Image Peter Coulls
This page is one of several pages which are based on articles in our book entitled Royal Leamington Spa, A History in 100 Buildings which was published in 2018 and is no longer in print.
Lillington Parish Church is Anglo-Saxon in origin, and though the present building dates mainly from the 1480s and up to the Victorian period, there is probable Saxon work still to be seen in the south wall of the chancel, and a Saxon doorway in the Lady Chapel.
Settlers from East Anglia reached this place between the rivers Leam and Avon about AD 570, towards the end of the second wave of Anglo-Saxon migration. The Lillingas, the people of Lilla, built their homesteads scattered across all the land which could be farmed. The site of the churchyard at the edge of a prominent central hilltop will have been their burial ground, and a likely place for a hilltop shrine or hearg (a form of altar) and the rituals of their pagan religion, of which we know almost nothing, except that its followers were so ready to hear the Christian missionaries who followed Augustine after 597, that within eighty years the whole of England had been converted to the Gospel.
The Mercian kings had a royal estate nearby at Stoneleigh and founded a minster church at Leek Wootton with a college of priests about AD 700. Priests from Wootton travelled to the settlements south of Stoneleigh, including Lillington, Cubbington, Leamington Priors, Milverton and Ashow to preach and collect their dues.
Within the old burial-grounds they would set up a cross. A cross was standing in Lillington in the 1530s when two parishioners asked in their will to be buried near it, and the base was still visible in the 1850s, between the chancel and south aisle. This space marks the centre of the old churchyard. The church is offset to the north, giving way to the now-vanished cross.
When a chapel was first built here is unknown, but perhaps about 760 during the long reign of King Offa. A wooden building is likely, though the red sandstone south wall of the chancel may be a remnant of this chapel.
The reign of Edgar the Peaceable was a time of religious revival. If Lillington did not already have a stone chapel, it is likely one was built in the 970s to replace the wooden building. With a nave and chancel of red sandstone, it had no east window. The chancel still had no east window up to 1820.
Canute’s raid into Warwickshire in 1016 afflicted Warwick and Coventry, and probably Lillington. After Canute became king he tried to make amends for the damage he had caused. The Saxon door now in the Lady Chapel may be one of these repairs. Dating from around 1020, it was the north door into the nave, but has been moved twice, in 1847 and 1884.
Pevsner records simply that there was a Norman church in the village.
At the foundation of Kenilworth Priory in 1122, the minster church at Leek Wootton with its lands, and many other Warwickshire estates, were given by Henry I to Geoffrey de Clinton who in turn gave them to the Priory to provide an income for the canons. Lillington church became Priory property until the Dissolution in 1538.
During those four centuries, a chantry chapel with an altar to Saint Catherine was added south of the nave around 1380, and a west tower about 1480. A bell cast then still hangs in the tower. With two cast in 1625 and 1675, and five from 1927, the tower now contains a ring of eight bells. On the tower wall behind the War Memorial are notches probably caused by arrow-sharpening.
The Spa at Leamington began to develop from the 1790s and Lillington also grew. Lillington Church was greatly expanded with north and south aisles in 1847, as new avenues of villas started to bring more residents to the parish. Further extensions were made in 1857 and 1868. The south aisle dates from 1868, when the previous narrower aisle and the chantry of Saint Catherine were destroyed. Inside the church, one arch from the nave into the aisle is all that remains of this chapel.
Leisured nineteenth-century visitors to Leamington would have made the walk up the hill and across the fields to Lillington to see the famous ‘Miser’s Grave’. Opposite the vestry door, the headstone of William Treen, who died aged 77 on 3rd February, 1810, bears this epitaph, quoted in many nineteenth-century guides to Leamington, and most famously by Nathaniel Hawthorne in Our Old Home in 1863 –
I Poorly Liv’d and Poorly Dy’d,
Poorly Bury’d and no one Cry’d.
Treen was a labourer and road scraper who, according to legend, lived by begging potato peelings and turnips. When he died he was found to be a man of more than average wealth, to the surprise and annoyance of his neighbours and his executor Benjamin Satchwell, the co-founder and poet of the spa at Leamington, who is thought to have composed the famous verse on his grave.
An extension in 1884 was designed by the local architect, John Cundall, and the church was further extended around 1914. The War Memorial was unveiled in 1920 and Captain Arthur Kilby VC, MC 1885-1915, who died in action and was awarded the Victoria Cross posthumously, is remembered by a stone in Lillington churchyard. The graveyard was extended in 1929 and reorganised in the 1970s and the separate meeting room named the Octagon was built in 1987.
Today the history and the structure of the church are well-regarded and it is Listed Grade II*.
Margaret Rushton, 2018