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St. Mary's Church is a Grade 1 listed〔, Retrieved 17 June2013〕 Anglican church in Chesham, Buckinghamshire, and is part of the Diocese of Oxford. Built on the site of a Bronze Age stone circle of puddingstones, parts of the church building date to the 12th century. Remodelled in the 15th and 17th centuries, the church is architecturally a mixture of English Gothic styles. Weakened by additions to the church tower and undermined by burials in and around the church, by the 19th century the building was structurally unsound. The church was remodelled and strengthened in the 1860s by George Gilbert Scott and again in the 20th century by Robert Potter. Formerly part of the Diocese of Lincoln, it served what was historically the largest parish in Buckinghamshire, and the church traditionally had two vicars. Initially the advowson (the right to appoint the vicar) was held jointly by a pair of prominent local families, but in the wake of the 12th century civil wars of the reign of King Stephen (1135–1154), the advowsons were granted to the monks of Woburn Abbey and to the Abbey of Saint Mary de Pratis in Leicester, each of whom appointed their own vicars to the parish. After the Dissolution of the Monasteries Woburn Abbey, together with its half of the advowson, was granted to the Earls of Bedford, while the half that had belonged to Leicester Abbey passed through a succession of private owners. In 1769 the Duke of Bedford acquired the Leicester half of the advowson and unified the parish, and from then on the parish was served by a single vicar. The town of Chesham grew rapidly in the 19th century. After the parish was transferred to the Diocese of Oxford, reforms introduced by the Bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce, led to the parish being partitioned, eventually becoming four independent parishes (Chesham, Latimer, Waterside and Ashley Green). In 1980 it was decided to reverse this decision, and over the 1980s and 1990s three of these parishes (Chesham, Waterside and Ashley Green) were reunited under St. Mary's Church. ==Historical background== (詳細はBuckinghamshire town of around 20,000 people, located in the Chiltern Hills at the head of the River Chess, about north-west of London and south-east of Aylesbury. There is archaeological evidence of human habitation during the Mesolithic period ''circa'' 8000 BC, of Neolithic farming ''circa'' 2500 BC and of Bronze Age settlement ''circa'' 1800 BC, during which time a stone circle of puddingstones was built at Chesham. The Catuvellauni tribe occupied and settled the area in around 500 BC, and at nearby Latimer there are remains of a Roman villa and archaeological evidence of Roman vineyards. Following the departure of the Romans the area appears to have been depopulated until Anglo-Saxon colonisation in the 7th century AD.〔 The first recorded mention of Chesham dates from 970 in the will of Lady Ælfgifu (identified with the former consort of King Eadwig of England), bequeathing ''Cæstæleshamme'', "the water meadow at the pile of stones", to Abingdon Abbey.〔 The Domesday Book of 1086 lists ''Cestreham'' as containing four mills and comprising three adjacent estates, the most important of which were held by Odo of Bayeux and Queen Edith, the widow of Edward the Confessor. As with much of England, Chesham suffered serious religious unrest in the 16th and 17th centuries, and in 1532 Lollard radical Thomas Harding was burnt at the stake in the town for heresy. From the 17th century Chesham was a focus for dissenters. The first Baptist chapel in the town opened in 1701,〔 Quakers have met in Chesham since the late 17th century, and John Wesley preached in Chesham in the 1760s. Chesham Old Town, to the south-east of the present-day town centre, is the oldest part of the town and was the centre of Chesham until the late 19th century; in 1851 the population stood at 2,496.〔 In 1889 the Metropolitan Railway reached the area as the first phase of a planned extension from Rickmansworth to Berkhamsted, and Chesham railway station was opened to the north-east of the Old Town. Following the Metropolitan Railway's acquisition of the Aylesbury and Buckingham Railway (A&B) in 1891, the extension to Berkhamsted was abandoned in favour of a connection between the Metropolitan Railway's station at Chalfont Road (now Chalfont & Latimer) to Aylesbury and over the A&B's route to Verney Junction, and Chesham station was left as the terminus of and sole station on from the mainline, a status it retains today. The new town of present-day Chesham grew between the railway station and the Old Town, leaving the architecture of the Old Town almost untouched.〔 In June 2009 the Old Town and the present-day town centre were added to Historic England's Conservation Areas at Risk Register, although the local authority claimed that this was owing to a misunderstanding of its responses to English Heritage's questionnaire.〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「St. Mary's Church, Chesham」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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