St John The Baptist's Church - This Saxon Grade 1 listed Church is The Burial Place of Thomas Hobbes

The Church is Saxon in foundation, a Grade 1 listed building one mile north of Hardwick Hall.

Ault Hucknall is the smallest village in England, clearly the successor to a much larger community in the middle ages. Either the Black Death took its toll, or Bess of Hardwick cleared out most of the residents because their dwellings blighted the landscape she planned nearby in the tree lined paths to the north.

The yew tree in front of the church is variously aged between 2,000 and 4,000 years old, evidence of a very ancient pre-Christian burial ground.

Every generation has added its distinct work to the building, There are  Saxon arches one of which is the blocked former west doorway. This latter contains the ancient carvings in the tympanum and lintel. Two green men can be seen in the roof support beams. The tower and north transept are Norman . The south transept, once early English was rebuilt by Smythson, Bess of Hardwick’s architect in 1597. Some of the glass from this former transept windows is in the Savage window in the Cavendish Chapel, so named from its links with the Earls and Dukes of Devonshire. The same chapel houses the renowned 1628 memorial to the Countess of Devonshire and is also the resting place of the great philosopher and secretary to successive seventeenth century Earls and Dukes of Devonshire.

The Victorians restored the church in 1887 lowering the floor and rebuilding the east wall.

The small congregation is currently seeking to raise over £100,000 to restore the tower and roofing, windows, rewiring, curing wood infestations, repairing the churchyard walls.

The building is open for tourism 1pm to 5pm on the Saturdays of summer.
Sunday Service is 11am.

You could help  in a very practical way to help maintain the fabric of this wonderful piece of English heritage  supporting this local community in its responsibility. Please go the “to donate” page or

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Research on the Door Carvings at Ault Hucknall

I received a letter from Mrs. Gillian Greenwood regarding some research done by her mother that included a passage on the carvings at the west end of Ault Hucknall Church. She kindly enclosed it, and if true, then her findings have caused me to revise my thinking on them. I reproduce it here for your

edification. She is hoping to publish her mother’s work.

Vicar

THE AULT HUCKNALL PANEL is very old, 12th century, and very precious. The scene is the Descent of Christ into Hades to defeat the Devil (here depicted as Leviathan) and to rescue Adam .

The shackle in which Leviathan had hoped to detain Christ has been overturned in the stress of the battle. It is interesting to me that the shackle appears in medieval drawings and sculptures. Sometimes we see it in   depictions of the Devil detained by Christ; an example of this is in a  wonderful drawing in an Anglo-Saxon psalter (Cotton Tib. C VI fol. 14) in the British Library. Another example is on a sculptured capital in the cloisters of the collegiate church of Santillana dei Mar in northern Spain, where the Devil is being detained by an angel.

We also see the shackle used to detain Christ but, however, only by his own volition. There is a wonderful example of this in-the manuscript of Beatus of Liebana (died 786) which is kept in the archives of Gerona Cathedral. The Lamb of God is shown within a roundel, bearing his Cross, while his right foot is freely and voluntarily placed within the loop of a shackle firmly fixed to its base.

In the Ault Hucknall panel we see exaeSly the same kind of shackle as the one shown in the manuscript, but here Christ is free of the shackle and he is fighting Leviathan.

The figure fighting Leviathan is not St George or St Michael who incidentally is usually depicted with wings, but Christ. St Michael is also generally shown fighting with a lance or a spear, but the figure here is shown wielding a butcher's knife. To understand this it is necessary to read the last part of Gregory the Great's Commentary (the Moralia) on the Book of Job. Gregory explains that the knife will be used to cut up the flesh of Leviathan for the merchants of Jerusalem. (Job 4).

"The Holy one, blessed be He, will in time to come make a banquet of the flesh of Leviathan". Mary Curtis Webb