The Seventeenth Century

- 1640

Very few changes were made to the church during the seventeenth century. The lamps which had burnt on the brackets had already been extinguished when the Chantries were closed during the reign of Edward VI, and during the Commonwealth period the building was denuded of much of its furniture and fittings. This included the Rood screen which divided the chancel from the nave. Evidence of it came to light during the restoration of 1846 when the grooves were revealed in the pillars, and part of the wooden cross was discovered in the graveyard where it had been buried in 1643. The Jacobean Bishop’s throne and the carved stalls survived, and tradition has it that the altar table and the rails were discarded in 1640 and taken to Poulton Hall (where a table and bannisters of the appropriate date may still be seen).

William Smith and William Webb in their gazetteer of the ‘Vale-Royall’ (1656) described Nether Bebington as ‘a church-town, with a fair Church, and goodly parsonage’, while at Over Bebington ‘John Minshal of Minshal Esquire, hath great store of good Possessions’. Peter Leycester, in his Historical Antiquities of Great Britain and Ireland (1673), mentions only that the Stanleys of Hooton acted as Patrons of Bebington Parish Church (and that they were in dispute with the Dean of Chester over patronage of Eastham Church).