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Posted 16 hours 56 min ago

 

Posted 16 hours 56 min ago

The Church of St Margaret and All Hallows at Orford near Warrington struck me as entirely ordinary and predictable. A late-Victorian building in leafy grounds, it is built of brick in a 'blended gothic'. It has a decent online presence and the array a services which one might expect of an active, Anglican church. Nothing at all struck me as extraordinary. The website reports:

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Gerard ter Borch’s The Messenger, known as 'The Unwelcome News' was painted in 1653 and hangs at The Hague’s Mauritshuis Gallery.

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I called at the site of St Leonard’s Priory in London’s Bromley-by-Bow in the summer. Little remains, but some old foundations and a romantic, Victorian gateway. Geoffrey Chaucer, the great writer of the Canterbury Tales, once mocked its Prioress for the inaccuracy of her French and the old fashioned pronunciation of its words:

Ther was also a nonne, a prioresse,