One legacy that may have survived the end of Roman Britain in the Marches was Christianity. Church dedications provide valuable hints about the degree of British survival in the face of pressures and influences from outside Britain. During the 7th century, the Anglo Saxons established political control over the Welsh Borderland, but this control was often unstable, and west of the Wye, many place names and field names remain Welsh in origin, including Moccas.

In the early Middle Ages, many churches belonging to Celtic saints were rededicated to fashionable Norman saints. However, there was often considerable opposition to this process and the proposed Norman saints were frequently rejected locally. A compromise was often made by rededicating the church to the Virgin or to St Michael and All Angels, as seems to be what happened at Moccas.

The Normans came as conquering feudal lords to a region that in 1066 had very few towns and a scattered rural population. Before their arrival in the late Saxon period, the Borderland had been politically unsettled: local border skirmishes were common, and on a larger scale the region was coveted by both the Anglo-Saxons and the Welsh. There was no fixed western Anglo-Saxon boundary, only a border which was shifting with the ebb and flow of conquest. Until the early 1060’s the Welsh held the initiative, with the English on the defensive, so Edward the Confessor had already introduced a number of Norman lords into positions of power in the borderlands in the 1050’s. The Normans found the Welsh borderland very attractive with geographic and political similarities to Normandy and Brittany. Whereas the conquest of England was achieved within 20 years, the conquest of Wales took over 100 years after the Battle of Hastings. The Marches formed the base from which this conquest was achieved, and the Normans’ ambitions and feuding have left a deep impression on the landscape. King William devised a scheme by which the Marches were administered as semi-autonomous earldoms based on the Saxon towns of Chester, Shrewsbury and Hereford. Within this framework, the land was divided between Marcher lords: in all, some 153 separate lordships which technically did not revert to their mother counties until the act of Union 1536. Within each lordship one or more castles were built, and these castles formed the nuclei on which the border boroughs were subsequently created. The parts of Wales conquered by the Normans came to be known collectively as the Welsh Marches to distinguish them from the unconquered parts, which were known collectively as Wales or Wales proper. The Normanised Marches of Wales was very different from Normanised England. The lords of the Welsh Marches were allowed to exercise extensive judicial powers in return for bringing the Marches and Wales under Norman control. These lords had jurisdiction over all civil and criminal cases, high and low, with the exception of crimes of high treason. They established their own courts and had unique rights of unlicensed castle building and of declaring and waging what was called private war, whereas a lord of an English estate had none of these privileges and held his lordship as a direct grant from the King. The first Norman castles in the Welsh Marches were made of earth and timber (motte and bailey), and many were later rebuilt as stone. Herefordshire’s first stone built castle is probably at Snodhill, just over the hill from Moccas. Moccas castle, now no longer visible, was a motte and bailey castle.

Moccas is itemised for tax purposes and military services in the Domesday book (suggesting it had been under English control for some time). The Moccas estate was placed in the Stretford Hundred, and divided between the minster church of St Guthlac’s in Hereford ( Moccas: 2 hides which pay tax. 6 villagers and 3 small holders with 4 ploughs. 1 Frenchman. Value 30s) and William the Conquerer’s physician, Nigel the Doctor (Moccas: Ansfrid holds from him. Ernwin held from St Guthlacs. 1 hide. In lordship 1 plough). Nigel or one of his tenants built an earthwork castle overlooking the Meres, which is a remnant of the large earlier glacial lake that had separated the monastic site from Woodbury Hill and Moccas Hill.

By the middle of the 12th century, both parts of Moccas were in the hands of Walter de Fresne. In 1293, his descendant Hugh de Fresne began building a castle at Moccas, but was arrested by the sheriff, having failed to comply with feudal law and seek a licence from the king to crenellate. The new works may have been on the site of the Home Farm and intended to replace the earthwork motte and bailey castle overlooking the Meres. The stone castle was said to be ruinous by 1375. The de Fresne family held the estate until it was acquired by the Vaughan family in the reign of Henry VII (1485 -1509). Throughout the Middle Ages, the incumbent at St Michael’s is described as a rector, confirming that the living was never impropriated by another religious institution and subsequently downgraded to a vicarage.

It is notable that Moccas is a dispersed village, with its two clusters of houses more than half a mile from the church, which is close to Moccas Court and Home Farm. The oldest houses in the village are 16th century, and so it is possible that the village was once much closer to the church and the presumed earlier monastic site, and that the village moved further away from the church at some previous stage, possibly in response to successive waves of the plague in the 14th century.

We have no evidence that the church suffered particular damage during the Reformation, although this might suggest why the lower panels of the 14th century windows were removed. In 1587, in a return to the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Bishop of Hereford, Herbert Westphaling, named the rector of Moccas as Lodovicus Prosser, classified as an ordinary Presbyterian preacher. The Patron of the parish is named as Watkin Vaughan, with Henricus Vaughan written in the margin.

In 1642, a Puritan’s Survey was compiled for Sir Robert Harley, MP for the County. Here, ‘Mockas’ is described as “a vicaridge worth 601i per annum. Mr Taylor is the Rector, non-resident being also the vicar of Bps.Upton where he liveth”, and Mr Henry Vaughan is Patron. It is something of a relief to know that Mr Hart, Curate, is termed “a constant preacher”, whereas at various other parishes including neighbouring Dorstone, over the other side of the hill, the Rector is said to be “neither constant preacher nor of good life”!