Article and photo kindly supplied by Mary Baldwin
In 2026 the USA celebrates 250 years since its Declaration of Independence, but back in 1776 the people of Ringwood had more local shocking news to gossip about. As Captain Keppel recounted in his book ‘The Ringwood Story Part II’, in 1776 one of the church registers was stolen from Ringwood church vestry. Curiously there is no mention of this loss in the Salisbury Journal of the time but it did report that on Wednesday night 20th March 1776 the church was broken open with the assumed purpose of stealing the communion plate, which fortunately was not kept in the church. However the thieves cut a communion crimson velvet table cloth to pieces and stole part of it with the name Philip Percival embroidered on it in gold capitals. They also took other cloth including two damask napkins marked with the initials JW in silver thread.
Philip Percival was a distant relative of Richard Branthwaite, in whose memory the valuable silver communion flagons, paten and alms dish was given to the church back in 1664. The napkin initials JW may well have stood for either John or James Willis, wealthy lawyers who then lived in Church Hatch.
That an altar cloth should be embroidered with the name of its donor would seem to modern tastes to be peculiarly ostentatious. It may have been the reason that the cloth was stolen, for there was a very strong number of local dissenters who would have considered such extravagance as ‘papist’. Or was it just a common thief?
What reason would a thief have for stealing the parish register of baptisms, marriages and burials? Despite a reward of £50, nothing was discovered until the register was finally returned to the parish in the 1830s, having turned up at a secondhand bookstall in London.
Today the Branthwaite silver is kept securely under lock and key elsewhere and all the parish registers are held in Winchester Record Office, though transcription copies can be found in the Meeting House.
Copyright © Mary Baldwin
Old Ringwood Church
Branthwaite Church Silver