Wrentham
is a fairly large village, a town that failed to
grow really, with surviving signs of its 18th and
19th Century prosperity that include its town
hall, a reading room, a coaching inn, and this
fine structure set away from the main road. The
village straddles the A12 just before you reach
the hinterland of Lowestoft and enter the perils
of the Diocese of Norwich. Not that this will
bother the good people of this chapel, of course.
This handsome building was constructed as a
Congregational chapel in 1778, probably by the
Wrentham master builder John Owchin, says
Pevsner. The interior is said to be still
relatively complete. The congregation actually
dates back to 1649 when it took over the medieval
parish church of St Nicholas under the
Commonwealth's suppression of the Church of
England. After the Restoration they worshipped in
another building, which this chapel replaced.
At the time of the census of
religious observance on Sunday 30th March
1851, at the start of a decade in which
the populations of many East Anglian
villages were reaching their peak before
a haemorrhaging to
the towns and cities, there were just
over a thousand people living in
Wrentham. There were four places of
worship, including this one and the
medieval parish church. There is a strong
tradition of non-conformism in this part
of Suffolk, but here in Wrentham the
Anglicans were doing fairly well, with
both the Congregational Chapel and the
Parish Church managing about 120 people
each for the Sunday morning service and
about 280 each for the afternoon sermon.
The two Methodist chapels, Wesleyan and
Primitive, accounted for another 80
between them on that Sunday morning, and
so here we have a situation where more
than half the population of the village
were churchgoers, an unheard of
proportion in Suffolk where by the 1850s
barely a third of the population were
attending Sunday morning service, and in
some areas this fell to a tenth. Perhaps
the attenders at the Congregational
Chapel were gathered from a wide area, or
perhaps they were merely a devout lot
around here in those prosperous,
optimistic days of the young Queen
Victoria.
Simon Knott, July 2015
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