iIs Villageless Country People Believe Site is Accursed; Manor Has Entirely Vanished Hartley Mauditt Church, in Hamp! shire, is one of the' few Christian churches in England where no Faster service was held. This quiet gem of Norman ang early English architecture is: a church with a rector but without a village and with almost no congregation. It has a curious-history, and local legend has attracted to it an even more curious reputation, states the "Observer."
The enclosed churchyard is gay with cuckoo pine and shrubs, and the graves are well tended. But the church, is kept locked. It used to be open, but depredations of gypsies and tourists made it necessary to close "its doors except at service time.
A very small congregation attends West Worldham church nearest to it, and every year Hartley Mauditt has service on Armistice Day. Sometimes parishioners choose to be married, christened, or buried there, but not often. They prefer West World-ham because the church is heated, says the Rev, John Parmiter, the Rector of Hartley Mauditt and West Worldham, "Accursed"
That may be, but the fact remains that the dwellers in more than one village near Hartley Mauditt believe that the site is accursed. The great oblong of trees behind the church, they say, is the manor that. was destroyed because of the curse. At another place a wide patch of nettles covers the site of an outhouse. The mournful lake, once the manorial fish-pond, has encroached until it covers the sites of the bam and stables, Here there was a manor held of the Confessor ənd the Conqueror, flourishing until late in history, and it has vanished exactly "like the baseless fabric of a dream," leaving as its only wrack the Christian church that it would be sacrilege to destroy. These are the facts, and it is a curious enough history. Even more curious is the coincidence hat Mauditt is the French for "accursed."
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.