ST MARY. Nave and chancel and bell-turret with saddle-back roof. The turret is supported by the oddest brick buttress, climbing up with seven set-offs. The former W tower has disappeared. Nave and S porches probably of c. 1300. Chancel of the same time, see the E window. NE vestry and a N attachment which used to be the squire’s pew. Roof with crown-posts with four-way struts, braced collars, and ashlar-pieces. - FONT. Bowl with nice cusped tracery; all designs, with the exception of one, are Dec. - PULPIT. c18; simple. - PLATE. Cup and Paten Cover 1634. - MONUMENTS. Edward Salter d. 1724 and John Lewis d. 1724. Two identical monuments l. and r. of the altar. No effigies, but a putto on top of the usual obelisk.
BATTISFORD. It has seen great days and has shared in great deeds. Something of its glory perished in the Fire of London, but its name comes into the story of Sir Thomas Gresham and his Royal Exchange. When Sir Thomas decided to house the London merchants, whose Exchange was the open street, it was to his woods at Battisford Tye that he came for timber. The massive building which rose under his sign of the golden grasshopper was framed in oak that had been growing on his estate for centuries.
Four centuries before his day the village had famous builders in the Knights Hospitallers, who raised here one of their hospitals, and the manor house is said to have been built from the materials of that first building. One of its chimneys still has a stone carved with the head of John Baptist on a charger, and the pond is part of the ancient moat.
An avenue of limes leads us to the 14th century church, with a wooden belfry crowning the tower. The beautiful porch has a carved step, seats made from old benches, and a splendid old door, sadly buried when we called under a mass of income tax papers. Here is the font which served for two centuries of christenings before Sir Thomas Gresham had thought of his Royal Exchange, and here still are the old kingposts and tiebeams as he saw them.
Of remarkable interest also is the brass tablet to Mary Everton, who died after seeing 100 years go by. In her lifetime six monarchs ruled in England; Flodden was fought when she was a child, and she must have talked of the Field of the Cloth of Gold, the fall of Wolsey, the fires of Smithfield, of Drake's voyage round the world and the coming of the Armada, and of a young man named Shakespeare, whose first play was produced when she was 83. Mary was 11 years older than Sir Thomas Gresham, and may often have seen him here: she outlived him 29 years. To her, as to the rest of the village, he must have seemed a king of men, with his vast fortune and his intimacy with the rulers of Europe.
There is an undying legend which maintains that Sir Thomas was a foundling, cast away and saved by the chirruping of a grasshopper which drew attention to his hiding-place; but the golden grasshopper was the crest of the Greshams before he was born. Son of a lord mayor, he was descended from a wealthy old family, and, trained as a merchant banker, became king’s agent to Henry the Eighth, a position he retained with hardly a break through the reigns of Edward and Mary and the early years of Elizabeth.
His position was unique. He had a palace at Antwerp, where he entertained like a prince. He travelled from capital to capital. He was responsible for raising all our loans abroad, from the Netherlands, from Germany, from France, and Spain; and his methods of securing funds and repaying them, of accumulating and secretly transporting arms and forbidden merchandise through jealously guarded ports is a story of marvel and ingenuity eclipsing fiction. He smuggled out arms at dead of night. He sent money in bags of pepper and hidden in casks. He bribed, tricked, and ran the blockade. Ambassador, spy, financier, champion of imperilled Protestants on the Continent, he effected salutary currency reforms at home, and encouraged the raising of loans in the English market in place of borrowings from foreign usurers. Handling enormous sums, he grew very rich by legitimate means, reinforced at times by the sharp practice of the typical financier of those days.
The unwilling custodian of Mary, a sister of Lady Jane Grey, he was a princely host to many famous Protestant refugees, and entertained Queen Elizabeth with almost Oriental profusion. With the death of his only son in 1564 he gave effect to his cherished dream of building the Royal Exchange which, raised on land provided by the city, was opened by the Queen in 1570. He bequeathed and endowed Gresham House, his London home, as a college, the cradle of scientific learning in England, the home and livelihood of many pioneers of learning. In addition to his estate at Battisford he had houses in Sussex, Middlesex, Norfolk, and elsewhere, and when he died in 1579 he was buried with regal magnificence in London.
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