Lepers' Peep at Bracewell Church

Submitted by Alan Marsden on Sun, 01/09/2024 - 00:00

The Vicar of Barnoldswick kindly agreed to show me around the Church of St Michael, Bracewell. Over the past few years, people have marvelled that I have travelled around the country inspecting churches, while apparently neglecting one on my doorstep. Suffice to say, I was excited at the prospect of entry. I have seen it from without several times, and was once advised by a congregant to attend the service if I wished to see within. Not in my job.

Interestingly, it was built around 1100 as a private chapel for the local manor lords, the Tempests, who still live across the fields at Broughton Hall. I had reason to contact Mr Roger Tempest a few years ago, and found him to be unusually helpful. By 1153, it was a functioning parish church for the whole community. High up, and barely noticed, there is a Leper’s Peep. I have previously written about lepers’ squints, a hole in the ground floor stonework to allow folk suffering from contagious and feared diseases to behold the altar from without and from afar. Unusually, Bracewell’s is above and in the tower, for this was accessed by separate stairs from an external door. Up those poor folk would climb, which might have presented some difficulty if physical disability they had, and that tiny window would not have been easy to peer through. Yet in another respect, they had the best view of the lot. A rood screen would have likely obscured the priests’ ministrations at the altar, and the crowd of villagers would have been thick in that small nave. Yet the leper, for all his difficult climbing and social ostracism, could see better than the able bodies and respectable folk thronging the downstairs.

As with Fanny Crosby, the blind, prolific hymnwriter, so many who are physically afflicted and bodily disabled have a better view of God’s grace and character than those who never give a second thought to the joys and freedoms of good health. The blind sometimes see more than the sighted, the deaf hear better than the hearing, and the chair-bound grow more than those who run and skip.